Dragons

[Zathris]

A number of games have tried to introduce dragons before and really have failed completely. I don't even know if dragons as a playable race would even be good in this game. I would like to open up the discussion though on how would these be implimented IF they were.

The way I see it is IF a Dragon Player Race was introduced then they should start in random places in the world and should only start as hatchlings. Dragons on a whole are going to be the strongest of all the other races BUT will take months or even years to get it to a adult stage.

Dragons have no alligance even amongst their own kind. They are loners. They are sought after for special reagents which they drop when killed. The whole point of playing a dragon to begin with is pure survival. You need to survive the first few weeks of play by hiding and attacking things to eat to stay alive.

If you die your growth counter goes backwords. When you get to adolescent you start to get some good attacks BUT are still rather weak as a whole. You also gain access to skills at this point which you can focus on. You could focus on claw and tail attacks and fire breath or take the more magical root and focus on magical spells that help or hinder or even destroy.

After Adolescent you finally make it to Adult. As an adult you finally gain access to flying and you can now take a REALLY bad beating and keep going. At this point it would take 5 REALLY skilled players to hurt and slay you. You gain access to many new skills.

After a year of living as an adult you can finally make it to an Elder Dragon which is the last one. As an Elderm you are one of the strongest things out there.

Of course getting there would take soo much time and effort. It would take longer to get there than it would a normal player. You aren't focused on quests and such just surviving as everyone wants your blood.


The life of a Dragon would be extreamly and painfully hard but if you ever made adult... well.. Then the fun begins.


How do you see it implimented if the race ever is? Remember I'm not saying if it should be or shouldn't. Just a discussion of ideas.

[Hampo]

Dont think dragons will be a player race. You are talking about the massive 4 legged crazy flying fire breathing things arent you. Your idea sounds good i guess but i doubt the devs will implement it. I wouldnt want to play as a dragon but riding one hell yes.

For example you discover a dragon egg. You keep it in your house properly incubating it. Until finally it hatches into a small baby dragon. Now this takes time to grow , you need to feed it every once and awhile and make sure it gets plenty of exercise e.g attacking stuff. Eventually it grows into teenage dragon , its alot stronger and bigger and can be wridden like a horse but it cant fly yet. THen eventually it grows into a full dragon , here you get to choose its skills , e.g heavily armoured or improved fire breathing or w/e. With the full dragon it is a flying mount and has mounted combatlike fire breathing or w/e skills you chose.

Something like this i would like. Ofcourse it couldnt be to overpowered .

[framinal]

Originally Posted by Hampo

Dont think dragons will be a player race. You are talking about the massive 4 legged crazy flying fire breathing things arent you. Your idea sounds good i guess but i doubt the devs will implement it. I wouldnt want to play as a dragon but riding one hell yes.

For example you discover a dragon egg. You keep it in your house properly incubating it. Until finally it hatches into a small baby dragon. Now this takes time to grow , you need to feed it every once and awhile and make sure it gets plenty of exercise e.g attacking stuff. Eventually it grows into teenage dragon , its alot stronger and bigger and can be wridden like a horse but it cant fly yet. THen eventually it grows into a full dragon , here you get to choose its skills , e.g heavily armoured or improved fire breathing or w/e. With the full dragon it is a flying mount and has mounted combatlike fire breathing or w/e skills you chose.

Something like this i would like. Ofcourse it couldnt be to overpowered .

i like this idea, lets run with it imo =)

[Jusik]

Maybe some dragon human hybrids would be a good idea.

[Metal Wolf]

I prefer my dragons to be terrifying things that randomly happen along a guild city rape if for fun and move on.

Not some 14 year old chat spamming "OMFG! I'm a dragon wEEeEEEEeEEEe!".

Way to fuck over the aura of a powerful and wise dragon.

So yea NPC/devcritter only.

[Xeranx]

Originally Posted by Zathris

A number of games have tried to introduce dragons before and really have failed completely. I don't even know if dragons as a playable race would even be good in this game. I would like to open up the discussion though on how would these be implimented IF they were.

The way I see it is IF a Dragon Player Race was introduced then they should start in random places in the world and should only start as hatchlings. Dragons on a whole are going to be the strongest of all the other races BUT will take months or even years to get it to a adult stage.

Dragons have no alligance even amongst their own kind. They are loners. They are sought after for special reagents which they drop when killed. The whole point of playing a dragon to begin with is pure survival. You need to survive the first few weeks of play by hiding and attacking things to eat to stay alive.

If you die your growth counter goes backwords. When you get to adolescent you start to get some good attacks BUT are still rather weak as a whole. You also gain access to skills at this point which you can focus on. You could focus on claw and tail attacks and fire breath or take the more magical root and focus on magical spells that help or hinder or even destroy.

