The Chronicles of Spellborn

Some believe that because you can enhance your stats this must be another item focus game. Now if you want to play semantics any mmo that allows that kind of upgrading is an item focus game. Guild Wars have that kind of upgrading yet people don't consider it focused on item. That's because not only is the range between those who are wearing the best gear and those who are wearing the worst is very small. Just completing the normal game will net you gear more then good enough to walk into any fight and do well. (I am not even counting the pvp character you can make from the start.) Because it’s your skills and there set up that matters most.


There is one mmo that is very focus on items. That is WoW. In the beginning while questing items are not really that important most of what you need will be gained just by questing. Once you hit max all that changes. For example can a fresh new level 70 war tank kara? Heck no. People would laugh at him if he asked. Can he do Heroics? Very unlikely, that war has to do different normal five man runs, maybe even some honor grinding before he is good enough to tank a heroic. At the very best (I'm being very nice about it) that war maybe able to tank heroic BF. After a few heroic runs he may have the gear needed to tank kara. Of course this means grinding that instance a dozen or so times. Also that war may find it a good idea to do 5 man heroics when he can't do kara for badges. All of this is done just to hit the next instance which is ZA. This of course means starting all over again.

WoW is an item focus game. Not because it has items to enhance yourself beyond max level but because content is limited by the quality of gear. PvE or PvP if you don't have the right kind of gear you can't go. Guild Wars gear was never a reason why I or anyone else could not beat a boss or get to an area. It was your skill and party set up that matter the most. Spellborn design in generally the same way. No encounter is design around having a said level of dps or healing or general stats. In fact encounter leave the door open to inviting those who are much lower in level to fight side by side with higher level players.


For those who question the sigils. I can see why you would since it’s too easy to compare it to past experiences from other mmorpgs (generally WoW) It doesn't mean spellborn is like WoW. Some say its misinformation to say that gear doesn't matter and you can look the way you want too. This does not end with just looks its true for all parts of Spellborn. From the character's visual there class, skills and there sigils.

Customizing is the backbone of this game. You should look at sigils like how a mechanic looks at parts when building a race car. Having the best parts to make a high performance machine is great. But when it comes to winning the race it’s the skill and experience of the driver that wins the race not the car. Anyone can see the difference between a vet and a rookie driver on the track. Also add the fact that everyone will have a good machine themselves having the best car out there is not all that great.

In relation to sigils they are use to build yourself or your skills to your liking. Easier said then done when you have more then one way to enhance yourself and you can not tell what your potential enemy will do.
There are sigils that increase the number of targets it will hit to increasing its range to increased damage of said skill. Which one is better? No one can say which is best because it’s up to the person who is using said skill. What's the point of doing either of theses things if you can't hit anyone with this skill or the enemy makes it very hard for you to use it in battle. Remember there are no auto functions, nor are there any stuns...etc so no attack is a sure hit. Combined that with a poorly made skill deck and poor manual dodging skills having the highest rank sigils does nothing to help change that.
I will show you how small of a difference the sigils are between ranks.

Level 10 to 19 - ranks 1 and 2.
Level 20 to 29 - ranks 3 and 4.
Level 30 to 39 - ranks 5 and 6.
Level 40 - 49 - ranks 7 and 8.
Level 50 - ranks 9 and 10.

This is how the ranks will go. Nothing special about it, most mmorpgs generally work in the same way. This is an example of a sigil that increases HP.

Rank 1 - Increase Maximum health by 50.
Rank 5 - Increase maximum health by 250.
Rank 10 - Increase maximum health by 500.

The rank 10 sigil looks very powerful when compare to a rank 1. Compared to a rank 5 it doesn't seem all that great. With 4 more ranks between 5 and 10 that gap is even smaller. How many people are going to be using rank 1 and 2 sigils once they past level 19? With that being said its power is still based on what the player needs/wants. Take the Blood Warrior many of there best moves involves blood links and having to hurt themselves in order to do damage to others.

So having the most HP will be something they may look into in order to get the best out of there links. But a Blood Warrior that doesn't use Blood links that often may find it less useful to load up on HP instead they may pick to use sigils to increase there melee attacks. Tricksters one of the rogue arch types may find that both types of sigils are overall useless to them and may find sigils that increase there buff durations more beneficial. With three arch types, nine sub-classes and the ability to learn the arch type skills at level 50 and the skill deck system. I see a lot of people hunting for sigils but unlike other mmorpgs, players will hunt for sigils as a way to increase there options of customizing your class. Not just so they can be competitive. If your content with you class and your skill deck. Once you have the sigils you want you don’t have to hunt for anymore.
 

