Originally posted by Forgrimm You were 7 years old when Everquest came out, so I wouldn't expect you to know this, so I'll explain. Almost everything in that game was a chore because of its design. The open dungeons weren't very fun when you had to literally sit around for 8 hours straight competing for a spawn. While the social aspect was nice, the fact that almost everything required a group meant that you could rarely log on for an hour or so and accomplish anything. MMO's have evolved because developers learned from mistakes of those early games like EQ.
I agree - but thats speaking more to the limitations at the time than to the appeal of the game. The game wasn;t about the (personal) accomplishment it was about the (shared) experience. We've been accomplishing things in games for years but EQ was one of the first to do it collectively.
That experience has not been duplicated since. Parts of it have been refined individually but never combined in a quality AAA product.
To answer the Op - I think that age of gaming is over. Today things are always connected so the social aspect isn't as important. I simply see it now as a means to give a limited experience to sustain a subscription.
Originally posted by Forgrimm You were 7 years old when Everquest came out, so I wouldn't expect you to know this, so I'll explain. Almost everything in that game was a chore because of its design. The open dungeons weren't very fun when you had to literally sit around for 8 hours straight competing for a spawn. While the social aspect was nice, the fact that almost everything required a group meant that you could rarely log on for an hour or so and accomplish anything. MMO's have evolved because developers learned from mistakes of those early games like EQ.
So much misinformation in this post.
None of the expansions focused on dungeons like LDON, DON, DoD, Prophecy, required any form of "8 hour spawn camping".
The only time EQ had 8 hour spawn camping is if a person really wanted to have an item, but this is no different from other games, most people never engaged in that kind of spawn camping. Yes, if you wanted a Mask of Deception, you would spawn camp it for a few hours, but many of those items were optional and most of the loot came through groups and guilds. The fact some people chose to spawn camp items for hours on end, was their choice, you have these people in WoW too, you have these people in every game.
As for soloing, you could solo in EQ just fine, all you had to do is pick a class that could solo. Everyone knew which classes could solo, if you picked a druid, necro, mage, bard or beastlord, you could solo all the way to max lvl.
Even clerics could successfully solo in EQ.
While there were classes that could barely solo at all, like warriors and rogues, you were never forced to play those classes. There's a large difference between "you couldn't solo in EQ" and "not every class could solo in EQ".
What EQ did require from you is to make friends and to be social, and for people who didn't do that, the game probably wasn't very fun. EQ was a very brutal game, but let's not go overboard, you could solo just fine in EQ and no one was required to spawn camp items for 8 hours.
Dungeons in WoW and modern MMO's are instanced, huge difference from EQ.
EQ had instanced dungeons before WoW even existed. The instanced dungeons in WoW were copied from EQ.
EQ's LDON expansion was fully instanced. A whole expansion with nothing but instanced dungeons. GoD had plenty of instanced dungeons and raid content too. Both came out before WoW did.
The box art of LDON has an instanced dungeon on the front cover for crying out loud.
Dungeons in WoW and modern MMO's are instanced, huge difference from EQ.
EQ had instanced dungeons before WoW even existed. The instanced dungeons in WoW were copied from EQ.
EQ's LDON expansion was fully instanced. A whole expansion with nothing but instanced dungeons. GoD had plenty of instanced dungeons and raid content too. Both came out before WoW did.
The box art of LDON has an instanced dungeon on the front cover for crying out loud.
+1 Nice to get someone who knows what there talking about instead of pulling miss info out of there arse.
Now release a game like Vanguard with updated graphics and open world pvp please .
Originally posted by Forgrimm You were 7 years old when Everquest came out, so I wouldn't expect you to know this, so I'll explain. Almost everything in that game was a chore because of its design. The open dungeons weren't very fun when you had to literally sit around for 8 hours straight competing for a spawn. While the social aspect was nice, the fact that almost everything required a group meant that you could rarely log on for an hour or so and accomplish anything. MMO's have evolved because developers learned from mistakes of those early games like EQ.
So much misinformation in this post.
None of the expansions focused on dungeons like LDON, DON, DoD, Prophecy, required any form of "8 hour spawn camping".
The only time EQ had 8 hour spawn camping is if a person really wanted to have an item, but this is no different from other games, most people never engaged in that kind of spawn camping. Yes, if you wanted a Mask of Deception, you would spawn camp it for a few hours, but many of those items were optional and most of the loot came through groups and guilds. The fact some people chose to spawn camp items for hours on end, was their choice, you have these people in WoW too, you have these people in every game.
As for soloing, you could solo in EQ just fine, all you had to do is pick a class that could solo. Everyone knew which classes could solo, if you picked a druid, necro, mage, bard or beastlord, you could solo all the way to max lvl.
