EQ Never

Thing I miss about EQ of old. Getting some high lvl hand-me-downs and able to use it at any lvl. I hate the blocks games have now. I remember the day some high lvl took pity on me in oasis, I was trying to fight and running back and forth to the zone line for hours solo just for the stupid crocs lvling. They asked for me to come to the docks and gave me a glowing staff (Dont remember the full name, glowing wooden crook? Druid usable). It was awesome, I used that thing till way into my 40's. I was just about 1 shot-ing most anything I could find that day and lvling like a madman on noobs (hehe)!

EQ was a broken game, devs had no clue how ppl were going to play it nor plan to code a way to force them into their set setting but limited crude code and I love it!
I miss the no limit, no blocks and the huge way you could play around with getting what you wanted and do the things you could with imagination. Its like the re-imagining that I look for, its the freedom to twink and bend the rules to get what you want.

The No drop, lvl limit, lvl adjusted, durability, limited charged, mob limit, zone blocked and throw away cheap quest item every 3lvl update, can go away and be deleted from all dev/coder memories to the rest of time and I would be a happy player. I will never miss that crap!!!
All that crap in place now was to stop, camping, farming, twinking and over powered lvling. At it did was dumb down game play to a point you are on rails with no ambition to but to raid with john all thumbs for the same crapping items everyone else has!

I look at EQ not as a game really but a time with limited coding, the shock and awe game company devs were seeing what the outside community was doing with their creation in both good and bad and quickly trying to correct what they could in where they wanted their creation to be.

Long winded rant incoming.

Utnayan_sl said:

I wasn't talking about fight mechanics at all. I was talking, originally, about being sick of DPS meters and agreeing with Mkopec. It takes away from the fun of just playing the game, and turns it into a job.

Click to expand...

There was a discussion we had in the 38s thread briefly about how you would get away from the concept of 'dps' entirely from the game, or at least from boss fights. It went basically the same way as what happens if you remove healing.

Think about it for a second. What point does healing add to a fight? And I'm not talking about the exciting big life saving tension moments where you shit yourself as you hit Divine Aura or whatever magic button you have. We're talking about chain casting lesser heal, lesser heal, lesser heal, COMPLETE HEAL, lesser heal...

If you ask any healer that isn't fucking retarded (or is a woman who does it because being a mediocre healer is the easiest way to not get chewed out for being mediocre at the game. Sexist I know but after 13 years you tend to see a few patterns) and they'll tell you that shit has just become second nature and is ultimately boring.

So let's remove healing and instead leave the classes with those super powers. Life grip, DA, LoH, etc...

Well you spend less time staring at health bars and more time watching for when you need to act. You start doing what's fun about healing which is directing the flow of battle and saving other people from when they fuck up.

So let's do the same with DPS.

Remove the sinister strike and fireball and what are you left with? Classes with a bunch of utilities. Utilities they never get to use because most bosses are 99% immune to that shit unless specifically flagged not to be (kick rotations, yay! /vomit).

The Rogue in WoW used to be (at least pre-Pandaria, I admittely haven't played since then) one of the classes that most showcased this. Rogues go from a class that has something like 30 tricks up their sleeves to a sinister strike rotation as soon as they go up against a boss monster. I always liked watching when Derkon or Kismo would get asked to cover an add on a boss fight and they're over there stunning it, vanishing, blinding it, using everything they got. Then they get back on the boss and it's mash SS while keeping up SnD.

Oh, oh...the good ones knew how to save energy to not waste SS cycles. Yeah.

So let's remove that shit. You've got a bunch fo DPS classes with stuns, intercepts, misdirects, escapes and so forth.

You know what I find to be the most fun times in boss fights? When shit goes wrong and you piss yourself. The only fucking time I actually enjoyed killing a boss in Mount Hyjal for example was when we fucked up the pull of the one mana drain guy and like 12 people died. But instead of aborting it, the 13 of us still standing said fuck it, this guys a pussy and killed him. It was absolute goddamn chaos but we pulled it off.

