western developers have the same attitude that american auto manufacturers have. "we dont care what the public wants." "this is what we making.....buy it and get out."
Can't really fault the developers for that attitude when the public pony up the dough regardless.
Best way to discourage developers from churning out bad product; stop buying it. You'd think that the MMORPG community would have that lesson well and truly learned by now, but what happens every time someone pops up and hypes the hell out of a new crappy product?
We bloody buy it.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
The game devs of the world need to realize that "no-lifers" exist along side of "1-2hour players".
These should be put in separate worlds.
Old Everquest was a epic no-lifer game. You could easily spend 10h straight in game on the same boss/quest/dungeon crawl. Believe it or not, but this is extremely attractive for some players.
Others just want to play for 2h after work and they want to accomplish TONS in that amount of time, like with wow and many newer games.
What the game devs do atm is trying to interbreed these two kind of players, and as result they both get fu**ed.
Separate the play-styles into different games! Stop trying to please everyone, its mmorpg-suicide!
The game devs of the world need to realize that "no-lifers" exist along side of "1-2hour players". These should be put in separate worlds.
Old Everquest was a epic no-lifer game. You could easily spend 10h straight in game on the same boss/quest/dungeon crawl. Believe it or not, but this is extremely attractive for some players. Others just want to play for 2h after work and they want to accomplish TONS in that amount of time, like with wow and many newer games. What the game devs do atm is trying to interbreed these two kind of players, and as result they both get fu**ed.
Separate the play-styles into different games! Stop trying to please everyone, its mmorpg-suicide!
So true. ^^
mmorpg's flop faster then mcdonalds cheese burgers these days.
From having played it quite a bit in Chinese, I think Aion has the possibility to capture parts of this.
It is interlaced with EQisms and seems to foster a good community. (Rare as hell loot, rare spawns, etc..) It also tends to highlight good players much more so than WoW did. However much of the useless pain (corpse runs etc..) are not there.
Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs:
Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth.
We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
There weren't millions playing EQ back in the day and there aren't millions looking to recreate that pathetic excuse for a MMO, by TODAYS standards. Want proof? Look at how well received Vangaurd was when it released. It basically recreated much of what EQ was like. But people weren't interested because horrible bugs & lousy content isn't what people look for in a MMO today.
Well I believe it may have had 1 million for a bit, but I think it did had a steady 700k or something sub base. You give proof about vanguard and how its much similar to eq. Well it does have some of that "humph" of eq. But when the game came out, it did pretty decent for a month. Yes, the bugs and everything went wrong. But that has NOTHING to do with what this thread is about in regarding EQ. You really missed the point here.
People don't understand the EQ concept because 75% of the people who post here or play mmos now are NOT EQ players. This thread would only really include EQ, EQ2, DoAc, Vanguard and possibly WoW gamers who never experienced it and would try it. That is the majority base of this community of what the OP will recieve with this type of mmo.
Nostalgia is such a ^%&$*#, right=) You know what? People playing their first MMOs now are experiencing what you did back in in 1998. Amazing right?
You still don't get it, however this is somewhat a valid point because people always want to be back in the past when something good happened. You must understand what we are looking for. The OP clearly stated the "three c's." He didnt go into much detail because I assume that he already expects people to know what he is talking about.
Innovation isn't forced grouping, loads of bugs, exploits, tedious grinds, simplistic heavily limited classes, kill stealing, trains, and lousy art design. Tradition sucks by todays standards. Ever drive a Model T every day to work? No AC, no seatbelts, no powersteering, no radio, no airbags, no cup holders, ect. Great to look at and recall the days when everyone had them. But now, really lousy to drive...much like EQ.
From the looks of it, I really think you are attemping to bash this in a subtle way. Again you are completley missing the point. Does the three C's the OP mention have ANYTHING to do with this whole paragraph here? NO, NOT AT ALL. Maybe because your a WoW fanboy and you just have it brianwashed into your head that WoW is always going to be kinig and its the best mmo out there, blah blah blah. EQ was great for it's time. If this game was so horrible, please explain the siginifigant amount of people who agree with the OP here and many others. What you say here, why would anyone want that in an mmo? I believe what we all want is..
an mmo that ensures a quality game that those 3 c's will complement but with a NEW IP and different ideas.
You can't create community. It just happens. Stick to niche MMOs. WOW had a fantastic community back when it first started. But slowly as more and more people started playing, you had to contend with the asshats. Thats life. Nothign last forever. EQ is better left in the past as a memory. That "FEELING" isn't happening again for those who first experienced it with their first MMO. Its over.
