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[Column] EverQuest Next: Our EverQuest Next Wish List
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
EverQuest Next will finally debut into the light next week during the annual SOE Live convention in Las Vegas. As we try to contain our own budding excitement, we have The List to offer a small sampling (5) of the things we would like to see featured in EQN. See if you agree before adding your own list to the comments.
5. Make an MMO HARD Again
That’s right. Most of us have had it up to here with the casualization of the MMO genre as a whole. Whether you are an old-school fan of vanilla-WoW or a hardcore Ultima Online fan, you know that those games have something that most of today’s game don’t: Difficulty. Players are led by the nose from one quest hub to another and even have markers on the world and zone maps to indicate where they need to go. In some cases, they are literally dragged to the necessary area for completing a quest. Players need to think, to learn, to grow with the game instead of constantly having tutorials and tooltips at their beck and call. “Figure it out” may take on a whole new meaning.
Read more of Suzie Ford's The List: Our EverQuest Next Wish List.
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Comments
My wish list:
#1. Absolutely NO Arena / Battlegrounds on the PvP Server
#2. Social Tools, e.g., LoTRO's playable instruments, player vs player gambling in the taverns and INNs, intense horse racing, etc...
#3. The ability to get "lost" in the world... because it's so fricken' big.
#4. The ability to plop a house down in the open world... from close the city to the far off BFE areas.
#5. MAKING THE MMO HARD AGAIN. So sick of all of this "hold my hand while I potty... but not too far from the trail" axiom.
If its all just being done for lore, then it wont matter the fight can be as easy or dumb or scaled or ..... it wont matter if your talking about world changing events. I would prefer to see it rediculously difficult to defeat a world boss.
How about we bring instancing to the open world. You form a raid group, tag the open world boss, upon tagging up to 10 ? people gain a buff that makes a shield the world boss imposes on itself vanish. The shield created a barrier that other players can not cross, the shield moves with the boss and is x amount of yards away from the boss at all points. Players without the buff and come in contact with the shield die. The shield is visible but can be seen through. Now we have open world instancing. Players not tagged with the buff can watch the tagged group do battle, but can not Iinterfere with the fight in any way other than sideline coaching. The boss does not have to be scaled and the open world boss can be just as epic if not way more than even the likes of a boss like Deathwing. Final key component, this boss must be the most difficult boss to defeat in the history of gaming.
We can do all sorts of things with open world instancing. Want to keep the everyone wins mentality yet keep the fight hard? Just make the instancing part of the fight the first phase and have the last phase be the same old dumbed down boss fight likd world bosses are today. Make sure though the 10 man group that pushed it into that phase is awarded well above and beyond just getting a world boss kill. This not only would create epic world boss fights but we would have iconic guilds and players again that are known throughout the land. Again just pushing the boss into that phase should be the most difficult task in gaming history.
Another suggestion let open world bosses come from instancex raids and dungeons. You get a feel for player response, you get a shot at working out glitches, the boss breaks out and is either replaced in the instance or the instance closes for good. Once you let the boss break out tweak it a bit more and make it very hard to defeat.
I happen to really like quest finder tools and quest hubs. I don't think they make a game less "hard" just faster to get done when my time is short. Think about this. Take a game like FFXI. It's a pretty unforgiving game and it's quests take some research to figure out how to do. I personally always just used a guide or online guides to get them done. Imagine if they had just put quest tracking in the game and showed folk where the quests are yet didn't change the actual quest itself or it's objective. Guess what? Still hard as hell to accomplish. Which means, these extra tools DON"T make the game EASIER. Really wish you "challenge" nuts would stop speaking for "most gamers" when it's not a universal desire.
Just had to pipe up on your number "5. Make it Hard again." The rest are ok I guess.
EQnext is unlike anythign seen before... and thats in my opinion probably because of the number 1 named here...
I think they are on to something, and i personally expect all 5 to be part of EQnext, which in my opinion will be a Sandpark,,... the middle of the road. With more freedom then we are used to in all these other AAA mmos, but enough rules to prevent it from turning intoo a rude mindless slaughter party.
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
The problem with making a world boss that can only be killed once is that your gonna end up with a small group of players who get to do that boss, which in turn then causes all the people who want to do the world boss to become disenfranchised and in the long run will leave the game. The whole oh maybe his twin brother will be somewhere else with his own storyline and world changing affect doesn't work either unless you expect them to have a team solely devoted to making a new storyline and world changes EVERYTIME a world boss gets killed. Do that and your gonna be cutting the amount of content offered down drastically unless you think SoE has thousands of people working on the title which ain't true.