After Adolescent you finally make it to Adult. As an adult you finally gain access to flying and you can now take a REALLY bad beating and keep going. At this point it would take 5 REALLY skilled players to hurt and slay you. You gain access to many new skills.

After a year of living as an adult you can finally make it to an Elder Dragon which is the last one. As an Elderm you are one of the strongest things out there.

Of course getting there would take soo much time and effort. It would take longer to get there than it would a normal player. You aren't focused on quests and such just surviving as everyone wants your blood.


The life of a Dragon would be extreamly and painfully hard but if you ever made adult... well.. Then the fun begins.


How do you see it implimented if the race ever is? Remember I'm not saying if it should be or shouldn't. Just a discussion of ideas.

What you have described is an alpha class. In fact, what you have there seems incredibly similar to Jedi in SWG which ruined the game in my opinion. An alpha class is something we need to back away from. No good will ever come of it. Just look at the aforementioned game.

[Zathris]

Xeranx, I do agree with you to some extent but then again they made becoming a jedi completely stupid.

I'm thinking this instead. Instead of allowing anyone to start a dragon character, you are granted the right to create one by a collection of Dev's who seek out those players who actually contribute to the game such as helping new players, participating in the forums, helping with development. Bascially a joint decesion by the devs so it's not abused.


The other thing you could do is again allow anyone to make it keeping to the scheme that it's going to be darn hard to survive and then adding only a set number of lives for the Dragon Player. The only way you will survive at that point is truely by picking your battles and fighting so hard to survive.

Of course again this is all speculation and still undecided myself it it would be good or bad. Just a cooky idea.

[Siegfried]

Regardless of how hard it should be to become a dragon, I'd still say no.

Dev/NPC only, at best.

The idea of maybe a very young dragon pet, or class that ties in it's abilities with the dragon is interesting, but I don't think our characters would live long enough to see their pet become fully grown.

200+ years for your average dragon? Don't think so.

As for a dragon/human hybrid, not too sure how that would work. I've never been a big fan of Hybrid races and characters, but that is just me.

[Xeranx]

Originally Posted by Zathris

Xeranx, I do agree with you to some extent but then again they made becoming a jedi completely stupid.

I'm thinking this instead. Instead of allowing anyone to start a dragon character, you are granted the right to create one by a collection of Dev's who seek out those players who actually contribute to the game such as helping new players, participating in the forums, helping with development. Bascially a joint decesion by the devs so it's not abused.


The other thing you could do is again allow anyone to make it keeping to the scheme that it's going to be darn hard to survive and then adding only a set number of lives for the Dragon Player. The only way you will survive at that point is truely by picking your battles and fighting so hard to survive.

Of course again this is all speculation and still undecided myself it it would be good or bad. Just a cooky idea.

It's still way too much like the Jedi system SOE put in place and it still doesn't handle the alpha class situation. Yes, SOE handled Jedi terribly and I'll admit my apprehension to anything resembling what they did. It's far too close and I can still remember how empty the game felt once force sensitivity was realized by the collective and then sought after diminishing the economy, classes, and giving people the right to state what they thought about classes they spent all of two weeks with versus someone who made their choice and stuck with it for months.

Then there's the idea that the developers would hand pick who they want to "evolve" (more or less) into this mythical creature. I seriously doubt the developers will be consistent enough (if they were going to go down this path) of picking who they want to play a dragon. I'm not saying they can't do it. I'm saying it'll be very time consuming and I can already imagine people complaining about people not being picked and certain aspects of the game suffering as a result of picking people for this race.

My compromise: If there is a need for a player to have draconic abilities then let them discover they have them. Or better yet, let them somehow learn of a way to incorporate a draconic ability within themselves. I say "a" as in one draconic ability. You pick which ability you want and it can never be as powerful as the weakest full dragon ability. The draconic ability is fostered through magical means and, as a result, is very limited (as well as weak as I stated before). I'll also add that the ability you pick is the ability your character has for the rest of his/her life. If you want a different ability then you'd need to reroll. Also I'll add that: a) if the ability is discovered and you forego accepting it then you never have the chance to claim it later and b) if the ability is fostered by magical means then you become resistant to trying again and each subsuquent trial to gain a draconic ability is harder to achieve making it nigh impossible to get one with each time. This can also be tied in with the power of the ability as well.

[TimTheSkeeter]

Originally Posted by Xeranx

What you have described is an alpha class. In fact, what you have there seems incredibly similar to Jedi in SWG which ruined the game in my opinion. An alpha class is something we need to back away from. No good will ever come of it. Just look at the aforementioned game.

I agree with him, and also even if you could earn the class it would still be stupid because you would be way overpowered and could kill any1...

[Zathris]

I would like to add that it's not INSTANT unstopable power. It's something that would take a lot longer than any normal race to advance. You would be a giant target for anyone at the begining stages as you are weak and infearior. It takes your age counter down when you die or you lose a life and only have a set amount of lives before the character is completely dead.

