Funny how a game like EQ for those that played it during its early days went very quickly from something that you held in awe, to something you dreaded. Despite the good times, it was only because we didnt know any better back then, and the only alternative was Ultima with its ancient graphics and WoW, which was an unfinished EQ clone back then.
As time went by most players realized after 6 months to a year of play , that the game really was not that fun. However, with a group of friends, even something as grindy and boring of what EQ really was, once the novelty wore off, still was somewhat fun.
The end came for me, when Sony/Verant began censoring the forums. You could not say one negative thing about EQ without censorship. The game stagnated...and if not for all the time people invested into characters, in what was essentially a total waste fo time, people would have left even sooner.
It was as if one day you woke up and realized what EQ really was...a novelty,,,,a total grindfest, campfest, that got you addicted to pay for what really was a meaningless and boring game. If not for the players, the game would not have lasted as long as it did.
Even though WoW was rough around the edges when it first came out, that game progressed into something more, with good and bad...but EQ just sat their not progressing at all, and went extinct like the dinosaur it had become.
Unfortunatelty, too many MMORPGs still take part of both EQs and especially WoWs formulas for the worse, when the suits run with the same old crap only because WoW does it. Yeah 11 million subscribors canr be wrong as Blizzard always says, but they certainly are easily impresssed.
I long for the day, when a mold breaking MMORPG comes out with features that are innovative and not the same old crap of taking our money for cheap thrills and 2 Frost Emblems a day.
I think dungeon gameplay atmosphere is a huge design space - I look at the handful of games I've played and it's not as simple as better or worse. Every game (MMO or single player) has simply had a different type dungeon - not better, not worse, just different. There are things from nethack or XCOM or Oblivion that no MMO I've played has captured. There are things I like and dislike about wide open camp-the-spawn dungoens. There are things I like and dislike about instances. There are things I like about vast mazes to get lost in. There are things I like about nice linear paths.
But a few thoughts come to mind ...
For the setback of death, I prefer the idea of a lockout to a corpse run after death - if you die in a dungeon, it's not a corpse run back, you are simply locked out of that zone for the rest of the day. I've not seen that enforced, but it was generally the way I played.
For monster layout, I admit I'm not a fan of monsters waiting in long lines to be pulled and picked off one-by-one. I like monsters to aggro on sight with few monsters standing around in halls.
I prefer to poke and prod at dungeons, tentitively explore until I reach my difficulty threshold then back off. I also tend to like to play eccentric non-optimal characters. So dungeons that are too carefully tuned in difficulty to a particular level/group-size tend to be wasted on me.
I always liked the old XCOM style of instances - as soon as the creatures were alerted to your presence, everything in the instance went on the hunt for you. You could do a hit-loot-and-run or you could attempt to fight the whole instance. If you successfully defeated everything, you autolooted the entire instance - equipment, resources, etc. I found it really let you focus on the fight during the fight and the loot during the looting instead of being in a constant tug of war between the two. Are there MMOs out there that use this idea for dungeons?
Content and dungeon design is FAR better now. Better stories & characters. Better dynamic events. More strategy. The social interaction was better back then...with STRANGERS that is. Playing with strangers was fun. Now, I couldn't care less. Playing with your friends in an instanced dungeon is still the highest quality experience there is. The "fun" of a 12 yr obnoxious no-lifer training and killing my group, causing untold hours of REPLAYING to get where I was, holds zero interest to me now.
So were they more adventurous? Depends. My best experiences in dungeons were in WOW, and I played EQ and DOAC, AO ect. I still remember DAOC specifically with some fondness. But I saw through the gimmick of heavy death penalties back in the 90s and knew they were designed to extend playtime and a cover up for lack of content.
Where to begin . . .
I saw your other post about static mob respawns, which is true in older and newer MMOs, so lets jsut say at best content is the same now as before, not FAR better. Design goes to older MMOs for their openess and for not being a straight line from entry to exit. Side rooms alternate paths, etc... make for better content, so newer MMOs are FAR worse than older for design. There are no stories and characters in instances so at best this is a wash too. There are no dunamic events in any modern MMO instance, nor will there be with the advent of GW2, TERA and Rift which all tout dynamic events, but that will be in the "open" world not in instances, so again a wash a best, but mroe likely better in older MMOs because with their openess comes dynamic interaction between players. Group interaction was better in the older MMOs because of the necessity to make sure you werent running withy asshats that would get you kill and then lead to corpse runs and death penalties. Newer MMOs have dungeon finder and its ability to make insta-PUGs. Which inturn leads to having to group with 12-yr old obnoxious no-lifers killing the group.
So after reviewing, we find the newer MMO dungeons are 0-fer.
And as to the original point, which is more adventurous, that would also fall to older MMOs including "vanilla" WOW. Let me make my point this way; if you take all of the 5-man instances (popularly known as dungeons) from WotLK and combine their content it would still not equal the content of BRD. And BRD was only one instance.
Dungeons were better in the older MMO's but only because if your party wiped out inside your corpses were trapped in there and were very hard to recover. This made dungeon crawls very dangerous, and as a result, more adventurous.
Dungeon crawls might be more fun these days, but it is not adventurous until you have something to lose.
I invaded Arthas' lair, fought waves of undead, witnessed a kickass fight between him and Sylvanas, then got chased out while he flung more undead at me and created ice barriers to bar my path.
There's good adventurous and bad adventurous. I'd prefer the former.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
Content and dungeon design is FAR better now. Better stories & characters. Better dynamic events. More strategy. The social interaction was better back then...with STRANGERS that is. Playing with strangers was fun. Now, I couldn't care less. Playing with your friends in an instanced dungeon is still the highest quality experience there is. The "fun" of a 12 yr obnoxious no-lifer training and killing my group, causing untold hours of REPLAYING to get where I was, holds zero interest to me now.
