I think that was answered when Vanguard was released Andy.
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I think that was answered when Vanguard was released Andy.
I have been playing for the last 6 months or so on FV still love the game =) Sadly someone has Lasgo so im Rasgo there and i ran into some people from druzzil that for some weird reason all there characters are named after Hoss people i have seen a Kattoo,Thuggo and Rika
Maybe ill have to hop on and say hi.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lasgo
Sounds good im 76 atm only 790 aa,s sadly this is a newly rolled character shaman though >< i box sleepey all the time her regular account shes 75 with 2k aa,s a beast she tanks AoW when i find him up lol =)
Are you sure those aren't the originals, when we were selling for big bucks?
Obviously the players behind the toons are different.
No they arent the guy i spoke to was a shaman on druzzil i forget his name and its his rl friends he told me they all rolled the names cause they always liked them
People really overestimate the amount of time it takes to level in EQ classic. I leveled a druid from scratch to 50 in like 12 days /played on p99. (and their exp tables are accurate) 51-60 took about as long. Granted the rate of advancement gap between a skilled and unskilled player is much larger in EQ.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andaas
If I remember right Andy, you work in the games industry. No offense, but you guys all suffer from a serious case of group-think. I hear the same crap from every developer I listen to. Maclir/Coral included. And yet when I read forums, I keep hearing from players that MMOGs are very stale right now. (and that's putting it nicely) Every single MMOG that isn't EVE online is hemorrhaging subs. Every single MMORPG developed since WoW's launch (which is nearly EIGHT YEARS AGO now) has had serious retention issues. Our SWTOR server lost like 20-25% population after the first subscription month. Even the highly polished and bug free Rift lost like 60% of their subs. Ask yourself why EVE is the only game in a decade, aside from WoW, that has seen an increase in subs over time, instead of a peak of subscribers at launch with a slow (or not-so-slow) decline. EVE's design is in many ways anti-WoW. I wish other devs would read articles like this one.
The only reason I don't still play an EQ1 emulator anymore is because I've practically memorized the entire game and nothing is really a surprise anymore as I've done pretty much everything there is to do. If some company made a modern game with EQ1 classic mechanics, I'd be all over it. Granted were I to design a MMORPG, I would do all sorts of things not yet seen in any game instead of merely clone EQ1 classic, so I'm not suggesting that classic Everquest is some definitive example of game design. I just think WoW (and every game made after it) went in the wrong direction.
What I'm really waiting for is some niche MMORPG to come out and give the finger to WoW and its single player quest grind bullshit now that middleware like Bigworld and Hero Engine is proven and cheap. It does not take $100 million to make a MMOG. EQ1 was created by like what, 2 dozen people? What I am absolutely DYING for is somebody to release a full high fantasy asset library under a commercial allowable CC license or some sort of profit share license, which would shatter the last remaining barrier facing very small teams (or even a single person) from creating their own MMORPG like the old MUD days when any coder could just download the diku mud source and make his own game.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think WoW, Rift, and SWtoR have gone in the right direction - I'm just saying that to appeal to the mass market, that games will need to either reinvent or bridge the gap between what EQ was and what WoW has become.Quote:
Originally Posted by Torrid
From a business and financial standpoint, I fully understand the route that Blizzard has taken with WoW - the previous (EQ) model, had developers creating far too much content that was only ever consumed by the top 5% (if that) of their subscribers. Even that I was among that limited target demographic - I can't imagine that it was valuable from a design standpoint to spend as much time as they did creating content that would not be experienced by the majority of their subscriber base.
And while I agree that the original EQ leveling curve is likely not as long as my recollection may make me recall - I also feel that any player entering the EQ world with no previous exposure to EQ or other MMO's, would require two to three times as much playtime to reach level 50.
I'm not currently working in the gaming industry, most of my observations are from an external view of where I see/feel things have gone (the last job I had in the core gaming industry was more than 8 years ago). Though I certainly agree that my history in gaming leaves me with a different perspective and understanding of things (I still think Blizzard, while not meeting what I truly want in an MMO, has delivered an excellent mass-market product that appeals to a broader user base than any other MMO).
