EQ Never

Grim1 · Feb 14, 2015

Laerazi_sl said:
This thread is fucking ridiculous. People advocating rushing out WoW clones.

I was talking about maintaining an IP's value and the need to keep it in the public's eye. What you read into my statement is purely your issue.

Big Flex · Feb 14, 2015

an old EQ Review from April 1999 from this old-ass PK website I just stumbled back across

A month into the game now, I think it's time I shed a little more light on EverQuest even though I know you don't care. But I have nothing to say really, so I'll just do that. I am going to start off by saying that I think EverQuest kicks all kinds of ass, far from the way UO kicked ass in the day, as those days are irreplacable, irreplaceable, however the hell you spell that word, but EverQuest I have come to realize has some serious drawbacks. I have to say from experience, that EverQuest is the singlemost frustrating game on the face of the planet when you are having a bad day in it. If you have yet to play the game, or are thinking about purchasing it, pretend there's a label in big red letters saying "Warning : If you are the type of person prone to chucking 20 pound dumbells into your Sony Trinitron, refrain from playing this game." It will make you foam at the mouth. Disregarding my note about comparing the 2 games, dying in UO is not near of a pure annoyance than it is dying in EQ. While the stat loss is not as quite severe as UO's torture to reds, it is certainly a pain in your ass. I am at 20th level now, and upon death I usually lose what I have gotten in 6 hours of my time. It can be quite a setback. Especially if you die 3 nights in a row. In the past week, if I was a wealthy citizen, I'd have gone through about 18 monitors I believe. And I am not a violent mouth foaming person in in real life.

However, aside from wanting to crush beer bottles over your head or break your hand punching the nearest wall upon death, when you are actually alive and well in EverQuest, the game is damned enjoyable. I recently have been hunting Evil Eyes for instance (Beholders to you D&D peops) with Cichlid and I have to say they are funnest AI in a game I have ever faced. There's nothing like being charmed by a big fucking eye, and watching helplessly as the thing remote controls you and plays with you like an abused child with many He-Men figures and a BB-gun. When you get charmed, it's basically a big joy ride for you. You are his playmate, and you do his bidding. So he generally either A) Unloads your mana upon the nearest hapless newbie (quite amusing, I usually light a smoke and reflect on the finer things in life whilst this is occurring) or B) Takes you back to Sardonicus's lair to let the Harley gang of Chasm Minotaurs use your head as a tether-ball, or C) Makes Cichlid kill you along with his other pet so that you can be sent back 430 zones minus 6 hours worth of experience so that you can make an hour and a half walk back to your mangled corpse while tossing around the idea of sending your aluminum Bombat crashing through your monitor and reflecting upon the fact that you should have gone to bed 2 hours ago and that you are tired as piss and you just let your cigarette burn out while typing "GOD DAMNIT" over and over while bitching that you hate this piece of shit game and that you wish you were never born and you realize it was your last smoke, your last few backwash drops of Coca Cola Classic are warm now, and you remember you didn't think to stop at the ATM before heading home from work so you realize you aren't going to get to have your normal average morning-just-out-of-the-shower smoke as well as the walk-to-work-after-buying-smokes that you ran out of the night before as you wake up 30 minutes late for work because you don't have any fucking money in your wallet. Anyway. EverQuest is a great game. Or something. I don't even know what day it is.Am I rambling?

How did we manage without voxels and soemote?

gogojira_sl · Feb 14, 2015

I feel like SOEmote is a dead thing.

Draegan_sl · Feb 14, 2015

Malakriss_sl said:
We want an RPG world, not a queue lobby, not a dig-dug minecraft, but a world with things to do it in that aren't classified solely as a "daily" or "bear ass quest" or "weekly lockout timer"

If the words "boss enrage" ever come up someone's getting a pencil to the eye.

So what are the things you want to do?

a_skeleton_02 · Feb 14, 2015

gogojira_sl said:
I feel like SOEmote is a dead thing.