So were they more adventurous? Depends. My best experiences in dungeons were in WOW, and I played EQ and DOAC, AO ect. I still remember DAOC specifically with some fondness. But I saw through the gimmick of heavy death penalties back in the 90s and knew they were designed to extend playtime and a cover up for lack of content.
Where to begin . . .
I saw your other post about static mob respawns, which is true in older and newer MMOs, so lets jsut say at best content is the same now as before, not FAR better. Design goes to older MMOs for their openess and for not being a straight line from entry to exit. Side rooms alternate paths, etc... make for better content, so newer MMOs are FAR worse than older for design. There are no stories and characters in instances so at best this is a wash too. There are no dunamic events in any modern MMO instance, nor will there be with the advent of GW2, TERA and Rift which all tout dynamic events, but that will be in the "open" world not in instances, so again a wash a best, but mroe likely better in older MMOs because with their openess comes dynamic interaction between players. Group interaction was better in the older MMOs because of the necessity to make sure you werent running withy asshats that would get you kill and then lead to corpse runs and death penalties. Newer MMOs have dungeon finder and its ability to make insta-PUGs. Which inturn leads to having to group with 12-yr old obnoxious no-lifers killing the group.
So after reviewing, we find the newer MMO dungeons are 0-fer.
And as to the original point, which is more adventurous, that would also fall to older MMOs including "vanilla" WOW. Let me make my point this way; if you take all of the 5-man instances (popularly known as dungeons) from WotLK and combine their content it would still not equal the content of BRD. And BRD was only one instance.
Thanks and come again.
I include all of WOW in WOW, not just the newer stuff. The older dungeon designs were a lot more maze like, but I can understand the reason for the shift. I enjoyed BRD a lot, but when I didn't have a few hours to invest, knowing I could do a whole dungeon in an hour is a nice option, don't you think? I simply couldn't and wouldn't play any MMO now which trapped me in a dungeon for 3+ hrs. I need to get up, get away, talk with the wife, deal with my kids if they come in the room, ect. The interaction with other groups in a dungeon has no appeal anymore. It just leads to waiting around or dead stuff laying around that I want to kill. I get that out in the open world anyway. Having it a dungeon as well doesn't make it any more special. Although, having large enough dungeons where multiple groups have enough content to split up is certainly a nice option. WAR had something going for it in that respect.
Things have certainly changed, but 1 guy could still get you killed in WOW now and certainly back in 2004, and a wipe is never fun. Any EXP dept hanging over my head afterwards in DOAC didn't make my time after a wipe any more fun, so why have it? It made it annoying. I also never played with an idiot in WOW for very long. As soon as it was discovered, he got booted. Then again, I usually always played with people I knew or friends of people I knew, so an a$$hat here or there was never an issue. There certainly were less idiots back before 2005 though, which is just the nature of the genre now and its not going away. Thats why I stick to guilds. No idiots=)
I still say the best dungeon designs in WOW blow away anything in old EQ or DAOC. Tank & spank was rather lame, but thats all there was. We didn't know any better. It was cool back then more due to the newness than the actual design. The static nature just sin't the same as a dungeon environment thats dynamic, with events, ect. A bunch of tunnels with mobs standing around with various agro ranges, waiting to be killed, isn't good design by todays standards.
Missing the point DirtyJoe...yes you are right and most of us admit, those old EQ dungeons were static camp fests.
But some were genious in their simplicity, such as Befallen and that one dungeon whos name escapes me...it was like a Haunted House....someone refresh my memory.
The things is, the PLAYER COMMUNITY was so different back then....the players really really made these simplistic dungeons adventerous.
I guess it was the combination of good static dungeon design and a great player base.
Hell, in retrospect...TRAINS were hilarious and great fun!
Remember the Oasis? SG to Orc Highway! SG to Orc Highway!
Lol community, it was just as bad back then as it is today and can be just as good as some remember. I remember reading through L2orphus and L2blah through all the hate and discontent, flaming, name calling accusations of cheating and fraps videos of people "pwning" their enemies. I still had a lot of fun playing L2 because of the people that i played with it applies to any game your circle of friends makes the game what it is in an MMO it makes the dingy parts shiny. I hold no illusions of what kind of games use to be available, the design of some dungeons was good yeah the first few times i went to them. After being there day in and day out grinding i came to realize they were just static masses of crap and all essentially the same with the same purpose, provide me with static respawns so i can grind my ass off with no real purpose besides hoping for a sweet random drop or to watch the xp bar crawl towards the next level. There is no genious to the skins they put on the dungeons. Trains were not hilarious ask the kid who PM'd me telling me his girlfriend was crying because she dropped her boots, that netted me a sweet profit, being set back hours or days of grinding because some asshat like me was entertained because i rolled a dagger class.
Man, this brings back the good ol days. I dont know why all a sudden the developers started getting soft on the player base. It was the downfall of the MMO industry a silent slow downfall. Now people are use to easy mode so to bring back cr's and stat loss would be a kick in the butt but they'd get over it.
Man, this brings back the good ol days. I dont know why all a sudden the developers started getting soft on the player base. It was the downfall of the MMO industry a silent slow downfall. Now people are use to easy mode so to bring back cr's and stat loss would be a kick in the butt but they'd get over it.
Well, it made MMO's more accessible to the mainstream market, but I agree, too much easymode and low-challenging gameplay can make things stale and bland where they could have been more thrilling.
