EQ 'Next'

[Paelos]

I'm in my 30s and can't be assed to do shit in MMOs anymore like raiding and learning fights. I did it for 10 years and simply can't give a fuck anymore. I don't have a wife or kids yet, but I simply have better ways to spend my time.

[Draegan]

The dreams of people that don't come here. F13 is a pretty casual MMO crowd for the most part, or at the very least not masochistic. The people who will be shedding tears are the neckbeards that have been hoping for an EQ revamp for 15 years. They want harsh death penalties (the big risk vs reward crowd) because the think being screwed out of all your gear is motivation worthy. They want long long long level curves because you need to WORK for your levels. It's all about the journey who also get pissed if people level faster than you.

They want combat to be slow, and based off autoattack because they don't want to spam buttons anymore. People don't talk in dungeons these days because people are hitting hotbars. They want more chat. Use Skype/vent? NO! Chat is better because everything and I hate talking to people.

I really don't think these gamers exist in any large number any more.  Can you point me to a forum where there are more than 20?  These people are all over 35 years old and have lives these days.  The WoW generation is not looking for this.  And if they say they are it is only because they don't really know what they are asking for.  

Go to any large forum where people are talking about EQ.

[Margalis]

Why are we pretending that any standardish MMO isn't a huge time sink?

It's not like WoW is a game you just play for a couple hours a week. Sure, you CAN do that, just like you could do that in EQ, but WoW is a game that plenty of people have spent literal years playing. It can be life consuming.

Maybe in WoW you can level faster but once you level you still have a bunch of grinding to do so who cares? The fact that you can hit max level in WoW fairly quickly is an almost purely semantic point, because "max level" doesn't actually mean "max power level" or "experienced all the game has to offer" or "has most of the best items." If you want to get the full experience you have to put in an insane number of hours.

[Merusk]

There's timesinks and there's timesinks.

You can fuck 16 hours a day in to golfing or you can hit a par-3 and it's a few hours.

The difference is it's you - the player's - choice in what you're doing. I don't want to be a master, I want to shag a few balls badly and have some beers.

You're presenting the argument as-if it took less than 3 hours to get anything other than futile soloing going in EQ and that all things in WoW, GW2, LOTR or any other MMO still going take the same scope of time.  That's invalid.

[HaemishM]

I'm in my 30s and can't be assed to do shit in MMOs anymore like raiding and learning fights. I did it for 10 years and simply can't give a fuck anymore. I don't have a wife or kids yet, but I simply have better ways to spend my time.

It may also be that the same shit I was doing in EQ mechanically speaking is the same shit you'll do in EQ Next, only it might take a bit more attention span or have more buttons to press.

MMOG's went from a medium to a standard set of gameplay mechanics that have grown horribly stale because the only thing developers can figure out to make it more interesting is to speed it up and add MOAR BUTTONS.

[Paelos]

Fuck more buttons. Srsly.

[Surlyboi]

Did someone say Fuck Buttons?

[Kageru]

I'd be more worried about the next MMO's all being restricted to 3-5 buttons so they are controller friendly. Moar buttons!

[Threash]

Fuck more buttons. Srsly.

Pretty much this.  Too many buttons drove me straight out of SWTOR.

[Paelos]

I'd be more worried about the next MMO's all being restricted to 3-5 buttons so they are controller friendly. Moar buttons!

Oh noes, consolitis wharblegarble!

I'm fine with 3-5 buttons so I can operate a mouse and wasd properly. DOTA2 is a good example of this.

[Bzalthek]

I'll be honest, even with games where 6-0 have abilities and alt- and ctrl- keys have abilities... These abilities never get used.  Or essentially never. In GW2 I use signets almost exclusively because they have passive bonuses and I don't have to hit shit over there (except 6, fucking heals)

I don't care about consolitis.  I care about arthritis!

[Kitsune]

As long as you aren't required to use more than ten buttons in the course of an average fight, I'm happy.  I don't count buffs and other out of combat stuff against that number, since I just stick them off to the side and mostly ignore them, but if I have to be hunting through twenty icons just to make a character act, someone has fucked up.

[Kageru]

Console idea of buttons: 5 buttons all of which are various varities of "hit thing". Oh, I guess there's also jump, hug wall and block.

An interesting class will have multiple tactical roles. Are you healing, moving, buffing, debuffing or DPS (ideally with some sort of resource mechanic or seqeuence). And the easiest way to do that is to have a set of buttons that become your focus for that role. Original EQ and WoW both work this way. Or you could try and use the mechanic GW2 has and have a modal skill sets.