I can really understand were SOEmote is coming from, The people that still play EQ2 tend to be more on the .....Roleplaying side, Infact I loaded up EQ2 Last year and I can say I met more roleplayers than not on the server. The Player housing combined with the high fantasy really attracts that crowd, I really don't think SOEmote as much as it is bashed on this forum really took a lot of dev time and honestly even though I never used it I would like to see it and other roleplayer friendly features added to EQ Next.

It's one of those features that's not a Lock out or Bear ass quest like said above. It isn't required to be used but can enhance an experience for certain players. I also, think having a healthy population of Roleplayers is very good for the game as they tend to stay around forever and buy things for their houses using station cash as well they love to hold events that can be interrupted as player generated content.

I think all the Role Players in LOTRO kept that game profitable longer than the content hogs so I think they should cater towards both. It's the casual scum Xbox generation that is ruining MMOs not the 45 year old house wife that pretends to be a High Elf Enchantress when her kids are sleep. Both are unable to do truly challenging content but one of them accepts that and does their own thing and the other bitches until the content is brought down to their level.

Those are the casual players they should look to attract I think they know this with Landmark.

Itzena_sl · Feb 14, 2015

tad10_sl said:
I would have replaced Grim's comment with: "There is something to be said for getting a product out your playerbase has been asking for instead of shitcanning two different visions over five years and restarting in late 2012, even if it means that product doesn't have all the latest whiz-bang marketing terms in its product description."

Counterpoint: If a game is just not working no matter what, you scrap it and move on. You don't throw it out the door for a few bucks of profit. See: Blizzard Entertainment.

Mist · Feb 14, 2015

Itzena_sl said:
Counterpoint: If a game is just not working no matter what, you scrap it and move on. You don't throw it out the door for a few bucks of profit. See: Blizzard Entertainment.

You mean like Blizzard did with D3?

Convo · Feb 14, 2015

Itzena_sl said:
Counterpoint: If a game is just not working no matter what, you scrap it and move on. You don't throw it out the door for a few bucks of profit. See: Blizzard Entertainment.

It's not that it wasn't working. They just went in a different direction. It would have profited most likely. They should have finished it then worked on their EQN idea. But it's easy for me to say that not knowing what restrictions were at play. Maybe the 2 years of work wasn't as costly as it would seem

tad10 · Feb 14, 2015

Draegan_sl said:
So what are the things you want to do?

#TimeIsAFlatCircle

EQNextGenerationRedux

First get the basic elements of an MMORPG right:
(1) Zoned (EQ), Semi-Zoned (WoW-Vanilla) or Seemless World (Vanguard). Where in all cases you have travel times between areas, not a lobby as Malakriss states. I'm fine with Zoned/Semi-Zoned. I don't need to fly and it's a Hell of a lot cheaper.

(2) Trinity-based classes (EQ or VG). No uber hybrids (such as Druids in Vanilla EQ or everyone in EQNext) with a 5 or 6 group size.

(3) Questing should not give XP: only factions, gold or items. Multi-questing should not require back-flagging to accomplish goals (this is the "Great Goblin head should drop for everyone, not just people on the quest" rule).

(4) Heavy limitation on the use of instancing or phasing. Don't throw out instancing/phasing entirely but severely limit it: example you might use instancing or phasing for a class-based quest to get a class-specific ability out of a normally open-world dungeon. Another example: a raid dungeon might have an open-world wing and an instanced wing. With better loot in the open-world wing, the instanced (7-day lockout) wing prevents complete curb-stomping of lower guilds by a server uber guild.

(5) Primary advancement is traditional Level based but with an EQ-style alternate advancement system from the get-go, I assume some purely skill based types of advancement (such as weapon skills, safe fall, language skills, crafting).

(6) Decent graphics.

Sorta New Stuff

(1) Mix of camps and dynamic mobs. Everyone liked StoryBricks - it seems to have been too ambitious, but game would have a mix of fixed camps and wandering mobs. Rift tried to do this, but not in a good way.

(2) Significantly more interaction between toons and the environment - I'm talking Prince of Persia-ish-ish, not Minecraft. The example I always give is "Safe Climb"/Thief. Rogues should be able to climb walls to break into places. Druids should be able to grow vines to climb up walls. Etc.

