The point is how a LACK of features make a game great? In WOW: If you want to stand at DALARAN and trying to sell something at the street corner, you CAN. if you don't like quest grinding and wants to go back to single mob grinding like in EQ, you CAN. If you want to level slowly, just go kill mob that gives little xp or no xp, and you CAN. The only thing you CANNOT do is to force other people to suffer the same lack of features. If that is wat give you kicks, I guess you can't find it in newer MMOs. But you can do all the stuff you do in EQ.
Thats the amusing thing about these conversations. People complain how can't do this or that in newer MMOs, but you CAN play newer MMOs like EQ. Maybe dungeons take the place of spawn camping, but you're NEVER forced to solo and ignore everyone. Thats whats so funny. They claim they're FORCED to do quests and solo. No you're not. They say the death penalty is gone. NO its not. Drop some gold or some gear every time you die. Instant death penalty. You can create downtime very easily also. You can ignore convenient travel and run every place. You can find great like minded people to play with. If you can't its YOU. You can play newer MMOs like older MMOs. The difference is YOU have to ignore all those convenience features. Its not hard. You can still grind. You can still have a harsh death penalty. Just DO IT and stop bitching. It might take a little creativity and imagination, but isn't THAT part of what allowed you to enjoy those older MMOs in the first place? The reason they don't do it is because you can't turn back the clock. Once you've seen the strings you know how bad the puppet show was. You can't go back to the old ways and these people can't accept that they weren't so great.
People who don't get the statements are missing the point. When you play an MMO you want to be on even ground as everyone else. So when there are faster and easier ways to do things you are essentially forced to do so to keep up with the crowd.
What people want is an MMO without certain things because then everyone is on an even ground in a game world that those people would prefer. It really is a silly statement to always tell people not to use features that are there because the biggest part of an MMO is the social aspect, so you use and do what other people do.
For instance I am one of the people who wants harsher death penalties. I'm not going to force them on myself in a game that doesn't have them. I'm not going to go run a quest with a group and die and be like "Sorry guys you go and do it again I have to self inflict a penalty now." But I would be more inclined to buy a game that had harsher death penalties. It is not because I like to suffer but because I like to feel the danger and excitement of trying something difficult.
So no it is a weak and unfounded arguement to tell people to just make up their own rules in a game and ignore features.
So the whole point is that you want everyone else to suffer the lack of features (aka 1999 technologies) as you do? I think silly is the only word to describe the idea. There are reasons why those features are there (that is, to make the game less frustrating to play). If maximum frustration inflicted on others is what you are shooting for, there would be no place for it in the marketplace.
Note that there are MULTIPLE games in the marketplace so people do have choices about features. A game at the 1999 level feature-wise is not going to get a lot of business and it is not exactly a secret to developers .. THANK GOD.
So the whole point is that you want everyone else to suffer the lack of features (aka 1999 technologies) as you do? I think silly is the only word to describe the idea. There are reasons why those features are there (that is, to make the game less frustrating to play). If maximum frustration inflicted on others is what you are shooting for, there would be no place for it in the marketplace. Note that there are MULTIPLE games in the marketplace so people do have choices about features. A game at the 1999 level feature-wise is not going to get a lot of business and it is not exactly a secret to developers .. THANK GOD.
I can see this will go back and forth a while with you missing the point constantly. There are different demographics of players, and there are different types of MMOs, or at least there used to be. The problem people who have been playing MMOs for a long time have is that the entire genre has gone casual gaming. I don't have a problem with there being casual games and more serious games. But all the recent MMO releases and many of the ones announced are casual only. This leaves no place for the more serious gamers to go, which is why they post of how they'd like to see a game with the features they enjoy.
I hate casual MMOs, there are tons of games I can play if I want 30 min to an hour of gaming a couple times a week. But when I go for an MMO I want something that will be challenging, will take a while to get to the top and to build a successful character. I do not want the easy mode give me it all give it to me all now with no risk type of MMO, there's no fun in that and it is why the games have high sales numbers which turn into low sub numbers so fast. Everyone gets bored because they did it all within a couple weeks and there's nothing left to the highly directed theme park world.
There is a reason why those 10 year old games you hate are still running, they were quality and they captured an audience. They made people work for the top and they didn't make it easy. So there are still people playing these games for 10 years.
Will WAR have players in 10 years? No. Because it is easy and since you can achieve everything so quickly it gets old fast.
Do I think they should stop making casual MMOs all together? Of course not there is a large market for it. But I would like to see a mix and not only by the occasional indie team that doesn't have the budget to do it right.
This is the one MMO I have never palyed, yet it is considred to be one of those Hall of Fame games the revolutionized the field. I get the greatness of World of Warcraft and EVE Online. I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding father of MMORPGs....and can see why games like Guild WArs, Runescape and other free to play games have multi million subs currently. I even understand why Lord of the Rings keeps on trucking as a wonderful PvE/RP game and how Anarchy Online was ground breaking for numerous reasons. For me personally, SWG pre-nge was the best MMO I have ever played (as well as those listed above).
But I never got hooked on the Evercrack that folk tell me about. For me a game must have superior music and sound, non-instanced player housing, PvP (the more open the better), both a casual gamers and hardcore gamer appeal, decent graphics and a player base. What exactly was Evercrack? Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory....but during a time when there was no real competition?
Firstly EQ was basically the first real mainstream mmorpg along with UO(note UO was not the founding father of mmorpg ,M59 was).
Also fact you mentioned WoW and LOTRO in hall of fame has by default kept EQ there because this are clones of EQ.If you read the pcgamer interview few months before WoW release of a WoW developer he openly pays homeage to EQ as the model for WoW but as he said " we took the ideas and made it better!"
I would not say it had no competition when it was on top of the hill.Not certainly as much but games like UO and M59 are older then it and AC was released same year as it.Also it stayed top till WoW came which was about 5 years on top.Beating games like AO,AC2 and yes at that time even eve online .
I actually did like camps. I used to like quests because they were rare/cool. Most games now are talk to NPC.. run up hill.. talk to npc... run down hill... talk to npc.. run back up hill talk to npc... kill a mob in 30 seconds.. talk to npc... run down hill (etc)
When EQ came out it was a big mystery... no one really know much of anything. Now everyone is a walking knowledge base of web sites, strats, walk throughs and you have to stand right "there" and MORE DOTS MORE DOTS
Then of course its quite common now that we must have class A, B and C... it must be this way. If you bought the game to be class D.. you are out of luck.
We used to just play the game... which is pretty much how I saw EQ.
Tho to be honest... I would log into EQ and play with my guild for a bit and run right back to Ultima Online.. UO was always my "special world" and I only ever logged into EQ because my friends that left UO kept asking me to login...
everquest is the only mmo out there that makes you work for your rewards , Alot of poeple left becuase it got to hard for them and wow looked easyer n crap. i admit the first few years of eq were golden but the game is still top mmo out there today , i have played wow and that game is so easy me and my friends cleared all the 10 man content on our first try. in eq we still get our asses kicked by raid mobs and even some group mobs , you can't find that in anyother game. oh yeah 15 expansions of content rocks imo always somthing to do
So the whole point is that you want everyone else to suffer the lack of features (aka 1999 technologies) as you do? I think silly is the only word to describe the idea. There are reasons why those features are there (that is, to make the game less frustrating to play). If maximum frustration inflicted on others is what you are shooting for, there would be no place for it in the marketplace. Note that there are MULTIPLE games in the marketplace so people do have choices about features. A game at the 1999 level feature-wise is not going to get a lot of business and it is not exactly a secret to developers .. THANK GOD.
I can see this will go back and forth a while with you missing the point constantly. There are different demographics of players, and there are different types of MMOs, or at least there used to be. The problem people who have been playing MMOs for a long time have is that the entire genre has gone casual gaming. I don't have a problem with there being casual games and more serious games. But all the recent MMO releases and many of the ones announced are casual only. This leaves no place for the more serious gamers to go, which is why they post of how they'd like to see a game with the features they enjoy.
I hate casual MMOs, there are tons of games I can play if I want 30 min to an hour of gaming a couple times a week. But when I go for an MMO I want something that will be challenging, will take a while to get to the top and to build a successful character. I do not want the easy mode give me it all give it to me all now with no risk type of MMO, there's no fun in that and it is why the games have high sales numbers which turn into low sub numbers so fast. Everyone gets bored because they did it all within a couple weeks and there's nothing left to the highly directed theme park world.
There is a reason why those 10 year old games you hate are still running, they were quality and they captured an audience. They made people work for the top and they didn't make it easy. So there are still people playing these games for 10 years.
Will WAR have players in 10 years? No. Because it is easy and since you can achieve everything so quickly it gets old fast.
