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EQ - Veeshans Peak - Would Current MMOs Implement Such A Dangerous Place?
deadline527
Member Posts: 38
So back in the day of EQ - Kunark, there was a zone called Veeshans Peak. It consisted of the best gear in the game hands down, and was the hardest zone as well.
Here is the kicker though..
You could not gate out. You could not die without leaving your gear behind. You HAD to make it to the end of the zone or else you lost everything. There was no other exit except after the boss dragon of the zone. The risk vs reward was immense, but to come out on top was something very few accomplished or even tried.
Do you think such a place would ever fit in todays MMO world? Or would too many people attempt it, lose all their gear, and whine until the devs caved and dismembered the zone into something that can casually be completed?
I miss places like that. I miss the risks. I miss the REWARDS. Man, what a feeling coming out on top from that place, knowing that one mess up and your whole raids corpses and equipment would be dragon food. The feeling was unlike anything current MMOs could ever offer. Adrenaline rush would be an understatement.
I can only pray that one day, a game that follows the same concept of old school EQ is born. True risks. True rewards.
Comments
If you want adrenalin rushes, EVE or Darkfall. Would other games have such high risk vs reward? Doesn't seem like it any time soon at least. I don't think there's valuable gear in Earthrise, so yeah, EVE and DF are and will be for quite some time the only ones with risky gameplay. If such game is made, it's gonna be again by a indie studio, that's for sure. EVE is pretty much pure efficiency and risk vs reward calculating. I recall the devs wanted to experiment survival of the fittest theory with the game.
So no, not by big studios, but indie studios will make that kind of games every now and then, if you ask me. Games are played by so big audience nowdays, that they have to be made very casual friendly. Indie studios can entertain the hardcore gamers, as they don't have resources to compete with others.
If I understood you right...
Waiting on Xsyon & betaing stuff
EQ still remains the best MMO IMO. NO MMO has ever caught my attention like it did.
But in retrospec, VP(along with POP progression) was simply too much. I never made it into VP...but you can still see posts till this day about it over at ALLAs.
Although I think MMOs have become a bit on the easy side, I would never wanna play that "hardcore" again.
I couldnt recite how many hrs I put into raiding to finally be able to see Time(before they unlocked it). This from someone that is on disability.
Granted I think a game like old EQ would still sell to a niche crowd out there.
So unless they plan to live on smaller sub numbers, I see no way Devs ever put in content on par with POP/VP in any major MMO.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
Possible total gear lose in a game that is all about competitive gear grinding will only come from an independent developer. Chances of them touching it are slim. This concept didn't last long even in EQ.
Also, very few tried it mainly because of the immense time it took to camp and grind for the key to the zone. By the time grinding of the key was done by enough people in a guild(aside from the top 1 or 2 guilds), the next expansion was practically out.
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EQ2 started with more risk,players cried for a more WOW like clone,so the game has forever been dumb down to WOW standards.When i started EQ2 the entire party took on debt for another players death,after you died you lost your gear and had to return to your shard to get it and lessen your debt.
So the answer is no,personally i love a high risk versus reward,but your example from EQ1 is not my idea of great ,that is too much a linear design and unrealistic,i prefer to give players the realistic option to run.I also believe that realistically your gear should not disappear,you should be able to go back and get it.It might be sort of off topic,but i also do not believe in EQ's system of ATTUNED gear,i never liked that idea at all.SOE failed when allowing the selling of loot rights,SOE has many good ideas but they just don't think out some of their ideas very well.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Well thats why I'm talking about Kunark era, where VP was the exception and not the rule. POP was just way too much raiding, I agree with that totally. Although, it did leave a great deal of content for everybody to try without stepping on each others toes.
What I'm mainly saying though is during Kunark, VP was one of the only exclusively raiding zones. The rest were dungeons with boss mobs at the ends, but nothing like the scale VP took it to with raid mob after raid mob until you finished it. It was nice to have one zone that was a serious risk, but with amazing rewards for those who dared enter. And by saying dared I really mean it.
