Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Quaid said:

Man some SUPER retard decisions being made in this one. It’s like they looked at 1999 EQ and said ‘OH YA, well WATCH THIS, SCRUB! Don’t like it? I heard NeoPets is still running!’

Like stuff that doesnt even promote player interaction… Only certain vendors will buy certain items? Why? And I’m not talking 20% of vendors… im talking 1%. There is literally a ‘Rusty Weapons’ specific vendor. How does that make this game more fun? Crafting has a (VERY HIGH) chance to just utterly fail and return ZERO materials destroying an hour of farming? Why? The shit will destroy your RECIPE.

i dunno man. Feels like the inmates are running the asylum here. I get that it’s in development but Jesus. The fact there’s nobody saying ‘maybe dial it back a smidge or 6’ is real disconcerting.

My hope is that they’re just pushing the limits in pre-release to see what even the spergs wont tolerate. Fingers crossed.

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TJT said:

Is that intended though or just early dev whatever they haven't sorted out?

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Quaid said:

Guaranteed intended.

In disbelief about the vendor thing i went and looked. Absolutely intended.

So no in-game map, ok for sure agreed. But theres no in UI compass or /loc function. The game literally tells you to ‘lol look at the sky WoWtard’. Absolutely intended.

The night is stupid dark. I took the infravision trait and can barely see 20ft in front of me. Ok fine not complaining and i get it. Fire Beetle Eyes degrade over time!!! WHY? I swear i killed 20 of these things before i got a drop, and then they're useless after an hour of being ‘on’? It’s not like they’re even a very GOOD light source.

At least grinding feels normal… wait. What’s this ‘you feel tired’ shit? What do you mean I’ve gotta go back to town and sit by a hearth for a while? I’ve only been at this camp like half an hour? SHOULD’VE BROUGHT SOME WOOD FOR A FIRE AND TRAINED SURVIVAL YOU FUCKING BABBY WAH WAH.

I’m just baffled by some of this. None of these systems encourage player interaction and none of them make it more fun. They are making nonsensical ‘immersion’ decisions to the detriment of the game, and if they don’t figure that out before release, they’ll pay for it.

All that being said, the base game without the dumb decisions feels real good.

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TJT said:

Not having even a sense heading or compass to determine direction seems like a huge miss. Like, that's part of immersion and everything.

Fire beetle eyes and torches being consumable is okay in theory. As long as they are plentiful enough to get. Otherwise people will gravitate towards chad races with inherent ultravision.

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TJT said:

IDK I can get over the no in game compass thing easily enough. EQ didn't have it. Compasses were cheap and easy to get and reliable if you chose to use one. But everyone worth their salt had just trained sense heading and bound it to a directional key so they could always see which direction they were facing.

The vendor thing I don't get. I mean, I guess it makes some sense for ""realism"" but there needs to be a way to easily offload junk loot that's meant to be sold for coins. Unless there is some deep layer of crafting or something here I am not understanding.

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Quaid said:

No such thing as sense heading that I can see.

Oh ans there’s ‘shady’ vendors who will buy everything. They’ll just take it for 15% of what the appropriate vendor will.

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Kaines said:

The hype surrounding this game will ensure it has a huge first month. Plenty of terrible design decisions will guarantee that player base falls off significantly after that first month.

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Mur said:

I've played most of these tests, but meh'd out of this one. I just had an "ain't nobody got time for that" moment, and realized I'm just too old for this shit. I'm retired, and have all the time in the world to play, but there needs to be some kind of reward for my time, and the design choices here seem to just say fuck your time. Even more than original EQ ever did, even at it's worst.

I'm actually with Quaid on this one. Yeah I want an "old school" feel, but I'm not seeing the fun in running around a city for 2 hours trying to find some guard to talk to, or where to sell my items. We are all a little autistic here, but the devs are pushing this shit to maximum aspergers levels. We need more carrots, and less kickin rocks, at least until we can get addicted, then they can kick us in the balls a few times.

Of course then again, maybe I'm the retard...

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Daidraco said:

The game really just gives new players an overall fuck you when they first start the game. For us, as an older generation, we've encountered it before and thats supposedly what theyre calling back on for their niche audience. As hell, even POE can continue to develop new content with just 10k players. But yea, the vendor thing is just needless aggravation. If this was late game, and it was some "Cursed" weapon, or similar, then I could understand the theoretical situation that a vendor wouldnt want anything to do with it.

But they cant sit here and tell me that if you went out and busted your ass for hours and you collected all the "good bits" off a mob - (because if you think about it, why would you program in literal fucking trash to be collected off a mob? Meaning, everything thats looted is useful to someone, somewhere.) - then that vendor (pawn shop basically), which obviously, in the real world, would know exactly where to off-load all that shit himself so he could take some off the top. Which, in my mind, is the perfect compromise if you're trying to salvage this archaic, niche audience, bullshit. "All vendors will buy your <insert bullshit here>, but there are preferred Vendors that will buy it for 15% more!" So if you have two backpacks worth of <bullshit> then its worth it for you to find that specific vendor.

The decay timer, I ran into that crap last time I played and all the timers are just way too short. That, or the drop rate is way too low. Low vision is a "price you pay" to play a certain race. Last I checked, there wasnt a big enough, or even a trade off at all, for the races that had shit vision. If an Ogre can walk around the same places as a Human, then where is the fucking drawback to playing an Ogre? Oh, they have to duck to walk through some doors. Gee...

Im not knocking the game on a topical level. Its came along great. But its noobie experience is just straight awful. Could almost say its worse than EQ's. But I have a feeling the guys in charge are just like Maelfyn when it came down to making changes. Maelfyn thought the combat in NGO was fine, no matter what I or others suggested and now its macro'd non-stop. Beta's, Alpha's, all that are there for opinions from people that hope the developers at least COMPROMISE on their "vision." I understand holding your guns against people that want to completely throw away your idea, but a COMPROMISE is very relevant to a good game. Restricted Vendors is the Vision. Preferred Vendors is the compromise. (In case you're confused.)

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Guurn said:

There is a true north spell. So far this game has made me realize how lazy I've become as a gamer. I finally wasted the brain cells to learn the city and it turns out most things are pretty close to where you need them. The beginner quests are intended to get you to run around, as they should. I agree on the too short of timers on eyes and torches. Other than that I'm surprised how fair it is. If I get over my head usually I can run away and if I die, now that I have learned the layout, recovery is easy.

I'm a little disappointed Enchanter isn't what I want it to be, hopefully Inquisitor works out.

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Kirun said:

It's especially weird they've made these decisions considering that Shawn made a "name" for himself as a dev during arguably the best moment in EQ's history - PoP. But, that period was helped by the fact that a LOT of QoL had been added to the game at that point. Mounts, not needing to look at your stupid spellbook to regain mana(and with mounts you didn't even need to "sit" anymore either), knowledge stones negating much of the stupid reliance on Druids/Wizards to travel, tradeskill UI revamps, consolidated spell vendors, etc.

M&M is a return to the "classic" version of EQ that wasn't hard/difficult because of genius design. It was that way because of tech limitations and lack of developer experience. Most of it was an accident, rather than something like FromSoft where those decisions are very much intentional.

I understand that they've said they realize the game will be niche and not have a massive playerbase, since you can still be profitable without 1 million players. That's all well and good. But there's a difference between something niche like Albion Online and having 98 players in your game because new players are so turned off by it.

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