f13.net

EQ "Next' inDevelopment.  

http://www.zam.com/story.html?story=19260
      

Yeah.  I guess anything that's anything started from nothing and they really got me with innovative and outside the box.

...what?

Anyways, yeah. They're making another EQ - who really is surprised about that?

I don't think you have to speculate on microtrans and solo ability being part of the design. I'm fairly certain they learned their lesson on the second, and the first is the way SOE's talked about things for a bit now.

HHK Nobles camp LF1M!

 :awesome_for_real:

SOE and a whole bunch of old EQ players are both on the same page about this. They both want to recover the glory days when they were relevant.

Whatever the next EQ is, it will decidedly not be for the old EQ players. If it bares any resemblance to any part of EQ2 I'd be shocked. And unless FR starts doing some amazing numbers (as in, EQ1 heydey numbers), I don't think it'll be that either.

But then, I'd be shocked if it launches at all. EQ is an important brand, but the success of SOE seems more based on its infrastructure to support new games than any reliance on any one game.

I don't know. If you squint your eyes while looking at Free Realms you can see a lot of stripped down EQ2 in it. I can see them making a more streamlined EQ2 writ large with non-terrible graphics. The problem would be cannibalizing a market three ways instead of the already bad two. I'd kill for an EQ2 that doesn't make me motion sick so I'd be all about it.

Hm, so it hasn't been churning all those free accounts into a steady microtrans revenue stream?  I haven't been following.

EQ and SOE are both dead names in the MMO world.  They currently run a list of games that are all almost in the can, even EQ2 isnt doing well.  They would need to pull a miracle out of their butt to pull off another EQ title that would do well.

I started playing EQ as my last hurrah for the summer.  Reactivated my old account and started a new Necromancer.  It's almost a completely different game.  The newb zones are dead, but there are generally about 200 people in general chat on 7th Hammer at any given time.  From what I hear a lot of people got pulled into their new 50/51 server too.  I don't see why though.  In less than 2 weeks you can have a 55/100 and the defiant gear pretty much trivializes everything for it's level until big raids I guess.

I think SOE has learned some hard lessons over the past 4 years, I wouldn't count them out yet. However I would like to see some concrete info on what the plan is for EQ3.

I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say you know nothing about SOE or their financial situation or how their games are actually doing.

I think the name is good.  In fact, when I heard SOE was making a new EQ game, I even said:  NEXT!  In any case, I'll probably play it for at least a month when it happens.  I'm a whore.

It would surprise me if SoE didn't attempt to roll current subscribers of both EQ and EQ2 into a new product. Assuming that EQnext isn't complete departure from EQ/EQ2.

If EQ3 continues down the convenience path like FR, EQ2 and added more robust sidekicking/mentoring, I'd be very interested. I love some old fashion dungeon crawls also.  More adventure, less instance farming.

Both EQ2 and EQ are in slow burn.  I don't know why Sony should worry about eating it's own playerbase.  Someone is going eat them.  Better it be Sony and have the chance of returning to the top.  

 

EQ1 - how many servers are they down to?   
EQ2 - server merges over the last 3 years and many servers today calling for more.  There are only 2 servers in EQ2 considered "decent pop".  You do the math.
SWG - lol
Planetside - servers merged in the past and more merging this month
Vanguard - lol x 2
MxO - shutdown

I never said they dont make money(they probably do, how much would be in debate) but their current MMO lineup is weak and dying as time goes on.  Most of their games left now are 4+ years old.  Some of these games only survive because of the sony pass holding them together. All their games have or are merging servers(SWG being an exception but its probably due to player housing). 

I was not looking to argue with someone who has such a keen view of the inside.

4um nolej ACTIV8!

how is Free Realms?  I thought that was printing moneyhats.  If so, expect EQ3 to move that way, with console.  Leaping, jumping, AssassinsCreed-breadcrumbquesting-moneyhats.

I've played both EQ and EQ2 in the last three months.  Both could use merges on their low end servers to reinforce populations.  EQ2 especially works better on High population servers and it would be in SOE's best interest to merge on the lower pop ones. 

That said, I don't think their situation is as dire as some make it out.  The TCG built into the games keeps a lot of people there and the population on the two EQ servers I play on is very strong. 

The lore is solid and I'd buy EQ3 to try for a couple months on name alone.  Yes, even after being burned numerous times in the past few years on other MMOs.

Another title in the EQ series would get a serious look-see by a ton of people just for the name.  It is a great foot in the door.  I'm pretty stoked to see how it turns out.  That being said, SOE titles suck ass right now.  They need some oomph. 

I'll take 'MMO brandnames that are no longer relevant' for 200, Alex.

The angst this has generated over at foh is hysterical.  And jebus Smedley looks old. 

EQ3 would rock. If Scott Hartsman were leading the team. Otherwise, meh.

Just about any MMO with Hartsman at the helm would probably rock.

This.  The EQ2 turnaround was the best save of an MMO I've ever seen. 

It's a pitty then, that guy took his bandanna and left SOE.

He left SOE for his startup.  He has also left his startup.  He could be anywhere.

I'd say I'm looking forward to this, but I really dont like SOE's business model these days (micro trans) so I am hesitant. I'd probably still play it for a month or so.

It could be good, if they hired the right people. It's fun to bash EQ now, but for it's time it was revolutionary. And it still has some of the most imaginative design we've seen in an MMO yet.

Can I have some of what he's smoking, please?

 :geezer: :why_so_serious: :dead_horse: :popcorn: :roflcopter:

that's really all that needs to be said.

The generic high fantasy blender was very original.  There, I said more.   :awesome_for_real:

If EQ2 re-released now with an updated graphical engine I would play that.

I'm not sure I want to start another fantasy MMO that is stuck in the just launched and has no extended content and is also rife with gameplay issues that will be worked out over the next two years phase.  Solid Sci-Fi MMO IP though?  Yeah, I'd give them a couple of breaks.

Graphics weren't what made eq2 boring and bland.

You can't blame them really.  They are thinking that despite recent failures and some past successes that they at least have to try to go up against Blizzard's next gen MMO, and if they do nothing but replicate WoW's polish, ease of entrance, and casual friendly atmosphere, then they can compete based on something as easy a realistic graphics vs. Blizzard's generally cartoony look that turns many off.  So no, I'm not saying they have any reason to be that optomistic, but it really isn't a huge stretch to think that after all this time they see a new window opening between WoW1 and WoW2.

EQ2's graphics were far from "realistic".  They were just bad.  Faces, animations, and the generally plastic sheen to everything were horrible.  More than that, though, was the complete lack of soul any of the art seemed to have.  It was just bland.  To quote Stephen Colbert, it was a manila envelope stuck to a tan wall.  And then there were the little things, like your character not seeming to really make contact with the ground.  I never got the sense that my toon was running so much as gliding around with a running animation playing as I went.

I guess you could fault WoW's cartoony aesthetic, but fuck, at least they have an aesthetic.  I'd go even further in saying that all their art is internally coherent and oozing style.  Think about what they've managed to pull off with a really low poly-pushing engine.  Best artists in the business, easily.

I always found it amusing the in both EQ1 and EQ2 they insisted on sticking cat heads on human bodies and calling them a new race without changing anything except the head graphics. Shouldn't a cat person animate a little differently or something.

EQ2 did have the rat person that actually looked and moved like a rat person, but IIRC every other race was just a human with a different head, skinnier, or blue.

You mean like sticking bunny ears on a human and calling it a viera? OH RIGHT.

It's the voice actor for Fran that sold Viera for me.  Nicole Fantl did a good job.

When I last played eq2 there was talk of a skeletal re-vamp. Not sure if that happened, but it did seem like they made some effort with the sarnaks to make them different.

I agree that the art people at Blizz did a great job with wow when it came out. and since they have pushed that engine in some interesting ways.

Nope.  It was shelved.

Probably because if they were going to do all that work they may as well do a whole refresh.  But, like I said above, I think most players are at the point where limited launch content doesn't really get anyone excited anymore.

For every 1 milllion gamer interested in WoW, 1 refuses to play it because of cartoony graphics.

How about refuse to play it partially because of just plain old crappy graphics?

It's graphics looked old and chunky when it released 5 years ago.  Take the blinders off, it looks like shit.

You have no sense of aesthetics, apparently.  More polys and next gen goo does not equal good.

You must be disappointed a lot.

Most of the greatest works of art, are also the most simple, this applys to music too.

Having said that, I have always been a fan of EQ2 graphic techniques, I always thought they were quite brilliant, and quite sensible for the output achieved.

Because I think WoW is ugly?  Heh.

Yep.

(http://kotisivukone.fi/files/nordic.kotisivukone.com/kuvat/advanced_dungeons_and_dragons.png)

I hate WoW's character models to the point that I neglected playing it after beta.  The look of the world was impressive enough to draw me back in. 

I would play WoW 1.0.1 if I could get away from their crap-ass lore and art.

/Shuffles off to Aion forum

I too was initially turned off on WoW's graphics; the cartoony look is one of the things that pushed me to try EQ2 when they both launched. (Of course, I'm playing WoW now, so...)

I kinda wish people would stop using the word "cartoony". Wow has very little that is cartoon about it.

Ill take "cartoony" but runs awesome over "realistic" and runs like shit any day. 

I really do wonder what's next. The fact that it's taking a long time to get here makes me lose heart.

Is the WoW/EQ1/Diku model the only one that works?  And maybe Eve Online, which is really just a Diku IN SPACE with an (admittedly interesting) world conquering gameplay mechanic?

I don't think microtrans is where it's at.  The idea that the alpha players are those that not only piss all their time away but also all their money feels pretty dirty to me, and pathetic.  Besides, microtrans is not a game mechanic, it's a subscription model (such as it is).

The hardcore should be exploited to make the game fun for the rest of the playerbase. If it makes you feel dirty that's cause your more hardcore then you thought you were.

Suddenly it's all clear.  Now I can understand the mentality behind burning people at the stake.

I agree. For it's time, it was revolutionary. It was a very good online world and I was entertained as fuck. The fantasy of original EQ and the first two expansions was more engaging and atmospheric to me than anything in WoW. I'd take the minds behind everything from Nagafen's Lair to Velketor's Labyrinth over the minds that brought me Molten Core, Onyxia's Fugly Cave and the Burning Linear Crusade any day.

EQ was about as revolutionary as the first airplane. Sure it could fly, but that's about it. And if you thought flying was all that special, then you never driven a car or road a train.

Airplanes are awesome.  You are an idiot.

Nope, nothing "cartoony", nothing at all.

(http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/8053/cartaxd.jpg) (http://www.freecodesource.com/image-hosting/view/img232/8053/cartaxd.jpg/)

STOP TALKING.

They both use color!  Fucking Blizzard!

If you can't see the stark difference between those two images, buy a cane and a dog.

If you thought having something only .0000000001% of the world population could experience at the time of invention particular special then that's your prerogative...the airplane itself is revolutionary but the first inception of it was not ideal.

Did I stutter?

(http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/82533/scanners.gif)

I liked art in both EQ2 and WoW, but I have a top end PC and I'm getting 33fps in EQ2. It's been a major barrier for them. I would expect EQ3 to be based on the FR engine in some way.

I'm with the earlier poster who complained about the plastic look of the original EQ2 models.  The game is like a near-photorealistic implementation of plastic action figures.  With playdough hair.  The races added later look a bit better but still.   I'd guess that their graphics engine doesn't support transparency in textures, except that they've got marvelous looking water and glass. 

But it really seems odd to me that they would choose to toss all the existing content they've created, implemented, debugged and polished over the years to make a sequel.  They've actually got enough PVE content to compete with WoW.  AoC and WAR both showed how important content, or lack thereof, is.  Seems like they could get a much better return on investment by spending money on a new engine for EQ2 and all it's content than starting over from scratch.  Especially given their piss-poor track record of content-quality at launch.

On a related note, Sony also wasted a lot of marketing money and ideas when they tried to market EQ2 as a destination for players who had outgrown WoW about a year after launch.  If they'd started that marketing blitz about 6 months ago it might have gotten a lot more interest from bored WoW players looking for something new.  With many more races and classes, a much more interesting crafting and player-economy, and even a raid game that is a little more casual than that of WoW - EQ2 offers a lot of options for those who found WoW's end-game options of raid, pvp or re-roll a little too stifling.

It's good to finally be able to understand DLRiley.

http://translationparty.com/#1915754

By train, the special flight, to drive the road is considered.  :awesome_for_real:


I agree with Count nerfedalot, they would burn alot of good will by putting out eq3 and marketing it as a better version of eq2. Unless as I mentioned there was a incentive for players to migrate to the new game.

If they put EQ3 on Station access, it's a non-issue.  The hardcore EQers are playing them both all the time.  I think the majority of EQers would welcome another iteration.

It's not enough to drag a few people over to Station Players. They need to take their existing community, move it to the new game, to provide a base for more building. There's no point in EQ3 unless they shut down the first two.

Transparencies en-mass are expensive to render, i do believe that they use, or lack of on certain objects was a conscious decision, one that is not uncommon.  Mostly I have always been impressed with the world graphics, not necessarily there player models, however those are well done too even if highly stylized. Mostly its the texture use and very nice fidelity that allays impressed me.

I would not be surprised at all that SOE has been using one single engine for its in house titles, with variations of course. The differences mostly come from art assets and use, not necessarily engine level rendering features. I do know that free Relms uses scaleform (http://www.scaleform.com/). Its hotness in a GUI middleware.

This is anecdotal but struck me as weird:  When I got a new machine I downloaded the EQ2 trial to see how nice it looked. When I cranked the graphics slider to the top, I got a message to the effect of: "Don't use this setting, it will turn your video card into glass".

Why put something in that's not recommended?  At least hide it away in some config file.

They built it (Engine) using combination's of features that would be used 5 years out. Its just an old warning from a few years ago. YMMV.

The EQ2 engine also was designed around the theory that single core processors would be running at extremely high speeds and the GPUs would not advance a great deal. That means most graphics are brute forced by the CPU. They've moved some things to the video card and other things they haven't. The result can be some very bizarre results where since the video card isn't doing much you can turn some effects they've moved to the GPU up to max without any effect on performance, but changing other effects that would be very mild in effect on other engines will bring the game to its knees.

I custom built a machine for EQ2 and one core on my E8600 is at 100% virtually all the time I play with middle settings. And that probably averages only 30fps.

I respectfully disagree.  There's room for all three, especially if EQ3 gameplay evolves into something new (which it needs to).

Evolving and EQ? EQ is the reason why the mmo industry isn't evolving.

MMO devs and suits are the reason MMOs are not evolving.

I didn't feel it was worth a serious reply. But you forgot 'mmo players'.

Yeah, them, too.  Plenty of blame to go around.

I blame the blamers!

I blame everyone that is buying Aion.

I like to keep my battles small and controllable.

I blame human nature.

I like to keep my battles quixotic and unwinable.

Unless it's a PS3 game.

I'm going to stay away from this for the most part, but would like to chime in on the merit of doing this:

Consider what you know about the average span of time between announcement and delivery of a game to the market. Add that span to now, whatever span you think is the average. Looking at the EQ  franchise from that point in the future, is it cannibalization, or high time for a 'modern' rendition of the game?

"EverQuest II (EQ2), based upon the popular EverQuest, is a fantasy massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) and shipped on 8 November 2004."

Anyway, here it is 09, so I guess in 5 years we will see EQ 3 Next.

Of course you have a point, Grim, but will SOE honestly run 3 iterations of EQ? I can't see them turning away paying customers on what have to be pretty low-cost EQ1 maintenance, especially since there have to be tons of people with piles of accounts, toward the end of playing most people I knew had at least four accounts running.

EQ2 still has a lot of life in it and a solid graphics engine. Not sure what has released since EQ2 that brings much new to the table beyond WAR's public quest system and scenarios?

I would hope they would keep the RMT-heavy stuff on Free Realms and keep the monthly sub style for EQ3, though there's already been movement in that direction in EQ2, not that I care too much about it as implemented thus far when I was playing this spring.

I love EQ2, but I have to disagree on the graphics engine. They need to replace the entire graphics engine and they needed to do it years ago. The graphics are sub-par for a modern game, but the requirements are beyond most current PCs. They've made some strides in moving different aspects from the CPU to the GPU, but it's just patching what is a fundamentally flawed design.

looks good to me. I'm also not sure how many other MMO's have cloth physics.

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/5/56/Eq2_level_60_mount.jpg)

You sure your not confusing art style, with rendering capability?

Yeah, you can argue style but EQ2's technical engine is great with the mapping and the shadowing and whatnot.

I love EQ2's graphics and the engine, although cluggy at the time, has held up well and does very well with new hardware. That said, that ain't the problem. EQ had a very real immersive world, while for me at least, EQ2's zones feel like theme parks connected via zoning doorways. The snap-to combat mechanics also broke immersion.

For me, and I bet a great many others, all SOE would have to do is take the current EQ's content -and- mechanics and redo the graphics engine and update the art to current standards. I know, its no small amount of work. But if you sold it as 'reliving the dream all over again' with exactly the same zones with the same exact layout, the exact same skill trees and a rejigging of loot tables to adjust for mudflation, and then just new art and animation, you'd probably have upwards of half a million instant customers at launch. By no means WOW numbers, so it might not get by the money people, but it would probably garner enough internets chatter to tack on a bunch more folks as well.

I'd go for EQ1's content with updated graphics. The feel of combat in EQ was really nice. It felt really solid. I didn't care for the downtime or the punishment of death. I also didn't care for game mechanics which encouraged camping. The loot would definitely need to be updated. I'd also want an updated questing system which didn't require me to type "What helmet?" "Which helmet?" "I want to make a helmet." "Helmet" and various combinations of crap just to get the NPC to realize you just wanted to make a damn helmet. If they fixed those things and just gave me EQ1 over again, I'd play.

Oh and I'd want them to leave out the vast majority of the crappy later zones.  :oh_i_see:

I guess at this point it's not really EQ1 anymore and more like a totally different game with EQ1's content.

I wouldn't. Would be nice if they went for something new rather than rehashing the same old content. Those old zones would feel so cramped and small compared to something like Kunark, though.

Also, real worlds have large areas of completely unused and boring landscape, which is why they don't design that way anymore.

Open wilderness can make for memorable player interactions. In Kunark I found a level 7 newbie human paladin swimming upstream in that long empty run-in to Lake of Ill Omen from Firiona Vie.

He was a genuine newbie who had started in Freeport, caught the boat to Butcherblock, caught the boat to Firiona Vie, fell off and died, retraced his entire journey and got to LoIO. He was running to Cabilis to meet a fellow newbie who started an Iksar. He thought the monsters might not see him if he stayed in the water (not roleplaying - he didn't know anything about the game - to him it felt like a safer thing to do).

He was having the time of his life. An adrenaline-fuelled adventure. I escorted him to the end of the river, explained KOS to him and warned him about Cabilis (he still wanted to go meet his friend), and petitioned for him to be awarded some kind of medal. Got a response from a guide who made sure he was OK.

Gah!  :headdesk:

Ok, buddy, this one's really annoying. The 'unused' 'boring' landscape is necessary to create a sense of depth, large space and vistas. The fact that you could, indeed, find one large patch of entirely unoccupied patch of turf in West Karana was very important to the sense of immersion EQ garnered.

Nowadays, its nearly as if there's a phobia against unused space. Even the 'vast' vistas of Conan's mountain zones are nearly completely occupied by folks. You can't walk for 20 seconds without running into someone else, entirely ruining the sense of being 'lost in the wastes'. Its FUCKING PATHETIC and it makes me STABBY.

I completely agree with this post.  It's ok if there's space with nothing in it, especially if you give players a quick way to pass through it.  Such as mounts at lvl 1.  In fact, the whole travel system in MMOs needs to evolve. 

That's one thing I've never understood. Just give me a damn horse to ride around on at lvl 1. I don't want that used as a carrot in games anymore. I'm tired of being slow as fuck to begin with and if I'm "special" enough, I might earn the privelage of spending a fuckton of money on a mount. Blarg!

That screenshot still looks like a 90's Ray Trace art project.

