Is EQ just nostalgia, or was it really that good?

DelCabon

Originally posted by soulmirror

It was unique for its time, it was 8. out of 10 for a game, but what made it great for its time was technology (or the lack of).

 

It was the world 1st community where you could make a 3d person and communicate with others and play a game.  Today we have fb, instagram, twitter and all sorts of social media, EQ was the social media of that time and place.  We would run quests in a group and our 4th person had 6 chat windows up and typing at 90 wpm, they left their account up almost 24/7 because they could talk to anyone, anytime. I remember hanging out on the grassy knoll outside some bank casting spells for people that stopped, all the while chatting to friends about this or that. I was not playing the game, I was chatting to good friends because we only had one phone in r/l and long distance was expensive.

Yes it was a good game, corpse runs are nostalgic however, the community and more importantly communication was what made the game.  All you have to do is look at the stories about guild gatherings, in game / real weddings, divorces, threats, turf wars, anger, tears, laughter even if they were just across the street or in Australia 3,000 km away.   

Great reply.

When I think back on all the good times in EQ1, they always involved friends and guild members. I have fond memories of those week long camping events for Traveler boots, but clearly they would not be so fond if not for the company I kept at the time.  I often forget how frustrating EQ1 was in terms of corpse runs, mana rests and long raids with absurdly low drop rates and month long efforts to net few (if any) upgrades.

Compare all that to my memories of AC and DAOC which mostly involve actual game play and fondness for my avatar's skills.

 

 

Phry

At the time it was out, it really was that good, it had features that i think a lot of modern games could still learn from. One of my favourite classes was Monk, where your defence was really affected by what you were wearing, and how much weight you were carrying, which meant had to wear the right kind of armour, and only had a GLS, water, bread and a few bandages carried on me, carry too much and you'd be too easy to hit, so bulky armour was totally out of the question anyway, then there was the levelling issues, if you levelled too fast, your fighting skills would lag behind your level, as they levelled up independently of your actual level, it meant you could have 2 monks of the same 'level' wearing identical gear, with wildly different fighting ability, although what skills you chose to use in combat could vary things quite a bit too, there were a lot of combat skills to work on, so it paid to concentrate on just a few of them, otherwise you could end up spreading your abilities out too thinly, and besides, it you didnt train them up, they tended to 'miss' far more often. Travelling around even was a lengthy process, unless you had a druid or wizard friend to give you a lift, as waiting for boats could be a lengthy proposition, although it did give you time to work on skills while you were waiting for them. Besides, in what other game could shouting the words 'train' get everyone to flee the zone

EverQuesting

Yes, it WAS good up to Velious.

So called classic nostalgia.

spiritglow

Originally posted by jeddak

This thread is so large and I doubt the op even reads it anymore. As someone who left my favorite game (UO) for it and played for 3 years from the start I feel I can comment for whatever it's worth.

 

It was a difficult game that almost required grouping.

Dieing was painful. You lost experience, respawned miles away naked and had to return to your corpse to get your stuff. Some corpses became landmarks.

It had a charm in being called Everquest when it had few quests (at least early on).

Great sound effects especially with spells. They still haunt me today.

Long zone times for me with my slow computer.

Weather

Giants roaming some zones.

Trains! (mob trains chasing folks to the zone line as you couldn't break agro otherwise. And unlike now days where they run back harmlessly to their starting point these killed everything in their path. Great fun in dungeons.

A very regional game in that it was hard to  travel across the map without a port from a wiz during the first few months as leveling could be slow unless you had a regular group.

Atmospheric feel to the starting zones for each race.

Swimming!

No restricted equipment like in most games today so you could 'twink' your new characters with great equipment (if you had great equipment). And crafted stuff was sought after.

Evil races like dark elves, trolls and ogres.

Those were some of the good points.

 

In my experience you sat naked a lot at your bind point many zones from where you died hoping for someone to recall you back to your corpse which tended to be next to the mobs that killed you unless someone drug your body to safety.

