Hello, was thinking about this and figured it'd be an interesting thread.

I am wondering what kind of role will gear play in CU? Will it be as all-important as gear usually is in mmo's, where the gear usually "makes" your character and you're extremely dependent on it or will gear be m  treated more realistically, where it can enhance certain aspects but isn't nearly as important as skill in combat?

Like in the film Conan I find this quote fits best:

"That is strength, boy. That is power: the strength and power of flesh. What is steel compared to the hand that wields it?"

In MMO's this is usually the opposite, finding an "uber" sword or armor, while it is nice for "loot" games (IE diablo, etc)  gives you far more of an advantage over someone, even if they are more skillful as a player. I find it drastically takes away from the "pvp" experience found in mmo's.

DAOC was fairly ok with this, gear wasn't a huge a factor early on and with things not being bop(bind on pickup) and  attainable by ways other then pve was good, but TOA kind of killed this with it's uber gear.

UO was a great example of this. In UO gear was obtainable through crafters (which seems to be a major point for CU's crafting system from the interviews) and it wasn't uber nor did it "make" your character. A sword was a sword and generally compared to other swords, swords were more different depending on the type of sword (IE a longsword vs a rapier). Same goes for armor generally as welll. Crafters made gear, you could buy it fromt hem and with full loot drops it kept things turning over when you'd die and lose it. There were a few "rare" things, but because of looting these were something you'd want to use at the right moment (vanq weapons they were called) and losing them hurt bad because of the worth of them.

When it comes to mmo's in general most games , in terms of combat, go something like this:

Gear>Level/character skill>player skill.

Whereas games designed without a huge importance or relience on gear can put character and player skill head of it, which imo seems better for pvp reasons. Would you rather fight someone and win or lose depending on their skill in actual combat, what combat moves they make, how well they dodge/block your attakcs, or would you rather win or lose because one of you had more "uber" gear?

Moving on, there ar ea couple things I'd like to talk about, that are common myths that many video games just get flat out wrong when it comes to weapons and armor in the games. It was just something that irked me a bit, like the people making the game didn't research a lot of things they had or simple didn't care (I can understand if they think it "fits" better, it's their game afterall) but it usually comes off like they didn't know/research things enough or know better, which isn't generally helped by the poor myths perputated by Hollywood in movies and even books (even historical ones).

1. Weight of Swords/weapons and Plate armor. 

The Myth that swords used in fighting, could weigh a lot. Simply false, this is one of the most common myths. Some games just flat out  run with this (I'm looking at you Elder Scrolls with your absurdly huge weights for weapons). Most swords were <3 pounds, even some of your two handers could be around 3 pounds, with most being under 5 pounds at the max. People simply did not use 20+ pound swords. Not only would it be a pita to swing around, but it would tire you out quickly. The point of fighting was to stay alive, and the lighter the sword the longer you could fight and stay alive, not to mentiont he better balance. Swords aren't some unwieldly piece of steel you swing around like a madman, even the bigger ones, like Hollywood generally portrays. There was so much skill in fighting with them, one only need look at classic historical combat manuals to find this.

This also applies to other weapons, most notably the classic "warhammers" you find in most games, which look like...well big hammers, in reality they weren't nearly that big (the head of the weapon) and looked more like a normal hammer head rather then a huge blunt hammer head, weighed a hell of a lot less as well and were great vs heavy armor.

See: http://www.thearma.org/essays/weights.htm

As well it's a common myth that "plate" armor weighed a lot as well. While it could weigh more then other armors (like light leather, etc)  a good suit could weigh as little as 45 pounds and going up to around 65. To give you an idea of that, the average soldier these days can carry around 60 pounds in thier rucksack and even more depending on their mission, and that's ont heir back mostly.  Plate armor's weight was more evenly disitributed over your entire body and wasn't focused on one specific point of your body, unlilke Chainmail which had the majority of it's weight resting on your shoulders and could tire you out more easily.

A guy wearing full plate armor can easily do things , such as mount his own horse, run, hell even do cartwheel sin if he wanted.

2.  Shields - "Bigger = better" myth.  It's another common myth that the bigger the shield the better it is. This is simply false and ignores how important shields were and how much the right shield could add to a fight. It always takes away a LOT of strategy that is untapped in any game with shields.

In almost any rpg or game  with shields you find that "bigger=better," you generally start with bucklers and small shields, which have shite protection and are treated as "crap"shields, then you move up to bigger shields, going toward tower shields and such that are treated as some godly shield that can protect you from the weight of the moon falling upon you.