Fallen Earth might just be the game for you.

It's POV-Ray-Tastic!!  :drill:

While I freaking love the Karanas just for the awesome open spaceyness, I can understand the need to skip over it all in order to get to where the players really want to be.

Some people see open wasted space, I see kiting room.

 :heart:

Looks better in game. I"m with the open world crown. I miss a bit of adventure and discovery, not a guided by hand, no thinking *cough*questhelper*cough* game.

An insult to ray tracers everywhere :oh_i_see:

EQ II's texturing looks like ass cause, except for the metal bits, the character model and the horse textures all share the same "matte" plastic look. Horse hair, horse hooves, character hair, cloth, character skin, etc. -- they all (again except for the metal) look they are made out of the same material.

Hey, when I had all day to play and a fat sack of weed, I loved nothing more than exploring for hours on end.

Now I have maybe an hour a night to play, the last thing I want to do is spend it trudging through some empty expanse of terrain having nothing happen, or looking in every building in a city to find the one quest npc I need to talk to.

There's no reason a game can't have both. 

SWG had theme parks and lots and lots (and lots) of open space.  Not that it was a shining example of how to make an MMO, but that is one aspect I thought worked. 

You have a point, to a point. There's always a balance between playability and realistic immersion. It is true that in the bad ole days, you had to sacrifice upwards of 3 hours just to start and complete a quest, assuming the right NPC was up, you could gather your friends to defeat the MOB, etc, etc. I think its clear that those days are over in the industry. That said, I'm looking at Fallout3 as a potential model of content dispersal. There's stories lying around absolutely everywhere in that game. GF's been playing it for 4 months solid and is still finding letter and tapes for mini quests in the most remote backwaters of the map. The main quest line exposes you to the central travel lines for the game, but there's stuff for the wanderer. Its all about the options, as opposed to being shunted through the cattle chute-o-fun.

Questgrind.  :awesome_for_real: Someone needs to write a Bot addon for that shit.

Read the quest text?  :why_so_serious:

Did you even play EQ?

Btw, I'm one of the few here that reads everything.

I think he was joking. There's a reason why EQ2Map was so popular.

Yes, and yes I played EQ.

I'll just be dusting myself off from my fall.

My prediction:
Free to play but there will only be about 6 zones you can visit.
all zones above level 10 $5.99
Raid zones $19.95
All items can be bought
XP can be bought
Gold can be bought
Web based
Adverts in the window unless you pay to remove them.
The only thing resembling EQ1 or 2 will be the Name of the game, cities and a few zones.
Froglok Jedi at release, just to mess with us.


Come on SOE, prove me wrong.   :awesome_for_real:

Wouldn't that be a better game than EQ1 and 2 could ever hope to be?

There'd only be like 2,000 people playing it, but they'd singlehandedly be funding all three EQs  :grin:

You have a point.

Although, I think the one thing SOE excels at is low operating costs. They can keep just about any game going forever, even with just a few customers left.

Absolutely.  Fallout 3 is probably too "short" for an MMO, but if you could take that model of content, and apply it to a larger scale game, I'd be interested.  The problem that immediately comes to mind is that if you go through the "main" or "required" content, whatever you want to call it, I think you'd see a lot of people just rushing the end game and totally ignoring all the chewy goodness off the beaten path.  And, if it was required to get to max level (which is all people seem to care about in MMOs), then it wouldn't be the optional, exploration based, content that we both really love in Fallout 3, and you are back to square one.

Fallout 3 works great as a single player game, and it COULD work great as a multiplayer game with a playerbase willing to play the game a certain way, but I'm not sure that kind of game would really work with the current MMO community.

I think I just talked myself out of this idea.

Questgrind already exists... Blizzard calls it WoW.  That WotLK Questgrind puts any other grind to shame...

Clearly you've never played any Asian MMOs.

Or any mmo before WoW.

omg I'm about to defend SOE... holy cats!

Why do people insist on complaining about grind in MMOs? What you're complaining about is called "Playing the game"
Do you call playing the same map over and over again in TF2 for an entire evening "Grinding"?
There's far less content in all of the TF2 maps combined than there is in just about any single outdoor zone in an MMO.

How on earth do you expect to play a game for 20-40hrs a week and not end up having some repetition?

If you don't like "The Grind" what you really don't like is the game. Stop playing.

When I was playing warhammer, the quests felt repetitious, and the PVP was boring... that wasn't grind... that was the game sucking.
The fact of the matter is you can go into either EQ1 or EQ2 and if you get bored with one quest there are a thousand others you can do instead. If there's 1 thing EQ isn't it's repetitious. Just because you chose to repeat the same thing over and over again doesn't mean you actually had to play that way.

And yet somehow, the TF2 is more interesting.

That's cause they did it right. I'm wasn't trying to rip on TF2... quite the opposite actually. I love that game.

Somehow nothing. Grind is when I wanna do something or have something (or both) in a game, but I have to do Barely Related Activity X a hojillion times in order to "earn" the something.

I'm not going to pop my cap at grind in MMOGs, it's far to ingrained into the genre now. But I sure can snort and laugh at it.

That's pretty much totally invalid. One game is about complex physics and human opponents and wants a known and balanced arena. The other is about coming to a new area, defeating it and looting the bodies with the actual game play not being nearly as dynamic. Thus the second needs a constant diet of new maps even without considering the influence of out-levelling the challenge.

We can make this TF thing more like MMORPGs if you have to play 150 local matches against bots in order to play online!  :awesome_for_real:

When I log off in TF2 I'm rewarded by knowing that I kicked all sorts of ass, probably died 50 times, but it was awesome. When I log off in an mmo I'm rewarded by the fact that I know that I am woefully underpowered and all those guys who could one shot me when I was playing 10 minutes ago can now at worst (for them anyway) have to 2 shot me. Yeah me :oh_i_see:

One game is about athletic skill, hand-eye coordination and immediate gratification.
The other is about long hours of planning and preparation followed by a long sought after reward.

It's like the difference between driving a classic car, and restoring a classic car. Some people just don't have the patience for working on cars but enjoy driving them. Other people couldn't imagine driving around it something that was pre-built for them.

I recon its the difference between playing a good game and a bad game.

I think it's the difference between depth and breadth. Grinding in TF2 is the process of learning the subtleties within a simple framework. At the end of the process, players have acheived a degree of obvious skill and can enjoy flaunting it. Like a capable pianist, a capable TF2 player can sit down at a keyboard anywhere and impress the rubes. Grinding in DIKUs is like getting a modern highschool diploma. You basically have to obey a schedule and keep your eyes open. A high-level DIKU player, like a graduate, has a certification that allows them a degree of improved access.

The first sort of acheivement is impressive to anybody who plays the game. The second sort of acheivement is only impressive to anybody who wants to believe that their own version of that acheivement is valuable. The accomplishment of either provide a particular sort of fun, and a game can't be judged on this choice alone.

Most DIKUs contain a moderately skill-based endgame for the players who advance too quickly or don't know when to quit, but for the most part they substitute breadth of content for depth of gameplay. When it looks like they're losing subscriptions, they advance the goalposts a few levels and add another continent or a character class.

MMOs are a gigantic emotional ponzi scheme. The collective belief that people are having fun makes it fun. But on their own, the "game" is usually weaksauce RPG crap that'd never pass muster in a solo RPG.

FPS games are more classic "game". People are there to have fun. Some percentage are there to really compete, but the most serious are rarely in the public space playing random pickup games with the rabble. Players compartmentalize by skill. Any persistence is just a value add, not the main reason to be there. Nobody convinces themselves to stay because everyone else is having fun. They either stay or go and that's it.

Comparing WoW and CoD is folly. They're not comparable in any way other than they both are sold in the same retail space.

I agree that there's a vast difference, but comparisons are still enlightening.

It's reasonable, for example, to distinguish games based on content from games based on gameplay. The first is something you consume, the second something you perfect. Almost all RPGs tend towards the former: any mastery you develop over the course of your first playthrough is largely incidental. Your characters' skill advancement has more in-game effect than your own. Replayability is about trying every class, discovering every subplot, playing through as a "good" or "evil" character. Expansions appear which take place in different environments with additional story.

It's not an environment well suited to competitive play, but it works splendidly as cooperative fodder. A game you can play with your friends and family because even if somebody plays badly, they won't tend pull the whole team down. You get a sense of accomplishment for finishing tasks and are rewarded with exposure to new abilities, new sights, and new equipment. Breadth of experience. Accessible even to total newbies... somebody looking over your shoulder not only "That looks cool," but "I could do that!" The ponzi scheme isn't just emotional.

Popularity tends to also attract people who would rather be playing CoD. They want to start perfecting their skills and are disappointed on two fronts: Little mastery is actually required, but a LOT of tedious, braindead grinding is. When competitive content like raids are added to keep the perfecters busy, it disappoints the consumers since they feel there's part of the game they're implicitly forbidden to see.

Right, but MMOs can't be held responsible for not fulfilling the entitlement needs of players who don't really know themselves. The emotional bond between player and MMO is almost entirely unique to this particular industry, at this scale anyway. For example, plenty of people still play Diablo 2 with an equivalent fervor, but in far fewer numbers (and no revenue back to Blizzard except in a potential future sale of D3).

I won't say this clouds judgment. But it does changes the rules in how people assess someone's "enjoyment" of an MMO. The type of enjoyment is so different you can't even expect them to instantly jump to another AAA fantasy themed MMO, much less out of the genre.

I agree it's not suited to competitive play in the same way that competitive RTS and FPS games are. However, they certainly are competitive, and they certainly do appeal to people. Here again though, the nature of that appeal is more important than there simply being some appeal at all.

Edit: Realized I had no point here.

But worse still is this "MMO" term still used to canvas everything from Club Penguin to WoW to Eve. Eve is a genre unto itself. Players from CP are not going to graduate to WoW (not all of them anyway). WoW is a genre unto itself, unless something else comes along that actually pulls people away and keeps them.

So the catchall term is really about the EQ1-AoC games vying for second and third place. In a space so saturated with sameness the only way it'll change is when real games that are based on games, but happen to tack on persistent elements, arrive and draw in the people looking for games.

Like Planetside!  :awesome_for_real:

I agree. It's just hard to imagine game types that can deal with latency working well massivley online. Just look at the 'fun' of Heigan and cube clicking and other monstrosties in WoW. Not to mention Frogger in Naxx.  :uhrr:

Except for an abstract social or economic layer, there hasn't yet been a big huge successful MMO that's required hundreds or thousands of people to act in concert with military precision. Except or Eve which is a genre unto itself. The activities most enjoyed are by those in small groups from 2 to 40 or so, -/+ the dunbar number depending on event.

Since getting so many even in these smaller groups to work together is so tough as to only appeal to minor percentages of a total playerbase, I contend that any engine which limits itself because it might someday need to support 1,000 people in one place has already missed the point. Social gathering and Frogger do not mix, both as activities and as the tech required. So don't even bother. Open World is great. Just smartly compartmentalize the PLAY into areas your tech can deal with as both you and your players expect.

Maybe someday we can have Planetside done right. But the only way it'll be PLAYED right is to force players to start at boot camp to be beaten into hiearchy :-) 

I am going to mention EQ and two other games in this post, because EQLive was so important to me.  I loved the “the old rock” and truly miss the community that it fostered and nourished.  EQLive set a standard that few games followed and embraced, but that’s all it took.  I could never see the “reflection” of EQ in any of these games dating from WOW and on.  Those that found inspiration in EQ created some of the most amazing experiences that I had in gaming.  In WoW we saw how a certain game designs could bring out the worst in people, but as I gaze in to the beauty of EQ I  am able to compartmentalize all I do not like in the genre today.


I started out playing EQ approx 5 years after launch and enjoyed it immensely.  In fact, the first time I logged in I remember falling off a ledge, landing in a pool of water and drowning to death.  Today, a gamer would simply scream bloody murder and hit the IQUIT button.   I played in a duo for a bit with a really cool cat that I meet in commons.  Equs be thy name.  Both of us were console gamers, hard core console gamers that walked into a game shop and saw this shiny box with a hot chic on the cover and poof, magic.  
Not long after, reading about a console version in PSM called EQOA and getting in to the beta, at that moment I realized how great these games can be.  When done in the most simplistic and pure way.  Simple mechanics that encourage team work, heck maybe even forced team work that was far too apparent in the next game I would play.  Four years after EQOA came FFXI.  I was a max player in EQOA, a respected elder of a prestigious guild on the most popular server but it felt like it was time to try something else and FF was by far a standard barrier that I judged RPGS by (well honestly, it was Phantasy Star).

Along came FFXI, the spiritual successor to EQLive (Funny, that’s what Brad advertised Vanguard as).

To this date, nothing has come along that kicked my ass and still made me feel as if I was an active participant in a real breathing world.   A game that was so unforgiving, so much that it produced a community that was forgiving and understanding of what has become the biggest sin in MMO’s to date, being human.  In EQLive, EQOA and FFXI, being a “Noob”, is such virtue or a status that seasoned plays looked upon with admiration and their counter parts looked upon the accomplishments of these elders.  In doing so, players experienced a true feeling of mentorship.  

Mentorship is missing from these games.  EQ and FFXI delivered this in a way that I have never seen and even till this day, I could logon to my old Dwarf or my Galka find this.  Helping my fellow man was amazing and felt genuine for I understood the hardships they encountered.  Helping others was my new drug.  Nothing gave me more pleasure than helping someone to Jueno for the first time.  Seeing some lost soul trying he’s best to get that coffer key and better, that poor soul trying to get that last Genki piece.  Experiences came that I never expected, working with people from other cultures and seeing how someone who lived on the other end of the world, was no different than I.  I can’t even explain how that impacted me, I learned so much and would never have had that privilege if it were not for EQ.

I miss it and as I write this I realize what is wrong.  I am a selfish greedy prick that has left behind friends and a community that I owe something to.

True clans like Neversleep, NuDawn, Ominous and Rites of the Four Horsemen.

Today, I give thanks to Everquest and while I gaze upon FFXIV I also would try the next version of EQ in a heartbeat.

Grunk of Valefor / Remora

Oh, hello Grunk. Nice post.

Thank you.  It came from the heart.

 :yahoo:

:Love_Letters:

Great.  Now the grunk-fallenstarfuckers are going to come out of the woodwork.

 :pedobear:

Although, EQ 5 years after launch is about as far from "original EQ" as WoW '04 to  EQ '04. Which is a lot. The Vision was murdered by then. Which is a good thing.

Congrats!  Which step was this?

Pardon me?

That was @ Grunk. She's wondering which of the 12 steps is necroing a months old thread to wax maudlin about a dead game.

Yes.  I seem to have wandered off at some point.  Sorry about that.

 :popcorn:

I'd like to recapture the past when the thrill and excitement of living in a virtual world was almost enough in itself. When a fringe population of relatively savvy gamers (hey, they had internet!) deeply believed in the medium and everything seemed novel. When cheat sites and convenience add-ons didn't exist and the community wasn't totally dominated by levelling efficiency and progression. When weaknesses in Lore and game mechanics were tolerated because there wasn't really much competition or interest in hopping to a new game as soon as the shiny wore off.

But in reality that age has gone. And it passed in EQ long before WoW was out.

I certainly don't think SOE has shown any ability to rekindle that sort of world. Indeed their increasingly sad attempts to prosper off their first "lucky" fame shows a development studio bereft of ideas or conviction.

I think it still is enough, its just that barely any MMOs these days actually try to provide anything more than the facade of a virtual world.

True clans!

Not like those fake ones.

I don't so. I think that the current incarnation of virtual worlds, large amounts of virtual real estate, social hubs for spammers/crafters/rp'ers and player housing (cause you can't be a true virtual world without it) is pretty lame and most people by now have caught on to that. If you haven't your niche but don't worry mainstream games will keep designing that way (though probably not caring much for social hubs and housing) because that's all anyone knows. I'm waiting for the day when virtual worlds means, a world where shit happens, not just some place for rp'ers to speak in tolken and for crafters to brag about how important they are to the in game economy.  I like to log on and see some orcs not wondering in the woods waiting to be quest/mob grind but pillaging a town, or say that fanatasy army of npc's that always need your help because your some great hero, actually get off their butts and do something and then when I'm asked whether my alignment with X npc faction means something I might give two shits. The world itself must move if you want the players to be remotely interested in it. Just another park for the players to piss in is only interesting to a point.

I want to play an elf with three boobs. Two isn't cutting it.

funny enough until last week I've been playing the project 1999 EQ Emu pretty long.  It's terrific.

No. My guess is that the game grunk played in EQ '04 would be right after the GoD megadisaster and somewhen OoW expansion. The Vision(tm) wasn't exactly dead but wounded badly with a WoW deathblow coming in. It was still the unforgiving game that grunk describes. The Vision(tm) well and truly died (with the head chopped off and garlic stuffed in the pantaloons) when they introduced the Drakkin master race and hirable mercenaries; just so you don't need to find a group to level or be forced to "solo"  :awesome_for_real:.

Getting back on topic...
EQ Next = WoW
nuff' said

Y'know, I gotta sorta agree with the Grunkster a little bit here, at least with EQ1 and the community and fellowship that it inspired. It was a hard ass game even after the Vision had been extinguished but more often than not that brought out the best in people. Yes, there were the asshats who would train the whole zone to the ZO point just for kicks or the numbskulls would would bring the raid to a screeching halt by aggroing things when they should've been at the back being quiet (I...uhh...probably did this on more than one occasion myself), but for the most part, people were great. I miss my old guild, The Lords of Drakova. We were more or less the Boy Scouts of Cazic-Thule, lending a helping hand to any and all that needed it. And it was really cool once I got some high level toons, taking the lowbies on Blackburrow and Crush runs. It was a great game when it was the only game in town and I miss the atmosphere and camaraderie. I also would not for the life of me go back due to the crushing game mechanics. I've grown old and soft and have found that I prefer to solo. Take today for instance. Somehow, I don't know how, I was able to solo (after several tries) Emissary Roman'Kahn in Silithus. He was all big and Anubis looking and elite with a skull for a level, but me and the trusty Void took him down. I would never have been able to do that in EQ. Not even if he was green and several levels below me. WoW, fortunately or unfortunately, has provided the path of least resistance to 'winning' (if there is such a thing in an MMO) and I'm weak and like it. That said, if Sony adjusted the rate of downtime and the ability to be effective against a foe +/- 2 levels at the higher ranks, I might consider resubbing. I never could understand why my BL would die to a blue when there was two of us against one of them. Seriously fucked up level ramping. It got to the point where the only things I could solo were light blues and lower and that just didn't make any sense due to the pitiful lack of exp rolling in. And since everyone else on the server had gone up into the 70's and up, there wasn't too much for lil' ol' level 56 me to do.

In short, EQ was great for it's day, but it, FFXI, and others like it are doomed to being niche because that woot/ding/gratz just doesn't come fast enough and dying sucks.

And I seriously fucked that emissary up and it felt good.

FFXI was never niche, even today it has over 300k subs and early it was over a mil.  If a game doesn’t reach WoW numbers it is immediately labeled as a niche title?  Is Aion a niche? 

Everyone likes to rage about WoW breaking the genre.  How it has forced developers to produce these soulless single player mmos.  Once you take away the magic or the “vision” that makes these games special your left with nothing more than a cheap single player experience.   Every time a company produces a WoW clone that fails, it forces people to rethink what makes an MMO successful.  In the end, the only important lesson developers should have learned is the level of polish that Blizzard was dedicated to delivering.

I just find it interesting that people on this board are starting to have second thoughts.  At first it was amazing that one could reach end game without even sending a /tell to another player only to be upset that when they are forced to talk to each other they realize they have nothing in common.   How could we even attach the word community to WoW? 

Even with a busy life style (being an adult?) I’d rather play a game that was harder or took longer even if at the expense of feeling “behind” and that is the problem.  No one wants to feel behind, or lacking or whatever.  Everyone wants to feel like they are on the same playing field but that is simply boring.  So they make the game easy so the player can feel like they are equal or have an equal opportunity to be successful but its all smoke and mirrors.  It’s all bullshit.

