Big Flex
Fitness Fascist
- 4,314
- 3,166
EQ Never
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Big Flex
Fitness Fascist
- 4,314
- 3,166
Blackyce
Silver Knight of the Realm
- 836
- 12
Instancing has been confirmed. I have a friend who corresponds with Moorgard and was told that instancing will be in EQNext. He did not say how it will be in the game but it will be in the game.
Lenas
Trump's Staff
- 7,494
- 2,233
Erronius
Macho Ma'am
- 16,527
- 42,521
Don't insult Vanguard. And yes, I'm saying that knowing full well how Vanguard turned out. I ripped the shit out of Brad and VG (deservedly so imho) but even I have to admit that VG had a lot of potential, and frankly I wouldn't mind at all if Brad worked on EQ3 (AKA VG 2.0).
This brings me back to a point that I wanted to mention about SOE and Smed: Smedley may have a history of saying stuff that he gets crucified for but I do have to give Smed and SOE credit. Despite their history, they manage to keep turning profit and putting out games. I think that might be the best quality that is brought to the table, is that they seem able to keep their eye on the financials even if they fail elsewhere. Now, had SOE been backing Brad from the start and supported the development of VG (without interference) VG might have been much better at release and maybe Brad could have avoided having a meeting in a parking lot.
I dunno. We had a LAN store for some years and you wouldn't believe the number of parents that would give their kids a $20 so that they could come in after school and fuck around (daily). Some parents just throw money at their kids and I'm sure that their eyes just glaze over whenever their kids talk about ANYTHING regarding video games.
Don't forget EQ2, with some of the worst class balance, combat structure, itemization and stats that I've ever seen. Someone could come back from the future and hand SOE the best MMO ever and they'd probably manage to fuck it up somehow.
"You know what this futuristic miracle MMO needs? CRIT MIT!"
Shonuff
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 5,538
- 790
I don't have a strong opinion, one way or another. It's Everquest, I hope the game does well, but none of us have even played a demo of it, let alone beta test it.
iannis
Musty Nester
- 31,351
- 17,656
Well, one good thing about Landmark is that it would seem to imply that they do plan on having a truly massive overmap and they finally are able to admit that there's no way in hell they'll be able to fill it with interesting content themselves, so they're turning to the pro-am community for help.
Which is an ok thing. Depends on the quality of the modders they draw. The "mod community" is fickle as hell, but I've played quite a few mods of games that were more fun than the released game.
Edit: It worked for 5 years for muds, and these are the oldschool everquest designers. Makes sense, and it might turn out to be a big draw. Or it might completely flop as a design decision.
Which is an ok thing. Depends on the quality of the modders they draw. The "mod community" is fickle as hell, but I've played quite a few mods of games that were more fun than the released game.
Edit: It worked for 5 years for muds, and these are the oldschool everquest designers. Makes sense, and it might turn out to be a big draw. Or it might completely flop as a design decision.
Qhue
Tranny Chaser
- 7,492
- 4,446
Here is how I would go about class design were I in their shoes:
Design a whole bunch of abilities that can function within the voxel dominated world you have invented and which fall in line with the overall basic concepts of EQ. Go crazy with concepts and implement anything you can possibly imagine but dont worry about number values or necessarily who gets what ability. This represents the metaphysics of movement, combat, and environment interaction.
Put very neutral values in for the necessary ability parameters and set your designers / QA staff / whoever loose to use whatever combination of 8 abilities they want and tell them to go crazy and monitor the results.
Why?
A sufficiently large and creative group of people actively trying to break the game will almost certainly be able to do so far faster than any particular math model you can cobble together that tries to incorporate all the different variables of how you move and interact within this new destructible world. No sense in putting an inordinately large amount of effort into developing 'classes' and abilities until you get some empirical results on how they really function.
Armed with what it looks like people do when they actually have access to everything you can then start to make choices about how likely it is to have access to everything and if you want to ever allow them to slot whatever they want from whatever pool of abilities. You can then form the basis of your 'core' classes with the most fundamental sorts of abilities and see how the game plays when they have access to more restricted lists of abilities that correspond to the various archetypes.