No other game since has offered such a do-or-die situation that was all or nothing.
Veeshans Peak was something everybody looked up to, but very few even attempted it. Even when they had a decent idea they could finish it, they still didn't attempt it due to the massive risk involved. This paved the way for certain brave guilds to step up to the plate and basically say they trust their guild mates enough to risk everything they have to come out on top. Failure was not an option. And when they did come out on top, the news traveled fast. It was a feeling unlike any other ever in a mmorpg.
Risk vs reward is what made EQ such an amazing game. Those who ventured deeper into a dungeon with their group had a much higher chance of dying and having their corpses stuck all the way down in a bad spot, BUT, because the rewards in that spot were so sought after it made the attempts worth it.
There is a lot your leaving out here about EQ and Veeshan's peek. Yes it was hard, yes it sucked to die in there. But it was nowhere the threat you make it out to be and VERY few ever lost any gear for a variety of reasons.
1) EQ was about corpse retrieval. You die, you travel back to your corpse and loot it(nobody else could loot it.) Or you drag it to safety. Corpses stayed around for a long time...2 weeks I believe it was. Raid bosses, when killed. would not repawn for days, sometimes a week. So if your raid group died to a boss, some other guild would come in and kill it clearing the path for you and yours to retreive your corpse. I was in 1 of the 1st clans to clear that zone, less than a week after we cleared it there were several clans on almost every server waiting in line to kill it. If raid 1 failed, raid 2 would try...etc. The zone was cleared almost every week the day it spawned.
2) VP was EQs 1st and only outdoor raid zone at the time. As such, Sony warned everyone upon the release of it that it was NOT intended for loners and travelling there without a raid was dumb. These were the only people that effectively ever lost ALL their gear. And they lost it because they went alone to a place where it takes tons of people to kill 1 mob when they were warned not to.
3) There were skills and tactics in that game to get your corpse back, including spells which could call a corpse to your location, speed buffs for speed corpse dragging...etc.
So few if any ever perma -lost anything. There were definately long painful repetetive corpse runs. There was also some times when you had to gather a few people together to help, or you had to wait for another raid to kill a boss for you. But almost everyone who ever perma lost a corpse did so because of nerd raging over doing something stupid like going in alone and then dieing repeatedly.
And as we can see, MMOs are full of false perceptions and weird mechanics.
First, as the poster above shown, it is not risk vs reward. If the risk is high enough people will not take it and will mitigate it instead, warping it into high rewards for medium/low risk. It was shown above for EQ and it is happening in EvE. The smart devs know that few smart/nolife people will warp the whole paradigm so the games offer good rewards for low risk right out of the door.
Second, the whole MMO gear grind is warped. Strange how fantasy MMOs are not some ideal vision of middle ages, when dragons existed and illnessed and famine did not cripple whole nations. Instead it is consumer society where all boils down to possesions and to total exploatation of the world and where everything is menial factory labor where what you work on and what you get for it is pretty much unrelated.
What we can have is noticeably harder content that gives only slightly better rewards if better at all and - this is important - takes the same time etc as the easy content. In the end it rewards skill and skill only but only very slightly not to unbalance the game.
But:
a) most people want time=gear equatation in place without skill being too important (and here lack of skill would not harm your character progress but would prevent you from joining groups)
b) people tend to average out their assesment of their own abilities, the skilled ones feel normal while the unskilled ones feel better than they really are, leading to stupid deaths (see above - going to raid place solo) - and unfounded yet angry customer support petitions
c) the gifted few would be unhappy anyway because they would be getting almost same reward for a task the rest of cummunity has no hope of achieving
So no, games will not offer it except maybe some indy project that will be doomed to fail. EvE is moving away from risk vs reward as we speak.
The only MMO I can think of is EVE, there are alot of "risky" adventures you can go on about, carrying cargo, mining, or just pirating really, high risk, high reward sort of thing, even just trading stuff between systems can be dangerous and very rewarding if you make it.