Even clerics could successfully solo in EQ.
While there were classes that could barely solo at all, like warriors and rogues, you were never forced to play those classes. There's a large difference between "you couldn't solo in EQ" and "not every class could solo in EQ".
What EQ did require from you is to make friends and to be social, and for people who didn't do that, the game probably wasn't very fun. EQ was a very brutal game, but let's not go overboard, you could solo just fine in EQ and no one was required to spawn camp items for 8 hours.
There was no mis-information in my post. You're talking about LDoN, the 6th expansion, and beyond. Obviously the game progressed over time. Now it bears little resemblance to what it did when it first came out. Planes of Power, which came out before LDoN, is widely considered as the point at which the game started to go downhill. I played the game from 1999, aka Classic EQ, into Ruins of Kunark. And at the time, everything that I said in my original post was exactly how it was. If you played the game at a later time then your experience would obviously be different, as the game changed over time. But I'm pretty sure when people yearn for old school EQ, they're not talking about the watered down version that the game became as it aged.
Dungeons in WoW and modern MMO's are instanced, huge difference from EQ.
EQ had instanced dungeons before WoW even existed. The instanced dungeons in WoW were copied from EQ.
EQ's LDON expansion was fully instanced. A whole expansion with nothing but instanced dungeons. GoD had plenty of instanced dungeons and raid content too. Both came out before WoW did.
The box art of LDON has an instanced dungeon on the front cover for crying out loud.
+1 Nice to get someone who knows what there talking about instead of pulling miss info out of there arse.
Now release a game like Vanguard with updated graphics and open world pvp please .
What for? When Vanguard came out it's graphics were "updated" for the time, and it had a free for all PVP server. And we all know how that game ended up.
What for? When Vanguard came out it's graphics were "updated" for the time, and it had a free for all PVP server. And we all know how that game ended up.
Except the issue with Vanguard was a horribly broken and buggy game.
If there is one thing Blizzard does well, it's know their markets. They do not waste time on anything that won't rake in the cash. They do their research and they do it well.
They have a successful MMO, ARPG, Card Game, RTS, and soon to be FPS. Don't you think that if there was a market for an old school MMO Blizzard would already be injecting themselves into that cash cow?
They're not, because there is no cash cow. Old-school gamers are insignificant. There is no ROI associated with building a game for them.
Are you really trying to say that Blizzard knows the market so well that every other company should just copy them in everything they do? That kind of "logic", to the extent that companies have actually followed it, got the genre where it is in the first place and why would Blizzard make any other type of MMO when they already have the most successful one on the market by far? They'd just be cannibalizing their own customer base and they aren't exactly hard up for cash or profit making games so it probably would be a waste of time for *them*.
There are plenty of profitable companies making games in genres Blizzard has nothing to do with yet..
Fixed that for you, rest assured, only a matter of time before Blizzard delves into every genre and they'll likely to be a huge success in all of them.
And "yet" is the keyword there. gg calling that out.
If another genre becomes viable, you can bet Blizzard will take is and bring it to the masses, which is what they seem to do particularly well.
BTW (this is for iridescence), what genres are left? They just sealed it with the "big six": MMO, ARPG, RTS, TCG, MOBA, and soon to be FPS.
And "yet" is the keyword there. gg calling that out.
If another genre becomes viable, you can bet Blizzard will take is and bring it to the masses, which is what they seem to do particularly well.
BTW (this is for iridescence), what genres are left? They just sealed it with the "big six": MMO, ARPG, RTS, TCG, MOBA, and soon to be FPS.
FFA-PvP Sandbox? rotfl
Go on Steam and you will find many different types of games which Blizzard has nothing to do with. I don't really feel like listing all the dozens of possible genres and subgenres you could group them into. You'd probably just say that those don't matter because Blizzard isn't involved in them though so we get a circular argument.
There probably isn't a mass market game possible for a sandbox MMO, I'll grant you that, but it's a good niche market someone could exploit (as EVE already does).
I played EQ1 starting with the Kunark expansion. If I knew then what I now know I would have never played the game.
Nevertheless I loved the game and hated it, had never seen anything like it at the time. I hadn't played DnD table top games but were aware of them. Had read the Tokien novels at age 15. Loved them.
I suppose playing EQ1 fed the need to be a part of something similar.
I only grouped when invited and was inclined towards it for whatever now forgotten reason.
EQ1 has had many iterations and it's much more geared toward soloing today.
I even married in EQ and had a real life romantic interest that may could have led to dating and marriage in our world.
