What else is out there?

[Descended]

I second the player skill mattered thing. Not just being able to run the buttons like a complex arcade controller, but knowing what to attack and how to attack it and whether to retreat or charge. And that was just the combat; you also had to manage equipment choices and skill choices, and those choices mattered.

There is something about games where you can plan out a long term strategy or a set of goals and then be able to see that plan come to fruition, yet at the same time see small, continuous improvements while doing interesting, short-term tasks, like not dieing to a group of frenzied minotaurs who surprised you in a narrow, icy tunnel. The uniques, recipes, and skills allowed for rewarding (mostly in the "I've got this design for a character" area) long-term planning and execution, and the random map and loot generation kept the action from being too predictable for my taste.


Blizzard could make WoW 2.0 ten times as addictive by:

• Having some good and superior items be randomly generated. We know they use a 'point buy' system for balancing stats with an item level. A random item generator that, when given a base item type ("leather shoulders"), quality, and a point value (based on the mob's/chest's level plus whatever modifiers), generates one, two, or three mods for an item would make equiping characters so much more interesting. Imagine what happens to the economy when there is occasional items generated that happen to be perfect fits for a particular type of character. For example, blue plate gauntlets with +agi, +str, +1 crit. Blizzard hasn't provided optimal blue items in each slot for each talent build archaetype, crit focused warrior in this case. If those items could be generated randomly, your equipment horizon opens up dramatically.<>
  
• Randomly generated instances. There wouldn't be a need to make the geography random, which would avoid the biggest technical hurdle. Instead, randomness could be achieved by more flexible use of spawn points (so boss locations or even the creature ecology of a instance could vary) and randomized quests (something that would probably take a good deal more design genius to do well than randomizing spawns).<>
  
• One, two, and three man instances. I likes me a skill challenge, but it's often more headache than it's worth to find four other people to do, say, Mauradon with no one above level 48. Nuff said.<>
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