I disagree with you here in a way. You can very well guide and give the OPPERTUNITY to have a good community. For example, in EQ yes it was forced grouping, what happened, a GOOD community sprang forth because the forced grouping allowed players to group with alot of people. By doing so, it allowed you as a player to have a sever rep. If you did NOT have a good rep, you was on a black list, which means you could not get into groups and good guilds did not want you. There were repocussions. I remember back when Eq' had epic weapons 1.5. I got that in 20 hours straight because I was sick and I had nothing else better to do. I got it ALL WITH PUGS. People would help you because they would need to learn the fight for when they did it for thiers or even need it for them selves. Or they simply wanted to help in good faith. You hardly ever see that in WoW. In WoW, you solo from 1 to max level. NO COMMUNITY. Bad pugs, rude people. But thats simply because blizzards design didn't have ANY guidence for them, plus it was the new people who never ever played an mmo before. That experience is going to happen with my mmo. I have discussed my ides with some old eq vets, doac vets and others, and they BELIEVE it has potential to be that mmo that SHOULD of been released after EQ, not this WoW garbage.
I can't really relate to the OP's nostalgia. I played UO around it's second expansion, I played EQ shortly after it's release and Asheron's Call the week it came out. They were all grinds that demanded way more of my time than any other game I had played to that point. Yeah, there were long games, and games with long stretches between save points, but I still never had to spend as much time, per session, playing as these new fangled MMORPG thingies required.
With UO, they were trying to simulate a world and I understood that. Unfortunately, simulating a world means all the tedious grinding of the real world so it didn't appeal to me. Which is odd when you consider that I was rivited to Harvest Moon 64 for a time.
EQ and AC were just like single player RPGs with all the plot yanked out. Given, this can work with something like Angband or Diablo, but both the action and progression were so slow in EQ and AC that you would really have to have an addictive personality to keep playing past level 25. On top of that, I'd spend a lot of time in the early 90's MUD hopping so I realized that EQ wasn't giving me anything that I couldn't get from any random, free Diku MUD.
And yes, I've found most MMOs boring as hell from the very beginning. EQ was not good enough to stand up against Diablo 2, Phantasy Star Online, Baldur's Gate or any other MORPG when it came to my entertainment. It wasn't until I played Anarchy Online that I noticed MMOs getting better. With AO, I could log in, form a party and just do a quick instanced dungeon. Yeah, there was hella grind, but I could drop in and immediately start kicking ass. So it's little wonder that I also liked City of Heroes and Guild Wars. In my opion, that's what people really want in these games. They don't want some "living breathing world" or alternate life. They want to hop on with there friends and crawl a dungeon for an hour or two.
Originally posted by spades07 Answers are in blue.
You answered him? This guy is someone who resents the popularity of older mmos here, and feels he must troll every thread poster that dare liked any part of older mmorpgs. It is probably part understandable by WoW-haters constant attacks of WoW as a kid-game, which while false has reasons why people call it that- which when the general understanding of this on these forums is poor doesn't really get touched upon. The polarity and ego wars are much more important than understanding.
Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs:
Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth.
We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
You cant just say we are ready to believe again, because honestly we never stopped believing. what your saying is what we have been doing ready willing and able to experience. if im not mistaken most of us are pretty tired of doing this because of the BS they keep coming out with. I think the only way to get a satisfactory game is to call them out on their BS. We are letting them lie cheat and steal our gold pieces, we are eating it up and asking for more.
Maybe a lot of it is rose-tinted nostalgia but if I was to list the best times i had in older games it would be:
1. SWG - immersion - not sure why exactly - the game just had it.
2. Trying to solo level the less soloable classes through hard-to-solo EQ1 dungeons like Unrest.
3. Trying to not die in the big open EQ1 dungeons like Blackburrow and Crushbone when they were full of players and pure chaos reigned.
4. Large group PvP when it worked just right (few different games).
The reasons 2 and 3 were so fun aren't locked away in a nostalgic past - most games still have dungeons which follow a similar design, except they're in instances.
Sorry fellas and ladies, I was there in the begining and I piss on the past. Maybe I was born ahead of my time, dunno, but even at my age I won't let the problems of the past, anchor me down for the future. You guys and gals keep trying to re-live those memories and one day you'll be too damn old to see the keyboard and will be too damn senile to remember what w,a,s,d is......nope I will continue the journey for you if you fall behind and I won't regret a thing if I don't find what I'm looking for because I don't feel like I need to devote large chunks of my time to do so......funny...at least the devs are being considerate to me by lifting the time restraints......
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs:
Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth.
We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
My vote is with the others in that you're feeling the grass is greener/nostalgia stage. However, just to try and prove this in another method, lets take your three C's and break them down between then and now:
Challenge: What Challenge did Everquest offer that MMOs after it did not? All the common themes, forced grouping, no instances, and so on are all present in other games. You'd be hard pressed to find something unique about EQ anymore.