The truth of the matter is that shields of all shapes and sizes had both their advantages and disadvantages. There is no "This shield is thie BEST shield because that's simply not how combat works. It was dependent on both what style of fighting you wanted to do and what enemy you were facing and tactics you planned to use. Some shields are better at one thing, but worse at something else while another is better at the ladder.

A buckler for instance, which is almost always the "Crap" shield in any game, was actually one of the most versatile shields and widely used shields throughout history, and for good reason. When it comes to melee combat they provided the best advtages fighting vs other melee fighters. They were very light, held in your hand by a grip rather then strapped ot your arm like bigger shields. Because of their size and lack of weight you could block attacks more quickly with a buckler plus the  smaller sized didn't obstruct your vision as much and you could see the battlefield (and thus attacks coming at you) better. Because the buckelr was simply held in your hand, if it got grabbed or tangled up in something, you could simply "let go" of it and drop it. Also on top of this, the buckler could serve as an offensive tool as well. From simply hitting your enemy with it, to even going as far as adding vairious tools to it, such as a spike in the middle, to a latch (which was used to "catch" swords and pull them out of the hands of your enemy) to even sharpening the edge of the buckler to use as a slashing weapon. Hoewver the weakness of the buckler was range attacks, because of it's small size you couldn't protect as much of your body at once and thus were vunerable to arrows and other range attacks.

This is where bigger shields have an advantage, such as the kite shield and Tower shields. However the disadvantages of thees shields were in their weight which was heavier and could obstruct your vision more because of their size, as well sinc ethey could be strapped to your arm they could be used to throw you off balance and other things.

This is somoething that Irks me because I've alwyas wanted to play with a buckler in rpgs, but not a single game has ever did it quite right. Dark Souls was about the closest that it's come, since shields had weights and weights affected your attack/movement.

See here for some good info on bucklers and their use in combat:

http://www.thearma.org/essays/SwordandBuckler.htm

Sorry this went on a LOT longer then I intended, got into a bit of a ranty mode lol.

Just a closing note. I was a big player of UO (more so then DAOC I have to confess) and the player crafting and housing in it was second to none. You could just randomly wander around player towns, meet a crafter sitting on his porche crafting items, strike up a conversation with them and end up getting some great deals and even forming friendships that lasted long after UO was gone.  I hope CU has that sense of community with it's housing and crafting system, could even expand on it in more ways.

Your character will probably appear in the world with a full set of basic gear that is good enough to start RvRing. When you can afford it, you will want to upgrade to a full set of crafted gear. It's unclear whether gear will have stat bonuses and if there will be something like spellcrafting.

Hopefully beyond that gear will mainly be a cosmetic thing along the lines of the horizontal progression GW 2 was supposed to have then abandoned after 2 months. You could have glowy weapons that require components that are only dropped by keep lords etc.

(Thanks for the info dump on real life weaponry. That was interesting.)

* Edited to remove dumb statement that gear will work like in DAOC through SI when it clearly won't.

Originally posted by Lore84
I believe the gear progression will almost exclusively be through crafted gear

Ok, but the question was whether gear will be more important than player skill.

we dont know yet..

hopefully they will let us know in one of their updates :)

There needs to be a reason for crafters to continually push the envelope and develop higher quality items. In SWG, there were crafters, weaponsmiths/armorsmiths, that would literally be sold out everyday because they were considered the best and I'd buy 4 of their weapons if i saw them in stock. Likewise, if I found a rare mat for a weapon I'd go to XXX because he was the best.

The differences in the items were never that huge, but for those wanting the best it was worth it I guess.

Originally posted by Galadourn

Originally posted by Lore84
I believe the gear progression will almost exclusively be through crafted gear

Ok, but the question was whether gear will be more important than player skill.

I think we all hope not, but we don't know yet is the short answer.

The thing with going "realistic" in these games is that plate armor basically makes you invulnerbale to most weapons unless you get taken down, arrows and even crossbow bolts are mostly harmless as well. The only thing that really mess you up is a something like poleaxe. Most the fighting 1on1 in plate is basically wrestling to see who can take the other guy down and then stick him with a dagger once he is down.

Plate is also so much better then any other armor made before it. Leather, chain or anything else people came up with before is a joke compared to even early plate armor. Conan quote and all but even a very average fighter wearing decent quality plate will destroy even the most skilled unarmored opponent with ease and quality of plate matters, before firearms people learned and could make extremely thin plate armor tha could still withstand any hand weapon while weighing very little. Heavy plate is from later periods where it was designed to stop bullets, which it did very well

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Originally posted by Tadder
There needs to be a reason for crafters to continually push the envelope and develop higher quality items. In SWG, there were crafters, weaponsmiths/armorsmiths, that would literally be sold out everyday because they were considered the best and I'd buy 4 of their weapons if i saw them in stock. Likewise, if I found a rare mat for a weapon I'd go to XXX because he was the best.

