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It doesent have to be that way.
delete5230
Member EpicPosts: 7,081
It's my experience that people here on mmorpg.com are stuck. They fixate and stay close minded on so many misconception's. Out of the many fixations, I would like to talk about just one because it has so much to do with Pantheon Rise of the Fallen.
Ready !!!.................The year 1999.
Why are so many stuck in thinking Pantheon will be stuck in 1999 ?
In my opinion, This game WILL NOT BE Everquest 1. In my opinion is not just to attract Everquest 1 players. I guess there is a popular game called project 1999 to attract nostalgia.....This game is not that !..... It's a new game !
Everquest 1 has a wide range of views. Some love it because its hard way of life. Some because the community has to pull together, some simply for nostalgia. Others view it as old, broken stick figure and bad graphics, that's nasty and unforgiving. This game was made long time ago......What would you expect ?......Yet, its still loved by many. But many don't, just the same.
In my opinion :
Panthion Rise of the Fallen, will be its own game. My guess is it will have solo content too, just not hand holding. Players are sick of being taken by the hand in mmos, just to please the 6 year olds. Universal for everyone games are NOT WORKING AT ALL, for anyone ! This is what makes this mmo stand out
I don't call it a nostalgia game. I call it a non-butchered with dumb ideas game. It will have good ideas, not dumb ones like auto everything !
Comments
I have a question.
- Will Panthion ONLY have crazy over the top hard content, that's so nasty and unforgiving that only that special player can handle it ?
- Or will it be a fun community game, that people will log in for simple enjoyment. Living in a world outside there own for a few hours when they have time to escape ?
Classic Everquest can be played today, SoE opens a new classic server at least once a year. There were at least 3 in 2015. Yet, the population on those servers never manages to stay afloat, those people who join those servers full of initial excitement, tend to log in less and less, a few weeks later they stop logging in altogether.
A lot of those problems, that made people leave classic initially, were fixed later in the game. Raid instances, OOC Regen, OMM missions, flagging the whole raid instead of one person (see Txevu key)...all made the game more enjoyable, it made it possible for people with limited time to enjoy the game too, and it is why after 16 years, the game still has enough players to keep multiple servers alive.
A lot of things in early EQ were badly designed, a lot of things were improved upon. Ignoring them and simply recreating classic EQ, will give you an initial burst of excited players, but very low retention, after a few weeks players will remember some of the less pleasant things about EQ, and leave.
EQ grew up around Omens of War, that model is what kept it going for 16 years. Achievements in a reasonable time, using instances to avoid drama over contested content, group gear divided into tiers, named that have a 15% rate of spawning from a placeholder, an easily identifiable placeholder, flagging system that is fun and straightforward. It's not classic EQ that kept EQ going for 16 years, it's the model that vastly improved upon classic that kept it alive.
SoE has tried everything, it has made classic servers with very low XP rate, below how EQ was, it has made servers with faster XP rate. It has made classic were defiant armor drops, it has made classic servers where only classic items drop, painstakingly going through every single item. It has made classic servers where all expansions are unlocked, it has made classic servers where every expansions needed to be unlocked, it has made time locked expansion releases.
SoE has tried everything, SoE has tried every single version and every single request classic players wanted.
Yet none of the classic servers stay afloat, they are all merged after a few months with normal servers.
The funny thing is, that the server that was the least classic, the one where defiant armor drops, where all expansions were all unlocked, the one with a bit faster XP rate, was by far, the most successful. The classic server that was the least like classic EQ, was by far the most successful.
My experience with classic EQ is, that of the people who say they want classic EQ, less than 1% actually does, and 99% don't stick around after the first week.
Most classic mmorpgs were ruined by the solo crowd pacification trend which destroyed our genre (AC was actually very solo friendly up to a point but was a different game at it's core really. What was lost in later games was it's massive open world concept).
I see a major issue on forums where a game is listed and talked about and the first thing people respond with is "This game will fail because the industry has moved on and has to interest every single person, including me with easy mode game play and a near 100% solo experience!". Bull shit! The industry is stagnant because it watered itself down. We need options in game play and Pantheon gets this.
If this industry did not have room for different styles of mmorpgs it wouldn't have an indie push for more classic style games currently. This movement is largely player funded proving the point further.
I see Pantheon (also stated by the devs) as what classic EQ could have become if it was allowed to evolve based upon it's original concept. This is what was lost (ie. Wow). There was no "evolution" to what we have now. Money and big business drove that change. The major issues that hindered games like EQ when they aged were entirely different problems to tackle and it was solved by destroying it's original concept and creating entirely new problems (like the genre vanishing). I applaud these devs for trying to fix these issues while preserving concept ... something not yet done by the industry.
You stay sassy!
Necromancers, Mages, Wizards, Beastlords, Bards (especially AOE pre-nerf), Druids, could all solo incredibly well. Even classes that couldn't solo well with group gear, could easily do so once they attained some raid gear, paladins with their epic could solo very well against undead for example.
I spent many days enjoying quad kiting in Halls of Honor on my druid.
EQ did force players to group in instances, during raids, and some classes simply couldn't solo well (warrior, rogue).
But EQ wasn't that solo-unfriendly as I think you assume it was.
First of all, SoE has never had a classic EQ server without most of the changes that have taken place in the last 16 years. They simply don't have the code. They probably don't even have anyone there from the original team.
Second, SOE has never demonstrated an understanding of what actually made EQ classic a good game. They've only changed it farther and farther from what it once was.
Lastly, even if they had all the classic assets and server code, there probably isn't more 50k people who would even play the game again. We've been playing it for 16 years now, including on various emu servers, and a game that old (that looks that old) is not going to draw a crowd...
