I personally don't feel old MMO's were harder. They were longer than most newer games, they definately had points that were more irritating. But the game itself, how you played wasn't any harder or more challenging... just longer and more tedious.
Actually as much fun as I had in EQ I actually find that it was more limited in almost every way than games today. Less choice in developing my character, less choice in the areas I played (eventually solved by... what 16 expansions now), less choice in the content available for single player progression.
However I did like the teamwork. These days I team when I want and solo when I want, however I will admit that sometimes sparking up conversations and keeping groups is harder today. There has to be some way to not only make grouping as easy and rewarding as it is today (and yes groups get more xp, more loot and more coin than soloing) encourage teamwork, while still keeping soloing as a real viable experience and not the afterthought of games gone by.
Venge
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it is bad.
I personally don't feel old MMO's were harder. They were longer than most newer games, they definately had points that were more irritating. But the game itself, how you played wasn't any harder or more challenging... just longer and more tedious.
Actually as much fun as I had in EQ I actually find that it was more limited in almost every way than games today. Less choice in developing my character, less choice in the areas I played (eventually solved by... what 16 expansions now), less choice in the content available for single player progression.
However I did like the teamwork. These days I team when I want and solo when I want, however I will admit that sometimes sparking up conversations and keeping groups is harder today. There has to be some way to not only make grouping as easy and rewarding as it is today (and yes groups get more xp, more loot and more coin than soloing) encourage teamwork, while still keeping soloing as a real viable experience and not the afterthought of games gone by.
Venge
I feel the same.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief. Join me on TwitchFacebook Twitter
Online resources weren't as prevalent. For example, wikis didn't exist and fansites were more about events and guild news than walkthorughs.
NPCs weren't marked and quest logs weren't as detailed.
You could actually do things or have certain rep levels that would get you guard-killed in otherwise-friendly towns.
In UO, there was no global chat and even when one was introduced, no one used it. All chat was based on proximity.
Ingame maps were very limited, IIRC, in EQ, I had to constantly spam 'Sense Heading' to raise the skill that told me what compass direction I was facing.
No respeccing or skill builders available. If you took cooking on your swordsman in AC and were 30 levels into the character (took al ong time to do that back then), you either lived with it or rerolled.
People also played very differently back then, though.
People used their first character or two to learn the game before making their actual character. The first character almost always ended up a mule with a skillset or build that was entertaining to see years later. Now people expect their frist character to be their main and, as such, MMOs are designed to support that which means less expeerimentation and more direct information, less choice and more handholding, and definitely as little consequence as possible.
People back then also came from group gaming backgrounds. The early MMO gamers were that cross section of PnP gamers and computer users. They were people that actively looked for groups, wanting to emulate the teams they read in their fantasy books or played in their DnD games. As such, with a group-focused audience, the games were designed to offer challenge to groups, resulting in often torturous gameplay for most solo players (*cue the jackass that has to reply with how that isnt' true because they leveled their druid/necro/whatever to cap solo*).
Politics were more a part of gameplay.In the older games there was more of a hierarchy, and when you had a problem with someone you didn't start spouting profanity in general/local but rather went to your guild leader who went to their guild leader to resolve it. As such there were a lot of rules, written and unwritten that players generally followed.
Well this is my opinion of older MMO's as compared to newer MMO's:
fun < pain in the ass
To me it would seem like older MMO's took the joy out of playing and replaced it with bashing your keyboard and pulling your hair out. I'm all for hardcore, like loosing items during PvP or more intense death penalties (those are understandable). However, shady quest txt that leaves you searching the map for a rat killing quest for 8 hours because there's no marker or proper quest description is just rediculous.
No global chat? Imo seems to take away from the MMO experience in general.
No respecing? So if you miplaced one skill or took the wrong profession you'd have to waste another couple weeks of your life to re-roll and redeem a simple mistake. That would really suck.
Also, theres plenty of grouping in modern MMO's, it's all about who you play with. MMO's are 5 times more popular today than they were back in the day so of course there's going to be more immature players spouting profanity, being a nusance and not wanting to group (bigger population = higher chance of douche bags). But this is because of today's gamers themselves, not the games.
Imo games todays MMO's have evolved to be more entertaining rather than "hardcore". Not neccessarily a bad thing considering games are supposed to be developed for entertainment purposes anyway.
Most people go through life pretending to be a boss. I go through life pretending I'm not.
Mob health and damage VS player health and damage. I think that has been the biggest change.
“It's unwise to pay too much, but it's worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money - that's all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot - it can't be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run, and if you do that you will have enough to pay for something better.”
So correct my ignorance as I was not there.... what makes Ultima Online, Everquest, Asherons Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age Of Camelot, FFXI more difficult and immersive than modern day MMO's like I have listed?
They had no meaningful quests..............people had to group to progress
The WoW quest progressions killed real MMORPGs which should be about community
The whole MMO gaming atmosphere as well as genre' of people playing online rpgs was different. The community of players was pretty much free of anybody under the age of 21 with the average player ages 30+ There was no instant gratification as everything was hard earned. When you ran from a elite mob trying to kill you , you had an adrenaline rush and you feared for real losing hours of exp from a NPC death. You had to look at the game from a more realistic perspective.
Without going into a novel of a story i will state that WoW made the old school game developers change the format to instant gratification easy mode. As an example. My frst 50 in DAOC took me months of marathon play to achieve that level. I revisited the game last year and i went from 0-50 in about 32 hours of game play. Old school meant downtime to rest and power up which promoted socilizing. The social element is a game breaker for me. I haven't found a game since pre-wow that really had any social element. I'm still looking.
This can easily be answered in one word - Paradigm.
Even if you don't know what it is, you know what it is. It's the "zombie", "vampire" or ninja. It's the backstory behind the story. It's what makes something we all know, something we all know without needing an explanation. It's the reason we can see something and know all about it without being told anything.
When MMO's first came out, there wasn't this paradigm; everything was new and never, or only rarely, seen before in a game. Years have passed and now we all know what to expect in an MMO without needing our hands held or detailed explanations of the core gameplay itself.
No one has to explain that an MMO is a persistent world anymore. No one has to go into detail about the idea that you can attack another player-character in real-time. These are all things we just know by now. That's why MMOs now have their own paradigm, just like a movie villian or horror flick.
It takes the newness out of the game and the sense of mystery away from it. Those are the things that made the older MMOs a challenge. We didn't exactly know what to expect of the genre, never mind individual games. No one was exactly sure what was, wasn't or could be possible in the actual game itself.
Older mmos more difficult? Please. I wish more people would get this train of thought out of their minds. I'll tell you the truth that others don't want you to hear (and I've been playing them for a long time), old skool mmos were not hard, the players back then were just less experienced...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
At no point do I think they were harder in terms of Mob AI or anything like that. They were harder in the sense that grinding by just killing mobs.
The games were more group based. There was a lot less soloing involved.
A LOT less people played them, so there were a lot less resources put into helping new players. With most MMOs now, you have many websites to help you out in many regards to the game.
Do I think mezzing groups of people for minutes at a time was hard? Lol. Do I think chaining CCs from different classes that have very short durations hard? Not really, but it does take some coordination.
People try to scream about how now a days, "Everyone gets epix for free". That might be true. They might not have to camp a dungeon for over a week to see a boss spawn and hope their group gets more people on before the other. They might not have to spend weeks and weeks killing things to get one drop. That sure doesn't make it hard at all.
I play games to have fun. I don't play games to spend weeks and weeks and see no improvement or have no fun.
