Eventually if you play a number of different games, you’ll come across a point where you think to yourself ‘I wish such and such game had THIS feature!’ It doesn’t matter what the feature is exactly, but you’ll think it and you’ll feel a little dirtier thinking it depending on what “it” is. Now, there are a couple of directions you can go with this thought.
Number one, it’s common for games to “borrow” from one another and add popular features to their game that may have shown up elsewhere ‘first’. This only makes sense, why would you NOT add a popular feature to your game, even if someone else is using it. It’s not the developers who cry ‘we had that first!’ but the players who typically shout ‘oh yeah, well THIS GAME had that feature first! So it must be better.’ In the end it doesn’t really matter.
Second of all, if games only used unique and different features in their games we’d have even more indecision on what to play because no one game could possibly house everything you would like to see.
What feature have you seen in one game but would love to see in another? Would this feature changed whether or not you played either of those games? Feel free to name some that are realistic (ie: you could actually see them being implemented in your game) and some that you know there’s absolutely no way you’d ever see in your MMO of choice.
One of mine would have to be from world of warcraft. I would absolutely love to see EQ2 with a built in calendar much like WoW has (you click on it from the mini map) that tells players what world events are going on, and when they start. You can click on each specific day of the calendar and it will tell you everything you need to know about this event.
I think this would be fantastic for events such as the moonlight grotto that comes once a month, Frostfell, and every other holiday event out there. When a special promotion is going on (ie: doubt exp weekends, SC cards on sale) that could also be mentioned.
Of course it’s not good enough to simply swipe another games idea, you have to improve on it and make it better. So how about allowing guilds to customize their calendars and add events to it, raids. Then players know what is scheduled without having to always log over to their guild web site, and it gives officers and leaders a neat place to write things down and keep track. The general calendar could be something simple and edited by the community team so that developers don’t have to spend hours and hours working on it once it’s released to the game, and things like Antonia Bayle’s server wide roleplay events could eventually get added to these calendars for players to look at while they’re in game.
This feature may not be for everyone, but it’s still something I would one day absolutely love to see (and yes, I’ve left /feedback about this before). Lets hear some other features out there, it doesn’t matter what game you’d like to see it in, I want to hear them all!
WoW’s calendar actually does allow guild officers to invite members to custom events (the only limitation is that you can only invite so many people to one event, so larger guilds might exceed the limit and have to invite mains only or somesuch). You can also view the events calendar while out of game via logging into your account on the armory website. My guild actually uses the in-game tool instead of the website, to keep all the information in game where the raid leader can get at it.
I’d love to see decent Public Quests and Open Groups. I thought those ideas were brilliant although just not quite right. Open Groups is a great idea and would work really well in a game lik WoW.
Awesome Idea,
I would love to see full control over the guild halls.
It would be cool to make our own floor plans, just zone into an empty 24×24 building, put up your walls, doors, windows etc and continue from there. It would then be YOUR OWN custom designed building.
I have to agree on the WoW calendar – awesome idea – especially for someone like me who’s just gotten back into it and would have no clue on when events happened or what they are all about :)
I think the EQ2 guild interface is very powerful and well done. I’d like to see it (and more) in pretty much every game that is released. It is hard enough to be a guild administrator. Having poor tools to do it just makes it more frustrating.