I want boss fights to be that. I want it to be a 5 minute chaotic shitfest. Maybe you only use a spell or ability every 10 seconds. Not because it has a 10 second cast time like in EQ, not because it has a 10 second cool down like in WoW, but because you need to wait until the right time to use it. There might be a better way to do it but unless someone hands me a contract and a big fat paycheck I'm not going to dwell on it. I just like to imagine fights where people are less concerned about keeping up their rotation and more concerned about not fucking up when it's their turn to push the big red button.

The only major problem with the concept that I can really see is that effectively turns every fight into a gimmick fight and the more you do gimmick fights the more you tend to hate them because you just want to be done with that shit. By the 20th time you're pulling the lever at the loot slot machine you want to not have to think about that shit and just roll over it because you've mudflated the fuck past it.

Anyways...

Dr Neir_sl said:

Thing I miss about EQ of old.

Click to expand...

This is a huge double edged sword. I'm going to separate it into two topics.

1) Twinking. You know what's funny? I remember back to the old flameplay and shit and twinking used to be a massive goddamn problem. People farming shit for alts, twinks taking up all the spawns, etc...if you wanted to spawn a 30 page thread all you had to do was whine about twinking. People took that shit seriously. You can still do it in WoW by the way. I'm not sure about most other games since I typically only play MMO's for the free month or whatever but in WoW you could twink some hardcore shit using tradeskills. Hilariously enough the whole reason you can level in BG's now in WoW was to combat the effect of twinking. They got sick of 'regular' players doing BG's and whining about twinks who had 3x the hp, had max level enchants on their weapons and so forth.

Twinking is fun as fuck for existing players but you have to be careful not to put them into direct competition with new players or shit gets heated.

2) The game being 'broken'. This is the one people usually cite when they say how EQ was so much better because you could do X and Y and Z. I don't think they realize how badly we exploited the fuck out of WoW in the beginning as well. Especially in battlegrounds, that shit was fucked up. There was so much broken stuff. The Green Whelp Tunic is like the flagship item for this but there were others.

The problem with stuff like this is that while it's amusing at first it can quickly become annoying. Yeah we all miss clicky buffs from EQ but if I had to go another raid in WoW with the Admiral Hat Buddy System I would have strangled a motherfucker. Using Mind Vision to push debuffs off the tank was great and all while it lasted but I didn't want to be doing that 3 expansions later. I hated losing a BG match because some prick on the other team figured out the Lion Horn crash bug.

I think being able to break the game on occasion is amusing but I'd rather they fix it then leave it in due to laziness or whatever. When you find yourself glitching through the floor in the Plane of Water every week because you know Sony is never gonna fix it is just sad.

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

The only major problem with the concept that I can really see is that effectively turns every fight into a gimmick fight and the more you do gimmick fights the more you tend to hate them because you just want to be done with that shit. By the 20th time you're pulling the lever at the loot slot machine you want to not have to think about that shit and just roll over it because you've mudflated the fuck past it.

Anyways...

Click to expand...

Get away from repeatable scripted encounters then. Give players all those nifty utility spells. Then create a vast pool of fight mechanics that engage the players and require them to utilize those skills. Then create a robust monster generator system. Allow monsters to have variable skill sets. The number and rank of the monster skills depends on the level of the content.

Certain monsters might be fairly set in stone and only have one real gimmick to them. However, named monsters and rares should always have an extra trick or two up their sleeves. Much in the same way attributes are given to champions in diablo II and III, except with actual fight mechanics.

Bosses could have long lists of potential skills. Each technique needs to have a notification or clue for the players to pick up on. A good animation that signals what attack is coming, or for attacks that give little warning, some clue on the creature itself. The creature is covered in large thorns if it has a damage shield, or rears its head back and flares it wings before unleashing a breath attack, good telegraphs of what the fight contains.