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums: Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
"old days" no instance dungeoning was way more immersive and adventurous. DnD, however, has pretty good instanced dungeoning. I will always love how on L2 that in order to get into this one tower or something, you had to swim underwater throughout a bunch of mobs and end up on the highest floor of this tower (under water?), but you're not in water anymore. That was fun to find.
In classic EQ (not the shit EQ1 is now) When you went deep inside a dungeon, you had this feeling... that if you screwed up, you were going to be in big trouble. If you died, you coulnd't recover your corpse alone, you would need a couple of friends to dedicate their time to help you out, maybe for a couple of hours.
Sometimes a guild would have to wait for days if they went too deep in a unexplored dungeon, until another guild was strong enough to help them.
Those where MMORPGS, not the silly multiplayer games we have now.
In classic EQ (not the shit EQ1 is now) When you went deep inside a dungeon, you had this feeling... that if you screwed up, you were going to be in big trouble. If you died, you coulnd't recover your corpse alone, you would need a couple of friends to dedicate their time to help you out, maybe for a couple of hours.
Sometimes a guild would have to wait for days if they went too deep in a unexplored dungeon, until another guild was strong enough to help them.
Those where MMORPGS, not the silly multiplayer games we have now.
^ This ^
When you venture into a dungeon in todays MMOS(including EQ live) there is no fear factor
Things always look greener in the rearview because the view is fertilized with bullshit.
Seriously though I think there are games out now that have dungeons like those of old. Vanguard has some good dungeon crawls. As does EQ2. Conan has a couple I really like. I did love AC's though. Game was much better than EQ imo.
Yet EQ2 and Vanguard are getting long in the tooth as well so the Next Gen needs to come on already lol
Thats a big negative. Dungeons today are designed alot better than they were in early eq. The fear just isnt there. The only fear you have today is your 18 year old healer might ragequit if he dies.
Part of the problem with what is happening in this thread is most people only remember the one game they were playing or the one game they think of as "old school", whether that be DAOC, EQ, L1 or L2, UO, AC, etc... The truth of the matter is that all of them had problems, and all of them did things wrong. This acts as a red herring, distracting people from the point of the thread, which is what all of these games had in common... And that was what they did right! Whether they did it exactly the same or not, there were certain similarities that just made it work better.
I agree that stories and scripted events can be fun.... Once, twice... five times... ten times? 50 times? 150 times? How many times do you have to run it to get all your gear?
I agree that having your own dedicated area can be a relief... You don't need to worry about what anyone else is doing, anyone interfering with you, etc.... But on the other hand you also have the problem of being stuck with who you have... Who remembers having someone leave the party in the middle of an instance in WoW or another game, and having to find someone to replace them for the rest of the dungeon?
With that said, I give you the following warning:
Wall of text below is mostly quotes with my responses. It is extremely long, so you can just skip the quotes, unless you want to know what I am referring to.
I played Lineage 2 for 4 years so i dont wanna hear it about not knowing what older games were like, or ffa PvP, or losing gear, or trains or grinding mobs or any number of things that a lot of people here think make a game "hardcore". Losing XP was in no way fun and discouraged PvP specially at higher levels where losing 5% of a level meant 24 straight hours of grinding to get it back. The only thing i remember about older dungeons is the frusteration of having trains dropped on you or getting cought in the middle of clan wars or some other crap excitement...maybe for the PvP that randomly happened. For the most part older dungeons sucked and the only thing entertaining about them was talking to friends in vent while doing the mindless grind that older games were.
Take a look at the highlighted part... there is the problem.
First off, most of us are going back farhter than lineage 2 (although I did use some examples from more modern games like requiem).
Second, lineage 2 was a severe grind-fest, and I quit it fairly quickly for exactly the reasons you described above. I, at least, am emphatically NOT talking about lineage 2 when I give examples of old-school dungeons.
The problem with modern dungeons is that they are like carnival rides(which is an especially apt analogy when people keep comparing the games to themeparks), which isolate you from everyone else. The content is the same each time you repeat it(other players add an element of randomness which doesn't otherwise exist) and no matter how gritty the ambience, it just does not have the same feel as a more open dungeon. There were also plenty of scripted encounters and things to do, with or without other players...
Originally posted by Ceridith
Old dungeons felt significantly more 'adventurous' than the ones in newer games, and instancing along with a lot of the 'perks' that came with it is a large part of what ruined it, to be honest.
The dungeons of old felt like dungeons because they were dangerous. As you progressed deeper into the dungeons you always had to be mindful of an escape route, because sometimes things could go bad, fast. Furthermore, as you cleared the dungeon, it didn't simply stay empty as you progressed through like pretty much every dungeon in today's "modern" MMOs do. Stuff respawned, sometimes at really inconvenient moments, but that's what made it so much more exciting.
Furthermore, there were many dungeons that were non-linear. No, I don't just mean you could choose to clear wing A, B, and C in whichever order you want. I mean some dungeons were quite literally mazes to be explored, and lost in. This of course added even more to the element of adventure, because nothing was more heartpouding in an MMO as trying to escape from a train of mobs in a dungeon where you can barely navigate out of combat, let alone while running away from a train of mobs at your heels.
There were also a lot of hidden bonuses and treasure to be had by the most adventurous of players who dared to venture down into the depths of the most dangerous dungeons. And then of coruse there was coming across and saving, or even being saved by, other players or parties.
This is exactly my feeling. You needed more situational awareness.
It also helped build community, because you weren't isolating people... This is one thing that the GW2 dev team talked about. Modern day MMOs have shifted in a direction which encourages isolation and negative competition rather than community. The design of dungeons, the way experience and loot are divided, and many of the other games systems are all designed to foster an isolationist experience. This is a large part of why communities have started breaking down.
