EQ 'Next'

[Furiously]

Landmark just seems to be, "Hey, make us stuff for practically free."

[Lantyssa]

"Make stuff for us by paying us," lest you forgot the founders packs, which only apply to Landmark.

[Venkman]

Feels like a possibility they discovered along the way (some meeting that included "hey wouldn't it be cool if...") that resulted in a business plan which includes what Lantyssa said, meaning more by extension than by design

[Lantyssa]

If they work like my bosses, the plan changes daily, so that's par for the course.

[Nebu]

"Make stuff for us by paying us," lest you forgot the founders packs, which only apply to Landmark.

Exactly.  You get to pay us for doing the job we were supposed to do.  Brilliant on their part.  It's not free labor... it's people PAYING THEM to do work.

Fucking brilliant.

[Draegan]

It's actually free. You would just be paying for early access. You don't have to pay them for shit. So you can figure something else to whine about I guess.

I could be wrong, but if you enjoy building stuff like Minecraft, and they use your thing in the game, that's kind of winwin. If you're offended by them using your shit for free, don't play then? EQN will be free to play to, in theory. Who knows if they hamfist it like EQ2 though.

[Nebu]

It's actually free. You would just be paying for early access. You don't have to pay them for shit. So you can figure something else to whine about I guess.

Saying that they're brilliant is whining?  I was paying their team a compliment.  They're getting the player base to build content for them.  It's genius.

[palmer_eldritch]

It's also supposedly going to let them start off with a massive gameworld. Much of it will be procedurally generated but with loads of interesting things to find, because they'll have a supply of things easily importable from Landmark.

[Venkman]

I think it's nice they're doing it from a PR perspective, but I don't know that they're planning to heavily rely on player generated content beyond that fan-friendly outreach.

They'll cherry pick the best stuff, and maybe hire on permanent or consulting employees to do some production work. But since the end goal seems to be a more pedestrian questing/adventuring game that just happens to have so advanced a toolset they can let users hit that first, I feel like they've got internal staff/budget to do all the real brand-based design heavy lifting.

It's generating great buzz for them for sure, and it comes at a good time when nothing seems to be drawing wholesale attention from Minecraft as far as I can tell. But I wouldn't bet on the find EQ Next game being largely populated by what comes from Landmark contributions. I'd expect that to be small percentages of the overall, very recognizable, maybe even highlighted.

[tazelbain]

It's actually free. You would just be paying for early access. You don't have to pay them for shit. So you can figure something else to whine about I guess.

Saying that they're brilliant is whining?  I was paying their team a compliment.  They're getting the player base to build content for them.  It's genius.

Small peanuts compared to minecraft + graphics + economy + auction house.  That's going to make bank.  The "let players design levels" shit is just PR.

[Tannhauser]

I may get flayed alive for saying this, but I'd like a new EQ MMO.  I loved the look and lore of the first one despite many other issues I had with the game.  Crushbone, Befallen, these are iconic gaming locations in my mind and nostalgia is strong with this.  EQ2 was a disappointment though it got better.  I don't have a lot of faith in SOE, but I hope they do well. 

[Raguel]

I guess I haven't followed this closely but I don't understand some of the negativity ( I mean besides lolSOE  )

I recall a pay to play alpha/beta thing but aside from that I like the feature list.

[Signe]

I won't flay you alive because I want to play it, too.  I'll be disappointed if they don't have collections.  I loved collecting in EQ2. 

[palmer_eldritch]

I'm really looking forward to it, and that includes the more traditional MMO part. It's the first MMO I've been excited about since WAR, except maybe for ArcheAge which seems to be missing in action.

[Count Nerfedalot]

How much of Everquest was actually questing? Shit, that's why WoW was World of Warquest colloquially

I never heard that one, but I certainly heard and used "NeverQuest" a lot, and the whole quest-to-level paradigm instead of sitting on my ass grinding mobs pulled by someone else to my "campsite" for hours at a time is one of the biggest reasons I went with WoW for years before giving EQ2 more than a passing glance.  Well, that and Blizzard had a reputation for making best-in-class games at that time, and once I got past the login issues I was absolutely shocked and delighted to discover that all those quests in WoW actually worked, quite unlike my experiences in EQ!

[zumu]

Personally, I prefer the EQ approach of quests taking several days (if not weeks or *gasp*  months) to complete. The burning rapier quest in particular has  a special place in my heart.

WoW questing, on the other hand, never really appealed to me. Doing trivial tasks for trivial rewards isn't any better than camping mobs in my opinion.

It will be interesting to see how EQ Next approaches the mechanic. I'd love some sort of compromise between the two paradigms. Though, I may be in the minority on this one.

[Falconeer]

EQ2 had millions of quests at launch. It was actually more story-quest driven than WoW. Problem was quests weren't all that visible since there were no exclamation marks over characters pointing you to quests, you had to talk to all of them or pay attention to visual/audio cues.

[Malakili]

Doing trivial tasks for trivial rewards isn't any better than camping mobs in my opinion.

This is more or less how I feel now that both are far enough in the past. WoW-style quests sure were shiny and new at one point though. But now, at this point in my gaming life, I'm not particularly interested in either farming monsters OR grinding through trivial quests.

[Hawkbit]

There's room for both.  The problem is the 'bear asses' quests, which do nothing but increase progress bars  (coin, stats/gear, xp). 

