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Neverquest
lorndarken
Member Posts: 279
to me , a good mmo gives you the entire option to play the game and never do a single quest or have to go the extra mile just to advance and be = to that of everybody eles . but unfortunatly that is not the case in terms of games these days.
of course i use to play eq . and never did a single quest in it . ever !!! did i enjoy the game >? you bet . but now it seems like with any mmo ,. you have to be the better geared up person just to have any fun .
like take for instance wow.
you have to grind in that game to get good weapons and gear and ect . by the time you spend your 15 $ a month going to work, cause thats what it is. you will find yourself bored to tears because you didnt have any fun at all. why ??? hmmm , could be because you worked for it ? work is never fun.
thats why they call it work. you will not find any letters in the english dictionary of the word fun in the word work .
but what ever makes people happy , and keeps them still in it. will be the reason why people keep "playing"
to me a good mmo also brings intresting things like abillitys for one. not many mmos, in these days have that oh wow. look what he can do, abillty in terms of class seperation.
for instance
in eq . a magician could summon stuff.
a wizard could teleport
a necro could have a undead pet.
a enchanter could turn into anything
. in daoc , you had some of that , but it was mostly for fighting, no "fun" spells
when will we see a mmo that brings thoese elements to the table again ?
maybe never......
the days of fantasy in a good mmo are long and gone and DEAD !!!!
you have to quest to get anywhere. you have to get the best gear and weapons. you have to belong to a hugh guild with a website and vent and radio show and youtube channel , you have to not have fun for awhile in order to have fun ???
so has the games of the past died out due to bordom and ever grinding. we shall never see another gem in the making.
Comments
It seems to me that you're just deluding yourself into thinking things were any different with EQ than they are now.
You claim that nowadays you have to grind quests and grind xp and grind gear in order to be able to accomplish anything in an MMO. I want you to tell me how, exactly, that is different than it was in EQ.
Were you running into lower guk, back in vanilla, at level 35 with nothing but vendor-bought gear on your character? Were you handling the pulls in old sebilis without a group that had run ALL over the old world finding themselves drops beforehand? Etc.
Edit - and you talk about "fun" feature in EQ (like enchant illusion spells) as if there aren't equivalents of that nowadays. What do you think the hundreds of different mounts and pets in WoW are for? Function? No way. They're vanity/fun things.
Edit again - I bet the only content you ever saw in everquest is the equivalent of heroic 5-mans in WoW. You talk about EQ as if you didn't need gear, high levels, or a guild in order to see everything. But that's not even close to true. You obviously needed levels to accomplish ANYthing. Gear was pretty freaking important once you got above, like, level freaking 40. And there is no way you did anything larger in scale than 5-man experience group PUGs or an ocassional raid PUG (Vox or some crap) without a guild.
That's just like WoW. You can run instances with crap gear. You can run instances lower level than you should be. You can see a lot of content without a raiding guild. But you can't raid without being the appropriate level. You can't succeed in raids without a certain level of gear. And you probably aren't going to see many raids (at least not of the newest raid tier) without a raiding guild.
Next!
This deserves a post of its own.
You end your OP by saying something like "So have all the great, old MMOs just died out cause everyone wants to grind all the time nowadays or what?!"
Dude. I'm honestly starting to think you never even played EverQuest. You think WoW is a grind compared to leveling up (and I'm talking about leveling up back in the day - hell levels and death penalties and corpse runs) and getting HUNDREDS of AAs in EQ? Lol.
doh, and here I thought the hours I spent farming whelps for sale was because ppl wanted them because they added 100hp /sarcasam off.
like in all games, the fun stuff is pure vanity. EQ with the amulet of necropotence and bard/rogue masks (I still remember being confused when I first started asto why I couldn't make a DE bard but one was standing right infront of me). WoW for the "omg I just made 200g on the AH selling a useless whelp", mechanical squirrels, various spiders, owls, cats, etc. EQ2 with it's useless class specific illusions (burning fists, turn your familiar into a raven, etc). There's no real reason to get them except to show off, always has been, always will be. That's the one thing that hasn't evolved (or in alot of cases has devolved) from then to now.
i think some people are forgetting the purpose of this thread.
it's simply to talk about the comparisson of a friendly , fantasy driven , game that has the makings for wanting to play because of the limitless possibliitys.
this was something that games like never winter nights, diablo 2, and everquest brought to the table.
was eq a grind ? in terms of levels, it was but i can assure you i was able to make a human magician on that very first mmo game and get him to lvl 35 , with each level it felt like a hugh celebration, cause it did take a very long time to level up. but the reward for doing so was well worth it. unlike most mmos you see now in days.
i can't say i have ever felt the same way i did leveling up in that game when i play other mmos, these days.
the last crap i played was warhammer online. not once did i feel any excitement of getting to level 40 . sure it was nice to do on my blackguard. but i also saw that it was BS ...... no eye opening abillitys. and i took a look at all the other abilitys for the classes in the game, not a single one was oooh, thats something similar to a fun spell to use like in old eq.
people have forgot what its liek to play a mmo where its not about who can be the best, but how much fun you can have .
when i played wow.. i had hopes for this game.... geuss what .. same bs you find in most mmos, now and days.
and as for going back to eq ?. the game died, it lost its magic that use to hold me.