Do I think they should stop making casual MMOs all together? Of course not there is a large market for it. But I would like to see a mix and not only by the occasional indie team that doesn't have the budget to do it right.
When is the discussion turned from features and frustration to challenges and easy mode?
Imagine a WOW with ONLY hard modes (or have the developers even ramped up the difficulty even more) but all the modern features like AH and quests and stuff like that. No one says you have to be feature lacking AND easy. I highly doubt all the MODERN hardcore gamers who wants a big challenge would want to live with a lack of AH, or camping without instances, slow single mob leveling and stuff like that.
The reason why some of old MMOs are still running . nostalgia. Even Meridian 59 is still running too and all of them combined are still a very niche market.
Originally posted by SnarlingWolf People who don't get the statements are missing the point. When you play an MMO you want to be on even ground as everyone else. So when there are faster and easier ways to do things you are essentially forced to do so to keep up with the crowd.
But those same people who seem to miss this point will use the exact same argument you just used when it serves their purposes. For example, people will say that EQ was forced grouping because in EQ grouping generally gave faster experience and was the safer way to level. But, in fact, you were not forced to group in EQ. Technically speaking. So why was it such a group centric game? Obviously because grouping was the fastest and easiest way to level.
So it was forced grouping in the sense that grouping was usually the most rewarding way to play it and if you wanted to get the most out of your time you had to group but strictly speaking grouping wasn't actually forced.
And then there is the extremely silly idea brought up in this thread of putting self-imposed limitations on yourself. How ridiculous can people be? Do the people who say those things actually think they are proposing a sensible idea?
Imagine playing a PvP game that has one extremely overpowered class. If this idea of fixing things with self-imposed limitations had any merit then we could fix this PvP imbalance simply by suggesting that all the people who play that particular class should refrain from using X ability or Y spell. Does anyone think that would work?
everquest is the only mmo out there that makes you work for your rewards , Alot of poeple left becuase it got to hard for them and wow looked easyer n crap. i admit the first few years of eq were golden but the game is still top mmo out there today , i have played wow and that game is so easy me and my friends cleared all the 10 man content on our first try. in eq we still get our asses kicked by raid mobs and even some group mobs , you can't find that in anyother game. oh yeah 15 expansions of content rocks imo always somthing to do
CHALLANGE IS EVERYTHING!
LOL .. don't tell me WOW is easy until you clear all the hardmodes of 25 man H content. No one in the world clear those first time, no wipe.
The first few weeks I played a troll, people from other races would come to my swamp and when they saw me they would run away back into the desert. (No there was no PvP, they just didn't know better and were immersed)
Or the first time I played a gnome and we heard there was an ogre character in the area and travelled for 10 minutes just to see it and people from all over gathered in front of the ogre and were in awe.
Today you can level to 50 in 10 minutes and ride a flying beast that costs 50 million gold and noone will even look at you twice.
That naivity was what made EQ so great. Today I couldn't have played it for 10 minutes without going nuts with frustration. Back then it was pure magic.
I have to reply here and it's rare that i do.There was nothing like it at the time and it instilled in one such a unique feeling,it was so emmersive and visceral.I've played em all since eq trying to recapture that felling that eq did,nothing has equalled it.the community was very good and the groups were exciting,unpretentious,and easy to get into.it was a great experience that i doubt will be repeated....ever again.
I've been in the MMO space since UO launched which was followed by AC and EQ. UO was addictive in its own right but EQ just threw it up a notch. It was the first to have a truly massive world with lots of options for class and race. Without a quest system grouping was easier and frankly needed. But the big catch was the 1st person immersion of a 3D world with varied zones and a lot of "oh ah looky over there" moments.
It did however expand far too fast and now has a retarded number of zones that really drove new players away so like EQ2 in a lot of ways is top heavy. WoW got this much right, expand slow make sure most of your player base has or can catch up. EQ had hell levels along the way and from 51+ that really made advancing work post PoP. Personally think it should have stopped there but having taken 6 years and not 3? to get there.
Unrelated I'm totally bummed that the next EQ2 expansion is Odus and not Velious or Luclin. Ya ya its torn in half but that just makes it more interesting, they could call it The Aion Odessey =P
Everquest was a world rather than a theme-park. The game thrived due to it's playerbase having control. There was no Auction House, rather people used a main City or a tunnel in a close by zone for trading. There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests. And unless you picked a certain few classes soloing was very difficult after the lower levels. This promoted group play and social interaction, and gave people a choice as to what they wanted to do in the game. What made Everquest so special for most of us was that it gave us the option to do what we wanted to in the game and didn't force us one direction or the other. It promoted Social play and that is the benefit of playing an MMORPG over a single player game, whether some people like to agree or not. By the time you reached max level ( it took me over a year for my first toon, which sounds long, but the game was so fun and immersive you didn't even notice ) you had made hundreds of friends and usually found a decent guild of people or one you strived to join. End game guilds took on new players and gave them the benefit of the doubt, rather than just checking their gear and dismissing them. The guilds had high confidence that if you attained maximum level in a game like this, you had a good knowledge of how to play and interact with other people and how to control your class in a co-op setting. Everquest will never be re-created again. It's not economically sound. The mass market of MMORPG players now days ( brought in by WoW ) are not interested in an Immersive world but are instead interested in a single player game with other people around them so that they can flex their Epeen and feel special. They do not enjoy a game like Everquest because they do not want to be immersed into a game world and/or social environment. This does not promote investors to re-create a game like Everquest because that's just not where the money is. If something like Everquest ever came along again, it would only have a fraction of what WoW has in terms of subscribers sadly to say. It's an unfortunate devolution and it can't be fixed now.
"There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests." Wrong, there were quests like that. No one DID them because the effort was greater than than of grinding xp in a group and less rewarding. There was only ONE quest in early EQ that was worth doing and repeating and vets will remember... Tumpy Tonics. Most of the quests pre-kunark were broken or worthless... but still there were quests.
Most of EQ if you were unlucky enough to not be in an uberguild, was spent shouting your class/level LFG for an hour or so in the later levels, waiting "in que" actually if there were more than a few of your class/level lfg also. Get in one, spend 3-4 hours camping one spot where mobs respawn, and hope that no one in your party goes linkdead or afk for smoke break while medding when the mobs "pop", or hope that the uberguild doesn't decide to run their monk over to the spot you have with half the zone trained on their ass, and feign death in front of you, just because their guildies need to level or want the specific item you're camping for. Sure you could report them, but more often than not, you got a person that only had the power to say "There's nothing I can do about it." or you got a GM who was guilded with the people in the first place and told you the same. If you died before zoning out, congrats, you just wasted 5 hours of LFG and grindtime from 1 death.
Everquest introduced boats, and a wonderful travel system... where floating from one contient to the other, took about 20 minutes in real time to go from Freeport, to Ocean of tears zone, to Butcherblock Mountains. Here linkdeath was feared also, because sometimes zoning in to either Freeport or Butcherblock... for me usually Freeport... you were disconnected. By the time you were able to log back on, you were already REZONING back into Ocean of Tears... and had to wait about 40 more minutes for the round trip to go BACK to where you wanted to go the first place.
The ONLY think you really missed with EQ... was the "Ding". It was Pavlovian...
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
Everquest was a world rather than a theme-park. The game thrived due to it's playerbase having control. There was no Auction House, rather people used a main City or a tunnel in a close by zone for trading. There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests. And unless you picked a certain few classes soloing was very difficult after the lower levels. This promoted group play and social interaction, and gave people a choice as to what they wanted to do in the game. What made Everquest so special for most of us was that it gave us the option to do what we wanted to in the game and didn't force us one direction or the other. It promoted Social play and that is the benefit of playing an MMORPG over a single player game, whether some people like to agree or not. By the time you reached max level ( it took me over a year for my first toon, which sounds long, but the game was so fun and immersive you didn't even notice ) you had made hundreds of friends and usually found a decent guild of people or one you strived to join. End game guilds took on new players and gave them the benefit of the doubt, rather than just checking their gear and dismissing them. The guilds had high confidence that if you attained maximum level in a game like this, you had a good knowledge of how to play and interact with other people and how to control your class in a co-op setting. Everquest will never be re-created again. It's not economically sound. The mass market of MMORPG players now days ( brought in by WoW ) are not interested in an Immersive world but are instead interested in a single player game with other people around them so that they can flex their Epeen and feel special. They do not enjoy a game like Everquest because they do not want to be immersed into a game world and/or social environment. This does not promote investors to re-create a game like Everquest because that's just not where the money is. If something like Everquest ever came along again, it would only have a fraction of what WoW has in terms of subscribers sadly to say. It's an unfortunate devolution and it can't be fixed now.
