EQ Never

Also, I may be alone in this, but I really liked how EQ's design was that you could only have 8 spells memorized and at your fingertips at any moment.

I wouldnt mind if a game took this idea and ran with it. Take away the skill tree(so sick of fucking talent trees, they cant possibly be the only way of progression, but goddamn if MMOs make it seem that way), gain spells/skills based on level/1hand slashing skill, and make it so a player has to decide which skills may be used. Skills and spells would be designed for longer cooldowns with more importance on the timing, packing more "punch" and "difference-makers", while putting the decision making in the players hands about which spells to use for what encounter, dungeon, or mob resist-type ect.

Edit: You don't need talent trees to "spec into" when you can choose from about 8-10 spells. Your "spec" turns into whatever spells or skills you choose to have loaded up at any given time.

Melee can have 10 skills used at one time, maybe spell casters can have 8. These numbers can be experimented with. Maybe a Diviner is a quick-casting enchanter-like class who can have more spells loaded at one time, his spells are quick-casting, but hey, his mez and charms dont last as long, while the Enchanter has fewer spells at his fingertips, but they take longer to cast and have more impact. Whatever.

Homogenizing skills and classes needs to go away. IMO, having few abilities at your fingertips would go a long ways towards:

1. Reducing button mashing (1,2,3,4 1,2,3,4 1,2,3,4)
2. Making skills more interesting, with more impact
3. Put more thought into encounter design
4. Putting decision making into the players hands (Gasp! I have to decide if I want an evac spell for my 8th slot for this dangerous dungeon or a CC spell!)

I had planned to make a more detailed post about this, but a friend is calling me to meet him up for some Pho. Hopefully you get the idea.

One last thing. I think player's avatars have gotten too powerful in comparison to the average mob. Thats a discussion for a different post though. Id like to increase mob AI and decision making abilities to counter players. But Im pretty sure that has already been hit on. This idea will undoubtedly cycle back to the "Well if the mobs are too powerful or smart then I cant solo and it takes too much time blah blah blah"

Zeus_sl said:

If you start out with everything you need, what's the point of playing? Don't you think in some respects this is exactly what many games have done by simplifying the entire process, which removes the motivation to even play. This is why current games being released have such a short shelf life.

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I'd actually say your way of thinking is what leads to short shelf life games dude. People constantly complain about the focus being on "end game" and not the journey, but that is exactly the type of thinking levels and talent/skill points encourages. Back in the day people approached EQ with a different outlook on games then they do today. You can not recreate the EQ experience without drastically changing it for today's market. You add in levels and AAs then it is a unquestionable fact that people will approach it with their eye on the finish line. That is exactly how people play EQ today. A bunch of people came back to EQ for F2P, or Test and everyone is looking for a PL so they can be 90+ with thousands of AAs too.

Ultima Online touched on what I think is the superior system before EQ even came out. You get access to ALL of your skills the second you log into the game. You can then choose to improve the skills you want to master. Anyone can use a bow,cast a circle 1 spell, all while wearing plate, cloth or leather if they want. Specialization came from playing the game. This gave ultimate freedom to the player instead of telling them what they can and can't do. UO's system wasn't perfect, but it encouraged play instead of reaching goals. You still had those people who didn't stop macroing/grinding until they had 7 skills at 100, but most of the people I knew (even pro pvpers) didn't bother developing a character to that degree. You could pvp at a competitive level much earlier then that, and doing dungeon crawls certainly didn't require it.

My opinion is that levels suck. They have always sucked. They just make you feel inferior until you are max level + whatever AA shit a game might use. If developers want the games to be about the journey then they need to stop setting such obvious destinations for people to aim for. Let people figure out, and enjoy games for the game itself.

I don't think UIs, limitations, or having a big enough world to run around in are problems with most modern MMOs. The problem is they all use the historic design based on levels, treadmills and mudflation. I could be wrong but a lot of people think that what we're missing is making that treadmill even harder with more class dependency and limitations and removing 'instancing'. I disagree.

I'm personally hopeful that we break out of that mold completely. There should be character advancement, but it's high time it's done in a manner that doesn't require grinds, farming, and repeating content.

Rift and Guild Wars 2 for all their 'fresh' ideas are all about...levels, treadmills, and to some degree mudflation. The same holds true for SWTOR. I get the uneasy feeling EQN will again be the same, more or less.

Creslin_sl said:

WoW had all those people too who enjoyed the journey and leveled slow.. it just wasn't us cause by then guys like us knew it was mostly wasted time.