But I dont believe we will see many of these situations anywhere, just because most people would rather not loose anything, and the masses control the products, its a bit of paradox, when you ask a very casual player this same question, and ask him if he would like the adrenalin rush and the excitment of a win all , loose all scenario they would be happy to, but in practice those same people would be frustrated over and over and just not want to play in an area like that.
What seems to be the trend nowadays is to have a sort of treadmill system where the more you play, the more you win regardless if you are good or bad, and then put a "hard" stamp on it, and most people will really believe when they say it was "hard" to achieve X. So the key for nowadays challenges are really, gratification through time spent, if you have the time you will get the reward, rather than reward for solving the jigsaw.
Nothing wrong with that just a different model, it allows for people who would never touch this genre to be drawn into it. Hopefully someone will devise a better system in the future.
It was surely a cool idea, and I hope we see something similar in the future.
A zone with great risk and great rewards is always cool, as long as there only is one place like that.
But I think it is time to get a new go at death penalties. Particularly in zone penalties. When you get rezzed inside a zone you should get some cooler penalties, like a critical wound that affects you until you rested a while in an inn or something. Losing an eye, having problem walking, concussion that makes magic tougher and so on.
It would still be kinda care bear but not like today when you (maybe) loose some armor percentage.
I liked Lineage where you sometimes dropped an item, and if you wiped or were alone any passing monster would pick it up and add it too their loot.
To this day EQ1 still holds the crown for best and most in depth dungeons/zones,Vanguard comes second IMO.
Furious Fighters
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Though I'm not an adrenaline rush type of person I think it's sad that games have no room for such places.
They SHOULD have such places.
But as Jeffrey Steefel very nicely explained to me regarding the change of the original old forest in LOTRO "you see, getting lost is not fun...".
Well, to ME getting lost IS fun.
So "no" I don't think in most of today's mmo's you would find such an area. Shame really.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I agree. Total gear loss in a game where you grind for gear is to much loss. It's a game breaker for many when you look at the prospect of grinding for all the lost gear.
In other words, it's enough to make people quit, and I did see people quit in EQ after total gear loss at a high level.
The ideas here sound like much more fun.
Like, half hit points till you spend 8 hours in a pub to rest up, and you actually have to do activities, not just let your character stay there while you sleep. That's a stiff penalty, but not one that will make you quit the game.
Though I'm not an adrenaline rush type of person I think it's sad that games have no room for such places.
They SHOULD have such places.
But as Jeffrey Steefel very nicely explained to me regarding the change of the original old forest in LOTRO "you see, getting lost is not fun...".
Well, to ME getting lost IS fun.
So "no" I don't think in most of today's mmo's you would find such an area. Shame really.
I get lost easy, and getting lost is not fun.
HOWEVER, I dont' mind paying someone a few coins to run me through a maze if they think learning mazes is fun.
You just have to design it so those that like it can do it ,and those that dont' like it have a work around.
Though I'm not an adrenaline rush type of person I think it's sad that games have no room for such places.
They SHOULD have such places.
But as Jeffrey Steefel very nicely explained to me regarding the change of the original old forest in LOTRO "you see, getting lost is not fun...".
Well, to ME getting lost IS fun.
So "no" I don't think in most of today's mmo's you would find such an area. Shame really.
I get lost easy, and getting lost is not fun.
HOWEVER, I dont' mind paying someone a few coins to run me through a maze if they think learning mazes is fun.
You just have to design it so those that like it can do it ,and those that dont' like it have a work around.
Sometimes I think these games should incorporate actual tracking abilities. So let's say we have you LOTRO example. Hunters would be able to place a noticeable marker for the party. This way the party can find their way through hard to navigate places.
Of course, most games don't have hard to navigate places so that would have to be changed as well.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
Well, as far as I remembered of VP you could in fact gate out and you didn't have to go all the way through to get gear from the dragons in there.
I spent alot of hours in there with the guild I was in (Arch Overseers) and some of the fun of it was the risk although people RARELY lost equipment due to not beeing able to get to their corpse but the possibility was still there and that just made it a bit more exiting.
