Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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It's almost at the end of page 2 now (which means someone is going to necro it soon). It dies when the hope really dies, and in EQ, you always have a cleric with a sprinkler around to rez you.
EQ Never
- Thread starter Convo
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
I suggested that they were using landmark to get people to pay them while having those players design the game a while back and a bunch of people here (possible devs) sent me some pretty offensive messages.
Kinda sad that I was proven right. This is an old scam. Like when the dude from limp bizkit had a contest to be a guitarist in his band, but you had to sign a contract that allowed him creative rights to anything you played during the audition.
Its kind of ingenious how they presented it, but still pretty fucked up.
Jait
Molten Core Raider
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To be fair....
Gaming companies have done this for decades. Using one project to fluff up another? It's old hat in any industry. That said, doesn't excuse it. And I'd leave this one hanging outside the 'shaw just a bit longer.....I have a feeling once a few of these SOE/Daybreak get pissy in the next month or three the stories will flow like Spice from Arrakis. You can't tell me you insiders aren't hearing grumblings already?
Gaming companies have done this for decades. Using one project to fluff up another? It's old hat in any industry. That said, doesn't excuse it. And I'd leave this one hanging outside the 'shaw just a bit longer.....I have a feeling once a few of these SOE/Daybreak get pissy in the next month or three the stories will flow like Spice from Arrakis. You can't tell me you insiders aren't hearing grumblings already?
Landmark began as nothing more than the tools to make EQN. Then ponytail got a wild hair up his ass to make it a game, which ultimately killed EQN. Developmentally, Landmark and EQN were the same on the engineering side for a long time because they had obstacles to overcome which applied to both. Ponytail is the main reason EQN never happened because he refused to let go of Landmark as a game and wasted years of resources in trying to brute force it into being. The designers on EQN wrote hundreds and hundreds of design docs, often rewriting them as goals changed because they had no actual tools to make the game yet.
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But Ponytail sold thousands of those Landmark preorders on some hyped up promises and sand art. So I guess management thought he was smart for riding the Minecraft bandwagon, when in the end most of these preorders for Landmark sold because of EQ nostalgia, and not because of Minecraft with Voxels.
Funny thing though that I remember him proclaiming that it was "the players who asked us to make Landmark available", so I guess he thought it was a great idea to make this a separate game. In the end the players just wanted to try creating stuff and play with the development tools until some sort of "real game" was happening.
But I don't only blame Ponytail, because the first rule when shit happens in a big company is always: It's not just some individual who fucked up, there have to be one or more people above him that enabled shit to happen and let him fuck things up. Because in a big company basically everyone is always in "cover your ass" mode.
I 100% blame Smed and not Dave, just because Smed hates MMO's now and thinks we all want 45 minute play sessions
Nope. Smed gave Dave free reign over EQN because he knew Dave had passion for MMOs where Smed did not. Smed's real blame here is trusting Dave too much and not keeping a closer watch on things. Also, Dave is incredibly good at the smoke and mirrors game. That and self-promotion are probably his two best skills.
Jait
Molten Core Raider
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For their next project some of you devs need to go out and get a really splintery 4x4 from your hardware store. Make sure it really needs to be sandpapered down, I'm talking just filthy with splinters, the bigger the better.
Ok. Got that?
Now get some rusty nails. Hammer those bad boys in there, if you split the wood it's not a problem. In fact it'll be perfect for our purposes. Next you'll want to cut and reinforce a 4x4 hole in the wall, roughly 2.5' to 3' off the ground. Now I know by now you've completely fucked this up and probably built a slide with a pinwheel attached, so go get an intern to follow my instructions while you play air guitar....done? Okay now slide that nasty old piece of wood into your slot in the wall. Now I want you to go Vaseline your asshole up, bend over, and slowly back into it until you die. Got it? Nothing better than 12 dollar an hour 'Devs' sitting around pointing fingers and blaming everyone else for the complete collapse of their industry. Fucking no talent retards.
Ok. Got that?