The differences in the items were never that huge, but for those wanting the best it was worth it I guess.

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Ah, fond memories. I remember a long, multi planet journey when I was a little newbling to see the best weapon crafter on the server. That type of interaction wasn't gameplay, it was a memory and an experience.

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I not a big fan of realistic design. that only ruins the experience.

From what i have read (like everyone else) im understanding crafted gear will be the go to items, but skills and abilities on a character will make or break you. Or at least that is what im hoping....

(Side thought: Remember how hard it was , Pre SI , to get a glowy weapon? For a while , only a few players had them, and it defined thier personalities. The weapon itself may have been just above average but it was great to get one since they were so rare. Player skill and character abilites still won the fights not a glowy sword.)

Originally posted by Loky

(Side thought: Remember how hard it was , Pre SI , to get a glowy weapon? For a while , only a few players had them, and it defined thier personalities. The weapon itself may have been just above average but it was great to get one since they were so rare. Player skill and character abilites still won the fights not a glowy sword.)

 

It wasn't that hard. They dropped like candy in Midgard's level 35-50 dungeon once it was itemized, off princes in DF, and various other places (there were I think Elylls in the Alb frontier that dropped swords with a blue glow with white stars). I used a purple glowing DF prince hammer on my cleric for a long while. I do remember that the glowy weapons in Mid and possibly Hib were added first and I thought they were so awesome playing against them on my Albs and therefore I was excited to get that DF hammer on my cleric.

Originally posted by MMOExposed

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I not a big fan of realistic design. that only ruins the experience.

Yeah, this is where personal preferences and opinions come in.

I actually want all my armours as realistic as possible. I mean, what I want, is armor fitting for the setting. In "western fantasy", especially high fantasy, I expect there to be some special leathers and other metals, such as mithril, adamantium and what not. D&D (Especially Neverwinter Nights) is a great example of using all these materials.

I personally cringe at the sight of eastern (manga or anime) influenced bikini armors and such. I want my girls clad in full mail and suits which make sense. Leather? Best leather armors what I've ever seen in games are in Neverwinter Nights 2, same can also be said for some absolutely gorgeous mail & plate designs there. Witcher -series also had an amazing visual style for armor.

I will use this art to portray "realistic", yet femine armor on a female. The art belongs to Mount&Blade series, which I absolutely love. If you are interested in the portrayal of such armors in game, look at screens of games what I mentioned above.

http://img820.imageshack.us/img820/185/mountbladez.jpg

To me, the armor above looks ten times better than any bikini- or high fantasy armor which is overdone and epic. I also hate the style of WoW and Dragon Age going overboard with "epic plates" (mostly shoulders, but Dragon Age also had those -Massive- armors which looked just silly.)

Yea, I am one for more realistically designed armours.

I've had enough of the huge spikey pauldrons and giant oversized helments with super giant horns sticking out of them. They have their place but it seems most mmo's design of armours go that route, the higher tier items have to look super-absurd to let people visually know "i'm super awesome" and I'd much rather have well designed, yet realistic looking armour.

I think part of the problem is that many people don't know just how varied real plate armor and others could be. They assume Plate armor is just a silver color for every single thing and that's that, when it wasn't. Then on top of this you had different regions which were known for their style of armor, such as "Gothic" plate from Germany vs "Milanese" plate from Italy.

No only was plate able to have various colours of the armour but it was also painted on, could have gilding, etchings, and then cloth over it as well.

I think this could be an aamazing part of crafting, if crafters were able to visually design both weapons and armor, from vairous "layers" where they can select different base models and pieces of an armor, then the colour of ht ebase armor, then paintings on the armour, and then etching/gilding, etc Bascially it's all layered one over th eother so you can create some truly unique armor different from others, even develop their own "style" of armor that sets them apart from other crafters visually.

Originally posted by tlear

The thing with going "realistic" in these games is that plate armor basically makes you invulnerbale to most weapons unless you get taken down, arrows and even crossbow bolts are mostly harmless as well. The only thing that really mess you up is a something like poleaxe. Most the fighting 1on1 in plate is basically wrestling to see who can take the other guy down and then stick him with a dagger once he is down.

 

Plate is also so much better then any other armor made before it. Leather, chain or anything else people came up with before is a joke compared to even early plate armor. Conan quote and all but even a very average fighter wearing decent quality plate will destroy even the most skilled unarmored opponent with ease and quality of plate matters, before firearms people learned and could make extremely thin plate armor tha could still withstand any hand weapon while weighing very little. Heavy plate is from later periods where it was designed to stop bullets, which it did very well

 Please do some research; you're incredibly painfully wrong here.