Community: Community is what you make of it. I played Everquest back in its early stages, and I can say it had its good and bad, just like every other freaking game in existance. Its called human nature, and isn't specific to a game. About your only real claim to fame is Everquest was founded in a time when tight-knit communities didn't exist, so people were more willing to work and cooperate with new people than they are today, where you've likely got a family of friends already built up. If people were more honest with themselves you'd find more people hate the community because they've abandoned it in favor of their circle of friends/guild-mates. Well, what would you do if you didn't have that circle of friends/guild-mates? Either be a loner, or put the effort to build a circle of friend/guild-mates, aka, create a small community you can be happy with. Noticing a pattern?
Content: I don't know what crack you're on, but Everquest didn't have a lot of content at launch. Again, like every other game. Content comes over time and, to date, that paradigm hasn't shifted.
western developers have the same attitude that american auto manufacturers have. "we dont care what the public wants." "this is what we making.....buy it and get out."
Can't really fault the developers for that attitude when the public pony up the dough regardless.
Best way to discourage developers from churning out bad product; stop buying it. You'd think that the MMORPG community would have that lesson well and truly learned by now, but what happens every time someone pops up and hypes the hell out of a new crappy product?
We bloody buy it.
Good luck with that when most of us suffer from MMO or general gaming addiction. Seems most of us will put up with just about anything to get our fix.
It's this very addiction that fuels the secondary MMO market and why companies are scrambling over themselves to get a piece of it with RMT and MT business models. Instead of quitting MMOs that obviously make gold and item acquisition a tedious chore, they buy from outside companies. Instead of developers combating this by making content more accessible and less of a chore, they are going to keep designing content the way they have been all along and cash in on it by implementing item and convenience shops.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs:
Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth.
We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
There weren't millions playing EQ back in the day and there aren't millions looking to recreate that pathetic excuse for a MMO, by TODAYS standards. Want proof? Look at how well received Vangaurd was when it released. It basically recreated much of what EQ was like. But people weren't interested because horrible bugs & lousy content isn't what people look for in a MMO today.
Well I believe it may have had 1 million for a bit, but I think it did had a steady 700k or something sub base. You give proof about vanguard and how its much similar to eq. Well it does have some of that "humph" of eq. But when the game came out, it did pretty decent for a month. Yes, the bugs and everything went wrong. But that has NOTHING to do with what this thread is about in regarding EQ. You really missed the point here.
People don't understand the EQ concept because 75% of the people who post here or play mmos now are NOT EQ players. This thread would only really include EQ, EQ2, DoAc, Vanguard and possibly WoW gamers who never experienced it and would try it. That is the majority base of this community of what the OP will recieve with this type of mmo.
Answers are in blue.
Just wanted to get the numbers right. Over 2 million people tried EQ over a several year period. They never retained more than 450K at the height of the game's popularity. Huge turnover rate for any game. That is why they came out with EQ2, to try and appeal to those who couldn't stand EQ Live. They failed of course. Making EQ2 slightly more casual friendly than it's predecessor wasn't nearly enough to draw in those millions.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
Originally posted by Jimmy_Scythe I can't really relate to the OP's nostalgia. I played UO around it's second expansion, I played EQ shortly after it's release and Asheron's Call the week it came out. They were all grinds that demanded way more of my time than any other game I had played to that point. Yeah, there were long games, and games with long stretches between save points, but I still never had to spend as much time, per session, playing as these new fangled MMORPG thingies required. With UO, they were trying to simulate a world and I understood that. Unfortunately, simulating a world means all the tedious grinding of the real world so it didn't appeal to me. Which is odd when you consider that I was rivited to Harvest Moon 64 for a time. EQ and AC were just like single player RPGs with all the plot yanked out. Given, this can work with something like Angband or Diablo, but both the action and progression were so slow in EQ and AC that you would really have to have an addictive personality to keep playing past level 25. On top of that, I'd spend a lot of time in the early 90's MUD hopping so I realized that EQ wasn't giving me anything that I couldn't get from any random, free Diku MUD. And yes, I've found most MMOs boring as hell from the very beginning. EQ was not good enough to stand up against Diablo 2, Phantasy Star Online, Baldur's Gate or any other MORPG when it came to my entertainment. It wasn't until I played Anarchy Online that I noticed MMOs getting better. With AO, I could log in, form a party and just do a quick instanced dungeon. Yeah, there was hella grind, but I could drop in and immediately start kicking ass. So it's little wonder that I also liked City of Heroes and Guild Wars. In my opion, that's what people really want in these games. They don't want some "living breathing world" or alternate life. They want to hop on with there friends and crawl a dungeon for an hour or two. Progress, it's a good thing.
