Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

If I posted all my ideas to fix 'pain points' it would result in posts so massive that nobody would read it and it would derail the thread further. I don't like top guilds killing everything for their 5th alts and denying casuals any access to raid content or groups sitting in one spot in a dungeon all day either. But I'd take both over any kind of instancing, if for no other reason than there are WoW clones all over the place and no real EQ clone. Even an EQ clone, with its flaws, but with new zones and items and classes would appeal to me more than any other game I've seen. Would people pay $15/mo for p99? That's not the real question. The real question is would they pay $15 for a p99 that has new zones and items. For me personally the answer is yes. I had long wanted to create a custom emu that had new items and zone NPCs just to give the emu guys something like that, but could not find other people willing to help with it and the TAKP client has issues so I abandoned the idea.

I started up on p99 a few months prior to Cataclysm's launch. Played Cataclysm for a week then said fuck this game and went back to EQ. Early WoW was a great game but it got worse every expac and I prefer EQ's more sandboxy open world nature. I hate the quest grind which every game now does. I like the freedom to pick any zone with blue mobs I want to level in. EQ had more community and more immersion. I don't see a WoW game and an EQ game as direct competitors really, as they have some different design goals. I want a world with both types of games, but the WoW fanboys seem to think that EQ style games shouldn't exist because they're archaic or whatever.

Torrid said:

Would people pay $15/mo for p99? That's not the real question. The real question is would they pay $15 for a p99 that has new zones and items. For me personally the answer is yes.

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How many people would you say that about though? If we go by Secrets “small indie group of 30 people” then to pay them all $100k/year you’re looking at maintaining 16,000 subs just to make payroll.

Quit trying to make this a WoW vs EQ thread. Literally nobody is bringing up WoW but you dude.

To be fair, 16,000 subs is a very reasonable number.

Kithani said:

How many people would you say that about though? If we go by Secrets “small indie group of 30 people” then to pay them all $100k/year you’re looking at maintaining 16,000 subs just to make payroll.

Quit trying to make this a WoW vs EQ thread. Literally nobody is bringing up WoW but you dude.

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I'm calling instance advocates WoW fanboys to be derisive and for brevity. Although when people discuss layering (something invented for Classic WoW) and when instancing is the most significant deviation by WoW from EQ, they're not far from the same group.

I spent 8 years of my life working on EQ emulators entirely unpaid, and our server is more accurate and true to the classic game than Daybreak's TLPs (granted that's not really a high bar) and we host a half dozen raid guilds. TAKP and P99 have absolutely zero trouble getting donations to keep the lights on. M&M does not need to go commercial to be a success. You may have gotten lower grades in middle school because of EQ, but I got lower grades in high school because of MUDs and before that BBS door games. MUDs birthed the genre and were hobby projects. The only difference between p99, TAKP and MUDs vs Niche World Cult is the latter managed to successfully form a larger team and include artists/world builders. That's no small achievement, however my point is it's very possible to find people willing to work for nothing. A payroll would significantly increase the likelihood of success and quality of the product but is not required for a functional game.

The best game ideas came from hobby projects. That's why new games are all stale: because it's much harder to make a modern 3d game so hobby projects are rarer. From a players perspective, I don't care if there aren't a million players playing the game. I only need one server with a few thousand people to exist and motivated developers.

Pretty sure EQ2 had instancing, " pick zones ", and time lock raiding based on when your character entered a zone, which came out before wow. iirc.

The great thing about MnM is you can take all these gameplay concerns directly to the team (Shawn) and he’ll actually respond. A novel concept, really.

EQ2 did have round about instancing, if a zone was full it would auto-create another one. The effect was almost the same as WoW's instancing. Vanguard was similar, APW had like 6 chunks of the same zone stacked on top of each other so guilds weren't cockblocked.

If M&M goes full old school EQ then it will end up with the top guilds monopolizing raids, which will get old fast. What they should do is the following imo:

1) Spawnable raid mobs locked to your guild. You could even turn this into it's own feature.. maybe you have to get a certain item, or kill x number of trash mobs to meet the spawn requirement. There's any number of ways you could do this.

2) Lockout timers on raid mobs per-character, similar to Vanguard. In VG the mob appeared as a ghost that you couldn't attack (or help others who are attacking) until the timer ran out.

With that then maybe you could mix in a handful of completely open raid mobs so you don't fully lose that sense of competition.

"Yo dawg I heard you like making EQ clones in your EQ clone discord while you're playing EQ emulators, so I messaged you to talk about EQ clones in your EQ clone discord while playing EQ emulators."

It's true about it being where the best ideas come from.
You've heard me say this one before and it's true here, this shit is classic.

Hateyou said:

When does this come out?

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Sometime between now and before Pantheon

Hateyou said:

When does this come out?

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They have a working launcher. I wouldn’t be surprised if a select few people are allowed in to run around before the end of the year.

If they got the funding to double their team size and quit their day jobs, I think there would be a playable game within 18 months. The systems are largely in place. They just need time and a little man power to flesh everything out. If you watch an art stream, it is pretty crazy seeing Zukan make a creature model from scratch in about an hour. The art style really allows them to bang out models fast.

