Tabula Rasa looked like it was going to have some legs until the whole dramatic implosion.I literally did not read through the wall of text, so my response is probably not on the mark lol. That being said, I am responding to the thread title of MMORPG vs RPG.
Here a number of years back, I discovered GOG.com... Good Ole Games. It's a service like Steam except it deals mostly with older games. The cool thing is that it packages them with built in emulation, so they run with on your modern OS with out having to fiddle with too much, but I am getting off topic...
The point is, I have bought quite a few old (really old) games on GoG that I did not play through back in the day (or didn't finish), and have had a lot of fun with them. It's amazing how fun some of these older RPGs can be even though the graphics are insanely outdated and there is some serious lacking in quality of life compared to modern RPGs.
As for MMORPGs, I haven't been that impressed with many of them over the years. EverQuest was my second (Ultima Online was technically my first for all of 1 week), so I pretty much based ever MMORPG experience against it from 2000 onward. That probably lead me to not like most of them just based on the fact that they were not EverQuest with a different theme I'm sure.
Some stand outs I liked in the MMORPG genre are:
Honorable mentions go out to:
- EverQuest
- Starwars The Old Republic
- Final Fantasy XIV
I could be forgetting one or two that I liked, but for the most part, out of the hundreds of MMORPGs I have tried over the past two decades, I can count the ones I liked and remembered liking on one hand.
- EverQuest 2 - Not at release. It sucked at release, and it got decent MANY years after initial release
- World of Warcraft - Original only. I did not like any of the expansions
- Path of Exile - I have trouble thinking of this game as a MMORPG honestly... it feels more like an Action RPG that you just happen to play online
- New World - This is a really fun game for about one month
The MMORPG genre just hasn't had a high success rate in my opinion.
2022 and we still don't have EQ in a browser.So why not just play EQ then? Like every year they have a new prog server coming online. They have the old school servers with like 35 expansions, plus the myriad of emulated servers that range from anything thats classic to custom with curated custom content.
You also have the vanguard emulated server thats running in alpha state. And maybe Pantheon that will release this century? Go and donate to that cause if you want more games like this.
Whow whow whow.I think RPG was getting very good in 90s with games like Might & Magic 5/6/etc. But then EQ made big leap ahead and became better than all RPG.
I still play EQ sometimes it was a masterpiece. But my point is that games are constantly stealing each others successes and ideas and cloning each other and competing with each other. But MMORPGs are like forgotten history and too many lessons are being lost that RPGs today should have learned well. Dragon Age Inquisition got a lot of hate for being like a single player MMORPG, and yet it didn't even contain any of things that I think made EQ special. Not many people seem to understand classic EQ and where it fits in with WoW and other big MMOs. To me it is like becoming an architect and ignoring every bridge that was ever made, or starting a rock band and ignoring stuff from the 60s. There is so much to learn from these classic games but it is being forgotten. People mock WoW but when I get some new RPG and there is a Druid that can't shapeshift or a Necromancer that has pets you can't control, I think that is a problem with gaming devs.So why not just play EQ then? Like every year they have a new prog server coming online. They have the old school servers with like 35 expansions, plus the myriad of emulated servers that range from anything thats classic to custom with curated custom content.
You also have the vanguard emulated server thats running in alpha state. And maybe Pantheon that will release this century? Go and donate to that cause if you want more games like this.
Well for a start there was about a year of fun classic EQ before CH was even a thing. So I don't respect your drama queen rewriting of history. Also CH chains didn't exist to soloers and groupers, it was just a raid thing. Also most of what people did in EQ was emergent gameplay. They never designed quad kiting, fear kiting, aggro kiting, feign death splitting, or lots of things that made up the bulk of the gameplay. That's because it was an amazing sandbox game where people could figure out new ways to play. If you don't like CH don't play a cleric! It was the only class that even had to know what CH was.This is as far as i needed to read. I played a cleric from Kunark to GoD. I can tell you for absolute certainty that if the most fun you had in the game was staring at the floor hitting a single macro button for 10-20 minutes then you need a new hobby.
I agree, I don't even think of Skyrim and Witcher or the nu-Fallouts as RPGs. And any RPG goodness they had in earlier versions is being removed. Yet so many people today think Skyrim is the pinnacle of RPGs. The best RPG. The one to beat. The biggest selling etc. Or the newcomer hipsters say DoS2 is better because it has a party and few more stats or whatever. My point is that neither are good, they are going downhill. They don't compare well to even old RPGs, and the old RPGs don't compare well to classic MMOs.I think the term "RPG" has become very diluted in recent years. Old AD&D based games were all class based, where each character had a distinct niche, and could have their own personality that fit that niche. The only way to translate this to a single player computer game was to have the player control a party of characters.