I don't always agree with you, but what you said here is 100% true. Totally summed up my thoughts on a lot of older MMORPGs.
EQ was a timesink and a neverending grind, and little else. The community was fun, but that was the saving grace for a game that took the potential of virtual worlds and turned them into repetitive treadmills on rails.
And content? Riiiiiight.
Kill this, deliver that. There's every piece of content in the history of EQ.
If you want to pine for the good old days, at least pine for Ultima.
I think the only way I will get the old EQ feeling again is when we can put on the 3D Helmet that allows us to see only the MMO world your in and graphics so real with solid animations it gives you the awe and thrill yo uhad when you entered Castle Mistmoore reading " Train to zone in, train to zone in" and you run back outside the zone or you run in to late and it's just you and 10 angry mobs hacking on you. Its a long ways away, maybe 10 to 20 years but will be worth it . Im just saying we need a big re-invention of the MMO's that would put us deeper into the MMO worlds to get the first MMO feeling back if that is even possible : (
Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs:
Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth. We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
No, I don't believe so. Not millions, the only MMOs that had that numbers are Wow and Guildwars, EQ never had that many players.
Many of the people on this site like you and me wants a challenging game with a nice community but the regular MMO subscriber wants an easy game that is holding your hand all the time.
A nice EQ type of game could get 500K players, maybe even some more but never millions.
Also to get the initial EQ/Meridian feeling the game will have to be very different from the games today.
Another MMO will most likely be that great experience that changes the genre, like what Half-life did to FPS, Total annhilation did to the RTS games, Diablo to the action games, Baldurs gate to the RPGs... Those games do show up and changes everything from time to time.
But the next great MMO that give that feeling will be nothing like EQ was because that train is gone since long. And it will be nothing like Wow either. I don't know how it will be but I know when I see it. If you played
"Doom" and then tried Half-life you get what I mean, or if you played "Eye of the beholder" and then tried "Baldurs gate".
Originally posted by afoaa You can never recreate the past. If you try it will always end up with a sick construction. Also there never were "millions" of players that played these kinds of games and most of those who were back then don't even play anymore. You are simply falling into the usual trap that happens to many people as they grow up. They remeber their past experiences in a glorified light and think that their current life is not as fun and exiting. They fail to realize its because THEY have aged and changed and blame outside sources for the state of things. Then they begin to resent the young, thinking they are stupid and simple compared to how THEY were back when they were young and in the end they become the old silly farts they looked down on while they were young. You see these kind of people everywhere on these boards never ever comming to terms with what they have become and accepting their age and new personality that comes with it.
What I gathered from the OP was they were looking for a game that has three crucial elements. I'm on Old School EQ player who did enjoy the game and remember it fondly. I've not lost the since of wonder that games can provide. I'm not hinging my sense of wonder and framing it around the nostalgia of EQ, nor do I get that from the OP.
EQ was a great game that had a great formula, Risk vs Reward, substantive story line, interdependency, social structure and a vibrate community of players. None of these elements are unachievable in an MMO. The issue lies in the demographic of players and what market Devs are targeting.
The Old Timers Guild Laid back, not so serious, no drama. All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
Originally posted by Josher Originally posted by declaredemer Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs: Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth.
We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
There weren't millions playing EQ back in the day and there aren't millions looking to recreate that pathetic excuse for a MMO, by TODAYS standards. Want proof? Look at how well received Vangaurd was when it released. It basically recreated much of what EQ was like. But people weren't interested because horrible bugs & lousy content isn't what people look for in a MMO today. Nostalgia is such a ^%&$*#, right=) You know what? People playing their first MMOs now are experiencing what you did back in in 1998. Amazing right? Innovation isn't forced grouping, loads of bugs, exploits, tedious grinds, simplistic heavily limited classes, kill stealing, trains, and lousy art design. Tradition sucks by todays standards. Ever drive a Model T every day to work? No AC, no seatbelts, no powersteering, no radio, no airbags, no cup holders, ect. Great to look at and recall the days when everyone had them. But now, really lousy to drive...much like EQ. You can't create community. It just happens. Stick to niche MMOs. WOW had a fantastic community back when it first started. But slowly as more and more people started playing, you had to contend with the asshats. Thats life. Nothign last forever. EQ is better left in the past as a memory. That "FEELING" isn't happening again for those who first experienced it with their first MMO. Its over.
I find it amusing that Knee Jerk reactions aren't held up to the same level of scrutiny. Vanguard had issues because Brad McQuaid had issues. Yes, as fans of EQ we were hoping McQuaid was going to deliver a substantive world with substantive content that made EQ immersive.