And i00x00i brings up some very good points. Rose coloured goggles = win!
Mob health and damage VS player health and damage. I think that has been the biggest change.
That is a serious change. BITD in EQ1, an even con mob was seriously an even fight - if you did not do your absolute best (hit every kick/bash/other hotbar ability to the fullest and in the right ways) you could easily lose. Sometimes the mob got lucky and you lost ANYWAYS lol. So you had to run for it with that sucker hot on your heels until you found a guard, or got to the zone edge, or some other player took it off of you - and that happened a LOT, because people were not oblivious to each other in those days. And you absolutely said Thank You! to that person for saving your hide
But that was part of the game - the purpose was for you to win by playing it well, not to hand you little packages of xps and loot because you logged in and clicked a target.
I'd throw in another reason was that the games were designed for grouping, and by that I mean if a warrior type did not have a healer with him/her, they were going to spend a LOT of downtime between fights. I tried soloing a rogue once, and around L18 he had around 400 hps. After a hard even con fight, he was down to around 10% health (not unusual even for a guy with good gear). Health regenned at something like 1 pt per second, meaning that he needed to spend 6 minutes downtime in between fights - or quit being a solo jerk and join up with a group
Another reason was no taunting. That's right, no instant "aggro management". The warrior actually had to do the majority of the damage in order to keep the mob on him. If someone else pulled aggro, it was up to either the warrior or the off-tank (usually a higher DPS character with some armor, like a ranger) to get the mobs attention and yank it back over to the warrior.
This took actual preparation, assignment of roles in the group, responsiveness to changing situations, and skill of execution. You pretty much found at least a modicum of the skill now needed for raids in every successful group.
mobs were just generally tougher. In the case of EQ, the damage and health they dad was on par, if not higher than a player of the same level. Interrupting their spells/actions also required some quick timing, easily missed if you just spam your skills and get stuck in cooldowns and casting times.
Debuffs were actually a significant part of the fight as well, one I always found mobs were very eager to fuck you over with it. Experienced this very early on in EQ with orc priests blinding and slowing me, and large stat reductions. Mobs that debuffed were a nightmare for a solo melee class. Players learned and picked targets that would put up the least amount of resistance to your classes abilities.
Mobs had large aggro ranges, and even unique triggers like just casting a spell near one. More often than not they had faster movement speed than the player, if you didn't have a speed buff or a root, you weren't likely going to get away unless guards or players helped you out.
Honestly the list goes on, all i'm going to say is mobs put up a serious fight in older games, and player classes didn't have a counter/solution for everything a mob might throw at them. This is why players were very eager to find groups back then.
Modern mmo's have needless to say, nerfed mobs to very tedious, grindy, and meaningless encounters that don't require any thought or effort.
I didn't play UO, I did play EQ and text based MUDs prior to EQ. You have to remember that EQ was more of a graphics engine placed on a text based game and I consider it to be the original MMO because it was 3d, first person or over the shoulder third..however you picked the camera angle.
What made EQ harder in the beginning was that they had to find a balance between system performance, graphics, stability, NPC difficulty, interesting classes, and xp loss. Plus along the way they had to figure out how people would exploit the system whether it be to level faster or deny other people. Some of this stuff in my opinion should have been more obvious to them prior to this stuff actually occuring, but I am sure they had their hands full pumping out the next expansion.
We had multiple starter areas, some of them were much much easier than others and depending on your class could be very difficult, I found being a gnome caster in Steamfont was rediculous with the "newbie" pit where rats and skeletons would start smacking you because you had to angle your camera up and down to see properly. In WoW, the quests and such pretty much walk you through and the NPCs are sectioned off so you aren't running into stuff that was 10 and 15 levels above you. In EQ, using Steamfont as an example again...instead of turning left to go to the newbie pit, you could go right and hit some dragon bones with stuff I believe that was at least level 25 maybe higher. And could even run out of the town and find the Minotaur Hero outside to greet you where someone could train him to the guards. Which training him that far was like a 10 minute run at least to run him around guards and such....he was level 30ish if I recall correctly.
You were wearing absolute crap as a newbie in EQ for the first 20 levels of your life in most cases. As an example, in Unrest (awesome zone) they had ghouls which were invulnerable to non-magic weapons. 80% of new players will not have a magic weapon at level 20 in EQ in the first year of it's life without friends hooking them up. So that meant you had an NPC that you literally could not hurt unless you had magic abilities, warriors/rogues were screwed. I remember I had some magic boots someone gave me on my warrior and that was the only thing that hurt the ghoul I had on me, I was kicking him for 1 and 2 damage until someone helped me.
Same zone mentioned above as another example (Unrest), this place has a spread of stuff that you could kill from like 20 to 40. It got overly crowded because of this. But it had a basement that was rediculously difficult in the beginning, and the NPCs were super unbalanced for awhile. They had a particular NPC called a Hag that people would train out of the basement to the zone line and it would charm people. Sometimes it would get someone on the way back to the house and that person would be locked in to charm and walked all the way back into the basement...where it would break and they would die. You could kiss your corpse good bye at that point because even level 50 people in the early days had trouble going into the basement and surviving...most of them would charge you absorbant fees for retrievals or flat out steal your stuff.
The zones had traps that would actually screw you, false floors are one that come to mind. You'd fall down 2-3 levels and unless you were a lot higher level than the NPCs...you were dead. With no idea how to get back to your body unless you had been DEEP into that zone enough times to remember.
Boat travel, instant travel was rare. Only Druids and Wizards could teleport and you had to find your spells to get to certain spots. Whether it be actually finding them as a drop, or buying them from a specific vendor at a specific location. So that meant people had to ride boats. I recall many times running across Butcher Block mountains trying to get to a boat before it left. They eventually added more boats to cut down on the wait times, but you'd wait like 20 minutes easy on boats. And there were two oceans that used seperate boats for travel in the beginning.
Factions. If you were specific races, there were places you flat out could not go without working on your factions. For instance, if you were a troll or ogre, Freeport (the central city) hated you. They had a special entrance you could use to get to the docks, but if you were a good guy with bad freeport faction...they'd kill you in the tunnels usually unless you did faction work. It was a royal pain to deal with the factions, but there were some pretty major benefits. And being an enchanter (a class in Everquest) meant you could get away with mediocre factions and improve them enough via illusions and spells to enter usually KOS locations.
Racial size mattered. It mattered enough that you had to carry shrink potions with you or have a shaman shrink you to be able to move well enough in some dungeons. This applied mostly to Trolls and Ogres, but also Barbarians. You also had different sized armor, most magical armor would fit all races...but not always.
NPC pathing. It wasn't what you'd expect it to be by today's standards. Most times today they run a straight path to you, jumping off any high things they may be on. But back them sometimes NPCs would run around obstacles and across bridges to get to you...or down ramps. So that meant if you pulled things by proximity instead of pathway, you could end up pulling 5+ things as they ran by them and aggroed them into a mob coming toward you.
Traveling. Everquest didn't mave mounts for a long long long time. That meant boats, portaling for most travel. But also foot speed spells such as "Spirit of the Wolf" SoW spells or potions to speed up foot travel. And some pathways were quicker, but more dangerous or confusing versus the longer but more straightforward ways. It wasn't always as clearcut as A->B->C->D->E Sometimes you could go another route and cut out zones but spend more time in more dangerous zones running. Some of the zones in the game were insanely large, Karanas come to mind on this. You could run a straight line for 15-20 minutes with speed modifiers on and maybe not hit the zone wall in some of these places. And you could never run a straight line at low levels.