Lots everything I owned once due to a crash that left me underground and naked only to respawn way above the ground so I could fall to my death. Followed by gm telling me they could do nothing for me. It was a difficult game to play naked and many times you worked long and hard to get your equipment.

The class mechanic was tough as a healer really couldn't function without a group and spent most of their time sitting (and medding up mana) during fights. It could be pretty boring just healing. Tanks just tanked and were almost unplayable solo without long periods of sitting in between fights to heal up.

Aggro was easy to get if you healed too much or did too much damage.

Camping for hours, days ect just to get rare equipment competing against many others also waiting. They had waiting lists.

 

That's some of what endeared it to its fans. It wasn't pretty sometimes and it was a challenge. Games that make you work and strive tend to make memories. There isn't much of that now days as everything is a rush to max level and that "ENDGAME". In EQ playing was the reason you logged on and not the endgame. That changed though of course later on and it was these changes that chased me away.

 

Thank you for this post, I salute you, my friend. It's old school EQ perfectly described, for some classes.

Jonrobin

Everquest was my first on-line gaming experience. I made the mistake of starting it during my honeymoon.....hm perhaps that's the reason the marriage didn't last! It was so addictive we called it evercrack. I played for five or six years, beginning in 2000. I was in the same guild the entire time. I never had a max character because most of us logged on to socialize rather than to grind levels. If someone did want to complete something difficult, we could always count on several guild members ready to help. I always played a ranger, or as we lovingly referred to them "designated corpse". When we came upon a boss mob, someone would always say "quick, throw the ranger at it; we'll escape while he eats the ranger". Lots of nostalgia here. I fear I won't have the same positive gaming experience again because it's always like "chasing the next high". That's not to say I haven't thoroughly enjoyed several other games, but I think you always remember your first one

movindude

I remember having to wait in line next to the room that a certain mob boss spawned that dropped Sow Boots every 3rd kill or so (something like speed of wolf) and after a couple hours it was my turn to go in the room that already have 4 or 5 other people in it waiting their turn to get that drop. One guy had to wait 11 hours because it was a random drop. I got lucky and got mine in less than 4 hours......Was totally worth the wait haha.  Because you had to have different classes to make up a good group it forced people to group and socialize. Games today are so easy you tend to solo through them more than group. Its just to easy to be non social and solo these days. EQ was so good even Sony can't make a better game but they actually didn't make EQ, I think they bought that game off another company and kept jerks like Smedly around. When the GM's were pissed at you or wanted a face to face they would appear in front of you as a bas azz avator looking threatening and since they could kick you from the game they were threatening. I had a rogue named Trustmee and they didn't like the name so they changed it for me to Orum or some krap. When you died your corpse stayed on the ground for a good 6 hours so I attacked the guards in Freeport and left a good 20 of my corpses laying around to piss off the GM's. Others saw this and started to make words with their dead corpses. There was sooo much that was great about EQ. Sony just needs to recreate that game with ESO graphics and they would be the next WOW. I would prepay $100 in a heart beat. EQ next is a better EQ landmark, pretty much like polishing a turd.

Jonrobin

I'll never forget my first trip through Kithicor Woods after dusk. Now that was a SCARY place! And my first time in Crushbone was a tense time. That game really ran me through the gamut of emotions...fear, tension, relief, frustration, anger, you name it. There was nothing bland about that game for me. I remember levitating over the Dreadlands onn the way to Karnor's Castle, just hoping that lev wouldn';t break! Also that tower with the vampire at the very top. Now THAT was a tough place from which to recover a corpse. Like was mentioned above, you really needed a balanced group in order to get anywhere and get back in one piece. The dragon raids required all kinds of coordination....chain heals, communication chat channels etc. I was looking at some maps from EQ the other day and it really took me back

brogett

Some of it is nostalgia, but some is genuine. A few things off the top of my head.