(3) Mini-games. Not to go into details here, but one way to shake up the current quest system is to add significant mini-games as part of Quests. A extremely simple example from (of all places) Harry Potter: part of a quest could require the player to actually play a chess game against a decent (but not Kasparov level) opponent. The chess game could range from an actual game from zero to an endgame setup where Mate is possible in 4 or 5 moves and you've got to figure those moves out. There are a thousand other mini-game possibilities besides games (Chess, poker, board games) or crafting/fishing: I gather WoW added some kind of housing mini-game in the latest expansion.

(4) Slow leveling. This is actually old. But Blizzard's "Game begins at 60" is bullshit. Game should begin at 1 and take a long time to get to Max.

Anyway, I've got shit to do but that's a quick summary of a bunch of old ideas that have been around for forever.

tad10 · Feb 14, 2015

Itzena_sl said:
Counterpoint: If a game is just not working no matter what, you scrap it and move on. You don't throw it out the door for a few bucks of profit. See: Blizzard Entertainment.

Count Counterpoint: the second iteration was scrapped because Smed, Butler & Co., wanted to ride the Minecraft train, not because people said it wasn't working.

Itzena_sl · Feb 14, 2015

Mist_sl said:
You mean like Blizzard did with D3?

Diablo 3 is a good game.

zzeris · Feb 14, 2015

tad10_sl said:
Count Counterpoint: the second iteration was scrapped because Smed, Butler & Co., wanted to ride the Minecraft train, not because people said it wasn't working.

Where is the proof that it was working? I see a lot armchair geniuses coming out of the woodwork after some lazy managers get fired. You are wanting a huge world, with environmental interaction, no instancing so that it's even harder to maintain frames, good graphics, dynamic AI, alternative advancement, lots of mini-games, etc because my huge 10,000-15,000 demographic is definitely going to keep this monstrosity afloat the next decade. I promise none of us flip through MMOs like mad or just won't move on like Vanguard. Sure, the game was shit and SOE has been bad but what does this look like to actual investors and decision makers? Like a really, really bad idea. Or...the reason this type of game has no huge backing anywhere in any market.

Draegan_sl · Feb 14, 2015

Took a while though.

Xexx · Feb 14, 2015

tad10_sl said:
#TimeIsAFlatCircle

EQNextGenerationRedux

First get the basic elements of an MMORPG right:
(1) Zoned (EQ), Semi-Zoned (WoW-Vanilla) or Seemless World (Vanguard). Where in all cases you have travel times between areas, not a lobby as Malakriss states. I'm fine with Zoned/Semi-Zoned. I don't need to fly and it's a Hell of a lot cheaper.

(2) Trinity-based classes (EQ or VG). No uber hybrids (such as Druids in Vanilla EQ or everyone in EQNext) with a 5 or 6 group size.

(3) Questing should not give XP: only factions, gold or items. Multi-questing should not require back-flagging to accomplish goals (this is the "Great Goblin head should drop for everyone, not just people on the quest" rule).

(4) Heavy limitation on the use of instancing or phasing. Don't throw out instancing/phasing entirely but severely limit it: example you might use instancing or phasing for a class-based quest to get a class-specific ability out of a normally open-world dungeon. Another example: a raid dungeon might have an open-world wing and an instanced wing. With better loot in the open-world wing, the instanced (7-day lockout) wing prevents complete curb-stomping of lower guilds by a server uber guild.

(5) Primary advancement is traditional Level based but with an EQ-style alternate advancement system from the get-go, I assume some purely skill based types of advancement (such as weapon skills, safe fall, language skills, crafting).

(6) Decent graphics.

Sorta New Stuff

(1) Mix of camps and dynamic mobs. Everyone liked StoryBricks - it seems to have been too ambitious, but game would have a mix of fixed camps and wandering mobs. Rift tried to do this, but not in a good way.

(2) Significantly more interaction between toons and the environment - I'm talking Prince of Persia-ish-ish, not Minecraft. The example I always give is "Safe Climb"/Thief. Rogues should be able to climb walls to break into places. Druids should be able to grow vines to climb up walls. Etc.