Holy shit! What the fuck was so difficult about EQ?!?!?! Been a while since these 3 smileys describe my reaction to a post  :awesome_for_real: :ye_gods: :uhrr: . If you think difficulty is the time spent getting your ding/gratz, I'm sorry but you're wrong. If you think difficulty is some archaic death penalty, you're wrong. If you think difficulty is having to pug, good god your wrong. If you think difficulty is the game making you take 3 steps back forever 1 step forward? If you think difficulty is spawn camping a spot on the map to prevent the other "noobs" from getting drops? If you think difficulty is dieing randomly because you didn't look at the guide that told you this area is filled with the super elite monsters who you can't kill because your 5 levels below the level requirement and losing several hours worth of xp because you died? Than your wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong , wrong, wrong. You're so wrong that I kinda wonder how can you possible think your right. You know why I know you're wrong? Because all the things you considered the hallmark of difficulty can be circumvented by a bot with 10 lines of C code. 

I guess niche was the wrong word to use (couldn't think of anything else when I was writing), I just meant that with WoW in the room, 300K is the new 5K sub-wise. EQ, DAoC and FFXI were the kings when 500K was a lot of subs.

I wouldn't mind a 'hard game' again but my life just doesn't have room for it. I'm 40 with a wife, kid, job and mortgage. The only time I get to play is on the weekends and even then, I don't want to wait 2 hours just to start anything. I need to dive in, get shit done, and get out. 10-15 years ago, I would have stood by EQ and proclaimed it the end-all be-all (and I did for the first year or so of WoW). But sadly, I don't have time for chess anymore, just checkers. Others, YMMV.

I will say that the guild I'm in right now on Ravenholdt (Artisans of War) is about the closest I've seen to my old EQ guild. They have fun and help the lowbies and it's a generally great experience. It's bringing back the old feel with none of the slapping and punching and crying.

I wouldn't say "difficult" so much as it was risk-reward.  In EQ you were hesitant to get in over your head.  While the punishment sucked, I miss that aspect.  If you went deep into a dungeon to get the best loot, you risked losing everything (or at least risked a good chunk of time recovering your stuff).  There were no "do-overs", no "quick runs from the spawn point" and no "I'll just keep trying the encounter until I win because there's no penalty not to".   Death is such a trivial thing in today's mmos that we jokingly refer to them as "newbie ports".  While I hated the odd death penalty that you couldn't avoid (trains, lag, etc), I liked the fact that you took risks at times during gameplay.  It gave you a feeling of urgency that I really haven't experienced outside of an FPS since. 

Nebu no problem with risk vs reward, as long as it is not a cockblock and ultimately we both know the death penalty was a giant cockblock. I have noticed that when most players are dealt with such a decision they generally play like pussies. The reward part becomes negligible because the risk is never worth the reward and if the reward is worth it the risk is negligible. In generally I don't like a game to tell me to be cautious by wasting my time. And really the difference between the EQ era death penalty and the WoW era death penalties are that you in EQ era you waste hours and in WoW you waste minutes. Either way 100% of your playerbase will pick the easy road and play without the risk one way or another by mostly not caring for the reward.

A non-cockblocky death penalty was Guild Wars death penalty. Where death is simply a health and mana debuff that stacks until a certain percentage of health and mana is lost. Why was it great? Because it didn't tell me my playstyle, it simply made it harder for me if I failed without wasting my time. The only thing it forced me to do was get smarter (trying to complete a mission at 40% health due to 60% morale debuff took brains my friends). Also the debuff goes away incrementally when you start kicking ass.

I agree.  My focus was more on playstyle than the death penalty itself.  If you ventured into a dangerous area, you had to do it with caution in classic EQ as you risked the loss of everything.  Summon corpse changed the face of the game drastically as people started to whine and eventually the risk reward went away.  EQ would have been fine without a death penalty, it was the opportunity to lose everything that made it exciting.  That's what made UO and the Zek server of EQ exciting as well.  When you died, you risked losing stuff you had collected. 

Yeah, but in UO wasn't re-equipping a trivial task?  In a game where your equipment is the game, it is a much harsher penalty.

Yes... and I enjoyed that.  If you wanted the best gear, you risked the most to have it.  This is one of the few things that I've ever experienced that gave PvE some sense of urgency.  Granted, it's not for everyone... like perma death.

This is really what I like about those sorts of penalties.  I've had more excitement out of mundane activities in EVE than I have going through the motions in a WoW dungeon.
Higher highs and lowers lows, of course.  I guess though, after years of it losing a bunch of gear doesn't seem that bad.  I can definitely understand the vast majority of people coming from WoW as their very first MMO thinking "holy shit, WoW would be HORRIBLE if I lost all my gear when I died" and they are right, WoW would be.  But they haven't had enough MMO experience to know it isn't the only way to design an MMO.

Also, regarding the idea of a cockblock, its only a cockblock if it doesn't serve another purpose.  But a stupidly high death penalty in WoW, and yeah, its a cockblock simply because the game mechanics are currently designed around a light penalty.  But when a harsh death penalty in a core mechanic of the game, it functions to drive the game (such as the economy in EVE).  Hell, you could probably even justify a much harsher gear related penalty in WoW with just a small change like removing the once per day limit on heroic dungeons.

Anyway, its all based on the context of the game.  So, when people are saying they want a harsher death penalty, I think what they are actually saying is that they are saying they want a game that is designed from the ground up with that in mind, not that they want harsher DPs slapped on to any game.

I was going to reply to this post but I lost interest. 

To answer your original question, which might or might not have been trolling - although I tend to assume it was - yes,  I think that is diffculty. I think this was difficulty back since the days of Zelda and Final Fantasy I in the genre of role-playing games: The game being totally balanced against your character, your in-game power being way off compared to the power of the environment that was designed for your level and the game ass-raping you with the cruelest death penalties that you could imagine.

I'm sure you can define difficulty differently for RTS/driving/sports/FPS/adventure games and so on, but yeah, you nailed "difficulty" pretty good for RPGs. Ding, gratz!


Yes. Like anything. FPS, RTS, RPG, fighting games. Anything can be circumvented by a bot, although probably not within your clueless 10 lines limit. Assuming you are talking about the time investment in grinding, the bot can sit there for you. He can cast the right spells, counter the right things, sit on his butt and heal. Assuming shooters, a bot can aim for you. Assuming fighting games, a bot can auto-block and throw counters for you. Assuming RTS, a bot can do the trivial but tedious micro-management.



I'd say Vanilla EQ + Kunark + Velious is what qualifies as Vision canon (coincindentally done when McQ was still holding the reins). Most of the stuff past Luclin (including Luclin) made huge efforts to lessen the degree of uber catassing required to get anything done. EQ 2004 had stuff like "fast" travel (PoK/Spires), instancing (LDoN) and a few other very notable improvements which would have never made it live in the Vision era.

P.S. Heh, mercenaries, no kidding? Never went back to EQ once EQ2/WoW were out, I missed out on all the fun!

Grunk has apparently gone sane, and now we have DLRiley. Coincidence?

Maybe it's a case of Jekyll and Hyde. Did you ever notice you never see grunk and DL at the same time...?

EQ1 wasn't hard. It was tedious. The difference is in knowing the path versus walking the path. The latter is why WoW crushed it to bonedust and why so many newer games are easymode for anyone who cut their teeth on EQ1. There's not a big enough market for people seeking tedium to justify throwing a AAA budget at it. Conversely, this is the reason budgets for modern MMOs are so much more than they were in the early days. Other genres got big budgets (relative to the time), but MMOs were experimental until the right formula was hit.

And that formula for the Western market is predominantly soloable quest grinds with the occasional opportunity to group in small enough numbers that comprise a RL circle of friends.

XP loss and corpse runs are the very essence of punishing tedium that drives people to play ultra conservatively and seek predictability. They are safely enshrined in the past history of the genre.


Depends on the era of UO. From what I remember, I could farm to my hearts content in GM gear, which by the time I played UO, was both easy to craft and cheap to buy. I could don by Invuln stuff, but most times I didn't need to, and the risk of losing it was too high.

I actually agree with this.  I, generally, dislike XP loss and corpse runs.  I, however, like "full loot."   Of of the things about the full loot system is that you are never really going to hit that magical "I have all the loot I want" spot.  The loot ceases to be a loot grind because saving up the perfect set of gear is simply not a reasonable possibility.  Certainly people want better gear for a variety of reasons. However, the dynamic life of a character which loses gear, has to get some new stuff, cobbles together a reasonable set to take out to PvP with without putting all their eggs in one basket, etc, is much more to my liking than the simple "Got Epic 1, now time to grind for Epic 2, Now time to grind Epic 3, oh I have a full set, wait for new loot to be released"  That loot treadmill makes me bored to tears (though I'll admit there was a time when I enjoyed it). 

EVE for instance, has loot loss, but it doesn't have corpse runs, necessarily, and it has avoidable skill loss.  Loot though, means that game has a constantly movement of resources, which adds a huge amount to potential game play.  Recovering from a loot loss isn't a big deal unless you are an idiot and spend all you resources on the gear you were using at the time of death.  But that isn't a BAD thing, it just means the "top end" gear for a given character isn't defined by the top end they can possibly acquire, but rather the top end they can afford to lose.  This isn't a big deal to me. 


Anyway, I'll agree with you in terms of XP loss definitely.  I don't like *mandatory* corpse runs (like in WoW), but I don't mind if my loot gets dropped and I can choose to go retrieve it (if I think it'll still be there), or not.

I think there is just a ton you can add when loot is constantly moving around/ out of the economy, that just can't be replicated in an economy in which items are BoE/BoP and never go away.

EQ1 wasn't hard. It was grindy and punitive. That's not hard.

Depends on when you played. When the SSoY was the best weapon you could reasonably get things were a wee bit more challenging :awesome_for_real:

I played from pre-Kunark until about 3-4 months into WoW. With another month or so in Sept 2005. The days when you saved up and then ran to Highhold to buy ringmail off players as it dropped off the gnolls from people trying for a PGT. It still wasn't especially hard, but damn it was punitive.

Good stuff here, thanks.

R: "Ah, I think I've got it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense, not to himself."

G: "Or just as mad."

R: "Or just as mad."

G: "And he does both."

R: "So there you have it."

G: "Stark raving sane."

That's one of the reasons I support item decay. It's not even close to being the best reason, but it's in there.  :grin:

I think for some Achievers, such a system just becomes an endless grind. They can't not have the best equipment, and would run themselves into burnout to get it and keep it.

Man it's true, grunk isn't even being THAT crazy this time. He even sorta owned DLRiley with that "I was going to reply to this post but I lost interest" thing. What the crap. Grunk go huff some paint until you're back to being the f13 phuckin' lunatic mascot we all love tolerate know about.

In all seriousness, how is that any different from right now?

Item Decay?  Really? 

I like item decay for its macro effects.

I'm a crafter.

I make the best sword for everyone in my guild.

I'm out of a job.

Most MMGs are not EVE, in which the destruction of resources by PvP serves to drive the economy and curb MUDflation.

Never did get my hands on that or a single piece of rubicite, despite all my camping.
-grumble grumble-

I did manage to get jboots by camping najera for 15 hours.

Still, i'm glad those kinds of mechanics are in the past...mostly because I have bills to pay.

 Now I know some of you may have fond memories of everquest and even miss that 'hardcore' playstyle but I've already played those games and I'm nearing thirty so all I can say is...

Fuck.That.

I still marvel at the fact that I camped jboots, Ghoulbane, an SMR, a SSOY, an FBSS, and other items all while staring at a spell book when the game was in its infancy.  It's pretty amazing what we were willing to tolerate back in those days.  Now I find myself stabby if I have to wait 2 mins for a quest mob to respawn in WoW. 

I agree 100% with your sentiment. 

also... CAMP CHECK!

As a crafter, I like item decay. It's an elegant solution to item glut.

As a player, I hate item decay. It's like a maddening itch to know that my hard earned Razor Sword of Catass is slowly falling apart.

I spent 8 months camping mob after mob after mob getting my Enchanter Epic Snake Staff(forgot actual name).  8 months of daily mob checking and competing with other guilds for rare spawns that popped once every 3 days or some shit.  My second favorite is dying on a POF wipe and waiting 6 hours naked for another guild to go clear it so we could get our shit back.  6 hour corpse run baby! 

Item decay exposes the inner gears and wheels driving the subscription engine too much for my tastes.

Also any game with it better have one hell of a great inventory management system, since everyone is going to be carrying around extra stuff to use on content that isn't important enough to use some of the precious lifespan of your +12 Sword of Awesome.

Why not just have weapons repairable by weapon crafters, armor repairable by armor crafters, etc?  Seems to value crafting without pissing off achievers.  You still have people macro crafting as a matter of convenience either way, so it would serve the same purpose. 

Well, there already is a sort of item decay in WoW, as in the more you get hit/use your sword the lower it's durability. I think outright destroying items would be too much a kick in the balls.  On the other hand though lets say only a smith could repair your sword, while it's a neat idea if it's 2am and i wanna do a quest but cant find any smith around and half my gear is broken, am I fucked? I'd like to think not.

Have two of everything.  Redundancy is the trademark of MMO's!

In games like WoW and EQ, there wasn't enough resources going out of the system to keep the value on resources being produced. Making something and having it be there forever and ever and ever hurts a good crafting system. EVE is the epitome of keeping resources valuable via a consumption rate / demand that keeps up with supply.

Those are more "life" / "world" aspects of an MMO. For some they just want to plop down and play the "game" aspect of the MMO without worrying about doing things like upkeep, resource acquisition, etc. I don't blame them either. Sometimes I want to build. Sometimes I want to kill.

Also, losing everything in a death in an MMO is like going back to the lobby between multiplayer matches in a first person shooter: it's a GREAT way get your player to stop playing. Minimal downtime along with a consistent experience keeps people subscribed and happy.

I discarded that idea in 2004. Repair is not crafting. Making a new item is crafting.

The joy of crafting is in adding something to the world that didn't exist before. Ideally, you get to customize it for to the satisfaction of the customer or your own artistic sensibility.

Repair pisses off both crafters and achievers, leads to Item Enchanter / Entertainer buffbots, and therefore serves no audience at all.

Crafters are just crazy people in disguise.

This thread makes me want 1999 back. :(

Skip that, I lost my soul getting orb of mastery skittle stick items from kedge keep, and the horrors in plane of motherfucking sky. But really the accomplishment at the end was nice (then they nerfed the summoned pet all to hell).

Speaking of which with items, I really miss the chance you had in EQ to have an item before it was nerfed in its original state (see COS).

Here you go:

(http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_d6f4H-GEynw/Sd0x0iwXwjI/AAAAAAAAAO0/GYY9Eed1GSQ/s400/Prince_1999_single.jpg)

Green Room.

If you're gonna have item decay, individual items can't be that important. It worked in pre-2002 UO because a crafter could easily churn out piles and piles of gear that was competetive with even the best looted stuff. Plus even the good looted stuff was relatively easy to get. It's not like there would be a 40 man raid to get 1 guy a new helmet in UO. Item decay in a game with a gear system like WoW would be brutal and pointless.

I think the point is not to make a gear system like WoW, I could be wrong though. :why_so_serious:

Its just a Vision(tm) thing really...  :grin:

Edit -
PS:
15 hours is nothing. I have camped the old school cleric epic (the rez stick) in Nagafen's lair for something like 30 hours straight (and in shifts of 5 days) for SOMEONE ELSE, for the only guild cleric that raids regularly. The Ragefire camp got so bad that when Verant (pre-SOE) changed it to a triggerable outdoors spawn, it made  news on the BBC. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2255330.stm) And what we did for our cleric was the norm for our server. Unwritten rules and ethics were followed to the letter, there was another cleric who was next in line and he too helped us camp the damn dragon (and we helped him kill his Dragon 5 days later) - no thought of Kill-stealing on such a major endeavor, at least on the Quellious server.

Now putting discussion on punishing cockblock gameplay like that aside, what game nowadays engenders such a sacrifice of virtual blood sweat and tears for virtual toons that you would hardly know in RL? Not endorsing EQ or the Vision(tm) of course, but the punishing gameplay produced incredible camaraderie amongst the guild people that you need to rely on to advance in the game.

PPS:
The monk epic is the stupidest "camping" epic (not hard at all - just all camp) . Seven day camps were not unknown with the Monk epic in a dark cave fighting random green frogloks waiting for Raster (anagram for rarest - ho ho ho - such wit that Vision(tm).)  

Woo!

I agree with the agreement as well. Ghoulbane, check, SSOY, check, no FBSS :sad_panda: ... yet!

Camp check: Executioner! Still need my FBSS!

Because when Devs go this route, they still feel the need to enforce resource rarity and tiers of equipment OR a combination of the two.  A noob crafter can't make the same thing as a master.. and the masters must be better, after all.  It's in the MMO laws of the universe and "more realistic!"

The crafters then have a lock on the resources for farming as only their friends get the best equipment, or at least first shot at it.  Typically the highest tier have guilds farming and pushing mats at them and those not in the loop must pay a premium or compete against this cabal for those resources. 

What winds up happening then is you get to spend your time farming cash or crafting mats instead of camping items.   SWG was a great example of this.. and made worse by those in beta who knew how to abuse the Factory 'bug' that was fixed about two weeks after the game went live.  They were already masters while others were still struggling in the mid-tiers.

Merusk  just summarize why I avoid games with crafting as a "major feature".

How about Fallout 3's repair system?

Make it so you cannot lose the item, however you need others of the same type to repair it.  Make its effectiveness based on its condition and people will always want repair materials.  I wouldn't have decay be quite as fast as Fallout's, nor vary the effectiveness too much, but it's a good basis.  Let people trade-off effectiveness versus repair costs while making a constant market for crafters.

Fallen Earth uses decay and repair kits.  They're not needed much, at least at the low levels though.  Following their long-term crafting system should provide some interesting insights.

There's still something that rubs me the wrong way about even a system like that. It rewards one playstyle directly at the expense of another, I think, almost like a crafting version of ganking someone in STV.

EDIT: OK that's overstating it. But still, I don't think the item maintenance minigame adds much 'fun' unless you're specifically trying to capture a setting flavor thing like Fallout 3, where there just aren't any new things being made.

The wow crafting system works fine. Crafters can make a number of highly desirable items but they're all consumable (potions, item enhancers), crafter unique advantages (eg. enchanters are the only ones with ring buffs) or vanity items (the hog). It also provides specialised gear (like a newbie PvP suit) and raid gear via recipes dropped in raids. So crafting and the raw materials to feed it do have a high value.

What it doesn't do is allow crafters to be the core of item progression, which would make no sense in a PvE progression game.

I must be the one person that positively loathed the WoW crafting system. I'm still rather partial to EQII's current system, personally. (Not to mention the click one button > craft all aspect makes me want to /wrist. I want to make the item, damnit, not watch a bar go across the screen. But then, that's a whole different complaint.)

I'm of two minds about it.  If you have a serious crafter focus, then there needs to be a way to make all kinds of items desirable.  However I am against ever taking away items.

Think of WoW as it is now.  Not so much the crafting aspect, but item damage.  If you could buy a sword (or whatever item) and use it to repair your weapon in the field, would you like that?

Appearance tabs and social clothes are another way.  I had so many sets of clothes in SWG it was unreal.  Houses dedicated to clothing storage.

Man I miss UO circa like 2001. After they nerfed PK but before they removed meaningful item decay so they could add uberitems and Diabloize everything. You'd go up to the public forge in Britain where there were always 2 or 3 player blacksmiths hanging out. Then you'd tell one of them you wanted a valorite platemail suit with a norse helmet, two broadswords, and a heater shield. He'd tell what it cost. You'd offer to buy two sets and throw in a nice tip. You'd put one set on, chuck the other one in the bank, and that was it. You were good to do anything in the game. You could go ages without interacting with an NPC for any reason other than to stable your pets or access your bank.

(http://blogs.pcmag.com/atwork/images/angry_old_man.jpg)

Why this is being discussed in an EQ thread escapes me. From memory EQ crafting was buy lots of vendor items, maybe a couple you found yourself, and hope the combine doesn't fail.

