EQ Never

Utnayan

Utnayan

F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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I'll take this moment to remind everyone here that Jeff Butler and Georgeson are behind this for the most part. Keep your expectations low as shit and you should be fine. Expecting anything "emergent" from these two retards would be like expecting Rich Vogel to bring battlecry studios to a Fortune 500 company. And when you read that post from the soe employee, those two and some other of the relics are exactly who he is talking about.
 
tad10

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,533
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Utnayan_sl said:
I'll take this moment to remind everyone here that Jeff Butler and Georgeson are behind this for the most part. Keep your expectations low as shit and you should be fine. Expecting anything "emergent" from these two retards would be like expecting Rich Vogel to bring battlecry studios to a Fortune 500 company. And when you read that post from the soe employee, those two and some other of the relics are exactly who he is talking about.
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Hi Ut. You forget that I (and a few others in this thread) liked Vanguard. Despite (and in the case of the bugavator becasuse of) the many bugs, and before it got thrashed post-APW/FTP it was probably my favorite game, even over EQ. So I've got no problem with Butler as Creative Director. I would have played EQN if all it were was EQ lore + VG classes/combat.

I am concerned though over the possibility that EQN has some kind of craptastic Wildstar/DCUO actiony combat. That would suck so I'm counting on the relics not to "innovate" in that manner.

In any event, we'll see in 7 1/2 days.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

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Teekey_sl said:
In combat? Yikes.
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It would blow your mind. Completely heal and recover all your mana, mid fight, with a potion. Buy as many as you want. Rez gems that bring anyone back from dead with no penalty, 100 cash in the shop. Extremely fast ground AND flying mounts at level 1. Entire sets of good gear that you can just buy in a set every 10 levels or so. And the lockboxes drop almost constantly from mobs, you need to buy they keys to open them, and they have legendary items as good as raid gear which you can wear even in the low levels.

It's truly obscene.
 
Utnayan

Utnayan

F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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tad10_sl said:
Hi Ut. You forget that I (and a few others in this thread) liked Vanguard. Despite (and in the case of the bugavator becasuse of) the many bugs, and before it got thrashed post-APW/FTP it was probably my favorite game, even over EQ. So I've got no problem with Butler as Creative Director.
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I would say you should be more concerned with Georgeson being the producer over Butler holding a creative position of which he has no experience in his life of actually doing. Think of that last part when reading the SOE employee comments. Regardless, we can agree EQ2's velious was one of the worst expansions. And eq2's cash shop was also designed by Georgeson, who on his linked in still claims to this day how awesome it all was when both were universally panned. While I cannot argue your subjective like for Vanguard or your specific tastes, we should agree that it was an objective failure and sunk the organization.

I wouldn't expect much out of this demo. If people hold their expectations low enough, it shouldn't matter. They would be in a lot better shape if Higby was behind this.
 
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Dizzam_sl

shitlord
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Utnayan_sl said:
I would say you should be more concerned with Georgeson being the producer over Butler holding a creative position of which he has no experience in his life of actually doing. Think of that last part when reading the SOE employee comments. Regardless, we can agree EQ2's velious was one of the worst expansions. And eq2's cash shop was also designed by Georgeson, who on his linked in still claims to this day how awesome it all was when both were universally panned. While I cannot argue your subjective like for Vanguard or your specific tastes, we should agree that it was an objective failure and sunk the organization.

I wouldn't expect much out of this demo. If people hold their expectations low enough, it shouldn't matter. They would be in a lot better shape if Higby was behind this.
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I don't think he will single-handedly tank EQN, but I can't say I understand the decision to put him in charge. He doesn't seem to have experience designing the kind of game that EQN is suppose to be. It seems the biggest title under his belt is Planetside. I've never played, but I've heard mostly good things.

My biggest concern with him is that he seems to be nothing more than a smart business decision. Of course, SoE is first and foremost a business, but Georgeson seems to only have passion for gimmicky stuff (e.g. zOMG! and Free Realms) that can make money. I could be totally wrong about the guy, and I hope he proves that I am.
 