Some of today's 'new gen' players most likely can't relate to a Risk vs Reward world, earn as you go game like EQ was. In EQ your actions had consequences, you had 'challenges' to overcome. This isn't about psychological analysis or traditionalist thinking, its about a formula that breaths life into what is now hollow games void of community and interdependency.
The Old Timers Guild Laid back, not so serious, no drama. All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
I found UO to be more challenging, had a better ( and more interesting imo) community, and quite challenging as well.. No MMO, im my somewhat limited experience, was more like an online world than UO.
I also considered EQ to be the mold that has brought us to a lot of these "cookie cutter" MMOs we see today.
Paradise is less obvious when you are there; it is more obvious when you're gone, or long for it. -- Me What happened to the three Cs:
Challenge Community Content
Millions of us are Ready, Willing, and Able to experience an MMORPG that returns the 3 Cs to the fold. An opportunity to recapture the spirit of each of them, without one overwhelming the other. An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells, and so forth.
We are ready for innovation; and we are ready for tradition (the three Cs).
I've played EQ back in the day. It's only advantage back then was there where only 2 other MMO's to compete with and the 3 of them were all vastly different from one another. (AC, EQ & UO)
Define "challenge" in an MMO. Time sinks, idiotically low drop rates, grinding, brutal death penalties that encourage players to take the safe route rather then take a risk...is this challenge?
Define what you mean by "community". All MMO's have them. Maybe you don't like them but that is irrelavent.
Define "content" what you mean by that? All MMO's have "content". EQ's content was nothing special. It is static and non-dynamic. You are actually very limited in what you can actually do in EQ.
"An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells and so forth" - honestly read that, you are grasping at air...that is ALL subjective and based on opinion. Talk about vague. Good luck with that.
"the good old days of gaming always look better when you look at them through rose colored glasses" ~ me
Comments
western developers have the same attitude that american auto manufacturers have.
"we dont care what the public wants." "this is what we making.....buy it and get out."
perhaps soon we will have to socialize game development........
Can't really fault the developers for that attitude when the public pony up the dough regardless.
Best way to discourage developers from churning out bad product; stop buying it. You'd think that the MMORPG community would have that lesson well and truly learned by now, but what happens every time someone pops up and hypes the hell out of a new crappy product?
We bloody buy it.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
The game devs of the world need to realize that "no-lifers" exist along side of "1-2hour players".
These should be put in separate worlds.
Old Everquest was a epic no-lifer game. You could easily spend 10h straight in game on the same boss/quest/dungeon crawl. Believe it or not, but this is extremely attractive for some players.
Others just want to play for 2h after work and they want to accomplish TONS in that amount of time, like with wow and many newer games.
What the game devs do atm is trying to interbreed these two kind of players, and as result they both get fu**ed.
Separate the play-styles into different games! Stop trying to please everyone, its mmorpg-suicide!
- Nothing lasts.. but nothing is lost. -
So true. ^^
mmorpg's flop faster then mcdonalds cheese burgers these days.
I'm going to go out on a limb here...
From having played it quite a bit in Chinese, I think Aion has the possibility to capture parts of this.
It is interlaced with EQisms and seems to foster a good community. (Rare as hell loot, rare spawns, etc..) It also tends to highlight good players much more so than WoW did. However much of the useless pain (corpse runs etc..) are not there.
I'd give it a good try if I were you.
There weren't millions playing EQ back in the day and there aren't millions looking to recreate that pathetic excuse for a MMO, by TODAYS standards. Want proof? Look at how well received Vangaurd was when it released. It basically recreated much of what EQ was like. But people weren't interested because horrible bugs & lousy content isn't what people look for in a MMO today.
Well I believe it may have had 1 million for a bit, but I think it did had a steady 700k or something sub base. You give proof about vanguard and how its much similar to eq. Well it does have some of that "humph" of eq. But when the game came out, it did pretty decent for a month. Yes, the bugs and everything went wrong. But that has NOTHING to do with what this thread is about in regarding EQ. You really missed the point here.
People don't understand the EQ concept because 75% of the people who post here or play mmos now are NOT EQ players. This thread would only really include EQ, EQ2, DoAc, Vanguard and possibly WoW gamers who never experienced it and would try it. That is the majority base of this community of what the OP will recieve with this type of mmo.
Nostalgia is such a ^%&$*#, right=) You know what? People playing their first MMOs now are experiencing what you did back in in 1998. Amazing right?
You still don't get it, however this is somewhat a valid point because people always want to be back in the past when something good happened. You must understand what we are looking for. The OP clearly stated the "three c's." He didnt go into much detail because I assume that he already expects people to know what he is talking about.
Innovation isn't forced grouping, loads of bugs, exploits, tedious grinds, simplistic heavily limited classes, kill stealing, trains, and lousy art design. Tradition sucks by todays standards. Ever drive a Model T every day to work? No AC, no seatbelts, no powersteering, no radio, no airbags, no cup holders, ect. Great to look at and recall the days when everyone had them. But now, really lousy to drive...much like EQ.
