EQ Next: #1 Next gen MMO

Ukerric · Feb 28, 2017

Fight said:
Yeah, it is pretty moronic. There would have been a week or two where it felt pretty epic, then the novelty would have worn off and you would have come to realize your gaming experience was at the mercy of lil Timmy and his pick axe. There would have been entire guilds devoted to nothing but world destruction and it would have been the biggest troll-fest in the history of gaming.

Which is why you had the concept of self-healing blocs (in Landmark, and scheduled for Next as well). The world was destructible, but permanent. Blow the wall to get in, but when the next group comes around next hour, it's gone.

Rezz · Feb 28, 2017

Depending on how fast that self-healing was, it is still a slap patch to a really bad mmo mechanic at absolute best and a hilarious mistake at worst.

Destructible environments work great when it doesn't effect content access/generation. Tying them together and then having that access be even remotely "griefable" by the playerbase at large? Have we learned nothing in the last 18 years?

mkopec · Feb 28, 2017

Yeah even back in like 2005 and WoW, And im sure in EQ and UO too before that, you would have corpse campers camp your corpse for fucking hours, for no other reason just to grief your ass and make you cry and quit. I remember people used to kill quest NPCs in WoW just to be dicks.

So lets give them all a destructible world, that should work out!

Rezz · Feb 28, 2017

The argument was that "just like the PVP servers in EQ, people will police themselves" whenever the subject of griefing comes up. The pro-pvp guys also liked to point to the blue WOW servers and saying that it was easier to grief people due to them not being able to fight back.

It's been an epidemic in competitive games for years; how many rival guilds in WoW would stand near Kazzak fights -just- to cause a wipe? How many unguilded bots were used to train during EQ? Hell, the play nice policies that involved engaging first were implemented entirely because people could -not- police themselves. There's a lot of dicks in mmos; giving them new and improved ways to be dicks and not expecting it to go sideways is just hilariously naive.

Mick · Mar 17, 2017

Mughal · Mar 21, 2017

Rezz said:
Depending on how fast that self-healing was, it is still a slap patch to a really bad mmo mechanic at absolute best and a hilarious mistake at worst.

The design was to block voxel editing in cities, have a limited impact in PvE areas and use it mostly in PvP areas. Also editing was going to be limited in time. But mostly the game design was never finished in most of the systems so it's not that it was a "bad MMO mechanic" - it was an idea that still needed to be fully fleshed out and tuned.

In the original concept (pre-tech pre-everything) the goal was to have a big ass monsters be able to destroy buildings (then Smed went to Minecon).

Rezz · Mar 21, 2017

The mechanic of players being able to do stuff to the environment and have an effect on other players from a content standpoint is the bad part; it has nothing to do with how it was intended. As it was presented (players getting to modify the world around them) it is a bad MMO mechanic. My citation would be literally every MMO ever made with how players react to each other and how subsets choose to play in those games. It sounds nice on paper in a utopia where you only ever play with your friends. Trash in reality.

Dandai · Mar 22, 2017

I'm also skeptical that they could've designed a destructible environment system that would've been enjoyable. That being said, when I heard Zelda had weapons with durability I immediately knew I'd hate it. As it turns out, I actually really enjoy it because of how they designed the other systems around the weapon durability. The constant weapon breaking can be annoying when you're fighting tough monsters that go through multiple weapons, but it's awesome because it allows them to have a system where creatures drop what they're using (and the constant need for weapons makes those drops useful).

Breath of the Wild plucks a few nostalgic EQ strings for me. You knew you were gonna get some sweet Fine Steel weaponry when the goblin/kobold was holding a weapon. In BotW, you know you're gonna get a quality weapon if the monster you're fighting is using said weapon against you.

zero_name · Mar 23, 2017

Dandai said:
Breath of the Wild plucks a few nostalgic EQ strings for me. You knew you were gonna get some sweet Fine Steel weaponry when the goblin/kobold was holding a weapon. In BotW, you know you're gonna get a quality weapon if the monster you're fighting is using said weapon against you.

I've said the same, which doesn't sound like it makes a lot of sense until you play it. It's solo, of course, but MMO world creators should play BotW and take some fucking notes on how to create a dynamic, engrossing world without fucking voxels. Mystery, danger and exploration; BotW is fucking fantastic.

I love how amazingly stupid it was that SOE decided to highlight canned animation traversal as an EQN feature. That's how fucked they were when it came to actually coming up with useful ideas on how to make EQN suck less.

Siliconemelons · Mar 27, 2017

This MMO Devs need to learn from BOTW

Agro mechanics, insanely detailed and accurate line of sight- mob pathing, investigating and following - sound and voice distance to player interaction.

you literally can throw a rock and have a mob come inspect it to - sneak by, lay and ambush - distract after running away and hiding... its insane.

zero_name · Mar 27, 2017

Reactive mobs are awesome, it gives them life. This guy's twitter timeline is full of awesome GIFs.