I believe their goal is to make their proof-of-concept fully playable, which includes a city and its overland zone, one or two dungeons, several playable races, and several playable classes. Then once funded, they would more or less just be adding playable content.

Neranja said:

The initial debate was about instancing or equivalent systems, basically allowing more people to access the same content at the same time.

There is a difference between camping something for yourself, and being forced to watch other people get ahead of you while you are forced to do nothing or other things. This is especially ironic, because the access to said content comes down to the choice of server/shard on the character creation screen, so it's not that the content doesn't allow parallel access to it in the first place.

What most people here don't seem to realize, is that this problem exists because of both camping (in contrast to the much touted exploration), and most iconic/unique items come from only one specific (and rare) source. Here's some thoughts for you:

• WoW (of all things!) knew about the problem in their open world, probably due to their reliance on quests for progression. They made sure that for most quests where you have to kill multiple mobs or collect multiple items, they have at least two locations. Sure, one may not be optimal, and this is not for all quests, but it exists.
• How about you make crafting a bigger part of the game, and able to create items as powerful as those rare drops from group/raid content. Make high crafting skill and rare artifacts a requirement, but don't require materials from the same source as the original item.

Also I find it funny that I am branded an "EQ hater" because I ask about the pain points of the original EQ design and how you'd like to address them in a modern game. In turn there is no brainstorming or ideas thrown around, it's just as if I am some kind of apostate to the true church of classic MMORPG design. Here's a thought: Meridian 59 and Ultima Online are even more "classic MMORPG", and did things different.

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Instancing sucks. It's a lazy man's solution to a problem that could better be handled by having more dungeons with equal loot. The problem with EQ wasn't that it didn't have instancing, the problem was there were only 3 or 4 dungeons worth going to because 90% of the best loot was locked into those specific choke points. If you triple or quadruple the number of dungeons with equal loot, you spread out the player base without having the need for instancing. It's even simpler for boss encounters, just randomize their spawn location and don't put them on a timer.

etchazz said:

Instancing sucks. It's a lazy man's solution to a problem that could better be handled by having more dungeons with equal loot. The problem with EQ wasn't that it didn't have instancing, the problem was there were only 3 or 4 dungeons worth going to because 90% of the best loot was locked into those specific choke points. If you triple or quadruple the number of dungeons with equal loot, you spread out the player base without having the need for instancing. It's even simpler for boss encounters, just randomize their spawn location and don't put them on a timer.

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Yeah there's actually a lot of truth to this. You can fix raid calendars and queues with methods other than instancing and pvp (though I still like the idea of battling over spawns).

1. Make sure there is plenty of raid content to go around.
2. Spread that raid content out geographically.
3. Make it hard (and time consuming) to get to.

One of the issues with later EQ is with binding/ports, top guilds could zoom around from raid target to raid target and pretty much kill everything in sight at will and do it quickly. Here is what I would prefer to see for raid mobs:

Instead of being on random spawn timers, raid mobs spawn once a week, and once a week only. Maybe every Sunday or something. They are hard to get to, not just because they are guarded by tough mobs, but because reaching them requires some kind of unavoidably long journey. Think a boat or a long run- whatever. Either way, it takes several hours to get to raid mobs, so most guilds pick one raid mob and set up in advance. Once they pop, raid mobs are only up for 4 or 5 hours- long enough to organize a raid to kill them, but not long enough to kill one and then make it to another. Maybe the best, most efficient guilds could do two raid mobs in one cycle, but it would be super, super difficult.

The end result is that every guild knows exactly when a raid mob is going to pop and they can set up in advance to try and take it down. One benefit of this is that your guild will have to pick and choose which raid boss you want to kill- there simply isn't enough time to get to more than one. Another benefit is that you can set the weekly spawn timers at a time that is most convenient for whatever time zone your server is targeting. Instead of fucking around with bat phones at 3am, you can plan your raiding time for every Sunday afternoon.

An important detail is that there would still be plenty of 1 to 2 group "boss mobs" on random spawn timers. Think Ghoul Lord, Fungus King, etc. These mobs drop great loot (but not raid loot) and follow a spawn pattern similar to traditional EQ.

Can you faggots on the anti-instancing train shutup about WoW?


EQ had instanced content before WoW.

Quit being faggots about it - your sacred cow broke your trust before your whipping boy even released.

E etchazz

You're basically asking a development group to create 3x the content (with similar rewards) for what could effectively be achieved by creating it once and using instances of that dungeon. What sane company makes decisions like that? When the -only- target is making sure there is enough content to go around? Do you realize how stupid that idea sounds when floated towards anyone who is involved in the design process?

"Yes, I'd love for our effort to result in 1/3 the populace -maybe- coming here. We also assume that all things will be equally accessible and equal in both reward and required effort to reach. You know, effectively cloning our work twice, but requiring 3x the manpower to do it. Vs. uh... using the same content, and instancing which costs 0 extra hours/effort sans setting up the instancing engine, which is infinitely easier than creating several dungeons of varying layout/aesthetics/boss but effectively having them shit out the same rewards."