I'm not sure how you can "loathe" WoW crafting. Raw materials go in, usable items come out and the implementation is fully supportive of their design goals of being adventure focused rather than people hanging around a forge. I can see wanting a game about crafting, but WoW will never be that game. Better animations for the trade-skills? Why when nobody watches them anyway.

I'm quite enjoying crafting in Fallen Earth though. In a post-apocalyptic world it makes sense that people would be scrounging and making stuff. Their system of crafts taking a long time but running in the background is not realistic but excellent for slowing the pace of production without making gameplay dull. More complex items having more subcomponents, experimentation to suck up some of the excess production and advantages to being a dedicated crafter is all quite cool.

What I would like to see in Everquest Next is a game that focusses on levelling.

I preferred levelling to the stuff there is to do at level cap. I like getting exp and dings but don't need 3 dings an hour. I remember Diablo 2 with great affection, a game where no one hit max level for almost a year (and it was an exciting race between GerBarb and RusBarb).

Instead of trying to be bad WoW it would be great to see this title aim for a now empty niche of a game where virtually no one has maxxed out. For many MMO fans our favourite memories are of times when everyone was trying to progress through the ranks.

I realise I'm basically asking for grind but I'd prefer that to aimlessly flying circles around Dalaran wondering if I can be bothered to do a daily for gold I don't need.

I agree, the journey to get to the endgame has lost a lot of importance since everyone seems to design the game around the concept of all the fun being at the endgame.

I actually think that vanilla WoW was awesome (and the oldskool EQ had merit too) in that regard, because so much of the PVE content was original and memorable to experience. Zone design, instances (dungeons in EQ), the unbelievably long and "epic" quest chains that led you all the across the world - assuming the reward was worth it - all that was contributing to not feel like "You're missing out of all the fun if you're not at the endgame".

The problem is that, unless the game has a very steady influx of new players, everyone drifts to the top of the level pyramid eventually, and not enough lowbies start to keep the low-level game fun. You noticed that even in WoW after a while, and WoW certainly kept selling boxes at an unbelievable pace. Then, one day, the whole effort you put into the low-level game becomes obsolete.

I think for a traditional level-based game, only studios like Blizzard working on AAA games can afford to spend lots of time making lots of high-quality non-level-cap content. It certainly has paid off handsomely, but there just isn't enough money in most efforts to sustain building 3 or 4 different places for level 20-25 players to go for ten hours.

WAR seems in specific to have failed along these lines: wasted effort on duplication (home cities), a T1 that was fun, and then both, too long of a grind to get to T4, because they were scared of people finding out how poorly thought out T4 was.

(maybe they should make T4 free to play, and then force you to subscribe to be able to play T1)

Remove levels.
Character advancement is based on equipment, and skill acquisition.
Add in full loot PVP with a little flavor of even noobs can tackle.

Sounds awesome to me.

Agree on the levels, full looting is kind of harsh though, especially if you link advancement to levels. It's like losing half of your character progress, if the items are all you have to show for it.

I'd rather want levels as a general indicator and not as the absolute deal-breaker that they are today. Something like Guild Wars levels. Or Demon's Souls, which actually has an awesome leveling/PVP implementation IMO.


This is a good observation, and I think that WoWs polish at lower levels (1-40 mainly) originates from a time where lower levels were supposed to take a lot longer than they were tweaked to in the retail launch. Back in 2004, I was marveling at the time and ressources it must've taken to design various dungeons and unique equipment pieces in the 10-20 level range (think: an entire blue *set* from wailing caverns for levels 13-17), when a focused player can mow through all that in a day and jump from level 9 green equipment to level 21 green equipment. I kept hearing that back in WoW closed beta leveling took a lot longer.

It also probably would be possible to have the lower level (non-endgame) take longer if your game is polished and content-featured enough to be fun at that stage. 20 hours for 20-25 can be very short if you're having fun or one heck of a problem if you keep counting mob kills to next ding.

So Guild Wars++? The only problem I see with that it is that A.) They'll never do it because Blizz hasn't done it yet and therefore it would never work in their minds, and B.) it completely negates 99 and 44/100ths of the game they worked so long on. I loved the concept of GW's instant 20(?) PvP but at that point it became old because it was basically Quake or UT with swords and spells instead of blasters and I got tired of that real quick. I'd like the model more if it was placed in an open world instead of a set number of small maps. When I saw some of the teaser vids of WAR where there were dozens (maybe hundreds) of players attacking and defending a city, I thought it was going to be fantastic. And as everyone has said, T1 was great, but then the bottom fell out and frankly I lost the will to get to the point where I could have maybe participated in an epic fight like that. And from what I've read, I don't even think it would've been possible given their engine and server tech.

Sometimes I just want to say 'Fuck it' and go back to Arena and Daggerfall. They both felt like MMOs before I had ever played one.  I'm still hoping that someday I'll find a game that's close to being Daggerfall Online.  Probably never happen.

Well it was more of a general armchair dev statement.  Also my game would be in a small-medium sized world with no instancing and a max online server population numbering in the 100's rather than 1000's.


Full loot is fine because in my magic game gear acquisition is easier and isn't as a pain in the ass as WOW.  Think diablo style gear dropping but maybe not as random.

Draegan has the right idea.

Character progression could concentrate on breadth and vanity instead of power level.  The level 80 game in WoW demonstrates quite clearly that people will spend tons of time without the promise of new levels, so why not just remove them?  Have Talent trees and diversification of abilities become the new progression path.

Other ways to progress might include gaining damage bonuses vs. specific creature types after fighting them long enough, character titles, vanity items like customizable armor and weapon appearances, character reputation that would open up new quests, etc..

Since character power stays relatively constant, new content would be accessable to a larger group of players, a much larger "game world" results as well...

I retyped this post and added a bit to it in the game dev forum as to not annoy people with shitty armchair developing.

However, to the point of these DIKU games, people love the gear chase and the dungeon crawl.  They hate having to go through tons of content just to get to where their friends are.  Take out levels.  A noob will be like doing heroics with someone doing 1200 dps.  It can be done, it just takes longer and usually others pick up the slack.

The only difference is that they arn't slogging through leveling content while everyone else is at the party.

Replace the level grind completely with the gear grind.  This also happens to get rid of the kill 10 rat quests and leave just "quests" for cool gear.  Give me a few million dollars some programmers, artists and whatever else I need and I'll make a DIKU game even schild would play for more than a week.

I would play the type of game you are preaching, it wouldn't even have to be perfect.

I think you are drastically underestimating the importance of the emotional bond that gets created between a player and the toon during the leveling period.  If your game doesn't in some way replace this, your game wont have long-term subscribers.  A large number of long-term subscribers are what get Blizzard from one glacially-delivered Wow release to the next.

Levels, skills, experience, whatever a particular game calls for are inherent to your character.  Loot, on the other hand, only really becomes important once you have a character that you want to pimp out.  People don't become attached to wearable loot simply because they are ephemeral - the player knows that he's going to replace those items.

Maybe there is some way of building out a character's bio without the use of levels that gate access to content (allowing everyone to play together), but "let's get rid of levels!!!" is only half the solution.  Currently the character bio consists of 1) inherent 'stuff' (e.g. levels/skills/etc), 2) wearable items and 3) memories of play the player has with that character.

I suppose housing might work, but what percent of the total playerbase would accept playing house versus forming an attachement to a toon.  I'm certain it's not 100%.  My gut tells me it's not even 50%.

Sounds like EVE with a focus on hand crafted PvE content instead of PvP.

I am totally with you that something is needed to attach people to toons, (and give gamers a ramp-up from 1 button to press to 20) but do you think that you need a full on classic WoW or EQ grind? I feel like a GW length campaign hits the sweet spot (and makes it plausible to develop more of those, as they did).

Guild Wars campaigns could stand to be shorter.  Even if you had several leading up to one grand story, there need to be more discrete, short arcs.  As much as I love GW, I've still only ever beaten one campaign despite putting in some ungodly number of hours.

I'm hoping GW2 will be a good model for a lot of these ideas.

I think you're wrong.  "Building up your character" doesn't have to be spending 12 weeks or 8 days /played to max out your characters xp bar.  Once you put a new piece of gear onto your character and you see tangible results especially after getting new skills you become more and more attached.

In my game your skills don't pop out of a trainer in your hometown.  You have to find them in the world from hidden/not so hidden trainers.  Behind PVP or PVE encounters.  The details arn't important, but you get my idea.  That's your attachment and you didn't once have to kill 10 rats to get a chunk of xp.


It's not EVE since you're playing the game and not watching it like EVE.

You can make this game PVE or PVP.  I prefer PVP with full loot.  Especially if you near Diablo-like gear dropping levels.

While I would love to play a game like the one you describe, it will never happen.  Creating a game with "Kill 10 rats" advancement takes 1000 times fewer resources than your game.  Your game is far to content intensive to a) be made on a practical budget and b) to generate enough content in a timely fashion to keep players entertained over the long-term. 

It's happened before.  He pretty much just described Shadowbanes skill system.  You found runes that dropped off mobs that represented skills, either you could learn them yourself or trade them to others.

I would say it's less.  You're not creating newbie zones, low level zones, medium level zones.  You're doing less writing, creating less quests etc.  All content doesn't need to be scripting WOW raid zones.  You can create simple non instance areas where you have bosses and other mobs to fight.  

Of course combat would have to be a quicker pace with minimal downtime so you're just not grinding mobs over and over.

So, UO with Diablo like loot?

Sort of but not quite.


I posted that in the game dev forum.   You take out leveling, create a limited skill base system.  I prefer a PVP based game, but you can design it around strictly PVE.  UO is sort of like it, but if I remember maybe people didn't use the best gear for fear of losing it?  This game you would want to use it.

edit to add:
I've played this game before (but with levels and other grindy crap in it) in the 90s as a MUD.  It's an incredibly fun game.  It also works on a real small scale too.

Well, you could do it that way (although from a realism standpoint it makes little sense in a pre-industrial* game, swords don't exactly have interchangeable parts like factory-made guns), but the question is what does it add? Mostly it sounds like it just adds extra interface headaches. Now you're dedicating some bag space to your extra thing to carry around, you might have to add an interface for repairing the item, and otherwise just adding extra clicks to a process that's really only there to give a bit of drag to the economy. (And of course in WoW engineers already can provide this service via repair bots, although that's really only cost-effective for raid groups I think.)

I think the conclusion I come to is big elaborate crafting systems are fine or even necessary for games like Fallen Earth or ATITD, where the goal or setting is very focused on it, but most action-oriented games really benefit more from a crafting system that just acts in service to (and stays out of the way of) the central goal jumping in and beating stuff up for treasure.

*On the other hand in sci-fi games personal crafting I often find even more jarring for other reasons. It really, really irritated me that I was turning out industrial quality goods from animal hides and bones in my brief trial of SWG.

Sounds somewhat Darkfallish actually now that you spell it all out.  No levels, check.  Skills increased by usage, check. Max skill level based on stats (not check, max skill level is always 100).   Gear can be worn by anyone (check, though skills can make you better at wearing certain stuff/wielding certain weapons). 

I'm not sure what you mean by  "Advanced skills being prerequisite for less advanced skills" Do you mean the oposite? I.E, skill up something like lesser magic, then you can learn greater magic, which is a totally separate skill?  Not sure.

Diablo style loot is a bit of a sticking point.  Also, Darkfall is about clan politics/city sieges and such, I think, so its not solo friendly, I'm not sure if that is something that matters in your design.

Skills and spells are like Civilization tech trees.  You need x and y before getting z.  But you're limited, based on race, on how many you can learn.

I'm not sure how skilling up in Darkfall, but there is no grind in my game just so people arn't forced to macro shit.

If my game were PVP it wouldn't be FFA it would be a 2 or 3 (preferred) faction type of game. 

Agreed Tastyhat.

What I had in mind was that 20-25 would take three months. That does make it worth doing for developers, the content they carefully craft will see a lot of use.. The reason people wanted to do Scarlet Monastery et al back in early WoW was because it was a long wait after that instance until the next one with decent loot.

Tobold stated recently that it took about 500 hours to hit 60 in early WoW for an average player, that's a year for a 10 hours a week casual.

You could even omit end game content entirely.

Now some hardcores will burn through your content however hard you make it unless you secretly turn off exp completely. But that's ok, let the vocal 0.1% whine that there's nothing to do at endgame and leave. As long as 99.9% are happy levelling.

As for the pvp ideas isn't that simply a different game? It may well do better without the millstone of an IP but if you want a MMO-inspired IP surely UO2 or Shadowbane 2 would be a better fit than EQ Next.

Somebody give Emmert his red name, plz.

Blush

Well there are certainly worse designers to be compared to.

Just to clarify I'm not anti-raid or anti-pvp. I love to see radically different games around though and I think an old fashioned levelling game will, in 5 years time, be very fresh.

All your PVE ideas are terrible.  

You want to extend mid range levels for months at a time?  Have you not seen Aion?  That doesn't even make sense at all.

You want to omit end game content?  Ok.  Ding Grats Level 60, please cancel your sub.  You just spent 10 years leveling a character, there's nothing else to do.  Oh here's a coupon for Lineage 2.

What hardcores are you talking about that's some arbitrary 0.1% vocal whine?  Everyone reaches the end game, everyone wants to keep playing.  Aion is a perfect example of why you don't extend early levels.  If you want to spend a billion years grinding out levels, EQ and 1999 are waiting for you.

Lolz. Hate to remind everyone but a gear grind (if I'm understanding you correctly) is the same as a level grind to the player. Unless the gear is vanity items your asking today's player base to give applause because you replaced mob grinding with quest grinding. While technically all mmo's have a level grind followed by a gear grind, so technically your idea is 50% less grindy than the norm. But 50% less grindy isn't necessarily less grindy as far as players are concerned.

Skills are unlocked, not found like pokemon. Players should be able to map their future progress (without opening their browser). Complicating skill progression is guaranteed to end in tears for all but a extremely niche playerbase. No one should be expected to auto-attack through encounters or simply go without skills because their too noob to find it. Maybe 1 out of 8 skills need to be unlocked through some hoop and ladder mechanism(it was done with success in Guild Wars), but to make that norm for all your skills in clown shoes.

Hand crafting content is only viable if your player base regularly uses it as their game. Spending the resources on the before max areas in the game is arguably retarded. New players need enough time to get used to the game. The early levels or whatever should be used to teach them the game and make them competitive. This is not a 24 hour+ activity. After you have prepared them for the game, that is when they should be in the officially dumped into the "end game" which should be 90% of your game and lateral progression should end.

Why do I get the impression you have no idea what you are talking about.

It wasn't McQuaid, so there's that...

So you basically didn't read anything I wrote.  Cool.

Which is why EQ Next might want to repeat that experience.

As for the ideas being terrible well games are about implementation more than ideas.

If Blizzard took my ideas and ran with them I bet they could make an awesome game. In fact no end game, endless levelling, oh wait they already did that it was called Diablo 2. Terrible, huh?

Even WoW at launch did not sell based on it's end game. In 2004-5 people bought WoW because they expected it to be fun, found it to be fun and told other people it was fun. Based on the levelling game. Hardly anyone raided in the first 6 months and there was no structured pvp.

Your game reads like a checklist of features that hardcore veteran gamers would love. Skills over levels, full loot pvp, etc.

But those aren't the main audience, certainly not for Everquest Next. In fact designing for vets has already been thoroughly debunked:
http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20041103/bartle_01.shtml

In the end we're both kidding ourselves. EQ Next will obviously be a reasonably polished DIKU, basically EQ2 with some extra shine.

No, I think McQuaid and Co. proved conclusively that that option was a non starter just recently.

But 5 years is a long time. 200 hours to level cap sounded not terrible back then, and now it's deathmarch ahoy. Also, and more importantly, the reason why WoW classic worked so well is not just because of standard issue Blizzard polish, but because no MMO had done the quest-driven game so thoroughly.

Today, if a well-polished WoW classic-style game were released, it'd just be "kill ten rats" snarks over and over.

Similarly, end game dungeons like UBRS and MC kept people entertained/cursing at the bugs for months, largely because the bar was low. If you gave a game an end raid of a bugless MC today, people would just be bored off their asses: "Really? All I have to do is decurse and then debuff Shazzrah? Boring."

It's a tricky issue, that the MMOG industry has made a lot of "casual" people actually quite good at their games.

You obviously have no idea what you're talking about.

Diablo 2?  Endless leveling?  That game was all about the gear grind and not about the leveling (That and the single player  game story.)  It wasn't even an MMOG either so I don't see the comparison.

The reason why Vanilla-WOW was fun because it put a ton of people into a familiar world, allowed them to play in it and had a structured advancement method to it that was easy and entertaining.  In short: it was a fun game.  Levels didn't have anything to do with it.  Now every game has kill 10 rats, kill 10 bigger rats, dinggrats. 

And how does using a skill based system to measure character strength make it hardcore?  You're stripping levels and putting another measuring stick.  (I believe Funcom's The Secret World is doing something like this)  It's actually less hardcore because a new player can play with a veteran.  If you actually read what I wrote, I would say that I would like to see full loot PVP, but you don't necessarily need that.  You can use the game mechanics in both PVE and PVP.

You sound like one of those bitter "casual" players that hate those really "hardcore" gamers.  Can you show me on the doll where that hardcore raider touched you?

I'm not a hardcore gamer, or raider or whatever you want to call it.  I havn't been for years. 

I would love that.

Imagine that the game told: "This fight has 2 phases. In phase 1, your task is to remove Curse1 with your Skill1. In phase 2, your task is to keep Debuff2 on the boss with your Skill2. That is all." And that would be all, you'd do that, shoot the breeze on vent, sip a beer and then you'd win and get loot. GG, same time tomorrow?

Maybe someday someone (Blizzard?) makes a game like that.

Now this is the interesting point: does fun change over time?

Richard Bartle, in the article I linked suggests that the wheel can turn full circle.

 :oh_i_see:

I don't think it was ever fun.

Its repetition that isn't fun.  If you are doing something brand new, 200 hours to "max" isn't bad.  But a 200 hour quest grind is going to seem pretty terrible now.  Just that they are NEW quests isn't really going to be all that much of a consolation either.

My first 200 hours of EVE didn't feel like a grind, but if FEVE (my imaginary EVE rip off) did the same thing, the first 200 hours would probably drag.

Being original matters.  Well, being original AND good.

Eh?

There have been no original games in this genre* yet. Everything is a derivative of Dikumud, Elite and/or Ultima 1.

(*by genre I mean graphical virtual world games not muds).

I know, right, we've had attacks, and equipment, and character death, and points, and winning, and losing and keyboard shortcuts, fonts and pixels in computer games for ages now. God, when are MMOs ever going to start doing something original?

(i for one am superexcited about world of cheesecraft)

I've heard about that. Isn't it supposed to be real innovative with the first instance of smell-based technology?

(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/be/Ultima1-1.gif)

The thief class is clearly unbalanced. Needs fixing ASAP.

I downloaded the EQ2 trial yesterday and discovered that they have addressed the issue of people who like to level slowly in a rather creative way.

In your alternate advancement window there is now a slider bar:

Amount of adventure experience to convert to alternate enhancement experience

I set it to 75% and carried on playing. My character is now level 11.44 with 7.25 points worth of AA progression.

For people who haven't played EQ2 recently alternate advancement is like a talent point system that you level up separately. It's based on advancement experience which is earned in a different way from regular adventure experience with more of an emphasis on rewarding exploring.

It starts at level 10 so with 75% of my adventure experience going towards it I've earned 7 and a bit levels of AA progression and one and a half levels of adventuring levels since the system became active.

Now what's so nice for me as a slow leveller is that not only can I set my levelling speed to slow but the game is rewarding me for doing so. Having these extra AA points makes me a more powerful character for my level than I would be had I not touched the slider bar.

So I can explore several different 11-20 areas and progress without my quests and AA objectives turning grey and ceasing to reward me.

The ingenious thing about the system is it doesn't stop people powering to max level. If you never touch the slider bar you will hit max level in the usual way then experience after max level will be converted to AA (in other words you'll collect these quasi talents as if you set the bar to 100%).