Yeah no wonder ive been bored of games, its true having to grind away at quests is boring. But for me my real job its fun, I really enjoy pushing a dustmop and propane buffer around while listening to my ipod. I'd have to say its the most enjoyable job ive ever had, just walking around listening to music never having to speak to a soul but my boss.
But anyways yeah there needs to be games that have more freedom on how to level up so it don't feel like a grind. WAR kinda had it going you could get xp from questing or doing PvP but everyone was doing scenarios over world RvR which is the most fun of the PvP for me anyways. Fallen Earth has a great idea, you get xp for questing, harvesting and as well with killing mobs just like every other game. Im not sure if you get xp for crafting, my brain is kinda fuzzy right now.
@ Lorndarken
Yeah a level up in a game just don't feel the same anymore. When I played FFXI it was a big deal when you leveld up now most games its like yay I gained a level, it just isn't exciting. I rememberd how good it felt to get a level in PnP DnD and I miss that feeling.
The simple answer is: MMOs are what you make them.
I could go on and on about different things I have done, giving examples of the good times I've had in this or that game, but the point is that the fun was what you made, not what the game spoon-fed you. You guys don't get that same sense of excitement because you're expecting the game to shove it down your throats.
I really hate to say it, but most MMOs just aren't fun without that all-important portion of M M O; multiplayer. If there's nothing else I've learned about gaming recently, it's that no matter what game, no matter how polished, no matter how feature-filled and no matter how amazing; none of it's fun if you're not able to share the experience with others.
The OP wants the option to never do a single quest. Name a game where it's completely and utterly impossible to level without doing quests? You mention WoW, but in WoW you can level 1-80 without touching a single quest. As for the quest rewards, they're by far not the best you can get in most every case in regards to gear.
The OP mentions 'abilities'. In EQ2 everything he lists is available - the fun spells are there. In WoW a hunter can tame most any animal in the game and make it their pet. A warlock can summon 1 of 4-5 pets at a time. There are items that let you shift your form into something else entirely (a wand that turns you into a furlbog, a trinket that transforms you into another race of your enemy faction) and mages get teleports (EQ2 some classes get them - not positive on which). Nevermind the slew of pets and mounts in both these games... and that's just pointing at two major MMOs. Customization goes infinitely further into EQ2's housing, so that argument goes poof.
Oh, and the guilds I've been in in my past MMOs have been amongst the best, and we generally only used ventrilo, with possibly a guild site that had a forum - if that.
In all, again I say; they are what you make them. If you have a solid group of friends, and a sincere interest in the game you play, you'll enjoy yourself. Without either, it doesn't matter what you play - it'll flop in your own experience.
"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."
George Bernard Shaw
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Sure, EQ took much longer to reach level 60 than it does in WoW, but with WoW the repetition is unbelievable. Like, you run the same instance 20-30 times just to grind exp. Then you go to the next instance, or do w/e quests you need to.
But in EQ you have more options where you want to grind. There were at least 10-20 zones that could give exp for any level in EQ. So you could travel the world and grind wherever you want basically.
WoWs grind is so mindless in comparison to EQ's. It's like the quest givers just tell you where to go and you go do it basically. In EQ, where there weren't quests really, you actually had to make a decision where you want to grind. You can grind in an area with better exp, or maybe you want to go farm the frenzied ghoul in LGUK, etc. But WoW s exp system is basically : Go collect 20 berries, then go kill 20 pigs, etc. The quests have no relation to the game even, they are just a distraction.
And look at quest in EQ, they were actually meaningful. Like, most of them gave faction etc. and faction could be used on PvP servers. Also, the quests weren't so trivial, like JBoots quest wasn't something you could go do in a few minutes.
As for leveling, EQ has a better system. WoW is a game where every newbie is able to reach level 80 easily. But in EQ if you weren't good then it's difficult to level up. They made WoW grinding too easy, and it became trivial / boring. At least the camps in EQ were exciting and unpredictable.
If you think EQ didn't have endless grind, you are deluding yourself.
More fool you? What? It was the best exp in the game to grind the same instances in WoW. For instance, around level 40 you can grind ZF to 54 easily, which requires more than 20-30 runs most likely.
Oh big deal you have to sit and meditate if you are a caster. If you are in a group, it doesn't matter anyway because you have multiple casters and enchanters usually. So you can chain pull stuff anyway.