Dieing, When you died you went back to your BIND POINT. That meant if you forgot and didn't bind yourself on the same continent you died on..you had to get a port or take a boat back to where you died. You could literally spend hours just running to get back to the same zone you died in. An example might be being bound in Kelethin (Wood Elf city), and dieing in Lower Guk. That meant you went from Greater Fay-Butcher Block-Boat through the Ocean of Swords (maybe Tears got em mixed up all the time)-Freeport-N Ro-Oasis-S Ro - Swamp - Upper Guk - Lower Guk. If you had speed modifiers, it'd take 20-25 minutes to get to the boat, 15 minutes on boat minimum, and probably 5 minutes on average per zone until you hit Upper Guk..then you'd be naked having to fight your way to Lower Guk if you can't invis yourself. So that's at least an hour to just get within 1 zone of your corpse, no spirit walking, ghost form, etc...you could die again on the run.
Boss NPCs were mainly dragons at the beginning of Everquest. It'd take 30-40 people to kill a dragon in the early days, and the dragon could knock your body into very unpleasant to retrieve from locations. Especially the ice dragon, Vox I believe, she could knock you into hidden holes filled with NPCs below her. It was also possible that someone could fall into the pit, get healed and pull all that stuff up into the dragon chamber if the timing was right. And for 30-40 people, there was crap for money to be to split..and maybe 5 items to be split across them. It was an almost an utter waste of time doing this as pick up groups because you never got preference on items, you could spend a year killing dragons and end up with nothing....there weren't quests designed to give you something for bothering...like new MMOs. And these dragons were on like week long respawn timers...so you might have planned to kill it on Friday...and someone kills it on Thursday. No dragon for at least another 5 days in most cases.
Selling equipment. No auction houses. Hell there wasn't even much of a trade system in EQ, they didn't even have item linking for a long time. That meant you either had to list states, memorize item names, or look at everything in trade windows. And there was East Commons to do all this in. You could actually make more money buying and selling stuff in EC than most other tasks available in EQ. I liked EC so much, it was a blast...people screwed around and just BSed showing off their items and telling you about things they've done. Auction houses and global chat really ruin a lot of the possibilities in MMOs....having global markets when each in-game town or region could be it's own market.
There were a lot of issues and problems with the old MMOs.......I mean so many that you'd probably never subject yourself to it given a choice between those issues and a newer, easier, MMO like WoW.
But one thing Everquest had that no MMO can replicate and be competitive is a sense of adventure. You weren't walked through everything. Stuff was hard, you had to find out from other players where stuff was or how to get to places. And you'd actually stumble across nice people who played, the jerks had no reason to do anything with you because there wasn't a quest telling them they needed to run dungeon XYZ today. You didn't know how everything worked, you didn't know the bare minimum you needed to kill Boss Shaka-Khan. You just tried. If they had reduced the XP penalty in EQ but kept a lot of it's more rudimentary systems, I think it might have created a different MMO market. But the death penalities seemed to be the sticking "punishment/time sink" factor these games ran with.
Early days when you did not have sites to visit for walkthroughs and cheats or ingame where you realy could get lost and for hours try find your way back and dying alot. I realy doub the hardcore gameplay could survive these days we would have 90% of community on forums whine and cry all day:p
Darkfall try introduce the hardcore back into mmorpg but the new generation kept whining untill whole game was dumb down so much, it meets requirement of todays gamers.
I dont have any hope we will get a mmorpg with todays graphics and old skool gameplay and gameworlds. with maybe some new improvements but still give core feeling how old AC was thats what i want.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009..... In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Older mmos more difficult? Please. I wish more people would get this train of thought out of their minds. I'll tell you the truth that others don't want you to hear (and I've been playing them for a long time), old skool mmos were not hard, the players back then were just less experienced...
Overall this is the feeling i'm getting from this thread with regards to difficulty, though I will concede that MMO's have gone a little to far the other way in adding convenience tools that remove immersion from the game but I see many other benefits in the better MMO's and options is one big one, just because they add a feature doesn't mean you have to use it you can always adopt the older strategies if you want or find like minded people to play with.
Cal.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
Older mmos more difficult? Please. I wish more people would get this train of thought out of their minds. I'll tell you the truth that others don't want you to hear (and I've been playing them for a long time), old skool mmos were not hard, the players back then were just less experienced...
Overall this is the feeling i'm getting from this thread with regards to difficulty, though I will concede that MMO's have gone a little to far the other way in adding convenience tools that remove immersion from the game but I see many other benefits in the better MMO's and options is one big one, just because they add a feature doesn't mean you have to use it you can always adopt the older strategies if you want or find like minded people to play with.
To some extent this is true. The games got easier when you knew more about them, like all games. However, knowing more about Everquest did not get you to max level in a week or two of casual play. And it certainly did not get you the money or opportunities to be fairly well equipped once you got there in a short period of time. And later in the game development (3rd expansion?), you had AA points to deal with that kept you gaining xp to further your character.
But, it's easier to believe this to be true. If you wish to test it for yourself, there are free servers running old versions of Everquest where they aren't quite as far back as release...they are substantially far enough back that you will a good taste of what it was like. Or if you don't think you could figure out how to get one of those working, you could always try Vanguard. It's not quite as primitive as Everquest was when it comes to questing and such, but you'll see there's a difference when the game is not nearly as forgiving as WoW and the classes are not over the top powerful compared to normal NPCs like WoW....a normal solo NPC (non-elite, etc) can kill you.
WoW has stuff that you will never obtain without a lot of effort and time, but this was much more common in old Everquest...it was pretty tough to solo in the game...only a few classes were very efficient at it. And they had to rely on potions, items, and spell begging to make it possible for some of those. Wizards with SoW so they could kite, come to mind.
For an example of Everquest mentality, to even get to some of the planar zones...you needed a Wizard class to teleport you to them with expensive gem stones. And in some of these planar zones, if you spoke near NPCs and said the wrong thing it could make it impossible to continue further or teleport you prematurely into danger.
In my opinion, very few players today could sit still long enough to participate in a planar raid in old Everquest, and if they managed to wait it out...would probably intentionally ruin it for everyone else when they found out they were not likely to actually walk away with anything useful on their first run.
Older mmos more difficult? Please. I wish more people would get this train of thought out of their minds. I'll tell you the truth that others don't want you to hear (and I've been playing them for a long time), old skool mmos were not hard, the players back then were just less experienced...
Overall this is the feeling i'm getting from this thread with regards to difficulty, though I will concede that MMO's have gone a little to far the other way in adding convenience tools that remove immersion from the game but I see many other benefits in the better MMO's and options is one big one, just because they add a feature doesn't mean you have to use it you can always adopt the older strategies if you want or find like minded people to play with.
To some extent this is true. The games got easier when you knew more about them, like all games. However, knowing more about Everquest did not get you to max level in a week or two of casual play. And it certainly did not get you the money or opportunities to be fairly well equipped once you got there in a short period of time. And later in the game development (3rd expansion?), you had AA points to deal with that kept you gaining xp to further your character.
But, it's easier to believe this to be true. If you wish to test it for yourself, there are free servers running old versions of Everquest where they aren't quite as far back as release...they are substantially far enough back that you will a good taste of what it was like. Or if you don't think you could figure out how to get one of those working, you could always try Vanguard. It's not quite as primitive as Everquest was when it comes to questing and such, but you'll see there's a difference when the game is not nearly as forgiving as WoW and the classes are not over the top powerful compared to normal NPCs like WoW....a normal solo NPC (non-elite, etc) can kill you.