"There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests." Wrong, there were quests like that. No one DID them because the effort was greater than than of grinding xp in a group and less rewarding. There was only ONE quest in early EQ that was worth doing and repeating and vets will remember... Tumpy Tonics. Most of the quests pre-kunark were broken or worthless... but still there were quests.
Most of EQ if you were unlucky enough to not be in an uberguild, was spent shouting your class/level LFG for an hour or so in the later levels, waiting "in que" actually if there were more than a few of your class/level lfg also. Get in one, spend 3-4 hours camping one spot where mobs respawn, and hope that no one in your party goes linkdead or afk for smoke break while medding when the mobs "pop", or hope that the uberguild doesn't decide to run their monk over to the spot you have with half the zone trained on their ass, and feign death in front of you, just because their guildies need to level or want the specific item you're camping for. Sure you could report them, but more often than not, you got a person that only had the power to say "There's nothing I can do about it." or you got a GM who was guilded with the people in the first place and told you the same. If you died before zoning out, congrats, you just wasted 5 hours of LFG and grindtime from 1 death.
Everquest introduced boats, and a wonderful travel system... where floating from one contient to the other, took about 20 minutes in real time to go from Freeport, to Ocean of tears zone, to Butcherblock Mountains. Here linkdeath was feared also, because sometimes zoning in to either Freeport or Butcherblock... for me usually Freeport... you were disconnected. By the time you were able to log back on, you were already REZONING back into Ocean of Tears... and had to wait about 40 more minutes for the round trip to go BACK to where you wanted to go the first place.
The ONLY think you really missed with EQ... was the "Ding". It was Pavlovian...
Pretty much my thoughts.. I didnt play pre kunark but I remember doing alot of pelt turn ins , snake teeth turn ins and rat whisker turn ins ect.. for exp and coin.
wow so much misinformation and "DO NOT KNOW" in this thread. basically noobs with no clue talking out of their ass.
Everquest was "so great" because of a number of things:
1) for the first time introduced the concept of "grouping" to the masses. you had games like Gauntlet and Diablo where you played BESIDE other players but introducing a game where you actually PARTIED with other players, where you could heal others and division of labor like tank, healer, dps opened the door to another level of player interaction where you were playing the game WITH other players, not just parallel playing along side them.
2) this grouping, and increased player interaction led to a COMMUNITY like none has existed since. you could literally walk into Guk or Seb, meet someone at a camp one night and make a friend for life. back in EQ the player base is literally the top 1% of what you have in WOW. stop a moment and think of the top 5 guilds on your server. then think of the top 5 players in that guild. those 25 players FROM YOUR SERVER are the people you'd meet and group with in EQ. the best of the best.
3) emergence of guilds. previously "guilds" were basically social networks out-of-game for nerds with no IRL friends or RP in-game as in UO. because the importance of grouping in EQ, for the first time guilds became significant for in-game progress of individuals and became extremely important in terms of gameplay. this is where you see the emergence of basically every important first generation guild: Afterlife (inventor of DKP) FOH, LOS.
4) raids. EQ introduced epic encounters with Nag and Lady Vox, and epic quests, and raid zones.
5) truly 3D perspective. other games like M59 had limited Doom-like view but EQ was the first truly open 3d world, emphasized by the first person perspective. visually, there was NO game like it ever seen by the masses.
6) a truly mature, tuned and balanced combat system. 99.9% of the noobs dont know this but EQ was NOT a ground up game. it "borrowed" the combat engine from MUDs which had been refined and balanced for decades. basically they took an existing MUD and put graphics on top of it. in fact it was so similar that Sony (989/Redeye at the time) was sued for using stolen code by the developers of DIKU mud and reached an out of court settlement where Smed and other Sony Interactive execs signed a statement stating they'd used the code. so out of the gate the game was "balanced" something that no subsequent game can say... so EQ was addicting out of the gate
7) unparalleled complex combat/casting system. EQ had 20 years of MUDs to look at and only took the best spells and combat systems from its predecessors. Geoffrey Zakin who was an acknowledged genius singlehanded integrated these spells (along with creating something no one had ever seen: the BARD system) into a rich vein of race/class combinations that was unparallelled in its complexity, balance and intricacy to that time. in many ways the combat system was SUPERIOR to pen and paper systems.... something NO ONE thought possible then or able to replicate today even with 10s of millions of dollars in development investment
8) impact. many games literally stole from EQ. DAOC is one example which the exec producer (mark jacobs in this case) admitted freely they took combat systems, balance, grouping from EQ. Blizzard took it a step farther, actually hiring EQ developers and guild leaders in addition to stealing game components. Pardo, Jeff Kaplan etc were from EQ. Blizzard devs have said numerous times how WOW 's class system and raids are directly from EQ
9) the game was HARD. EQ self-weeded the noobs out. if you met a dude who was a full level 40 or 50 or whatever the max was... you KNEW he was good. noobs simply could NOT MECHANICALLY max out. the game simply would force them out of the game. also the pace of PVP rewarded STRATEGIC thinking... PVP took many many rounds, there were no lucky instagibs or lucky wins... if someone beat you they beat you because THEY WERE BETTER... either their skills, their strats, or a combination of experience and gear they were better. in EQ , if a guy beat you... 9 times out of 10 they would beat you in a rematch... whereas in WOW and other games it comes down to 1)what class you play 2)what consumables/cooldowns you use (wow pvp is fun too... that's why I'm a 2 season gladiatior and old rank 14, but FACTS are that EQ took less luck... in wow a lot comes down to RNG which you do plan around but which is still fucked up)
so you see there's so much that EQ introduced that noobs had never seen. it's like the matrix. some 12 year old might say... "what's so great about the matrix? I've seen that wire-fu on Sci-Fi network blah." but if you're more than 16 years old and know more than 2 things in your life you understand how revolutionary it was when it came out in 1999 and blew ppl's minds. of course if you're another level of intellect you understand how behind that revolutionary impact there's a precedent... Ghost in the Shell, Hong Kong action, Japanese Anime etc etc. (but that's too much to ask of noobs to know)
now for noobs talking out of their asses
I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding fathers of MMORPGs
3 games preceded Ultima Online. Not the least of which was Meridian 59 in 96. Also Ultima Online had no impact on the development of EQ, both of which were in production before the others' release. UO is an outgrowth of the RPG genre gone to an online application. EQ (therefore WOW and Aion) is an outgrowth of the MUD genre. They have nothing in common except for the payment plan which OSI introduced and Sony Interactive copied
What exactly was Evercrack? Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory...but during a time when there was no real competition?
You've learned today how EQ was in fact groundbreaking in many ways noobs do not realize, and in fact NOT groundbreaking in many ways noobs assume that it was. EQ in fact had numerous sources of competition, including UO which from your post you are at least cognizant of (but like noobs have somehow conveniently "forgotten" as you spew noobsauce). EQ is significant precisely because it EXPANDED the category. Before EQ publishers thought only noobs would be loser enough to pay $10 a month to play online. It's retarded to try to turn the fact that it CREATED some market space by QQing that it "had no competition" lmao. these other games "compete" in the space that EQ CREATED
Then my question is why not go back and play?
You dont need to. If you play WOW or Aion these games are based on EQ. They're basically 2nd and 4th generation iterations of the game (admittedly dumbed down and made more mass-friendly).
Nothing it sucks now and it only had like a year or two of being good before SOE ruined it.
