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I just finished reading John's wonderful post on the Official Design Plan and I'm glad to see pretty much all of these things... Save one. Isle of Dawn.

I try to keep up with what's going on here and offer my two cents when I can but I must have missed the question period on this (or not been in the right places to weight in!). So I wanted to take a moment to talk about Isle of Dawn and how I feel about it and it's place in the game world.

At the core of it... I don't feel that the Isle of Dawn, by lore, should be a starting area. When you arrive at the Isle of Dawn with a brand new level one character you're treated as if you're already an adventurer of some renown. It's as if you're expected. Every other starter you aren't explicitly marked out as something special (that I can recall). You're treated for what you are; a novice. You're an up and comer in the world and that's where you begin. It takes time and effort for you to become someone of note and even then note everyone has heard of you and if it's cross-continent? You might still just be some guy and still have to prove yourself. (Correct me if I'm wrong here, my memory is far from infallible after all!)

I've always felt that Isle of Dawn's tone seemed better suited to being something you come to after reaching a certain point of experience. While the quest pacing is obviously done with a starter zone in mind, I think that the Isle of Dawn could be easily rebalanced into a zone appropriate for a higher level and brought more in line with the world.

Personally, I think an appropriate level would probably be around the late-mid-twenties. And it would, obviously, be best included as a part of the Kojani line. Kojan leveling content only brings a character so far and then it's off to the two other continents until you've hit max level. So you're more or less done with everything that Kojan has to offer at roughly level 25 (give or take) and then there's nothing to come back to until 50 when you can go to Magi's Hold or take on the overland raids.

At this level range there is becoming less to do (there's a few periods in leveling when question runs a bit dry and while there are no XP curve hell-levels there's a decent period where the game kind of feels like a slog before it picks back up again, generally found this to be late twenties and early thirties if memory serves) but it's still a level range where you can level at a speedy enough pace for the Isle of Dawn to be able to represent a few levels of growth.

I'm not sure how limited we are with the starting area stuff what with client limitations but if possible it's something I'd like to see when content work gets going (mob design, questing, and encounter scripting that is).

Would love to hear anyone else's thoughts!

I'm actually a fan of the design of IOD, everything is very nicely streamlined, and you feel like you're part of something bigger.

However, this is actually a really good idea, especially if veskals goes back to being a teens area. I say this mostly because there very little to do in the 20's. Most people just went to TK or CIS. That was about it. Kojan had some early 20's stuff, but that was stuff that could be done in an afternoon, not a trek that should span a couple of days.

Making it Kojan's mid 20's, early 30's zone would give at least a third option to those looking for quests, and the only one available on Kojan.

That's my thought as well. I do like the flow of Isle of Dawn. The island itself isn't bad. It just felt weird for it to be a starting area when it could have been a part of the Kojan leveling experience and help fill out that mid twenties gap.

Some adjustments of course would need to be made but I think it could be a good way to shore up some lacking content that was wasted on an attempt to homogenize the game.

**And Tenby hunting was super fun, not gunna lie.

My biggest concerns with IoD has always been that stupid Bracelet of Lucky Charms that was so damn over powered that nothing would top it until you completed the "last" quest in KDQ.
When they then decided to copy that stuff to the redesigned continental starting areas... my heart broke.

Yeah I most definitely missed the convo on the Isle of dawn. A boat to go back and forth? People want to go back to the isle? What is the reasoning behind this? I would love to know.

I really love Koralith's suggestion for the isle. I think it solves two issues at once.
1. It removes the Isle as a starter area. This simplifies everything associated with starter areas. Back to starter towns, work on itemization for beginner quests. We don't even have to talk about the isle in this scenario. We can just focus on the origional starter areas and get them right.
2. It gives Kojan some much needed content. I always loved Kojan. It's my favorite continent of the three. But it always lacked in content. You could easily get to about level 17 or 18, but then it just kind of fell off.
I know there was content for a few more levels, but it just seemed kind of pointless to force the last couple of levels there when you were going to have to leave for Thestra or Qalia anyway.
Using the isle for Kojan content would fix that issue. It would add a lot to the overall game also I think.
Great idea Koralith!

The client offers every starting character the option of starting on IOD. I'm not sure what can be done to shor-circuit that via the server. We really don't have many ways we can influence the client.

Otherwise, I rather like the idea. IOD was extremely unbalanced relative to the other starting areas and arguably unbalanced for the level; my characters that went through IOD usually didn't find anything equivalent through the entire next tier. And that's not even to bring in the stupid charm.

I agree that the 20s were the toughest levels in VG to find an area to adventure in. BTW, when I was playing around with .rifting by the numbers, I discovered that the original 20-something Pantheon of the Ancients chunk is still there. So I believe it would be possible to hook back into the game the way it used to be hooked in. It would need to be repopulated, and we don't have collections for that, but there might still be some information floating around on the web. Or it could be redesigned from scratch.

If we do decide to (or have to) keep IOD as a starting area, I would like to see it soundly thrashed with the nerf bat.

Most client side stuff we cannot alert but we can change how the server handles it for instance.

1. Redirect the Isle of dawn button to go to the racial starting area like the other button.
2. Redirect isle of dawn button to go wherever we want. Ie.. create a custom starting area that gets you familiar with the game but you can't level and after you finished the tutorial ports you to the racial starting area.
3. Nerf the crap out of IoD.

Those are just a few options to show we do have some other routes we can take.

On the topic of extended Kojan content, I agree, Kojan did seem to get ripped off. The idea of using "Isle of Dawn" is a clever one. IoD and it's 8 surrounding chunks are indeed styled after the Kojan continent:

[attachment=0]IOD-chunks.jpg[/attachment]

Understand, we have been talking this stuff over for a year while the server core was being built and stabilized. During those conversations (and you'll see in the Plan document) we discussed options for Custom Content, once all the original content has been completed.

With "Isle of Dawn" remaining a starter area by player choice, what if after release, we built up the surrounding chunks to be that missing Kojan content, progressively? Levels 20-40 or so. There's lots of real estate. This way the player who chooses IoD as their home would also have somewhere to go without ever leaving their Continent, until the end-game takes them back to Kojan or the other continents.

(Note those IoD chunks are disabled on New Telon currently just to match Live, but there's no reason we cannot enable them. Far as I can tell, they are stable and usable - Xinux?)

I think it would be weird to go from level 1-10 and then immediately 25-30 stuff. Otherwise I think it's a great idea.

There's actually a lot of islands on Kojan that went completely unused for years that could also provide the same thing (especially if we don't want to mess with IOD too much).

EDIT:

Thinking about John's map, I had this thought about it:

[img]http://jakkal.com/IsleofDawnmap.jpg[/img]

Don't forget that some of those extra chunks doesn't have water physic volumes , so you will be running around on the sea floor unless we figure out how to stream things like that from the server.