Plate armor was *done* as soon as crossbows came about.  Why might you ask?  Crossbows actually punched threw plate armor.   The british longbow could also bunch threw some plate.  The reason being is that plate armor for the weight and ability to stop slashing weapons actually had issues stopping crossbow bolts because they were much more powerful than normal bows (and required little training).

Also to your point about heavy plate armor stopping bullets... yeah... no... I'm sure someone probably tried it, but by no means is it historically relevant since plate armor was gone militarily by the time we started using even basic muskets.

A lot of the views of plate armor in our past are romanticized and not terribly factual.

Originally posted by Angier2758

Originally posted by tlear

The thing with going "realistic" in these games is that plate armor basically makes you invulnerbale to most weapons unless you get taken down, arrows and even crossbow bolts are mostly harmless as well. The only thing that really mess you up is a something like poleaxe. Most the fighting 1on1 in plate is basically wrestling to see who can take the other guy down and then stick him with a dagger once he is down.

 

Plate is also so much better then any other armor made before it. Leather, chain or anything else people came up with before is a joke compared to even early plate armor. Conan quote and all but even a very average fighter wearing decent quality plate will destroy even the most skilled unarmored opponent with ease and quality of plate matters, before firearms people learned and could make extremely thin plate armor tha could still withstand any hand weapon while weighing very little. Heavy plate is from later periods where it was designed to stop bullets, which it did very well

 Please do some research; you're incredibly painfully wrong here.

Plate armor was *done* as soon as crossbows came about.  Why might you ask?  Crossbows actually punched threw plate armor.   The british longbow could also bunch threw some plate.  The reason being is that plate armor for the weight and ability to stop slashing weapons actually had issues stopping crossbow bolts because they were much more powerful than normal bows (and required little training).

Also to your point about heavy plate armor stopping bullets... yeah... no... I'm sure someone probably tried it, but by no means is it historically relevant since plate armor was gone militarily by the time we started using even basic muskets.

 

 

A lot of the views of plate armor in our past are romanticized and not terribly factual.

Actually, there was a documentary (was it Mythbusters? don't remember)  that tested longbows against plate armor and found out that even at 20ft the plate proved impenetrable.

Plate armor seriously hinders mobility and speed...

A knight in heavy plate could be easily bested by a mere musketeer

Originally posted by Galadourn

Originally posted by Angier2758

Originally posted by tlear

The thing with going "realistic" in these games is that plate armor basically makes you invulnerbale to most weapons unless you get taken down, arrows and even crossbow bolts are mostly harmless as well. The only thing that really mess you up is a something like poleaxe. Most the fighting 1on1 in plate is basically wrestling to see who can take the other guy down and then stick him with a dagger once he is down.

 

Plate is also so much better then any other armor made before it. Leather, chain or anything else people came up with before is a joke compared to even early plate armor. Conan quote and all but even a very average fighter wearing decent quality plate will destroy even the most skilled unarmored opponent with ease and quality of plate matters, before firearms people learned and could make extremely thin plate armor tha could still withstand any hand weapon while weighing very little. Heavy plate is from later periods where it was designed to stop bullets, which it did very well

 Please do some research; you're incredibly painfully wrong here.

Plate armor was *done* as soon as crossbows came about.  Why might you ask?  Crossbows actually punched threw plate armor.   The british longbow could also bunch threw some plate.  The reason being is that plate armor for the weight and ability to stop slashing weapons actually had issues stopping crossbow bolts because they were much more powerful than normal bows (and required little training).

Also to your point about heavy plate armor stopping bullets... yeah... no... I'm sure someone probably tried it, but by no means is it historically relevant since plate armor was gone militarily by the time we started using even basic muskets.

 

 

A lot of the views of plate armor in our past are romanticized and not terribly factual.

Actually, there was a documentary (was it Mythbusters? don't remember)  that tested longbows against plate armor and found out that even at 20ft the plate proved impenetrable.

 I watched a documentary where they proved the longbow could punch through, but found out it was in part due to the strength of the guy using the bow and not only the bow itself (might have been the same documentary?).  The british longbow is not a normal bow either.  They also showed how a crossbow bolt could go punch through plate armor; which sort of made plate armor a death trap.

Also.... what was said about plate armor wearers wrestling each other to the ground.... that did not happen LOL.... they could barely walk in plate armor let alone fight in it... once a guy was brought off his horse in his plate armor he was done for.

He wasn't a walking fortress by any means.  The reason the poleaxe was deadly was similar to the reason why crossbows were deadly to plate wearers.... a lot of force on a tiny point could punch through the armor....