Elidroth · Mar 28, 2017

zero_name said:
I love how amazingly stupid it was that SOE decided to highlight canned animation traversal as an EQN feature. That's how fucked they were when it came to actually coming up with useful ideas on how to make EQN suck less.

The Parkour movement thing was cool, but hardly a 'feature' no matter how much ponytail tried to claim it was. It was just movement. You didn't control it, you didn't do anything to enable it.. It was nothing more than an attempt to show they had been working on things..

zero_name · Mar 28, 2017

Elidroth said:
The Parkour movement thing was cool, but hardly a 'feature' no matter how much ponytail tried to claim it was. It was just movement. You didn't control it, you didn't do anything to enable it.. It was nothing more than an attempt to show they had been working on things..

It looked jank as fuck in that initial trailer and in Landmark it was the dumbest thing because it didn't look fluid in any way. Maybe there are cool ways to do it, but there was nothing cool about what we saw of the canned animations.

forehead · Mar 29, 2017

I wonder which focus group said they wanted parkour in their MMOs.

Oh right, there wasn't one.

Conefed · Mar 29, 2017

World reversion defeats point of persistent world. I'm not for it.
I'd rather have preservation be a driver.
You get bounties on your head for destroying too much.
Regeneration could be a thing, but have it literally procedurally, slowly, grow - not revert.
Druid purpose (quests, NPC behavior) grow trees and plants on things.
Mages and beings build mountains.
Affecting a permanent landscape is crucial.
Rangers hunt down those that destroy too much, as do paladins, and guards - because destroying hurts faction, walls even worse so.
And obviously, zones should have 'bedrock' infrastructure.

Mughal · Mar 30, 2017

forehead said:
I wonder which focus group said they wanted parkour in their MMOs.

There wasn't one. The game was a result of the games the leads played: Terraria (with destructible environments), League of Legends (with heroes, a small subset of abilities and fast paced combat). Then they decided to make it an official EQ game and later the AI was added to it. Some of the design choices were hotly debated even internally by other groups (the 3d artists were opposed to voxels).

It was never stated publicly but Terraria had probably the biggest influence on the initial design than anything else.

zero_name · Mar 30, 2017

Every idea they had and showed us had been done before and their version looked awful (parkour, combat, class system). It's hilarious how huge the EQN leads thought it could be. It doesn't take a game dev or a financial genius to predict Landmark to be a tremendous commercial and critical failure.

I just wanted EQ with smart AI and a dynamic world (not destructable, fuck voxels).

Rezz · Mar 31, 2017

Terraria/Minecraft/Etc work great as single player/small group games. Their concepts do not apply well to MMOs. Going forward, I hope other devs at least paid attention to that concept and realize that the Fuckhead Factor(TM) of the MMO playerbase means you simply cannot have mechanics that let the fuckheads ruin it for more than 0 people as a design choice.

Expand/invent in other areas, my dudes.

Muligan · Mar 31, 2017

As someone brought up earlier, I think BotW demonstrated how you can make the world a living place without it being 100% destructible. How that would translate to a MMO, I don't know. However, there were several moments when I had that EQ vibe when roaming around, looking for the next thing to do. If someone would have been LFG for Shrines, a Hinox, or seed runs, it would have been a lot like EQ. I may be completely off on this but I believe if you look at EQ, look at BotW, and borrow from each, you have a pretty solid game.

I still believe you could essentially remake EQ. If you were to bring the best pieces of each expansion through PoP with the end game being the PoP storyline, it deserves that chance. Runescape did a complete overhaul of their game. I never liked their game but it's pretty amazing to make they put that kind of effort into their game. I'm not sure it attracted new people but I thought it was exactly what EQ should do instead of making expansions.

Jarek · Mar 31, 2017

Mughal said:
There wasn't one. The game was a result of the games the leads played: Terraria (with destructible environments), League of Legends (with heroes, a small subset of abilities and fast paced combat). Then they decided to make it an official EQ game and later the AI was added to it. Some of the design choices were hotly debated even internally by other groups (the 3d artists were opposed to voxels).

It was never stated publicly but Terraria had probably the biggest influence on the initial design than anything else.

I'm glad other people saw this too. EQN was a clusterfuck from the very first EQLive reveal.

Only 4 skills, and 4 "weapon based skills" available at any given time? Like the 4 buttons on a controller?

Can't eaily target or direct heal other players, and the combat is action based and jumping around? Like made for a controller instead of kb/mouse?

No support classes, everyone is on their own in terms of survival? With auto-climb objects and auto-parkour movement, easy to use with a joystick, not too much clicking needed to navigate?

This was a fucking console game. It was a fucking console game and they tried to pawn that shit off as the next EQ. What a complete and utter mess.

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EQ Next: #1 Next gen MMO

Ukerric

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Rezz

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mkopec

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Mick

Mughal

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Dandai

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zero_name

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Siliconemelons

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Elidroth

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zero_name

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forehead

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Mughal

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Muligan

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Jarek

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