Wrong. 1) The golden age of EQ was SOV which was the 2nd expansion, the best year of EQ was its 3rd year. 2)SOE didn't ruin it. There's nothing about renaming a company that's going to inherently ruin a game
ADMITTEDLY EQ had some issues... sadly MOST of these issues had to do with the fact that John Smedley was a bad manager IRL than with game issues. Smedley was visionary in assembling his team from 96-98 when he developed the game but he couldn't hold on to his talent. Within a couple years he lost EVERY ONE of his key players which in turn seriously weakened the ability sony had to address bugs and game issues as well as seriously devasted sony's ability to deliver quality expansions. In the end Smedley was more concerned with playing with the stock, constantly renaming, reorganizing, spinning off his company from 989 Studios to Redeye to Sony Interactive to Verant to SOE etc etc than in running his game. THAT's what actually killed the game and prevented them from continuing the franchise with EQ2 and onward
In the end what's MOST significant of EQ is its legacy. It occupies that sweet spot of SO FEW GREAT games where its legacy is established and lives to this day. On one hand you have SEMINAL PC games like CIv and Xcom that occupy such a unique space that, while greatness is admitted, no one can really build on those games. On the other hand you have a game like Diablo which was great in many ways but carries such a heavy imprint that every subsequent games appears basically as a "clone" without any significant advancement even 15 years later. EQ on the other hand exists in WOW and now in Aion which their producers all freely admit the inlfuence of EQ, but they're different enough that they exist freely and which will in turn influence more games. EQ is the basis of all that. There's very few games... maybe Doom/Quake off the top of my head which has expanded into FPS via CS and Unreal etc to FPRPG like Halflife etc which has had similar success with its progency
wow so much misinformation and "DO NOT KNOW" in this thread. basically noobs with no clue talking out of their ass. Everquest was "so great" because of a number of things: 1) for the first time introduced the concept of "grouping" to the masses. you had games like Gauntlet and Diablo where you played BESIDE other players but introducing a game where you actually PARTIED with other players, where you could heal others and division of labor like tank, healer, dps opened the door to another level of player interaction where you were playing the game WITH other players, not just parallel playing along side them. 2) this grouping, and increased player interaction led to a COMMUNITY like none has existed since. you could literally walk into Guk or Seb, meet someone at a camp one night and make a friend for life. back in EQ the player base is literally the top 1% of what you have in WOW. stop a moment and think of the top 5 guilds on your server. then think of the top 5 players in that guild. those 25 players FROM YOUR SERVER are the people you'd meet and group with in EQ. the best of the best. 3) emergence of guilds. previously "guilds" were basically social networks out-of-game for nerds with no IRL friends or RP in-game as in UO. because the importance of grouping in EQ, for the first time guilds became significant for in-game progress of individuals and became extremely important in terms of gameplay. this is where you see the emergence of basically every important first generation guild: Afterlife (inventor of DKP) FOH, LOS. 4) raids. EQ introduced epic encounters with Nag and Lady Vox, and epic quests, and raid zones. 5) truly 3D perspective. other games like M59 had limited Doom-like view but EQ was the first truly open 3d world, emphasized by the first person perspective. visually, there was NO game like it ever seen by the masses. 6) a truly mature, tuned and balanced combat system. 99.9% of the noobs dont know this but EQ was NOT a ground up game. it "borrowed" the combat engine from MUDs which had been refined and balanced for decades. basically they took an existing MUD and put graphics on top of it. in fact it was so similar that Sony (989/Redeye at the time) was sued for using stolen code by the developers of DIKU mud and reached an out of court settlement where Smed and other Sony Interactive execs signed a statement stating they'd used the code. so out of the gate the game was "balanced" something that no subsequent game can say... so EQ was addicting out of the gate 7) unparalleled complex combat/casting system. EQ had 20 years of MUDs to look at and only took the best spells and combat systems from its predecessors. Geoffrey Zakin who was an acknowledged genius singlehanded integrated these spells (along with creating something no one had ever seen: the BARD system) into a rich vein of race/class combinations that was unparallelled in its complexity, balance and intricacy to that time. in many ways the combat system was SUPERIOR to pen and paper systems.... something NO ONE thought possible then or able to replicate today even with 10s of millions of dollars in development investment 8) impact. many games literally stole from EQ. DAOC is one example which the exec producer (mark jacobs in this case) admitted freely they took combat systems, balance, grouping from EQ. Blizzard took it a step farther, actually hiring EQ developers and guild leaders in addition to stealing game components. Pardo, Jeff Kaplan etc were from EQ. Blizzard devs have said numerous times how WOW 's class system and raids are directly from EQ 9) the game was HARD. EQ self-weeded the noobs out. if you met a dude who was a full level 40 or 50 or whatever the max was... you KNEW he was good. noobs simply could NOT MECHANICALLY max out. the game simply would force them out of the game. also the pace of PVP rewarded STRATEGIC thinking... PVP took many many rounds, there were no lucky instagibs or lucky wins... if someone beat you they beat you because THEY WERE BETTER... either their skills, their strats, or a combination of experience and gear they were better. in EQ , if a guy beat you... 9 times out of 10 they would beat you in a rematch... whereas in WOW and other games it comes down to 1)what class you play 2)what consumables/cooldowns you use (wow pvp is fun too... that's why I'm a 2 season gladiatior and old rank 14, but FACTS are that EQ took less luck... in wow a lot comes down to RNG which you do plan around but which is still fucked up) so you see there's so much that EQ introduced that noobs had never seen. it's like the matrix. some 12 year old might say... "what's so great about the matrix? I've seen that wire-fu on Sci-Fi network blah." but if you're more than 16 years old and know more than 2 things in your life you understand how revolutionary it was when it came out in 1999 and blew ppl's minds. of course if you're another level of intellect you understand how behind that revolutionary impact there's a precedent... Ghost in the Shell, Hong Kong action, Japanese Anime etc etc. (but that's too much to ask of noobs to know) now for noobs talking out of their asses I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding fathers of MMORPGs 3 games preceded Ultima Online. Not the least of which was Meridian 59 in 96. Also Ultima Online had no impact on the development of EQ, both of which were in production before the others' release. UO is an outgrowth of the RPG genre gone to an online application. EQ (therefore WOW and Aion) is an outgrowth of the MUD genre. They have nothing in common except for the payment plan which OSI introduced and Sony Interactive copied What exactly was Evercrack? Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory...but during a time when there was no real competition? You've learned today how EQ was in fact groundbreaking in many ways noobs do not realize, and in fact NOT groundbreaking in many ways noobs assume that it was. EQ in fact had numerous sources of competition, including UO which from your post you are at least cognizant of (but like noobs have somehow conveniently "forgotten" as you spew noobsauce). EQ is significant precisely because it EXPANDED the category. Before EQ publishers thought only noobs would be loser enough to pay $10 a month to play online. It's retarded to try to turn the fact that it CREATED some market space by QQing that it "had no competition" lmao. these other games "compete" in the space that EQ CREATED Then my question is why not go back and play? You dont need to. If you play WOW or Aion these games are based on EQ. They're basically 2nd and 4th generation iterations of the game (admittedly dumbed down and made more mass-friendly). Nothing it sucks now and it only had like a year or two of being good before SOE ruined it. Wrong. 1) The golden age of EQ was SOV which was the 2nd expansion, the best year of EQ was its 3rd year. 2)SOE didn't ruin it. There's nothing about renaming a company that's going to inherently ruin a game ADMITTEDLY EQ had some issues... sadly MOST of these issues had to do with the fact that John Smedley was a bad manager IRL than with game issues. Smedley was visionary in assembling his team from 96-98 when he developed the game but he couldn't hold on to his talent. Within a couple years he lost EVERY ONE of his key players which in turn seriously weakened the ability sony had to address bugs and game issues as well as seriously devasted sony's ability to deliver quality expansions. In the end Smedley was more concerned with playing with the stock, constantly renaming, reorganizing, spinning off his company from 989 Studios to Redeye to Sony Interactive to Verant to SOE etc etc than in running his game. THAT's what actually killed the game and prevented them from continuing the franchise with EQ2 and onward In the end what's MOST significant of EQ is its legacy. It occupies that sweet spot of SO FEW GREAT games where its legacy is established and lives to this day. On one hand you have SEMINAL PC games like CIv and Xcom that occupy such a unique space that, while greatness is admitted, no one can really build on those games. On the other hand you have a game like Diablo which was great in many ways but carries such a heavy imprint that every subsequent games appears basically as a "clone" without any significant advancement even 15 years later. EQ on the other hand exists in WOW and now in Aion which their producers all freely admit the inlfuence of EQ, but they're different enough that they exist freely and which will in turn influence more games. EQ is the basis of all that. There's very few games... maybe Doom/Quake off the top of my head which has expanded into FPS via CS and Unreal etc to FPRPG like Halflife etc which has had similar success with its progency