Firefall is the current example smacking me with modern minimalism. 3 skills on 30 second timers most of which are various flavors of damage... yawn.

[tmp]

Console MMO idea of buttons: 5 10+ buttons all of which are various varities of "hit thing".

fixed..?

[Margalis]

If you look at a screenshot of WoW as it is today there are like 60 buttons, 10 meters, and 40 other various icons onscreen...yet if you can manage to view the game through the UI it looks dull. All those buttons aren't translating into anything worthwhile.

An interesting class will have multiple tactical roles. Are you healing, moving, buffing, debuffing or DPS (ideally with some sort of resource mechanic or seqeuence). And the easiest way to do that is to have a set of buttons that become your focus for that role. Original EQ and WoW both work this way.

In theory sure. In reality these games have little in the way of tactics, strategy or interesting mechanics.

[eldaec]

All I really want is a less cockpunchy EQ.  Get rid of 8 hour camps and massive XP loss and I'm down.  I like travel times, no WoW quests, group oriented play, vastly different classes, and no automatic group finder.  I'm one of them.  Shit.

I'd suggest CoX.... oh wait.

[eldaec]

Actually, now I think for a second, EQ2 meets that criteria.

I'd try this game if it turns out to be an iteration on eq2. I wouldn't expect to stay with it, but would give it a go.

[eldaec]

Fuck more buttons. Srsly.

Pretty much this.  Too many buttons drove me straight out of SWTOR.

Not enough buttons drove me out of swtor (among other things)

In reality of course, its number of decisions.

My eq2 defiler had forty+ buttons which representated actual decision making and prioritisation. It was grand.

CoX had about 15 per character but had just as much decision making because of how positional the game was.

SWTOR and WoW have maybe 30 buttons but felt like much less decision making on the fly.

[Ruvaldt]

Speaking of buttons, I really liked EQ's spell preparation system.  Not the looking at a spellbook to meditate thing that they did for the first year.  That was stupid.  I mean the actual limitation on the number of spells that you could have prepared and cast at one time.  It made me think ahead, kept my abilities at a managable level, and gave me some agency over what I could and couldn't do at any given moment.  It's something that I really liked about EQ but sadly hasn't translated to other games, and I wish it would have.  It's too much to hope EQNext would have a similar system, I'm sure, but I really liked that solution to...I don't know what to call it...button-bloat?

EQ and EQ2 were both good about that though.  Every ability had a considerable outcome.  EQ2 started out with a confusing ability system, which was thankfully fixed later on, but the abilities all did something that had an immediate and noticable impact without being samey.

[Merusk]

Spellbook med was the first 3 years.. maybe 4. They took it out in 2002.

I also enjoyed the spell selection but players bitched enough it got removed in other games until GW made it a synergy thing.  Still hasn't caught-on to be a primary MMO feature, though.

[Bzalthek]

While I did love that part of EQ, it was only implemented for casters.  Non-casters had fuck all they could do.  They started getting other minor abilities, and then they got ability bloat which they could use all the time (except many were on same cooldown timer) and overall the system was ad-hoc and pretty shitty in an attempt to make them more enjoyable to play... ?  So the next generation of games gave us a combination.  Eveyone uses spell-like abilities, but since they're not really spells, you have access to all of them.

I'm pretty sure, though not positive (I'm hardly crunch numbers on this shit, it just feels truthy) that the uniqeness of classes were sacrificed in the name of balance (and what exactly is being balanced is also subjective.)  Now it's mostly different themes or flavors.

[Ruvaldt]

I remember playing in 2000 and not having to meditate with a spellbook after level 20.  Before 20 I still had to meditate with a spellbook.  That was definitely stupid.

[Merusk]

I remember playing in 2000 and not having to meditate with a spellbook after level 20.  Before 20 I still had to meditate with a spellbook.  That was definitely stupid.

Yeah, they lowered the level before they removed the requirement.  The first few years you had to meditate with the spell book until level 37.

The idea was to take old school RPGs and bring them to 3d, after-all. In those your character had to study their spellbook, so voila!  It was a literal translation that took too long to question.

While I did love that part of EQ, it was only implemented for casters.  Non-casters had fuck all they could do.  They started getting other minor abilities, and then they got ability bloat which they could use all the time (except many were on same cooldown timer) and overall the system was ad-hoc and pretty shitty in an attempt to make them more enjoyable to play... ?

Hey now, the warrior had 3 buttons! Kick, bash, taunt! 

