SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

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kaid

Blackwing Lair Raider
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The game wasn't quest centric for sure, but I do recall quite a few back in the noobie days as a barbarian. (Talking real original vanilla EQ here)

Crafted Armor quests were commonly done as a warrior:
Crafted Armor Quests - Project 1999 Wiki

This was godly:
Langseax Quest - Project 1999 Wiki

Every damn healer was talking about:
Paw of Opolla Quest - Project 1999 Wiki


No one really grinded out "collect 10 bear ass" quests like modern mmos.
There was some of that but not very much. I still remember helping my ranger buddy camping for his pants in the out on an island in the ocean smacking down place holders. I took the night shift so I was up keeping an eye on the thing and then the guy finally spawned at like 3am. So I call him up all excited yelling dude your pants are up and he woken from a deep sleep cannot figure out wtf I am talking about. Finally got him to wake up enough so he ran and logged in and we killed the thing and he got his item he needed. I cannot see doing that for anything in a game any more but back then when all this stuff was new that was a pretty epic quest to complete his armor set.
 

Vitality

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The fuck you guys talking about no bear ass quests. There's a polar bear skin quest in Halas.

Did you guys even play the game?
 

Nija

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EQ was those things to you guys because it was really your real deep multiplayer experience.

For me, I have a certain attachment to earthquaking people in Meridian 59 and camping various spots in UO dungeons. Camping various floors of Hythloth I was way more deadly than any of the NPCs. And I was the one that took you loot, it didn't just sit on your corpse.
 

Jimbolini

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I would be interested in knowing what Feldon knows.

It would appear they are at least considering stopping development on Eq2 and I assume EQ.
 

Jysin

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I would be interested in knowing what Feldon knows.

It would appear they are at least considering stopping development on Eq2 and I assume EQ.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least. They could just ride the Marketplace cash into the grave and shift focus elsewhere.
 

Draegan_sl

2 Minutes Hate
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The more people we can educate about the good ol' days of MUD/D&D before the WoWification, the better.
Do we have to do this again? MUDs were awesome back in the day and I played them for hours on hour just like a lot of you guys did with EQ. But their design elements were simple. A bunch of places with static spawning mobs with rare loot. Force grouping for anything after a certain level. If you didn't group the game became a chat program.

Let's not get back to that shall we? WOWification or whatever you call it just the ultimate refinement for DIKU games. It just happened to go the more user friendly route than the hardcore grouping route.
 

mkopec

<Gold Donor>
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Why cant we have both? Im sure plenty of people around to play something oldschool. and were not talking 100million MMO with grand graphics. It could be something simple ALA EQ type shit.
 

Muligan

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You fuckers need to stop getting high of nostalgia because you all seem to forget all the sheer retardation that was put into that game.

example;


People talked about it because it was one of the few decent items in the game at the time. People didnt talk about it because they couldnt wait to sit on their ass for 20+ hours in befallen.
I completely agree. There a lot of stuff I would choose to never do again or experience. However, I'm just confused how a lot of simple elements were lost and replaced with more complicated features. More is not always better. Also, this was primarily aimed at how I would fix SoE's current lineup. Though, I would like to see a game, if targeted at our niche audience, replicate some of the good from long ago.
 

Draegan_sl

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Didn't say you can't have both. There should be both and every other spectrum. I like hardcore group centric games, and I like WOW type games too. Sometimes I want to feel the challenge of getting to max level sometimes I just want to listen to music and ding level 100 in a few days and play farmville.

But let's not ignore the fact that games like EQ and MUDs were incredibly simple in their design. There is really nothing to learn other than the effect of the experience curve and mob difficulty vs. retention rates.
 

Cinge

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Why cant we have both? Im sure plenty of people around to play something oldschool. and were not talking 100million MMO with grand graphics. It could be something simple ALA EQ type shit.
Please, everyone cries for "oldschool" but would never want to go back to that. They would use addons, maps, websites, cheats w/e to get around any kind of Obstacle. And cry the entire time about having to <insert "old school" feature here>.
 

