Hi, my friends and I played together for about 15 to 25 hours, about a couple of months ago, and one of the four of us didn’t play as much as the rest. To best explain this, my friend who did not play as much kind of got semi-hard locked out of progression because the other two players advanced the world one or two stages past where my first friend was, causing the shops to stop selling lower-level items, which made the prospect of catching up quite daunting.
Here is a quote from him to hopefully give a bit more of his feelings: “All the shops leveled up their stock and stopped selling low-level stuff (bad design), and all the enemies in previous areas leveled up, so it was going to be a real tough slog to catch up. I think that’s pretty rough design, so hopefully they fixed it by their 1.0 release. A persistent shared world where any one person can completely swamp everybody else on the server by progressing is not great. It would be like if prior dungeons became inaccessible whenever someone cleared the next one in World of Warcraft.”
I know that the best way to fix this is for all of us to have restraint and not progress the world when not everyone is online, but at the very least, making it so that the shops continue selling lower-level items, even when most of us don’t need them—except for the person who might not have as much time as the rest of us—could possibly still need those items.
Thank you for hearing me out. I do want to say that I really enjoy this game, and I am really looking forward to the release of 1.0!
This is not bad design. Bad or good design only reflects on whether a system/mechanic is acting like it is supposed to be.
In this case, since the world progresses forward for each boss defeated, it is only logical that merchant stock does as well. If a merchant would still sell level 1 item for example, the upgrade cost would be quite a lot more then buying it at lvl 12, which in turn affects grinding and easy of material aquisition.
But I could see a case being made however where a part of merchant’s stock is lower level. Maybe 10 items based on world progression and always 2 or 3 pieces that never go above lvl 4?
Or perhaps a vendor that only sells strictly low tier stuff?
The argument that one person can progress an entire world while leaving behind the other 3 is fair, but intentional as well. Moon wants people to communicate with each other how you handle this. They went this way because they want you to see a world as a DnD session (Creative Director Thomas’s words), including communication beforehand how you want to deal with bosses etc.
If one people has very much less time, I think it would be best for him/her to also have their own personal world, where they can catch up. Either that or as you put it already, refrain from progressing. Moon decided to let this be up to the player, and have them final word on these matters.
Hope your friend can still enjoy the game for what it is!
Silas
I totally agree with your points, and at the end of the day, he would most likely not feel this way if the other two people had a bit more restraint when it came to beating story bosses. So, the blame is mainly on us for not waiting.
Even though I think that the devs will most likely never see this, or if they do, would reasonably not want to put the effort into even thinking about this problem, I wanted to bring this forward anyway to show that if this happened to one person, then this could definitely happen to someone else.
While I think progressing the world should actually mean that the world moves on with or without you, I can see how being left behind can suck because I have been there with other games and other friend groups.
Anyway, thanks for responding. I appreciate your insight!
Wow, I’ll keep this in mind for when 1.0 comes out. Thank you for letting me know! 