I agree that the potential for an indie MMO based on available technology can easily become a huge (though probably not WoW-huge) game, and make a small team a huge profit. It just needs to be the right game at the right time (which I always felt EQ was.. it was the "Quake RPG" that landed at just the right time and led to breaking out the current MMO industry we know today).
I would agree with some of what you said about EVE's success, for lack of a better term, but EVE's biggest issue, unless it's been fixed in the last year or two, is the learning curve to figure everything out and that it has one of the most cumbersome horrid UIs I have ever seen in a game ever.
The learning curve made the game somewhat engaging as you had to spend time trying to figure things out.
The UI literally argued with me at every turn and was literally the only reason I stopped playing the game after 50 days or so. 50 RL days not in game days.
This I very much disagree with. If you design all of your content to be consumed by the majority of the player base, then you will have to make your game an unchallenging faceroll snozefest. Players will have nothing to look forward to and nothing to do after they quickly consume all of your content. The awe people feel when seeing a high level player in town is gone. The drive to be like him one day is gone. The sense of accomplishment of defeating the high end content is gone, because it becomes meaningless when everybody else does it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andaas
I consider it a minor miracle that Blizzard maintains the subs that they do, when a large chunk of their player base plays the game in spurts and then quits after consuming all of the content there is to do. They just quit playing and not cancel. Or they play a mere one night a week due to lockouts, and faceroll instanced content to pick up algorithmically generated loot that gives them +10 more gooder that will be replaced in 6 months with another meaningless +10 gooder drop.
The better design is to not waste all of your previous raid content from past expansions, and let the less skilled players raid that when new expansions make them more powerful by not obsoleting all previous gear in one night. Or let them simply zerg content all they wish. In social games, player organization is half the challenge.
Also, just because you make a plane of time, doesn't mean you can't also make some new zones for the more casual players.
Taken to its logical extreme, an MMORPG should have one race with one city zone because, after all, not every player is going to roll an erudite and experience Erudin. Why waste your dev time creating a dozen cities?
I want a world where I can hit the level cap while only visiting a faction of the available zones. A world where people have many places to visit, explore, and advance their characters in. A world where you can sell common drops in barbarian land for a nice profit after making a long trek to elf land. An Erudite in Faydwer should be a 'wow, an Erudite' event for the locals. Any dev that considers this a 'waste' of dev time, should be making is a single player game. (and probably is, but for some reason still calls it a MMOG)
Google is failing me, but I seem to recall some stats posted by blizzard that indicated that a very large percent of the player base (or the majority) do not reach the level cap in WoW. My response is pretty much, 'so what?' Why does it matter that it takes a long time to reach the level cap? The game should be as fun or funner pre-level cap than post-level cap. A level is just a carrot to feed players with. Blizzard just likes to feed players carrots by the cart load, with more, faster levels and a loot drop every 10 minutes. The problem is Blizzard carrots taste like vegetables while EQ's carrots taste like a five star restaurant.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andaas
Blizzard more or less sold out. Blizzard is the Zynga of MMOGs. You're playing a game with far less depth than games from a previous millennium.Quote:
Originally Posted by Andaas
Blizzard also didn't realize what gameplay was lost when they 'fixed' EQ's problems. Reading a book while meditating is bad? Make mana regen nearly instant out of combat! Oh wait, now you've just removed any decisions players make as to when to use their abilities and turned them into a resourceless fireball button mashing drone.
They even took the easy way out in SC2 by changing so little from SC1. You see virtually zero strategy in SC2 until you reach the APM cap, as the game requires players to micro way too much shit that should be automated. (spawn larva anyone? I quit zerg just because of that)
D3 will not even reach parity (in terms of gameplay quality) with previous Diablo titles. Sure, it'll be well worth buying and playing, but Blizzard is so concerned with saving players from their own mistakes that they watered down the game, just like WoW.