Originally posted by Josher
So were they more adventurous? Depends. My best experiences in dungeons were in WOW, and I played EQ and DOAC, AO ect. I still remember DAOC specifically with some fondness. But I saw through the gimmick of heavy death penalties back in the 90s and knew they were designed to extend playtime and a cover up for lack of content.
In DAOC you had a minor xp penalty when you died, and could recoup most of it by praying at the tombstone which popped up where you had died... hardly a "heavy death penalty" imo...
Originally posted by Josher
Aaah, so you're telling me those spawns back in EQ and DAOC weren't exactly the same every time=) C'mon. You played didn't you? You were killing the same spawns & bosses over and over again to get gear back then too. Hell, maybe you were just doing it for exp, because the gear itemization was useless, which was even worse. Having a story that makes it cool the first time is still better than NO STORY.
Nothing is as exciting the 50th time, but to say DAOC was more exciting the 50th time than WOW, just shows the bias. It all got boring and repetitive at some point. For me the harsh death penalty accelerated the BORING and repetitive parts, because dying just meant the last hour or two had to be replayed and its not like it was any harder or more exciting. Its like driving all day and then going back a few hundred miles to drive it all over again. Does driving past the same road you just drove past 2 hrs ago make it any more exciting? Nope.
Don't sugar coat the past. Like others said, how many people go into a MMO completely cold like we did back then? If you don't look at FAQs, videos or maps or walk-throughs or skill builders, which is the chief cause of all that adventure being stripped away, you're just a liar=)
The spawns were exactly the same. The scripted encounters were exactly the same. But if all you were missing was the drop from Prince in DF, you only had to do Prince and nothing else... You didn't have to play through the entire story each time you wanted to kill it once for the chance at the drop, which meant that your total time per number of kills to drop was lower.
Also, as has been said before. The challenges you faced in the dungeons were somewhat different each time, because you were interacting with others. EQ was definitely over-camped, but DAOC wasn't(even dungeons which were heavily camped weren't "over-camped").
I don't really see how this is being sugar-coated. I think everyone will admit there were flaws with the old systems... But one thing they definitely DID do was bring people together.
Originally posted by maplestone
For the setback of death, I prefer the idea of a lockout to a corpse run after death - if you die in a dungeon, it's not a corpse run back, you are simply locked out of that zone for the rest of the day. I've not seen that enforced, but it was generally the way I played.
Getting locked out of the dungeon is an interesting idea... But its only feasible if you are playing solo. If you are in a group, it means that if anyone dies, your whole group is down a man. Not very fun for the others in the team.
Originally posted by dragonbrand
Design goes to older MMOs for their openess and for not being a straight line from entry to exit. Side rooms alternate paths, etc... make for better content, so newer MMOs are FAR worse than older for design. There are no stories and characters in instances so at best this is a wash too. There are no dunamic events in any modern MMO instance, nor will there be with the advent of GW2, TERA and Rift which all tout dynamic events, but that will be in the "open" world not in instances, so again a wash a best, but mroe likely better in older MMOs because with their openess comes dynamic interaction between players. Group interaction was better in the older MMOs because of the necessity to make sure you werent running withy asshats that would get you kill and then lead to corpse runs and death penalties. Newer MMOs have dungeon finder and its ability to make insta-PUGs. Which inturn leads to having to group with 12-yr old obnoxious no-lifers killing the group.
So after reviewing, we find the newer MMO dungeons are 0-fer.
And as to the original point, which is more adventurous, that would also fall to older MMOs including "vanilla" WOW. Let me make my point this way; if you take all of the 5-man instances (popularly known as dungeons) from WotLK and combine their content it would still not equal the content of BRD. And BRD was only one instance.
I think this post hits the nail on the head...
Originally posted by Ozivois
Dungeons were better in the older MMO's but only because if your party wiped out inside your corpses were trapped in there and were very hard to recover. This made dungeon crawls very dangerous, and as a result, more adventurous.
Not all dungeons were in that one game... As a counter-example of a good dungeon of the same era, how about DAOC... No corpse runs there. If you didn't mind losing the xp you could even just abandon your tombstone. I remember the entrance of the tomb of muire being a graveyard at one point... You had to cycle targets to find your own grave.
Yes, EQ1 is still the king of dungeons,nothing has come close except Vanguard.
I'm having fun now with Vanguard, we just did Khegor's End ( 13-19 ) and our group wiped, we added each other to our friends list and will be doing it with all of us at a higher level tonight. Next we have Chrystol Mines, this one is very very hard, I'm scared. When I played Vanguard a year ago, we could not even get 1/4 of the way, so my group of friends will plan for it.
Stop me if I'm wrong but Vanguard is not very old. And you can play it with a low population, you just have to use the social panel to make friends, and add them to your list. No one ever uses the social panel's, they think they will get friends by screaming LFG, or guilds, even in WoW I never got many groups with any of my guilds. This almost never works in any mmo, sorry !
No dungeons were not more adventurous,they never were any good imo.They are always the cheapest looking textures,narrow pathways,very cheap map design.There is also very little content within a dungeon,instances are the exat same,which is why i do not like a game that relies on them.