The purpose of the generator is to populate the far reaches of the world with rather unique encounters, and once defeated these encounters are gone. Some encounters might be god awful difficult due to a really bad combination of mechanics, so each mechanic should be ranked or given a difficulty index. When the monster is being pieced together, the overall difficulty index should reflect the level of the area it will be encountered in. Or, the players should be clued in that it's going to be a tough fight before they attempt it some how. However harder creatures should net better rewards, or harvest better components.

Overall... I would like to see monster hunting become a sort of specialization or profession within a game and not just THE game.

Pancreas_sl said:

Overall... I would like to see monster hunting become a sort of specialization or profession within a game and not just THE game.

Click to expand...

Hmmm that's kinda interesting. What if there was a set of skills in the game that allowed a PC to 'sense' incoming attacks?

Low skill: Monster begins casing ability_14, Player sees indicating aura
Mid level: Monster begins casting ability_14, Player sees colored indicating aura revealing magic type (arcane, fire, ice etc)
High level: Monster begins casting ability_14, Player sees colored and unique graphic aura indicating magic type and spell type (dd, cc, dmg shield etc)

Could be kinda neat and reactive.

I want boss fights to be that. I want it to be a 5 minute chaotic shitfest. Maybe you only use a spell or ability every 10 seconds. Not because it has a 10 second cast time like in EQ, not because it has a 10 second cool down like in WoW, but because you need to wait until the right time to use it.

Click to expand...

This is what i hated the most in World of Dance Dance Revolution, everything was perfectly balanced, scripted.

While i disliked "random" abilities like Deathtouch, AE Fear, Teleport, CornerWarp, they gave you "semi controlled chaos".
There is nothing more rewarding than "losing half the raid due to a random event/fuckup" and then being able to recover.

WoW's biggest failure is limiting combat resurrections, if you can't rez people, you can't kill people, so "unavoidable deaths" are out of the equation.

Losing 2 tanks to General Rapem in PoF, 3 healers at Razorgore, having 4 bad calls during Nefarian....
"Messy, Bloody, Fun", MMO should not be DDR

EmiliaEQ_sl said:

This is what i hated the most in World of Dance Dance Revolution, everything was perfectly balanced, scripted.

While i disliked "random" abilities like Deathtouch, AE Fear, Teleport, CornerWarp, they gave you "semi controlled chaos".
There is nothing more rewarding than "losing half the raid due to a random event/fuckup" and then being able to recover.

WoW's biggest failure is limiting combat resurrections, if you can't rez people, you can't kill people, so "unavoidable deaths" are out of the equation.

Losing 2 tanks to General Rapem in PoF, 3 healers at Razorgore, having 4 bad calls during Nefarian....
"Messy, Bloody, Fun", MMO should not be DDR

Click to expand...

EQ raids started leading this direction in OoW I believe, specifically the Mata Muram fight and a couple of the Trials leading up to it. Someone fucks up, raid is fucked type scenarios. I don't particularly enjoy the razor tight tuning of modern MMO "hard" raiding, as while I enjoy relying on people I don't like having to be the guy that knows he didn't fuck up but someone you theoretically trust/like/are friends with did and it cost time and resources because of them. That's a bad feel, bro. I much prefer something a bit more in the middle, like the Ony/MC fights of old WoW and the Velious raid bosses, but more hybridized.

I also want procedurally generated bosses =| Shit that is different each time you fight it, not the same scripted encounter or the same shitty "Lawl I'm AOW I flurry and quad! Rawr" each week/month/whatever the respawn is. Scripted encounters become instantly boring when you figure out the script or have seen it more than once, the other becomes boring the first time you fight it. Once it comes down to victory hinging on your clerics not fucking up the rotation and all the DPS not falling asleep, the encounter sort of loses its fun. Toss some statics in for story/lore reference, but have the majority of difficult content be stuff that is constantly different and difficult in its own way instead of revolving around class stacking a raid or "This guy can only be beaten if we have an enchanter" type shit. Take away the razor edge tuning, but create variety so that if farming needs to happen, it isn't the same boring crap every time you kill it.