Torrid, you represent a rather small minority of the MMO player I think. Back in EQ's prime, we were all the baseline player. Nowadays people don't want to really have to invest as much time as we did to make progress in a game. Of course, this has the side effect of making games short-lived, because once everyone can consume everything, they do, and then quit. That said, EQ is not the horrible grind-fest it once was. I've been playing a new Monk lately, and I'm level 28 now in roughly 2 days played. Mind you, I AM using experience bonus potions, and grouping pretty consistently, and I'm going through a lot of the Hero's Journey (content path we made for new players), but you can still play any way you want.
Crescent Reach was introduced nearly 8 years ago, and the reason we're starting newbies there by default now is an MMO dies hard without the community. Nobody wants to play in an empty world, and if players all started in their home city, the world would feel empty, due to the overall server population being so much lower than it was when EQ had 450k subs. There's nothing stopping brand new players from coming in and starting in the racial home city however.
So far, moving to Free to Play has been a huge success for EQ. Yeah we made a couple really dumb mistakes, that somehow got overlooked (the augments causing your gear to be worthless was the big one for me), but those are now fixed. Yes, the game is very different than what we all obsessed over, but to almost ALL of the players, the game is much improved as far as accessibility. Just because players are able to complete quests, and explore and adventure in the world doesn't mean the game is dumbed down, or easier. The end-game content is harder than it ever has been in the past. We've just made getting to that content less painful and tedious. The depth is still there for those that want it. Considering the size of our team right now, I'm frankly AMAZED at the quality and quantity of content we can publish. Working on this game is no picnic. We have no tools to speak of. Everything is done through Access, and basic scripting.
You can call it selling out, but the fact remains that companies that produce these games do so to make a profit. Consistently kicking your customers in the balls so you can feel 'hardcore' is NOT how you keep them playing. We played EQ like we did because it was the only option. Had other games come out at the same time as EQ that offered up a persistant world, I doubt EQ would have been as successful as it was.
Torrid while I agree about the idea of scope for an MMO, (the idea of a to scale Warhammer or Warhammer 40k universe is one of my fondest dreams in fact) in your Elf/Barbarian concepts the main reason it isn't done is one relating to space. WoW is a fairly large land mass (especially if you remove Griffon taxis, flight and mage portals) but even then I could easily get from one place to another in a span of a few hours. Like Vanilla back when Nelfs would travel to IF or SW. But to get that sense of awe or reward you would need to make that traveling take at minimum half a day of travel, not to mention the scripting to make reactions happen the way you're talking is a whole different ball of yarn. But if WoW is going to be 20+GB now how large would a game like you're talking about be? 50GB? 100GB maybe even 1TB? You get into a world that is impractical to build with the current PC constraints in place, you would need something more like Star Ocean 3's VR worlds.
Second about the level cap comment, the reason it's a big deal if people never hit the level cap in WoW is obvious. There is no content worth doing in WoW until you level cap unless your with a group of 40 other people wanting to organically feel the whole game. Now if you look at a game like Secret World that should hopefully be less of an issue, but that's how WoW is and thus they have to care because every failed account to hit level cap is basically a lost subscriber. (On a completely unrelated note your analogy about Blizzard carrots and EQ carrots makes no damn sense cause even EQ "5-star" carrots will taste like vegetables...)
To your last point you can call it selling out if you want but what they did was make the most profitable game in history. While they made plenty of mistakes in WoW, they made no more or less mistakes than EQ. You just overlook any mistakes EQ made as you enjoyed the game more. But frankly Elidroth is right if a more welcoming user friendly game had ever come out EQ would basically have died. Actually that is more or less what happened isn't it?