wow so much misinformation and "DO NOT KNOW" in this thread. basically noobs with no clue talking out of their ass. Everquest was "so great" because of a number of things: 1) for the first time introduced the concept of "grouping" to the masses. you had games like Gauntlet and Diablo where you played BESIDE other players but introducing a game where you actually PARTIED with other players, where you could heal others and division of labor like tank, healer, dps opened the door to another level of player interaction where you were playing the game WITH other players, not just parallel playing along side them. 2) this grouping, and increased player interaction led to a COMMUNITY like none has existed since. you could literally walk into Guk or Seb, meet someone at a camp one night and make a friend for life. back in EQ the player base is literally the top 1% of what you have in WOW. stop a moment and think of the top 5 guilds on your server. then think of the top 5 players in that guild. those 25 players FROM YOUR SERVER are the people you'd meet and group with in EQ. the best of the best. 3) emergence of guilds. previously "guilds" were basically social networks out-of-game for nerds with no IRL friends or RP in-game as in UO. because the importance of grouping in EQ, for the first time guilds became significant for in-game progress of individuals and became extremely important in terms of gameplay. this is where you see the emergence of basically every important first generation guild: Afterlife (inventor of DKP) FOH, LOS. 4) raids. EQ introduced epic encounters with Nag and Lady Vox, and epic quests, and raid zones. 5) truly 3D perspective. other games like M59 had limited Doom-like view but EQ was the first truly open 3d world, emphasized by the first person perspective. visually, there was NO game like it ever seen by the masses. 6) a truly mature, tuned and balanced combat system. 99.9% of the noobs dont know this but EQ was NOT a ground up game. it "borrowed" the combat engine from MUDs which had been refined and balanced for decades. basically they took an existing MUD and put graphics on top of it. in fact it was so similar that Sony (989/Redeye at the time) was sued for using stolen code by the developers of DIKU mud and reached an out of court settlement where Smed and other Sony Interactive execs signed a statement stating they'd used the code. so out of the gate the game was "balanced" something that no subsequent game can say... so EQ was addicting out of the gate 7) unparalleled complex combat/casting system. EQ had 20 years of MUDs to look at and only took the best spells and combat systems from its predecessors. Geoffrey Zakin who was an acknowledged genius singlehanded integrated these spells (along with creating something no one had ever seen: the BARD system) into a rich vein of race/class combinations that was unparallelled in its complexity, balance and intricacy to that time. in many ways the combat system was SUPERIOR to pen and paper systems.... something NO ONE thought possible then or able to replicate today even with 10s of millions of dollars in development investment 8) impact. many games literally stole from EQ. DAOC is one example which the exec producer (mark jacobs in this case) admitted freely they took combat systems, balance, grouping from EQ. Blizzard took it a step farther, actually hiring EQ developers and guild leaders in addition to stealing game components. Pardo, Jeff Kaplan etc were from EQ. Blizzard devs have said numerous times how WOW 's class system and raids are directly from EQ 9) the game was HARD. EQ self-weeded the noobs out. if you met a dude who was a full level 40 or 50 or whatever the max was... you KNEW he was good. noobs simply could NOT MECHANICALLY max out. the game simply would force them out of the game. also the pace of PVP rewarded STRATEGIC thinking... PVP took many many rounds, there were no lucky instagibs or lucky wins... if someone beat you they beat you because THEY WERE BETTER... either their skills, their strats, or a combination of experience and gear they were better. in EQ , if a guy beat you... 9 times out of 10 they would beat you in a rematch... whereas in WOW and other games it comes down to 1)what class you play 2)what consumables/cooldowns you use (wow pvp is fun too... that's why I'm a 2 season gladiatior and old rank 14, but FACTS are that EQ took less luck... in wow a lot comes down to RNG which you do plan around but which is still fucked up) so you see there's so much that EQ introduced that noobs had never seen. it's like the matrix. some 12 year old might say... "what's so great about the matrix? I've seen that wire-fu on Sci-Fi network blah." but if you're more than 16 years old and know more than 2 things in your life you understand how revolutionary it was when it came out in 1999 and blew ppl's minds. of course if you're another level of intellect you understand how behind that revolutionary impact there's a precedent... Ghost in the Shell, Hong Kong action, Japanese Anime etc etc. (but that's too much to ask of noobs to know) now for noobs talking out of their asses I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding fathers of MMORPGs 3 games preceded Ultima Online. Not the least of which was Meridian 59 in 96. Also Ultima Online had no impact on the development of EQ, both of which were in production before the others' release. UO is an outgrowth of the RPG genre gone to an online application. EQ (therefore WOW and Aion) is an outgrowth of the MUD genre. They have nothing in common except for the payment plan which OSI introduced and Sony Interactive copied What exactly was Evercrack? Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory...but during a time when there was no real competition? You've learned today how EQ was in fact groundbreaking in many ways noobs do not realize, and in fact NOT groundbreaking in many ways noobs assume that it was. EQ in fact had numerous sources of competition, including UO which from your post you are at least cognizant of (but like noobs have somehow conveniently "forgotten" as you spew noobsauce). EQ is significant precisely because it EXPANDED the category. Before EQ publishers thought only noobs would be loser enough to pay $10 a month to play online. It's retarded to try to turn the fact that it CREATED some market space by QQing that it "had no competition" lmao. these other games "compete" in the space that EQ CREATED Then my question is why not go back and play? You dont need to. If you play WOW or Aion these games are based on EQ. They're basically 2nd and 4th generation iterations of the game (admittedly dumbed down and made more mass-friendly). Nothing it sucks now and it only had like a year or two of being good before SOE ruined it. Wrong. 1) The golden age of EQ was SOV which was the 2nd expansion, the best year of EQ was its 3rd year. 2)SOE didn't ruin it. There's nothing about renaming a company that's going to inherently ruin a game ADMITTEDLY EQ had some issues... sadly MOST of these issues had to do with the fact that John Smedley was a bad manager IRL than with game issues. Smedley was visionary in assembling his team from 96-98 when he developed the game but he couldn't hold on to his talent. Within a couple years he lost EVERY ONE of his key players which in turn seriously weakened the ability sony had to address bugs and game issues as well as seriously devasted sony's ability to deliver quality expansions. In the end Smedley was more concerned with playing with the stock, constantly renaming, reorganizing, spinning off his company from 989 Studios to Redeye to Sony Interactive to Verant to SOE etc etc than in running his game. THAT's what actually killed the game and prevented them from continuing the franchise with EQ2 and onward In the end what's MOST significant of EQ is its legacy. It occupies that sweet spot of SO FEW GREAT games where its legacy is established and lives to this day. On one hand you have SEMINAL PC games like CIv and Xcom that occupy such a unique space that, while greatness is admitted, no one can really build on those games. On the other hand you have a game like Diablo which was great in many ways but carries such a heavy imprint that every subsequent games appears basically as a "clone" without any significant advancement even 15 years later. EQ on the other hand exists in WOW and now in Aion which their producers all freely admit the inlfuence of EQ, but they're different enough that they exist freely and which will in turn influence more games. EQ is the basis of all that. There's very few games... maybe Doom/Quake off the top of my head which has expanded into FPS via CS and Unreal etc to FPRPG like Halflife etc which has had similar success with its progency
Very very nice! /clap
I'll agree with you on almost everything, except the instagib, Wizards with Ice Comet could most definitely instagib you in PvP.
Also on balance, at launch, I played a mage, and they were definitely like wizards in terms of DPS and their pets could tank better than warriors before the nerfs came around.
Also in terms of community, I am a PvP gamer, yet loved this game because the community was so great and the PvE was indeed so challenging, but even this community had its dark spots, I'm sure everyone who played on Rallos Zek has heard of Tunes, a role model for griefers everywhere.
Weight: every item had weight that affected falling damagen, walking speed, stamina.
Factions that really meant something. Good luck being an Ogre and exploring the world, you couldn't sell or train anywhere.
No map. No minimap. No radar.
No teleport.
Corpse runs naked. Many people hate this, but it's the way to feel inmersed in a dangerous world and to have a decent community because everybody needs everyone else to survive.
What was so great about EQ? It perfected the 3 "C's". Classes, Community and Challenge.
I can't believe no one remembers the - /shout, "MGB 65% EXT, KEI, VIRT, DMF, SOW, F07, BRELLS, NINE, SYMBOL AND SD AT MAIN BANK IN 5 MINS"
How the heck can you forget about that haha - The places where that was most common was, Nexus and PoK Main Bank for those who stayed around for the PoP expansion.
What was so great about EQ? It perfected the 3 "C's". Classes, Community and Challenge. I can't believe no one remembers the - /shout, "MGB 65% EXT, KEI, VIRT, DMF, SOW, F07, BRELLS, NINE, SYMBOL AND SD AT MAIN BANK IN 5 MINS" How the heck can you forget about that haha - The places where that was most common was, Nexus and PoK Main Bank for those who stayed around for the PoP expansion.
It is far from perfect. If challenges mean that you have to camp for 10+ hrs to get a shot at a drop, I would much rather do without. I have a life. WOW has the best system catered to people that can only play a little a nite. You still get a shot at some purples.
Sure I made friends in EQ but i don't see a big difference from the guildie friends i have made in WOW.
EQ was where the players who wanted a highly structured, interdependent game, where most of the choices where made by the developers not you. What is it with people that they would rather have someone else make their decisions for them?
Me, I could not take it, after 3 months of experimenting went back to UO. I have tried it a couple times since then, but still have not found the game with any pluses.
EQ was where the players who wanted a highly structured, interdependent game, where most of the choices where made by the developers not you. What is it with people that they would rather have someone else make their decisions for them?
Me, I could not take it, after 3 months of experimenting went back to UO. I have tried it a couple times since then, but still have not found the game with any pluses.
Because games are about entertainment & fun, not decision freedom.
That is why FPS, where you have almost no choice but to go this way and kill everything, is so popular.