I doubt that any game will have this mechanic again due to the fact that getting ones corpse back from high risk zones was overly time consuming resulting in hours spent corpse running.
Gamers are more prone to picking a game where they know they can get to the fun stuff in a small amount of time played.
I agree. Total gear loss in a game where you grind for gear is to much loss. It's a game breaker for many when you look at the prospect of grinding for all the lost gear.
In other words, it's enough to make people quit, and I did see people quit in EQ after total gear loss at a high level.
The ideas here sound like much more fun.
Like, half hit points till you spend 8 hours in a pub to rest up, and you actually have to do activities, not just let your character stay there while you sleep. That's a stiff penalty, but not one that will make you quit the game.
8 Hours!?!? I don't know of ANYONE who would play any game with that system! People play to ...play... not be forced into into a death-penalty box. That WOULD make anyone who played that game quit!
DDO added food/drink at taverns to cut the time you'd have to spend there [though they also added a 1 min per death level drain].
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I agree. Total gear loss in a game where you grind for gear is to much loss. It's a game breaker for many when you look at the prospect of grinding for all the lost gear.
In other words, it's enough to make people quit, and I did see people quit in EQ after total gear loss at a high level.
The ideas here sound like much more fun.
Like, half hit points till you spend 8 hours in a pub to rest up, and you actually have to do activities, not just let your character stay there while you sleep. That's a stiff penalty, but not one that will make you quit the game.
8 Hours!?!? I don't know of ANYONE who would play any game with that system! People play to ...play... not be forced into into a death-penalty box. That WOULD make anyone who played that game quit!
DDO added food/drink at taverns to cut the time you'd have to spend there [though they also added a 1 min per death level drain].
Keep in mind that I'm referring to the OP's scenario. This isn't something you'd do all the time, but it's the penalty for failure for this one particularly hard dungeon, and you don't have to go into that dungeon if you don't want to.
It's a heck of a lot better than losing equipment that would take months of grinding to replace.
While it is true that you could not easily get out of veeshans peak, there were plenty of methods to get out and never be at risk of losing items to decay. There was never really a true risk of losing anything in VP, it was just a major pain in the ass to recover and leave. Otherwise guilds would never go there or you would hear stories of entire guilds being set back to square one after wiping.
To me, that doesn't make the actual gameplay more challenging. Spending 30 minutes to recover didn't make fighting a 1 minute respawn dragon any more fun than taking 30 seconds to recover. The fun was always in the win/lose conditions of actually fighting the dragons. Not determined by how many hours worth of penalties were assigned to losing or how artificially difficult everything other than the actual combat was was.
Is there room in mmos for more risk/reward, sure. There are plenty of things that could change, but honestly I hope to never see another zone like VP, because the "difficulty" always felt artificial.
i dont think any would risk it !(game dev)
father and grand-father played those hard style.
younger today say 23years and younger .think eq1 is probably easy (from trying the cave)but older gamer are probably senile and dont know what hard is(i bet those old gamer would love to see these young uns in eq1 show them how hardthis mistress truelly is!
would bringing this harshness in other mmo doable,some do it i believe but very rarelly ,most gamer i know that dig hard gaming like this stopped bothering they went baught a copy of underfoot and leveled a toon in eq1 instead
some gamer have been asking this for 5 years at least ,it doesnt sell ,free realm sell.take 5 minute dungeon go in go out ,your just in time for that important meeting with ibm!yep thats how it is
What has changed in the mmo genre (not all games, but many) since EQ is the extent players expect to win.
For example, WoW. Instances are created so that everyone who wants to fight a boss has that opportunity. No waiting. All of the bosses are sitting in those dungeons waiting to be killed. They are never absent. The fact that someone else killed a boss that week, or wants to, has no effect on you. The number of players you bring to the encounter is predetermined, and doesn't take very many people. Provided you can get 25 or so people with decent gear and a willingness to learn the "step to the left here, step to the right there" routines, you can reasonably expect some treasure. And if for any reason you can't, there is a 10 man version for you to succeed at and practice on.