As much as I would like to take credit for this post I cant,This was all the work of Sera a Volunteer forum mod over at TCoS offical forums.

here is another post from Sera dealing with other issue's including pve...

As far as replay value of pvp encounters go, they would be about the same as any other mmorpg in fact I would say replay is far greater. Since since encounters are not bases around RPS and without auto functions. Devs have to freedom to create wicked challenging fights. For example For the solo player you will find a lot of enemies travel in packs. So there is no pulling one out of the group then killing them one at a time.

Here is a set up that you could see in Spellborn. five enemies in a group. (I will use letter to help keep up with who is who)

Mob A is a light melee fighter, not much in terms of starting damage but they have a nasty way of building up there morale (aka one of the three stats that controls overall damage output) with each connected hit so its damage will start low but could greatly increase bases on how well they can hit you.

Mob B, is another melee fighter. His based damage is higher then the light fighter in general so they will hit for a decent amount from the start but what makes him dangerous is that he can debuff your movement speed. aka Physique (state that effects movement speed) Not only is this guy a threat on his own but he works well with mob A.

Mob C is a range user. With next to no melee or magic abilities they make up for it with range attacks. What makes this guy threat is he will work hard to always stay at range and with make you work to catch him. Easier said then done with two melees on you.

Mob D is a med range fighter. This guy will be moving in and out of melee range attacking you with range/magic attacks if you are to far away and melee attacks if you get to close.

Mob E is the support of the group. This guy will be buffing/healing his allies while debuffing you. An depending on the mob. They could do some nasty stuff like sending the remains of a mob you just killed back into the fight getting the most out of its members.

You want a challenge? How would you go about winning against odds like this. This is a solo encounter that you will see often. Remember there are no stuns or CC like fear/polymorph in the game. When related to sigils. With five to one odds. Having sigils that increase the number of targets a attacks hits would be very good to have. If you like to use range or long range magic attacks. Sigils that increase your range would be great. If you can stay out of melee range the Mob A and B lose much of there combat effectiveness. Or you could engage the melees and hit the long or med range attacks Mobs C and D.

If you are using a lot of buffs/debuffs you can use sigils that increase there duration. Not only will this help with keeping debuffs on your targets longer. There are debuffs that reduce healing, damage, "stats" even preventing some attacks. They can also work great as a defense against incoming debuffs reducing there effect on you. So Mob E will have its work cut out when trying to support his team. To show you that this is not just a example what the devs are trying to do but something that is done. I will show you a video of it in action this will also show you how the AI will work.

http://mygamersvideos.onlinewelten.com/videos/MIrDOqpDJ55m/

Want to fight without using sigils. You could do it but why would you? This goes back to what I said in my last post and what others have said. Sigils are powerful because they give you room to custom build you class for your needs but they don't win battles on there own. You as the player have to but those skills to good use. Another thing, this is just a solo encounter going on knowledge of the group you are up against. This would be even harder if you had no clue who you was fighting. I haven't even begun to talk about bosses or group battles. We can if you like. Over all I think you will be more then happy with Spellborn's PvE.
 

Again  thanks to Sera for making these posts and allowing me to add them to the MMORPG.com site.

latest update from sera...

By Zoraï request we are going to take a deeper look into both group dynamics and Boss encounters. For now I will talk about grouping from both a player and npc stand point. Using information provide by Chris Nengerman one of the combat developer for Spellborn I am going to provide you with and even greater understanding of Spellborn’s PvE encounters.

TCoS has many different factions. All of these factions have a specific place and role within the world and its history. Seeing as all these factions have different backgrounds, making them all fight the same would result in a monotonous and unrealistic stream of enemies from level 1 to 50 (and beyond). It's this monotony we want to avoid with our approach to engaging combat.

For a look at some of the factions in Spellborn you can check them out here.
http://spellborn.wikia.com/wiki/Factions

Faction

TCoS has many different factions. All of these factions have a specific place and role within the world and its history. Seeing as all these factions have different backgrounds, making them all fight the same would result in a monotonous and unrealistic stream of enemies from level 1 to 50 (and beyond). It's this monotony we want to avoid with our approach to engaging combat.
A good example is the difference between the Howler and Arionite factions.
Howlers are a very driven alien-like race that, when they have their enemy in sight, will stop at nothing to annihilate that enemy. Although they lack a certain individual intelligence they are all well aware of the presence of their hive members. This results in the Howlers having a wide range of swarming tactics. They try to defeat the players with numbers. Although, when push comes to shove, the Howlers can field very strong opponents that will defend the hive to the death.