The only reason anyone even enters an instance or dungeon is to get some reward they want,otherwise they would never realm into such a boring map.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
EQ1 - Best dungeons i've played, before the LDoN instanced stuff. I do not like instances, I realize the need for it, for some mechanics, but I am not a big fan of it. Yeah, their were times that other peoples screwups killed you, or people multi-tasking and not paying attention and getting roamers on you, while you had all you could handle, but it just felt like you accomplished more, than a lot of newer games I played. I mean you can climb a hill, or everest, they are both hills to an extent, but which one gives more gratification. I am not a fan of the meaningless no death penalty type stuff, people have complained enough that hardly any game has a real death penalty anymore. I hated it sometimes, and it sucked, but it made you want to live more, fear making mistakes, ect....When I play some of the newer games, I am llike oh well, don't lose anything, and even kill myself for instant travel to make things 'easier'....I don't like it, and call me a hypocrit, but I am not a masachist either, if its in place, I will use it....
I read some people talking about how people wouldn't go into dungeons, but I disagree, and while a lot is static, they also have random spawn times, roamers, random named....A lot of the challenging dungeons took 'pull teams', some took up to 3 people to split pulls to make killing managable...Breaking into the old planes of EQ, before the higher levels, and often fighting as you arrive and sometimes being dead before you loaded, yeah it could suck too, having people that could feign death, to watch the roamers, to shout the time to enter to the breaking party, and of course, the runners that train 70 mobs on you, and having...I could agree that maybe it was too hard, but it seems like things now have overcorrected imo.
Vanguard had a few nice dungeons also.
The less instancing, the more apt I am to play something, it is something I look at when I deicde what to play.
It's something that was talked about in the 'Old MMORPG's vs new MMORPG's' article that made me think back about it, namely this part:
“Train!” would sound out into an over-crowded dungeon. Immediately everyone with any sense would duck and cover and those unfortunate enough to be caught unawares- they were already dead. Dungeons in MMORPGs of yore were hotbeds of death, terror, and feverish excitement. The best way to describe places such as Blackburrow would be akin to a copper mine: the constant threat of death and the unstable behavior of mobs would see everyone clearing out periodically until the atmosphere was safe once again. Am I sexing the descriptions up in the name of nostalgia? I don’t think so.
Back in the old days, to die in an MMORPG was not just a jolly trip to a spirit healer; it was like opening a whole can of excrement covered worms. To enter a dungeon meant preparation and maturity. Everyone involved was drilled with almost military discipline. Before even thinking about entering somewhere, bind points were made, rations were stored, and maps were printed from fan sites. One slip up could spell a five hour naked corpse run and many angry interactions with people who were once your friend. Was such fear inducing adventure fun? Well yes it was and the immersion of it all was simply magical. How many of us tell tales of late night dungeon crawls from games a decade old compared to those who tell of how things got a bit hairy in Great Barrows?
I recognized it immediately, I had the same feeling about those EQ dungeons: the added risk and danger because of the highly agressive mobs and the troubles dying could bring you in did make a lot of those encounters stick more vividly in my memory than dungeons and raids in later MMORPG's.
So how is it with you people? Did the dungeons and encounters in older MMORPG's you played leave you with a more exciting experience than later MMORPG's you played?
No . much less excitment. I remmber camping Lower Guk in EQ. Absolute boring, no challenge and no adventure. Every spawn spot (particularly the bosses) was camped to the hilt. Everyone takes a number and wait their turn. Since there are so many players around, no mob last more than a few seconds after spawn.
There is zero challenge and zero adventure. And i prayed that the next boss kill will have my drop so i can get out of there.
Yes and no, I'd say:
Yes - In EQ, I remember tons of trains to the zone, plane raids and group raiding dungeons like Splitpaw and having a blast.
No - what he said - camping sucked. Imagine having to get on a calendar in order to camp a specific mob for a chance to get an item you needed or wanted.
I am on disability, and there is no way I would devote my time to a video game like EQ1 used to demand. Which is saying a lot, as EQ1 is by far the best MMO I ever played.
The zones I luved best in EQ were Unrest, and Tower of Frozen Shadow. I played a paladin the first couple of yrs, and undead zones were our bread & butter. Lower Guk could be good, but you had a lot more worries about trains.
If EQ was on the FTP plan ala EQ2 and LoTRO, I would dabble once in a while as I miss my characters. That said, I would never get back into the grind....even if they paid me.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Games like Everquest,the sheer danger of wiping deep inside a dungeon(and these dungeons werent easy!), with the thought of hours of exp loss and having to retrieve your corpse with ALL of your gear on it? it would rattle the nerves.
There was no reviving at the nearest spawn stone if you didnt bind there or reviving as an invisible spirit with added run speed to help you on your way.When you died you respawned at where you bound,if that meant on the other side of the world? oooopppps better start runnin' or someone with teleport was nice enough to give you a free ride.
When there were "trains" in a dungeon,everyone had to worry..mobs wouldnt focus on just the aggroer,if u got caught in the train of mobs,you would get aggro'ed and be in major risk of being overwhelmed and dying.
When mobs aggro'ed,they didnt "give up" or reset after 20 seconds,the only way they'd reset is if the aggroer died or made it to the zone line.Thats wasnt the end of it either,mobs would walk their way back and aggro anyone that would get close enough,thus starting the process all over again.
it was a whole different world back then..
Today,MMO's are way to merciful and forgiving IMO.It detracts from the emotion that one can recieve.The sense of defeat and accomplishment are dulled greatly.
Comments
Funny how a game like EQ for those that played it during its early days went very quickly from something that you held in awe, to something you dreaded. Despite the good times, it was only because we didnt know any better back then, and the only alternative was Ultima with its ancient graphics and WoW, which was an unfinished EQ clone back then.
As time went by most players realized after 6 months to a year of play , that the game really was not that fun. However, with a group of friends, even something as grindy and boring of what EQ really was, once the novelty wore off, still was somewhat fun.
The end came for me, when Sony/Verant began censoring the forums. You could not say one negative thing about EQ without censorship. The game stagnated...and if not for all the time people invested into characters, in what was essentially a total waste fo time, people would have left even sooner.