Sadly diablo3 does it perfectly with elite packs getting "Vortex FireChain Fast Jailer" is vastly different from "Desecrator, Illusionist, Plagued, Teleporter".
This can easily be implemented into an MMO adding "multiplicative loot coefficients" (harder combo = different items/drop rates).

Zehn - Vhex_sl said:

So let's remove healing and instead leave the classes with those super powers. Life grip, DA, LoH, etc...

Click to expand...

So basically Guild Wars 2

Convo_sl said:

I always figured this is the way games would go. Even on a smaller level with group zones and different mobs becoming a boss after the last boss was killed. Allowing for different encounters when you revisit the zone. I have no idea how hard it would be to design a system like that tho? When I think living and breathing world these are the type of things that make sense.

Click to expand...

Can you imagine the EPIC rant by furor if the encounters changed everytime FOH went to raid? hahahaha

The real problem is doing any of this content for longer than 2-3 months sucks. There is no way to make farming something fun for 6 months. The high amount of attention that a modern raid takes makes it worse imo, slogging through month 5 of PoTime was more bearable than month 5 of say ICC because for he most part by month 5 in PoT you didn't have to even pay attention.

No matter how many retarded rings of fire you add it won't fix it. Making easy ass copypasta content like EQ had for the first 8 or so years is prolly better than tightly scripted stuff, cause the high amount of scripting and difficulty really slows down how fast a company can make new raid zones. OMMs was the first boss who could kinda wipe you, but even missing a mask wasn't a wipe if you had abashis.

GW2 didn't eliminate healing. It just made everyone responsible for their own heals to an extent or allowed some people to specialize in group healing if they really wanted to. That is very different than NO HEALS FOR YOU.

If I were to make a no heals system I would do three things.

First, I would change how a character gets hurt. Instead of a flat HP resource that allows the player to function without penalty right until their last hp, I would create a damage system based around status ailments and a stamina resource.

The stamina resources works just like rogues in WoW. You use it to fuel your moves skills AND magic (no more mana). It recovers fairly quickly (depending on endurance/stamina stat). When you get hit, you lose a chunk of your stamina that you have to recover. If you get to low stamina you start to move slowly as you become exhausted. If lose all stamina you lose consciousness.

However the real issues comes with the status ailments. Normal hits can inflict critical status ailments like crippled/broken limbs, blindness, concussions, bleeding ect. Most of these ailments are permanent until they get treated.

Death can occur in many ways. Some critical effects result in instant death. (Decapitation, heart piercing, ect.) Also, if a player reaches a negative threshold for stamina they will die. Reaching 0 stamina results in loss of consciousness. Reaching, lets say -100, stamina results in death. Striking an unconscious player results in an automatic critical hit and almost ensures they will die. Also, bleed effects can continue to drain stamina past 0, so if you lose consciousness while bleeding heavily, you probably will bleed out.

Second, I would change how support spells operate. Like Zehn said, take away healing but leave the positioning skills, damage prevention and mitigation skills. When you are in combat, you have a rapidly recovering stamina stat that can take hits, but if you get status ailments, those accumulate and reduce fighting effectiveness quickly. So the goal of a fight is to A. Hit the enemy and B. Not get hit or minimize the effect of a hit. All skills revolve around those two elements.

ThirdStatus Ailment recovery and treatment is something that occurs primarily outside of battle. This is not a hard restriction but a natural one. To treat someone for their injuries they need to remain stationary and the person treating them needs to be close. Also, most injuries will require some medical consumables that need to be applied to the patient and so will require some inventory management. This means two players are going to be stationary and unable to readily defend themselves while treatment is occurring. In order for this to happen while combat is in progress, other players will need to screen the vulnerable players.

So getting hit once can quickly lead to getting hit multiple times as status ailments reduce mobility and effectiveness. Things can go downhill fast.

Oh and for a system like this to shine, there is no tab targeting or targeting at all really. You use a skill... it goes off whether you are in range or not. Spells are manually targeted and can miss. Projectiles requiring aiming and leading moving targets. This increases the chances of avoiding damage.