Leveling in WOW at launch was also not that much faster than leveling in EQ, the primary difference was it was way easier to get knocked off the rails in EQ, die in lguk and spend 3 hours on CR, spend the evening LFG and find a group with an hour left to play.. but the actual hours that you spent xping to get to cap were not as far apart as alot of people think.

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I agree with this, and I really did like vanilla wow. In fact, those were some of my favorite MMO experiences because a lot of my time in classic wow was spent exploring and world pvping. Leveling was slow, pvp was frequent, and it was fun. I played wow pretty heavily during that era. It's what came after vanilla wow where I lost interest. Flying mounts made world pvp just barely ever happen, stat inflation on items was stupid, and every expansion added like 6 zones to explore, compared to how big the base game felt. But it felt like the base game was heavily abandoned because the loot in the new expansion zones was just head and shoulders so much better than in vanilla. I feel like eq didn't really have that going on until after velious. At the top-end velious was the place to be, but the old world still felt really heavily used until luclin.

The core problem here might be that I hate mudflation, quest hubs, and level treadmills, but maybe thats what keeps people playing.

Creslin_sl said:

Alot of the reason people put up with the journey in EQ is cause people didn't realize they were wasting their time. Alot of that was because EQ was their first mmo rather than cause of any brilliant design that EQ had that WoW didn't. WoW had all those people too who enjoyed the journey and leveled slow.. it just wasn't us cause by then guys like us knew it was mostly wasted time.

In EQ velious era you had people camping stuff like a GBS, or slowing down at lvl 50 to camp fear armor or get that pair of eboots, or trying really really hard in the scarab camp to get a lammy.. when for the most part putting your head down and grinding out to 60 and heading straight to kael arena or HOT was by far the better plan for all those people... cause those items we were camping were pretty much trash, and it wasn't til later that we realized this.. then we go into WoW and they have all the same shit, but this time we know better, we know to just get to cap and start raiding, we know to check wowhead to see if spending 50 hours at lvl 40 getting that sword from sunken temple was worth it (it wasn't).. and then we complained that the game had lost its journey.

Leveling in WOW at launch was also not that much faster than leveling in EQ, the primary difference was it was way easier to get knocked off the rails in EQ, die in lguk and spend 3 hours on CR, spend the evening LFG and find a group with an hour left to play.. but the actual hours that you spent xping to get to cap were not as far apart as alot of people think.

I think you need a game more like EQ Kunark era, as much as people like velious or PoP they are examples of the first time sony caved and gave us the carrot. Velious was a shower of raid loot, the first time you could only raid and actually come away with a full set of gear and the raid gear just trashed any group loot you could get. And PoP was the first xpac where they really reset the gear, the easy trash raid mobs in a T1 zones outclassed raid drops from the hardest content in the previous xpac. exactly the same crap people bash a WoW xpac for today. Kunark struck the best balance, raid gear was best but not so much better that it made a grouper feel like they were trash.

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dude, wow and eq were fundamentally different.

in eq there was a little more comradery, relying on others was an integral part of the game, and even if you account for some of the distractions, leveling was still slower. wow was all about soloing through cartoon land with the occasional grouping for elite mobs and instances.

i'm also glad you think doing something in a game is wasting time. thanks for the enlightenment.

another thing: people don't seem to understand how minor features like exclamation points or instant travel impact the way people perceive a game's environment.

edit: people continued camping older items because they were still valuable, especially for alts. did you even play the game?

Tol_sl said:

I agree with this, and I really did like vanilla wow. In fact, those were some of my favorite MMO experiences because a lot of my time in classic wow was spent exploring and world pvping. Leveling was slow, pvp was frequent, and it was fun. I played wow pretty heavily during that era. It's what came after vanilla wow where I lost interest. Flying mounts made world pvp just barely ever happen, stat inflation on items was stupid, and every expansion added like 6 zones to explore, compared to how big the base game felt. But it felt like the base game was heavily abandoned because the loot in the new expansion zones was just head and shoulders so much better than in vanilla. I feel like eq didn't really have that going on until after velious. At the top-end velious was the place to be, but the old world still felt really heavily used until luclin.

The core problem here might be that I hate mudflation, quest hubs, and level treadmills, but maybe thats what keeps people playing.