WoW has stuff that you will never obtain without a lot of effort and time, but this was much more common in old Everquest...it was pretty tough to solo in the game...only a few classes were very efficient at it. And they had to rely on potions, items, and spell begging to make it possible for some of those. Wizards with SoW so they could kite, come to mind.
For an example of Everquest mentality, to even get to some of the planar zones...you needed a Wizard class to teleport you to them with expensive gem stones. And in some of these planar zones, if you spoke near NPCs and said the wrong thing it could make it impossible to continue further or teleport you prematurely into danger.
In my opinion, very few players today could sit still long enough to participate in a planar raid in old Everquest, and if they managed to wait it out...would probably intentionally ruin it for everyone else when they found out they were not likely to actually walk away with anything useful on their first run.
From what you explain it does sound as if there were many unique elements to EQ that made it what it was and this uniqueness is not really happening within modern AAA MMO's at present which is a shame and falls into my point about modern MMO's going to far the other way and removing any element that might be considered a "time sink" or not worth doing because of no chance of getting a shinie for the effort, making modern MMO seem like pez dispensers.
As I said in my OP I have played the free shards UO Second Age, EQ1999 and the SWGemu and I have played Vanguard I have a level 25 Orc Hunter and a level 20 Lesser Giant Druid so I'm very familiar with Vanguard and its only poor performance, low population and lack of support that keeps me from playing it. I hope SOE sell it off to a company that cares and they open an EU server and I'll be there.
Cal.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
1. Lack of soloability: These games used to be a lot more group oriented which meant you had to rely on others to accomplish your goals whether it was for grouping to complete content, receiving buffs, etc.
2. Death Penalty: The death penalty used to be rather severe in these games. Many included a loss of xp that could even delevel you if you had just recently leveled, losing your character's items/coin, and having to find your corpse which could be problematic if you were in an area you don't know well or is swarming with monsters.
3. Lack of quick travel: Many of the older games did have near the amount of teleportation, spawn points, bind points, etc. you see in today's games. So traveling to different destinations was much more time consuming.
4. Regen Rates: The regen rates for health and mana back in the day was way lower. In most games today a mage can gain back their mana or least the bulk of it within a few seconds whereas back in the early games it could take ten minutes or more to gain back your spell power.
5. Leveling Curve: Leveling in the older games took a lot longer to accomplish. You didn't see the majority of players reaching max level within a month or two.
To be fair, none of these really make the older games more difficult. Simply more time consuming far as I'm concerned. About the only thing I do miss from the old days is the community seemed a lot friendlier and helpful back in those days. You still had your pricks, but they were rare especially when you compare it to most games today.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I'm seeing a lot of people say that MMOs were more group based originally. That is wrong. In AC1 you could solo 1-126 no problem right out of the gate. In EQ1 some classes (druids, necros, etc) let you solo to endgame if you knew what you were doing. You could solo fine in UO if you knew what you were doing.
Wow pretends to be solo friendly but it is actually among the least solo friendly games I have played. Wow lets you level to 85 solo but it is faster in a group. And once you hit max level the real/interesting/fun game begins and you can't do anything solo.
EQ2 was never solo friendly - it didn't even pretend to be. LOTR, also, not solo friendly. Conan and Aion: not solo friendly if you want decent gear. Warhammer - you won't get anywhere solo.
I'm not saying that solo friendly is good or bad, but I have no idea where the perception comes from that older games required grouping more than current ones. I have found the opposite to be true.
I actually find the newer games like WoW so much harder than the old games.
In the old games, you didn't need to go through marathon raids. You didn't need to be perpetually logged on for hours. You didn't even have to fight at all if you didn't want to. There were things you could do if you didn't want to do combat. You could be a hero and not even have to powergame.
In the new games, everything that isn't directly tied to combat has been taken out or made pointless. The new games practically require you to stat mash, use diagnostic apps, use TS/Vent. Guilds are a lot more picky. Raids are a lot more exacting. And the new games are tests of endurance, how many hours you can stay on doing combat after combat, without getting burned out.
__________________________ "Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it." --Arcken
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I actually find the newer games like WoW so much harder than the old games.
In the old games, you didn't need to go through marathon raids. You didn't need to be perpetually logged on for hours. You didn't even have to fight at all if you didn't want to. There were things you could do if you didn't want to do combat. You could be a hero and not even have to powergame.
In the new games, everything that isn't directly tied to combat has been taken out or made pointless. The new games practically require you to stat mash, use diagnostic apps, use TS/Vent. Guilds are a lot more picky. Raids are a lot more exacting. And the new games are tests of endurance, how many hours you can stay on doing combat after combat, without getting burned out.
Everquest has one really good example that WoW can't even come close to touching for time investment and sheer aggravation. The cleric epic weapon. Where you had to camp a dragon spawn that was contested by multiple guilds for multiple clerics had a random spawn time where it could spawn at anytime of any day. So it meant you literally had to have someone there watching, and have enough people on a moments notice to log in and kill it before the other guilds assembled....and if you weren't fast enough then you started over. That means you have a email/IM/phone tree, people who have to login in from work or enough people who work odd hours to make up for the lack of people during regular hours. And if you were the cleric who received it, then you were everyone's slave.........assuming you didn't get it and bail because people started wearing you out travelling all over to rez bodies anytime they died or an alt or friend or friend of a friend of theirs died.
Raiding guilds in EQ were just as picky if not more so in WoW because there were classes they needed more than others. For instance, try finding a guild in Everquest as a Druid...no one wanted you unless you were nearly done collecting armor because everyone in the guild who had a useful character also had a druid alt they'd gladly bring to raids if given a chance. If you were a bard you could find a guild pretty easily, because being a bard was carpal tunnel inducing in EQ....but they were also necessary for resistances during encounters before you had your armor and stats built up as a guild.
The only thing that stopped marathon raids in EQ was that they didn't have instances in the early days, and I am not sure if they incorporated instances since. But that meant you had to play nice with other guilds or you'd have other guilds show up to ruin your raids.....which meant you had to schedule raids. WoW somewhat has this with reset timers on their dungeons...assuming they haven't changed their policy on this. If by marathon you mean length of time spent raiding a single zone...that's going to vary by guild and experience. But EQ could easily compete, it wasn't unheard of to plan for at least 4 hours of time spent raiding on the first night when you break a zone....and then finish the next night in another 4 hour play block.
I would rather play WoW over old school Everquest for "fun", but WoW has too much stat tracking to feel like you've actually completed something worthwhile when you see 900k other people have done it before you.
1. Mob Difficulty. The difficulty of mobs cannot be understated. Some classes could not even fight even-level mobs. I do not think many people today could deal with that fact. I do not think most people today could deal with it taking 2 or more minutes to kill a green con mob.
2. Combat/Casting. Although it varied from game to game, you had to pay more attention than players do today. Anyone can pump out acceptable dps in WoW. As long as you have the gear, you can use whatever rotation applies to your class. I cannot count the times that a player from uber guild #1, decked out in the best possible gear, was a complete moron and did not even grasp the basics. But if they could stand in one place and faceroll the keys, everything worked out. For me, I always prefered DAoC combat. As a melee, many of your styles were positional, reactionary, or chained. You had to pay attention to what was happening and , for example, if you did not get directly behind the player, that light tank was going to annihilate your healer/caster. As a caster, there really is no comparision. I would love to see today's modern players deal with the hard interupt code that DAoC had. Not being able to face tank mobs without consequence as a caster is something that is lost on the new generation.
