SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

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Big Flex

Fitness Fascist
4,314
3,166
Going back and looking at this black box is its like watching the news coverage of an actual plane wreck and seeing photos of all of the dead passengers in the faces of all the fired developers.

 

Louis

Trakanon Raider
2,836
1,105
The one that turned you into a fog man I imagine? Some of their spell effects had to be massively nerfed.

I remember they added a raid off of Zek during vanilla EQ2, and it used the floating globule elemental model a lot, which was a laggy piece of shit. They had to nerf that model for performance reasons, which was nice because the part of Solusek's Eye where you walked on a small glass bridge over a huge pool of lava was surrounded by those things, and I was always a little paranoid walking down it for fear of lagging off the edge.
Speaking of Solusek's Eye, that was seriously one of the most amazing dungeons I'd ever been in at the time from a visual point of view. Too bad 80% of the space was of no use.
 

Kuro

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
8,932
23,485
EQ2's issue wasn't just that it required a beefy machine; that shit was un-optimized as fuck. Even when you did get a beefy machine, it couldn't properly use a beefy machine.
 

Jysin

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
6,457
4,345
EQ2's fundamental engine flaw was that it was developed at a time when PC processing power was simply increasing in CPU frequency. Up to that point it was a never ending increase in clock cycles and didn't appear to be changing anytime soon. Well, that is until the early 2000s just before EQ2 release. Everything diverged into parallel processing and multicores. EQ2's engine was extremely CPU bound (especially shadows). This was also compounded by the fact that SoE were trying to future proof by having a TON fo graphic customizations intended for use once hardware caught up. That CPU bound engine was the achilles heel and bit them in the ass for the forseeable future.

People with top end PCs couldn't run the game on high, let alone max, settings. I appreciate what SoE were trying to do but the CPU bound engine just fucked them for years to come as clock speed stagnated and multi-cores proliferated through the market.

It was a sound idea on paper, but the CPU market took a radical change that the engine was never really able to overcome.
 

Agraza

Registered Hutt
6,890
521
Yea, Solusek's Eye was a treasure in places. So many buzzkill features in vanilla EQ2 really hindered the first impression. Combat movement speed, shared xp penalty, and a weak group xp bonus really made leveling up gay. Quest flags rather than quest items meant we had to closely coordinate everyone's quest log and communicate our progress in group chat, which wasn't so great when your group had mouthbreathers that could barely even find their quest log to begin with. It was just a very big adjustment from EQ1. The mechanics should have flowed from game to game more organically. A bit of that got cleaned up while I was playing, but it took years for the game to really get in fighting shape.

I'm still frustrated with quest logs and collection quests to this day. Too often both the log and the types of quests you can get actually discourage cooperation, and that's just such a huge design RED FLAG that these professional designers don't even fucking notice. It was still an issue in Cataclysm era WoW when I quit, and while they often nailed design elements this issue continued to go unnoticed.
 

Teekey

Mr. Poopybutthole
3,644
-6,335
After personally spending hundreds of dollars on League of Legends...I think F2P absolutely can work. But first, you need a fun game that people want to actually play.
 

KCXIV

Molten Core Raider
1,456
180
After personally spending hundreds of dollars on League of Legends...I think F2P absolutely can work. But first, you need a fun game that people want to actually play.
i have to admit i have bought a few things from Planetside 2 store. I needed some cool masks for my characters! haha
 

iannis

Musty Nester
31,351
17,656
I really enjoyed parts of EQ2.

But yeah there was a lot of awful shite in it too. SHITE. So annoyingly awful that it requires the british spelling.

That said... I never had much belief that storybricks was anything except a clever reskin of the quest log. I still want to be wrong about that. That one guy who used to post here for a little bit seemed to actually be involved with the company and the storybricks project, and I hope he manages to find a way to make it work. Because in theory storybricks is pretty awesome. I'm just jaded enough to discredit the successful implementation of it, and I think it should be obvious at this point that if it happens it won't be happening in an EverQuest derivative.
 

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,533
595
After personally spending hundreds of dollars on League of Legends...I think F2P absolutely can work. But first, you need a fun game that people want to actually play.
F2P is an abomination unto the MMORPG genre: anything obtainable in a game (XP, gold, items, etc) should only be obtainable through playing the game.
 

Xaxius

Lord Nagafen Raider
531
147
F2P is an abomination unto the MMORPG genre
And yet, it's the only way any EverQuest IP is allowed to survive in an official operating capacity.
eek.png
 

Teekey

Mr. Poopybutthole
3,644
-6,335
F2P is an abomination unto the MMORPG genre: anything obtainable in a game (XP, gold, items, etc) should only be obtainable through playing the game.
Since when does F2PrequireXP, gold, and items to be purchasable?
 

tad10

Elisha Dushku
5,533
595
Since when does F2PrequireXP, gold, and items to be purchasable?
F2P always and inevitably leads to P2W.

* * *

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
slouches towards Bethlehem waiting to be born.

-W.B. Yeats, clearly talking about F2P MMORPGs.