A religious friend of mine had a word of knowledge about the relationship that conveyed what I had ignored. I had never been so anguished till then nor since then. For the first time I cried from my soul.
I played EQ1 off and on since then.
I have a real gift for the divine but also a real gift for sarcasm.
One day while on the test server I got irritated about a food bug and started pissing off the devs about it with biting sarcasm.
That led to a lot of unpleasant things in game and a few in real life which I shall not talk about but trust me, you don't want to piss off game devs, they have unlimited access to you computer and identity.
I love how the game has evovled as I have snuck in from time to time to play anon. It's much more playable solo then ever but I now don't have much time to play nor an anon computer to play from.
Since then nothing has been as immersive for me although for a time I enjoyed GW1. If I had time and an anon computer I'd still play the EQ1 till it's soloable levels. That's my 2 cents.
P.S. For you EQ devs former and present this I say, "I'm Sorry, Please Forgive Me, Thank You, I Love You". That phrase comes from an ancient hawaii tradition.
Dungeons in WoW and modern MMO's are instanced, huge difference from EQ.
EQ had instanced dungeons before WoW even existed. The instanced dungeons in WoW were copied from EQ.
EQ's LDON expansion was fully instanced. A whole expansion with nothing but instanced dungeons. GoD had plenty of instanced dungeons and raid content too. Both came out before WoW did.
The box art of LDON has an instanced dungeon on the front cover for crying out loud.
I was there when LDoN came out and for a long time after. It was popular for all of a month before people had enough and carried on raiding and losing themselves in non-instanced dungeons. Not much has changed, the new MMO's have instanced dungeons and they seem to start losing people after a month too.
Originally posted by Vahrane "The amount of games catering to people with limited time and attention spans has grown exorbitantly. Big numbers, gaudy armor, and instances allowing for no outside interference have become the industry standard. The original mmo gamers have, for the most part, moved on to RL after an absolutely astonishing dismissal of their opinions by the aforementioned industry which, as with all businesses, seeks to maximize shareholder wealth by designing games that anyone can succeed at (quantity of players pays the bills while quality design cost more money and time, simple cost benefit analysis there). Some of us wish it weren't so, but that isn't going to change anything as evidenced by the past decade. Even newer games that claim to champion old styles of gameplay continually fail to deliver the experience they were trying to emulate in the first place."
Unfortunately, I believe that Vahrane is spot on here.
Having said that, part of me wonders if the John D. Carmacks (if you will) of the MMO industry in general are being replaced by unimaginative drones which are only good at providing common, cookie-cutter ideas and skills. After all, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that investors and shareholders are strictly anti-new ideas. I think that even people like them understand the importance of creative capital in generating more revenue.
Waiting for:Citadel of Sorcery. Along the way, The Elder Scrolls Online (when it is F2P).
Keeping an eye on:www.play2crush.com (whatever is going on here).
Seriously, I'm at a loss here. I've been looking and I've not been able to find a single game post-EverQuest that I would define as Massively Multiplayer Online.
Where are the huge sprawling dungeons where you can come across other player groups? Where's the social interaction? Where's the actual socialisation and playing with others?
Why have MMOs became "Statistics Grinding Online" without even the veneer of living in a virtual world?
Comments
I agree - but thats speaking more to the limitations at the time than to the appeal of the game. The game wasn;t about the (personal) accomplishment it was about the (shared) experience. We've been accomplishing things in games for years but EQ was one of the first to do it collectively.
That experience has not been duplicated since. Parts of it have been refined individually but never combined in a quality AAA product.
To answer the Op - I think that age of gaming is over. Today things are always connected so the social aspect isn't as important. I simply see it now as a means to give a limited experience to sustain a subscription.
I'll be in EQ until something comes better.
So much misinformation in this post.
None of the expansions focused on dungeons like LDON, DON, DoD, Prophecy, required any form of "8 hour spawn camping".
The only time EQ had 8 hour spawn camping is if a person really wanted to have an item, but this is no different from other games, most people never engaged in that kind of spawn camping. Yes, if you wanted a Mask of Deception, you would spawn camp it for a few hours, but many of those items were optional and most of the loot came through groups and guilds. The fact some people chose to spawn camp items for hours on end, was their choice, you have these people in WoW too, you have these people in every game.
As for soloing, you could solo in EQ just fine, all you had to do is pick a class that could solo. Everyone knew which classes could solo, if you picked a druid, necro, mage, bard or beastlord, you could solo all the way to max lvl.
Even clerics could successfully solo in EQ.
While there were classes that could barely solo at all, like warriors and rogues, you were never forced to play those classes. There's a large difference between "you couldn't solo in EQ" and "not every class could solo in EQ".