1) EQ is HUGE, especially at the low levels. Back then it had, err, 14? races mostly with their own starting zones. Around 10 starting zones anyway.  Compare that to modern MMOs and you'll see they don't even get remotely closed.   It was never expected that anyone would go through all zones and all quests as you'd typically outlevel an area before completing everything.  This is *so* different to modern games, even modern EQ.

2) Zones are oftten populated with mobs and terrain "just because".  I remember thinking on this in Rift. There was virtually nothing at all that wasn't part of some quest. It seemed every single mob, every single loot drop, was part of a quest somewhere. The zone layout had you gradually moving around the zone from quest hub to quest hub until you'd visited everything.

Compare that to EQ where it had relatively few quests compared to size of the world. You could just go off exploring and start camping somewhere.

3) Faction. It worked. (It doesn't now in EQ). I know a lot of games have faction, but EQ faction in early days was actually about choosing a side. Velious for example even had quest NPCs which could also be killed. Imagine that? Imagine the amount of player hate it would produce now!  It had Dragons vs Giants vs Dwarves. Each with their own town and quest hubs, but those same quest NPCs were raid targets that the opposing faction wanted you to kill, for their own quests.  You could obviously only get those quests once you'd ground out enough faction so that those NPCs were amiable or better.

These days people would hate it though.   It *did* cause inter-guild griefing even back then, but it also made the whole environment seem more believable too.  The same applied to open-world raid bosses. Originally there were no instances, so if a raid mob was up then you could find yourselves in a race.  People hated that too, but again it also made the world actually feel lived in rather than a game made just for my guild with no interaction outside it.

Point 3 is therefore largely nostalgia. It was a different game, arguably a better game for the times, but not one which would work any more. Expectations have moved on.

4) Travel - it really meant something. It took a long time to get across the world (*cough* buggy boats!). That made the world feel big and again lend some sort of credance to the whole game world. Now you just port all over the shop and it all feels "bittty" and small with no real structure.

Again though, this point is just nostalgia. Yes the long travel was a good thing, but equally so I wouldn't have the patience any more and it just wouldn't work in a modern game IMO. People would complain too much.

5) Death mattered. That was a good thing mostly!

You still lose XP in EQ (and can even delevel) on death, but now as in back then you could get resurrected and regain most (up to 96%) of the lost XP.  Rez also summons you back to your corpse.  All your gear was on the corpse, so you'd have to run back and loot your own corpse to regain it (others couldn't loot it, at least on non PVP servers).  That was sometimes challenging so you'd sometimes need a rogue to go in with stealth and /corpsedrag your corpse away froom whatever mob just killed you.

We even had times (ahh Plane of Fear, happy memories) where the entire guild raid wiped and then repeatedly wiped trying to get back to our corpses. We had to get a higher up guild to come out a day later to bail us out. heh.

Now in EQ you keep all your gear on you and have the abilitiy to summon your corpse back to the central hub so it can be ressurrected there, and everyone has an ability to rez by some means or other (cleric mercinary).  Much friendlier and what players wanted, but again there's just *something* lost there.

6) Ignorance and community!

This is a tricky one, but without mobs announcing themselves with "!" or "(quest)" (Modern EQ equiv) above their heads you had no idea who wanted help with what. There were a few guides, allakhazam primary amongst them, but they were community driven.  The players would go out and explore the world, collectively working out how to progress through tasks, sometimes taking months to solve a specific quest.

These days, even in EQ, the quest guides are posted the same day a new expansion goes live. Everyone knows who is a quest NPC. Everyone knows what they want and how many steps there are (it'll say that in the quest anyway).  Again it's partly nostalgia - people just wouldn't put up with the old system any more, but it's also completely killed off a major part of the EQ community and that sense of togetherness.

So mostly nostalgia, but points 1 and 2 are still very valid IMO.