... which proves what? That somehow because people don't flock to a bastardized version of classic EQ that people don't want to play a new game based on the same ideas? That just isn't a logical conclusion.
SoE must have launched at least 15 different classic servers by now, all with slightly different rulesets, all on request of players who claim they will play EQ if only, x,y and z was different. Using polls in-game on and forums, so classic players can decide what they want.
You have players from normal servers, actually making characters on classic servers, just so classic players would feel welcome, inviting them to serverwide chats on normal servers, making guides for them.
The amount of catering that has been done to please classic players, is beyond anything I have ever seen in any game.
Almost none of them stick around, all have a plethora of excuses at the ready when they no longer show up on serverwide chat.
What people claim they want, and what they actually want, is completely different, and it is nowhere as striking as when you talk to nostalgic EQ players who look back fondly onto early EQ, through incredibly rose tinted glasses.
EQ hits 17 in a couple months, and nothing is going to make the game popular again. Like I said, a pristine classic EQ isn't going to suddenly become popular with past and current fans, let alone new players. Its old. However, that doesn't mean people don't want to play a game based on the same concept.
Arguing against Pantheon on the basis of people's response to Daybreaks progression servers is ridiculous.
Best two combat games are Dragons Dogma and Kingdoms of Amalur and nobody is raving about those games,so what exactly do rpg fans want?
I feel right now this is nothing more than a popularity contest,not even about quality game play.If Blizzard throws out a game it is auto success.
What is waiting to happen is a mmorpg with a better world,more interaction and more systems.
When is the last time we saw secrets,hidden doors things to discover and interact with that didn't have sparklies or hand holding attached to them?When has a game been about REAL discovery other than lame gimmicks like step on a new pixel of land and get soem free xp.
Perhaps even more importantly when is a game going to look like the designers put some plausible thought into it instead of just trying to find some lame gimmick to create sales like "flying" or COOL mounts "WOW",i can really see how Wow players are attached to their mounts.
IDK maybe the gamer's don't really want a rpg,maybe they just want cheap gimmicks like being able to fly or create a character in the character screen that looks like Angelina Jolie or a game that gives them lots of free xp and easy handouts and yellow markers over npc heads,maybe players don't want immersion.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
For every minute you are angry , you lose 60 seconds of happiness."-Emerson
I never played the classic servers, so I do not know other than through second hand knowledge if they were true. How did they handle various rule aspects that changed in class abilities and powers, rule changes in the content, etc...?
Did they achieve those as well? Over time, EQ made some pretty major changes to those systems that made the game much easier in many ways.
Maybe Dullahan could provide you with some details to explain what changes are specifically different between them and how that invalidates your points? /shrug
As for what people want, I can only speak for those that I know and myself, but I want old EQ (ie systems of old game play, not the mainstream ideals of today), my want and my need for the game to be a certain way are exactly the same. I even comment on the problem of player want vs need many times as a development evaluation in these threads.
That said, I see your point. There are many out there that claim they want old school game play, but defy attempts to achieve it. I don't think that will matter though as those who claim they want are likely larger than those who truly know what they want and my fear for Pantheon will be that those who "think" they want will be the ones to drive the games focus. Such will only end up with yet another game that is not as bad as today, but in no time will be quickly on its way to being such.
If that is their only change, they would be better off making it an AH system like EQ2 which gives extreme power to the player to search, sort, and analyze the who/what/where/how of the trade. This at least would level the playing field as then as even the most casual player could work the market and make advancement.
I don't agree with it, I would rather have a more game like system with trade, but the idea that the EC style will solve the problems is wishful thinking.
Commonlands trading only worked because setting up a forum was hard to do yourself.
Now it's not, times have changed.
Without AH / EQ Bazaar, you get stupid stuff like forums dedicated to trading.
You get stupid stuff like this, which is 10 times worse than an AH.
Having to constantly check forums for items inside the game being traded, is horrible.
As I have said, I don't think an AH is the solution (I already explained my points in another thread), but the emulating EC trading really won't do anything. It is a feel good solution.
I don't think low level will really stop much of the abuse as those who are the abusers won't be deterred by having to level an alt up for a mule or multiple sales accounts. This would likely just end up being a deterrent for the average player, and are they really the main problem? I don't know.
As for preventing one person from controlling things, I honestly don't know how they can do that and keep the system completely uncontrolled and free.
If you read the arguments by some, apparently EC trading is the savior and everything will be just fine. /rollseyes
I merely mention that the game was far more group oriented than most now and certainly more so than AC was. The quote you picked out from my post is the extreme example, albeit prevalent, of today's mmos and the different crowd now playing them drawn from conventional video gaming based far more around the individual. EQ, despite having some classes having mechanical advantages (kiting is a failure of game design and not one of conceptual design hence why all the anti-kiting mechanics introduced into most mmos today) is not a solo mmo compared to the majority of those today ... hence why Pantheon, at least by concept, even exists now.
I should state that I actually do not want to play a game 100% group oriented. I want a large and realistic fantasy world which would offer a full range of content from solo through group. If Pantheon were to be hardcore group oriented right from your character spawn point I am sure that game would flop instantly. I can only imagine the developers are smarter than that. What I want most from an mmo is f'ing difficulty.
Just as some classes could solo in EQ I consider myself an advanced player who enjoys min/maxing. I am an upper crust player so the "standard" difficulty is far below my interests. The core game must be harder even if I am taking on group content solo. I also want to play with 1-2 friends online and be challenged. Today's mmos rarely offer this challenge and I hope Pantheon returns to a game where taking on 2-3 mobs at once solo is a life threatening situation ... instead of packs of mobs to mass grind which seems to be the standard today.
You stay sassy!