Not only does it suit slow leveller explorer types but it also helps keep people who want to play together at the same stage. I was recently playing DDO with a friend but I couldn't keep up with him and he got further and further ahead until we could no longer operate together without penalty. With this system he could still progress his character while not out-levelling me.

Well done SOE, very nice solution to my issue. Hope this feature makes the cut into EQ Next.

2001, is that you? AA points and being given a slider to adjust how much XP goes to AA or leveling isn't exactly new.  :oh_i_see:

Still, it is nice that you can start gaining them at such a low level, and spend time going through all of the content. Makes me wish they had had it in game when I was running my Dirge up.

My favorite part is using decimal places in describing your level.

Christ I just winced.

The stock UI doesn't give that type of detail, he must have a UI like Profit or something. It gives you decimal graduation for those really retentive people who like to know exactly how much exp a kill gives them.

I resembled that when grinding to 80

Not to mention skill based systems make it intensely harder to form a group for content.  With class and level based systems, you know exactly what someone is/is not capable of.  With skill based systems you have to correlate all of their high skills together and figure out a role for them.  Grouping is already becoming difficult enough that people have done more and more solo play, and this will make it so that even the casual grouper probably wont' group up.  Destroying social abilities in an MMO is not going to make it remotely successful these days.

I dunno, in UO and early SWG you could just wander off and see how you did. There was always something you could do.

I think an important difference between those games and level-based games was a much smaller differentiation in the power levels between different mobs, and between players. It wasn't a world of almighty gods at one end and little fleas at the other.

EverQuest. That, right there, is the key to EQ. The game was utterly trivial, but was a great excuse to shoot the breeze.

Were you playing the same encounters I did? The coordination it took to take down the boss mobs in Plane of Nightmare and Planes of Disease (Bertoxulous) was anything but trivial. It took enormous stamina and communication between dozens and dozens of people over a chat interface (vent wasn't used very much in my raiding days).

I'm going to guess that most of us had quit EQ by the time those planes were introduced?   I know that I left shortly after Velious released. 

Not I. I was there for Disease, Innovation, Nightmare and that one Marr was in (or was it Ro..)  I knew guys in guilds that were doing the "you must have at least 72 players in your raid" raid, Rathe Council.

It still amazes me it was all done over chat instead of vent.  Boggling..

/cast 'Complete Heal'
/yell *** Complete Heal on %t *** 
/yell    --> Roxxie Cast Next in 3.5s <--
/pause 3.5
/yell !! CAST NOW ROXXIE !!

My first real raid was NTOV as the only shaman.  That was some tense shit.

90% of the coordination was setting up a competent CH rotation though and then you were set, at least that is what I remember. Yeah, it went like that with the macros and the clerics needed to be on their toes. DPS classes, however, were just spamming DPS, and tanks were just, well, hitting their button.

Slows and other debuffs were just cast and maintained, once you figured out what was slowable.

God I hated Plane of Disease. My mantra was 'LFG for anything BUT PoD!'

Different "generation" and MMO-mentality though.  Graphics aside, if UO was released today it would probably fail because people are expecting hand holding  (unfortunately imo) and expect things to be handed to them.  We are given so much information in MMOs these days that we have come to expect it, and when we aren't given that information people's first thoughts aren't to figure it out themselves, but instead get frustrated or look online for the information required. 

"Everyone" has also been trained in the holy-trinity and that MMO's these days have classes designed around specific roles, and those classes are designed where redundancy in roles is bad, you must fill up the groups with all different roles.  I (again unfortunately) think the mentality has gotten so ingrained that even if a game comes along that designs classes where redundancy is acceptable, it will be such a shock that most players won't take advantage of it. 

I think you're confusing hand holding to shitty design.  Terrible game design is dropping someone somewhere and say "Go." 

I made it to Luclin, then died to some buggy blue mob and lost level 54 which had some groovy spell. Recovered my stuff (luckily I was a necro, so CR was never a big deal), camped out and never went back. Primitive, shitty game, punitive as hell but still ended up being able to solo more stuff than in EQ2, heh.

I disagree.  I look at that as being dropped somewhere and being told to discover.  Perhaps it's all what we grew up with in games.  Early games didn't direct your play nearly as much as they do now. 

It's certainly true that a game with skills rather than classes would have to be different to WoW in other ways too.

No, my point is that both hand holding and shitty design has changed the way we look and play MMOs.

*edit* and by we I mean the population in general, not specific people and probably a lot of people on this board.

There are games for everyone out there.  I'm just saying a game that gives you a character and drops you somewhere and play is not one for mass appeal without content to drive your game whether it's story or anything else.

Open ended gameplay is great, but there needs to be some sort of direction for new players or else your retention numbers are terrible.


Almost every MMOG released has had shitty design.  All games hold your hand one way or another.

I dunno man, debuffing and slowing every single mob (that can be) without getting agro, plus maintaining a metric fuckton of buffs on 72 people can be pretty god-awful.

Oh, and cannibalizing whenever you can.

Early games were a novelty unto themselves though.

I played a shaman as my main myself until (and including) PoP raiding. It was in many ways comparable with a WoW affliction lock, except that the WoW lock has a lot more complex interactions and skill synergies. And you have to do stuff like play DDR with avoiding random PVE hazards in WoW when the lamp turns red or something.

The complexity of the EQ debuffing-slash-"whatever-else-in-endgame-raiding" was due to the total fuck-up of the game, UI and interface in giving feedback and supporting your actions, not due to the game being rocket science. Let's not forget we're talking holy trinity/tank'n'spank canon from the years 1999-2001 here. The average 5-man endgame (Strat/Scholo/LBRS) from vanilla WoW or, God forbid, UBRS back when 15 people in greens were "raiding" there were at least of similar twitch and reaction difficulty levels, except that everyone could manage due to the godsend that is .lua addon programming.

Nah, I wouldn't call it rocket science, but it took it's toll on you. I don't even want to consider chanters.  I just remember our chanters in Vex-Thal were the fucking shit.  Then there was the fact that these fucking raids lasted forever.

Anyways, you can't really disregard UI and feedback and all that.  They were a part of the game.  Sure if EQ provided as much flexibility and feedback as WoW it would be a lot less complex.  They didn't, though, and you had to compensate for that.  Most of EQ now is trivial, not due to levels, but because of the widescale use of Vent and other VOIP shit.  99% of our spam-chat macros could have been tossed out the window.

(http://www.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/pacman.jpg)

There's intuitive learning environments and then there's the absolutely inscrutable.


Is vastly different from, say, the Taxi-to-Victory chatlog.

> Murder mailbox

1) I meant RPGs.

2) Pac man isn't all that early.  EDIT: Ok, maybe it was.  I was thinking back to games in the late 70's and saw that Pac man was released in 1980.  My bad on that one.


Yes.  Obviously.

Well, you're talking about a sim in that case, the game isn't meant to just be picked up and played.  Thats kind of the point though, the vast majority of recent MMO games ARE meant to be picked up and played.  The trick is finding a balance between easy to pick and, and complex enough that it doesn't get boring.

I was being a dick (and almost went with Pong, but you could argue that Pong has sandbox qualities  :grin:), but to get to my point: there were a lot of early games that railroaded players into certain play types, but they hid it behind an interface that made part of the guesswork actually figuring out the game.

Adventure games were all about that - it wasn't necessarily that the game was more flexible, it was just that you had to know you needed the glowing stone and then type the exact words "put glowing stone in mouth" in order to crawl through the dark caves (Space Quest I, iirc). The game could come to a dead halt if you didn't have the glowing stone. That's not good game design; it's cockblockery. Rampant cockblockery should not be a game design aim.

Personally I'd rather not fight the game to find the fun in it. Part of that is having a nice interface to let the player play. Another part is having progression that lets the player feel like they are achieving something this session and that there is more fun progression left for the next session.

Tying it back to the thread: EQ might have been great for its time, but it was full of rampant cockblockery that won't fly in EQ Next. Vanguard tried to go down that route and flinched; EQ Next has a better chance of being a WoW clone. What I don't know is if it will be a fun WoW clone with enough differences to make it successful.

Is this a non-sequitur?

Well considering that we are talking about accessibility/ease of play I think genre matters.

Unsub explained what I was thinking.

There are plenty of sims that give you a quick tutorial and you're off to make up your own way in the game in your own manner.

After I thought about it, I realised I should have used an RPG example, not an adventure game one. However, I think the point still stands about early games railroading you if you talk about early Ultima titles, Bard's Tale and pretty much every other (western - can't speak for eastern titles) dungeon crawler that bore the RPG genre along in the 1970s and 1980s. Sure, there were some exceptions in titles that didn't force you to play exactly the same way repeatedly, but they were certainly exceptions (and generally later on).

The difference back then is that it was new and therefore exciting.

Nah, I think you're right, RPGs are a bad example. :) It just wasn't that much of a progression. Akalabeth was a railroad that led from the surface to the bottom of the dungeon. Ultima 1 was open, but with gates along the way; Kill a guard to save a princess to get the spaceship, etc. Ultima 2 was completely open; you could go to the final badguy from the start of the game, but it had one gate (you need The Ring to survive). Bard's Tale 1 was completely gated, because at the end of each dungeon was the "key" to the next one. Bard's Tale 2 had multiple paths to the final boss, but the last dungeon had the "key" to trigger the final baddie. "Open" versus "Gated" was just all over the place back then.

in my mind the only chance for soe was destroyed when ffxiv was announced.  FFXI did more damage to the EQ universe than anyone (i remember watching ffxi rip every single player from eqoa and on top of that, seeing the hardcore pve players ditch eqlive).

soe simply doesn't have the in-house talent to deliver the dream game we are thinking about.

I agree.  :why_so_serious:

For some of us that was a nightmare game. The ONLY thing that has me even remotely interested in FFXIV is the fact that the Mithra model is unbelievably perfect. I'm a sucker for animation and motion capture done right. The demos of the character models in action were good but the Mithra was just spot on. I think that's half the reason I still really like WoW. The ingame animations and stances and such are just so good that I feel immersed in the world even if it is made of 7 polygons.

As much as I think you're eating the troll-bait, I'll agree with you too.  :why_so_serious:

FFXI had very nice visuals (not just for it's time.) It's the first MMO I recall using cutscenes also including major NPCs to drive the plot along. Skill chains were awesome when they worked (and people tried.) Tons of neat little things tucked away in there, like notorious monsters. I could go on.

FFXI had a lot going for it, but it didn't all come together in a way that kept me playing. I still hold a reservation that they'll get it wrong for FFXIV. SOE has had a lot of opportunity to learn from mistakes (and a lot of practice making mistakes as well, you could argue.) Square/Enix's MMO team has only shown us that it can reconsider boss fights so long that they make people physically ill.

I just really hope that they do a good job on the next EQ. I am so unhappy with everything else right now.

Most of FFXI's problems were just part of the genre at the point. Except they launched towards the end of when players were no longer willing to put up with that sort of thing. For me, it was the gating of content. I actually gave up because of an airship access quest, came back a year later, and was still sitting in the same set of caves LFG for the quest when I quit again.

The gameplay itself I thought was pretty cool. It was just the number of "vision" style misery inducers that made the game impossible to play.

FFXIV all comes down to whether the devs want to emulate WoW or an Asian grinder for their general model.

This was and continues to be my only problem.  If I could have been capable of doing things on my own at a reasonable pace after level 10, I would still be playing it today.

All of this. And I'm not holding my breath for a WoW clone. That region of the world just does not think along those lines.

+1 FFXI was one of the best and the last of the games that tried to actually craft a world.  The problem was forced grouping sucked balls, the grind was looooooooong and sub classes made it worse not better because you needed to level up through the same grind twice even if you weren't making an alt.  I loved the combat, the classes, the world, it was great EQ style gameplay but I can't stand grinding, I didn't make it out of Lake of Ill Omen because sitting around LFG is fucking bullshit.

No it isn't. It's an oxymoron.

A non-sequitur would be....

Here's what ultimately killed it for me: I subbed to the game because some of the kids I worked with had it and were raving about it. So I bought the box, installed, made umpteen attempts in character creation before the game finally decided to put me on the same server they were on (early FFXI randomly chose servers for you - you couldn't specify your server unless someone provided you a world pass). So I log in, decide to create a Taru and start in Windurst. Loved it. Had tons of fun. My friends started off in Bastock though. When I finally hit 14 or 15 or so, I tried to run to Bastock. Finally hit the point where I said screw it and rerolled so I could play in the same area as they were. Rolled a Mithra, got about 14 levels in Bastock (really didn't like the area or quests), hit the Dunes and said Fuck It. Uninstalled and never looked back.  If I'd had more free time I probably would've stuck with it. FFXI was fun but it required that you devote every waking minute to it. I've got a wife, kid, job and mortgage. Weekend WoW is just about all I can manage anymore. If the new one offers some semblance of casual play, I may go for it. But I'm not expecting it. Maybe in 25-30 years when I'm retired in the nursing home I can go back to being a catass.

What's this got to do with Shadowbane?

(http://www.planet-science.com/sciteach/jokes/images/08OldJoke.jpg)

Perhaps, but my point still stands.

So tell us something about EQ's expansion already to rerail the thread.

[edit]Or this thread was about EQ3 (next)... ? wasn't it?[/edit]

It launched last month. It's not much of a rerail though, EQ is not EQ 'Next'

Plus, we all know I'm going to have a muzzle on anything I know. It just find reading what y'all might have to think on the topic to be more interesting than the average bear.

haha +1 lurking for Grim

grunk ran an exploit that crashed the thread and allowed rogue conversations to run unrestricted.

What else would there be to do in a thread about the completely unknown next version of EQ other than 1) reminisce about EQ experiences and / or 2) derail it?

doomcast!

The next EQ will be designed solely for the PS3 with 3 buttons for attacks and 1 button for looting. It will be made a lot more linear to reduce confusion and 90% of the development effort will be going into gibs and special effects. Tanks and support classes will be removed because who has the patience for that when you could be killing shit?

Why don't you tell us?

So, Untold Legends. If you're gonna doomcast, do try harder.

They should bring back "vanilla" EQ for PS3 and call it Chronicles of Norrath.

Sup.

Point taken. Sadly.

How about make EQ2 with less button mashing.  That's the only thing that keeps me away from it.

Weird I know, just how I feel.  Hitting 20 buttons to kill a single mob is not fun.

We tried 1 button.  Most people liked that even less.

Then play Vanguard.


This is not a recommendation you understand, but if that's what you want....

Is your problem with EQ2 that you have more abilities or is the problem that combat is slower?

While I agree that while soloing the slower combat is not as much fun, when you're grouping or raiding, imho it improves the gameplay a great deal providing time to think, adjust, and making it less of a weird ritualized dance.

If the number of options is a problem, I just plain enjoy having more options.

I feel like I'm playing the piano when I play EQ2.  Plus the graphics and sounds are terrible.

I can only handle about five regular abilities unless the combat is really slow, or it has a staged bar.  My reflexes aren't great so more than that and I have problems.

In WoW for example, I need my interrupts on key four or five or I just won't be able to fire them off in time.  That, however, means I can't have a regularly used ability there.  Swordmasters in WAR however, had stances.  With a mod that switched my bar depending on the stance, I ended up having three bars of 4-5 abilities, which I could handle, and was surprisingly good at.

EQ2?  I'd have a bar full of abilities with the one above it almost all duplicates.  Then I'd just start hitting 1-10, then clicking one up 1-10, and maybe then two-up 1-10...  I never could focus on the combat itself because I was playing my cast bars.

The only way to make EQ games more linear would be to put everyone in 1 zone and force them to walk single-file along one road from point A to point 5 for 50 levels.

I don't understand this criticism. If you have less buttons to push, then auto-attack and forget is the way the gameplay will move.  Even single player games give the characters lots of abilities to use in combat (Dragon Age) or else you are just spamming the fire button (Mass Effect).

Actually let me rephrase: I understand what your criticism is pointing to, but I don't see a way to change it in any significant way. We are playing these games on devices with buttons. How else do we interact other than pushing buttons?

EQ2 button pushing is in line with using damage ability 1-10 that do all the same thing except a minor tweak to it.

I don't mind a lot of abilities to use like my Warrior in WOW.  I have a ton of different abilities that do DIFFERENT things.  I don't want to play a mage and have to cycle through 10 different damage abilities with all different cooldowns.

I don't think the "EQ2 button mashing" complaint is an idle gripe. The game may have changed since, but when I remember played, I didn't have enough hotkeys between 1 - = including CTRL+ and ALT+ banks (36 hotkeys!) to contain all of the standard macros, combat abilities, AA abilities and items I would use in a regular non-raid play session. I would CTRL+ and ALT+ my most standard button presses, and for my less common actions I would need to SHIFT+ to another hotkey bank so I could press yet another number. And now that I think back, some of my macros even combined 2 related abilities into 1 key when possible.

BUTTON MASHING HELL.

IMO a game should be designed for:
1 hotkey bar of actions
1 hotkey bar of items

That's plenty of options if the game has a cohesive design.

Of course there should be options to have more macros for when people want to get fancy/save button presses, etc., but that's not the point I'm arguing.

Why would I want developers to design for hotbars at all? That line of thought doesn't even make sense to me.

So how would you play Dragon Age without a hotbar?

What really ticks me off about control systems is that all these gadgets we have with additional buttons for gaming generally don't actually ADD buttons that we can use - the buttons have to be programmed to duplicate the functions of normal keyboard buttons, so I have a G13 with 24*3 extra buttons and a G15 with 18*3 extra buttons, but those buttons all have to be programmed to duplicate normal keyboard buttons, or button-combinations, rather than being their own unique buttons that I can map directly to an action.

If I could use all these buttons as unique buttons and map them to various controls within the game directly, I wouldn't have a problem with hotbars and whatever, in general.  As it is, I find myself running out of buttons in many games, because there's only so many 'free' buttons on my keyboard, and all my peripherals don't improve the situation.

You expect every MMO to code support for every keyboard's extra buttons?  :uhrr:

Honestly I have no idea how this sort of thing works on the technical side, but if somebody could work out some kind of standard that could begin to be implemented, so that these things just work right, it would be nice.  I kind of figure this would be more of an issue for the manufacturers of the keyboards rather than the game makers, but I don't know.  I mean, I have noticed that my mouse buttons are usually regarded as unique buttons in games, except some games where none but the main two buttons can be mapped to anything.  I really have no idea how it works, but whether it's in the game programmer's camp or the hardware manufacturer's, or somewhere in between, I just want more buttons to actually be more buttons.

The worst are some games that even have promotions where there are specific pieces of hardware that bear the game's name and such, and yet they have no special support for that hardware.  The least they could do when they make a branded piece of hardware is add support for each of those buttons to be an actual unique button.

There is a standard.  As outlined in this standard, keyboards with macro keys are non-standard keyboards. (http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/archive/Scancode.mspx)

That is inconvenient, yes, but if you only had 10 buttons and had to just cycle them constantly you would still be pushing the same numbers of buttons per fight.

I guess EQ1 was perfect. Attack, taunt, kick!

The one thing I miss was the little macro I set up for when my PGT would go off.

YARRRRRRRRRR BERSERKER ELF!

Exactly. The balance between that and button mashing is different for everyone.  The big improvement for EQ2 was that I wasn't spending 90% of my time watching a chat scroll box, even though a lot of that burden was removed by Ventrilo.

Planetside was great because you didn't even need chatbox to play. Once again, this was enabled by a tool not included in the game - TS or Ventrilo.

The next real step for MMOs is combat that targets a specific space, not a mob. Aim for the head or torso. Cast AE spells that have to anticipate a mob's location after casting time ends. A game with real, true collision to an extent that you could play football or basketball with the engine would be nice.

Here's the basis for my thinking: hotbars are a major element of a game's interface. What lives on a hotbar defines a portion of the user's interraction with the title. If I need to cycle through 3 (or more) hotbars in a fight to be effective, and the abilities that I'm triggering have very little situational value, the fight is going to end up feeling frantic and a little braindead. On the other hand, if I'm triggering abilities and items from a focused pool of hotkeys, and those abilities offer a wide range of situational considerations (skill chains, increased damage potential, situational status effects, positioning, resistances, ally disposition, etc.) the game is going to feel more organic and strategic.