Here is picture of what Howlers will look like for those who haven’t seen them.
http://www.stratics.com/content/images/spellborn/npc_2.jpg

Arionites have a basic military history and hierarchy. This has resulted in the Arionites 'thinking' more about their strategy and attacks then the Howlers. Arionite groups are often more intricate in makeup. They consist of units that work well together and will also try to execute their attack with this compatibility in mind.

Group

Not all encounters will feature the same amount of units for each encounter. Mostly based on the purpose and the location of the encounter, the number of group members is defined. Although TCoS will feature single unit encounters, a lot of the encounters are strategically placed groups that require a group of players and some good tactics to defeat.

From here on things get a bit difficult to explain but I will do my best clear up any misunderstandings.

The devs of Spellborn took some bold steps towards agro management. When a group of players attacks or gets attacked by a group of NPCs, players get assigned an NPC to fight with. No longer will the tank just stand in the middle with some casters and healing giving support. The assigning of “sparing partners” is based on 2 things being the NPC's class and the NPC's attack pattern.

In short everyone has to fight no matter the class or skill deck set up. The idea of “sparing partners” does sound strange to most and for some players easy to exploit. But the npc’s attack pattern prevents that. Depending on what skills said npc has they will change there targets if there actions are ineffective against there current one. This also means that to small degree players have some influences over how npcs will react. For example if a player is running away from a npc that has no way of slowing you down and no range/magic attacks, that npc is not going to keep following you if there are easier targets around for it to hit.

In this video you can see examples (among other things) of the “sparing partners” and” attack pattern” is action.
http://mygamersvideos.onlinewelten.com/videos/fZIwCXCwhabq/

I would like to point out a few points that give clear examples of both for those who can’t pick them out right away. Group fight with three players (this is also at the time PeP was being explained) you can see how one of the mobs was changing targets. Since the mob had no range who ever it could get at got attacked.

The fight with the three players vs the camp of humanoid npcs shows both systems working perfectly. At the start of the fight as the npcs approached the first thing they did was spread out and each went for a different target. Since the three players where out numbered this time around one player had two mobs on him at once while the others had only one. Did you notice how the two npcs attacking the male human and female daevi stopped attacking them to go after the male daevi. Can you guess why they did that?

In the next fight the players went up against a different set of npcs. Notice how the battle changed this time around everyone had to be more active. Not only was the group of npcs bigger but they showed far more skill in battle then the last group. Theses npcs where using a lot more skills and had far better team work then the other npcs.

In the last big fight that had all four players fighting together showed how hectic a battle can become. Sadly theses guys where tough but where no match for the players. Still you can see how mobs will come to each others aid and assist one another. Notice when one npc turned to target another player one or two other npcs would do the same. With superior numbers why wouldn’t two or more people gang up on an enemy? Also did you notice near the end of the fight as the npc’s number went down they started spread themselves out between the players more? This shows that npcs will try to adapt as best they can even in a losing battle.

Class

Heavy melee, heavy ranged, Moderate melee, moderate ranged, light melee, light ranged, dotter, healer, slower, buffer, alerter, support, rezzer, debuffer, blinder.

Each class can have one specific role or a combination of several of these roles. For example an Arionite scout is a light melee, alerter unit while the howler orb is a heavy melee, healer unit. These roles, we call skill types, these skill types determine what skills the units will have in their skill deck. This is the same system that is available to player characters including rotating tiers of skills.

Attack patterns

Attack patterns are used to define the attack style of each unit. Although 2 units within a group are for instance defined as a fighter class, it doesn't mean that both of these units should act exactly the same.
Attack patterns can be compared to plays in American football where every unit (football player) has its own specific role to play and route to take. Attack patterns determine which target a specific unit will choose and what action the unit will take against that specific target.
With each unit in an encounter given its class and attack pattern the level parameters come into play.

Level

Based on the deployment location and, to a lesser extent, the purpose of the encounter, the level parameters are set. Each unit gets assigned a character level defining the unit's statistics such as hit points and resistances. The system creates its own small level range variations within the level parameters to create subtle differences between units that get assigned the same level.