While I appreciate your desire for a super hardcore tedious game, played Dark Souls/Demons Souls? (and boy could they have not done a better job of localizing that name????), there isn't really a market for that as an MMO of any kind. MMOs are expensive as hell which means you need enough subs to make it worth while, whether that's from F2P mini-transactions or from WoW/SWTOR full subscriptions, or the game dies. While it would be nice if we lived in the land of Star Trek where money was useless because I can just use a Holodeck or an in house unit to make anything my mind can think of, we live in the real world where a game needs to be profitable or everyone loses their job and the game dies anyway.
Something you said about MMOs costing so much money is something I've been trying to fight with SOE management for awhile now. I keep pushing on Smed to let me take a small team and make a niche game. We have an engine in-house now that is really capable, easy to use, and scalable, and I think a smaller, less expensive game that grabs 50-100k subs would be a great thing. We could afford to throw 3-5 mil on a small project, and if it tanks, OK, we try again with something else for low investment. It's better than sinking 70+ million into a game and having it be a flop. You might even catch lightning in a bottle and have a HUGE hit. Sort of a shotgun approach.
I think any company that purposely tries to go head to head with Blizzard is foolish.
Yea it can work but you need a solid battle plan to get people to go along with a $3-5M project. I mean that is still a very expensive project most indie projects seem to cost $50-250k from what I've seen. I would offer a smaller demo/beta concept where you build the equivalent of a small zone with a lot of good stuff and you offer to do it using a kickstarter project. Then you can get independent funding for a specific project if it works and you catch that bolt then maybe you can get your $3-5M that way all SOE loses is a bit of dev time from you guys working on a small project.
No way to do Kickstarter projects within SOE unfortunately. I asked if we could try something like that and our legal dept. balked at it bigtime!
This over and over and over again. Though I disagree about so many of EQ players would of jumped ship just for a easier game had they been out on equal footing with EQs release time. As I think the social aspect EQ had kept people far longer then other games keep subs. I think a large part of the players saying they wouldn't of or couldn't of played EQ are those whose only or first MMO was/is World of Warcraft. In my opinion Blizzards accomplishment was not making a better game, but increasing the appeal of MMO's to a broader market especially those players who were mainly gaming on consoles. Their Marketing should be attributed to the success compared to other companies.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
I will say at some point though, how much of the tedium can you remove before you have no decisions to make in a mmo? Perhaps some would prefer that who knows. But really we are getting to the point of just one starting area etc. How long before there is only the one race the one class or maybe even 3 classes just called tank, dps, heal.
It's definitely a delicate balance. When EQ2 was made, they went WAY overboard on the classes. You want diversity, but you can go too far. When you have SO MANY classes (EQ2 has 32 I think), it's hard to make them unique. In playing FFXI some more, I really have come to like their job system. I like the idea of people playing one toon, and being able to make it whatever they want. but I want to take it further into a skill point based character development system and not a class based. So you could, if so desired, become a plate wearing, spell casting battlemage, who can tank via spells and armor.
The biggest thing I DON'T like about WoW (and a LOT of games since WoW) is they've segregated their player base. If you don't like any of the evil races, but all your friends do, you can't play with them. I'm all for lore based racial bias in the game, but I think there should be a way for a 'good' player to gain respect and faction with 'evil' races allowing them to interact.
Waiting for Fir to come in and begin his "rant" about the stupidity of enforced factions. Which to some extent I agree with.
I think I've made that rant enough times to warrant not having to restate my stance.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
When they put in Arena and gave Horde Pallys and Alliane Shaman, they had a perfect opportunity to just let both sides play nice with each other. I mean really, every fucking expack it has the horde and alliance working toward the same goal of killing "bag of loot" so why keep them separated? PVP? Arena you fight your own people as well as Horde. Why the separation still?
Yea Warcraft would be a far more dynamic game with allowing the players to choose whether they support the Alliance or Horde.
I rather like enforced faction, but in a different way. Letting people choose which faction they wish to join and then from there enforced is all fine and dandy to me. Both sides just being friends together is not in my view of course. In a game that has no established lore they should design the lore around people joining whichever side they want, if your a chosen race is of evil but you choose to be good then you join the good side at creation vice versa. Beyond that just letting people choose the side they want and then still grouping/raiding etc together, that I do not agree with. Unless you design the game to be different on pvp servers where they enforce sides strictly and on pve servers they are not but I see that eventually leading to be a pain in the ass.