EQ was different. Failure was a very real possibility. Loss was a very real possibility. Total hair pulling frustration and fear was assured. There were encounters in the game that were there for very long periods of time that almost no one ever defeated. It might take hundreds of people to defeat an encounter. You die, you lose experience. You die a lot, you lose a lot of experience. And even through there were ways to retrieve a corpse, the possibility you might not haunted you.
People can reasonably debate which system is better, I will grant you. But what made EQ special is the feeling it generated among the community that it was the players against the game. The game was not your friend. It was not there simply to inconvenience you or put you through some paces on the way to your reward. It was there to curb stomp you and send you home in tears unless you could overcome significant odds.
Because there are not really dragons and because I am not really a hero, I don't know what it would be like to fight such a beast. But in my imagination, I expect that I would be scared out of my wits and almost certain to die. That's how fighting a dragon felt to me in EQ lol. So from an immersion point of view, it was spot on.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I seriously doubt you will see anything like that, except in a very narrow niche game. There just aren't the demographics for that type of game play any more. I remember having to keep three entire sets of back up armor and weapons in my vault, just to have a chance to get my gear back in Asherons Call(one). Even then you had to weight the risk involved. Some times you just had to walk away. I enjoyed the game, but certain elements of it had a sadistic design. I'd not wish to go back to that.
If you want a FFA full loot gankfest, you could try Darkfall or Mortal Online. Lots of risk, for uncertain reward from what I hear. But some people like that. To each their own(shrug).
ty its the best description i have read of eq1.and i love that description!
Kind of off topic, so I am sorry but Loke666. Last night in Pirates of the Burning Sea, I blow off one of my legs doing a mission and now I have a peg leg instead of my normal leg. Kind of funny and was a fun mission to say the least. Are these the kind of things you are thinking about for a death penalty. It did not effect my stats or speed just my look.
Sooner or Later
Harsh penalties that translate to lost time don't make the actual FIGHT any more fun or difficult. Never has, never will. If it did make it more fun, people would be dropping gold and deleting gear in WOW or LOTR when they wipe on a dungeon. They don't...hence...NOT fun. They don't choose to keep playing EQ either, hence, NOT fun ANYMORE.
If you could choose instantly that in Darkfall or Eve, when you died, you didn't drop your gear and didn't lose your ship, lets take an honest guess as to how many more people would prefer to not lose anything. Who's taking bets?
How many people played Dragon Age and NEVER used quick save or ONLY saved at the camp? How many played on normal or easy compared to the hardest difficulty? I played on hard, but thats because losing didn't translate to mindless LOST time. The actual fights were harder and required a lot more strategy which made it more fun. But in a MMO, penalties and time sinks don't make the fights harder. Its the same fight. Remove the corpse run and the dungeon is NOT more difficult. Its just more time consuming when you do happen to fail. And as we've seen over time, a corpse run is NOT fun for the vast majority. Penalizing a player's time does not lead to FUN gameplay. It does appeal to a select niche, but those people have long been forgotten by the higher quality developers. Thats life.
What I do not understand is that you guys keep talking about time this and time that.
MMORPGs = TIME SINKS. ALL OF THEM PERIOD. The whole point of an MMORPG is to get the player to play endlessly so that they keep paying the monthly fee.
Death Penatlies do make fights harder because players know that if they lose they lose time, they lose time that they will have to make up. Without the Death Penatlies people just throw themselfs at the encounter over and over and over again till they win, that is not how it should be. You should have to learn how to win the battle and if you do not learn quickly you should have to "pay" something and since we are playing MMORPGs, time is the logical thing to have to pay.
I do not understand the instant gradification crowd, I just do not understand it at all. Games are here for fun but I do not have fun unless I feel like I earned my victory and I cannot feel like I earned it if I risk nothing in trying to win the event/encounter/fight. That is my opinion and I know others do not share it but can you please explain why getting something with no risk or effort is rewarding?
Even older console games had Death penatlies that took time away from the player as the penatly. Look at super mario bro's, if you died you had to restart the whole level, that was the death penatly, making the player start the level over again.
Sooner or Later