Nothing was so great about Everquest. People wear rose-colored glasses, and it was the first game for a lot of folks. In reality, it was a grind-fest that took everything that was great about the virtual world aspects of these games and dumbed them down into a stats-driven treadmill that WoW and every other theme park game ever made has copied. You didn't miss a thing by not playing EQ, as large bits of it are still around today in just about every game on the market.
I guess this is true. I myself started with Ultima Online and then moved to Dark Age of Camelot. I recon that DAoC was similar to Everquest in a lot of regards. I loved it at the time, since it was new, unique (more or less) and also promoted group play like EQ did. However, it was nothing but an utter dumb grindfest.
I was out of a job at the time, so had time to kill, and managed to get to max level in 4-5 months. Once I reached it, I was so burnt out, that I quit the game a week after. I tried EQ also, to try something different, but it seemed even worse than DAoC. So I am still, upon this day, puzzled as to why some people keep saying EQ was great.
I can imagine that the community was great, like it was in DAoC as well. WoW cannot even fathom to compare to those games community wise. But the games themselves I think were very painful to play.
Nothing was so great about Everquest. People wear rose-colored glasses, and it was the first game for a lot of folks. In reality, it was a grind-fest that took everything that was great about the virtual world aspects of these games and dumbed them down into a stats-driven treadmill that WoW and every other theme park game ever made has copied. You didn't miss a thing by not playing EQ, as large bits of it are still around today in just about every game on the market.
The grinding was phenomenal. But the game was beyond that. And yes we miss a lot by not playing EQ, obviously you didn't play it.
About the colored glasses. Give me an MMO with EQ features and you will see it's not that case. It's like your first gf was Nicole Kidman and people say "bah, it's first kiss, she wasn't so great" and you go ape saying "FFS she was Nicole Kidman!"
Wait, obviously I didn't play it because I don't feel the same way about it that you do?
Lol, ok, nice logic there champ.
I played it for a year before coming to the conclusion that it was an unimaginative and neverending grind. At that point, I returned to Ultima.
As to the rest of your post, I can only assume that English isn't your primary language because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Comments
Thats the amusing thing about these conversations. People complain how can't do this or that in newer MMOs, but you CAN play newer MMOs like EQ. Maybe dungeons take the place of spawn camping, but you're NEVER forced to solo and ignore everyone. Thats whats so funny. They claim they're FORCED to do quests and solo. No you're not. They say the death penalty is gone. NO its not. Drop some gold or some gear every time you die. Instant death penalty. You can create downtime very easily also. You can ignore convenient travel and run every place. You can find great like minded people to play with. If you can't its YOU. You can play newer MMOs like older MMOs. The difference is YOU have to ignore all those convenience features. Its not hard. You can still grind. You can still have a harsh death penalty. Just DO IT and stop bitching. It might take a little creativity and imagination, but isn't THAT part of what allowed you to enjoy those older MMOs in the first place? The reason they don't do it is because you can't turn back the clock. Once you've seen the strings you know how bad the puppet show was. You can't go back to the old ways and these people can't accept that they weren't so great.
People who don't get the statements are missing the point. When you play an MMO you want to be on even ground as everyone else. So when there are faster and easier ways to do things you are essentially forced to do so to keep up with the crowd.
What people want is an MMO without certain things because then everyone is on an even ground in a game world that those people would prefer. It really is a silly statement to always tell people not to use features that are there because the biggest part of an MMO is the social aspect, so you use and do what other people do.
For instance I am one of the people who wants harsher death penalties. I'm not going to force them on myself in a game that doesn't have them. I'm not going to go run a quest with a group and die and be like "Sorry guys you go and do it again I have to self inflict a penalty now." But I would be more inclined to buy a game that had harsher death penalties. It is not because I like to suffer but because I like to feel the danger and excitement of trying something difficult.
So no it is a weak and unfounded arguement to tell people to just make up their own rules in a game and ignore features.
So the whole point is that you want everyone else to suffer the lack of features (aka 1999 technologies) as you do? I think silly is the only word to describe the idea. There are reasons why those features are there (that is, to make the game less frustrating to play). If maximum frustration inflicted on others is what you are shooting for, there would be no place for it in the marketplace.
Note that there are MULTIPLE games in the marketplace so people do have choices about features. A game at the 1999 level feature-wise is not going to get a lot of business and it is not exactly a secret to developers .. THANK GOD.
I can see this will go back and forth a while with you missing the point constantly. There are different demographics of players, and there are different types of MMOs, or at least there used to be. The problem people who have been playing MMOs for a long time have is that the entire genre has gone casual gaming. I don't have a problem with there being casual games and more serious games. But all the recent MMO releases and many of the ones announced are casual only. This leaves no place for the more serious gamers to go, which is why they post of how they'd like to see a game with the features they enjoy.
I hate casual MMOs, there are tons of games I can play if I want 30 min to an hour of gaming a couple times a week. But when I go for an MMO I want something that will be challenging, will take a while to get to the top and to build a successful character. I do not want the easy mode give me it all give it to me all now with no risk type of MMO, there's no fun in that and it is why the games have high sales numbers which turn into low sub numbers so fast. Everyone gets bored because they did it all within a couple weeks and there's nothing left to the highly directed theme park world.
There is a reason why those 10 year old games you hate are still running, they were quality and they captured an audience. They made people work for the top and they didn't make it easy. So there are still people playing these games for 10 years.
Will WAR have players in 10 years? No. Because it is easy and since you can achieve everything so quickly it gets old fast.
Do I think they should stop making casual MMOs all together? Of course not there is a large market for it. But I would like to see a mix and not only by the occasional indie team that doesn't have the budget to do it right.
Firstly EQ was basically the first real mainstream mmorpg along with UO(note UO was not the founding father of mmorpg ,M59 was).
Also fact you mentioned WoW and LOTRO in hall of fame has by default kept EQ there because this are clones of EQ.If you read the pcgamer interview few months before WoW release of a WoW developer he openly pays homeage to EQ as the model for WoW but as he said " we took the ideas and made it better!"
I would not say it had no competition when it was on top of the hill.Not certainly as much but games like UO and M59 are older then it and AC was released same year as it.Also it stayed top till WoW came which was about 5 years on top.Beating games like AO,AC2 and yes at that time even eve online .
Meh...
My basic view...
I actually did like camps. I used to like quests because they were rare/cool. Most games now are talk to NPC.. run up hill.. talk to npc... run down hill... talk to npc.. run back up hill talk to npc... kill a mob in 30 seconds.. talk to npc... run down hill (etc)
When EQ came out it was a big mystery... no one really know much of anything. Now everyone is a walking knowledge base of web sites, strats, walk throughs and you have to stand right "there" and MORE DOTS MORE DOTS
Then of course its quite common now that we must have class A, B and C... it must be this way. If you bought the game to be class D.. you are out of luck.
We used to just play the game... which is pretty much how I saw EQ.
Tho to be honest... I would log into EQ and play with my guild for a bit and run right back to Ultima Online.. UO was always my "special world" and I only ever logged into EQ because my friends that left UO kept asking me to login...
everquest is the only mmo out there that makes you work for your rewards , Alot of poeple left becuase it got to hard for them and wow looked easyer n crap. i admit the first few years of eq were golden but the game is still top mmo out there today , i have played wow and that game is so easy me and my friends cleared all the 10 man content on our first try. in eq we still get our asses kicked by raid mobs and even some group mobs , you can't find that in anyother game. oh yeah 15 expansions of content rocks imo always somthing to do
CHALLANGE IS EVERYTHING!
I can see this will go back and forth a while with you missing the point constantly. There are different demographics of players, and there are different types of MMOs, or at least there used to be. The problem people who have been playing MMOs for a long time have is that the entire genre has gone casual gaming. I don't have a problem with there being casual games and more serious games. But all the recent MMO releases and many of the ones announced are casual only. This leaves no place for the more serious gamers to go, which is why they post of how they'd like to see a game with the features they enjoy.
I hate casual MMOs, there are tons of games I can play if I want 30 min to an hour of gaming a couple times a week. But when I go for an MMO I want something that will be challenging, will take a while to get to the top and to build a successful character. I do not want the easy mode give me it all give it to me all now with no risk type of MMO, there's no fun in that and it is why the games have high sales numbers which turn into low sub numbers so fast. Everyone gets bored because they did it all within a couple weeks and there's nothing left to the highly directed theme park world.
There is a reason why those 10 year old games you hate are still running, they were quality and they captured an audience. They made people work for the top and they didn't make it easy. So there are still people playing these games for 10 years.
Will WAR have players in 10 years? No. Because it is easy and since you can achieve everything so quickly it gets old fast.
Do I think they should stop making casual MMOs all together? Of course not there is a large market for it. But I would like to see a mix and not only by the occasional indie team that doesn't have the budget to do it right.
When is the discussion turned from features and frustration to challenges and easy mode?