Creslin_sl said:

The real problem is doing any of this content for longer than 2-3 months sucks. There is no way to make farming something fun for 6 months. The high amount of attention that a modern raid takes makes it worse imo, slogging through month 5 of PoTime was more bearable than month 5 of say ICC because for he most part by month 5 in PoT you didn't have to even pay attention.

No matter how many retarded rings of fire you add it won't fix it. Making easy ass copypasta content like EQ had for the first 8 or so years is prolly better than tightly scripted stuff, cause the high amount of scripting and difficulty really slows down how fast a company can make new raid zones. OMMs was the first boss who could kinda wipe you, but even missing a mask wasn't a wipe if you had abashis.

Click to expand...

I think the problem is not making interesting encounters.... it's expecting those encounters to be repeated dozens of times each. I hate farming or repeating content. However I understand the effort and time that goes into making even a single encounter and realize a game that has a bunch of scripted encounters that I complete once will not keep me occupied for long. (See every single player action/adventure game ever)

So I say the only alternative that can create interesting fights and not require me to repeat them forever is one where the encounters are generated and then removed once completed. This probably works better in a non instanced sand box environment.

I think the EQ type bosses that are simplistic and have only a few abilities can be great for lower level and generic creatures. Every mammoth you meet will tend to behave the same way but still have some moves like trample, tusk swing, charge ect. Rare enemies and special encounters might have generated ability lists and scripts on how to use those abilities together. These will never be the same really. Maybe a few slots in each monsters arsenal can be set in stone. Like all flying dragons get a tail swipe, wing buffet and breath attack. However one ancient black dragon also gains a lot of skills from the undead/ defilement group of monster skills and can summon undead, use mind control, spread disease clouds and cause horrifying vissages/phantoms.

Categorizing skills an letting monsters pull from those pools can help maintain themes. However in such a system seeing similar skills from different boss encounters is totally possible. So eventually an experienced player will devise strategies to counter particular skills and not specific bosses.

Categorizing skills gives players a better chance to prepare for a fight as well. If you know you are going after a lich lord... you can prepare to fight a whole host of dark and evil skills. What specific skills this lich has will be somewhat random, but you know the general theme and methods to counter those possibilities.

The key to all of this? once you kill something it's dead. You never fight the same creature twice. Generic creatures may be essential copies of each other, but bosses and champions will always have something different about them.

Going off of Zehns anti healing rants, I'd like to specify what I'd actually like to see in a combat system. It goes back to my long ass post in the "What next" thread. Essentially the game is broken down back to autoattack.

Instead of making it so I have to hit a key every single GCD with pretty shitty rotations, why not automate that? I believe Bards worked like this a bit in VG, but I can't remember. Essentially as a mage at level 1, your autoattack is a wand pew-pewing, or your staff swinging at a mob. You can change the rate of your attack depending on skills and whatever. Then at level 5 you get fireball, so you go into your character pane somewhere and augment your attack with fireball. Now whenever you attack something you cast Fireball.

You can then augment that fireball to cast faster, slower, bigger AOE, zero aoe, two at a time, whatever. You can go nuts with higher amounts of customization of secondary spells or whatever. Like at level 30 you get Bigbys Clenched Fist your autoattack now is FB every seconds and Bigbys ever 4 seconds.

You know those retarded Korean games where you fly a ship through a shitfest of enemy fire but your spaceship gains different levels of shooting? That becomes your autoattack essentially.

Then toss in your timed attacks, spells, defenses, heals, whatever. These spells can be on like 30s cooldowns or whatever.

In the end you are then more worried about controlling your character's POV, speed and placement on the map. You can then create a more platform or action based combat if you are so inclined.

If you're melee, the autoattack "pulses" as I like to call them, can become faster where you attack twice every pulse, or three times, or whatever. Lots of things could be done.

Blocking can be made into an active skill. You could also probably blend in TERA's combat system as well. I always digged that combo flow system they had.