It was as if one day you woke up and realized what EQ really was...a novelty,,,,a total grindfest, campfest, that got you addicted to pay for what really was a meaningless and boring game. If not for the players, the game would not have lasted as long as it did.
Even though WoW was rough around the edges when it first came out, that game progressed into something more, with good and bad...but EQ just sat their not progressing at all, and went extinct like the dinosaur it had become.
Unfortunatelty, too many MMORPGs still take part of both EQs and especially WoWs formulas for the worse, when the suits run with the same old crap only because WoW does it. Yeah 11 million subscribors canr be wrong as Blizzard always says, but they certainly are easily impresssed.
I long for the day, when a mold breaking MMORPG comes out with features that are innovative and not the same old crap of taking our money for cheap thrills and 2 Frost Emblems a day.
I think dungeon gameplay atmosphere is a huge design space - I look at the handful of games I've played and it's not as simple as better or worse. Every game (MMO or single player) has simply had a different type dungeon - not better, not worse, just different. There are things from nethack or XCOM or Oblivion that no MMO I've played has captured. There are things I like and dislike about wide open camp-the-spawn dungoens. There are things I like and dislike about instances. There are things I like about vast mazes to get lost in. There are things I like about nice linear paths.
But a few thoughts come to mind ...
For the setback of death, I prefer the idea of a lockout to a corpse run after death - if you die in a dungeon, it's not a corpse run back, you are simply locked out of that zone for the rest of the day. I've not seen that enforced, but it was generally the way I played.
For monster layout, I admit I'm not a fan of monsters waiting in long lines to be pulled and picked off one-by-one. I like monsters to aggro on sight with few monsters standing around in halls.
I prefer to poke and prod at dungeons, tentitively explore until I reach my difficulty threshold then back off. I also tend to like to play eccentric non-optimal characters. So dungeons that are too carefully tuned in difficulty to a particular level/group-size tend to be wasted on me.
I always liked the old XCOM style of instances - as soon as the creatures were alerted to your presence, everything in the instance went on the hunt for you. You could do a hit-loot-and-run or you could attempt to fight the whole instance. If you successfully defeated everything, you autolooted the entire instance - equipment, resources, etc. I found it really let you focus on the fight during the fight and the loot during the looting instead of being in a constant tug of war between the two. Are there MMOs out there that use this idea for dungeons?
Where to begin . . .
I saw your other post about static mob respawns, which is true in older and newer MMOs, so lets jsut say at best content is the same now as before, not FAR better. Design goes to older MMOs for their openess and for not being a straight line from entry to exit. Side rooms alternate paths, etc... make for better content, so newer MMOs are FAR worse than older for design. There are no stories and characters in instances so at best this is a wash too. There are no dunamic events in any modern MMO instance, nor will there be with the advent of GW2, TERA and Rift which all tout dynamic events, but that will be in the "open" world not in instances, so again a wash a best, but mroe likely better in older MMOs because with their openess comes dynamic interaction between players. Group interaction was better in the older MMOs because of the necessity to make sure you werent running withy asshats that would get you kill and then lead to corpse runs and death penalties. Newer MMOs have dungeon finder and its ability to make insta-PUGs. Which inturn leads to having to group with 12-yr old obnoxious no-lifers killing the group.
So after reviewing, we find the newer MMO dungeons are 0-fer.
And as to the original point, which is more adventurous, that would also fall to older MMOs including "vanilla" WOW. Let me make my point this way; if you take all of the 5-man instances (popularly known as dungeons) from WotLK and combine their content it would still not equal the content of BRD. And BRD was only one instance.
Thanks and come again.
Gaming since Avalon Hill was making board games.
Played SWG, EVE, Fallen Earth, LOTRO, Rift, Vanguard, WoW, SWTOR, TSW, Tera
Tried Aoc, Aion, EQII, RoM, Vindictus, Darkfail, DDO, GW, PotBS
Dungeons were better in the older MMO's but only because if your party wiped out inside your corpses were trapped in there and were very hard to recover. This made dungeon crawls very dangerous, and as a result, more adventurous.
Dungeon crawls might be more fun these days, but it is not adventurous until you have something to lose.
I invaded Arthas' lair, fought waves of undead, witnessed a kickass fight between him and Sylvanas, then got chased out while he flung more undead at me and created ice barriers to bar my path.
There's good adventurous and bad adventurous. I'd prefer the former.
"What is truly revealing is his implication that believing something to be true is the same as it being true. [continue]" -John Oliver
I include all of WOW in WOW, not just the newer stuff. The older dungeon designs were a lot more maze like, but I can understand the reason for the shift. I enjoyed BRD a lot, but when I didn't have a few hours to invest, knowing I could do a whole dungeon in an hour is a nice option, don't you think? I simply couldn't and wouldn't play any MMO now which trapped me in a dungeon for 3+ hrs. I need to get up, get away, talk with the wife, deal with my kids if they come in the room, ect. The interaction with other groups in a dungeon has no appeal anymore. It just leads to waiting around or dead stuff laying around that I want to kill. I get that out in the open world anyway. Having it a dungeon as well doesn't make it any more special. Although, having large enough dungeons where multiple groups have enough content to split up is certainly a nice option. WAR had something going for it in that respect.