3. Grouping. Yes, you could solo in most of the old school games, but it was always more efficient and rewarding to group. Grouping lead to socializing and subconscious roleplaying. The poster who said it was better to group in WoW as opposed to soloing is either really bad at quest grinding or simply has never played the game. There is absolutely no reason to group in WoW outside of running instances for drops as the experience will always be better solo quest grinding.
4. Pulling. Although it was somewhat present in the vanilla days, I do not think most newer players could handle the pulling present in the old games, particularly EQ. Actually having to think about pulling before you do it would be Greek to most people. Good pullers were very skilled players and dictated how the group or raid faired.
5. Trains. Its one thing to pay attention to what you are doing. It is another to pay attention and be prepared for the unknown. Knowing how to deal with trains was a skill in and of itself. Having agro transfer to other groups or players added an additional dimension.
6. Experimentation. If you wanted to test something out, you did not plug the variables into a theorycrafting spreadsheet. You didnt use a utility like Rawr to find your best in slot items so that you could gain that extra .05 to your dps.
These are just a few of the things that set the old games apart from the new ones. While certainly there were some unnecessary time sinks, the older games required more thought, more commitment, and more patience. Unfortunately, the MMORPG genre has been hijacked by the fps crossovers and alot of the things that made the games what they were has been lost.
I still think most of you are missing the point of why some people think that older mmos were not harder. Think of it like driving a car. Driving a car in and itself is not hard. You get behind the wheel and take off. Now let's add leveling pace. If it takes longer in one mmo over another, well that's like adding extra miles to your trip. It doesn't make it more difficult, just makes it take longer to get there.
Now add a few potholes to simulate death penalties and some road comstruction to simulate mob damage/HP levels. Ok that still didn't make the trip any more difficult, it just pisses a lot of drivers off. Now add a nav system to simulate resource gathering (TS/addons/strat guides) and all of a sudden you're avoiding trouble spots, hitting all the rest stops and bypassing construction to get to your end destination. That nav system made the trip more enjoyable rather that take away from the journey.
And if you take that same trip 100s of times over a 10 year period you find out that it isn't as cool as it was the first time and you find out that you're not as enthusiastic about driving (just like same old mmo formula) as you were when you were 16.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
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Tedium.
I personally don't feel old MMO's were harder. They were longer than most newer games, they definately had points that were more irritating. But the game itself, how you played wasn't any harder or more challenging... just longer and more tedious.
Actually as much fun as I had in EQ I actually find that it was more limited in almost every way than games today. Less choice in developing my character, less choice in the areas I played (eventually solved by... what 16 expansions now), less choice in the content available for single player progression.
However I did like the teamwork. These days I team when I want and solo when I want, however I will admit that sometimes sparking up conversations and keeping groups is harder today. There has to be some way to not only make grouping as easy and rewarding as it is today (and yes groups get more xp, more loot and more coin than soloing) encourage teamwork, while still keeping soloing as a real viable experience and not the afterthought of games gone by.
Venge
I feel the same.
Jeremiah 8:21 I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, dumb with grief.
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mob difficulty, death penalties, playing without sleep. 1999 was a fun year
Well this is my opinion of older MMO's as compared to newer MMO's:
fun < pain in the ass
To me it would seem like older MMO's took the joy out of playing and replaced it with bashing your keyboard and pulling your hair out. I'm all for hardcore, like loosing items during PvP or more intense death penalties (those are understandable). However, shady quest txt that leaves you searching the map for a rat killing quest for 8 hours because there's no marker or proper quest description is just rediculous.
No global chat? Imo seems to take away from the MMO experience in general.
No respecing? So if you miplaced one skill or took the wrong profession you'd have to waste another couple weeks of your life to re-roll and redeem a simple mistake. That would really suck.
Also, theres plenty of grouping in modern MMO's, it's all about who you play with. MMO's are 5 times more popular today than they were back in the day so of course there's going to be more immature players spouting profanity, being a nusance and not wanting to group (bigger population = higher chance of douche bags). But this is because of today's gamers themselves, not the games.
Imo games todays MMO's have evolved to be more entertaining rather than "hardcore". Not neccessarily a bad thing considering games are supposed to be developed for entertainment purposes anyway.
Most people go through life pretending to be a boss. I go through life pretending I'm not.
Mob health and damage VS player health and damage. I think that has been the biggest change.
--John Ruskin
They had no meaningful quests..............people had to group to progress
The WoW quest progressions killed real MMORPGs which should be about community
The whole MMO gaming atmosphere as well as genre' of people playing online rpgs was different. The community of players was pretty much free of anybody under the age of 21 with the average player ages 30+ There was no instant gratification as everything was hard earned. When you ran from a elite mob trying to kill you , you had an adrenaline rush and you feared for real losing hours of exp from a NPC death. You had to look at the game from a more realistic perspective.
Without going into a novel of a story i will state that WoW made the old school game developers change the format to instant gratification easy mode. As an example. My frst 50 in DAOC took me months of marathon play to achieve that level. I revisited the game last year and i went from 0-50 in about 32 hours of game play. Old school meant downtime to rest and power up which promoted socilizing. The social element is a game breaker for me. I haven't found a game since pre-wow that really had any social element. I'm still looking.
This can easily be answered in one word - Paradigm.
Even if you don't know what it is, you know what it is. It's the "zombie", "vampire" or ninja. It's the backstory behind the story. It's what makes something we all know, something we all know without needing an explanation. It's the reason we can see something and know all about it without being told anything.
When MMO's first came out, there wasn't this paradigm; everything was new and never, or only rarely, seen before in a game. Years have passed and now we all know what to expect in an MMO without needing our hands held or detailed explanations of the core gameplay itself.
No one has to explain that an MMO is a persistent world anymore. No one has to go into detail about the idea that you can attack another player-character in real-time. These are all things we just know by now. That's why MMOs now have their own paradigm, just like a movie villian or horror flick.
It takes the newness out of the game and the sense of mystery away from it. Those are the things that made the older MMOs a challenge. We didn't exactly know what to expect of the genre, never mind individual games. No one was exactly sure what was, wasn't or could be possible in the actual game itself.
Older mmos more difficult? Please. I wish more people would get this train of thought out of their minds. I'll tell you the truth that others don't want you to hear (and I've been playing them for a long time), old skool mmos were not hard, the players back then were just less experienced...
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."
At no point do I think they were harder in terms of Mob AI or anything like that. They were harder in the sense that grinding by just killing mobs.
The games were more group based. There was a lot less soloing involved.
A LOT less people played them, so there were a lot less resources put into helping new players. With most MMOs now, you have many websites to help you out in many regards to the game.
Do I think mezzing groups of people for minutes at a time was hard? Lol. Do I think chaining CCs from different classes that have very short durations hard? Not really, but it does take some coordination.
People try to scream about how now a days, "Everyone gets epix for free". That might be true. They might not have to camp a dungeon for over a week to see a boss spawn and hope their group gets more people on before the other. They might not have to spend weeks and weeks killing things to get one drop. That sure doesn't make it hard at all.
I play games to have fun. I don't play games to spend weeks and weeks and see no improvement or have no fun.
And i00x00i brings up some very good points. Rose coloured goggles = win!
