Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO

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Ukerric

Ukerric

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mkopec said:
First, i will say that as a game designer of a particular genre of game, you should be doing your homework and at least casually checking out the competition, thats for sure.
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That's what we did at Nevrax as part of the pre-prod/production work for Ryzom. But it was structured; the producers and lead devs never actually played the competition. There was a dedicated team (of... 1) that would be playing about everything (that was in 2000, so we had mostly UO, EQ, AC, later DAoC and stuff like T4C or Mankind. The asian stuff wasn't looked at), organize demo shows and do copious notes and compile design docs on every mechanic. The devs themselves were all EQ players.

Of course, in those days, we thought that SWG would end up the top dog of the MMO space.
 
gLobal

gLobal

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I’ll describe my vanilla WoW experience. I remember it being more on the lame side. I played on Azgalor and later on joined friends on Medivh.

I thought the environments, animations, and systems were wonderful. The game was smooth, framerate was good (not counting server lag), and the UI/camera were great. PVP was also fun.

That’s the good part of my experience.

For the first few weeks/months, I remember server problems. Trying to loot things for 2-3 minutes. Getting disconnected and seeing queues of 1,100 people. Logging in, only to get hit with more lag and wondering what the fuck is the point of a queue, if it doesn’t actually prevent you from lagging while in game??

First time I died, around level 7 was because I got a little too cocky. I appeared at a ‘Spirit Healer’, released, and realized the only penalty was low health, no mana, and a quick run back. I was actually disappointed that I wasn’t punished for dying.

A few more levels and gear started dropping like candy, all my gear slots were full, and any sort of inter-dependence was non-existent. I can remember typing out introductions and jokes - trying to get to know people, and was totally ignored. Every second I was typing, I wasn’t mashing a button. Groups didn’t like talkers, they liked button mashers.

Then I decided to go off the rails a little bit and solo yellow/red mobs in different areas. I checked my experience bar after each kill, and realized I would have been better off sticking to quests or even blue cons than yellows/reds. You couldn’t even get higher level quests. There was absolutely no incentive at all for going off the rails.

Danger, outside of PVP, was pointless – because who cares if you die? Going off and doing your own thing was worthless. Stick to the level appropriate zones. Gear, even blues, stayed around for 5-6 levels at most, unless you were capped. Even epic gear cycled out too fast unless it was BiS.

When battlegrounds and the honor system finally got added in, I had a lot of fun – but all progression outside of gear was basically worthless. Max level was boring, and raids were mostly terrible because ADHD fuckers ran around doing dumb shit, and spamming Vent with “Leeroooy Jeeekaaans”.

WoW, by itself was a good game – but the experience when combined with server problems, a few design decisions, and BLIZZARD PLAYERS, was mediocre. I went back to EQ shortly after WoW launch, only to find everything entirely dead. If EQ hadn’t been snuffed out by WoW, I would have kept playing.
 
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Itlan

Itlan

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I like qwerty outright states Brad doesn't know why his own fucking game failed.

This dude is like the Trump of MMOs.
 
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Reht

Reht

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etchazz said:
I liked getting in a group and just camping way more than having to run each dungeon from beginning to end ad nauseam....
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That's the kicker right there, it's how they intended for you to play them rather than the dungeons themselves. WoW dungeons were great if you actually enjoyed true dungeon crawling since there was a start and a finish and you knew where the rewards were going to be. In the 17 years i have played EQ (off and on) i can't think of a single time where i was with a group where we crawled through an entire dungeon from start to finish in one sitting, because unlike WoW, there was no reason to. We crawled to a camp and stayed there. It was done piecemeal, you camp here for this then you camp there for that later on, and sooner or later you see the whole dungeon. What most EQ players did was not really dungeon crawling even though they like to use that term. Like you, i actually prefer finding a camp and staying there, it's usually not quite as fast paced and allows a little more time for socialization or netflix since you aren't always fighting AND moving.
 
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mkopec

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You could not do crawling in EQ anyways because of the level disparity between mobs. Most dungeons had a level range of 10, even 20+ levels between the entrance and the bowels. Some even having raid encounters at the bottom. And while im sure the original intent was to be crawled through, reality was that that it could not be done. Take for example Chardok in Kunark. Level rage was like 45-60, there is no way that even a good group of 50s could go down to the depths where there was lv 58+ mobs plus nameds. Shit even the noob dungeons like Balckburrow was like Lv7-20. Try taking a group of lv10s and doing the commander room. Maybe if leveling was 200% faster you could...

Dont get me wrong I liked WoWs dungeon crawls, its jsut that once you did it once, you seen it all. EQs dungeons had this thing about them that those places were a mystery until you spent some hard time in them getting to know them.

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Im kind of mixed on the map thing. On one hand it definitely was tougher not having maps in EQ. You really had to learn the zones by feel and landmarks, navigating on your own. Outside you could use the clouds as a means of telling which way you were going, they always flowed in one direction, I forget but I think they always went from south to north.(Later this was changed when they added better sky, I think in Luclin?) But inside you were fucked until you got to know the place by certain landmarks, boulders, tunnel shapes, shit like that. But once you did, you had an intimate knowledge of the place that no map could ever provide.