Imagine a WOW with ONLY hard modes (or have the developers even ramped up the difficulty even more) but all the modern features like AH and quests and stuff like that. No one says you have to be feature lacking AND easy. I highly doubt all the MODERN hardcore gamers who wants a big challenge would want to live with a lack of AH, or camping without instances, slow single mob leveling and stuff like that.
The reason why some of old MMOs are still running . nostalgia. Even Meridian 59 is still running too and all of them combined are still a very niche market.
But those same people who seem to miss this point will use the exact same argument you just used when it serves their purposes. For example, people will say that EQ was forced grouping because in EQ grouping generally gave faster experience and was the safer way to level. But, in fact, you were not forced to group in EQ. Technically speaking. So why was it such a group centric game? Obviously because grouping was the fastest and easiest way to level.
So it was forced grouping in the sense that grouping was usually the most rewarding way to play it and if you wanted to get the most out of your time you had to group but strictly speaking grouping wasn't actually forced.
And then there is the extremely silly idea brought up in this thread of putting self-imposed limitations on yourself. How ridiculous can people be? Do the people who say those things actually think they are proposing a sensible idea?
Imagine playing a PvP game that has one extremely overpowered class. If this idea of fixing things with self-imposed limitations had any merit then we could fix this PvP imbalance simply by suggesting that all the people who play that particular class should refrain from using X ability or Y spell. Does anyone think that would work?
LOL .. don't tell me WOW is easy until you clear all the hardmodes of 25 man H content. No one in the world clear those first time, no wipe.
What was so great about EQ?
The first few weeks I played a troll, people from other races would come to my swamp and when they saw me they would run away back into the desert. (No there was no PvP, they just didn't know better and were immersed)
Or the first time I played a gnome and we heard there was an ogre character in the area and travelled for 10 minutes just to see it and people from all over gathered in front of the ogre and were in awe.
Today you can level to 50 in 10 minutes and ride a flying beast that costs 50 million gold and noone will even look at you twice.
That naivity was what made EQ so great. Today I couldn't have played it for 10 minutes without going nuts with frustration. Back then it was pure magic.
I have to reply here and it's rare that i do.There was nothing like it at the time and it instilled in one such a unique feeling,it was so emmersive and visceral.I've played em all since eq trying to recapture that felling that eq did,nothing has equalled it.the community was very good and the groups were exciting,unpretentious,and easy to get into.it was a great experience that i doubt will be repeated....ever again.
I've been in the MMO space since UO launched which was followed by AC and EQ. UO was addictive in its own right but EQ just threw it up a notch. It was the first to have a truly massive world with lots of options for class and race. Without a quest system grouping was easier and frankly needed. But the big catch was the 1st person immersion of a 3D world with varied zones and a lot of "oh ah looky over there" moments.
It did however expand far too fast and now has a retarded number of zones that really drove new players away so like EQ2 in a lot of ways is top heavy. WoW got this much right, expand slow make sure most of your player base has or can catch up. EQ had hell levels along the way and from 51+ that really made advancing work post PoP. Personally think it should have stopped there but having taken 6 years and not 3? to get there.
Unrelated I'm totally bummed that the next EQ2 expansion is Odus and not Velious or Luclin. Ya ya its torn in half but that just makes it more interesting, they could call it The Aion Odessey =P
"There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests." Wrong, there were quests like that. No one DID them because the effort was greater than than of grinding xp in a group and less rewarding. There was only ONE quest in early EQ that was worth doing and repeating and vets will remember... Tumpy Tonics. Most of the quests pre-kunark were broken or worthless... but still there were quests.
Most of EQ if you were unlucky enough to not be in an uberguild, was spent shouting your class/level LFG for an hour or so in the later levels, waiting "in que" actually if there were more than a few of your class/level lfg also. Get in one, spend 3-4 hours camping one spot where mobs respawn, and hope that no one in your party goes linkdead or afk for smoke break while medding when the mobs "pop", or hope that the uberguild doesn't decide to run their monk over to the spot you have with half the zone trained on their ass, and feign death in front of you, just because their guildies need to level or want the specific item you're camping for. Sure you could report them, but more often than not, you got a person that only had the power to say "There's nothing I can do about it." or you got a GM who was guilded with the people in the first place and told you the same. If you died before zoning out, congrats, you just wasted 5 hours of LFG and grindtime from 1 death.
Everquest introduced boats, and a wonderful travel system... where floating from one contient to the other, took about 20 minutes in real time to go from Freeport, to Ocean of tears zone, to Butcherblock Mountains. Here linkdeath was feared also, because sometimes zoning in to either Freeport or Butcherblock... for me usually Freeport... you were disconnected. By the time you were able to log back on, you were already REZONING back into Ocean of Tears... and had to wait about 40 more minutes for the round trip to go BACK to where you wanted to go the first place.
The ONLY think you really missed with EQ... was the "Ding". It was Pavlovian...
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
"There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests." Wrong, there were quests like that. No one DID them because the effort was greater than than of grinding xp in a group and less rewarding. There was only ONE quest in early EQ that was worth doing and repeating and vets will remember... Tumpy Tonics. Most of the quests pre-kunark were broken or worthless... but still there were quests.
Most of EQ if you were unlucky enough to not be in an uberguild, was spent shouting your class/level LFG for an hour or so in the later levels, waiting "in que" actually if there were more than a few of your class/level lfg also. Get in one, spend 3-4 hours camping one spot where mobs respawn, and hope that no one in your party goes linkdead or afk for smoke break while medding when the mobs "pop", or hope that the uberguild doesn't decide to run their monk over to the spot you have with half the zone trained on their ass, and feign death in front of you, just because their guildies need to level or want the specific item you're camping for. Sure you could report them, but more often than not, you got a person that only had the power to say "There's nothing I can do about it." or you got a GM who was guilded with the people in the first place and told you the same. If you died before zoning out, congrats, you just wasted 5 hours of LFG and grindtime from 1 death.
Everquest introduced boats, and a wonderful travel system... where floating from one contient to the other, took about 20 minutes in real time to go from Freeport, to Ocean of tears zone, to Butcherblock Mountains. Here linkdeath was feared also, because sometimes zoning in to either Freeport or Butcherblock... for me usually Freeport... you were disconnected. By the time you were able to log back on, you were already REZONING back into Ocean of Tears... and had to wait about 40 more minutes for the round trip to go BACK to where you wanted to go the first place.
The ONLY think you really missed with EQ... was the "Ding". It was Pavlovian...
Pretty much my thoughts.. I didnt play pre kunark but I remember doing alot of pelt turn ins , snake teeth turn ins and rat whisker turn ins ect.. for exp and coin.
wow so much misinformation and "DO NOT KNOW" in this thread. basically noobs with no clue talking out of their ass.
Everquest was "so great" because of a number of things:
1) for the first time introduced the concept of "grouping" to the masses. you had games like Gauntlet and Diablo where you played BESIDE other players but introducing a game where you actually PARTIED with other players, where you could heal others and division of labor like tank, healer, dps opened the door to another level of player interaction where you were playing the game WITH other players, not just parallel playing along side them.
2) this grouping, and increased player interaction led to a COMMUNITY like none has existed since. you could literally walk into Guk or Seb, meet someone at a camp one night and make a friend for life. back in EQ the player base is literally the top 1% of what you have in WOW. stop a moment and think of the top 5 guilds on your server. then think of the top 5 players in that guild. those 25 players FROM YOUR SERVER are the people you'd meet and group with in EQ. the best of the best.
3) emergence of guilds. previously "guilds" were basically social networks out-of-game for nerds with no IRL friends or RP in-game as in UO. because the importance of grouping in EQ, for the first time guilds became significant for in-game progress of individuals and became extremely important in terms of gameplay. this is where you see the emergence of basically every important first generation guild: Afterlife (inventor of DKP) FOH, LOS.
4) raids. EQ introduced epic encounters with Nag and Lady Vox, and epic quests, and raid zones.
5) truly 3D perspective. other games like M59 had limited Doom-like view but EQ was the first truly open 3d world, emphasized by the first person perspective. visually, there was NO game like it ever seen by the masses.