That is a serious change. BITD in EQ1, an even con mob was seriously an even fight - if you did not do your absolute best (hit every kick/bash/other hotbar ability to the fullest and in the right ways) you could easily lose. Sometimes the mob got lucky and you lost ANYWAYS lol. So you had to run for it with that sucker hot on your heels until you found a guard, or got to the zone edge, or some other player took it off of you - and that happened a LOT, because people were not oblivious to each other in those days. And you absolutely said Thank You! to that person for saving your hide
But that was part of the game - the purpose was for you to win by playing it well, not to hand you little packages of xps and loot because you logged in and clicked a target.
I'd throw in another reason was that the games were designed for grouping, and by that I mean if a warrior type did not have a healer with him/her, they were going to spend a LOT of downtime between fights. I tried soloing a rogue once, and around L18 he had around 400 hps. After a hard even con fight, he was down to around 10% health (not unusual even for a guy with good gear). Health regenned at something like 1 pt per second, meaning that he needed to spend 6 minutes downtime in between fights - or quit being a solo jerk and join up with a group
Another reason was no taunting. That's right, no instant "aggro management". The warrior actually had to do the majority of the damage in order to keep the mob on him. If someone else pulled aggro, it was up to either the warrior or the off-tank (usually a higher DPS character with some armor, like a ranger) to get the mobs attention and yank it back over to the warrior.
This took actual preparation, assignment of roles in the group, responsiveness to changing situations, and skill of execution. You pretty much found at least a modicum of the skill now needed for raids in every successful group.
mobs were just generally tougher. In the case of EQ, the damage and health they dad was on par, if not higher than a player of the same level. Interrupting their spells/actions also required some quick timing, easily missed if you just spam your skills and get stuck in cooldowns and casting times.
Debuffs were actually a significant part of the fight as well, one I always found mobs were very eager to fuck you over with it. Experienced this very early on in EQ with orc priests blinding and slowing me, and large stat reductions. Mobs that debuffed were a nightmare for a solo melee class. Players learned and picked targets that would put up the least amount of resistance to your classes abilities.
Mobs had large aggro ranges, and even unique triggers like just casting a spell near one. More often than not they had faster movement speed than the player, if you didn't have a speed buff or a root, you weren't likely going to get away unless guards or players helped you out.
Honestly the list goes on, all i'm going to say is mobs put up a serious fight in older games, and player classes didn't have a counter/solution for everything a mob might throw at them. This is why players were very eager to find groups back then.
Modern mmo's have needless to say, nerfed mobs to very tedious, grindy, and meaningless encounters that don't require any thought or effort.
Gear was alot harder to obtain..
Money was alot harder to obtain.
No Maps..
No compass..
No Radar
major exp loss upon death
corpse runs after death with all your gear on corpse
No real indicator of which mob is an 'elite'
no hand holding,during quests and in general.
Lots of mobs were underconned...a giant who is an even level with you could still tear you apart and rightfully so.
just a few off the top of my head.
I didn't play UO, I did play EQ and text based MUDs prior to EQ. You have to remember that EQ was more of a graphics engine placed on a text based game and I consider it to be the original MMO because it was 3d, first person or over the shoulder third..however you picked the camera angle.
What made EQ harder in the beginning was that they had to find a balance between system performance, graphics, stability, NPC difficulty, interesting classes, and xp loss. Plus along the way they had to figure out how people would exploit the system whether it be to level faster or deny other people. Some of this stuff in my opinion should have been more obvious to them prior to this stuff actually occuring, but I am sure they had their hands full pumping out the next expansion.
We had multiple starter areas, some of them were much much easier than others and depending on your class could be very difficult, I found being a gnome caster in Steamfont was rediculous with the "newbie" pit where rats and skeletons would start smacking you because you had to angle your camera up and down to see properly. In WoW, the quests and such pretty much walk you through and the NPCs are sectioned off so you aren't running into stuff that was 10 and 15 levels above you. In EQ, using Steamfont as an example again...instead of turning left to go to the newbie pit, you could go right and hit some dragon bones with stuff I believe that was at least level 25 maybe higher. And could even run out of the town and find the Minotaur Hero outside to greet you where someone could train him to the guards. Which training him that far was like a 10 minute run at least to run him around guards and such....he was level 30ish if I recall correctly.
You were wearing absolute crap as a newbie in EQ for the first 20 levels of your life in most cases. As an example, in Unrest (awesome zone) they had ghouls which were invulnerable to non-magic weapons. 80% of new players will not have a magic weapon at level 20 in EQ in the first year of it's life without friends hooking them up. So that meant you had an NPC that you literally could not hurt unless you had magic abilities, warriors/rogues were screwed. I remember I had some magic boots someone gave me on my warrior and that was the only thing that hurt the ghoul I had on me, I was kicking him for 1 and 2 damage until someone helped me.
Same zone mentioned above as another example (Unrest), this place has a spread of stuff that you could kill from like 20 to 40. It got overly crowded because of this. But it had a basement that was rediculously difficult in the beginning, and the NPCs were super unbalanced for awhile. They had a particular NPC called a Hag that people would train out of the basement to the zone line and it would charm people. Sometimes it would get someone on the way back to the house and that person would be locked in to charm and walked all the way back into the basement...where it would break and they would die. You could kiss your corpse good bye at that point because even level 50 people in the early days had trouble going into the basement and surviving...most of them would charge you absorbant fees for retrievals or flat out steal your stuff.
The zones had traps that would actually screw you, false floors are one that come to mind. You'd fall down 2-3 levels and unless you were a lot higher level than the NPCs...you were dead. With no idea how to get back to your body unless you had been DEEP into that zone enough times to remember.
Boat travel, instant travel was rare. Only Druids and Wizards could teleport and you had to find your spells to get to certain spots. Whether it be actually finding them as a drop, or buying them from a specific vendor at a specific location. So that meant people had to ride boats. I recall many times running across Butcher Block mountains trying to get to a boat before it left. They eventually added more boats to cut down on the wait times, but you'd wait like 20 minutes easy on boats. And there were two oceans that used seperate boats for travel in the beginning.
Factions. If you were specific races, there were places you flat out could not go without working on your factions. For instance, if you were a troll or ogre, Freeport (the central city) hated you. They had a special entrance you could use to get to the docks, but if you were a good guy with bad freeport faction...they'd kill you in the tunnels usually unless you did faction work. It was a royal pain to deal with the factions, but there were some pretty major benefits. And being an enchanter (a class in Everquest) meant you could get away with mediocre factions and improve them enough via illusions and spells to enter usually KOS locations.
Racial size mattered. It mattered enough that you had to carry shrink potions with you or have a shaman shrink you to be able to move well enough in some dungeons. This applied mostly to Trolls and Ogres, but also Barbarians. You also had different sized armor, most magical armor would fit all races...but not always.
NPC pathing. It wasn't what you'd expect it to be by today's standards. Most times today they run a straight path to you, jumping off any high things they may be on. But back them sometimes NPCs would run around obstacles and across bridges to get to you...or down ramps. So that meant if you pulled things by proximity instead of pathway, you could end up pulling 5+ things as they ran by them and aggroed them into a mob coming toward you.
Traveling. Everquest didn't mave mounts for a long long long time. That meant boats, portaling for most travel. But also foot speed spells such as "Spirit of the Wolf" SoW spells or potions to speed up foot travel. And some pathways were quicker, but more dangerous or confusing versus the longer but more straightforward ways. It wasn't always as clearcut as A->B->C->D->E Sometimes you could go another route and cut out zones but spend more time in more dangerous zones running. Some of the zones in the game were insanely large, Karanas come to mind on this. You could run a straight line for 15-20 minutes with speed modifiers on and maybe not hit the zone wall in some of these places. And you could never run a straight line at low levels.
