Random encounters in the world

I felt slightly weaker about the random stuff, cause very quickly I started "reading" them as soon as I saw a broken cart, a pyre or a summoner with skelingtons.

But what I DID love were the quests that would trigger if you were in a certain location and heard an npc cry out for help. Now THAT was a super cool mechanic.

And there would even be chains of these quests, where I saved a dude on a waterfall that talked about some bandits in a nearby location stealing his stuff. Then when I came to that location this same npc was now caught by the bandits and I had to save them and then kill a named mob in the area to get a certain item. And I think there's a continuation to this chain too, but I didn't get that far during my gameplay.

Definitely hope we manage to get something similar in Ashes.

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I'll just hope that Ashes and other games work out how to make these more procedural/truly random.

Curated versions of this content always seem to show up in the 'early stages' of these games and then drop off as the game ages, even though they should technically be easy content to add. But ofc, who has time to complain about 'the mildly lower percentage of cool random OW stuff?' (me, I have time, I'll complain)

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I love it when games feel that way, but in the Node system and related things in other games, it can be really hard to produce handcrafted content without sacrificing the scale of your world.

The Node system is intended to create a very large world that updates/builds itself in direct response to player activity, which is a great idea for a PVP-centric MMO. But the tradeoff is that it can make detailed quests/storylines harder to develop, since your quests have to account for the world constantly changing.

A good fallback for this when developers lack space is procedurally generated content - "go to X location and grab Y item, then take it to Z person in $othernode". That's a template that's super easy to fill in, but dedicated storylines and detailed sidequests tend to be be built around a world with rigidly set locations, with the quests built around those places.

I'd love to see a game strike the balance between something like the Node system (which is in itself a very cool concept) and handcrafted content, but honestly? This sounds REALLY REALLY HARD to do right.