You just have to accept that the "hardcore" crowd is no longer the majority in any games. The things you list off would be nice but will never happen unless they expect to have a very small gaming community, and as I'm sure we all know by now with SoE if a game has a small gaming community just go ahead and kiss that game goodbye cause they will shut it down.
Space available for rent.
In writing, there is a concept called "Show, Don't Tell". Basically what it means is that it is preferable to show the reader something and let the reader come to his/her own conclusions, rather than tell the reader what he/she should think. "John was mad" tells the reader how John feels, but "John's face turned red and a vein pulsed on his left temple" shows John's reaction and the reader is left to interpret the meaning. This engages the reader and gets him/her involved in the story.
The same thing is true in games. If we take a quest and get a marker on our map to the quest location, we are being told where to go. We don't even need to read the quest text . Take away the quest marker and instead put clues in the quest text, now we have to use our brains a little. It doesn't need to be hard to figure out, it just needs to engage us, to make us part of the story.
So many game companies these days talk about story, but fail at some of the most basic concepts of story-telling. Readers (and gamers) aren't stupid. Don't treat us as though we are.
Its a nice list but i think a lot of people are living in the past. Whether we like it or not, this genre has moved forward. We can write posts, complain out loud or start up that old game, but it wont matter. I think some of us need to look in the mirror and realize that we wont get old school games like this anymore. Was vanilla WoW amazing? Yes it was, but it was also 9 years ago. I bet a lot of us are in our thirties now, with families and real jobs. Who has time to grind for a skill for months. I know I don't. If I spent as much time on the comp as I used to do when i was in my twenties I would be castrated then divorced.
Lets all wake up and realize where this genre has gone and where it will likely go. We either suck it up and play or we bemoan the good old days and turn bitter with each mmo release.
1. limited instance travel.
2. craft system that has an impact not just a side game and time and money sink
3. weapons that do the different damages. In eq2 they made every weapon do the same damage so the only thing you were picking was a skin. This was the thing that make me leave eq2. A dagger dose not do the same damage as a 2h sword.
4. Combat system that is based on skill not 45 skills maco-ed to one key.
I'm hope, praying, for art direction that can capture the nature of a fantastic world, yet still be restrained and give a nod to reality. What do I mean? I just can't get into equipment that is stupidly impractical: giant shoulder pads that would prevent you from entering a castle gate, swords so large that they would more adequately be described as a siege weapon.
I'd also love to see some sort of continuity of equipment styles based on power of the item, and the origin. We all know, from our world, where a samurai sword comes from, what cultures generally used falchions, or scimitars. Sure there are a lot of generic types of weapons, but I'd love to look at someone and their worn equipment where it came from. What culture? Continent?
As to power, I'd like clothing, armor, weapons, to start out kind of ordinary looking, while constantly getting more of a "wow" factor as power levels increase.
I know for a lot of folks this is just eye candy, but it can really add to the immersion level of the game, and something imo has been in constant decline.
5- hard quests? > go X website to see how to finish it
4- Connections , I agree
3- Crafting like in eq2?or FFXIV? meh will be boring in a week
2- Grinding for months sure is fun......
1- yeah because ppl want to miss content because others killed the content already , whats happens when every outdoor boss is killed for the week? wait until next week and hope u are online when 10000 ppl are camping everything ?
Nice list, Suzie. I agree with you and hope to see most of these things in EQN, with the exception of #1. This would limit a ton of content to only the hardcores that play games 24/7. As an average gamer, i'd like to see stuff too. I agree very strongly with #5. I think a LOT of people are tired of easy games and would like to see the challenges older MMOs had. I also hope they don't inculde fast travel portals (unless player cast), mounts (unless they're very expensive or hard to obtain in some way) and definitely NO player controlled flying mounts ever. In EQ1 they had boats. I think this was a good way of transporting people from one continent to another. The only problem with it was that if you had just missed the boat, you had to like some crazy long time for the next one. Instead of making the transport instant, which makes the world seem much smaller, I think they could have just add more ferries. 3 instead of 1, so that if you just miss one, the next will be by in 10min rather than 30min, or something like EQ2/WOW transportation with uncontrollable flying mounts. It zipped people from place to place in reasonable time and didn't make the world feel smaller.
EQNext cannot be hard or "old school", because it relies on appealing to a mass audience.
SOE cannot take their flagship IP and launch a game for a niche audience. Not if that game is F2P... because for a F2P game to be profitable, it has to pull in huge numbers of players.
I think she's referring to creature toughness. More HP, better AI, better spells ect. That's what I would like to see anyway. Games where one player can slaughter 6 mobs of equal level at one time solo is boring.
I can't wait until the Reveal, then after with the beta reports from the players, so all the speculation can end.
7 days to go!