And like what caster has to sit and med? A wizard? My mage in EQ could solo with no downtime at all. Most casters didn't have to meditate that long. And they shouldn't be soloin in the first place.
Camps were exciting because they were actually challenging. Like, WoWs camps are trivial, how often does a group wipe doing some instance? Never? unless they suck maybe. But in EQ there was more skill required. Mobs had to be mezzed, rooted, etc. and generally CCed. In WoW you don't even need CC because they made the NPCs ridiculously easy.
EQ > all other MMOs combined
I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, since I never played EQ way back then, but that line right there is patently false. A full 5 man group doesn't make much more experience per kill in an instance than a solo player does in the world. Often times, it's much less, except for bosses
WoW has always been solo to level, group to gear game. If you're honestly complaining that you had to grind an instance just to level, all I can tell you is that you were doing it wrong, because even at its start, a player could hit max level easily without ever seeing the inside of an instance. And they could do it quicker than the people who only grinded instances for exp.
I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, since I never played EQ way back then, but that line right there is patently false. A full 5 man group doesn't make much more experience per kill in an instance than a solo player does in the world. Often times, it's much less, except for bosses
WoW has always been solo to level, group to gear game. If you're honestly complaining that you had to grind an instance just to level, all I can tell you is that you were doing it wrong, because even at its start, a player could hit max level easily without ever seeing the inside of an instance. And they could do it quicker than the people who only grinded instances for exp.
I can maybe see some super fast powerleveling group doing ZF over and over because they had some math that said that it gave them the best XP/hour but I have personally never met of heard of anyone like that in my years of WoW play.
Generally people would run ZF a few times for the quest rewards (Carrot on the Stick and some blue rings) and for some of the nicer drops but really you just wanted to move on to Ferals and Ungoro which had a ton of quests and a high mob density if you wanted to grind. At level 50 everyone I knew would start on Western Plaguelands since it gave good xp and loot.
I know that some people would just grind away to max level but running ZF 20-30 times for the xp just sounds insane. The only reason I can think of to do it would be to suck away all the enjoyment out of your gameplay. It is the equivalent of the South Park 'kill level 2 boars' way of leveling.
I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, since I never played EQ way back then, but that line right there is patently false. A full 5 man group doesn't make much more experience per kill in an instance than a solo player does in the world. Often times, it's much less, except for bosses
WoW has always been solo to level, group to gear game. If you're honestly complaining that you had to grind an instance just to level, all I can tell you is that you were doing it wrong, because even at its start, a player could hit max level easily without ever seeing the inside of an instance. And they could do it quicker than the people who only grinded instances for exp.
I can maybe see some super fast powerleveling group doing ZF over and over because they had some math that said that it gave them the best XP/hour but I have personally never met of heard of anyone like that in my years of WoW play.
Generally people would run ZF a few times for the quest rewards (Carrot on the Stick and some blue rings) and for some of the nicer drops but really you just wanted to move on to Ferals and Ungoro which had a ton of quests and a high mob density if you wanted to grind. At level 50 everyone I knew would start on Western Plaguelands since it gave good xp and loot.
I know that some people would just grind away to max level but running ZF 20-30 times for the xp just sounds insane. The only reason I can think of to do it would be to suck away all the enjoyment out of your gameplay. It is the equivalent of the South Park 'kill level 2 boars' way of leveling.
ZF is the best exp at those levels because of the temple event.
Western Plaguelands? You mean farming the cemeteries? Un goro crater is horrible lol. Unless you like running halfway across the zone every quest.
Suck enjoyment out of gameplay? Some people play MMORPGs for the endgame, leveling is just worthless overhead. It's unfortunate that WoW's endgame sucked though. I don't know how doing pointless quests counts as being enjoyable. I loved EQ how you could farm named spawns for loot, it's more fun than "kill 20 x","collect 20 y", etc.
I don't have much to say about the rest of your post, since I never played EQ way back then, but that line right there is patently false. A full 5 man group doesn't make much more experience per kill in an instance than a solo player does in the world. Often times, it's much less, except for bosses
WoW has always been solo to level, group to gear game. If you're honestly complaining that you had to grind an instance just to level, all I can tell you is that you were doing it wrong, because even at its start, a player could hit max level easily without ever seeing the inside of an instance. And they could do it quicker than the people who only grinded instances for exp.
Exactly. I've never bothered to do an Instance twice on the same character. WAY too boring.
I did grind instances in WoW, but I did it because I had fun doing it. The part I didn't like was doing quests, because there were so many, they lead you from one place to another. But I know they serve a purpose, because quests give you a reason to grind. So in the end, you are grinding no matter what, because they are all MMO's and their key is to make you spend time ingame and stay subscribed month after month.
Now some people prefer not doing quests and just grind, and have fun at it. I'm like that. Others prefer questing, some of them can't do anything without having quest log full of quests to do. They're all grinds, it's what you prefer and what's fun for you.
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO