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EQ was the best thing to happen to MMOs
Moaky07
Member Posts: 2,096
It showed devs folks didnt wanna deal with forced PvP, and that PVE was an appealing gaming style in the MMO realm.
I think WoW really went too far with the casual approach(same as the game I am playing....TOR). That said, PVE themeparks should fall somewhere in the range between WoW n EQ IMO. Going to extreme ends of the scale really dont seem to pan out as well as the original, even though they generally afford the company a good chance to at least recoup the investment.
If you were going to play a themepark MMO, where would your ideal game sit?
For me, it would be a game that is probably 60% WoW, and 40% EQ on the scale. I want a little issue from deaths/no quest markers etc, but I dont wanna spend all night waiting on a bod run to complete.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Comments
80% SWG, 20% Vindictus
*touches self* purrrrrr
(basically a wide open sandbox with pockets of themepark content... and awesome combat mechanics)
Writer / Musician / Game Designer
Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture
Depends on how themeprk-ish it is. If it's the normal ones we have going on today, i'd say stick to either pve or pvp. Make one of them 80% the focus of the game. Sandboxes are players driven, mostly in the pvp aspect, so they don't need large content updates like themeparks.
However, these types of mmorpg's rely on constant dev work to keep fresh. The more time you give to making BG's and RVR maps and pvp related functions, the more time you lose making more quests, dungeons, storylines, etc, and vice-versa.
Everquest was a great game, but also started the decay of the genre before WoW ever launched. EQ is to blame for gear becoming outdated instantly by a new expansion, really became a problem from PoP onwards.
And also is to blame for instances (segregating players from each other) in LDoN. And the destruction of player run business and interaction with the introduction of The Bazaar, which completely destroyed the nomadic market of the commonlands tunnel.
WoW just took those bad ideas and ran with it, the devs were admitted EQ addicts. I'd say EQ is the best and worst thing to happen to mmos.
Personally, I think Nexus: Kingdom of the Winds was the best thing to happen to mmos. For those that have heard of it and or played it back before it became a fashion show.
Playing: Smite, Marvel Heroes
Played: Nexus:Kingdom of the Winds, Everquest, DAoC, Everquest 2, WoW, Matrix Online, Vangaurd, SWG, DDO, EVE, Fallen Earth, LoTRo, CoX, Champions Online, WAR, Darkfall, Mortal Online, Guild Wars, Rift, Tera, Aion, AoC, Gods and Heroes, DCUO, FF14, TSW, SWTOR, GW2, Wildstar, ESO, ArcheAge
Waiting On: Nothing. Mmorpg's are dead.
I dont know what "decay of the genre" you are talking about unless you mean MMO sandboxes, and yeah....EQ showed they arent very popular.
As for your comments.....
For those willing to spend hrs on end running their shop and/or looking to short change others, I bet the bank/tunnels was their bag. For those looking for a fair price, or being able to find something at 2 AM, the bazaar was a god send, even if at first it lagged everyone out.
The loot issue? Yeah it could be discouraging to see the raid item you got from 2 expansions back beat out by some vendor trash in the new expansion, and yet the path for raiding nearly always included doing the expanions in order. If the items gotten from previous expansions were meaningless, folks would of been concentrating on the new expansion only. One thing I think you have to consider is back then EQ was hitting us with 2 expansions per yr. IMO the correct way is to introduce 1 expansion a yr. One yr between needing upgrades is fair IMO.
LDoN brought good n bad....Bad because the open world dungeons helped to shape the community. Good because folks could play what they wanted with their groups. The same was true for guilds raiding.....it wasnt a matter of if the MOB was up, just simply a matter of it needed to be keyed, and where the lock out timer stood. When you get 30, 40, 50, 60 or even 70 folks together, you should be able to do things. The best thing to come of this was no more outside griefing ruining others fun.
I dont know about the game Nexus, or what it was supposed to add the genre. I still contend bringing PVE to MMOs, and doing away with forced PVP is the best thing to happen to MMOs.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
And yet EQ's FFA PvP server was able to accomplish what other servers could not due to the fact we had a civil environment in which there was far less kill stealing, training, ninja looting, etc than on pve servers due to actual repercussions for the offenders..