All things being equal, I'd rather press fewer buttons if there isn't a lot of variety in the effects. And if all we're doing is standing toe to toe with an enemey (so to speak,) and pressing the same patern of buttons each fight it doesn't sound like a very good game to me.


3 abilities is obviously too few. 36 is too many. There's a sweet spot somewhere in between.

Honestly I think EQ1 was perfect - as a bard, at least.  Cleric also caught it pretty spot on, in the later ages once Complete Healing wasn't the all-purpose tool for every situation, and was merely one of the tools at a cleric's disposal.

My protection specced warrior in WOW is perfect at level 71.

Ability design needs to be about choice and tactical significance.  I didn't enjoy EQ2 because the abilities existed to be cycled mindlessly, with little individual effect.  Honestly, I would rather play EQ1...at least there I could eat a sandwich during combat.  WoW does a bit better in this regard but still has alot of spam for the sake of spam.  However, in WoW, you're often spamming 2-3 abilities instead of 10 cycled ones, which I actually find an improvement.  And your other abilities are generally the good kind:  Stuff to be used in various circumstances but not all the time.  Guild Wars was probably the best ability design I've seen so far in the MMORPG genre in this regard.

Auto attack as a baseline is ok with me, because I don't see much of a difference between auto attack and spamming skills constantly other than busy work.  There might be a better solution than 'autoattack', but it sure isn't constant ability spamming, at least not for me.

I agree with this for the most part.  If an ability consists essentially of 'cause more damage' and is not situational, has no secondary effects, etc, I feel like it should be folded into autoattacking.  I shouldn't have to press a button in order to do my normal amount of damage, in my opinion.  Button presses should be for something that has a significant effect on the tactical situation, not just to do your standard amount of damage.  An ability 'rotation' is absurd to me, because it implies that I should be constantly hitting this sequence of buttons in order to do my normal amount of damage.

A 30+ scrapper or tank in CoH was about right for the number of attacks.

If those attacks could be upgraded to do something more, or morph into chains (ala the WAR Swordmaster+mod I mentioned), it would be good for variety without overload.

For me, it's 10. If I have to hit some kind of Ctrl-Alt-Del-Funct-Ent-Spc-NumLoc-F12 combo to fire off an ability, I'm probably just going to forget about it and learn to make do without it.

Fallen Earth? And I assume the instance based shooter hybrids like crime craft (lol) and global agenda.

That said I'm still not sure how these are going to solve the FPS sensitivity to lag, or how demanding it is of server power.

You're all fucking crazy.

I'm perfectly happy with several dozen ability buttons, the more the merrier, so long as they all do something slightly different. Even if it's just 'power efficient dd' 'time efficient dd' 'really big long cast dd for alpha' and so on. I take the point about EQ2, it was a little confusing when you had six spells on the same cooldown timer that did the same thing, that doesn't really count as separate abilities and just made the UI awkward, that said, to be honest lern2hotbar noob.

If picking the right ability isn't the point of combat in these things I don't know wtf is.

Simple rule of thumb : if I don't need to use a mouse because I ran out of keys to assign shit to, then you haven't given me enough spells yet.

There is no such thing as too many abilities.

I thought the EQ2 problem being described was there were 6 different abilities that did the same thing on DIFFERENT cooldowns?

I'm like that as well. I'm currently playing Fallen Earth and even though I've used up the 1 to = and all my numpad keys, there's still abilities I'd have to alt- or crtl- for and they never get used.

Each spell has about 10 versions, each version is just a scaled up copy of the last (minor ass rodgering, lesser ass rodgering, ass rodgering, greater ass rodgering etc). They are all on the same cooldown.

When EQ2 launched, they also had arbitrary and only vaguely connected names (ass poke, bottom shock, sodomy, assageddon etc) which meant much fiddling with hotbars.

As far as I know there were no identical abilities on different cooldowns.

If that's how it works then yeah, I don't really get the complaint. (Other than the figuring-out-which-is-your-best-rank issue obviously.)

Just looked up the list of spell lines for my EQ2 class (defiler)

My hotbars would have these on different cooldowns.


Small heal (costs health)
Big Heal (costs Health)
group heal (costs health)

Single target ward
Instant single target ward (emergency big ward with long cooldown)
Group ward
Instant group ward
pbaoe Turret ward
fucked up thing that grants a bigger ward on more injured targets

Debuff + DD
WIS Debuff + Dot
Haste Debuff + Dot
aoe dot + res debuff
aoe manaleech
dot +manaleech
aoe dot that gains power vs low health

Health+power buff
group resistence buff
group health buff
group health and STR buff
HP regen selfbuff
group heal proc buff
slow debuff proc
death prevention buff
dot proc buff

haste debuff
attribiute debuff
aoe fear
dps debuff
fear
str/agi/wis debuff

rez
rez+power regen
aoe rez
battle rez

cure
group cure
group demez





The rez spells could be rationalised, but that aside, this is a sensible number of spells, obviously you need to add AAs etc on to this.

You're broken.

I'm with eldaec, I like the diversity EQ2's ability choices, rather than WoW's "less is more" approach.

Eh it isn't like WoW is Diablo. Realistically speaking most classes have around 15-20 buttons that they'll push in various situations, some much more. A lot of them are situational but it isn't like you can really sum up an arcane mage for example as a two button class, despite it having 2 main abilities it uses as primary dps abilities. It still has a whole suite of buffs, defensive spells, CC, utility spells, etc.

EQII was pretty button mashy, but I never really had a problem with that. My Dirge had/has seven hotbars of twelve abilities each, and I use pretty much all of them. (Okay, so one hotbar is half-full, but still.)

I like having options.

Don't get me wrong Ingmar, I don't find the lack of buttons a problem in WoW. Just that given the choice, I'd rather have more options. In WoW, it's largely dependant on class; some classes have far more options and abilities than others.

All these games are button mashy, it's whether you're hitting the same button or a bunch of them. I like the diversity.

20 abilities that do similar damage with different names on the buttons is not diversity.

The WoW developers have fairly consciously been trying to move towards a reactive or combination based gameplay. Things like one ability randomly building up power points that can be used for certain instant abilitiies, or short lived debuffs applied by one attack or heal that modify the next X attacks of a certain type. So a reasonably small number of abilities can have quite complex interactions (the feral druid DPS cycle is apparently almost too complex). I certainly don't think it's made the challenge of class balance any easier though.

Both systems cost you something in terms of situational awareness. Watching the cooldown on a large number of abilities is less interesting and variable than watching and reacting to the movements of the mob and my allies. So something like the wow shaman's chain heal (heal that hits one target and then chains to 1-3 more) is good because it forces you to consider the environment on every cast.

Having played a Mystic (damage shield based healer) in EQ2 and a resto shaman in WoW, there is no comparison between the complexity of my job raiding in EQ2 vs. the relative simplicity of the shaman in WoW.

WoW healing is largely staying aimed on the tank and repeatedly rotating riptide and chain heal or riptide and LHW. For sides, I refresh the earth shield and drop the odd flame shock if I have time. That's pretty much the fight. Oh and drop heroism when the raid leader says to. Consider the environment? No. Combat moves far too fast. The entire point of chain heal is that you don't have to think about it, it heals whomever is sickest. The most you do is cast it on yourself if you or other casters have damage. I don't have any debuffs. Buffs are totems before the fight. If there's going to be poison/disease, curing is done by a totem.

EQ2, otoh, involves rotating a group and single target ward on the tank, including keeping track of how much is left on each for power conservation because the spells last longer than the recast timers. Figuring if the single target ward has enough left on it to cast it on the offtank if you don't have another shaman class or whether there's a DPS who's grabbed aggro that needs it. Direct heals to spot heal non-wardable damage on the tank and MT group. Running four spell based debuffs, some of which need to be refreshed and have major effects on the fight others of which are situational. Doing melee damage with a few different attacks, each of which has it's own debuff or other effect. Curing both individual and group (each classes group cure only handles some types of damage). And while my mystic attacks don't require you to be behind or to the side of the mob, if you want to live, you usually need to watch positioning. While generally we don't rez, we all have in combat rez's, in my case I have an uber AOE group one on a long timer, and if necros and dirges get behind in rezzing or there's an entire group that needs to be brought back up, I have to balance that against the casting time which is longer usually than my wards last and can endanger the tank.

While I never raided on my dirge, their attacks require positioning, sometimes behind, sometimes to the side. Each different attack has a different debuff. You are in charge of utility rezzing. No, a million times no, these are not all buttons that do the same thing. That might be the appearance when soloing, but it most certainly is not the case when you are raiding.

Well, you still need to make sure CH is actually going into a clump at least or you get no bounces, and players who are more situationally aware can get more out of it. And I wish curing was done by a totem, but given it's group only, pulsed and non-curse there's still plenty of single target curing.

Do EQ2 raid encounters have as much movement and ground effects as the WoW raids? Having to rotate 4 debuffs and attack powers while staying out of the bad stuff sounds quite painful.

I'm amazed you have a ward that survives long enough you can monitor points remaining. There's nothing in WoW really using that mechanic which come close to that level of durability.

Let alone the idea of in-combat AoE rezzes, that blows my mind.

While everyone has their debuffs up, the wards can last quite a while, when the mob is not debuffed the ward usually gets chewed up right away and works like a pre-heal.  Debuffs used to be the key in EQ2, but I havent raided for a year, so they might have changed since then.

Having raided in both games, there is a large difference between the two.  WoW is all about the mob scripts, and each player doesnt have much to do, as long as you move when you have to, and if you try to do it outside the script, you get an Enrage.  EQ2 is all about the abilities and everyone has to do their thing when it is needed.

I don't really understand that. Enrage is almost always a "you are too slow" mechanic to limit stacking healers to win even if your DPS people are mostly AFK. Which was somewhat of the EQ mechanic.

I did find there was a big difference in player activity the smaller the raid group though. WoW 10 man is a lot more interesting than 25 man (to me) because the roles are less specialised. You have to cover more ground and there's less tolerance if you lose people or timing.

I generally pre-ward the tank, the group ward is a big pool and will go to whomever is damanged until it runs out, ie, it's 6000 points of healing for anyone who needs it, not 1000 each. That usually goes down on the first hit. But once the debuffs are in, it slows down a great deal and you have a lot of time to think about what's going on. Debuffs are huge in EQ2. Profit UI is preferred in my experience by shamans (mystics and defilers) specifically because it has a running total of how much is left on the wards and try to time it so the new one hits just as the other expires. You can also watch them and see other problems, if your single target is the primary ward and the group one is taking a lot of damage, someone has clearly grabbed aggro and it can be hard to figure how whom until the ward drops. The slower speed and additional time to think in EQ2 is which is one of the big reasons I prefer EQ2 to WoW. WoW feels to me like a choreographed dance that you learn and execute. EQ2 always felt like I was actually raiding, much more spontaneous. Much less predictable. And part of that, I think, is all the stuff that can go on because you have this great variety of things to do.

EQ2 is less don't stand in the crap stuff and a lot more jousting. Generally I was MT healer, so I didn't joust. I just ate it to keep the tank up. Fun! Also a lot more stuff with people going places and doing clickies or something.

As far as monitoring how many bounces you're getting on chain heal. I watch gridstatuschainwho and if I only see the tank is the only one getting hit by it, I might switch to LHW. But I'm spec'd for CH and I'm using the mana cost reduction totem. I think I only need one jump to come out ahead on power? Usually someone wanders into range. Also as above, it's pre-planning, the times I've raided, if we're expecting a lot of splash damage rather than picking targets to heal on the fly, instead you tell everyone ahead of time to keep their butts close together so you can AOE heal them.

I thought mages and shaman were some of the more mind numbing classes in WOW.  I raided as a Shaman in TBC and it was incredibly easy, I just kept pressing the same buttons over and over.

On the other hand, I've raided as a DK (tank and dps), Warrior Tank, Disc and Holy Priest and they're all more situational classes.  I raided as a Paladin (Tank) and it's easier since you press about 3 or 4 buttons and everything works.

Probably true.. I don't think the shaman is one of the most complex classes in WoW. Possibly one of the reasons it's the least popular. And I guess I'm a MT healer generally so my use of CH is more situational.

A lot of the EQ2 mechanics sound somewhat like EQ. Landing a slow made a monstrous difference to incoming DPS and AoE's were frequently handled by dodging the pulses, running out to heal or having a healer chain... I assume that's what you mean by jousting?

My guild used to have an EQ2 chapter but they sort of evaporated. Shame. But always nice to know there is another game supporting an active raid game.

EQ2 is very heavily oriented around raiding, but honestly I felt that when they did the bait and switch about Velius, landing all these Velius giants on the shore and leadiing up to an announcement the new expansion would be.... Odus?! Well, I felt like a lot of wind went out of the sales of the game.

38 total abilities - not counting items and AAs, but you feel that only 4 are redundant?

It takes all kinds, I guess. I like complexity as much as the next guy, but this seems like quantity more than quality.

I notice a lot of your spells have group and single target varieties - I think it would be neat if the game were smart enough to have an option to only load 1 version of a spell, and use alt or ctrl hotkeys to fire off the group version. I'm sure some people would prefer to have all their hotkeys (group and single) loaded separately on ctrl or alt hotkey banks, so maybe I'm the wierd one here, but conceptually it just seems a lot cleaner to me. And there is the issue of abilities that shouldn't have a group version.

I'm counting 50 (http://www.wowwiki.com/Shaman_abilities) not including spec or items and I don't see that any of them are redundant.

No, I only think two are redundant. Still going to need rez and group-mega-rez.

Just going off the list in this thread:

- All of those debuff-one-stat + DoT type things could be redesigned for less bloat quite easily, along with the general pile of debuffs. Functionally a haste debuff and a dps debuff are basically doing the same thing, lowering a mob's damage. Etc.
- This goes double for buffs - group health buff, and also a group health+strength buff?
- Do you really need all those slightly different types of wards? The ward with cast time/ward without cast time things seem particularly redundant to me

While the shaman does have a huge pile of abilities, any one character isn't going to use all of them, more like 1/2. Shamans are really 3 different classes due to the talent specs.

Guild Wars looks at this conversation and laughs.

Despite the fact that Numtini's character is a vile tree hugging badger bothering shower avoiding hippy, she basically has this right.

The ability design is about resource management. You absolutely need a single castable ward, and an emergency instant ward, asking why is like asking why you want both a laser *and* a smart bomb in defender.

The buffs are on a different resource model, you can only cast a limited number, the point is to force a decision about which to use depending on group structure and battle situation.

Debuff choice tests understanding of what sort of damage your group is doing, and what the mobs are likely to rely on.


All of this is how EQ2 introduces decisions into battles. And besides, it means I HAVE MOAR BUTTANS.

What I'm getting at is why does a ward, for example, necessarily have to have a cast time at all? You already have heals with cast times, presumably, let the ward have the instant niche all the time. Or whatever.

Needs a cast time because it forces you to be at least a couple of seconds ahead of events, and can therefore have the size and costs balanced accordingly. But even if they were both instants, you'd want both because the short cool down normal version is your bread and butter, wheras the big, long cool down emergency ward is your oh shit button.



Also, I have no idea what is good about fewer buttons to push.

Elemental shaman:
1) Does the target have flame shock on it? Y - go to 2, N - go to 4.
2) Is Lava Burst on cooldown? Y - go to 5, N - go to 3
3) LAVA BURST! Now go to 1.
4) FLAME SHOCK! Now go to 1.
5) LIGHTNING BOLT! Now go to 1.

Seriously, that's it.

And in TBC it was Trinket/Elemental Mastery
Lightning Bolt about 4-5 times and then Chain lightning.

That's it.  Toss in your totems and hero/lust whenever.

It really comes down to a matter of preference. In most WoW rotations you're going to be pushing 1-3 buttons a lot, and keeping 2-3 other things up, while in EQ2 you're going to be prioritizing the use of 15-20 things. This makes WoW's combat feel more like button mashing, and EQ2's slightly more tactical. Some people here would rather push 11111111 than 12314516 or whatever.

I played resto (vanilla and levelling TBC because I'm a moron) -> elemental (as it was getting good in TBC then switched to enhance late TBC -> WoTLK. In MC restos had to purge (MC I know :( ) but other than that it was CH/LHW. Earth shock became useful as an interrupt then they moved that to wind shock (I think - I hit the point of WoW-overload when it was introduced). Enhance became a lot more fun, mostly because you could hit on the move and you got wolves, had to mana-regen (cant remember the damage that led to mana-back spell), watch to see how close you were to getting to full charges for an insta-bolt/chain and fiddle with totems depending on the situation. I had more fun enhance than the other 2 specs and never trained dual-spec. you had to think on your toes a bit more.

I think that's why I enjoyed Guild Wars a lot more. The spells you put on your bar and the attributes you took required thought. Sure there are only 8 options (7 if you are carrying the mandatory res sig) but if you ballsed it up, then there was no coming back. In a way, that appealed more to me than other MMOs with 11ty different buttons to mash.

I'm seriously wondering if ANYONE posting in this thread has played EQ2.  In combat you are not pressing 15-20 buttons, in any class.

I think it varies a lot by class.  I know that the game felt a lot more active to me playing my brigand than it did on my defiler. 

Bullshit

In WOW you press 123456 in any normal fight.

In EQ2 you press 1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvxyz

Neither is tactical.

No.  You don't.

(Point noted about EQ2 not being as button intensive as people make it out to be)

This, and this, and this.  You can certainly be made to process more information, to press more buttons, to have to maintain more buffs, and to have to not stand in more fires. But as far as tactical decisions, the whole point of being a competent raider is to minimize the amount of tactical thinking you have to do and replace it with stimulus/response, and efficient largely one way communication.

Interestingly, the best gameplay is this zone where things have gone to shit, but it's not a wipe. I'm not sure how to replicate that in PvE on a reliable basis.

No, that's what WoW raiding is about. EQ2 raiding is somewhat different. It may not be quite the same as a full combat sim of some kind, but in my experience it's far less rote memorization and far more knowing and playing your class.

A roll of quarters could play a shaman in WoW.

Ok, I guess you didn't read the rest of my post. However, I'll provide an example. In WoW as a rogue, you spend most of your time spamming your primary attack, which you use to set up other attacks. Your rotation will look something like 1123114115115115115. A brigand in EQ2 on the other hand, has a LOT more attacks, which will result in your rotation looking something like 1234567, shift+1234567, ctrl+1234. There is a lot less repetitive use of a single ability in EQ2 than in WoW.

In EQ2 tanks, rogues, and priests do not simply rotate abilities at all unless you are fighting mobs well below the capabilities of the group.

Mages might be a little different, suspect they were closer to a rotation than other classes.

Every class I've played (played seriously, not just created for work) in EQ2 has some form of pattern to it. This is because EQ2 is a game and all games can be distilled down to a very simple list of interactions that advance play.

On a comparative level, the average mid to high level EQ2 player is going to have a large stack of buttons on toolbars around their screen. Some are tied to key class abilities used in every combat, some are for crafting, some are situational, and some are just for convenience and fun. Depending on how someone plays, they could get lost in the buttons and ignore the action and watch only the UI in a nasty combat. That noted, the game isn't so darn complex that you *have* to ignore the action in favor of the UI. If you are doing more than a trial and put in some time with the game, you can manage your core abilities without having to look.

eldaec has 9 heals on his ability list (counting wards as heals, natch.) With the remainder of his debuffs, damage, group buffs, utilities and as yet unmentioned AA abilities, I'm pretty sure he's cycling an additional 6 - 11 keys per combat.

This is all verbal masturbation at this point anyways - while it's been far too long since I've played to give you a similar list for my guardian, I can tell you that one of the reasons I stopped playing was that I did not appreciate the "chewing gum for the fingers" that was my hotkey rotation. And I certainly didn't feel that I had too many strategic options. I think it's safe to say that while some are o.k. with the number of button presses in EQ2, others are not. And it has nothing to do with how awesome one group is vs. the other.