Things have certainly changed, but 1 guy could still get you killed in WOW now and certainly back in 2004, and a wipe is never fun. Any EXP dept hanging over my head afterwards in DOAC didn't make my time after a wipe any more fun, so why have it? It made it annoying. I also never played with an idiot in WOW for very long. As soon as it was discovered, he got booted. Then again, I usually always played with people I knew or friends of people I knew, so an a$$hat here or there was never an issue. There certainly were less idiots back before 2005 though, which is just the nature of the genre now and its not going away. Thats why I stick to guilds. No idiots=)
I still say the best dungeon designs in WOW blow away anything in old EQ or DAOC. Tank & spank was rather lame, but thats all there was. We didn't know any better. It was cool back then more due to the newness than the actual design. The static nature just sin't the same as a dungeon environment thats dynamic, with events, ect. A bunch of tunnels with mobs standing around with various agro ranges, waiting to be killed, isn't good design by todays standards.
@ for doing it. Those are the types of things that are missing now a days.
P.S. 1 for older dungeons.... who remembers camping a fungi tunic for the alt monk that had a tranq staff?
Lol community, it was just as bad back then as it is today and can be just as good as some remember. I remember reading through L2orphus and L2blah through all the hate and discontent, flaming, name calling accusations of cheating and fraps videos of people "pwning" their enemies. I still had a lot of fun playing L2 because of the people that i played with it applies to any game your circle of friends makes the game what it is in an MMO it makes the dingy parts shiny. I hold no illusions of what kind of games use to be available, the design of some dungeons was good yeah the first few times i went to them. After being there day in and day out grinding i came to realize they were just static masses of crap and all essentially the same with the same purpose, provide me with static respawns so i can grind my ass off with no real purpose besides hoping for a sweet random drop or to watch the xp bar crawl towards the next level. There is no genious to the skins they put on the dungeons. Trains were not hilarious ask the kid who PM'd me telling me his girlfriend was crying because she dropped her boots, that netted me a sweet profit, being set back hours or days of grinding because some asshat like me was entertained because i rolled a dagger class.
Man, this brings back the good ol days. I dont know why all a sudden the developers started getting soft on the player base. It was the downfall of the MMO industry a silent slow downfall. Now people are use to easy mode so to bring back cr's and stat loss would be a kick in the butt but they'd get over it.
Well, it made MMO's more accessible to the mainstream market, but I agree, too much easymode and low-challenging gameplay can make things stale and bland where they could have been more thrilling.
The ACTUAL size of MMORPG worlds: a comparison list between MMO's
The ease with which predictions are made on these forums:
Fratman: "I'm saying Spring 2012 at the earliest [for TOR release]. Anyone still clinging to 2011 is deluding themself at this point."
Well... yeah.
"old days" no instance dungeoning was way more immersive and adventurous. DnD, however, has pretty good instanced dungeoning. I will always love how on L2 that in order to get into this one tower or something, you had to swim underwater throughout a bunch of mobs and end up on the highest floor of this tower (under water?), but you're not in water anymore. That was fun to find.
In classic EQ (not the shit EQ1 is now) When you went deep inside a dungeon, you had this feeling... that if you screwed up, you were going to be in big trouble. If you died, you coulnd't recover your corpse alone, you would need a couple of friends to dedicate their time to help you out, maybe for a couple of hours.
Sometimes a guild would have to wait for days if they went too deep in a unexplored dungeon, until another guild was strong enough to help them.
Those where MMORPGS, not the silly multiplayer games we have now.
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
^ This ^
When you venture into a dungeon in todays MMOS(including EQ live) there is no fear factor
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Thats a big negative. Dungeons today are designed alot better than they were in early eq. The fear just isnt there. The only fear you have today is your 18 year old healer might ragequit if he dies.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
Part of the problem with what is happening in this thread is most people only remember the one game they were playing or the one game they think of as "old school", whether that be DAOC, EQ, L1 or L2, UO, AC, etc... The truth of the matter is that all of them had problems, and all of them did things wrong. This acts as a red herring, distracting people from the point of the thread, which is what all of these games had in common... And that was what they did right! Whether they did it exactly the same or not, there were certain similarities that just made it work better.
I agree that stories and scripted events can be fun.... Once, twice... five times... ten times? 50 times? 150 times? How many times do you have to run it to get all your gear?
I agree that having your own dedicated area can be a relief... You don't need to worry about what anyone else is doing, anyone interfering with you, etc.... But on the other hand you also have the problem of being stuck with who you have... Who remembers having someone leave the party in the middle of an instance in WoW or another game, and having to find someone to replace them for the rest of the dungeon?
With that said, I give you the following warning:
Wall of text below is mostly quotes with my responses. It is extremely long, so you can just skip the quotes, unless you want to know what I am referring to.
Take a look at the highlighted part... there is the problem.
First off, most of us are going back farhter than lineage 2 (although I did use some examples from more modern games like requiem).
Second, lineage 2 was a severe grind-fest, and I quit it fairly quickly for exactly the reasons you described above. I, at least, am emphatically NOT talking about lineage 2 when I give examples of old-school dungeons.
The problem with modern dungeons is that they are like carnival rides(which is an especially apt analogy when people keep comparing the games to themeparks), which isolate you from everyone else. The content is the same each time you repeat it(other players add an element of randomness which doesn't otherwise exist) and no matter how gritty the ambience, it just does not have the same feel as a more open dungeon. There were also plenty of scripted encounters and things to do, with or without other players...
This is exactly my feeling. You needed more situational awareness.
It also helped build community, because you weren't isolating people... This is one thing that the GW2 dev team talked about. Modern day MMOs have shifted in a direction which encourages isolation and negative competition rather than community. The design of dungeons, the way experience and loot are divided, and many of the other games systems are all designed to foster an isolationist experience. This is a large part of why communities have started breaking down.
In DAOC you had a minor xp penalty when you died, and could recoup most of it by praying at the tombstone which popped up where you had died... hardly a "heavy death penalty" imo...