It's something that not anyone could achieve. Even people who play a hell of a lot would find it to achieve or even skilled players. A lot would be due to luck.

But thats how I see it. To be honest I am starting to lean more to not having it anyway but at least it's an interesting subject.

[Xeranx]

I understand what you're talking about, Zathris. The thing is, and I don't know if you played SWG or were there during development, your idea (as you stated it completely) was what SOE wanted to do with Jedi. Acquiring Jedi-dom was supposed to be mysterious and very hard to accomplish. You'd pretty much exile yourself from the rest of the population because you were always a target by anyone of your opposing faction. Considering this was an MMORPG that SOE was developing it should have seemed dumb to try for this, but people wanted to be Jedi.

When they (SOE) had the force sensitivity (FS) system activated for some time they realized that people weren't getting to Jedi fast enough or was it the players said they weren't able to get there fast enough. Eventually the developers put in holocrons that would direct players to their next class that "might" unlock force sensitivity for them. I should add that it became known that professions dicated whether or not you unlocked the slot for a force sensitive character.

Again, your complete idea concept is what was going to happen for Jedi in SWG. Unfortunately or fortunately (depending on your view) your idea has two strikes against it. For one, it's an alpha class. Instant unstoppable power or not, the goal is to be more powerful than anyone else in the game. This should never happen. Point two is that it's been done already by a company that everyone or almost everyone has blacklisted because the company left an extremely bitter taste in their mouths with what they did. Look at any IP that is going to be associated with SOE and you'll have people saying it's going to be horrible despite it not being developed by SOE.

[LadyNico]

You just described Horizons, which has a dragon class.

http://www.istaria.com/races.php

"Be a dragon" Horizons trailer:- http://community.istaria.com/gallery...cat=15&pic=268

[Annihilator27]

How about a dragonoid form

[Phoenixphire]

Forget the whole "I want to play a dragon" thing, please.

Dragons are supposed to be ancients, with knowledge and power that should be respected and feared. They should be, at the least, end-game characters to battle, that would require the might of a guild, or maybe even multiple guilds.

They should make you stand in awe, much like the teaser trailer. Not some everyday 14-year old, with hiz uber-1337 skillz PWNzorz!11!! OMG!

[Diella]

I played a dragon in horizons from hatching to almost ancient. Balance was a joke you were told play the weakest character in the world and one day... that never happened. Most Dragon on my server pray to be equal to the rest not over powered. But it makes little sense for a dragon to be equal in power. Leave them as npc it for the best.

[Traceur]

wow, this looks familiar. you forgot the part about aging rate getting slower or coming to a halt based on the distance & number of sentients around you.

Zathris... somethings actually require permadeath in-game, and a hunted-down grow-to alpha class is one of them.

sorry, i miss TOA too but this game isn't TOA and you can't force it to be.

[Zathris]

Alright can you all PLEASE stop getting so offensive. I said right from the start it was just an idea and that I hadn't decided if it was even a good one.

The point of this thread is to present your views and ideas not attack the OP.

[Erroneous]

Not a good fit for the features already revealed for this game in my opinion. Could be interesting, but the entire game would have to revolve around this game dynamic.

[Lemons]

I don't think I like this so much. Cool ideas, you obviously put a lot of thought into them, but I don't see them working well in what my understanding of this game is. If you want an enjoyable, sandbox FFA PvP game - you can't have an uber race, no matter how much time it takes to make one.

[CryeMoore]

Originally Posted by Annihilator27

How about a dragonoid form

Done.

[Zathris]

Originally Posted by Lemons

I don't think I like this so much. Cool ideas, you obviously put a lot of thought into them, but I don't see them working well in what my understanding of this game is. If you want an enjoyable, sandbox FFA PvP game - you can't have an uber race, no matter how much time it takes to make one.

I agree with you. An interesting idea but sadly less phiesable.

[LadyNico]

Done II

[Santa]

Originally Posted by Jusik

Maybe some dragon human hybrids would be a good idea.

Imagine a Human and a five-meter tall dragon "breed". lol
Cause that's what gotta happen if you want a Dragon-Human hybrid.

[Zathris]

Originally Posted by Santa

Imagine a Human and a five-meter tall dragon "breed". lol
Cause that's what gotta happen if you want a Dragon-Human hybrid.

Depends on who the female is... and of course nothing stopping the dragons from taknig human form.

[LadyNico]

Originally Posted by Zathris

Depends on who the female is... and of course nothing stopping the dragons from taknig human form.

That's...not a gig this female would be volunteering for in any great rush.

Besides, you know what they say, once you've sampled a dragon, you'll never look at another human again...

[Traceur]

zathris, are you an X-horizoner or an X-TOAer? cause you sound very familiar...