Dieing, When you died you went back to your BIND POINT. That meant if you forgot and didn't bind yourself on the same continent you died on..you had to get a port or take a boat back to where you died. You could literally spend hours just running to get back to the same zone you died in. An example might be being bound in Kelethin (Wood Elf city), and dieing in Lower Guk. That meant you went from Greater Fay-Butcher Block-Boat through the Ocean of Swords (maybe Tears got em mixed up all the time)-Freeport-N Ro-Oasis-S Ro - Swamp - Upper Guk - Lower Guk. If you had speed modifiers, it'd take 20-25 minutes to get to the boat, 15 minutes on boat minimum, and probably 5 minutes on average per zone until you hit Upper Guk..then you'd be naked having to fight your way to Lower Guk if you can't invis yourself. So that's at least an hour to just get within 1 zone of your corpse, no spirit walking, ghost form, etc...you could die again on the run.
Boss NPCs were mainly dragons at the beginning of Everquest. It'd take 30-40 people to kill a dragon in the early days, and the dragon could knock your body into very unpleasant to retrieve from locations. Especially the ice dragon, Vox I believe, she could knock you into hidden holes filled with NPCs below her. It was also possible that someone could fall into the pit, get healed and pull all that stuff up into the dragon chamber if the timing was right. And for 30-40 people, there was crap for money to be to split..and maybe 5 items to be split across them. It was an almost an utter waste of time doing this as pick up groups because you never got preference on items, you could spend a year killing dragons and end up with nothing....there weren't quests designed to give you something for bothering...like new MMOs. And these dragons were on like week long respawn timers...so you might have planned to kill it on Friday...and someone kills it on Thursday. No dragon for at least another 5 days in most cases.
Selling equipment. No auction houses. Hell there wasn't even much of a trade system in EQ, they didn't even have item linking for a long time. That meant you either had to list states, memorize item names, or look at everything in trade windows. And there was East Commons to do all this in. You could actually make more money buying and selling stuff in EC than most other tasks available in EQ. I liked EC so much, it was a blast...people screwed around and just BSed showing off their items and telling you about things they've done. Auction houses and global chat really ruin a lot of the possibilities in MMOs....having global markets when each in-game town or region could be it's own market.
There were a lot of issues and problems with the old MMOs.......I mean so many that you'd probably never subject yourself to it given a choice between those issues and a newer, easier, MMO like WoW.
But one thing Everquest had that no MMO can replicate and be competitive is a sense of adventure. You weren't walked through everything. Stuff was hard, you had to find out from other players where stuff was or how to get to places. And you'd actually stumble across nice people who played, the jerks had no reason to do anything with you because there wasn't a quest telling them they needed to run dungeon XYZ today. You didn't know how everything worked, you didn't know the bare minimum you needed to kill Boss Shaka-Khan. You just tried. If they had reduced the XP penalty in EQ but kept a lot of it's more rudimentary systems, I think it might have created a different MMO market. But the death penalities seemed to be the sticking "punishment/time sink" factor these games ran with.
Early days when you did not have sites to visit for walkthroughs and cheats or ingame where you realy could get lost and for hours try find your way back and dying alot. I realy doub the hardcore gameplay could survive these days we would have 90% of community on forums whine and cry all day:p
Darkfall try introduce the hardcore back into mmorpg but the new generation kept whining untill whole game was dumb down so much, it meets requirement of todays gamers.
I dont have any hope we will get a mmorpg with todays graphics and old skool gameplay and gameworlds. with maybe some new improvements but still give core feeling how old AC was thats what i want.
Games played:AC1-Darktide'99-2000-AC2-Darktide/dawnsong2003-2005,Lineage2-2005-2006 and now Darkfall-2009.....
In between WoW few months AoC few months and some f2p also all very short few weeks.
Overall this is the feeling i'm getting from this thread with regards to difficulty, though I will concede that MMO's have gone a little to far the other way in adding convenience tools that remove immersion from the game but I see many other benefits in the better MMO's and options is one big one, just because they add a feature doesn't mean you have to use it you can always adopt the older strategies if you want or find like minded people to play with.
Cal.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
To some extent this is true. The games got easier when you knew more about them, like all games. However, knowing more about Everquest did not get you to max level in a week or two of casual play. And it certainly did not get you the money or opportunities to be fairly well equipped once you got there in a short period of time. And later in the game development (3rd expansion?), you had AA points to deal with that kept you gaining xp to further your character.
But, it's easier to believe this to be true. If you wish to test it for yourself, there are free servers running old versions of Everquest where they aren't quite as far back as release...they are substantially far enough back that you will a good taste of what it was like. Or if you don't think you could figure out how to get one of those working, you could always try Vanguard. It's not quite as primitive as Everquest was when it comes to questing and such, but you'll see there's a difference when the game is not nearly as forgiving as WoW and the classes are not over the top powerful compared to normal NPCs like WoW....a normal solo NPC (non-elite, etc) can kill you.
WoW has stuff that you will never obtain without a lot of effort and time, but this was much more common in old Everquest...it was pretty tough to solo in the game...only a few classes were very efficient at it. And they had to rely on potions, items, and spell begging to make it possible for some of those. Wizards with SoW so they could kite, come to mind.
For an example of Everquest mentality, to even get to some of the planar zones...you needed a Wizard class to teleport you to them with expensive gem stones. And in some of these planar zones, if you spoke near NPCs and said the wrong thing it could make it impossible to continue further or teleport you prematurely into danger.
In my opinion, very few players today could sit still long enough to participate in a planar raid in old Everquest, and if they managed to wait it out...would probably intentionally ruin it for everyone else when they found out they were not likely to actually walk away with anything useful on their first run.
From what you explain it does sound as if there were many unique elements to EQ that made it what it was and this uniqueness is not really happening within modern AAA MMO's at present which is a shame and falls into my point about modern MMO's going to far the other way and removing any element that might be considered a "time sink" or not worth doing because of no chance of getting a shinie for the effort, making modern MMO seem like pez dispensers.
As I said in my OP I have played the free shards UO Second Age, EQ1999 and the SWGemu and I have played Vanguard I have a level 25 Orc Hunter and a level 20 Lesser Giant Druid so I'm very familiar with Vanguard and its only poor performance, low population and lack of support that keeps me from playing it. I hope SOE sell it off to a company that cares and they open an EU server and I'll be there.
Cal.
This doom and gloom thread was brought to you by Chin Up the new ultra high caffeine soft drink for gamers who just need that boost of happiness after a long forum session.
1. Lack of soloability: These games used to be a lot more group oriented which meant you had to rely on others to accomplish your goals whether it was for grouping to complete content, receiving buffs, etc.
2. Death Penalty: The death penalty used to be rather severe in these games. Many included a loss of xp that could even delevel you if you had just recently leveled, losing your character's items/coin, and having to find your corpse which could be problematic if you were in an area you don't know well or is swarming with monsters.
3. Lack of quick travel: Many of the older games did have near the amount of teleportation, spawn points, bind points, etc. you see in today's games. So traveling to different destinations was much more time consuming.
4. Regen Rates: The regen rates for health and mana back in the day was way lower. In most games today a mage can gain back their mana or least the bulk of it within a few seconds whereas back in the early games it could take ten minutes or more to gain back your spell power.
5. Leveling Curve: Leveling in the older games took a lot longer to accomplish. You didn't see the majority of players reaching max level within a month or two.