6) a truly mature, tuned and balanced combat system. 99.9% of the noobs dont know this but EQ was NOT a ground up game. it "borrowed" the combat engine from MUDs which had been refined and balanced for decades. basically they took an existing MUD and put graphics on top of it. in fact it was so similar that Sony (989/Redeye at the time) was sued for using stolen code by the developers of DIKU mud and reached an out of court settlement where Smed and other Sony Interactive execs signed a statement stating they'd used the code. so out of the gate the game was "balanced" something that no subsequent game can say... so EQ was addicting out of the gate
7) unparalleled complex combat/casting system. EQ had 20 years of MUDs to look at and only took the best spells and combat systems from its predecessors. Geoffrey Zakin who was an acknowledged genius singlehanded integrated these spells (along with creating something no one had ever seen: the BARD system) into a rich vein of race/class combinations that was unparallelled in its complexity, balance and intricacy to that time. in many ways the combat system was SUPERIOR to pen and paper systems.... something NO ONE thought possible then or able to replicate today even with 10s of millions of dollars in development investment
8) impact. many games literally stole from EQ. DAOC is one example which the exec producer (mark jacobs in this case) admitted freely they took combat systems, balance, grouping from EQ. Blizzard took it a step farther, actually hiring EQ developers and guild leaders in addition to stealing game components. Pardo, Jeff Kaplan etc were from EQ. Blizzard devs have said numerous times how WOW 's class system and raids are directly from EQ
9) the game was HARD. EQ self-weeded the noobs out. if you met a dude who was a full level 40 or 50 or whatever the max was... you KNEW he was good. noobs simply could NOT MECHANICALLY max out. the game simply would force them out of the game. also the pace of PVP rewarded STRATEGIC thinking... PVP took many many rounds, there were no lucky instagibs or lucky wins... if someone beat you they beat you because THEY WERE BETTER... either their skills, their strats, or a combination of experience and gear they were better. in EQ , if a guy beat you... 9 times out of 10 they would beat you in a rematch... whereas in WOW and other games it comes down to 1)what class you play 2)what consumables/cooldowns you use (wow pvp is fun too... that's why I'm a 2 season gladiatior and old rank 14, but FACTS are that EQ took less luck... in wow a lot comes down to RNG which you do plan around but which is still fucked up)
so you see there's so much that EQ introduced that noobs had never seen. it's like the matrix. some 12 year old might say... "what's so great about the matrix? I've seen that wire-fu on Sci-Fi network blah." but if you're more than 16 years old and know more than 2 things in your life you understand how revolutionary it was when it came out in 1999 and blew ppl's minds. of course if you're another level of intellect you understand how behind that revolutionary impact there's a precedent... Ghost in the Shell, Hong Kong action, Japanese Anime etc etc. (but that's too much to ask of noobs to know)
now for noobs talking out of their asses
I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding fathers of MMORPGs
3 games preceded Ultima Online. Not the least of which was Meridian 59 in 96. Also Ultima Online had no impact on the development of EQ, both of which were in production before the others' release. UO is an outgrowth of the RPG genre gone to an online application. EQ (therefore WOW and Aion) is an outgrowth of the MUD genre. They have nothing in common except for the payment plan which OSI introduced and Sony Interactive copied
What exactly was Evercrack? Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory...but during a time when there was no real competition?
You've learned today how EQ was in fact groundbreaking in many ways noobs do not realize, and in fact NOT groundbreaking in many ways noobs assume that it was. EQ in fact had numerous sources of competition, including UO which from your post you are at least cognizant of (but like noobs have somehow conveniently "forgotten" as you spew noobsauce). EQ is significant precisely because it EXPANDED the category. Before EQ publishers thought only noobs would be loser enough to pay $10 a month to play online. It's retarded to try to turn the fact that it CREATED some market space by QQing that it "had no competition" lmao. these other games "compete" in the space that EQ CREATED
Then my question is why not go back and play?
You dont need to. If you play WOW or Aion these games are based on EQ. They're basically 2nd and 4th generation iterations of the game (admittedly dumbed down and made more mass-friendly).
Nothing it sucks now and it only had like a year or two of being good before SOE ruined it.
Wrong. 1) The golden age of EQ was SOV which was the 2nd expansion, the best year of EQ was its 3rd year. 2)SOE didn't ruin it. There's nothing about renaming a company that's going to inherently ruin a game
ADMITTEDLY EQ had some issues... sadly MOST of these issues had to do with the fact that John Smedley was a bad manager IRL than with game issues. Smedley was visionary in assembling his team from 96-98 when he developed the game but he couldn't hold on to his talent. Within a couple years he lost EVERY ONE of his key players which in turn seriously weakened the ability sony had to address bugs and game issues as well as seriously devasted sony's ability to deliver quality expansions. In the end Smedley was more concerned with playing with the stock, constantly renaming, reorganizing, spinning off his company from 989 Studios to Redeye to Sony Interactive to Verant to SOE etc etc than in running his game. THAT's what actually killed the game and prevented them from continuing the franchise with EQ2 and onward
In the end what's MOST significant of EQ is its legacy. It occupies that sweet spot of SO FEW GREAT games where its legacy is established and lives to this day. On one hand you have SEMINAL PC games like CIv and Xcom that occupy such a unique space that, while greatness is admitted, no one can really build on those games. On the other hand you have a game like Diablo which was great in many ways but carries such a heavy imprint that every subsequent games appears basically as a "clone" without any significant advancement even 15 years later. EQ on the other hand exists in WOW and now in Aion which their producers all freely admit the inlfuence of EQ, but they're different enough that they exist freely and which will in turn influence more games. EQ is the basis of all that. There's very few games... maybe Doom/Quake off the top of my head which has expanded into FPS via CS and Unreal etc to FPRPG like Halflife etc which has had similar success with its progency
Very very nice! /clap
Very very nice! /clap
I'll agree with you on almost everything, except the instagib, Wizards with Ice Comet could most definitely instagib you in PvP.
Also on balance, at launch, I played a mage, and they were definitely like wizards in terms of DPS and their pets could tank better than warriors before the nerfs came around.
Also in terms of community, I am a PvP gamer, yet loved this game because the community was so great and the PvE was indeed so challenging, but even this community had its dark spots, I'm sure everyone who played on Rallos Zek has heard of Tunes, a role model for griefers everywhere.
And...
Weight: every item had weight that affected falling damagen, walking speed, stamina.
Factions that really meant something. Good luck being an Ogre and exploring the world, you couldn't sell or train anywhere.
No map. No minimap. No radar.
No teleport.
Corpse runs naked. Many people hate this, but it's the way to feel inmersed in a dangerous world and to have a decent community because everybody needs everyone else to survive.
What was so great about EQ? It perfected the 3 "C's". Classes, Community and Challenge.
I can't believe no one remembers the - /shout, "MGB 65% EXT, KEI, VIRT, DMF, SOW, F07, BRELLS, NINE, SYMBOL AND SD AT MAIN BANK IN 5 MINS"
How the heck can you forget about that haha - The places where that was most common was, Nexus and PoK Main Bank for those who stayed around for the PoP expansion.
It is far from perfect. If challenges mean that you have to camp for 10+ hrs to get a shot at a drop, I would much rather do without. I have a life. WOW has the best system catered to people that can only play a little a nite. You still get a shot at some purples.
Sure I made friends in EQ but i don't see a big difference from the guildie friends i have made in WOW.
EQ was where the players who wanted a highly structured, interdependent game, where most of the choices where made by the developers not you. What is it with people that they would rather have someone else make their decisions for them?
Me, I could not take it, after 3 months of experimenting went back to UO. I have tried it a couple times since then, but still have not found the game with any pluses.
Because games are about entertainment & fun, not decision freedom.
That is why FPS, where you have almost no choice but to go this way and kill everything, is so popular.
I think the biggest reason it was so popular is because it was one of the first MMO's and the first 3-d MMO. UO was big but it was 2-d.
Not to say it wasn't a well put together game, because it was and it had a great community as well.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
I guess this is true. I myself started with Ultima Online and then moved to Dark Age of Camelot. I recon that DAoC was similar to Everquest in a lot of regards. I loved it at the time, since it was new, unique (more or less) and also promoted group play like EQ did. However, it was nothing but an utter dumb grindfest.
I was out of a job at the time, so had time to kill, and managed to get to max level in 4-5 months. Once I reached it, I was so burnt out, that I quit the game a week after. I tried EQ also, to try something different, but it seemed even worse than DAoC. So I am still, upon this day, puzzled as to why some people keep saying EQ was great.
I can imagine that the community was great, like it was in DAoC as well. WoW cannot even fathom to compare to those games community wise. But the games themselves I think were very painful to play.
The grinding was phenomenal. But the game was beyond that. And yes we miss a lot by not playing EQ, obviously you didn't play it.
About the colored glasses. Give me an MMO with EQ features and you will see it's not that case. It's like your first gf was Nicole Kidman and people say "bah, it's first kiss, she wasn't so great" and you go ape saying "FFS she was Nicole Kidman!"
Wait, obviously I didn't play it because I don't feel the same way about it that you do?
Lol, ok, nice logic there champ.
I played it for a year before coming to the conclusion that it was an unimaginative and neverending grind. At that point, I returned to Ultima.
As to the rest of your post, I can only assume that English isn't your primary language because it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.