Rezz

Rezz

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There's a real problem with the words "emergent gameplay" in that they are trying to encapsulate what they -think- made EQ1 great. Instead of saying "emergent gameplay" to say "we didn't know how pathing worked in our own game, nor how abilities we put into our own game would be used with said pathing we didn't understand." Because otherwise, their version of a sandbox might as well be a lobby where you pick Everstrike servers to play zero grav 1hit kill nonsense in EFP. Their wording is making it sound more and more like a toolset and less like a game.

Wouldn't that be a hilarious: they re-release EQ1 but you can modify terrain like Populous and change mob/player stats and abilities through a simple UI. No graphics update, nothing. Cash Shop to purchase moddable expansions and races and stuff. Just tools to make EQ in a Window so Tyen shits himself in a rage.

EQ:psyche.

I fucking -hate- when PR guys use buzzwords repeatedly like SANDBOX! over and over without explaining what the fuck they mean when they say it. Drives me nuts.

edit: also apparently I replied to a post from hours ago without realizing it. Woops~
 
Quaid

Quaid

Trump's Staff
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Heh I'm pretty sure they know exactly what emergent gameplay means, however, I'm not sure one can design a game with the intention of players creating it... It's not very emergent then, is it?

My favourite example of emergent gameplay making a game better than the original concept was in TRIBES. At launch, mediocre a best... When players started to 'ski' it became the best FPS of all time (IMO)
 
tad10

tad10

Elisha Dushku
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Utnayan_sl said:
I would say you should be more concerned with Georgeson being the producer over Butler holding a creative position of which he has no experience in his life of actually doing.
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Georgeson is a concern. Butler has creative experience at Sigil and at SOE (you forget that he was head of the unnamed-most-likely-EQN prototype team that formed right after SOE bought Sigil) though I'm certainly pleased they hired Trost (presumably to help fill in the blanks). Though the hiring of Trost - which of course I only found out about after I jumped on the August 6th-Beta annoucement bandwagon - has me jumping off the bandwagon and thinking Beta will be later.

My biggest worry about EQN is Smed's obsessive focus on FTP. I think a decent EQN (whatever that means to you) would be quite succesful with a traditional PTP model + PlayerShop of cosmetic items only but that option was never on the table. A decent EQN (whatever that means) with a FTP model is a problem because it will inevitably become PTW.

Anyway, I think SOE's in a bit of trouble (I note that Sony Games had something lost 97% of revenue the past fiscal year compared to 2012) so they desperately need a hit. I like to think that desperation may just get them the hit they need. But lets hold off arguing the merits of EQN until the reveal. I do think if EQN ends up sucking SOE is dead in the water and will get sold off.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

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I think they are thinking deeper with emergent gameplay this time. Not just oh look, people are using fear in combination with snare, or people are using FD to split stuff. I think in EQ Next they are looking at emergent gameplay outside of combat mechanics. Like they want people to own their own towns and care about them, so that when someone comes along to threaten it, they will be a serious enemy. And if someone is a respected trader or tradeskiller, the player might offer some kind of incentives to those types of players to hang around in his town. Maybe he will make money from the town by taking a cut of trades or something, or maybe the towns generate their own income somehow. And if so, maybe he will then hire players to help him protect his town. So players become part time Guards or something.

Maybe if players are no longer quest grinding, the rich people who are building their own towns might hire a player or group of players to go and chop some valuable wood from a far and dangerous place. Adventurous types will go and do that for the XP and then make cash from selling the materials.

Maybe mages can set trees on fire and it spreads like wildfire through a forest, injuring all the mobs - making for easy XP. But maybe those trees were needed by some players. So you have two groups of players with opposing needs. Something might come from that. If PVP is enabled.... a tradeskiller might hire players to go and kill other players who are disruptive by burning forests etc.

I'm sure there will be emergent combat stuff too, if you give players an interesting variety of spells and skills, smart people will inevitably come up with their own sneaky combinations. But I think the interactions between the players and the world is going be a bigger deal this time. That's what they are leading us to believe anyway.
 