To further enhance the uniqueness of an encounter, each unit can be assigned additional Personal experience Points (PeP) ranks. These PeP ranks give the unit bonuses to their basic statistics. This way a group can be created with units that are extra tough for their level or a group can contain a stronger 'named' unit.

This is one of the more interesting aspects of PvE combat. For those you play mmorpgs. Running across an enemy that is stronger then the normal npc is very common. But for the most part they just have more HP, deals more damage and they may come with a new attack. This is what makes them different then the average mob. Many boss fights are design the same way.

Spellborn does share similarities with this. With the skill deck system combined with PeP devs can create a boss mob that truly deserves to be called a boss. With the skill deck devs can place very powerful skills in the npc’s deck that are far more powerful then that of his henchmen. They can also be set into combos make then even more effective. With PeP controlling “states” (You can learn more about states here. http://spellborn.wikia.com/wiki/Character_States) devs can greatly increase the npc’s movement speed, resist and overall damage beyond normal standers showing just how powerful he is compared to both his allies and his enemies( the players).


Wrapping this up, I can assure you that we worked hard at creating unique hostile encounters in a unique world. Of course TCoS wouldn't be the MMO it is if we didn't have some additional encounters to be found. For the boss monsters we used extensive scripting to create encounters that require some serious thinking.

More on boss encounters next time.

It’s been long over do since my last post. So here it is. Like before I will use info provided by devs of spellborn this time Hessel Bonenkamp and El Drijver then give you a better insight and understanding from my experience and knowledge. In my last post I explained a lot on how npcs react in the world of spellborn and how they work together to defeat there enemies(the players) so now we discuss how boss fights work. I will start with the basic actions of the boss. This is divided up into both normal mob AI and scripting.


Scripts and the 'physical' game world are very closely related since most of them need some sort of information on their surroundings. Some scripts, for example, need to know where that cursed tree is standing or which locations it can pick to ambush the player. This connection makes the editing of scripts two-fold: first we have to write the actual scripts and then we have to place it in the world and connect them to the relevant world objects.

The attached screenshot shows an area in the Ormoburu encounter with some scripts and their connections. The scripts themselves are displayed as scrolls, because they are pure magic , and the arrows indicate connections: black for attached scripts and blue for triggers (see below). The stars and peasants represent NPC spawners and the rest, well, the rest you would have to figure out yourself.
http://tcos.com/sbforum/images/downloaded/170844ormoclearing.jpg
Spellborn uses a modified version of the Unreal engine, so the scripting is done in a modified version Unreal's scripting language which we refer to as: UC. How UC works or looks is beyond the scope of this journal, but if you are interested there's plenty information out there. Using UC we can override all of the standard AI functionality (the blood, sweat and tears of bpmm et al.) to customise or completely rewrite the fundamental behaviour for each boss.

Basically, each NPC reacts to messages like: "enemy detected", "received damage", "I died", etcetera and (standard Unreal) triggers, which are best described as "generic" messages. By overriding the actions in, and responses to these messages, we can change their normal behaviour and let them interact with other NPCs, players and the world (and vice versa).

So, if some hypothetical boss is mind controlled by an evil mage that (obviously) receives a part of the damage that's inflicted on the boss, we override the "received damage" message to first find that culprit of a mage and then calculate and deal the preferred amount of damage and possibly, when it died, trigger that door behind you to open it.

More complex bosses require more complex scripts and more complex interactions between each message. An interesting boss would be the great, jolly lizard: Ormoburu. The encounter where the players meet Ormoburu has many factors that determine what he'll try to do to you. These factors include, but are definitely not limited to, the distance to the players, whether or not there are players behind him and if the players interacted with certain objects in the level.

Back in my last post I said that players had limited amount of control on how a npc reacts in battle this is the same to a degree in boss fights. Using Ormoburu as a example. ( for those who don’t know what Ormoburu looks like http://spellborn.gameamp.com/gallery/viewScreenshots/25713.php)

Ormoburu could have a tail sweep attack for those who stand behind it so using close range backstab attacks could be dangerous. Standing in a pack could push Ormoburu into using AoEs.

During the biggest part of the encounter, the standard AI isn't running at all. While the AI is turned off, all the movement, attacks, chats and animations are controlled by the multitude of scripts attached to Ormoburu. If Ormoburu gets triggered, the scripts determine to which state (if at all) Ormoburu should switch. A state could tell Ormoburu to summon (very nasty) enemies close to your position, another state might tell him to hunt you down while yet another state can trigger him to insult you.