From the looks of it, I really think you are attemping to bash this in a subtle way. Again you are completley missing the point. Does the three C's the OP mention have ANYTHING to do with this whole paragraph here? NO, NOT AT ALL. Maybe because your a WoW fanboy and you just have it brianwashed into your head that WoW is always going to be kinig and its the best mmo out there, blah blah blah. EQ was great for it's time. If this game was so horrible, please explain the siginifigant amount of people who agree with the OP here and many others. What you say here, why would anyone want that in an mmo? I believe what we all want is..
an mmo that ensures a quality game that those 3 c's will complement but with a NEW IP and different ideas.
You can't create community. It just happens. Stick to niche MMOs. WOW had a fantastic community back when it first started. But slowly as more and more people started playing, you had to contend with the asshats. Thats life. Nothign last forever. EQ is better left in the past as a memory. That "FEELING" isn't happening again for those who first experienced it with their first MMO. Its over.
I disagree with you here in a way. You can very well guide and give the OPPERTUNITY to have a good community. For example, in EQ yes it was forced grouping, what happened, a GOOD community sprang forth because the forced grouping allowed players to group with alot of people. By doing so, it allowed you as a player to have a sever rep. If you did NOT have a good rep, you was on a black list, which means you could not get into groups and good guilds did not want you. There were repocussions. I remember back when Eq' had epic weapons 1.5. I got that in 20 hours straight because I was sick and I had nothing else better to do. I got it ALL WITH PUGS. People would help you because they would need to learn the fight for when they did it for thiers or even need it for them selves. Or they simply wanted to help in good faith. You hardly ever see that in WoW. In WoW, you solo from 1 to max level. NO COMMUNITY. Bad pugs, rude people. But thats simply because blizzards design didn't have ANY guidence for them, plus it was the new people who never ever played an mmo before. That experience is going to happen with my mmo. I have discussed my ides with some old eq vets, doac vets and others, and they BELIEVE it has potential to be that mmo that SHOULD of been released after EQ, not this WoW garbage.
Answers are in blue.
I can't really relate to the OP's nostalgia. I played UO around it's second expansion, I played EQ shortly after it's release and Asheron's Call the week it came out. They were all grinds that demanded way more of my time than any other game I had played to that point. Yeah, there were long games, and games with long stretches between save points, but I still never had to spend as much time, per session, playing as these new fangled MMORPG thingies required.
With UO, they were trying to simulate a world and I understood that. Unfortunately, simulating a world means all the tedious grinding of the real world so it didn't appeal to me. Which is odd when you consider that I was rivited to Harvest Moon 64 for a time.
EQ and AC were just like single player RPGs with all the plot yanked out. Given, this can work with something like Angband or Diablo, but both the action and progression were so slow in EQ and AC that you would really have to have an addictive personality to keep playing past level 25. On top of that, I'd spend a lot of time in the early 90's MUD hopping so I realized that EQ wasn't giving me anything that I couldn't get from any random, free Diku MUD.
And yes, I've found most MMOs boring as hell from the very beginning. EQ was not good enough to stand up against Diablo 2, Phantasy Star Online, Baldur's Gate or any other MORPG when it came to my entertainment. It wasn't until I played Anarchy Online that I noticed MMOs getting better. With AO, I could log in, form a party and just do a quick instanced dungeon. Yeah, there was hella grind, but I could drop in and immediately start kicking ass. So it's little wonder that I also liked City of Heroes and Guild Wars. In my opion, that's what people really want in these games. They don't want some "living breathing world" or alternate life. They want to hop on with there friends and crawl a dungeon for an hour or two.
Progress, it's a good thing.
most if not all current mmo's offer the 3 C's in their own way and they don't do it half bad. Get over it.
Maybe 2 or 3. They could off those three C's but doesnt mean it will be done correctly.
double post
You answered him? This guy is someone who resents the popularity of older mmos here, and feels he must troll every thread poster that dare liked any part of older mmorpgs. It is probably part understandable by WoW-haters constant attacks of WoW as a kid-game, which while false has reasons why people call it that- which when the general understanding of this on these forums is poor doesn't really get touched upon. The polarity and ego wars are much more important than understanding.
You cant just say we are ready to believe again, because honestly we never stopped believing. what your saying is what we have been doing ready willing and able to experience. if im not mistaken most of us are pretty tired of doing this because of the BS they keep coming out with. I think the only way to get a satisfactory game is to call them out on their BS. We are letting them lie cheat and steal our gold pieces, we are eating it up and asking for more.