Adjuvant1

EQ didn't have the instant gratification modern mmos have. "Wah, I don't like to griiiind. I want everything nowwwww. Hurrrrrr".

EQ mobs were mostly social, so they'd yell to each other adding to fights and heal each other, and would run when low health, aggroing half the nearby area. Too complicated for gamers today.

EQ mobs didn't have the same tether to spawn/path point, so they'd chase you all over the map until you zoned.

EQ community was relatively intimate, at least at higher levels, so you knew everyone, and couldn't really get away with being a douche.

EQ had real danger of failing. If you died all over the place like a dunce, you'd actually de-level.

EQ had plenty of quests but they weren't common knowledge. Some 70-80 quests in the vanilla weren't completed by anyone for the first year and a half. klatu varada nicto? No one will get this befallen reference, and it wasn't one of the "unknown" ones.

EQ had no voice chat for the first 2.5-3 years.

EQ had room at the top for heroes. There were people who knew their stuff, and there were people the "people who knew their stuff" hero-worshipped, and felt honored when they'd take time to help a raid.

EQ had contested just-about-everything, from dungeons to raid mobs to the raid zones themselves.

EQ players ebayed their toons, sometimes for thousands of dollars, discontinued gear items sometimes for hundreds.

EQ faction, mentioned by players above, had real consequence and often you'd accidentally screw yours up, like helping a paladin do Lucan or xp'ing on gnomes in sol a, requiring hours to fix so you weren't kos to freeport or akanon anymore.

EQ had some rare spawns, so rare, with rare drops so rare, they were almost mythical items.

It was alot like "walking to school every day, up hill, both ways, in the snow" and I loved almost every minute of it, except all the guildmates selling their toons. A few months into planes of power, many game aspects were becoming too streamlined and easy, and too many players on bought toons turned me off. It was a great 3.5-4 year run in my gaming life, and I'd come from a long line of rpg and computer gaming. I wouldn't trade having had that experience.

Tutu2

Nostalgia, it was the kind people and tight knit guilds that made it so great. I could never go back to the tedious game mechanics of 1999 but I did miss the complexity of the classes. Gaining a level and new ability was actually exciting.  I'm sure I'm not the only one hating the homogenized 5-buttons only style of combat trend.

sirphobos

Many things about EQ sucked, such as competing for spawns, the amount of downtime (I do support downtime, but EQ went overboard here, especially when in a small group or recovering from dwath), etc. However, there are some things that no other game that I've played can come close to EQ. Things that come to mind are the social aspect, class design that encouraged and required teamwork, the difficult and sense of accomplishment, not having one correct way to progress through the game and being able to go where you want within reason, and the risk vs reward.

Flyte27

There are a lot of opinions here on what was good and bad in the game.  The reason I eventually stopped playing EQ because it was a huge grind to level.  Most people were more interested in leveling and getting the best items including myself.

One thing that was nice about EQ is it felt like it was designed by some intelligent D&D nerds who just wanted to create a fun forgotten realms style world to romp around in.  Even the classes mimicked D&D 2nd edition which is one of my favorite rule sets in terms of how races and classes work.  One dead give away is looking at the Ranger and Paladin.  They both originally started off with no spells.  Eventually they got spells at level 8 or 9 I believe.  This is exactly what it's like in D&D 2nd edition.  They also used the Cleric, Druid, and different specialty classes of mage (wizard, necromanacer, etc).  The warrior was basically the fighter.  In D&D 2nd edition fighters get extra attacks per round at certain levels.  It's the same in Everquest.  There are some minor differences, but basically this was forgotten realms and D&D 2nd edition.

A lot of the things like camping, buffing people for money, transporting people for money, and gathering in certain places to trade were all created by the players.  Competition over spawns was also created by the players.  This was actually a good thing as it made the game feel a lot more rewarding and fun when you actually got something.  It was frustrating, but worthwhile. 

