Originally Posted by
AmonGwareth
Appreciate the post. Nearly every MMO is grindy (Dailies, repeated Instances or Raids), but we understand what you mean. Modern MMOs contain a lot of features that work to mask that grind and make it less obvious.
There is only so much we can do without redoing a lot of the core game concepts, but we have recognized for a while now that adding quest content and interesting regions can go a long ways to improving things. We've revamped Tier 1 (Lesser Aradoth), T2 (Dalimond/Chiconis), and other areas. We've added dungeons (Dralnok's Doom, Helian's Tomb, Ashlander's Tomb) as well as other areas of interest for T6 (Barrier Vale, Eastern Outpost, Island of Ice, etc).
We've got more revamps in the works... Island of Fire, Western Deadlands, Tier 3 (Tazoon), and New Trismus.
We've added a new school, Crystalshaper, revamped others (Confectioner, Scholar, etc) and made a lot of tweaks and changes to adventure school abilities to reduce the timer and the boredom of using abilities once every 30-60 minutes (most are no more than 5 minutes now).
But, ultimately, some aspects will always be grindy (i.e. crafting, construction) here and in any game.
This unfortunately is not true. Unity 3D is a powerful engine and does include a lot of community support, add-ons, and plug-ins. But to create a true 3D MMORPG game client a heck of a lot of work would have to be done that would not be able to simply be imported or purchased. For example, Istaria uses definition and entity files that are a custom format so something would have to be written to read, interpret, and make use of them. Yes, the assets could be directly imported, but still quite a bit of work would have to be done to make use of them in Unity3D.
Another aspect that would be problematic is the terrain system. Istaria's terrain is saved on the server, while Unity 3D out of the box requires terrain to be generated on the client. So a system would have to be written to handle that, which would introduce further issues with pathing, plots, etc.
Finally, you end up with numerous aspects of the game such as the UI, communications layer, tutorial system, and much more that would have to be written from scratch.
However, we are working on upgrading some graphical aspects of the game. We currently have a full upgrade of the weapon textures that will soon be in testing on Blight. We resized the textures to take advantage of memory that modern computers and graphics cards now have (as opposed to what they had in 2003).
Teaser: And we're looking at other things to improve the appearance of such as.... trees.