What EQ did require from you is to make friends and to be social, and for people who didn't do that, the game probably wasn't very fun. EQ was a very brutal game, but let's not go overboard, you could solo just fine in EQ and no one was required to spawn camp items for 8 hours.
EQ had instanced dungeons before WoW even existed. The instanced dungeons in WoW were copied from EQ.
EQ's LDON expansion was fully instanced. A whole expansion with nothing but instanced dungeons. GoD had plenty of instanced dungeons and raid content too. Both came out before WoW did.
The box art of LDON has an instanced dungeon on the front cover for crying out loud.
+1 Nice to get someone who knows what there talking about instead of pulling miss info out of there arse.
Now release a game like Vanguard with updated graphics and open world pvp please
.
There was no mis-information in my post. You're talking about LDoN, the 6th expansion, and beyond. Obviously the game progressed over time. Now it bears little resemblance to what it did when it first came out. Planes of Power, which came out before LDoN, is widely considered as the point at which the game started to go downhill. I played the game from 1999, aka Classic EQ, into Ruins of Kunark. And at the time, everything that I said in my original post was exactly how it was. If you played the game at a later time then your experience would obviously be different, as the game changed over time. But I'm pretty sure when people yearn for old school EQ, they're not talking about the watered down version that the game became as it aged.
What for? When Vanguard came out it's graphics were "updated" for the time, and it had a free for all PVP server. And we all know how that game ended up.
Except the issue with Vanguard was a horribly broken and buggy game.
And "yet" is the keyword there. gg calling that out.
If another genre becomes viable, you can bet Blizzard will take is and bring it to the masses, which is what they seem to do particularly well.
BTW (this is for iridescence), what genres are left? They just sealed it with the "big six": MMO, ARPG, RTS, TCG, MOBA, and soon to be FPS.
FFA-PvP Sandbox? rotfl
Wait for Black Desert and Everquest Next. One of those 2 games has to be the one.
Go on Steam and you will find many different types of games which Blizzard has nothing to do with. I don't really feel like listing all the dozens of possible genres and subgenres you could group them into. You'd probably just say that those don't matter because Blizzard isn't involved in them though so we get a circular argument.
There probably isn't a mass market game possible for a sandbox MMO, I'll grant you that, but it's a good niche market someone could exploit (as EVE already does).
Nevertheless I loved the game and hated it, had never seen anything like it at the time. I hadn't played DnD table top games but were aware of them. Had read the Tokien novels at age 15. Loved them.
I suppose playing EQ1 fed the need to be a part of something similar.
I only grouped when invited and was inclined towards it for whatever now forgotten reason.
EQ1 has had many iterations and it's much more geared toward soloing today.
I even married in EQ and had a real life romantic interest that may could have led to dating and marriage in our world.
A religious friend of mine had a word of knowledge about the relationship that conveyed what I had ignored. I had never been so anguished till then nor since then. For the first time I cried from my soul.
I played EQ1 off and on since then.
I have a real gift for the divine but also a real gift for sarcasm.
One day while on the test server I got irritated about a food bug and started pissing off the devs about it with biting sarcasm.
That led to a lot of unpleasant things in game and a few in real life which I shall not talk about but trust me, you don't want to piss off game devs, they have unlimited access to you computer and identity.
I love how the game has evovled as I have snuck in from time to time to play anon. It's much more playable solo then ever but I now don't have much time to play nor an anon computer to play from.
Since then nothing has been as immersive for me although for a time I enjoyed GW1. If I had time and an anon computer I'd still play the EQ1 till it's soloable levels. That's my 2 cents.
P.S. For you EQ devs former and present this I say, "I'm Sorry, Please Forgive Me, Thank You, I Love You". That phrase comes from an ancient hawaii tradition.
Thanks for the memories EQ.
Spiritglow
I was there when LDoN came out and for a long time after. It was popular for all of a month before people had enough and carried on raiding and losing themselves in non-instanced dungeons. Not much has changed, the new MMO's have instanced dungeons and they seem to start losing people after a month too.
Unfortunately, I believe that Vahrane is spot on here.
Having said that, part of me wonders if the John D. Carmacks (if you will) of the MMO industry in general are being replaced by unimaginative drones which are only good at providing common, cookie-cutter ideas and skills. After all, it is a bit of an exaggeration to say that investors and shareholders are strictly anti-new ideas. I think that even people like them understand the importance of creative capital in generating more revenue.
Waiting for: Citadel of Sorcery. Along the way, The Elder Scrolls Online (when it is F2P).
Keeping an eye on: www.play2crush.com (whatever is going on here).
Everquest was shut down??