Maybe a lot of it is rose-tinted nostalgia but if I was to list the best times i had in older games it would be:
1. SWG - immersion - not sure why exactly - the game just had it.
2. Trying to solo level the less soloable classes through hard-to-solo EQ1 dungeons like Unrest.
3. Trying to not die in the big open EQ1 dungeons like Blackburrow and Crushbone when they were full of players and pure chaos reigned.
4. Large group PvP when it worked just right (few different games).
The reasons 2 and 3 were so fun aren't locked away in a nostalgic past - most games still have dungeons which follow a similar design, except they're in instances.
Sorry fellas and ladies, I was there in the begining and I piss on the past. Maybe I was born ahead of my time, dunno, but even at my age I won't let the problems of the past, anchor me down for the future. You guys and gals keep trying to re-live those memories and one day you'll be too damn old to see the keyboard and will be too damn senile to remember what w,a,s,d is......nope I will continue the journey for you if you fall behind and I won't regret a thing if I don't find what I'm looking for because I don't feel like I need to devote large chunks of my time to do so......funny...at least the devs are being considerate to me by lifting the time restraints......
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
My vote is with the others in that you're feeling the grass is greener/nostalgia stage. However, just to try and prove this in another method, lets take your three C's and break them down between then and now:
Challenge: What Challenge did Everquest offer that MMOs after it did not? All the common themes, forced grouping, no instances, and so on are all present in other games. You'd be hard pressed to find something unique about EQ anymore.
Community: Community is what you make of it. I played Everquest back in its early stages, and I can say it had its good and bad, just like every other freaking game in existance. Its called human nature, and isn't specific to a game. About your only real claim to fame is Everquest was founded in a time when tight-knit communities didn't exist, so people were more willing to work and cooperate with new people than they are today, where you've likely got a family of friends already built up. If people were more honest with themselves you'd find more people hate the community because they've abandoned it in favor of their circle of friends/guild-mates. Well, what would you do if you didn't have that circle of friends/guild-mates? Either be a loner, or put the effort to build a circle of friend/guild-mates, aka, create a small community you can be happy with. Noticing a pattern?
Content: I don't know what crack you're on, but Everquest didn't have a lot of content at launch. Again, like every other game. Content comes over time and, to date, that paradigm hasn't shifted.
Can't really fault the developers for that attitude when the public pony up the dough regardless.
Best way to discourage developers from churning out bad product; stop buying it. You'd think that the MMORPG community would have that lesson well and truly learned by now, but what happens every time someone pops up and hypes the hell out of a new crappy product?
We bloody buy it.
Good luck with that when most of us suffer from MMO or general gaming addiction. Seems most of us will put up with just about anything to get our fix.
It's this very addiction that fuels the secondary MMO market and why companies are scrambling over themselves to get a piece of it with RMT and MT business models. Instead of quitting MMOs that obviously make gold and item acquisition a tedious chore, they buy from outside companies. Instead of developers combating this by making content more accessible and less of a chore, they are going to keep designing content the way they have been all along and cash in on it by implementing item and convenience shops.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
There weren't millions playing EQ back in the day and there aren't millions looking to recreate that pathetic excuse for a MMO, by TODAYS standards. Want proof? Look at how well received Vangaurd was when it released. It basically recreated much of what EQ was like. But people weren't interested because horrible bugs & lousy content isn't what people look for in a MMO today.
Well I believe it may have had 1 million for a bit, but I think it did had a steady 700k or something sub base. You give proof about vanguard and how its much similar to eq. Well it does have some of that "humph" of eq. But when the game came out, it did pretty decent for a month. Yes, the bugs and everything went wrong. But that has NOTHING to do with what this thread is about in regarding EQ. You really missed the point here.
People don't understand the EQ concept because 75% of the people who post here or play mmos now are NOT EQ players. This thread would only really include EQ, EQ2, DoAc, Vanguard and possibly WoW gamers who never experienced it and would try it. That is the majority base of this community of what the OP will recieve with this type of mmo.
Answers are in blue.
Just wanted to get the numbers right. Over 2 million people tried EQ over a several year period. They never retained more than 450K at the height of the game's popularity. Huge turnover rate for any game. That is why they came out with EQ2, to try and appeal to those who couldn't stand EQ Live. They failed of course. Making EQ2 slightly more casual friendly than it's predecessor wasn't nearly enough to draw in those millions.
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
I don't always agree with you, but what you said here is 100% true. Totally summed up my thoughts on a lot of older MMORPGs.
I have to disagree with the OP.
EQ was a timesink and a neverending grind, and little else. The community was fun, but that was the saving grace for a game that took the potential of virtual worlds and turned them into repetitive treadmills on rails.
And content? Riiiiiight.