Rezz

Rezz

Mr. Poopybutthole
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Tad: There are ways to monetize things (especially in the world of SANDBOX!) without being P2W. Paraphrasing myself from earlier in the thread, the easiest and most no-brained idea I can think of is to have questing be a purchasable option. If people want to sit around and grind mobs forever, that's 100% ok, but if someone wants a breadcrumb quest that takes them all over the world, they can pay a little extra. Or detailed maps (such as mapdaemon supplied in EQ) where as the Free player would just have access to a map making tool. Cosmetic items are a no brainer (additionally, I think charging a nominal fee so you -don't- have to see the stupid cash shop cosmetic effects would be genius and while wallet raping lame, something that many people would drop coin on) as would level restricted things such as mounts/modes of transportation/(if "Binding" is a thing, consumable items that let you bind just like a caster) etc etc. Shit that is neat but in no way pay to win. And if they are going to put in things that speed up xp/skill gain, they still have to have content organically gated so that 100 people working together off a shared wallet expenditure don't suddenly fuck up the economy/content for everyone else, while all they would be doing is progressing for themselves.

To extrapolate, content doesn't have to become more scarce because someone got there first. Every tier of content should expand the options available to -everyone- and not just the people opening it. The people opening it get first swing at even harder content, but it doesn't short change the entire server. I may be tooting my own horn a bit, but I also previously posted about dynamic monster populations that result in increasingly difficult encounters/mobs spawning, that killing them continues to add increasingly difficult mobs/encounters to the game, while increasing the rate at which earlier milestones occur.

Click for concept:
World is populated at server start by all normal mobs. Nothing named, nothing raid worthy. Nada. You go out into a field full of random shit (orc camps, darkweed snakes, and a single griffon floating around. I may have played East Commonlands a bit much) and start killing shit indiscriminately. Over time, you decide that killing orcs is the best way to spend your time since the snakes are SUPERpoison dickheads and the Griffon instagibs you. So you sit there killing orcs. Lots of people think this is a great idea as well, so the orc population of ECland dwindles. They stop respawning (some tiered ratio. 10 dead, camp of 4 spawns 1 less. 20 dead, camp of 3 spawns 1 less, etc etc) until all the orcs in EC are just simply... dead. Somewhere in this melee of orc rape, a stronger version of a Darkweed snake spawns, requiring effectively a group or beyond to kill. It drops items with stats or something more desirable than stuff that drops off orcs. So the evil snake thing dies, and you change zones, looking for more orcs to fuck up because orcs are good xp/skill points and no SUPERpoison to deal with.

So now there's only darkweed snakes to deal with in EC aside from the Griffon. People start killing the snakes. Now, you have orcs starting to respawn at the camps, which people of course are camping so they get instagibbed. Another snake boss spawns, and this cycle goes on for a bit. After a day or two of people cycling back and forth, an ingame town cryer (or a player made newspaper, whatever) tells the server that in Lavastorm there is a gigantic fucking snake now. So the world tries to kill it, but this is pretty explicitly a raid mob.

Now expand this type of content for every single mob type in every single zone. And here's the fun part: While killing those orcs over and over may not directly spawn a low level boss for you, they are kept as a tally for a raid boss regardless. The snakes were expedited because bosses were killed, which count as -tons- of regular kills for normal snakes. So people continue to fuck things up all over the world, with nobody high enough/organized enough to raid the raid bosses. This continues to spawn Tier 1 (the tier is important) raid bosses in specific locations around the world, with a few randomized bosses in random locations.