Add to that Kerafyrm in Sleepers Tomb has only been killed on Rallos Zek (and the kill verified to be legit by a gamewide announcement accross all the servers by SOE). And I'm not talking about their "Dragons Dragons Dragons" ring event version I'm talking about the original destroy the world kerafyrm....
Hmmmm.
i think UO was the best thing to happen to MMORPGS. i remember the launch of EQ and whilst i was intruiged i just couldnt get over the awful 3d grpahics. UO didnt have good gprahics but its isomteric 2d view worked well for the times. I think EQ was the best thing to happen to mmos if you think wow is an awesome game since EQ inspired WOW almost completely and was the godfather of Themepark mmos.
EQ2 was such a terrible disapointment.
Its surprising how little i rated SWG bakc at its rlease after palying it for a few mnoths. But the sad thing is looking back its actually one of the better mmos ive played. At the time i tohguht it was pretty sucky.
there are 2 types of mmo, imitators and innovaters.
I'm agreeing with you up to a point OP, but Ultima Online was the one that really got the ball rolling in the right direction.
Death is nothing to us, since when we are, Death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
Yeah OK
IIRC training was a legal tactic on the FFA server.....doing so on a PVE one got ya banned. How the hell you think Fansy became famous? It wasnt the "Go go good guys".....it was training the shit out of everyone.
Kerafym was a neat accomplishment. I would take nothing away from the folks that participated. They dealt with a lot of exp loss due to the death touch. It seems like the mob had to be reset the first time. IIRC a GM killed it. It probably didnt hurt to have more folks show up, and get in on what would be a one time thing. I believe all but Xev had spawned the Sleeper on PVE servers years prior. They didnt have the luxury of extra lvls that waiting yrs afforded folks on PVP servers. The Xev sleeper was awakened by a black op move, and the xev server as a whole lost their mind on the folks involved.
Also IIRC PVP servers were 8% of the total number of servers, and the 4 of them were the first servers to be merged. Which harkens back to your contention about the actions going on......kind of hard with a lack of players. It wasnt until the major losses caused by WoW kicked in that the PVE servers started being merged. I was on Mith Marr, and we got folded right before I left.
Getting rid of forced PVP was a good thing, no matter how much the griefers miss the easy marks. The mechanic is not popular, and worse, it gives gamers the power to drive off other customers.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Pretty sure Fansy wasn't on Rallos Zek server. Fansy was on one of the Teams servers....
Also you said that the other servers didn't have the luxury... No thats not it. They didn't have enforcable ingame consequences for acting like social deviants to block other guilds. We had that on Rallos Zek. They had the choice not to wake him.. Guess what they woke him.... Its hard to explain the environment on Rallos Zek. In many ways it was similar to a blue server but we self enforced policies on everyone. If you broke the rules you not only were shunned in groups, you had to deal with repeated deaths for your crimes & people learned you had to get along because it made things work..
We didn't have players stealing kills or messing with spawn triggers etc because it led to guild wars. If you were in a guild war good luck trying to raid... Guild wars had terms to end them (usually involving massive payouts to get off kos lists from the losing side)
Its hard to explain how well Rallos Zek worked. We didn't have to go crying to gm's to enforce "rotations" on mobs. We did it ourselves. If you broke the rotations then see above. When one guild was past that content other guilds filtered into the rotations..
FFA PvP works, its just that people have preconceived notions that it doesn't because it emposes restrictions on them that they cannot handle such as having to be civil and take turns in many cases (and look where that got us in the global chats in many current games)
The only reason that Rallos Zek failed was because SOE didn't do enough to stop the hacking programs that became rampant (teleport & zone crash were very prevelant)
EQ is the origin of most of the bad mechanics we see repeated in so many MMORPGs.
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- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
You might wanna actually back that up with what you consider to be bad mechanics. Most of the mechanics i've seen lately have evolved since EQ (mindless dailies, dumbing down of abilites, on rails questing, shallow faction systems, etc)
Well, I will only mention the worse ones then... gear grind based raid end game and forced grouping.
That's pretty much why I prefered games like UO and AC1 back then. No matter if you were alone online at 3am or with tons of people at prime time, you could progress efficiently and even at high level, have a chance to get equipment to improve your character.
Actually, to make it even shorter... the worst thing EQ introduced is that notion of "end game" in a MMORPG.
Respect, walk
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- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
EQ stole all that from Meridian 59, M59 was the best thing to happen to MMOs.