Kill this, deliver that. There's every piece of content in the history of EQ.
If you want to pine for the good old days, at least pine for Ultima.
I think the only way I will get the old EQ feeling again is when we can put on the 3D Helmet that allows us to see only the MMO world your in and graphics so real with solid animations it gives you the awe and thrill yo uhad when you entered Castle Mistmoore reading " Train to zone in, train to zone in" and you run back outside the zone or you run in to late and it's just you and 10 angry mobs hacking on you. Its a long ways away, maybe 10 to 20 years but will be worth it . Im just saying we need a big re-invention of the MMO's that would put us deeper into the MMO worlds to get the first MMO feeling back if that is even possible : (
No, I don't believe so. Not millions, the only MMOs that had that numbers are Wow and Guildwars, EQ never had that many players.
Many of the people on this site like you and me wants a challenging game with a nice community but the regular MMO subscriber wants an easy game that is holding your hand all the time.
A nice EQ type of game could get 500K players, maybe even some more but never millions.
Also to get the initial EQ/Meridian feeling the game will have to be very different from the games today.
Another MMO will most likely be that great experience that changes the genre, like what Half-life did to FPS, Total annhilation did to the RTS games, Diablo to the action games, Baldurs gate to the RPGs... Those games do show up and changes everything from time to time.
But the next great MMO that give that feeling will be nothing like EQ was because that train is gone since long. And it will be nothing like Wow either. I don't know how it will be but I know when I see it. If you played
"Doom" and then tried Half-life you get what I mean, or if you played "Eye of the beholder" and then tried "Baldurs gate".
What I gathered from the OP was they were looking for a game that has three crucial elements. I'm on Old School EQ player who did enjoy the game and remember it fondly. I've not lost the since of wonder that games can provide. I'm not hinging my sense of wonder and framing it around the nostalgia of EQ, nor do I get that from the OP.
EQ was a great game that had a great formula, Risk vs Reward, substantive story line, interdependency, social structure and a vibrate community of players. None of these elements are unachievable in an MMO. The issue lies in the demographic of players and what market Devs are targeting.
The Old Timers Guild
Laid back, not so serious, no drama.
All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
Nostalgia is such a ^%&$*#, right=) You know what? People playing their first MMOs now are experiencing what you did back in in 1998. Amazing right?
Innovation isn't forced grouping, loads of bugs, exploits, tedious grinds, simplistic heavily limited classes, kill stealing, trains, and lousy art design. Tradition sucks by todays standards. Ever drive a Model T every day to work? No AC, no seatbelts, no powersteering, no radio, no airbags, no cup holders, ect. Great to look at and recall the days when everyone had them. But now, really lousy to drive...much like EQ.
You can't create community. It just happens. Stick to niche MMOs. WOW had a fantastic community back when it first started. But slowly as more and more people started playing, you had to contend with the asshats. Thats life. Nothign last forever. EQ is better left in the past as a memory. That "FEELING" isn't happening again for those who first experienced it with their first MMO. Its over.
I find it amusing that Knee Jerk reactions aren't held up to the same level of scrutiny. Vanguard had issues because Brad McQuaid had issues. Yes, as fans of EQ we were hoping McQuaid was going to deliver a substantive world with substantive content that made EQ immersive.
Some of today's 'new gen' players most likely can't relate to a Risk vs Reward world, earn as you go game like EQ was. In EQ your actions had consequences, you had 'challenges' to overcome. This isn't about psychological analysis or traditionalist thinking, its about a formula that breaths life into what is now hollow games void of community and interdependency.
The Old Timers Guild
Laid back, not so serious, no drama.
All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett
I found UO to be more challenging, had a better ( and more interesting imo) community, and quite challenging as well.. No MMO, im my somewhat limited experience, was more like an online world than UO.
I also considered EQ to be the mold that has brought us to a lot of these "cookie cutter" MMOs we see today.
/shrug
I've played EQ back in the day. It's only advantage back then was there where only 2 other MMO's to compete with and the 3 of them were all vastly different from one another. (AC, EQ & UO)
Define "challenge" in an MMO. Time sinks, idiotically low drop rates, grinding, brutal death penalties that encourage players to take the safe route rather then take a risk...is this challenge?
Define what you mean by "community". All MMO's have them. Maybe you don't like them but that is irrelavent.
Define "content" what you mean by that? All MMO's have "content". EQ's content was nothing special. It is static and non-dynamic. You are actually very limited in what you can actually do in EQ.
"An appropriate balance, achieved through items, mobs, dungeons, class diversity, class spells and so forth" - honestly read that, you are grasping at air...that is ALL subjective and based on opinion. Talk about vague. Good luck with that.
"the good old days of gaming always look better when you look at them through rose colored glasses" ~ me