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Some mudflation is good, all games age and change as they age. I actually think that EQ handled it pretty well from a conceptual standpoint in the GoD->Ro era. Starting PoP you had the stat cap lift and soe turned everything up to 11, stats almost literally doubled on every single slot you had, people loved it at the time but it was actually really damaging to the game. Starting GoD they really toned that down. A Tacvi item with 275hp mana was kinda your baseline and Ro ended with items around 350 hp mana. This meant that items had a long shelf life, you werent trash in DoDH because you had a couple tacvi items tho generally upgrades were available. It also meant that the zones were worth doing even for mains for a long time since you couldn't rely on getting everyone an upgrade in every slot like you could in WoW or PoP era.

Had sony not been releasing those expacs as buggy half finished PoSes EQ might not have cratered, but conceptually they were pretty sound in terms of how power progression was handled. Its actually not that dissimilar from how WoW Classic raid progression went but EQ I think handled group/casual progression at that time a little better. EQ was just too damaged and bloated by then to be savable I think, too much AA grind, to many systems stacked on top of systems. Blizzard does one thing right, when they decide they don't like a system it is just gone, EQ would just leave it floating through the game neglected and forgotten forever.

mkopec_sl said:

You should seriously consider trying TSW.

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I'm interested in it, but I figured I'd let it cook for a while. I played both AO and AOC at release and had major issues with both games. AOC particularly pissed me off because of the vaporware siege game setup.

Supertouch, The biggest difference between EQ and WOW from my memory was the lack of cockblocking of content in WOW. I don't equate the need to beg a cleric for a ress or sit at the entrance to a dungeon shouting for a group with community.

The Secret World is seriously worth the price of admission. Even with all the bugs it had at launch it is one of the best leveling experiences on the market imo. Was a TON of fun. Just don't go into it thinking it has any staying power because it doesn't. When you finish up Transylvania and have run some dungeons that is pretty much it. (Always play Illuminati...fuck the other two factions)

Combat is super shitty at first as well. Got significantly better sometime in Egypt for me. Anyway don't want to get into a TSW derail, but I highly recommend TSW for a quick play through. Couple weeks of cheap fun.

Modern EQ handles AA bloat well. They changed the curve so that new players can get to 2000+ AA without months of work. They also give great AA exp from tasks. The courtyard quest in House of Thule gives 9-12 AAs each time you turn it in when you have low AA. Quest only wants you to kill 4 snakes, and 4 rotdogs which are all right there in the fields next to the task giver. Can repeat it as often as you want with no lock out timer. Can get hundreds of AAs a day with a good group, or a PL.

Draegan_sl said:

So how do you build a game where it's all about the journey? What kind of content are you creating that will keep people occupied? I assume that characters won't change as much since you're not leveling as fast and your not getting gear upgrades as fast. So what are you doing that keeps people playing your game for 5-10 hours in between dings and gear upgrades?

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UO was totally all about the journey.

Zeus_sl said:

If you start out with everything you need, what's the point of playing? Don't you think in some respects this is exactly what many games have done by simplifying the entire process, which removes the motivation to even play. This is why current games being released have such a short shelf life.

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Well the current games pretty much have a shelf life, but a lot of them are not designed well at all. I've posted this several times but I'll reiterate quickly:

Instead of 2-4 days /played to max level, I'd shrink it to the length of decent single player game. So like 6-12 hours or so. Then if you're a smart developer there are a lot of things you can do give people incentive to play and grow their character.

Things like obtaining sets of gear. Resist sets; defensive, offensive sets. Grinding out special weapons, going on real quests that take weeks/months to complete for legendary gear. Doing content for reputation that gates other kinds of gear, whether it's cosmetic or not. You can include crafting, tradskilling, and player housing here.

Clickies or armor that augments your abilities like forking your lightning bolt or whatever.

I reeeeally like what Path of Exile did with their game. I wouldn't mind basing an MMORPG around that system.

I mean there are tons of different things you can do with character progression that doesn't rely on you gaining levels to access your basic set of skills.

Pancreas_sl said:

snip

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Good ideas here. I described a similar system in the What's Next? thread.

Draegan_sl said:

I love the romanticism of the "journey" and the idea of living in a world. I know what that feels like because I've been there and done that in other games. But I'm a practical guy, and it would take a really good game to change that paradigm of leveling vs. end game. For a journey game these days, you would have to get rid of numbers. No levels and no stats, no damage numbers floating up above the person's head. You would have to completely restructure the expectations of players when they enter your game.

Then you would have to design a way you can build your character as it gets older which is haaaaaaard.

The point is, that in today's gaming world, you need to create an incentive for people to care about the journey. If the only way you can make people slow down the leveling process is by gating it by exp gain per hour, you're going to lose the fight. You have to create another incentive or gating mechanism that is more fun.