One person mentioned they logged in a drowned almost immediately.  That is the difference between people who played games in the 80s/90s and people who play games now.  We were a lot that wasn't easily swayed from our goal.  We would spend days camping for an item or questing for an item. 

It had a lot of frustrating moments in EQ, but it was because of that and the ideas that different people who were playing thought of that made it memorable to me. 

The best way I could describe games like UO and EQ are that they gave you the feeling of being a settler in a high fantasy world.  If you know anything about American history it was a lot like people who came from England/other places and started exploring a large new world full of dangers.

I also liked having to type in commands.  It separates the people who just want everything easy from the people who are actually interested in the game.  It's not like command line operations are difficult.  You just have to type and remember a few commands.

My first character was a Ranger (worst class in the game) because I liked Tannis Half Elven from the forgotten realms.  If you played the original EQ you know melee classes sucked.  I played a Ranger up to level 17 and could no longer progress solo. 

At this point I tried other classes like the Druid.  Necromancer was probably the easiest class because of how efficient it was at killing.

The coolest thing was going into dungeons/starting areas at low levels and having all these people running around and bringing trains.  It was both exiting and frustrating.  I recall having to ask people for help finding and retrieving my corpse many times.  In the original EQ there was no resurrection to get exp back.

Trying to figure out how to get from place to place without a map was fairly exiting as well.  The Karanas were so big it was difficult to tell where you were going and where you died.  Some of the areas you had to go through to cross from one town to another were high danger zones like Runnyeye and High Pass Hold.

There were so many places I imaged that just came to life in this game.  Places I imaged from books and cartoons I watched as a kid.  The games today don't seem to like to use the same type of fantasy world.  The races/classes are just nothing like the ones from this game and D&D 2nd edition.  The world in current games isn't anything like Forgotten Realms or JRR Tolkien worlds either.  For some that may be a good thing, but I don't like what people consider fantasy these days. 

At any rate EQ was a really frustrating and fun game.  A game made for people who liked to suffer and persevere. 

PS I never liked end game/raiding in EQ.  I only went to a few raids.  The game was much more fun before developers added that to the mix IMO.

Loke666

It is a bit of both actually. EQ was great but it wasn't as great as many people remembering it.

It many ways it was more fun than modern MMOs, the difficulty made grouping a very different experience and the huge world was a wonder to explore but the game had loads of timesinks and bugs as well. The story varied between brilliant and poor.

EQ was one of the best MMOs ever but if someone was going to make a modern version of a really classic MMO I would still vote for AC instead. AC was a game that invented so many great mechanics that just disappeared again. Most of EQs ideas are still alive in newer games.

Markn

Originally posted by rockin_ufo
One of the things I think adds to the complication of a "redo" of Everquest is that the game was obviously designed around a lower population then what we are used to now. I think it was 150k subs? That's chump change for even the lowest MMOs now.

 

Pretty sure EQ peaked at 500k before POP came out.   

 

I've played since 99 and the game is better today.   Why ? Because MMO players change if you remade EQ exactly like it was in 99 no one would play it for long.   New generation MMO players do not want that kind of grind or difficulty and the older players well we have families jobs and cannot give the game the time you need to do things.

Flyte27

Originally posted by movindude
I remember having to wait in line next to the room that a certain mob boss spawned that dropped Sow Boots every 3rd kill or so (something like speed of wolf) and after a couple hours it was my turn to go in the room that already have 4 or 5 other people in it waiting their turn to get that drop. One guy had to wait 11 hours because it was a random drop. I got lucky and got mine in less than 4 hours......Was totally worth the wait haha.  Because you had to have different classes to make up a good group it forced people to group and socialize. Games today are so easy you tend to solo through them more than group. Its just to easy to be non social and solo these days. EQ was so good even Sony can't make a better game but they actually didn't make EQ, I think they bought that game off another company and kept jerks like Smedly around. When the GM's were pissed at you or wanted a face to face they would appear in front of you as a bas azz avator looking threatening and since they could kick you from the game they were threatening. I had a rogue named Trustmee and they didn't like the name so they changed it for me to Orum or some krap. When you died your corpse stayed on the ground for a good 6 hours so I attacked the guards in Freeport and left a good 20 of my corpses laying around to piss off the GM's. Others saw this and started to make words with their dead corpses. There was sooo much that was great about EQ. Sony just needs to recreate that game with ESO graphics and they would be the next WOW. I would prepay $100 in a heart beat. EQ next is a better EQ landmark, pretty much like polishing a turd.