Also, I think we're getting sucked into a WOW vs. EQ2 thing here. If WOW and EQ2 represent polar opposites on the question of hotkey presses / ability selection, I think they could both be a little closer to the center.

WoW is everything from the centre towards the minimalist.  Take an Arms warrior for example:

Main Attacks:

Mortal Strike
Slam
Rend
Overpower
Execute
Bladestorm

Rage Burn:

Cleave
Heroic Strike

Short Cooldowns:

Sweeping Strikes
Bloodrage
Berserker Rage
Heroic Throw
Shattering Throw

We've created a false dichotomy there, though; WoW is not actually the extreme other end of the simplicity spectrum.

EQ would be simplicity.

Except you don't cycle the heals. You use them in 9 different circumstances (arguably you cycle one of them - the ordinary ward - in the specific 'not much going on' circumstance).

No, he's using different levels of the same spell so it looks like OMG LOTS! of different abilities.  I'm guessing that this is so he can try to be a little extra efficient with his mana but I'm pretty sure you can do the same thing in WoW if you wanted to and it's not actually required to play the game.

No, we covered that on the last page, we're talking about the number of damage mitigation spell lines that a defiler has, not the dozens of individual spells you get if you count the tiers seperately.

They killed this back around the end of Burning Crusade, spells cost a straight % of mana now regardless of the rank of the spell.  They did this to purposefully destroy downranking, I can't really remember the rationale, I guess people were spamming incredibly low mana spells but their huge amounts of +spellpower were just becoming too powerful (though frankly, people were doing this as far back as Molten Core, so I dunno).

You have the right reason. But historically, they already had nerfed it a lot by the beginning of TBC by modifying the amount of +spellpower to only work 100% on the last two ranks of the spells known to you. The flat % mana cost was just the final death blow to downranking.

The basic idea behind it is downranking was killing the mana management aspect of the game for healers. Although it turns out they still have a ways to go on that front, making that change did help make it a little better.

Ah thats right, now I remember.  I recall spamming rank 4 healing touch back in vanilla because it had a shorter cast time, and you could spam it with no regard for mana, and was still hefty enough with enough +healing.  I had forgotten that they did the initial nerf, and then the later nerf.

Either way, I remember being annoyed by it at the time because I liked being able to mix up ranks depending on the situation rather than doing the chain-cast / cancel if tank is full max rank healing touch that came later. (then of course healy tree form changed everything).

This pretty much sealed the deal for me as far as raiding in EQ2. Anything this asinine makes my brain hurt.


http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/The_Djinn_Master's_Prism

I must be odd, I like raids like that.

That sounds like a fight against the interface more than a fight against the monster.

My EQ2 illusionist had a lot of different abilities that actually did a lot of different things.

I found it a lot of fun to play. On the other hand, one reason I won't go back to EQ2 is because I know I'll never remember what half the abilities actually do (could just make a new character I guess).

That fight sounds really really annoying. It's the sort of thing that'd work out ok in a P&P game but not in an MMO.

It's Tomb of Horrors level of annoying.  I don't think an encounter like that ever works unless it's so Monty Haul that players are willing to endure it.

There you go... two nerdy P&P references as a bonus. 

I have tried going back to EQ2 twice and the above is the exact reason why I have never lasted long. It's a pain to relearn to play my brigand and warlock since there are so many options and I can't bring myself to start all over.  

Ahhahahahaa!

I could see me doing that once in a single-player game, then using cheat codes thereafter.

Of Eldaec's listed spells these are actually spells that would be in a rotation in group combat against a single target:
These would be cast once per target situational use buttons:
These would be O-SHIT! single use, very situational buttons:
Next you have the occasional, once per group/very long (multi hour) timer buttons:
And then finally the probably don't ever get used in a good group buttons:

The stuff about EQ2 being a festival of panicked button mashing is really just pure invention.  A damage skill based class like a monk or a wizard will have a higher number of spells in 'rotation' but that's still only 5 or 6ish.

It's not panicked button mashing, there are just too many.  Both my Bruiser and Shadowknight had about 20 buttons I used in every combat.  That is not an exaggeration.  It is quite literal and were I subscribed I would be happy to show a screenshot.

I never panicked since combat there is slow enough.  I did, however, only stare at my bar clicking buttons instead of actually watching what was going on.  The only 'problem' is that I tended to not notice things I could interrupt since I was so focused on the bar.  Surviving wasn't an issue, only my enjoyment of combat.

I played 3 classes to level 30.  By that time, all of them had 7-14 abilities that I used mindlessly and without variation in every combat on a predetermined, maximal efficiency rotation that are obtainable using basic math (based on effect and cooldown cycling).  These classes were defiler, bruiser, and paladin.  Defiler was the least mindless of these, as you have to more tactifully apply wards and such, but yet just as boring as their abilities were so damn underwhelming and combat lasted forever.  Note that this applies to soloing...in groups with my defiler things were different as I would just basically cast wards only.  Although things were not really different for the other two classes.

I'm sure that end game is much different, but I can only account for my experiences, which were lower level and almost exclusively solo.

I think this more related to positioning (the only meaningful thing you can see in the main view) being irrelevant to combat in all these games.

The only reason to watch what is going on in simpler games like wow is that you don't have anything else to do.

Some people equate "watching what's going on" with fun.

CoH proved why most people play MMO's.  It's for the phat lewtz.   Ultimately it doesn't matter how fun your combat is (see also AoC), if you don't have an elaborate loot treadmill your title will suffer.  

Raiders like watching bars.  I like watching the action.  Seeing characters hit things or spells being flung about.  That's what I mean by "what's going on".  I don't want to see the mechanics of the battle.

  :uhrr: I'm a pretty serious WoW raider and I spend more time watching action bars, Omen, and DBM than cool spell effects. The only thing I really "watch" is fire, to prevent standing in it (although lately DBM has a warning for that too).

I misstated myself with the "raders" comment.  

I too wish for games where I could watch the action rather than watching action bars, particularly if I'm forced to play the healer in the holy triad.  

I apologize.    

I don't think it was just the lack of loot, CoH was truly awful at disguising the grind and could really have benefited from more higher complexity PVE encounters that didn't take all day - task forces were cool but they took much too long. It was the lack of variety in combat that eventually killed it for me, since most of the time in game was spent fighting what essentially felt like reskinned copies of the same guys - for whatever reason, WoW mobs don't give me that feeling, maybe because they're just more polished. CoH could really have used some voice acting.

Even with those problems, it is probably my 2nd or 3rd most-played MMO behind WoW and maybe DAOC. Well, GW is up there too. But I really did like CoH for quite a while.

It did have them at lvl 45-50, and in some of the newer zones (striga espeicially) problem was 30-40 being pretty barren.

I did get sidekicked through some of the archvillain fights at the higher levels, but it was kind of a too little too late sort of scenario. And yeah Striga was pretty cool. They needed some more stuff like that eariler in the game's life, awesome and accessible right out of the gates, kind of ilke Deadmines. I really think to this day it was my first trip to Deadmines that really hooked me on WoW. (You landlubbers are tougher than I thought!)

We seem to have similar tastes in games.  

I just find myself wondering what the hook is with WoW.  DAoC kept me coming back because of the social aspects.  CoH hooked me with the character creator, travel powers, and the fast-paced combat.  I find myself returning to WoW often but a) I don't care for the art direction, b) I'm not enamored with any of the classes, and c) I don't have any friends playing the game at a high level.  Perhaps it's just the fact that I can log on for as little as 10 minutes and still get something somewhat meaningful accomplished.  That and it's always active with people...  

Well, it's finally officially announced (http://www.massively.com/tag/everquest-next/). Looks very early and pretty WoW-Like in graphics. Not a lot of details other than PVP at launch and fewer classes.

Videos at work wont play for me so not sure they cover this but how does this game fit into the EQ genre?  Before EQ1?  After EQ2?  Something completely new?

According to what I've read, it's a reboot of the franchise.

God, I hope they don't Wow it up artistically. That would not be a reboot, that would be the final coffin nail.

Is there any doubt about what is going to happen?

Please note that I specifically said 'art', not gameplay. Clearly, Wow's gameplay is a success story that I can't blame any MMO company from trying to approximate.

The art direction on EQ1 and EQ2 managed to not go into cartoonsville. There were elements of the 'cute', be it the froglocks or the gnomes, but you didn't get 'groovy' zombies, kewpie doll gnomes or disney paladins.

Don't get me wrong, its probably a 'winning' formula, due to the infantilization of the populace at large when it comes to artwork. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

edit:spelling iz hoard.

I agree, on more than just the art level, since I didn't care much for WoW but liked EQ2. But whatchagonnado? If you don't like WoW, forget playing mmo for the next ten+ years, pretty much. Unless someone embraces the niche, understands you won't get million+ subs and makes an mmo like they used to (which were profitable enough to kickstart the whole thing anyway). Not "like they used to" meaning draconian rulesets, but financially responsible. If someone likes WoW, they'll play WoW, if you can't win them over with a LotR license, pretty much nothing else has a chance.

Also, and more importantly from my viewpoint, Scott Hartsman is no longer with SOE. A new phoenix might arise from the ashes, but EQ2 without Scott isn't something I've played in over a year. The direction has gone in a very non-Sky way. I have more interest in that game I just heard about from his new studio, how the hell did I miss that thread? Blah, stupid mmo forum.

They seem to have all the pre-requisites- 

1.  Darkshire
2.  Goldshire
3.  Worgen


Should be awesome.

not a lot from those videos - I couldn't listen to it all.  Just saw the stills.  Was there any gameplay info?

It doesn't look too cartoony to me, albeit based on just two screenshots, and one of them blurry. But it's an arty look, like the type of illustration you might find in a D&D manual, rather than the realistic look they went for with EQ2.

Personally I liked EQ2 as a game a lot more than WoW but I thought the graphics were horrible even at maximum settings. The characters looked like plastic. The new style appeals more.

DAOC for the social aspects?  Not the RvR?  I agree about CoH and WoW.  Those are my three favorites.

EQ seemed far too punishing for fun for me - at that time (pre-DAOC) I was playing text muds anyway.

I wish someone would make a DAOC (preToA) Next.

I don't think any of that was anything other than concept art, I would not base to much off that at this point.

Both really.  All of my gaming friends were the people I'd log on and RvR with.  When they all left DAoC, I realized that I had been playing for 5+ years just to chat with a group of people. 

I'd love for a new DAoC server/game to come out, but it just wouldn't be the same without the group of people I RvR'ed with for 5 years. 

At least one of them is a screenshot . . . actually it's "in game art" whatever that is. Either way you're probably right.

Massively's intro to the videos mentioned "There's also some information on what players can expect with regard to support for subscribers of EverQuest and EverQuest II once EverQuest Next comes out."  Did anybody catch what info that might be? 

Also, I sure wish someone would find the sweet spot between cartoony and realistic brown.  EQ had fantastic textures for the day, but they were limited by low poly counts.  EQ2 upped the poly count dramatically, but botched something with the textures or reflectivity such that everything looks like plastic.  You'd think raising the graphics settings would make it better, but no, the higher the setting the more like plastic shiny plastic everything gets!  Oh well, maybe EQ3 will be high-def cartoony, that sounds like something Smedley would go for.

The EQ franchise is a marginal quality. Only a bunch of old veterans really remember EQ1 positively and EQ2 has actually poisoned the well for more than it added to the pool. They should just come up with a new fresh IP showing off the lessons they have learnt. But I guess only Blizzard has that sort of arrogance / confidence.

Then again SoE games seem to be designed primarily by marketing committees rather than game designers so I expect the result to be mediocre. That's if it ever comes out of course given how long they've been sitting on "The agency".

EQ3 has to be designed from scratch -- none of this 3 debuffs per level bullshit where you literally end up with dozens of skills on multiple hotbars.  I love lots of races and lots of classes, but the core gameplay (combat, travel, crafting) was really poor. 

I'm sorry, but what? What?
Did you play the same EQ as me, with the lumbering fatty ogres and trolls, the vaguely creepy male/cute female gnomes, the in-jokes and shout-outs (http://www.bardsguild.com/everquest/easterquest.htm) around every corner, and so on? EQ wasn't some 'pure' fantasy MMO and WoW lowered the tone - WoW was just EQ Done Right. Including the gnomes.

Wait, I bet you used the terrible, soulless "Stop having fun guys!" Luclin models.

Worst idea ever.

From what I understand from a friend, this is pretty much exactly the way it works. The dudes in the trenches are then tasked with making it come together as a functional game, and it can be a nightmare. I would guess though that a lot of games are made like this.

We all have different feelings, but to me this was the best part of EQ2, lots of things to do. I'm in favor of anything that gets away from WoW style "press these three buttons in exactly this order repeat as necessary. I loved the fact that I actually needed to think about what I was casting and prioritize things.

Also I liked the fast easy travel in EQ2. To me WoW felt like a huge chore with travel used to slow down levelling--world of travelcraft. And for whatever reason, despite being the fastest travel I can think of, it never lost the feeling of a world with different places like the insta-teleport dungeons in current WoW.

EQ's in-jokes were much, much more subtle than the ones in WoW.  Many of them are simply playing with words, not direct references to out-of-game things.  (Merchant Tekrama, for instance).  Others are references to things specifically related to EQ, such as the names of GM's, famous players, programmers, or forum moderators for major game-related forums.  There are still a decent number of amusing references to out of game things, but the vast majority of those don't immediately jump out and make themselves blatantly obvious.  A few of them do, but it's entirely possible to walk around any given city in Norrath without instantly recognizing blatantly obvious references, unlike most cities in WoW.

And man, I hated the Luclin models cause they never got around to bothering with the Velious textures on them.  The velious textures were so awesome, and then they got rid of them and as far as I know, have never brought them back.

Oh fuck you. You're the first person I've ever encountered who preferred EQ2's soulless dead-eyed mannequins to WoW's cartoon graphics.

Are you ok with someone not liking either?  I'm sick of EQ2's plastic models and even more sick of the cartoony WoW look.  Of the two I also prefer EQ2, but not by much. 

I'll take the functional cartoony graphics over creepy plastic love-doll, system killing graphics any day of the week.  EQ2 really failed graphically for folks with not stellar machines.  People shouldn't underestimate how accessible WoW's graphics are and how much it contributes to its success. 

WoW's graphics are much more vibrant compared to EQ2's.  While they've gotten better, the colors in early EQ2 were very muddled, and bland.  Particularly the armors.

While I don't care for the totally over the top look to a lot of WoW gear, especially the shoulders, I much prefer their look to EQ2's.  Also, hair styles.  I don't know what drugs were being taken by whoever did the hair in EQ2, but they should probably face criminal prosecution.

WoW's graphics are, quite frankly, fun.  That is a great thing about WoW-  it doesn't take itself too seriously.  Are the graphics dated now?  Sure, but I'm sure they'll get a little spruce up with Cataclysm. 

The only saving grace were races that didnt have hair.  Nothing like choosing to play a rat cause the hairstyles on the human type races looks like something out of 2 girls 1 cup

Every time I want to go "The EQ2 models aren't that bad" I subsequently remember that I'm using the post-release Animu~ ^_^ models for most races. :-)
And yeah, the art direction for the core (original release) EQ2 game was outright fucking terrible. For example, WoW's newbie gear looked like worn and tatty hand-me-downs. EQ2's looked like crap 'rescued' from the bottom of a mouldy junk pile and then left to rust for a year. And then painted brown.

Not only do WoW's graphics not bother me, I love them.  I think Nagrand is beautiful, in an old Disney way (Sleeping Beauty, not Lion King).

Cartoony doesn't bother me, as long as the environment feels rich.

I'm not crazy about how big my characters' feet are or ridiculous shoulder pads.  Ridiculous weapons, on the other hand, are fun.

EQ2's graphics remind me a little of Lord of the Ring Online.  They're both pretty but they look like paintings.  Flat.  WoW seems to have more depth somehow, which is weird because they are more cartoony.  Aion,  I thought, avoided this somehow.

I'm a fan of both WoW and LotRO's graphics - LotRO's character models and animations are not really great but the environments are fantastic. WoW's fit the game perfectly and don't get into the uncanny valley horrible zone which I appreciate a lot.

EQ2 not so much, I always felt like it looked really plastic, especially the character models. WoW was more cartoony but EQ2 was still somehow more 'fake'.

wasn't part of the problem with EQ2 also the fact they paired up photorealistic animals with poorly rendered fantasy mobs that just ended up looking odd?   True about all the texture and shader issues, but I thought it was also this giant lack of design guidance that also killed the experience.  And yes about LotRO -- beautiful landscapes but dull character details.  Same issue.  WoW if anything is at least 100% consistent.

Aion bugs me because there is too much goddamn teal for my tastes.  It looks great, but it's also pretty monotone, meaning it all looks similar. 

WoW has it down because of the variety in the look of the different locations and the great variety of the different character choices, e.g you can be a Tauren or an elf or whatever suits your fancy.

I played a little EQ2, but I really tried it after it was in its prime, graphically.  The character creation variability is putrid and the overall feel is that they just pulled out some stock graphics for their races and went with it.  Froglocks?  Really? 

EQ2's particle system is amazing. Per vertex attachments!

EDIT: Well it was, looks like they changed the system recently :/ (http://eq2wire.com/2010/07/29/gu57-new-spell-effects-elicit-mixed-responses/)

"Animated roots and chains coming out of the ground have been replaced with a glowing yellow effect on the target’s feet. Ice comet has been replaced by a few wisps of blue light."

Damn that sounds awesome. 

I really don't like the over the top "warcrafty" looks of WoW. But hey, it's a warcraft game! Be kind of stupid if it didn't have those graphics. It's the particular look though, not that it's cartoony. I like Free Realms looks just find and they're cartoony.

In general, I found early EQ2's graphics dull. And then there were the huge issues with their miscalculation about the future of technology--gambling on 10ghz CPUs and little to no advancement in GPUs. Later expansions the graphics in EQ2 really came together for me, but I also custom built a machine around the oddities of their CPU demands so I could see them.

LOTRO's graphics are beautiful, but the avatars are, to me, very lifeless. Also rather flat, in a literal sense, it just doesn't feel three dimensional.

In terms of WoW's lightneartedness, I could use fewer pop culture jokes. A lot fewer. Fewer poop jokes as well.

Well, you know, this is their first time changing something the people they have left like too late to make an overall difference for the game. I'm sure they've learned their lesson now.

There were things I loved and hated about both WoW's and EQ2's graphics, at least the Asian revamp characters.  My Arasai is still one of my favorite looking characters across games.

 :facepalm:

It's got to be Smedley.  Surely nobody else on God's green earth is THAT stupid? 

Well, if they are going to open up a free to play EQ2 server, it makes sense to simplify the graphics and try to make the game run better for more people... it may not amaze people with the pure awesome of the effects... but when I was there most people turned off the effects for performance anyway...

Wouldn't it make more sense to just set the defaults to be super low instead of taking them away from everyone? Or do players react better to being given no options than more.

Right. Just "Sorry, turning off the spells" is dumb. ESPECIALLY if you're a hardcore EQ2 player who might have dropped big bucks on a machine just for this game.

You assume they care. It's pretty obvious they consider EQ2 to be at best moribund and at worst in an irreversible decline. They'll focus their efforts on EQ_sort_of_free and see if that grows the population to something they consider interesting and then make a decision on whether or not to continue investing effort into it. After all, both are probably just stop-gaps while they focus future development on EQ3.

Oh, I don't assume that at all. I'm just saying it's stupid.

The horrible payment model and sequestering the free from pay servers was nonsensical until the announcement. It's pretty clear post-EQ3 news drop that they see EQ2's only future on the free servers with a residual rump on the pay. It's cold as ice but given the EQ-EQ2 cannibalization it makes a certain crude sense.

Fixed

Quite sure a good chunk of it had to do with the particle system being on the CPU instead of GPU as well. However some of the old particle FX and system abilities were amazing, still would be.

The people who learned anything are gone.  The remainder got promoted to positions where they can make the same kinds of stupid decisions and dictate them down to multiple dev teams instead of just one.

