EQ Never

Honestly, you could find ways to make each race have its own flare and do something better than other classes without making any other Race look like shit or Homogenizing the shit out of everything. That was the biggest problem with the system that EQ had. You knew that if you had to choose between a Wood Elf Warrior and an equally equipped and skilled Ogre Warrior, the Ogre Warrior would win every time. Let the Wood Elf Warrior gear himself towards agility and maximize his Armor Value. Let the Ogre gear himself towards Stamina and be able to take a larger hit. In the end, the two would balance out the total amount of damage taken (granted AC is actually fixed, but i digress..). Rose Tinted Glasses all you want, but I hate WoW's direction of homogenization and getting rid of stats. Things like +hit are fucking dumb, but Dodge and Parry were interesting stats that some people liked to gear towards.

It all sounds nice on paper until they decide to add truly hard content and you are forced to min max. Wow doesn't make the decisions they make because they hate choice, they do it because in a game with hard content you can't have eq1 levels of imbalance.

It would be refreshing though if eqn more like eqs difficulty model where fielding a large force with some minimum coordination is what matters rather than wows where you need to min max everything because its so much harder.

Dandai_sl said:

If I were a betting man I'd say outdoor raid bosses will be like that while instanced raids will be more like WoW/EQ2. The question then becomes, how much of each type of content will there be?

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If the AI is smart enough, and the world is vast enough, there shouldn't be much need for instancing beyond conveying specific story elements to individual players. Those are pretty big 'if's though. Not to mention, I may be underestimating the importance of instanced areas with regards to encounter complexity.

We shall see.

There's no such thing as making a world big enough unless you completely remove any ability to fast travel, at which point you are just fucking the player in the ass to have a "world" instead of a game.

I for one would love a giant world without quick travel.

Lenas_sl said:

I for one would love a giant world without quick travel.

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Lenas trying to open a new can of worms ~

Kreugen_sl said:

There's no such thing as making a world big enough unless you completely remove any ability to fast travel, at which point you are just fucking the player in the ass to have a "world" instead of a game.

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I think you could include quick travel. You'd just have to make it extremely expensive.

Options are key. I always wanted tiers of travel.
Walk on foot. - slowest, most engaging time wise, but you also can gather and see events popping and such.
On rails and waypoints you have visited. (Rented Horse / Griffons) Cheap but take some time, great for a break.
Instant Teleport from a vendor/map/wizard NPC to a waypoint - Cost should be high but you are there quick.
Summons/ Player made gates. Instant and freeish But should have a reward for giving others time saved and such. I always thought giving the summoner a xp bonus buff for 15- minutes would be a nice incentive to help folks.

Games should be looking for options to draw people into groups and not separate them out. Wildstar has the path system and I can promise you that if you have all 4 paths represented then you will see and do a great deal more in overland adventure stuff than if you go solo. But you have to be social, which will doom a great number of mouth breathing fucktards.

zzeris_sl said:

It just depends on the select audience. No game will satisfy the top percent who have to finish anything ASAP. I know it won't happen, but I was really looking forward to reduced early content that expanded as you leveled. Some limits could be initiated and as long as you have solid content and a solid plan. I've always liked roads between cities and drawbacks to riding. It would be hard to initiate just because mounts are so popular. There is a lot of leeway SOE could give itself based off the storyline. I don't think they will take it as shown by allowing home cities which makes little sense in context.

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OOW expansion begs to differ my friend.

a_skeleton_02_sl said:

You should be able to buy a mount at a certain level/certain amount of money/certain quest that will be your main source of travel. All Teleports and portals should be player cast either by multiclassing into a porting class or asking for someone to port you telelocation style. Those big wizard spires we see in landmark should be able to port you from around the world but they should not be in every fucking zone, each continent should have one at the top,middle and bottom at the most.

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I'm not a huge fan of this system. I don't like teleport classes. I'd prefer to see fast travel dictated by extremely rare/valuable consumables that are obtained through crafting or raid drops. There should be a teleport node in every zone with an NPC town. Your character would spawn with one (a NO DROP version) on creation so you can TP to your friends, but that's the only free one that everyone gets.

You're just making someone jump through any extra hoop to get where they are going without adding anything that would encourage a person to be social. I personally want the world to seem larger. Ground mounts only - flying mounts are neat, but no. Mounts with wings like a Pegasus or a Dragon could just Glide if we must have winged mounts. Add a teleport system that transports to the four corners. Wizards in the greatest of cities built spires JUST FOR YOU to transport to another wizard spire. Say no to class teleportation spells. If Cities are spread out properly, then it should only take you 20-30 minutes to get to somewhere popular and not 2 hours. One is immersive, the other is just player punishment.

Having a huge uninstanced world and no shortcuts to travel is great though, especially when it comes to group content. First you either spend a bunch of time putting together a group and then traveling to the content (ensuring that you don't bother to log in unless you have 5 hours or more to play), or you just head out alone in the hopes of finding a group when you finally get there. Then you arrive and the area is either overcamped and useless, or dominated by the other faction (if PVP), or there's no one around to group with so you're stuck waiting for more people to join you and every time someone leaves it takes an eternity to get a replacement. So you either wait it out or you're stuck wasting your goddamn day traveling around and accomplishing nothing. This is awesome gameplay and is the primary reason Everquest and Vanguard were such terrific games that should be copied in every way.

My preference for travel runs closer to how it's done in Diablo 3's adventure mode. It's very immersive - you bring up the world map and click on the zone you want to go to. Then, after an agonizing 5 second channel time you teleport at no cost. You can also teleport to anyone in your party. It's a nice system because after you've traveled across the entire goddamn world once it's not really enjoyable to do it over and over again for no reason other than filling time. As fun as it used to be to point roughly towards the next zone line and autorun while flipping tv channels, I soon started to feel that it wasn't really a good use of my time once that new MMO smell wore off. Wake me up when WoW flight points just show the first few seconds and last few seconds of your journey instead of the pointless time wasting filler in between.

Of course, if you aren't wasting player's time making them run through places they've seen a thousand times already, you have to replace it with lots of interesting places to go and things to do. Which is a trick that no one has really managed to perfect yet and is really the only interesting thing to watch for in any upcoming MMO. Will anyone manage to come up with a max level treadmill that isn't endless grinding, balls-hard raiding (now with four difficulty switches!), or a shitty zergfest PVP zone?