Eventually, some group of players (or whatever, from day 1) manages to get a raid force ready/geared/leveled and starts killing these raid bosses that are all over the place now. King Orc. King Snake. King Kobold. (I'm a misogynist) All die. This is adding into a second layer of kill counts that keeps track of how many raid bosses have been killed. The first kill of each "type" raid boss reduces the requirements of killing unrelated mobs in spawning that particular raid boss. Killing 100 orcs was enough to spawn Darkweed group Boss 1. When he dies, it only takes 50 orcs to spawn Darkweed group Boss 2. So! This second layer keeps track until a threshold of bosses (random +/- #) of the first Tier have been killed. This spawns a Dragon! (Or some other mob that is highly underrepresented among populations in the game) Killing this Tier 2 Boss then causes Raid Bosses from Tier 1 to have smaller requirements (1000 orcs or 10 Bosses down to 500 orcs or 5 Bosses) which then increases the rate at which Tier 2 raid bosses spawn. This is then kept into a third layer, which keeps track of how many tier 2 raid bosses are killed. You know the rest, eventually a Tier 3 boss spawns and this shortens the requirements for tier 2 bosses spawning, which in turn makes tier 3 bosses spawn more often, thus fueling more chances to spawn tier 4 bosses etc etc.

Tie this into resources for crafting/xp bonuses for zones becoming available.
When the game opens, you have Stone -> Gold equipment available with gemstones to match. Kill the first Dragon, Ebony becomes available. Kill a 3rd tier boss, Cobalt becomes available. Rare spawns on nodes or simply increasingly common finds on type mobs such as earth elementals etc. Killing the 4th tier might make previous matierals combinable into higher level versions of them. Take Terraria, a full on 2d Sandbox sorta, and how they progress from regular to hardmode and the frequency of ores and you have a similar concept. Extrapolate from there.
And you can easily turn a P2W into a Progress2Win scenario for everyone on the server. Then, nobody cares if you spend some real dollars to gain XP faster for a couple of hours. All you are doing is progressing the entire server and giving -more- chances to the rest of the server to enjoy varying types of content. If the name of the game is Content Denial(my favorite hipster punching bag) then I'm out. That type of gameplay suits jobless people/college kids/stay at home bad parents and pretty much nobody else. You -can- have your sandbox and play nice with the other kids as well.

And about PVP... well, fuck'em, they can have their ruleset servers and let the "emergent gameplay" that occurs in those cesspools be their badge of honor. This comes from a guy who has played on PVP servers in every game from EQ+ for the majority of time in each game played.

edit: added the hidden shit!
 
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nate_sl

shitlord
204
1
If the game is F2P, and everything seems to indicate it will be, the only way I see it working is if it's setup like EQ's (and I believe EVE's) system. Where you can play the game up to whatever point, and after that you really need a susbscription to play. The token system is the way to go, where a 1 month token can be purchased for $15.99 or whatever and traded in game between players. This will also make SOE the most cash in the long run, if the game is good. Let those subscription tokens be a way for players to trade in game plat for RL $. If SOE isn't using any form of subscription, count on it being P2W.
 
Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

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driedcatnip_sl said:
games that have this lvl of ptw you can't take seriously; enjoy what parts of it you can.
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Well with Vanguard I didn't really care because it's so old and nearly dead anyway. I just like to explore it and mess about, so paying to win was an advantage to me if anything. It's like a museum ride only I get to do it fast.

But they just can't do that to a new game without making it crap.
 
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Caleros_sl

shitlord
5
0
my concern is that it will end but being a game like every other mmo where you have to keep 9 buttons on cooldown while having 30 other buttons you should be pressing. I love how i can do other stuff(magic drafts, online poker, watch movies) and play classic eq(p99).
 
Teekey

Teekey

Mr. Poopybutthole
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There have been two quotes that really keep me excited - despite trying hard to temper my expectations:

Say what? You thought this one wasn't at E3? Well, really... it wasn't in any official capacity. But we were treated to an early look at what SOE has planned for the game's unveiling in August and we were quite simply blown away by every little detail we saw. This is going to sound like a cop-out, but we can't say why we are choosing EQN as our Best of Show because we've been sworn to secrecy until the big debut in August. What we can say is that we saw grand plans for the world's largest sandbox and it was more than enough to stand head and shoulders above any game we saw at E3. When Sony pulls back the curtain later this summer, you will not be disappointed. EverQuest Next is this year's E3 Best of Show, and in just a couple months you'll all understand why. We promise.