"3x the art assets; 3x the design assets; 3x the server requirements, for what could be solved with 1x of each and saleable instance technology, which we can use repeatedly over and over, while our unique art assets/design assets/servers will need to be replicated in triplicate every time we release any type of content."

Do you create 3x the content each time any new content is released? Are all raid encounters required to be developed in triplicate? You -do- realize that just going "and then multiply by 3" means that all development time is going to take 3x as long, for all content, yeah? And that you have to pay these people for that time discrepancy?

But yes, a tiny indie studio is definitely going to do 3x the work for 1x the payoff, because... reasons?

And I'll explain:

Unless all your "copy" dungeons to allow for equal content access are equally accessible, and the loot is equal, and the time spent getting/playing there is equal, you're going to have favorites. And then you're back in the same spot you are with how EQ camping worked. If they are equal, and equally accessible? Then why wouldn't you use some instancing technology? Your content is effectively cloned anyway at that point, but you're hiring 3x the people to make it happen. It's a nonsensical argument, and always has been.

And with all that? I'm very interested in the progress of this MMO and I've actually watched several of the technical videos because I like what they are doing. It's the retarded "hur dur instancing bad!" arguments that boil my blood. This is very much an EQ clone, written by a smaller studio. Still interesting!

Neranja said:

So basically you're admitting to not wanting to discuss in good faith, but to just vent your frustration and anger that WoW has changed the MMO landscape forever, in a way that isn't to your liking. Is that it?

Also, layering wasn't invented by WoW for Classic, it existed in Korean MMOs like forever, even with nifty little GUI selectors for the layer. Look at Lost Ark for the current iteration of it. Have you even played any other MMO other than EQ and WoW?

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Huh? Do you not realize what board this is? Good faith? Lolz

Omar Gonzalez was literally going around doing interviews calling his solution "new and innovative" and saying "we're calling it layering" so I dunno what Korea has been doing as I never had any interest in any Korean game, but Blizzard themselves were selling the tech as a new solution. Check the interview he did with that Tips Out youtuber.

Yes I despise what WoW did to the genre. The entire genre is on life support because of that game. That's why this thread exists. That's why I could name FIVE independent projects working to recreate EQ: EQEMU/PEQ, p99, TAKP, EQClassic, Project Lantern. That's why I find it annoying when people come into this thread and tell us that EQ's design should not be replicated because it's a game nobody would play when the entire purpose of M&MEMORIES is to replicate EQ's basic design. (More specifically the original game era. Yes we know LDON exists and the emu players aren't congregating on a LDON emu, are they) It's not just the nostalgia, we like old EQ's gameplay.

Neranja said:

That's the biggest pile of bullshit I read this week. You can literally download well-known 3D engines like Unreal or Unity, and even lesser ones like Godot, for free. You can right this moment even buy asset packs and tools for Unity on Humble Bundle, of all things. There are even specialized tutorial companies like Zenva to teach you how to create your first game.

The cost to entry for making 3D games engines has never been this low.

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Games existed before 3d cards were required to play them, guy. Making text based or 2d games, which is what I was comparing modern games to, is much easier than making games today in Unity. DIKU MUD threatened legal action against Sony because there were suspicions that EQ used DIKU source code, so the chasm between text and 3d isn't as wide as it seems. Furthermore Unity and Unreal engine have limitations that prevent developers from doing certain things, particularly large seamless open worlds with hundreds of players because they were designed with shooters in mind first. (I suppose that may be slowly changing) Vanguard was clunky in large part due to these limitations. But obviously it's a good thing that engines are more accessible nowadays.

Regardless the biggest obstacle to making hobby 3d games is the art and world building, because it's a lot easier to find coders willing to work for free than artists and usually you need a lot more artists. The amount of store assets required for a MMOG would require significant funds, and even if you found an asset for every need and tried to use them they would lack any sort of common motif or style which would look silly. Plus animations need to match the skills you want to implement and that is not likely to be included with the character assets. Poly counts would vary widely making performance prediction difficult. Rendering armor on the models likely isn't going to work on store elves and even if it did you'd still need to model the armor. Etc. You also can't buy world geometry in an asset store or if you could then it's not really your world anymore. There's a reason why most indie Steam games are 2d cartoons and Pantheon is a meme.

Torrid said:

Blizzard themselves were selling the tech as a new solution.

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Let me stop you right there. Taking Blizzard's word for ANYTHING they call "innovative" is the height of naitivity. C'mon man. Do better.

Torrid said:

That's why I find it annoying when people come into this thread and tell us that EQ's design should not be replicated because it's a game nobody would play when the entire purpose of M&MEMORIES is to replicate EQ's basic design. (More specifically the original game era. Yes we know LDON exists and the emu players aren't congregating on a LDON emu, are they) It's not just the nostalgia, we like old EQ's gameplay.

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We aren't telling you people won't play it. People obviously play P99, TAKP, etc. What we are telling you is that these games aren't COMMERCIALLY VIABLE. When they stop being passion projects and start being companies with investors that demand a certain ROI, the concepts die. REPEATEDLY.