Really fundamental questions need to be decided by the team right off as they will make huge differences in how the game plays. Do tanks make use of collision detection? Do you intend wall / persistent effect creation plus collision detection and the fully destructible environment to play a significant role in establishing how the combat flows? Do you want to reward specialized roles with increased effectiveness in doing a particular function (tank, dps, healing, cc, support) or do you want to allow nearly unrestricted synergy?
Once you know these things then you can really start to solidify the classes and make them really feel like Everquest, but it does you no good to focus on creating a whole series of Enchanter base and specialized classes, for example, if mezzing and charming are no where near as efficient as just blowing the crap out of everything and healing through every encounter.
Whatever is done and however it is done I thoroughly believe in two core concepts:
1) Cure is bullshit. Every debilitating effect in the game that has to be there for important encounter reasons is always tagged uncurable and every other DoT / debuff ends up being a can-timmy-hit-the-big-red-button-fast-enough mechanic with various different flavors of cooldowns and effect types and other such things. Balance your game around there being no such thing as an instant Cure and you will be much happier in the long run.**
2) Healing is the very last thing you work on. Far too many games have gotten fucked up from day 1 because someone had a really cool concept for a healer (Complete Heal in EQ, Chloromancer in Rift etc.) that then required all content to be designed with that in mind. Allow all movement, avoidance, mitigation, crowd control and such to mature and then put in healing that compliments and enhances the experience rather than dominates it from day one.
If done right the physics of this new creation could make for very very different combat concepts that compliment synergies and looks much more tactical. If done badly then we'll end up with carbon copy flavor-of-the-month characters all standing under the dragon and backstabbing him in the balls while the beast stupidly swings at the most heavily protected person in the room who also happens to be bathed in a deluge of healing magic.
**For shits and giggles you can make some debilitates the result of persistent magical effects that, because they are made of transparent voxels you can move through, are destroyable and thus "cured" by damaging them with the right spell (Dispel Magic) and which are immune to all other forms of damage.
Design a whole bunch of abilities that can function within the voxel dominated world you have invented and which fall in line with the overall basic concepts of EQ. Go crazy with concepts and implement anything you can possibly imagine but dont worry about number values or necessarily who gets what ability. This represents the metaphysics of movement, combat, and environment interaction.
Put very neutral values in for the necessary ability parameters and set your designers / QA staff / whoever loose to use whatever combination of 8 abilities they want and tell them to go crazy and monitor the results.
Why?
A sufficiently large and creative group of people actively trying to break the game will almost certainly be able to do so far faster than any particular math model you can cobble together that tries to incorporate all the different variables of how you move and interact within this new destructible world. No sense in putting an inordinately large amount of effort into developing 'classes' and abilities until you get some empirical results on how they really function.
Armed with what it looks like people do when they actually have access to everything you can then start to make choices about how likely it is to have access to everything and if you want to ever allow them to slot whatever they want from whatever pool of abilities. You can then form the basis of your 'core' classes with the most fundamental sorts of abilities and see how the game plays when they have access to more restricted lists of abilities that correspond to the various archetypes.
Really fundamental questions need to be decided by the team right off as they will make huge differences in how the game plays. Do tanks make use of collision detection? Do you intend wall / persistent effect creation plus collision detection and the fully destructible environment to play a significant role in establishing how the combat flows? Do you want to reward specialized roles with increased effectiveness in doing a particular function (tank, dps, healing, cc, support) or do you want to allow nearly unrestricted synergy?
Once you know these things then you can really start to solidify the classes and make them really feel like Everquest, but it does you no good to focus on creating a whole series of Enchanter base and specialized classes, for example, if mezzing and charming are no where near as efficient as just blowing the crap out of everything and healing through every encounter.
Whatever is done and however it is done I thoroughly believe in two core concepts:
1) Cure is bullshit. Every debilitating effect in the game that has to be there for important encounter reasons is always tagged uncurable and every other DoT / debuff ends up being a can-timmy-hit-the-big-red-button-fast-enough mechanic with various different flavors of cooldowns and effect types and other such things. Balance your game around there being no such thing as an instant Cure and you will be much happier in the long run.**
2) Healing is the very last thing you work on. Far too many games have gotten fucked up from day 1 because someone had a really cool concept for a healer (Complete Heal in EQ, Chloromancer in Rift etc.) that then required all content to be designed with that in mind. Allow all movement, avoidance, mitigation, crowd control and such to mature and then put in healing that compliments and enhances the experience rather than dominates it from day one.
