You sure have fallen in love with this "face roll" phrase. Eq really wasn't very difficult compared to modern MMOs. More unforgiving with death penalties, but otherwise very simplistic
When I played EQ1 I hated that simplicity, I yearned for more. When the next generation came out pretty much every studio addressed that issue and they tried adding more complexity. Suddenly you ended up with battles that in order to win you HAD to install addons for, unforgiving raids that had fail conditions predicated on the most minor of triggers, and overly complex combat systems that led to things like the abortion of hotkeys that was EQ2. I mean, when the standard just to play an MMO is that you must install X addons to even go on a raid and you need to macro tons of abilities while every content expansion ADDED YET MORE ABILITIES, you know that shit has gone too far.
I don't understand how SOE could go from having such a minimalist game to something where it felt like a single class had more abilities than all of the classes from EQ1 had, combined.
I don't want another EQ1 in terms of simplicity, but I'd like the pendulum to start swinging back towards that direction some. I don't care what the haters say, WOW had some decent class design that originally wasn't too overly bloated. There is room for improvement, sure, but SOE has staked out the two extremes in complexity and hopefully they find some happy middle ground with EQ:N
The EQ2 combat system is probably the only thing that I've truly wanted an apology from Developers for. Throwing more abilities at a combat system does not make it better.
you just described what made EQ awesome and what no other game has been able to replicate.
Meh. I have little to no desire to herd cats. I didn't ever really want to do it before, and now I want to avoid it at all costs. I think that I am now one of those players who has tried scads of MMOs and I am not sure that I even want to play them on an even semi-serious basis anymore. They're repetitive treadmills and FFS the last thing I want to do is log into a game so that I can spend hours slowly crushing my testicles in the figurative vise of organizing raids or dealing with things like taking hours to either get a CR or to even get to a raid in the first place.
We've had this core debate for years though: on one side we have players that have no desire to climb over those hurdles again and just want to get straight to the actual gameplay, and on the other side we have players that actually want the long tedious CRs, terribly time-consuming travel and having the time spent forming a raid end up being longer than the actual raid itself. But now I'm getting to the point where I question the model of MMOs themselves and I start thinking that maybe all that I want is something smaller and more intimate, like an online multiplayer Skyrim, what I take Shroud of the Avatar to be, or a Minecraft server to play on with a handful of friends.
Sometimes EQ1 reminds me of the 1973 Oil Crisis where you had to wait in line for hours to even have a chance at getting gas, but unlike EQ1 I don't remember anyone reminiscing about how it was so incredibly awesome and actually wishing that they could sit in line waiting for gas for hours on end again. I guess I just never "got" what made that stuff "awesome". I mean I grasp the premise that those trials and tribulations may have been what made the eventual successes all the sweeter, but for me the successes in the game were sweet in and of themselves and the tedium was just that...needless tedium.
On paper we can make any game that we want, unfortunately Devs have to make games for a broad range of players. If I could make an MMO with the most unforgiving design decisions for some of the minority niche players I would (and I think that we can all agree that the players wanting CRs and hours of travel back are in a minority niche, overall). I mean if we could cater to that demand seperately we wouldn't have an issue, but we all know that isn't going to happen because so many people look at those CR mechanics and long travel times and think
"fuck that, I'd rather go clean the garage"