Now we will talk about the boss encounters as a whole
Boss encounters is a term we use loosely here, it doesn’t stand for something necessarily big and dangerous. It means the encounter is unique, typically harder then the encounters before it and usually marks an achievement of some sort. We have bosses of level 4 and bosses of level 50, some are tiny, some are huge, it’s all there.
Boss encounters can be located inside instances as well as outside. Our outdoor bosses are spread everywhere and go as low as level 4. Usually players are lead to them with quest lines or lore, but innocent travelers might stumble upon them deep inside a cave system.

Designing these encounters is always difficult. Bosses work like players; they have their own skilldecks with tiers and are thus limited in the same fashion. One can say they have exactly the same possibilities as players, but that’s not entirely true, I’ll get to that later. The skills are usually designed to match with the quest, lore and surroundings. A bear boss would look silly with a ‘wing buffet’ attack, obviously, but also, will there be other mobs nearby and what are the surroundings?

Finding something that fits into all these factors is nice, finding something that actually uses all these factors is even nicer. Imagine a big Urgarut in the Quarterstone mines as a boss. This is a pvp area, so what we would try is to involve pvp in the boss’ skilldeck. Something like, placing debuffs that will kill the player when the timer runs out unless he kills another player. All though this might be a bit too straight forward, mechanics like this really make for rich and different encounters.
With this being said expect some boss encounters to take the environment into consideration and used to make things difficult for players. More on this is a minute
Bosses inside instances have a more controlled environment, just the players from the group and mobs from the instance will be present. Bosses inside instances can be easily supported by scripts, because of these controlled environments. These scripts can handle actions and events that are not possible with the use of just the regular skills from the skilldeck. They range from lights going on and off to the flooding of an entire area.

For example, they might have some spooky old house which is partially destroyed and decide that the old housekeeper is the boss that still wanders around. They also indicate what kind of attacks the boss to use. Like, mostly melee attacks, using his broom and that near the end of the fight the roof should come down. The roof coming down near the end of the fight is not possible with regular skills, it has to be triggered at a set moment and needs custom graphics. Art will take care of the graphics, while the scripters will make sure the roof comes down at the right time. (Check the picture below to see the skill being developed.

http://tcos.com/sbforum/images/downloaded/170729skill_editor.JPG

PvP
The section on boss encounters was a bit short I know. That is only because so much of what I could have said I did back in my last post. So I’m going to add a little post covering a bit of pvp (can’t let pve have the spot light all the time). I will start by showing a oldie but a goody.
http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/693/693923p2.html
Now for those of you whole know Spellborn well your wondering why I would bring up a feature that won’t be out until post release. The point of all my post is about understanding what spellborn not about what features they have or how cool they would be. Back to the link I posted this is a early example of Spellborn’s Shard Conquest system. According to the lore the main drive for a lot of the conflict in spellborn comes from exploring new shards where each High House would fight for control over the new land. What does wining mean? For one you get bragging rights as towns on the new shard would have statues and High house banners of the winners. Also from guild stand point the guild that does the best would get access to there own guild shop that would earn them a large amount of gold and resources at the player base’s expense. Sadly it was push to post release. Mainly because while the devs did have a work shard conquest system they soon realized that it was like a one hit wonder. Everyone shows up for conquest it is a big hit after that no one thinks about it again until it starts over again.
Devs want pvp to be a little more consistent then that. So they had to change up the system. So for now we will have to wait. Another reason why I posted old Shard Conquest it helps when bringing up a lot of other issues. For one what is the basic standing on pvp? Is it build around small group, solo or large scale? The answer is its build far all three. When the devs designed the skill deck and class system they did not want players to feel like they couldn’t be part of all forms of combat. Below are a few examples of PvP combat and how things flow general.

http://mygamersvideos.onlinewelten.com/videos/HasqfHSi8FGC/

This is live game play from last years GC that spellborn took part in. The first half of the video shows pve with a player who is clearly new at spellborn. I would like to point everyone’s attention to the second have which shows a few players fighting each other. One of the first things you will notice is you see a lot of misses floating over the head of the female warrior I sure you all know that there are no auto functions or other systems that can assist the player. This first part of this fight show just how engage you have to be when aiming your attacks. It is not as hard to do as people think but there is an advantage from being able to aim better then your target as you can clear see from the video.
From this video and others you will notice that there is a lot of melee action going on and not much spell casting or at least not at long range. Spellborn is more close combat oriented then other mmorpgs. That’s not saying there aren’t plenty of range/magic attacks. You can check out the skills here.