I think the Witcher and Skyrim are closer to what used to be called Adventure games, where the gameplay centers around exploring the world and solving a main quest. It has RPG elements but it's not really locking the player down in the limits of a class like old RPGs did.
EQ definitely tried to do it like the RPGs of old, but with each player only having one class to control obviously. I think that's what some people liked about CH chains, it was at least uniquely defining to the class fantasy of playing a cleric: your character was there to heal and no one could do it as well, and the chain nature of it made it a team effort. I don't think it resulted in interesting gameplay but that's true for most classes in early EQ during raids. Rogues just stand there and press backstab every few seconds. WoW advanced the genre here with more active gameplay for all classes during raids.
I don't even know if a new EQ would work. People are so different now and I don't think many people would accept being kicked in the balls like EQ did to people over and over. But I just think it is sad when someone talks about going to a KOOL DUNGEON in Skyrim or something which is little more than a few corridors. Bitch please! Go play in Sebilis and Guk and Chardok and stuff! Or I get some new indie RPG with 'overwhelmingly positive' on Steam or something, and then find it has about 10 loot items and 4 mob types. 2 towns... 18 magic spells... In the whole game. And people are all excited about it in the comments. Tragic! Huge decline.Whow whow whow.
Also, why are you referencing Skyrim as a modern RPG? Did you know, Skyrim's release date is almost closer to EQ's release date than it is to today?
If I ignore most of what you said, I do think that the market is ripe for a well-dome MMO where the world is dangerous enough to force players to group to do anything and doesn't provide the kind of tools to let the game handle the grouping / loot for you, which would kinda go at what you want. I wouldn't play it myself though, maybe when my kids move out of my house in 18 years???
Bitch please, go play Outward, Kenshi and Dark Souls. I love those games because they are difficult and punishing. They don't have the spell/item bloat you seem to enjoy though.Bitch please! Go play in Sebilis and Guk and Chardok and stuff!
You can try to rewrite history all you like. A huge portion of this board was there from the beginning in EQ and all of us know what a buggy, unbalanced, broken... and yes FUN game it was. But you can take the rose colored glasses and stick them up your ass.You can find it boring but don't pretend it was broken unbalanced game because it wasn't.
I don't even know if a new EQ would work. People are so different now and I don't think many people would accept being kicked in the balls like EQ did to people over and over. But I just think it is sad when someone talks about going to a KOOL DUNGEON in Skyrim or something which is little more than a few corridors. Bitch please! Go play in Sebilis and Guk and Chardok and stuff! Or I get some new indie RPG with 'overwhelmingly positive' on Steam or something, and then find it has about 10 loot items and 4 mob types. 2 towns... 18 magic spells... In the whole game. And people are all excited about it in the comments. Tragic! Huge decline.
No way, Eq dungeons are way better! And have other groups and crazy shit happening, invisible walls, traps, you need two types of invis to explore and neither work 100%. No brainer. Also what item or spell bloat in EQ? Most people hardly had any items at level 10, maybe some cloth. By 20 just some bronze junk. Every item was famous and every new spell was exciting. And they didn't just call them Fireball1 Fireball2 Fireball3.Bitch please, go play Outward, Kenshi and Dark Souls. I love those games because they are difficult and punishing. They don't have the spell/item bloat you seem to enjoy though.
Like what? You don't want balance you want homogenization. May as well play an FPS?You can try to rewrite history all you like. A huge portion of this board was there from the beginning in EQ and all of us know what a buggy, unbalanced, broken... and yes FUN game it was. But you can take the rose colored glasses and stick them up your ass.
That question clearly shows how little you understand the difference between diversity and balance. Glad you've never tried to make an RPG. It'd be shit.Like what? You don't want balance you want homogenization. May as well play an FPS?
CH wasn't broken but it was INCREDIBLY unbalanced.So what examples of broken unbalanced EQ are there? CH was neither broken or unbalanced.
I don't think you understood the post.
Yeah, combat, especially for the melee, was lame as hell in EQ. Casters had a bit more fun with all their tools and such. Healers became essentially heal bots. Especially later on when the 3-6 box meta became a thing.