EQ 'Next'

[KallDrexx]

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

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.

[Draegan]

Terrible game design is dropping someone somewhere and say "Go."  

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.  

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.

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.

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

[Bzalthek]

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.

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.

[Fordel]

Terrible game design is dropping someone somewhere and say "Go." 

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. 

Early games were a novelty unto themselves though.

[Kageh]

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.

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.

[Bzalthek]

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.

[UnSub]

Terrible game design is dropping someone somewhere and say "Go." 

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. 

[Murgos]

Terrible game design is dropping someone somewhere and say "Go." 

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. 

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

"You are west of a white house. There is a mailbox here"
>

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

[Bzalthek]

> Murder mailbox

[Nebu]

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.

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

Yes.  Obviously.

[Malakili]

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

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.

[UnSub]

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.

I was being a dick (and almost went with Pong, but you could argue that Pong has sandbox qualities  ), 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.

[Murgos]

Well, you're talking about a sim in that case, the game isn't meant to just be picked up and played. 

Is this a non-sequitur?

[Malakili]

Well, you're talking about a sim in that case, the game isn't meant to just be picked up and played. 

Is this a non-sequitur?

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

[Draegan]

Unsub explained what I was thinking.

[Murgos]

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

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.

[UnSub]

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.

[Slyfeind]

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.

[grunk]

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.

[Dtrain]

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. 

[raydeen]

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.

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.

[Dtrain]

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.

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. 

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.

[Pennilenko]

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

[Numtini]

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[raydeen]

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.

[Hoax]

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.

[eldaec]

Well, you're talking about a sim in that case, the game isn't meant to just be picked up and played. 

Is this a non-sequitur?

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

A non-sequitur would be....

Well, you're talking about a sim in that case, so I love lamp.

[raydeen]

+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.

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.

[Grimwell]

What's this got to do with Shadowbane?

[Ratman_tf]

What's this got to do with Shadowbane?

[Grimwell]

Perhaps, but my point still stands.

[taolurker]

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]

[Grimwell]

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.

[taolurker]

haha +1 lurking for Grim