The spawns were exactly the same. The scripted encounters were exactly the same. But if all you were missing was the drop from Prince in DF, you only had to do Prince and nothing else... You didn't have to play through the entire story each time you wanted to kill it once for the chance at the drop, which meant that your total time per number of kills to drop was lower.
Also, as has been said before. The challenges you faced in the dungeons were somewhat different each time, because you were interacting with others. EQ was definitely over-camped, but DAOC wasn't(even dungeons which were heavily camped weren't "over-camped").
I don't really see how this is being sugar-coated. I think everyone will admit there were flaws with the old systems... But one thing they definitely DID do was bring people together.
Getting locked out of the dungeon is an interesting idea... But its only feasible if you are playing solo. If you are in a group, it means that if anyone dies, your whole group is down a man. Not very fun for the others in the team.
I think this post hits the nail on the head...
Not all dungeons were in that one game... As a counter-example of a good dungeon of the same era, how about DAOC... No corpse runs there. If you didn't mind losing the xp you could even just abandon your tombstone. I remember the entrance of the tomb of muire being a graveyard at one point... You had to cycle targets to find your own grave.
I'm having fun now with Vanguard, we just did Khegor's End ( 13-19 ) and our group wiped, we added each other to our friends list and will be doing it with all of us at a higher level tonight. Next we have Chrystol Mines, this one is very very hard, I'm scared. When I played Vanguard a year ago, we could not even get 1/4 of the way, so my group of friends will plan for it.
Stop me if I'm wrong but Vanguard is not very old. And you can play it with a low population, you just have to use the social panel to make friends, and add them to your list. No one ever uses the social panel's, they think they will get friends by screaming LFG, or guilds, even in WoW I never got many groups with any of my guilds. This almost never works in any mmo, sorry !
No dungeons were not more adventurous,they never were any good imo.They are always the cheapest looking textures,narrow pathways,very cheap map design.There is also very little content within a dungeon,instances are the exat same,which is why i do not like a game that relies on them.
The only reason anyone even enters an instance or dungeon is to get some reward they want,otherwise they would never realm into such a boring map.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
EQ1 - Best dungeons i've played, before the LDoN instanced stuff. I do not like instances, I realize the need for it, for some mechanics, but I am not a big fan of it. Yeah, their were times that other peoples screwups killed you, or people multi-tasking and not paying attention and getting roamers on you, while you had all you could handle, but it just felt like you accomplished more, than a lot of newer games I played. I mean you can climb a hill, or everest, they are both hills to an extent, but which one gives more gratification. I am not a fan of the meaningless no death penalty type stuff, people have complained enough that hardly any game has a real death penalty anymore. I hated it sometimes, and it sucked, but it made you want to live more, fear making mistakes, ect....When I play some of the newer games, I am llike oh well, don't lose anything, and even kill myself for instant travel to make things 'easier'....I don't like it, and call me a hypocrit, but I am not a masachist either, if its in place, I will use it....
I read some people talking about how people wouldn't go into dungeons, but I disagree, and while a lot is static, they also have random spawn times, roamers, random named....A lot of the challenging dungeons took 'pull teams', some took up to 3 people to split pulls to make killing managable...Breaking into the old planes of EQ, before the higher levels, and often fighting as you arrive and sometimes being dead before you loaded, yeah it could suck too, having people that could feign death, to watch the roamers, to shout the time to enter to the breaking party, and of course, the runners that train 70 mobs on you, and having...I could agree that maybe it was too hard, but it seems like things now have overcorrected imo.
Vanguard had a few nice dungeons also.
The less instancing, the more apt I am to play something, it is something I look at when I deicde what to play.
Yes and no, I'd say:
Yes - In EQ, I remember tons of trains to the zone, plane raids and group raiding dungeons like Splitpaw and having a blast.
No - what he said - camping sucked. Imagine having to get on a calendar in order to camp a specific mob for a chance to get an item you needed or wanted.
~Ripper
I am on disability, and there is no way I would devote my time to a video game like EQ1 used to demand. Which is saying a lot, as EQ1 is by far the best MMO I ever played.
The zones I luved best in EQ were Unrest, and Tower of Frozen Shadow. I played a paladin the first couple of yrs, and undead zones were our bread & butter. Lower Guk could be good, but you had a lot more worries about trains.
If EQ was on the FTP plan ala EQ2 and LoTRO, I would dabble once in a while as I miss my characters. That said, I would never get back into the grind....even if they paid me.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Huge difference between now and then..
Games like Everquest,the sheer danger of wiping deep inside a dungeon(and these dungeons werent easy!), with the thought of hours of exp loss and having to retrieve your corpse with ALL of your gear on it? it would rattle the nerves.
There was no reviving at the nearest spawn stone if you didnt bind there or reviving as an invisible spirit with added run speed to help you on your way.When you died you respawned at where you bound,if that meant on the other side of the world? oooopppps better start runnin' or someone with teleport was nice enough to give you a free ride.
When there were "trains" in a dungeon,everyone had to worry..mobs wouldnt focus on just the aggroer,if u got caught in the train of mobs,you would get aggro'ed and be in major risk of being overwhelmed and dying.
When mobs aggro'ed,they didnt "give up" or reset after 20 seconds,the only way they'd reset is if the aggroer died or made it to the zone line.Thats wasnt the end of it either,mobs would walk their way back and aggro anyone that would get close enough,thus starting the process all over again.
it was a whole different world back then..
Today,MMO's are way to merciful and forgiving IMO.It detracts from the emotion that one can recieve.The sense of defeat and accomplishment are dulled greatly.