We are definitely too far on the other side of the spectrim, IMO.  I know Eldac and others love them some buttons, but I'd rather have GW/ TSW's system than WoW/ EQ2's.

[Paelos]

Ok so just as an example, the Sniper in SWTOR has 20 abilities noted across all the levels on torhead.

5 of those things are just damage shots with various effects. 4 are shots with debuffs. 3 are dots. 6 are buffs or cooldown reductions. 2 are situational escape.

Here's the thing. All I need is one quick damage, one slow large damage, one debuff, one dot, one buff, one escape. 6 things. That's it. The rest is just ridiculous fluff.

[Miasma]

There are way too many buttons in games like WoW and SWtoR.  I have eighteen programmable buttons on the left side of g15 keyboard, and it's still not enough, that's absurd.  I hate having that many buttons and still having to actually move my cursor and click on particular icons.  My dream system would be a combination of gw2 and diablo 3.  I want spells that I can decorate with side effects like in diablo and I only want to have to push six buttons but those buttons and abilities can change based on combos/stances/weapons like in guild wars.

[tmp]

Here's the thing. All I need is one quick damage, one slow large damage

Tera does something interesting regarding this -- some classes have ability to 'charge' their attacks by holding down the skill button. The longer you hold, the bigger damage output (it scales up through something like 4-5 grades)  Pretty sure some older MMOs i'm unaware of did it too, but in any case helps nicely to trim down the amount of buttons all available grades for these skills would otherwise require, if it was done the 'traditional' way.

[Lantyssa]

Warframe's combat is just about perfect for me.  Four abilities.  Weapons have vastly different characteristics.  Jumping, unlimited rolling, wall climbing...

Not a huge fan of the powers themselves, but they still show you can do a variety of things with them.

[eldaec]

Ok so just as an example, the Sniper in SWTOR has 20 abilities noted across all the levels on torhead.

5 of those things are just damage shots with various effects. 4 are shots with debuffs. 3 are dots. 6 are buffs or cooldown reductions. 2 are situational escape.

Here's the thing. All I need is one quick damage, one slow large damage, one debuff, one dot, one buff, one escape. 6 things. That's it. The rest is just ridiculous fluff.

Really depends how you design the rest of the game and how you design those side effects. If the debuffs are appropriately meaningful and situational, they add to the depth of combat (see EQ2 or CoX). If they are really just a solvable rotation puzzle that you have to look up on a forum, then yeah, worthless (see WoW or SWTOR).

[Ingmar]

Ok so just as an example, the Sniper in SWTOR has 20 abilities noted across all the levels on torhead.

5 of those things are just damage shots with various effects. 4 are shots with debuffs. 3 are dots. 6 are buffs or cooldown reductions. 2 are situational escape.

Here's the thing. All I need is one quick damage, one slow large damage, one debuff, one dot, one buff, one escape. 6 things. That's it. The rest is just ridiculous fluff.

It has more than that, I think you left out the shared IA abilities. On the other hand I'm betting that view included spec abilities from the trees you can't have at the same time.

[Paelos]

Probably on the view thing, but I intentionally left out the IA stuff not to even further clutter the issue. Point being WHY BUTTONS WHY?!?!

[Sjofn]

I'll be honest, even with games where 6-0 have abilities and alt- and ctrl- keys have abilities... These abilities never get used.  Or essentially never. In GW2 I use signets almost exclusively because they have passive bonuses and I don't have to hit shit over there (except 6, fucking heals)

I don't care about consolitis.  I care about arthritis!

I'll use 6 without too much fuss, but yeah, 7 and onward? Those get used way, way less often than 1-5 for me. I even use signets in GW2 for the same reason!

[Ingmar]

Probably on the view thing, but I intentionally left out the IA stuff not to even further clutter the issue. Point being WHY BUTTONS WHY?!?!

I like having a broad toolbox to pull from. SWTOR is just on the edge of being too much on a couple classes, and EQ2 went too far for me, but I prefer it to something like TSW or GW2. It's kind of a tactics vs. strategy choice in how people play the characters in your game, there's not one right answer here.

[Paelos]

That sort of goes without saying. It's entertainment, not a logic puzzle.

I prefer mechanics to have impact, but I don't think it's a good thing if a "skill" in a game is managing cooldowns across 10 different abilities. Then again, I can play mount and blade for hours and that has essentially two buttons.

[Simond]

Counterpoint: EQ only had a couple of abilities for the melee classes and that was dull as fuck.

[Paelos]

EQ for the most part was dull tho, in retrospect.