Anyway, TLDR: Less "rotation" combat, and more reactive.

Personally I found PVE in GW2 to be tedious. I didn't enjoy the whole no healing thing because I don't find all that reactive jump around stuff to be fun for long periods of time. Kinda why I liked Darkfalls pvp but hated the pve, I don't want the monsters I have to sit and farm for hours to be jumping around making me play DDR, but I don't mind that the players do it because you don't sit there and farm players like that.

I think that issue more than most is just an issue of preference. Some people like more twitch, some like less. Arguing that one is better than the other is alot like arguing that Civ5 is would be a better game if it was more like Crysis or vice versa.

Draegan, I can see the system you are talking about working sort of like realm of the mad god. You can keep upgrading the auto-attack, but you also have some special skills that consume a resource.

It works well in a space shooter or bullet hell scenario where attacking is just a constant stream, and positioning becomes the main focus for the player.

For me personally, I dislike auto attacks in a melee or fantasy setting. Basically, I feel it turns combat intothis.

What I would like to see is a contextual system where attacks and abilities only become available when the player is in the right position and meets certain criteria. This is similar to Darksouls or other action rpgs. Each weapon comes with a set of moves, those moves are performed using position and movement and then executing the attack.

So rather than a backstab button, you equip a backstab compatible weapon, get in the back arc of the target, and attack... the backstab will occur if the positioning is correct.

As for spell progression. I think using a skill system for various schools of magic works well. A spell will become available at a minimum proficiency level. Here the spell has a long cast time, can critically fail (hurt the caster), fizzle, or cast normally. It costs a lot of resources to cast as well. As the player's skill in that school increases, the casting time, chance of failure and resource cost of the spell all decrease.

I would make the equipped weapon of the caster further differentiate the spell. A staff increases cast time, range, damage, and resource cost of a spell. A wand decreases cast time, range, damage, and resource cost. A sword increases damage a lot, increases resource cost tremendously, reduces range to point blank, and reduces cast time to near instant. A dagger reduces damage tremendously, reduces resource cost a lot, reduces range to point blank, and casting time to near instant. An open hand casts the spell normally per the players skill level.

The player readies a spell to cast and then left or right clicks the location to cast it. The left and right click correspond to to which hand or weapon they wish to channel the spell through.

There is a bunch of other ideas for melee minutia but I will stop here.

Well your backstab scenario works in my systems. You can augment your autoattack so that if you are standing behind a dude, you're attack will backstab for superduper damage. You can augment the whole thing based on how much twitch or control mechanism (controller vs. kb+m) you use.

Essentially think of it as a RIFT macro, which used to be awesome. You can stack all of your bullshit attacks into one button and spam it. Now just take out the spamming of the button. In the end it wouldn't be as retarded, and be more geared and developed for that system, but that's a way that I think I can communicate my idea with a real life example.

I'm with kerugen on the wow raiding. The moment they added multiple versions of the same zone I was out. Sunwell was the pinnacle of wow raiding for me. I'm certain they gained /maintained some small % of favor and subs by making raiding more universally accessible, but for anyone who enjoys the efforts of destroying and seeing mobs that others never will, then the experience is certainly cheapened. I do know I am in the minority however.

I posted this earlier but seems more in context now. Since we are talking about procedural systems for raid mob generation. One thing which has not been attempted yet is environmental manipulation affecting mob spawns. My field of dreams philosophy.

Say for example you have some empty , nondescript space. You can blast it, create a cave network and enrich it with minerals. This encourages a giant careworm raid mob to spawn. Depending on the minerals etc and location you get different types of the mob with different abilities and loot.

Alternatively, take that same land and grow a forest, place a buncha cows etc. now suddenly a dragon invades.

To add to the complexity, this defined space may be in a Pvp area, and ownership of the land is another factor in 'growing' your raid mob.

These are just a couple shitty ideas off the top of my head. Point being a sandbox could provide a lot of untapped potential for creating a more interesting raiding environment.