To be fair, none of these really make the older games more difficult. Simply more time consuming far as I'm concerned. About the only thing I do miss from the old days is the community seemed a lot friendlier and helpful back in those days. You still had your pricks, but they were rare especially when you compare it to most games today.
1. For god's sake mmo gamers, enough with the analogies. They're unnecessary and your comparisons are terrible, dissimilar, and illogical.
2. To posters feeling the need to state how f2p really isn't f2p: Players understand the concept. You aren't privy to some secret the rest are missing. You're embarrassing yourself.
3. Yes, Cpt. Obvious, we're not industry experts. Now run along and let the big people use the forums for their purpose.
I'm seeing a lot of people say that MMOs were more group based originally. That is wrong. In AC1 you could solo 1-126 no problem right out of the gate. In EQ1 some classes (druids, necros, etc) let you solo to endgame if you knew what you were doing. You could solo fine in UO if you knew what you were doing.
Wow pretends to be solo friendly but it is actually among the least solo friendly games I have played. Wow lets you level to 85 solo but it is faster in a group. And once you hit max level the real/interesting/fun game begins and you can't do anything solo.
EQ2 was never solo friendly - it didn't even pretend to be. LOTR, also, not solo friendly. Conan and Aion: not solo friendly if you want decent gear. Warhammer - you won't get anywhere solo.
I'm not saying that solo friendly is good or bad, but I have no idea where the perception comes from that older games required grouping more than current ones. I have found the opposite to be true.
I actually find the newer games like WoW so much harder than the old games.
In the old games, you didn't need to go through marathon raids. You didn't need to be perpetually logged on for hours. You didn't even have to fight at all if you didn't want to. There were things you could do if you didn't want to do combat. You could be a hero and not even have to powergame.
In the new games, everything that isn't directly tied to combat has been taken out or made pointless. The new games practically require you to stat mash, use diagnostic apps, use TS/Vent. Guilds are a lot more picky. Raids are a lot more exacting. And the new games are tests of endurance, how many hours you can stay on doing combat after combat, without getting burned out.
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"Its sad when people use religion to feel superior, its even worse to see people using a video game to do it."
--Arcken
"...when it comes to pimping EVE I have little restraints."
--Hellmar, CEO of CCP.
"It's like they took a gun, put it to their nugget sack and pulled the trigger over and over again, each time telling us how great it was that they were shooting themselves in the balls."
--Exar_Kun on SWG's NGE
Everquest has one really good example that WoW can't even come close to touching for time investment and sheer aggravation. The cleric epic weapon. Where you had to camp a dragon spawn that was contested by multiple guilds for multiple clerics had a random spawn time where it could spawn at anytime of any day. So it meant you literally had to have someone there watching, and have enough people on a moments notice to log in and kill it before the other guilds assembled....and if you weren't fast enough then you started over. That means you have a email/IM/phone tree, people who have to login in from work or enough people who work odd hours to make up for the lack of people during regular hours. And if you were the cleric who received it, then you were everyone's slave.........assuming you didn't get it and bail because people started wearing you out travelling all over to rez bodies anytime they died or an alt or friend or friend of a friend of theirs died.
Raiding guilds in EQ were just as picky if not more so in WoW because there were classes they needed more than others. For instance, try finding a guild in Everquest as a Druid...no one wanted you unless you were nearly done collecting armor because everyone in the guild who had a useful character also had a druid alt they'd gladly bring to raids if given a chance. If you were a bard you could find a guild pretty easily, because being a bard was carpal tunnel inducing in EQ....but they were also necessary for resistances during encounters before you had your armor and stats built up as a guild.
The only thing that stopped marathon raids in EQ was that they didn't have instances in the early days, and I am not sure if they incorporated instances since. But that meant you had to play nice with other guilds or you'd have other guilds show up to ruin your raids.....which meant you had to schedule raids. WoW somewhat has this with reset timers on their dungeons...assuming they haven't changed their policy on this. If by marathon you mean length of time spent raiding a single zone...that's going to vary by guild and experience. But EQ could easily compete, it wasn't unheard of to plan for at least 4 hours of time spent raiding on the first night when you break a zone....and then finish the next night in another 4 hour play block.
I would rather play WoW over old school Everquest for "fun", but WoW has too much stat tracking to feel like you've actually completed something worthwhile when you see 900k other people have done it before you.
1. Mob Difficulty. The difficulty of mobs cannot be understated. Some classes could not even fight even-level mobs. I do not think many people today could deal with that fact. I do not think most people today could deal with it taking 2 or more minutes to kill a green con mob.
2. Combat/Casting. Although it varied from game to game, you had to pay more attention than players do today. Anyone can pump out acceptable dps in WoW. As long as you have the gear, you can use whatever rotation applies to your class. I cannot count the times that a player from uber guild #1, decked out in the best possible gear, was a complete moron and did not even grasp the basics. But if they could stand in one place and faceroll the keys, everything worked out. For me, I always prefered DAoC combat. As a melee, many of your styles were positional, reactionary, or chained. You had to pay attention to what was happening and , for example, if you did not get directly behind the player, that light tank was going to annihilate your healer/caster. As a caster, there really is no comparision. I would love to see today's modern players deal with the hard interupt code that DAoC had. Not being able to face tank mobs without consequence as a caster is something that is lost on the new generation.
3. Grouping. Yes, you could solo in most of the old school games, but it was always more efficient and rewarding to group. Grouping lead to socializing and subconscious roleplaying. The poster who said it was better to group in WoW as opposed to soloing is either really bad at quest grinding or simply has never played the game. There is absolutely no reason to group in WoW outside of running instances for drops as the experience will always be better solo quest grinding.
4. Pulling. Although it was somewhat present in the vanilla days, I do not think most newer players could handle the pulling present in the old games, particularly EQ. Actually having to think about pulling before you do it would be Greek to most people. Good pullers were very skilled players and dictated how the group or raid faired.
5. Trains. Its one thing to pay attention to what you are doing. It is another to pay attention and be prepared for the unknown. Knowing how to deal with trains was a skill in and of itself. Having agro transfer to other groups or players added an additional dimension.
6. Experimentation. If you wanted to test something out, you did not plug the variables into a theorycrafting spreadsheet. You didnt use a utility like Rawr to find your best in slot items so that you could gain that extra .05 to your dps.
These are just a few of the things that set the old games apart from the new ones. While certainly there were some unnecessary time sinks, the older games required more thought, more commitment, and more patience. Unfortunately, the MMORPG genre has been hijacked by the fps crossovers and alot of the things that made the games what they were has been lost.
I still think most of you are missing the point of why some people think that older mmos were not harder. Think of it like driving a car. Driving a car in and itself is not hard. You get behind the wheel and take off. Now let's add leveling pace. If it takes longer in one mmo over another, well that's like adding extra miles to your trip. It doesn't make it more difficult, just makes it take longer to get there.
Now add a few potholes to simulate death penalties and some road comstruction to simulate mob damage/HP levels. Ok that still didn't make the trip any more difficult, it just pisses a lot of drivers off. Now add a nav system to simulate resource gathering (TS/addons/strat guides) and all of a sudden you're avoiding trouble spots, hitting all the rest stops and bypassing construction to get to your end destination. That nav system made the trip more enjoyable rather that take away from the journey.
And if you take that same trip 100s of times over a 10 year period you find out that it isn't as cool as it was the first time and you find out that you're not as enthusiastic about driving (just like same old mmo formula) as you were when you were 16.
"Small minds talk about people, average minds talk about events, great minds talk about ideas."