On the other hand it made things brutal. Couple this with the death penalty of youre corpse being somewhere in the bowels of a place you have absolutely no clue where the fuck it is, well it made dungeons a challenge. This is exactly why 90% people chose the easy path of outdoor zones to exp in. But it made those people with balls more money as they would sell all that good loot to peeps that did the Oasis, LOIO, OT and Dreadlands loop to level and just buy all their shit. Risk vs reward. I got to hand it to the explorer crowd in EQ back in the day, those people had some fucking balls exploring and mapping those places in the beginning days of whatever the expansion was.
 
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goishen

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One of the reasons why WoW took off was because of the accessibility of it. That coupled with the fact that you actually completed quests. I remember the "golden" days of EQ. It was called Neverquest for a reason.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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goishen said:
One of the reasons why WoW took off was because of the accessibility of it. That coupled with the fact that you actually completed quests. I remember the "golden" days of EQ. It was called Neverquest for a reason.
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Yeah I heard that recently Daybreak went through the item database and made a change to some 50K+ quest items that didnt have a quest tag on them. Basically fixing most of the broken quests in EQ that were broken since day one.
 
goishen

goishen

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mkopec said:
Yeah I heard that recently Daybreak went through the item database and made a change to some 50K+ quest items that didnt have a quest tag on them. Basically fixing most of the broken quests in EQ that were broken since day one.
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It wasn't only that quests were broken, it was that you had to have a guide beside your desk printed out to figure out how to complete a quest.

"Okay, so this says that he only spawns once every second Tuesday of every other month. WTF?!"
 
Fyff

Fyff

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And then there was buying Crushbone belts because everyone in Faydark had no idea you could turn them in when you got to see the Dorfs.
 
mkopec

mkopec

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goishen said:
It wasn't only that quests were broken, it was that you had to have a guide beside your desk printed out to figure out how to complete a quest.

"Okay, so this says that he only spawns once every second Tuesday of every other month. WTF?!"
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well the whole quest system was broke and fucked. Trying to type certain phrases to have the NPC advance the quest line? Or items that would drop whch were labled no-drop so you knew they were quest items, but you had to look that up in Allakhazams encyclopedia what quest it was for. Wow had nice simple quest box appears explaining what you have to do, then you do it, quest drops automatically are tuned over from your inventory and you complete the quest for exp and money or items. Later this was upgraded with quest helper functionality which sowed you where to go to kill etc..

Shit even AO back in like 2001 had a better quest system than EQ did. Mission hubs, same shit like WoW, simple popup appears explaining what you need to do, once accepted, it showed you on the map where to go.

EQ should of definitely upgraded that shit over the years. there is no excuse. Its too bad too since no one would even know it, but EQ had a shit ton of quests in every zone. But most people just ground their way through it all not even paying attention. Only focusing on those that got spread through word of mouth like the belts, gnoll fangs, etc.
 
Reht

Reht

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mkopec said:
Yeah I heard that recently Daybreak went through the item database and made a change to some 50K+ quest items that didnt have a quest tag on them. Basically fixing most of the broken quests in EQ that were broken since day one.
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Yeah, many are still broken lol
 
Reht

Reht

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mkopec said:
Dont get me wrong I liked WoWs dungeon crawls, its jsut that once you did it once, you seen it all. EQs dungeons had this thing about them that those places were a mystery until you spent some hard time in them getting to know them.
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That's one of the few things i actually really like about EQ1 now. You still have the big zones for camping (with the occasional dungeon revamp - they need to stop fucking around and provide updated Seb) but you also have the missions and heroic adventures which are kind of similar to WoW's dungeons. Kind of the best of both worlds.
 
popsicledeath

popsicledeath

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EQ still had best quest ever in Neriak as a newbie rogue where you'd go to Freeport and assassinate someone to get a whip that was piercing that sucked but was awesome to get. EQ didn't have a quest problem, it had an interface/mechanics problem.
 
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Q

qwertyqweqwertwqert

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BoozeCube said:
That's why it's a thriving successful game with tons of servers?
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Don't equate quality with popularity, we both know that is retarded, even for you.

Utnayan said:
You are forgetting we all played there spunky.
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Nah only a few people here really played it and gave it a chance. When SOE tidied up the game and then started doing free weekends, none of you were there to see it. That was the time to play it and see the good things the game had to offer, like the best classes of any MMO or RPG ever, made by someone who worked for one of the best game development companies of all time.

Itlan said:
I like qwerty outright states Brad doesn't know why his own fucking game failed.

This dude is like the Trump of MMOs.
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The difference is I am right. It is in his best interest to pretend like there were no bad design decisions, and the game died entirely because of technical problems and nobody got past level 2. But I know that isn't true. There are a lot of serious gameplay issues the game had, and there were places where the content went too thin and some areas of the world that were barely populated. Not to mention no end game content at all. Empty oceans, no reason to own a boat, etc.. etc.. Pretending everyone quit by level 2 is an easy way of ignoring all those other things.

There is also the fact that he wasn't around. You guys like to post all the quotes about him being completely absent for the last couple of years of development, do you really think during that time he was secretly grinding through the levels to see what the game was like? You guys are so desperate to attack everything I say, you don't even stop to think about it first.
 
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