If done right the physics of this new creation could make for very very different combat concepts that compliment synergies and looks much more tactical. If done badly then we'll end up with carbon copy flavor-of-the-month characters all standing under the dragon and backstabbing him in the balls while the beast stupidly swings at the most heavily protected person in the room who also happens to be bathed in a deluge of healing magic.
**For shits and giggles you can make some debilitates the result of persistent magical effects that, because they are made of transparent voxels you can move through, are destroyable and thus "cured" by damaging them with the right spell (Dispel Magic) and which are immune to all other forms of damage.
Quaid
Trump's Staff
- 11,565
- 7,878
I am very aware that gaining class abilities is very similar to gaining abilities via leveling.
My point is, this is in effect no different than a traditional level grinding system. The 'philosophy' they are trying to convince us that they are putting forth directly contradicts this.
EQN illusion of choice.
My point is, this is in effect no different than a traditional level grinding system. The 'philosophy' they are trying to convince us that they are putting forth directly contradicts this.
EQN illusion of choice.
I hope they to a point randomize class finding. If it just becomes a documented grind of go here then here then here to get each class and ability it would be really stupid as people will find the least involved method and best route to get all the classes and abilities as quick as possible. Also just being able to cherry pick and go for the ones you want would be dumb, the starting class should really be the only one you can pick and the rest should be found randomly to an extent.
It is completely different than a traditional level system. I don't really understand how you fail to grasp that.
Lenas
Trump's Staff
- 7,494
- 2,233
Because you have to accomplish ______ to gain _______ and get more powerful, obviously that the is the same as camping in a room for 10 hours grinding exp for arbitrary survivability and skill increases.
The difference is between someone that plays a game to be a character and enjoy the world versus someone that plays a game to see big numbers. The latter acts as if the experience is irrelevant, forgetting why we started playing these games in the first god damn place. None of us started playing vanilla EQ with the intention of raiding. I didn't even know what a raid was or why I would care about my DPS until I was already deep into the game.
The difference is between someone that plays a game to be a character and enjoy the world versus someone that plays a game to see big numbers. The latter acts as if the experience is irrelevant, forgetting why we started playing these games in the first god damn place. None of us started playing vanilla EQ with the intention of raiding. I didn't even know what a raid was or why I would care about my DPS until I was already deep into the game.
Is our Art director any good not trolling she is from free realms this really worries me that we will have Super Mario aka Disney models from them?
Anyone know what the unveiling of the blackbox did? For example are they a team of 100 devs and there were 10 in the black box finger banging each other while the other 90 were programing/designing with only limited information and they can now finally work with all the information in front of them?
I suppose I'm a traditionalist, I like my trinity and I like my levels. Removing both of those confuses and worries me a bit. But maybe it'll be something so different that'll feel new and exciting as EQ was in 99.
I like the trinity cause I suppose I like structure and without a "tank" I'm afraid combat will either last 3 seconds, everyone will be dps, will be a giant ping pong cluster fuck, or will turn into some shitty kitefest.
To removal of levels is so foreign to me that I don't know what to think. Tiers sound like the new levels, that or the collecting of classes but I don't know enough to say if my assumptions are correct.
The idea of mixing and matching class skills to tailor make my "class" sounds pretty cool. I doubt I'll take it as far as some will and have like 8 different specs across all sort of "roles." I'm more a fan of class identity I suppose. I'll be making my character to be as close to a traditional tank as I can.
If anything it'll be another game to drag 4-12 of my old EQ friends into for a few months.
I like the trinity cause I suppose I like structure and without a "tank" I'm afraid combat will either last 3 seconds, everyone will be dps, will be a giant ping pong cluster fuck, or will turn into some shitty kitefest.
To removal of levels is so foreign to me that I don't know what to think. Tiers sound like the new levels, that or the collecting of classes but I don't know enough to say if my assumptions are correct.
The idea of mixing and matching class skills to tailor make my "class" sounds pretty cool. I doubt I'll take it as far as some will and have like 8 different specs across all sort of "roles." I'm more a fan of class identity I suppose. I'll be making my character to be as close to a traditional tank as I can.
If anything it'll be another game to drag 4-12 of my old EQ friends into for a few months.