(3) Mini-games. Not to go into details here, but one way to shake up the current quest system is to add significant mini-games as part of Quests. A extremely simple example from (of all places) Harry Potter: part of a quest could require the player to actually play a chess game against a decent (but not Kasparov level) opponent. The chess game could range from an actual game from zero to an endgame setup where Mate is possible in 4 or 5 moves and you've got to figure those moves out. There are a thousand other mini-game possibilities besides games (Chess, poker, board games) or crafting/fishing: I gather WoW added some kind of housing mini-game in the latest expansion.

(4) Slow leveling. This is actually old. But Blizzard's "Game begins at 60" is bullshit. Game should begin at 1 and take a long time to get to Max.

Anyway, I've got shit to do but that's a quick summary of a bunch of old ideas that have been around for forever.

IF questing does not give xp it would mean the world and itself would need to give a good amount. Dungeon xp would need to be fairly amped b/c no quest xp already makes me think that i will be doing some mindless grinding which would automatically put any game in the "fuck you" category.

Dungeon/Group xp should always be good, and by good i mean "dam i hope this group doesnt wipe and break up" good. Back in EQ1 we'd be sitting at seb zone in for hours waiting on that money group to show up and plow through shit for xp and loot....them were the days.

Big Flex · Feb 14, 2015

Oh no is this thread turning into a "well what I'd do is" build-a-game circle jerk again?

tad10 · Feb 14, 2015

X X E X X_sl said:
IF questing does not give xp it would mean the world and itself would need to give a good amount. Dungeon xp would need to be fairly amped b/c no quest xp already makes me think that i will be doing some mindless grinding which would automatically put any game in the "fuck you" category.

1. Games need to be a little bit "fuck you" instead of "pull the free slot machine" to be, you know, interesting, challenging and have long-lasting appeal.

2. Quest grinding is worse than mob grinding unless you really, really like 400 collect 10 bear asses quests.

3. @Zzeris take a fucking valium dude, and keep taking them, it's what you'll need to enjoy EQNext with its 8 man "raids" and Rainbow Bright art direction. Well that or a lot of booze.

Xexx · Feb 14, 2015

tad10_sl said:
1. Games need to be a little bit "fuck you" instead of "pull the free slot machine" to be, you know, interesting, challenging and have long-lasting appeal.

2. Quest grinding is worse than mob grinding unless you really, really like 400 collect 10 bear asses quests.

3. @Zzeris take a fucking valium dude, and keep taking them, it's what you'll need to enjoy EQNext with its 8 man "raids" and Rainbow Bright art direction. Well that or a lot of booze.

You can only kill so many orcs, mob grinding touches into that asian territory that most western gamers flee from when it comes to MMOs. Questing shouldnt be the sole and biggest source of xp, but it should still be a viable option for those who want to do it. Grinding, Questing, Grouping/Dungeons should all be viable options in their own way. I personally would rather group for xp/loot if possible b/c i do agree questing is shit and i hate doing it in every game. However some people would rather be alone and quest/solo in their own time and they should have that option as well. No one is right, no one is wrong, everyone has their own preferred playstyle.

Dumar_sl · Feb 14, 2015

Itzena_sl said:
Diablo 3 is a good game.

Lol

Ukerric · Feb 14, 2015

Big Flex_sl said:
Oh no is this thread turning into a "well what I'd do is" build-a-game circle jerk again?

Any thread about an unrealeased-not-even-beta-yet game turns into one.

Itzena_sl · Feb 14, 2015

tad10_sl said:
1. Games need to be a little bit "fuck you" instead of "pull the free slot machine" to be, you know, interesting, challenging and have long-lasting appeal.

2. Quest grinding is worse than mob grinding unless you really, really like 400 collect 10 bear asses quests.

3. @Zzeris take a fucking valium dude, and keep taking them, it's what you'll need to enjoy EQNext with its 8 man "raids" and Rainbow Bright art direction. Well that or a lot of booze.

And from the top:

World of Warcraft: Ten million subscribers.
Wildstar: Fifty thousand subs (as averyoptimistic and generous estimate).
Vanguard: Dead.

Tell me again how the MMO market would do better if aimed at the poopsockers?

EQ Never

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