Maybe it is a side effect of growing older, but my list for changes for games becomes a little longer every year. It isn’t that I think any one game suffers or is unplayable, but with a few simple changes standardized across games, gaming life in general would be much improved.
My first wish is for area-wide auto loot to be implemented. I much enjoy the auto-looting in Lord of the Rings Online. Nothing is more convenient than loot automatically being deposited in your bags. Yes, it can be inconvenient sometimes when your bags are cluttered with vendor trash, but that minor inconvenience is outweighed by never having to loot an enemy again.
Next up on the wish list, mentoring. Everquest 2 and Rift both implement this feature enormously well. It makes sense and allows for friends and family who have differing play time to still play together. Turning off experience, doesn’t make it possible for a higher level character to effectively play with a lower level character without it being unbalanced and in the end power-leveling.
The ability to turn off experience directly from your experience toolbar. EQ2 does this and it prevents the problem of out leveling a zone simply and elegantly. This becomes more and more essential as games reduce the amount of experience required to reach maximum level. Nothing is more irritating than constantly out-leveling zones and leaving stories unfinished because non-story content has become trivial.
Housing, for the love of all that is holy, HOUSING. And not just any old housing, but housing as magnificent and immersive as the housing in EQ2. I want someplace my characters can all home, display their spoils of questing, relax with a full hobbit second breakfast, or curl up and read a book. I miss the housing in EQ2, and if there weren’t other issues preventing full enjoyment of the game, I’d still be playing it. I don’t want small cramped hovels with over-priced rents and storage costs. I want the ability to decorate and for all characters to be able to share the space. I also want housing that looks like house, not some weird variant of housing that only vaguely resembles housing.
Shared banking and storage among all characters on the server. How hard can this be to implement? Personal storage and communal storage should be standard at this point. And there should be separate storage for crafting materials shared among characters on a server. Guild Wars 2 does this beautifully. One of the few strong points of that game is the ability to send crafting materials to shared storage.
Cosmetic wardrobes and for this there are truly only two models to be followed: LOTRO and GW2. GW2 has the most beautiful dyes and more importantly, find the dye once and it is yours forever. Nothing I hate more than constantly having to search for the dye I want every time I want to dye a new piece of cosmetic clothing. LOTRO has hands down the best cosmetic clothing system, minus the dye issue. The ability to have multiple outfits to wear at a moments notice without changing or disturbing the stats on your battle armor is phenomenal. I freely admit, my LOTRO characters change clothes frequently depending on mood and season. Why can’t all games do this? Why can’t my casting class characters slip into heavy armor so they look intimidating if they want to, or why can’t me heavy plate warriors look less threatening and those surprise foes?
I know I’m tilting at windmills. I know despite he fact that I make sense and all games thieve from one another, no consensus amongst game designers and companies is magically going to unfold in the next year. Doesn’t mean I am going to stop wishing that there will be dramatic changes for the better across all games or that new games releasing this year will come to understand that it is better to delay release and implement features from other games that a vast majority of players consider as standard.
