OP didn't say "I'm grossed out by gore," they said "I don't want to play a game that's about killing stuff." The LEGO games are cutesy, kid-appropriate hack n' slash but they're still hack 'n slash.
"In this case, rather than offer properly balanced loot tables and tweak instances to allow continuous runs"
What kind of tweaks are you referring to? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm playing a Death Knight in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. Here is how starting a DK currently works:
-You start at level 55, with 0 talent points
-You start a chain of quests, nearly all of which educate you on some aspect of how Death Knights work, and most of which give you a new spell, ability, or talent points
-By the end of the chain, you now have all your talent points and (ideally, this is still being smoothed out) everything necessary to start questing in Outland, including a fast mount, a decent set of blue gear, etc.
Keeping in mind that this is a completely new class that NO ONE has ever played from level 1, it's actually reasonably easy to pick up if you have a decent amount of experience with WoW already. And in the live game you'll have to at least leveled to 55 before you can get one.
IMO, super super ideally, MMOs would have perfect adaptive difficulty so that your leveling/gearing speed corresponds almost perfectly with skill level until end game, but those treadmill habits die hard especialy in a genre that lives on subscription costs. In the mean time I think the DK way of doing things is a step in the right direction, and I would support such a feature for any class.
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OP didn't say "I'm grossed out by gore," they said "I don't want to play a game that's about killing stuff." The LEGO games are cutesy, kid-appropriate hack n' slash but they're still hack 'n slash.
"In this case, rather than offer properly balanced loot tables and tweak instances to allow continuous runs" What kind of tweaks are you referring to? I'm genuinely curious.
I'm playing a Death Knight in the Wrath of the Lich King beta. Here is how starting a DK currently works: -You start at level 55, with 0 talent points -You start a chain of quests, nearly all of which educate you on some aspect of how Death Knights work, and most of which give you a new spell, ability, or talent points -By the end of the chain, you now have all your talent points and (ideally, this is still being smoothed out) everything necessary to start questing in Outland, including a fast mount, a decent set of blue gear, etc. Keeping in mind that this is a completely new class that NO ONE has ever played from level 1, it's actually reasonably easy to pick up if you have a decent amount of experience with WoW already. And in the live game you'll have to at least leveled to 55 before you can get one. IMO, super super ideally, MMOs would have perfect adaptive difficulty so that your leveling/gearing speed corresponds almost perfectly with skill level until end game, but those treadmill habits die hard especialy in a genre that lives on subscription costs. In the mean time I think the DK way of doing things is a step in the right direction, and I would support such a feature for any class.
You might find this thread interesting: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42952 Brad Wardell specifically mentions Valve as a company that he thinks is doing things right.
It was also on the Super Nintendo