This was actually an event.  You only had a certain amount of time to get the jboots boots before the event ended.  That's why there were lines of people waiting to get them.  I remember going through that event and basically staying awake for almost two days.  I slept for about 2 days after that.  I believe you can now get jboots just by doing a quest.  Something about killing a Sand Giant.  It kind of takes the fun out of it.

The fungi tunic camp was pretty bad.  I tried to hold the room at Max level Necro (60 at the time) solo and I died many times.  I even got my friend to come and we still had trouble handling the room.  I believe it was level 30-40ish, but the mobs were really tuff even at light blue/grey.

Flyte27

Originally posted by brogett

Some of it is nostalgia, but some is genuine. A few things off the top of my head.

1) EQ is HUGE, especially at the low levels. Back then it had, err, 14? races mostly with their own starting zones. Around 10 starting zones anyway.  Compare that to modern MMOs and you'll see they don't even get remotely closed.   It was never expected that anyone would go through all zones and all quests as you'd typically outlevel an area before completing everything.  This is *so* different to modern games, even modern EQ.

2) Zones are oftten populated with mobs and terrain "just because".  I remember thinking on this in Rift. There was virtually nothing at all that wasn't part of some quest. It seemed every single mob, every single loot drop, was part of a quest somewhere. The zone layout had you gradually moving around the zone from quest hub to quest hub until you'd visited everything.

Compare that to EQ where it had relatively few quests compared to size of the world. You could just go off exploring and start camping somewhere.

3) Faction. It worked. (It doesn't now in EQ). I know a lot of games have faction, but EQ faction in early days was actually about choosing a side. Velious for example even had quest NPCs which could also be killed. Imagine that? Imagine the amount of player hate it would produce now!  It had Dragons vs Giants vs Dwarves. Each with their own town and quest hubs, but those same quest NPCs were raid targets that the opposing faction wanted you to kill, for their own quests.  You could obviously only get those quests once you'd ground out enough faction so that those NPCs were amiable or better.

These days people would hate it though.   It *did* cause inter-guild griefing even back then, but it also made the whole environment seem more believable too.  The same applied to open-world raid bosses. Originally there were no instances, so if a raid mob was up then you could find yourselves in a race.  People hated that too, but again it also made the world actually feel lived in rather than a game made just for my guild with no interaction outside it.

Point 3 is therefore largely nostalgia. It was a different game, arguably a better game for the times, but not one which would work any more. Expectations have moved on.

4) Travel - it really meant something. It took a long time to get across the world (*cough* buggy boats!). That made the world feel big and again lend some sort of credance to the whole game world. Now you just port all over the shop and it all feels "bittty" and small with no real structure.

Again though, this point is just nostalgia. Yes the long travel was a good thing, but equally so I wouldn't have the patience any more and it just wouldn't work in a modern game IMO. People would complain too much.

5) Death mattered. That was a good thing mostly!

You still lose XP in EQ (and can even delevel) on death, but now as in back then you could get resurrected and regain most (up to 96%) of the lost XP.  Rez also summons you back to your corpse.  All your gear was on the corpse, so you'd have to run back and loot your own corpse to regain it (others couldn't loot it, at least on non PVP servers).  That was sometimes challenging so you'd sometimes need a rogue to go in with stealth and /corpsedrag your corpse away froom whatever mob just killed you.

