EQ Never

All this Ponytail talk is making me want to walk off a cliff.

Here is to good memories...

Fight_sl said:

All this Ponytail talk is making me want to walk off a cliff.

Here is to good memories...

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I wish some of the original devs and/or Brad would discuss some of this stuff just for fun's sake. At least just the classic stuff.

Someone posted a fuckton of Lore to the Safehouse when they quit way back in the day. The design docs for kunark, and a few other things. Then there's that time Brad got all Vicced up and challenged folks at ShowEQ to break the new encryption. They did. And they hacked his PC. I think there were more secrets that came out in 99-01 then in the 15 years since.

Yea I highly doubt there is anything cool in the current EQ expansions.

I played off and on up through Depths. Up until that point, Velious and (to some extent) PoP were the best overall expansion lore stories. DoN at least had some cool stuff going for it with dragons everywhere. But Luclin, LDoN, LoY, GoD/OoW were pretty rough to terrible. Kunark and Vanilla would be after Velious and PoP, with Velious being the best lore stuff in the game. Depths was interesting but they raped Nektulos in the process. This is an opinion, but it also sort of coincides with the high points of the of the game. LDoN and Depths were more feature expansions than content expansions, but Luclin was just terrible storywise (especially when KK and SS ended up being mostly useless zones) and anything involving the discordians was dumb.

After that, on the last page or so there was a synopsis of recent expansions, and they all sound pretty silly from a lore standpoint.

I *was* amused by the "You murderhobos are responsible for destroying existence; I'd ask you to fix it, but I know that I have to offer you more shiny items to get you to undo your own fuck ups" expansion's "lore."

Yeah, the shit after Quarm was just... great. And definitely one of the lowest points during the first few Xpacs. Hence my "to an extent" addendum!

I hated luclin and POP because it made us move out of all the old cities with tons of character into bland white washed one that felt like hospitals. It's just sad how bad the devs were after velious, and they never even realized how terrible they were and just kept ruining more and more zones with revamps.

I would literally buy an expansion for $39.99 if the only feature was to re-do Freeport back to its old self

Yeah, who looks at that and thinks "this is an improvement; ship it."

Vinyard_sl said:

I would literally buy an expansion for $39.99 if the only feature was to re-do Freeport back to its old self

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Kuro_sl said:

Yeah, who looks at that and thinks "this is an improvement; ship it."

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If they consolidated all 3 zones into one Freeport, I might have swallowed it. But the fact they made the revamps these massive sprawling mazes and kept all of them? Such a clusterfuck.

I loved EQ up through PoP. PoP was the last expansion I really enjoyed. However, I do complete agree on not liking how they pulled us away from the cities. I still think they could have integrated of their decision into the old world. Some of these hubs should have been ran through the main cities or popular areas instead of furthering the world out into the multi-deminsional instances that really stretch the lore.

I think they should have placed the bazaar into EC Tunnels some how to embrace what the community created on their own. Travel should have never been messed with either as it served as a community builder and even an economy for some.

I believe a lot of their decision were just to make it look like you were getting more with each expansion. Quantity over Quality. Hindsight is always 20/20 but even still, they should have never pulled the community so far away from the old world that it became completely vacant. I would have rather they slightly altered the current world through each expansion. If you woke the sleeper, the next expansion should have been how that impacted current Norrath. After you restored it that led the next expansion. Same with Quarm, Zeb, and that entire story arc. There was no reason to forget Norrath. Enough happened to where we needed to save it over and over again instead of forgetting it.

I'm sure more people would have been upset if they kept redoing old content and got less new stuff with each expansion

I think the first miss-step was the graphics engine overhaul in Luclin was mismanaged badly. It basically threw out the entire art style of the old game, the new zones after that just never felt quite right. I think EQ screwing that up so badly has been why WoW has been so careful about it.

I think this phinny TLP is mostly hitting the right notes for what a modernized EQ should be. It's a shame we only have through luclin to really enjoy it. The marriage between contested open world for basically bonus loot for the truly hardcore and instances of the same content is a very good idea.

Creslin_sl said:

I think the first miss-step was the graphics engine overhaul in Luclin was mismanaged badly. It basically threw out the entire art style of the old game, the new zones after that just never felt quite right. I think EQ screwing that up so badly has been why WoW has been so careful about it.

I think this phinny TLP is mostly hitting the right notes for what a modernized EQ should be. It's a shame we only have through luclin to really enjoy it. The marriage between contested open world for basically bonus loot for the truly hardcore and instances of the same content is a very good idea.

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I will still never forgive them for what they did to the look of netted kelp with those Luclin models.

Creslin_sl said:

I think the first miss-step was the graphics engine overhaul in Luclin was mismanaged badly. It basically threw out the entire art style of the old game, the new zones after that just never felt quite right. I think EQ screwing that up so badly has been why WoW has been so careful about it.

I think this phinny TLP is mostly hitting the right notes for what a modernized EQ should be. It's a shame we only have through luclin to really enjoy it. The marriage between contested open world for basically bonus loot for the truly hardcore and instances of the same content is a very good idea.

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I'm glad to see someone else mention the art style. Many people seem to be unable to separate polygon count and texture meshes from the underlying art style. Quality means more than technical improvements, it also means the actual art itself is well done, that there's an overall theme, and it all fits together to make a uniform game world with inhabitants that look like they belong in that world.

The Luclin abominations looked like they had been cut and pasted from some bootleg foreign copycat version of EQ, and all the zones looked almost procedurally generated. Like, instead of being hand crafted, the new zones look completely computer generated somehow. But those Luclin models, what a crushing disappointment that was at the time. I had assumed we'd be getting updated, beautifully rendered versions of the exact same models we had. Jesus.

Yeah Luclin had some pretty shit zones. Whole expac including the models were terrible. Especially when they took the super stylized original models and tried to make them more "realistic" looking, resulting in some serious Pedo-gnome/asslings and the abominations that were the Iksar/Ogres/Trolls. And they took my DESK's platemail skirt away =/

The models were a definite downgrade, but I really feel like the animations were the worst part. They are terrible.

Kuro_sl said:

Yeah, who looks at that and thinks "this is an improvement; ship it."

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Can't be done easily. All of the quest spawns and such were moved to facilitate the new map, and a lot of stuff was added. To simply revert to the old maps would break a ton of stuff. While they had backups of the database from back then, code changes and data structure changes meant you couldn't just cut/paste it back in and have it work.

As for the look of the revamped Freeport, none of us liked it, except the artist who created it, who sadly passed away in 2014. It was a very sore subject with all of us honestly, and especially on him.. He took criticism of his work painfully, and I guess I could understand that.. After hearing how bad Freeport looked for years, I'm sure it would get to anybody.