Hi Elid. Was hoping you'd show up. Before I begin my walls of text, I'll reply to this
You mentioned this to me in swtor. I've had the same thought now for years actually, and would love to see it happen. This never ending stream of WoW clones needs to stop. Literally the ONLY option I have now to play a game that isn't some bastardized WoW clone are emulated servers of decade old games. It's depressing.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
I have another proposal, though. Pitch this to your boss: release a full high fantasy asset library under a commercial allowable CC license or a profit sharing license, so hobbyists can make their own MMOG using one of the middleware solutions.
Why would this benefit SoE? Because when people like me implement new ideas that are proven to work, you can then copy them for your own games.
The smaller the team, the more more nimble it is and the crazier the stuff that can be attempted; and the freer it is, the more developers you'll get. It's like your small budget idea, only going further. The only thing Sony stands to lose is that some rival companies will use some old 8 year old EQ2 assets. (or whatever assets you release) You could even degrade the quality a bit if you were worried about that. No serious competitor to Sony is going to want to make their game look like a rival's previous generation game regardless.
Writing gameplay code isn't all that difficult or time consuming. It's the boilerplate code that every game needs that takes up the majority of development time. Just look at the emulators. They have a far more difficult task in that they must reverse engineer the game protocols after deciphering the encryption and recreate every line of server code with zero documentation. If the boilerplate stuff is already done, it would only take one coder to implement most gameplay code. Much of it wouldn't take much code at all. EQ1 is emulated. DAoC is emulated. SWG is emulated. UO is emulated. WoW is emulated. Imagine what could be done if an engine and asset library was available to us with licenses that allowed us to profit from our work.
You could also reuse existing game assets in your smaller niche projects, dramatically reducing development costs. So what if the game looks like EQ2? Niche players don't care. I sure as fuck don't. I play a game with 1999 graphics and love it. IT'S ABOUT THE GAMEPLAY. Gameplay is king.
Because this is Warcraft, not Friendcraft. Don't forget this game is based off of a RTS game and you need warring factions for an RTS game. They will not close the door where Warcraft 4 will make no sense.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lonskils
Project 1999 has seen concurrent user numbers in the 4 digits. This server is a recreation of a 13 year old game, has zero advertising beyond some forum threads, and requires users to jump through many hoops to play-- including pirating the client (generally), finding old drivers for the dual core issue (that is somehow STILL in your EQ client?), setting up two accounts, and downloading a zip and overwriting Sony dlls with custom code that monitors all processes running on the client machine.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
How 'hardcore' is EVE? Lineage? I've never played Lineage, but I'm told it's awfully grindy. L1 and L2 both had subs well over 1 million, even long after WoW's release. EVE has way more subs than EQ1 or 2. Hell, even this chart says UO had 100k subs in '09. You mentioned FF11. I'm told that's pretty grindy as well. 500k subs in '08.
Hell, even Darkfall had more subs half a year post-launch.
You can have your cake and eat it to.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
I in fact think that encouraging your players to play 16 hours a day is bad, believe it or not. Traditional MMOGs encourage that by rewarding players to stay above the curve so there is less competition for resources (camps, mobs, etc) or in PvP games, to gain a level advantage over rivals. There are any number of solutions to this problem.
If I made a game, I would limit the progress a player could make per day, and/or per week on a diminishing returns curve. This would decrease the power gap between power gamers and casuals, but still allow the hardcore players to get an edge if they want to work for it. Progress should not be linear!