Louis

Trakanon Raider
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EQ2: Obelisk of lost souls (did you know it goes down very deep and the few nameds at the bottom didn't drop shit?), the beehive in Enchanted Lands (Rivervale) where there was absolutely no loot and there were two possible events that didn't work or bugged out, and many many more places I could add to the list, like Silent City and its neighbour area, egyptian underground cities, used mostly to grind shit for the peacock line quest, but not much more, were in my opinion underused and possibly subject to an old school design (is there anything interesting spawning here? you won't know if you don't camp it for hours, cheers!).
Then we got Unrest, the EQ2 version: brilliant, fun, challenging with a storyline akin to the old Netropos Castle design (great zone that one).
As someone who played pretty hardcore through the first 3 expansions I feel your pain. The layouts of some of the dungeons were really impressive, but just not fleshed out what so ever. Sad thing is I'm sure a very large portion of EQ2's population never even went to a lot of these places to atleast see the design and enviorments. You hit me with a lot of nostalgia with your post. I also tried logging back into my mystic when it went f2p and had the EXACT same feelings and result.
 

Vitality

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Please, everyone cries for "oldschool" but would never want to go back to that. They would use addons, maps, websites, cheats w/e to get around any kind of Obstacle. And cry the entire time about having to <insert "old school" feature here>.
I play on p99 from time to time still when I get the itch. It's quite a bit of fun outside of the usual 60's everywhere camping everything downside. Fills the gap for me.

Slinging bonechips in ec never gets old.
 

Jimbolini

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From that video , Dave basically said most of the focus will be on EQN in 2015. (Full blown EQN after open beta of Landmark)
 

Bruman

Golden Squire
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Thought this was interesting from the EQ2Wire thread:

EQ and EQ2 paid for 3 failed attempts to get EQNext launched, The Agency, and FreeRealms which never made its $40 million back.
So EQ and EW2 still make money. I wonder what the 3 failed EQN attempts were, and why this one is considered a "successful" launch.
 

Mures

Blackwing Lair Raider
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Wasn't the copy paste itemization put on that fat black dude who went with Brad's pre-evangelical Pantheon dev team v1.0?

Regardless, whoever signed off on that horse shit should have been fired all the way up to the top!

EQ2 was really a ton of fun in EoF / Kunark under Hartsman. Velious was pretty much the polar opposite of that era.
RoK was the beginning of the end for EQ, it brought about the solo your way to max gameplay and killed casual raiding, without the casuals to fill in the burnouts the game just slowly attritioned until you could put everyone on one server.

unironically true. the last boss of the group dungeon was awesome as shit. might have been 2 group. whichever one ends with the big ass room and the vampire chick. fun stuff.
That was both. That is how we got 32 new zones! whenever an expansion launched, 2 overland zones and 3 dungeons rehashed 10 times.
And since someone mentioned unrest and nek castle, each of those dungeons take a big ole dump on all of tofs.

Also those idiots, georgeson and smedley deserved to get shit canned if soe lost some 50 something million while eq2 was essentially printing money. How many times did we see funds created by eq2 diverted to other failed projects and how many times/months of development did we see lost because they would work on something for months only to shit can it the month before it was supposed to launch. I can't believe so many ppl here have been burned so badly by soe yet thought eqn was going to be anything different.
 

zzeris

King Turd of Shit Hill
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The main problem with older games is that people have moved on. People want the extra amenities, options, etc. Newer players didn't grow up with D&D, dial-up, landline phones, etc. they expect a lot of different things than older players. As much as EQ was a horribly designed game, people put up with it because it was new and unique. Nothing about that system is new now. Expectations and demands have grown. Also, Developers don't want to do the same thing they didn't 15 years ago. How do you market yourself if you haven't grown any? Enjoy and support the kS games.