I blame WoW for the gear based grind endgame. In EQ there were many routes to getting gear. and due to stat caps there wasn't a "best set" for everyone, And the fact that raids could be large means you weren't locked out of going many times because you weren't properly geared... (ie small raids are bad)
As far as "forced grouping", that was one of its better features, but it really wasn't forced, often you would see people try to solo things just for the "challenge". Also EQ had a way to counter the gear based grind where you could continually progress your character outside of raids using AA points. So if you were alone at 3am you could exp some to get AA's with your small group which could help you just as much as a gear upgrade.
Also since EQ focused less on twitch gameplay you actually had time to chat and talk which meant you actually /gasp got to know people online (unlike the dungeon finders of today's era in which most often the only thing that breaks the silence is the rage of someone who thinks that the world revolves around them and they couldn't possibly have messed up)
Gear becoming instantly outdated by a new expansion didn't happen in EQ until the last couple years. People were still doing Plane of Time several expansions later, for instance.
Pretty sure Anarchy Online had instances before EQ did, also.
Yep you are right AO did invent instances in MMOs (they were called missions and even had group ones)
Most EQ (and clones) fans can't imagine a game where people group for FUN and because they want to instead of being forced to, so I won't blame you for this. And no, WoW is not a good example of that.
Respect, walk
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- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
It was actually more efficient to group. And you know people have been grouping up for centuries do do things because they are more efficient that way and you get to meet new people. People used to like that.. Its kinda funny. the more connected this world becomes the more isolated its residents seem to want to be...
The Treadmill, XP Loss, Hell Levels, Corpse Runs, Gear Grind, /y Spawn Check, /y LFG.....
Not the best things
Best thing about EQ? You could get drunk in it.
Tried: EQ2 - AC - EU - HZ - TR - MxO - TTO - WURM - SL - VG:SoH - PotBS - PS - AoC - WAR - DDO - SWTOR
Played: UO - EQ1 - AO - DAoC - NC - CoH/CoV - SWG - WoW - EVE - AA - LotRO - DFO - STO - FE - MO - RIFT
Playing: Skyrim
Following: The Repopulation
I want a Virtual World, not just a Game.
ITS TOO HARD! - Matt Firor (ZeniMax)
You really think many of have that kind of time now? Some of us have 40hr work weeks we can't just stay home and ignore our responsibilties.
Treadmill - Maybe you treated it as such. but it was much less than the ratrace to max level then brick wall style content of current games
XP Loss - Made you pay attention, kept you on top of your game, if you died repeatedly then try to analyze what you did wrong & fix it. It teaches you that you can't just apply brute force to a problem and fix it (ie reduced zerging) and besides make friends with a cleric.
Hell levels - They smoothed those out & got rid of those LONG ago
Corpse Runs - Again consequences for dieing, Made you play at the top of your game and judge risk, and if you had problems get a necro to summon your corpse
Gear Grind - You know In current games you replace your gear much more quickly than in EQ. And there wasn't always a best gear set as i mentioned. If your playing a game and obsessed with gear thats your problem.
Spawn Checks - You mean the game world actually felt alive because the mob wasn't always up when you demanded it to be? It help keep the world from feeling hallow.
LFG - Thats what friends and Guilds are for.
Not being forced to group to bash mobs doesn't mean not interacting with other players. That's the point most if not all (ex)EQ fans have a hard time to understand. Forcing people to interact is actually the worse way to make them really socialize positively.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023
As opposed to the worse way of randomly grouping people together and letting the egotistical rage fly (ie battlegrounds and instances)
I don't really see how EQ's way was worse.... Too many players treat today's games as solo and complain when they hit max level within the first month & the lack of attachment to the game..
I already told you that WoW wasn't the best example either... and neither are BGs or Instances, which are only evolutions of the EQ model. And I don't talk about today's players and games, neither UO nor AC1 had either instances or BGs, or forced grouping, yet those two games had some of the best communities I had the pleasure to be part of since I started playing multiplayer games ages ago. Try to imagine that... people were not forced to group, ever, but they did it regularly, FOR FUN. That builds communities, unlike forcing people to go into dungeons to bash mobs because there's no other way to progress and actually nothing else to do.
Respect, walk
Are you talkin' to me? Are you talkin' to me?
- PANTERA at HELLFEST 2023