Otherwise you're just creating another stock MMO with a world, and levels, and items and this time it takes you 8 hours to level and not 3.

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I agree to an extent but I think it is a simple fix. You make the world what it is and put your time into developing the world itself and you move away from instancing. I also believe you remove the ability of tools, features, queues or whatever port you all over the world just because it found you a group or your warzone is ready. I think you put more into the hands of the players. These tools are fine and serve a great purpose but, at some point you have to keep the world you have joined in tact. The entire point of a MMO is that it is a massive multiplayer game but developers are constantly moving away from the masses. Outside of an auction house transaction, you do not interact with the masses. Essentially the masses long onto the same server but at that point you then interact with a tool that then brings a small group together and ports you into a place that is actually not part of the rest of the world.

I'm really beginning to think outside of technical and logistical reasons, there are no longer any point to a server. I can group with other servers and I can PvP with other servers. Before you know it, i'll be raiding with other server, and auction houses will be in server groups. Until MMO take a step into securing the integrity of a MMO for each player on each server, these games will never last more than a month or two. I do not think the formula is all that magical it is just they have painted themselves into a corner and someone is going to be hold and take a few steps out.

Lemmiwinks_sl said:

Also, I may be alone in this, but I really liked how EQ's design was that you could only have 8 spells memorized and at your fingertips at any moment.

1. Reducing button mashing (1,2,3,4 1,2,3,4 1,2,3,4)
2. Making skills more interesting, with more impact
3. Put more thought into encounter design
4. Putting decision making into the players hands (Gasp! I have to decide if I want an evac spell for my 8th slot for this dangerous dungeon or a CC spell!)

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A lot of games are actually doing this now; GW2 is the most recent. TSW did this as well. TESO is also designing a "deck building" system for their skills as well. I do not enjoy games where you need more than one hotbar for abilities.

Muligan_sl said:

I agree to an extent but I think it is a simple fix. You make the world what it is and put your time into developing the world itself and you move away from instancing. I also believe you remove the ability of tools, features, queues or whatever port you all over the world just because it found you a group or your warzone is ready. I think you put more into the hands of the players. These tools are fine and serve a great purpose but, at some point you have to keep the world you have joined in tact. The entire point of a MMO is that it is a massive multiplayer game but developers are constantly moving away from the masses. Outside of an auction house transaction, you do not interact with the masses. Essentially the masses long onto the same server but at that point you then interact with a tool that then brings a small group together and ports you into a place that is actually not part of the rest of the world.

I'm really beginning to think outside of technical and logistical reasons, there are no longer any point to a server. I can group with other servers and I can PvP with other servers. Before you know it, i'll be raiding with other server, and auction houses will be in server groups. Until MMO take a step into securing the integrity of a MMO for each player on each server, these games will never last more than a month or two. I do not think the formula is all that magical it is just they have painted themselves into a corner and someone is going to be hold and take a few steps out.

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Good points and they are all valid I think. In a game that is quest-hub driven you need fast travel and LFGs etc. If you can create a game that does not create a treadmill or a bread crumb, then you can start doing away with fast travel. It would be an interesting experiment to see how many people would of like GW2 more without their fast travel feature.

But the point of my post is that if you want people to tolerate a slower pace of advancement, then you need to make the game more entertaining in between those interludes. It can't be static mob camping. The game needs to be more engaging than that. It's very difficult to design it properly.

As long as levels are tied to character advancement then it will be next to impossible to convince players to enjoy the journey. The vast majority of the mmos produced have conditioned players to "rush to the endgame", that isn't going to change even if you make every level take a month to get through.

One way to change this mindset, is to just make levels totally meaningless. Keep levels, but give them no value whatsoever, except as a kind of status symbol that indicates the player has put a lot of time into their character. Push all character advancement into other realms and make it more of a horizontal progression game. Training skills, obtaining abilities, gear, crafting, faction, etc, etc then become the paths to making your toon more powerful.

Only by changing the leveling paradigm such that it has no relation to current mmos, can you then force players to give up the "rush to endgame" and get them to enjoy the journey.

Creslin_sl said:

Alot of the reason people put up with the journey in EQ is cause people didn't realize they were wasting their time. Alot of that was because EQ was their first mmo rather than cause of any brilliant design that EQ had that WoW didn't. WoW had all those people too who enjoyed the journey and leveled slow.. it just wasn't us cause by then guys like us knew it was mostly wasted time.