Take a single quest or a short series that focuses on furthering the lore of the game (see Duskwood in wow) and mix it with long story based quests, taking weeks and months.  There's room for a good dynamic there. 

[zumu]

The problem is the 'bear asses' quests, which do nothing but increase progress bars  (coin, stats/gear, xp). 

I think you're getting to the core of it here.

 However, to derail a little bit, I think the greater problem is the progress bars themselves. So long as they exist, there will be grinding of some form (camping, questing, etc.) to fill them.

[Merusk]

Vanilla WoW had plenty of story lines that were fun and kept me engaged.  Even through BC there were quite a number of stories I enjoyed running through and didn't feel like "bring me 10 bear asses" but I also read every single quest.  WOTLK had a bunch of stories I also enjoyed but I really started to see the latter, and in Cata it felt like there was one big story arc quest per zone and the rest were busywork.  This is all Alliance side, though and I hear Horde side had it worse.

After having played TSW and STO in the time since, I've got to say that STO does it best.  Leveling is incidental to the episodes and, unlike TSW and WOW it's not broken-up nearly as much into a billion minor quests doing stupid shit.  That drove me up a wall in TSW, even though each zone had a 'story.'  It felt a lot like Wow-cataclysm in that game.

[Draegan]

It's actually free. You would just be paying for early access. You don't have to pay them for shit. So you can figure something else to whine about I guess.

Saying that they're brilliant is whining?  I was paying their team a compliment.  They're getting the player base to build content for them.  It's genius.

Sorry about that. I was assuming sarcasm and snarkiness.

[Lantyssa]

I agree with Nebu, it is brilliant.  (Their goal is to make money and people are throwing it at them.)

Considering they're monetizing the shit out of letting people enter beta of a game meant to build them items for their real game, my opinion on the matter stands.  Founders packs give boosts, and I'm quite sure they'll sell individual items and other packs through the lifetime of Landmark, so I'm not sure how I'm missing the mark in my cynicism on the issue.

[shiznitz]

I must be losing my memory.  I thought EQ stood for Ever QUEST.  The again, writing good story, creating engaging dungeons, and developing an organic and heroic questing system is HARD.   

Well the "quest" to get my Dwarven Work Boots did basically take forEVER so it was aptly named.  I think it was close to a month of almost nightly 3-4 hour sessions.

[Simond]

There's room for both.  The problem is the 'bear asses' quests, which do nothing but increase progress bars  (coin, stats/gear, xp).  

Take a single quest or a short series that focuses on furthering the lore of the game (see Duskwood in wow) and mix it with long story based quests, taking weeks and months.  There's room for a good dynamic there.

And then the first time people make alts, they go "Jesus Christ not this fucking linear grind again. Let me get off this story railroad FFS". There is no way to win this - short quests  hubs/no chains means people complain about "bear asses lulz", linked quests are fun the first playthough and "smash my skull in with the keyboard" on repeat occasions, public quests are fun at launch and deserted within a week, and mob camps gets "Why is there nothing to do except kill ten rats?".

And of course, mix it up and within a day someone's figured out the optimal levelling route, everyone else follows suit lock-step, and then they're still complaining about linearity while also complaining about "all this wasted content".

tl'dr - Sod being a MMO developer, you can't win.

[Threash]

Leveling is just wasted content, make a game that takes about as long as a tutorial to level.  There, you win.

[Simond]

Then you'll get people whinging about how it's a casual game for babbys and levelling should take effort. 

[Merusk]

Leveling is just wasted content, make a game that takes about as long as a tutorial to level.  There, you win.

Another thing i really like about STO's model: the mission rewards scale to your 'true level' and you can replay them later for additional rewards.

We've been over this before, lots of people really like leveling.  Trying to do away with it just casts more adrift than it embraces.  Make it painless to join-up with other players regardless of level, let players skip it for PVP (if you bother including that, which is increasingly foolish)  and figure out how to let folks tackle all content at cap. Done deal. 

GW2 was pretty good at this, too.

[Lantyssa]

People like levels because they haven't known anything else.  GW2 has been one of the better compromises (or ways to hide a shallow curve), so it's not one that annoys me so much.

At least until the Ascended crap came about.  Even if the gain is minimal, achievers embraced it wholeheartedly and the GW2 team ran with it.  Grind, farm, grind.  Ugh.

[Ingmar]

People like levels because they haven't known anything else. 

 

[WayAbvPar]

Give me skill advancement or give me death. Fuck levels. Fuck gated content and loot.

[Draegan]

I would like to see a game based on achievement progression instead of filling up experience bars. Finishing quests (actual quests not the simple ones we expect today), dungeon completion, dungeon special runs, exploration and stuff like that.

[Malakili]

I would like to see a game based on achievement progression instead of filling up experience bars. Finishing quests (actual quests not the simple ones we expect today), dungeon completion, dungeon special runs, exploration and stuff like that.

Which is ironically closer to the reality of Dungeons and Dragons on which all of this is based than the way it's ended up.

[Pennilenko]

I would like to see a game based on achievement progression instead of filling up experience bars. Finishing quests (actual quests not the simple ones we expect today), dungeon completion, dungeon special runs, exploration and stuff like that.

Aradune pretty much said this in a post over on rerolled in regards to what he wants from his new project.

[Lantyssa]

People like levels because they haven't known anything else. 

Sorry for generalizing about the younger generation of gamers who think WoW started the MMO trend.  Replace the last part of my sentence with "haven't known anything else or because they have terrible taste."

Better?