I'm obviously a fan of EQ2, but I agree with the Count on that one. I'm sure there are still some talented people around, but they're not the people that made it the game I enjoyed. For every cool thing I hear about, I hear a dozen head-scratchers. Haven't played in well over a year and no urge to go back.

As far as graphics, obviously WoW wins in style, but EQ2's tech was pretty awesome. I really liked the amount of detail in the models, there just wasn't anything in that league for years. Once you're used to playing with those kind of facial details and stuff like finger articulation, it's shocking to see something like WoW, such a big step backwards, tech-wise. Obviously the LCD is going to like the low-poly, low texture stuff, it runs on cheap computers very well. I'm just not interested in playing what the LCD is playing. You don't need an authenticator for EQ2.

Anyway, anyone with half a neuron just made a profile for raiding, grouping, soloing. I raided maybe a dozen times but had a raid profile, ffs. Who cares about performance when you can click a button to adjust it on the fly? I'm on the side of putting in more graphical options than anyone can ever run, so everyone can tailor their experience to their own machine. GTA4 was pretty good for this, ignoring people who think they can always crank graphics to max for every game.

I subbed to EQ2 for a month. It runs better. It looks so fucking awful. It just looks like the art team didn't give a shit. Somehow, being able to turn things more or less all the way up has made it look WORSE than before to me.

I had a computer that could run EQ2 just fine when I played it and having a better pc doesn't help because shit Art just looks worse with all the effects turned on.

Fuck yeah, EQ2 sucked so bad let's go post in the EQ3 thread about how it sucks.

I love f13.

It's going to be like the SWTOR thread. Since all they've really announced is some concept art and a bunch of good intentions what else are we going to talk about?

That said I remember thinking EQ2 was a graphical downgrade from EQ1 (after the character model update). It had a lot more polygons but just looked so muddy for armor textures and so plastic for skin.

You're misreading me here, guy. I actually like EQ2. It's just ugly. And we were talking art styles in MMOs, generally, and EQ2 v WoW v EQ3 specifically.

Dave Georgeson, SOE's director of development for the EverQuest franchise, on how EQ Next is going to be something completely new.

"When we started working on Everquest Next, before I was involved in it, they were essentially honing the MMO model, the MMO model that we all know and love ... and we realised after a year or so of development that that really wasn't going to hit it  out of the park

"... so we threw it all away. That was about a year and a half ago . . .

"... we kind of tore down everything about the MMOs, and we picked and picked and picked at it until we found pillars that we thought were something that people would kind of lose their mind about. That they would look at and go, 'they're doing what?'"

See the whole thing in this YouTube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dt-MEgLXKXs (it seems to make a lot more sense when you hear him say it too)

The game will be revealed at EQ Live - their fan fair event - on August 1.

I hope they make a good game, because I like playing good games, but when they got to the part where he said, "we share all our knowledge across all our MMOs" I just closed out the video.

Pillars man.... it's all about Pillars.

I need that meme with the guy from the History Channel's ancient aliens.

I laughed when he said everyone comes back to EQ2 when they try other things.

This game will likely be a pay to win grindy cock puncher.

That's 3 pillars right there.

Now, if only they had a fourth pillar...

As jaded as I am, I'm going to let myself get a little bit excited for this.  Cautiously optimistic.

I have my doubts as to how exactly they're going to innovate more than what's already at the table for MMOs these days.  I mean, we 'are' talking about EQ/SoE here...any 'innovation' would simply be taking features and stuffs that are already in or are being planned to be rolled out in other MMOs and applying them to Norrath.  I'm sure after nearly 10 years of live-time, there's enough of those that they could bundle together into a new product and slap the EQ logo on the box.

But maybe I'm just jaded  :why_so_serious:

Last I heard it was a sandbox, which in SOE terms I assumed was going to mean it was a world with no game whatsoever.

AFAIK, this will be based on the same engine as Planetside2, just with out the 500+ people in your view stuff.

So any manner of combat is possible.

I want to get excited by this, just a little bit, and then I remember the years I spent in Norrath and still, to this day, throw up a bit in my mouth.

If it doesn't have tab-targetting, I will play it. I want to encourage every developer possible to move away from that model.

Yes please. More soft-targeting combat systems please. I'm happy to hear that Wildstar has something similar to this.

Did somebody imply twitch? :awesome_for_real:

I better be able to train people at zone lines...just sayin

It's posts like this that make me wish there was a way to indicate that it made me giggle (actually giggle!) for an inordinate amount of time (without actually posting a useless message about how I'm a giggling child)

I honestly miss trains. That was some hilarious shit.

A sooper sekrit preview screenshot!

(http://www.graffe.com/graffe1.0/screenpics/PawTrain.jpg)

I miss them only for the ability to powerlevel the fuck out of noobs with a few druid damage shields.

Trains were great practice for the CC classes.

As a monk, they were great opportunities to go get something to eat or use the bathroom.  Then you get back to a screen full of "can u drag my corpse to zone line plz?"

How can you not miss everything from this? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDkvy9sKuY) Are you heartless or what?

I still remember back in beta when me and 2 other bards had ppl train every gnoll in blackburrow to the courtyard and we had them all mezzed with the bards aoe mez song. Man it took SOE less than a day to nerf the fuck out of that song. It went from one of the most powerful to the most useless song ever. (the reason you needed 3 bards was interupts, if a couple of gnolls resisted the song they'd hit you and sure as shit stun you for enough time that you'd miss a pulse. A bard who missed a pulse of the mez song was a dead bard)

I LOVED playing my enchanter. Ah, the days when there was a bit of skill to playing these games instead of just facerolling the keyboard.

I want a collector's edition with a wizard hat and rose colored spectacles.

EQ really wasn't mechanically or conceptually more difficult to play than WoW or similar titles.  It just took a longer time investment and the whole thing was new.  We all sucked at MMO and there were less spoilers on the internet.

Playing a Bard was. Enchanter could be tricky too if you were getting beat on and having your spells interrupted.

Bard I'll give you.  That shit didn't look fun.  

Most enchanters I played with were barely literate and still managed to get along.  Weren't their roles in a lot of encounters pretty simplified?  If you can't charm something, what are you going to do the entire time?

edit:  
I'll add, my knowledge of EQ doesn't go too far past Velious, but at the time I was playing, many classes just weren't that difficult to play at all.  I mainly just pulled/dps'd/dragged corpses for a shitty 2nd tier raid guild.

Mezzing crowds wasn't skill so much as knowing "don't cast if shit's hitting you"

Kiting and song twisting was about the extent of "skill" in EQ.  The rest was just time investment.

The better the group the less for an Enchanter to do unless the group was pulling multiple mobs at once (more efficient than single pulling). Most groups (or the groups near yours) weren't that competent, though, which gave a CC class plenty of things to do (in EQ-relative terms), and why CC was usually considered part of the EQ "Holy Trinity".

What I liked about EQ was the feeling of risk in the dungeons.  If you screwed up on spawn timers there was a very real possibility that you had a long corpse recovery (aka time sink) ahead.  The tension that this created early on really added to the atmosphere, particularly when you were one of the first groups in a new area.  Take the risk deep in a dungeon, get rewarded with good loot. 

Maybe if you sat around farming for hours on end you'd eventually get something decent.  Or, as was often the case, sit around farming for hours, only to have some bastard(s) steal the spawn when it finally popped.

Agree so wholeheartedly. And laugh all you want, folks (not necessarily you Nebu), but that's exactly why I am loving Wizardry Online.

Playing an enchanter was pretty hard. If you were camping a room in a dungeon it was usual to have multiple mobs aggrod at once and your role was to make sure the group only had to fight one at a time. Charm was rarely used tbh as it was too unpredictable, except as an emergency CC spell when the real ones were on timers. You had a limited number of CC spells so you had to remember which ones you'd cast on which mobs and actually keep a timer going for each spell in your head so you knew which one needed refreshing next. You needed really good reflexes to catch a new mob when it spawned or came round on patrol. It wasn't the warrior's job to stop the pops killing the cleric, it was yours. I actually don't think I could do it now I am older and slower.

That's how it was in vanilla EQ anyway - I played to max level in the basic game and didn't really play any of the expansions.

Hey who left these pink glasses just lying here. Don't you know those things are dangerous?

Edit: Never mind that

I present this short film as evidence that SOE has finally worked out how to make the EQ2 engine create beautiful graphics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zas9mzFaHxQ

Looks like they upgraded from plastic to 2006.

I think that's a little much to assume.  The engine produced nice environments, even at launch.  We didn't see skin textures and NPCs beyond the mount, though.

What parts of EQ2 was that? And was the mount a rideable mount like a horse only flying? When did they add those?

The mount is controlled manually. They added flying mounts with Destiny of Velious, the 2011 expansion.

The zones you saw there were mainly from the most recent expansions, the newest being Chains of Eternity (the first zones with lots of blue and orange - it's meant to be a alternate plane of reality or the afterlife), then Destiny of Velious (area with spiky trees, area with big dwarf statues, the tower), then Sentinel's Fate, which came out in 2010 (floaty islands). Then a couple of shots of older zones, and back to Sentinel's Fate to land by the waterfall. The first couple of seconds are me flying around our guild hall.

Its a matter of opinion obviously, but I thought the environments were awful any time I played the game.

Well now you're talking texture design/ modeler skill vs. engine capabilities. They were terrible on both fronts but the engine was doing great things with specularity and material rendering for non-player objects.  Forests were convincing and wood looked like wood, cloth moved in a convincing manner (for '04).  Pity it was a waste on what it was given to render.

Also: Recent screenshots I found on Google Image seem to indicate that PCs are still as sallow and plastic-looking as ever.

The normal mapping (or whatever shader magic), the lighting, the shadows, all phenomenal in EQ2 right from the start. I still think it's the best in that department.

Same here.  I thought it all looked like shit, even with the modern PC I had in 2009.  I had all the graphic options turned on and up and I still thought WoW looked better.  In fact, from my vague recollections, it didn't look much better than Vanguard.

The early zones looked horrible, and still do. They may have had an amazing game engine but it took them years to work out how to make good use of it.

I disagree. Never liked the characters, but Freeport and Qeynos were beautiful since day 1 (November 2004) and so were the dungeons.

It's the MMO I've played longest and deepest, but though I've never been bothered by it, it was definitely not the art that drew me in. I think they went for a "realistic" look at launch that nobody really liked. It looked mostly drab and even a bit Stalinesque and went off the cliff into the uncanny valley at other times. It was when they started to get more vibrant colors and fantastic locations that everything really came alive.

There's also the stuff about the engine and CPU/GPU that we'll never know the real story of. Supposedly the engine was capable of more than we ever saw because it was designed for 5-10ghz single core CPUs that never arrived, but there's no way to really test the truth of that.

That was the most annoying thing to me: I kept updating my computer and years after launch it still ran like shit.

Then along came Planes of Power and charm was probably the most overpowered spell in the game for awhile.  I had a long grindy relationship with EQ that was mostly a downward spiral but at least before I finally kicked the habit SOE let me charm big ass giants that hit really really hard.  Also this is the only MMO that I ever 2 or 3 boxed with and that certainly made combat a little more interesting.

Qeynos did look nice.

Here's some footage of the original outdoor zones, as a comparison to the newer ones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxqEvWtlEQs

MMORPG.com has awarded this "best of show" among MMOs at E3, beating Wildstar, Archeage, Elder Scrolls Online, that Warhammer thing and whatever else was on show that looked like an MMO.

They claim they can't say why it was the best MMO at the show but just take their word for it:


http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm?loadFeature=7501&val=1&uh=BB8C9DF97F4F2911C53C8E016B0D7BA7

I know nobody here is going to jump on the hype train but I have to admit I'm becoming intrigued to learn just what SOE have come up with.

It wouldn't take much for it to be more interesting than a cute remake of vanilla WoW, an oddly feature packed yet at the same time generic Asian thing, a horrifically bad game that is hoping its IP is enough to get it by and something so bad that I didn't even know there was such a thing (another warhammer mmo? I thought they canned the 40k thing).

The worlds largest sandbox? well, color me intrigued.

Making a public announcement about a game for which you can give no details is superbly pointless journalism.

"Early look... Grand plans... debut in August".

Until the NDA drops I'm going to assume it's the standard SOE of big ambitions and flawed implementation.

So it begins.

Announcement of the announcement?

Even better - award won for the announcement of the announcement.

A "journalist" shouldn't give an award for something you can't talk about. This isn't the CIA and little stars on a wall.

Die in a secret fire William Murray and the assholes at that rag.

This is beyond ridiculous and says even more than we already knew about these awards. I am all ears for EQ Next, want to love it, but this is bullshit. I would be really surprised if whoever awarded that crap weren't getting paid for it.

When you look at the rest of what was on show, declaring best mmorpg to be some random vapourware that we don't technically know is terrible, seems fair enough.

Saying 'sandbox MMO' makes me perk up like a meerkat, but SOE...yeah...

If they're already shoveling money out to the PR hype machine to get fictional awards? You know it's shit.

EQ:Next apparently has gone through 2(?) revamps already. So that might be... bad.
However they are using an existing engine that PS2 uses, so at least they have some proven technology to work on. That helps. So that might be... good.

I hope the game is good, the genre needs something different. I'm not holding my breath though.

Also MMORPG article is douchey. Hey guys this game is best in show? Did they actually show it? No. Dumbshit.

A fantasy type fps mmo, that has the landmass of each ps2 continent combined could be quite large.

If you take PS2 and make it archers and swordsman and forts and castles, it could be fun.

I wonder how much I'd have to pay for them to revoke the award for Sony and re-award it to my nuts.

Two cheeseburgers, a bag of Doritos and a Coors Light.

Oh come on, they're not SAVAGES. At least throw them some Fat Tires.

I'll add a Mt. Dew cause Doritos will feel lonely.

Coming 2013!  DESE NUTZ
11.3 / 10.0 MMORPG.COM
"Best ride of my life!"-Suzie Ford
"Why does it burn now when I pee?"-Ben Kreuger

The first expansion had those dragon/giant/dwarf cities that doubled as raid zones, one of the ice giant NPCs was dubbed "the frozen jesus" because you could charm him and he would destroy everything in his path and tank the uber raid bosses for you.

So that's how these things actually sell

Heh, up against Eve for that title, I very much doubt it. Maybe the SOE of 2003, but certainly not the 2013 one.

But also: this is a non-story about a non-thing until the potential announcement sometime in August. Maybe.

If they f*ck this up I am going to...write a letter

I'm interested until I see a reason not to be.

Ya'll are some bitter jaded twats.

Jsmedly - 2012 (http://massively.joystiq.com/2012/10/20/soe-live-2012-john-smedley-on-eq-next-and-soes-future/)

Where's the fine line between bitter jaded twat and Charlie Brown going to kick the football?

It's "y'all".  Also we are, but with reason.

Sounds nice in theory.  Whether it is fun to play in an MMO setting is another story.

I'm going out of a limb here but I'm going to guess that this will be really bad but half the forum will buy the box anyway.

It's going to be free to play.

Yep, F2P is guaranteed at this point.

We're interested but giving a game a "best in show award" without actually telling anyone why is fucking retarded.  Also, soe isn't exactly the most trustworthy or competent dev studio so anything they say, esp. if it comes from the mouth of John Smedley, has to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

If any of SOE's other games are an indication, its going to be 7 dollar swords, and 15 dollar dress up kits.

For fairness, Planetside 2 stuff can be expensive but you can't really complain about the business model considering it's perfectly, totally, absolutely enjoyable without spending a dime. My son has been putting hours in it for a month and he didn't even think for a second about paying or ever complained about it. He plays to play, not to unlock stuff, and he gets what he downloaded the free game for.

PS2 is PvP, though. If it was "pay to win" there would only be a small number of people playing.

PS2 works really well because it is hard to say that any one gun is better than another universally.  That kind of balance is going to be really hard in a fantasy MMO where we all know that progression will be a significant part of the system.  Still, I am confident (for no concrete reason) that this will not be the mess that EQ2 F2P system is.  Races and classes should not be paywalled.  Mounts, housing, and clothing will certainly be.

We will see.  Even if they do this well, the time sink of any MMORPG means I am unlikely to participate even though I was a big fan of EQ and EQ2 (pre-F2P).

I would be surprised if the raid/loot progression system is the main focus of this game. Just a sense I get from reading all the cryptic tweets from SOE. The game will be closer to UO/EVE than it will be EQ1.

If it turns out anything like that, it's going to be vastly amusing to watch. From a safe distance.
"What, Goon Squad helped the marauding dragon torch Qeynos?"

So would I.  Fuck Qeynos.

MMO designers were saying that shit since before the acronym was invented.  It never came out as described, and it was never fun.  How about adding a line:
Dev: "Imagine if you're a soldier in Bree and you need to get a pie recipe somewhere off in the Shire, but you don't know where."
Player: "OH FUCK TRAVEL TIMES" , "WHY DO HOERSE TICKETS COST SO MUHC" , "WHY U NO FAST TRAVL" , "THIS IS 2015 WHER MY QUEST TRAKCER?"

FURTHERMORE this is John Fucking Smedley.

Sandbox MMO my ass.  Someone get Raph on the phone.

I remember Horizons promising just this idea before it completely crashed and burned, and they had to scale back to BS like World Events.

If one of these games could deliver real time, permanent landscape changes as part of World Events, that would be a step in the right direction.

Crashed and burned? Horizons is still alive (http://www.istaria.com/), and it's such a good deal if you are in the miliatary (http://community.istaria.com/pg.php/military).

Actually that reminds me that before quest trackers we had big signs telling us where to find resources.

I looked for a picture but gave up.

Man that game has not aged well, I remember thinking it looked pretty cool when it first came out.

A smouldering wasteland is not usually considered "the right direction".

Proof that even shitty MMOs never really die. Unless you are APB.

Who is also not dead, and also in the top 20 on steam.

Phallus-shaped crater in 3...2...

 :ye_gods:

Everyone looks at world modification by players like it will be one smoldering cesspit with penis statues.  But I like to think about it in a wikipedia mindset.  If people can alter the worlds, people can also fix and police the world.  Given the proper tools, nothing is really impossible.  But then you realize companies are making these things, and they only care about money now.  They have no long term vision.  If they can make a piece of shit that you'll buy and spend money on, hoping they'll deliver on their promises, a piece of shit you get.

You could have guilds of anti-penis statue police. We shall call them, The Cockburners.

Not Cockblockers?

But really, people are really protective of the shit they made or they like.  If given the ability it will be pretty hard for people to do permanent damage to the game world.

Cockblockers would imply they could stop it from happening. A Fool's Dream, that.

I do think that unleashing people on the world would be more interesting than creating a static theme park for the 100th time.

It's actually still kinda fun in well-spaced half-hour increments from time to time.

It did get a ton more fun when they increased team sizes.

No no, it should be "The Burning Sensation."

Shit, this was promised for EQ2. Remember how if you were going to relocate your shop from Qeynos to Freeport you'd load up a caravan and hire some guards and walk across and have events and it would be like SWG POI system with natural resource spawns as if it was all part of a whole ecosystem?

And that was back in the days when you could guarantee an income from a AAA priced box sale AND post launch subs for 4-6 months by relying on a good percentage of earlier adopters forgetting they were still paying a monthly fee.

Nowadays with the dicey predictability of games you need to give away just to get people to show up, and then maybe MAYBE get 5-10% to pay anything at all, while being up against the race to the bottom pricing on other platforms for all genres except FPS and that only because the big publishers can still keep hundreds employed in a crazy huge pipeline?

I think not.

It's a fun idea and maybe it's even true. I'll happily be surprised. But this isn't 2002 anymore.

You're wrong, wrong, all you cynics. Open your minds and dare to hope for MMO nirvana because all your dreams are set to be realised at last.


http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/251130/page/8

Ten Ton Hammer has spoken.

I liked ps2 so I'll try to keep an open mind.  It had better be so far away from launch day EQ2 as to be unrecognizable though.

Ten Ton Hammer gives out awards now?  Why don't we do that?  Apparently there are no requirements or prerequisites needed to do so.

Yeah, well I remember when EQ2 was going to be the game changer.  Turns out games can change for the worst.