Now get some rusty nails. Hammer those bad boys in there, if you split the wood it's not a problem. In fact it'll be perfect for our purposes. Next you'll want to cut and reinforce a 4x4 hole in the wall, roughly 2.5' to 3' off the ground. Now I know by now you've completely fucked this up and probably built a slide with a pinwheel attached, so go get an intern to follow my instructions while you play air guitar....done? Okay now slide that nasty old piece of wood into your slot in the wall. Now I want you to go Vaseline your asshole up, bend over, and slowly back into it until you die. Got it? Nothing better than 12 dollar an hour 'Devs' sitting around pointing fingers and blaming everyone else for the complete collapse of their industry. Fucking no talent retards.
Muligan
Trakanon Raider
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In what i've seen from Dave over the years those two skills are exactly the way i've pegged him over the years. It's quite obvious that's the way he operates. It's a shame he's pretty much drove everything I ever in enjoyed in the EQ franchise into the ground.
It was always called Next internally if I remember correctly. I don't remember ever seeing or hearing about anything EQ3. When Rich Waters and I were talking about things in the VERY VERY early days of a new EQ, before there was even a team really, he came up with the idea of a single character that could play any role, primarily so no group was ever left standing around for (class X) to login so they could do something. I had some very different ideas I'd hope to pursue, but we never really got a chance to explore much of that.. Shortly after this period, Rich got a great offer to basically run his own studio up in the bay area, and he left SOE.
Now, the initial full-game designs were definitely a departure from EQ1/2, and were nothing like what was shown/described to people at SOE Live, but those really never made it past the high level design stuff. I'm not sure who was responsible for shooting down the earlier ideas.
BilboFaggins
N00b
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The screen shots they showed before they scrapped the original design for EQN and went to EverMinecraft looked fantastic. It honestly looked like they finally got what we were asking for; Everquest's world and game play with WoW's game client.
All we the long time fans of Everquest really want is Everquest on a modern game client with EQ's stylized art direction.
I mean, who really liked the "realistic" look of Everquest II's characters or Everquest's Luclin modals? Luclin took the art style out of Everquest, and made all the characters look like various sized humans. I personally would love to see someone take the original Everquest art style and gameplay, and apply it to WoW's game client. I would buy that in a heart beat.
All we the long time fans of Everquest really want is Everquest on a modern game client with EQ's stylized art direction.
I mean, who really liked the "realistic" look of Everquest II's characters or Everquest's Luclin modals? Luclin took the art style out of Everquest, and made all the characters look like various sized humans. I personally would love to see someone take the original Everquest art style and gameplay, and apply it to WoW's game client. I would buy that in a heart beat.
I wonder what the original race/class concept art looked like for the original everquest? Is it out on the interwebs somewhere?
Mughal
Bronze Knight of the Realm
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The "EQ3" version (aka the one without voxels or AI) was just design docs made by Jeff Butler. By the time a team was formed and code was being written it had already morphed into EQN.
And yes the EQN failure lays with Georgeson primarily. And there were a lot of other issues beyond useless tools that he was not dealing with. That game would have failed one way or another because of his management.
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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I saw those original character models for EQ3 long before they were made public and the voxel crap started. They had more than just design docs if my inside man was to be believed. And since he provided the character models and animation, I had no reason to doubt him. Then they leaked a year later to the net and I assumed he was telling the truth.
The screenshots people saw early on were early prototypes of things in what was basically the Forgelight engine.. think Planetside 2 running EQ-like terrain.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Considering PS2 (Forgelight engine) looks pretty great and runs hundreds of players on screen at once, I've no clue why they strayed from that idea. Lower cost / proven tech? Na, fucking scrap it.. VOXELS!!
Melvin
Blackwing Lair Raider
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I thought it was pretty obvious as far back as the SOE Live debut that the proven tech that they really wanted to iterate on was Minecraft, and the cost saving reason why is so they could double dip into people's wallets by taking content created by paying customers and then selling that player created content back to other customers (thus requiring fewer content creating SOE employees). I'm sure there were plenty of people on the team that really wanted to make the best version of Everquest possible and using new and untested tech (VOXELS!!1) to do that made perfect sense as a means to that end. But the whole thing smelled like a cash cow to me from day one, and that's the kind of motivation that management needs to make big decisions like scrapping a project that's been in development for years and restarting from scratch like what happened with EQN.