Source
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We've been looking forward to EverQuest Next for quite some time now. Even though our expectations heading into our private viewing during E3 were high, EverQuest Next exceeded those expectations on all fronts.

While we are sworn to secrecy on exactly what we were shown, what we can say is that EverQuest Next was hands-down the best game we had the pleasure of seeing during E3 2013. Franchise fans and MMO gamers across the globe will be able to learn exactly why that's the case on August 2nd during SOE Live when EQNext is given its grand unveiling.

Trust us when we say that you'll want to mark that date on your calendar, and be prepared to bask in the warm glow of EverQuest Next in all its glory. In the meantime, kudos to the folks over at SOE for winning our Best of Show award; we're as excited as you are to witness the impact EverQuest Next is surely going to have on gamers this August!

Source
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But we'll have to wait and see for ourselves.
 
tad10

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,533
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Rezz_sl said:
And if they are going to put in things that speed up xp/skill gain, they still have to have content organically gated so that 100 people working together off a shared wallet expenditure don't suddenly fuck up the economy/content for everyone else, while all they would be doing is progressing for themselves.
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I cant see SOE thinking this far ahead. I think they lucked out on the storybricks ai stuff.
 
Miele

Miele

Lord Nagafen Raider
916
48
Draegan_sl said:
Good cash shops don't nickle and dime you, they provide stuff you don't need but really want. Bad cash shops nickle and dime you by making you pay for quality of life shit like hotbars and normal experience curves.
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R.I.P Swtor. Fuck them.

EDIT: there is something that keeps me on the "meh" side about EQ Next, hopefully I'm wrong, but still...
 
Mr Creed

Mr Creed

Too old for this shit
2,385
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tad10_sl said:
How did this work for PS2?
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tad10_sl said:
I don't mind paying money for something I like ($180/year no problem), I just don't like the FTP model precisely because it is designed to nickel and dime you, however the market has spoken and the idiots want FTP instead of PTP.

@Gask fair enough but I still think there's only so much horizontal advancement you can do with the EQ model at some point you've got to level vertically.
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Draegan_sl said:
Good cash shops don't nickle and dime you, they provide stuff you don't need but really want. Bad cash shops nickle and dime you by making you pay for quality of life shit like hotbars and normal experience curves.
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I just want to throw in a different perspective on the PS2 cash shop here. Imo it's one of the best implementations of F2P cash shop I encountered. There's not a single item in the PS2 shop that is cash-only and has a gameplay effect. Not one. Also, prices for weapons range between 125 and 1000 certs, where 1000 certs are at most a week, and more like a weekend or less if you play well. I've spent a bit of money on PS2 including alpha squad which came with some weapons, and snagged some when they were on sale 'just in case'. But mostly I just used the station cash for decals or camo. You dont have to spend money to play PS2. Imo, whoever claims that is bitter about other aspects of the game and leashes out, or is a compulsive "must have every gun even though I dont use it" type of player. You can try out one weapon per day so there's no need to buy it unless you like it.

The only thing I'll grant that for some vehicles you really should save up certs for a different main weapon while doing grunt combat because the default gun kinda sucks, but then again I'm ok with not using every vehicle at perfectly right after creating an account. Oh and the fact that only NC infiltrators start with a bolt action rifle, that blows, should be the same starting weapon on all.


TLDR: PS2 cash shop good, duh.
 
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Dizzam_sl

shitlord
247
0
Teekey_sl said:
There have been two quotes that really keep me excited - despite trying hard to temper my expectations:

But we'll have to wait and see for ourselves.
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I can't decide if that was their way of rubbing in everyone's face that they got to see EQN before us, or if they mean it and are really that excited about it. All I know is,ifthere is a huge negative reaction to EQN, those people should lose their jobs. We get enough false-hype from developers (especially SoE), we don't need it from gaming sites too.
 
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