In EQ velious era you had people camping stuff like a GBS, or slowing down at lvl 50 to camp fear armor or get that pair of eboots, or trying really really hard in the scarab camp to get a lammy.. when for the most part putting your head down and grinding out to 60 and heading straight to kael arena or HOT was by far the better plan for all those people... cause those items we were camping were pretty much trash, and it wasn't til later that we realized this.. then we go into WoW and they have all the same shit, but this time we know better, we know to just get to cap and start raiding, we know to check wowhead to see if spending 50 hours at lvl 40 getting that sword from sunken temple was worth it (it wasn't).. and then we complained that the game had lost its journey.

Leveling in WOW at launch was also not that much faster than leveling in EQ, the primary difference was it was way easier to get knocked off the rails in EQ, die in lguk and spend 3 hours on CR, spend the evening LFG and find a group with an hour left to play.. but the actual hours that you spent xping to get to cap were not as far apart as alot of people think.

I think you need a game more like EQ Kunark era, as much as people like velious or PoP they are examples of the first time sony caved and gave us the carrot. Velious was a shower of raid loot, the first time you could only raid and actually come away with a full set of gear and the raid gear just trashed any group loot you could get. And PoP was the first xpac where they really reset the gear, the easy trash raid mobs in a T1 zones outclassed raid drops from the hardest content in the previous xpac. exactly the same crap people bash a WoW xpac for today. Kunark struck the best balance, raid gear was best but not so much better that it made a grouper feel like they were trash.

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This is an interesting post as it is exactly what separates me from other gamers at times.. I level pretty quickly but i am interested in that leveling journey, seeing a class develop into a complex entity and exploring a world. What i don't get is ( "guys like us knew it was wasted time" ) if you are playing the game and exploring the world, i mean isn't that the game in itself ? This is what i don't seem to get that folks look at levels and gear replacement as a waste of time... Is the goal to be all powerful ? Or to enjoy the development of a character from small beginnings to power ? For me it is the latter.

I certainly agree with the point that seems to be trickling out here regarding "item value".. that is if i am replacing items too fast, it all becomes meaningless.. I agree wholeheartedly with that idea. However in my mind that can be solved with longer XP curves and fewer but more meaningful rewards.

Or perhaps there is a new approach. I tried the Guild Wars 2 thing and frankly, this limitation of skills is absolutely mind numbing for me. It seems choice limiting rather than increasing choice.. I recall having skills queued to the point where i didn't really know what skills i was using, because it didn't matter at all.. it was just a mash fest. ( i played casters and a ranger )

Certainly some class types this method may make more sense.. However i mostly play casters and if you consider the complexity in the DDO wizard and the options for types of play in that compared to the mezmer and necro for example of Gw2, its not even close... There is very little choice for customization... and why the hell is a weapon tied to abilities for a caster anyway ? It does not make sense at all to me..

The other funny thing is, many of us look back to WoW vanilla as a great experience in gaming.. it was for me.. However, why did all these clones fall short of what WoW did ?
- Less starting areas and less choices
- Less class options and less choices
-smaller worlds ( not talking square KM here, i mean CHOICE )
- Decent class customization ( until they removed action points down to like what 5-8 choices ). That was horrible and yet again a dumbing down of a more complex system for the masses.

WoW had one great thing and that was great world design. You felt as if you were in something greater than yourself and that is something sorely missed in many games of today. RIFT for me came close to WoW but failed miserably in world design... it felt small and linear... and that does not deliver a feeling of a world.. not to mention the fast XP curve and then the resulting lobby game...

Just some thoughts, sorry for the ramble.. what is interesting is we all seem to be honing in on a similar goal, but where many of us differ is the way that is delivered... hopefully someday some clever developer will figure this all out and we will have wow 1.5 or something.

Draegan_sl said:

Good points and they are all valid I think. In a game that is quest-hub driven you need fast travel and LFGs etc. If you can create a game that does not create a treadmill or a bread crumb, then you can start doing away with fast travel. It would be an interesting experiment to see how many people would of like GW2 more without their fast travel feature.

But the point of my post is that if you want people to tolerate a slower pace of advancement, then you need to make the game more entertaining in between those interludes. It can't be static mob camping. The game needs to be more engaging than that. It's very difficult to design it properly.

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This is an excellent point.. slower leveling can work to solve problems, but we really do need to see something move past the mob camping thing other than ( lets just make everything quest driven and make XP gains faster ) which is sort of where the industry has headed it seems