We even had times (ahh Plane of Fear, happy memories) where the entire guild raid wiped and then repeatedly wiped trying to get back to our corpses. We had to get a higher up guild to come out a day later to bail us out. heh.

Now in EQ you keep all your gear on you and have the abilitiy to summon your corpse back to the central hub so it can be ressurrected there, and everyone has an ability to rez by some means or other (cleric mercinary).  Much friendlier and what players wanted, but again there's just *something* lost there.

6) Ignorance and community!

This is a tricky one, but without mobs announcing themselves with "!" or "(quest)" (Modern EQ equiv) above their heads you had no idea who wanted help with what. There were a few guides, allakhazam primary amongst them, but they were community driven.  The players would go out and explore the world, collectively working out how to progress through tasks, sometimes taking months to solve a specific quest.

These days, even in EQ, the quest guides are posted the same day a new expansion goes live. Everyone knows who is a quest NPC. Everyone knows what they want and how many steps there are (it'll say that in the quest anyway).  Again it's partly nostalgia - people just wouldn't put up with the old system any more, but it's also completely killed off a major part of the EQ community and that sense of togetherness.

So mostly nostalgia, but points 1 and 2 are still very valid IMO.

I believe the hate was actually a good thing.  If a game isn't provoking emotions then it's likely going to be boring.  It's probably why most people today treat gaming like it's a joke.  There really isn't much to provoke emotional response in these games.  A lot of that has to come from the community itself, but the community is generally not allowed the freedom to do things that would provoke these emotions.

I loved the buggy boats.  It sucked when you were the one who fell off the boat and you had to swim back and wait for the boat.  It was much worse if you got stuck in the middle between Freeport and Kaladim.  I remember dying deep in the ocean there and I couldn't reach my corpse.  I also lost my sense of direction at times wondering if I would ever find the Island where I could get back on the boat.  It seems frustrating, but it was a memorable experience.  After it happened to you it was funny to see others drop off the boat.  There would be 10 people on the boat, but after zoning there would be 4.  It was just part of the world that you accepted.  An unexpected bug that actually added to the frustration/fun/emotional response of the game.

Subilac

I just want to throw in my two cents. I started EQ pre-Kunark. I was instantly addicted and still today, I compare every single MMO in some way to EQ. I still to this day keep in contact with about 10 people from my guild in 2000 on the Xev server. Only in EQ could you sit in a cave for 10 hours and have fun. Community was out of this world, corpse runs would cause you to call out of work, and I don't think we will ever get that "magic" back.

ArtificeVenatus

 

fivoroth

Originally posted by FoeHammerJT

From reviewing this lovely thread of times remembered I see a couple of very common themes that I whole heartedly endorse. If someone parsed this I think two ideas I've been pushing around various forums and communities would be common to many of these posts:

- Smaller Communities.

- A dangerous world that encouraged/almost forced grouping.

 

Both of these are missing from modern MMOs that currently strive and focus on MASSIVE and ACCESSIBLE.

However much I and many other espouse how much these simple concepts can change a game, current developers are largely ignoring them. I see some glimmers of hope: Wildstar's focus on challenging raid content & even the more challenging world that ESO presented are both improvements on the more face-roll friendly games that have plagued the genre lately.

I want a world where you get to know those around you, not just guild mates. Give me a smaller community, with a world that feels larger and more dangerous. Build a challenging environment with lots to do and lots to create by the players and turn us loose.

The argument from solo players doesn't hold up, there are plenty of games that are solo friendly in the MMO space PLUS the single player games out there and ARPGs etc.

I'd be willing to pay more for a niche friendly game that wouldn't have huge sub numbers. People will spend money on a game they want: See RSI/Space Citizen if you have any doubts.

Here's to hoping!

 

 

I thought the point of an mmo was to be massive? It's the main letter of the acronym that sets it apart from other genres!

ArtificeVenatus