Even Everquest had diminishing returns in the form of AAs. You bought the best AAs first and then eventually you bought junk AAs that did very little to increase your power. The difference between somebody with 0 AAs and 100 AAs was huge. The difference between 500 and 600 or even 500 to 1000 was quite small. (think Luclin and PoP era, not now) AAs also conveniently gave the illusion of making more progress than was actually made because you had to fill up an exp bar several times over to buy one ability, instead of one very long exp bar for, say, level 59. You saw much larger gains in the progress indicator because it was a division of a second indicator. (AA points) AAs also gave the player something to do for a loooong time. Players never really had literally NOTHING to do unless they had every single AA.
Another option is to fill your world full of high level NPCs that take the place of actual players to provide the competition for the power gamers who outlevel the general population, then phase them out as the population catches up. This would probably be more appropriate for something like EVE than Everquest, considering diku based MMORPG AI is still in the stone age.
A MMOG should be designed from the ground up to require interaction between players to accomplish significant goals, such that it should be difficult for a player to progress on his own without others to begin with, and advancing too far ahead of the crowd should limit his options severely and be self-defeating to a large degree.
EVE is the MMOiest of all games that I am familiar with. In EVE there is no content limit at all-- players construct the equivalent of raid targets and create their own mission objectives. Were I to make a MMORPG, I would try my best to merge PvP and PvE to get the best of both. PvP need not be full of griefing with lambs and sheep and enemies appearing unexpectedly out of nowhere. The potential for player created content is enormous.
How the hell do you start in the home cities? I couldn't even find the PoK book (if there is one) in that new dragon-in-trees city.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
I agree that a barren low level world is a big problem, however the problem with Crescent Reach is that even though you are surrounded by other players, none of them are actually grouping together or even talking to each other. In fact all the NPC spam makes any says from players easily missed. So you've removed the player from the charming starter cities to a featureless cave full of random NPCs and players are STILL soloing.
I'm not sure how I would fix that. I might just force all new players to play on the same server (without Crescent Reach) and allow players below a certain level to freely transfer to any server they wish at any time. And then possibly force them to pick a new server after a certain level.
Speeding up the rate of leveling is certainly understandable and probably unavoidable. I think what I would have done would be to have kept an old school server that is just as hard to level as classic was, then crank up exp gains per kill on the other servers so new people can catch up to the high end. (Too bad Sony didn't keep its old server code and databases to have REAL progression servers...) I would not, however, make it easier to solo and discourage grouping. Cranking up exp per kill is one thing; giving everybody a pet that can solo 3 reds simultaneously just removes all challenge from the game and is the wrong way to speed up progress.
One thing I like to say is that there is no right or wrong way to make a game. I firmly believe that games are as much art as they are engineered. As much as I complain about games sucking, what I'm mostly miffed about is them all being the same. WoW can be what it is. There is nothing 'wrong' with being a single player game with other people in it, as long as you don't pretend that it isn't. What I want is the option to play something that isn't WoW. The problem is every dev studio thinks Picasso in the form of Blizzard found the perfect way to make paintings and every painting should look just like his.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
A game that is challenging and social isn't 'kicking your customers in the balls.' Wanting to play a challenging game with forced grouping doesn't make me a 'small minority.' EQ had two major problems IMO. #1 was the difficulty in finding a group, and #2 was camping. WoW 'solved' these with making the entire leveling game not just soloable to everybody, but PREFERABLE to solo to the level cap, and instancing. Both solutions destroyed the multiplayer aspect of the game. Now instead of thinking up alternative solutions to EQ's problems, everybody just does that.
I also think WoW's non-gameplay related quality played a much larger role in its success than people realize. WoW's client, lore, and art blew EQ's away; although WoW is starting to look pretty retarded nowadays. Anecdotically, what made me quit was Uqua-- and the expansion as a whole-- being ridiculously unfinished and EQ's primitive annoying to use UI which became rather glaring after using WoW's beta client.
You make games for a profit, and that's fine. So does Zynga. Some of Coral's friends work there, and I hope they get rich, because they are nice people. But I still hate their games.
Not true at all. If necessary, you could reduce the number of tris in your geometry/make them larger. The Karana geometry files are about 3 megs in size, and it takes 10 minutes to run across west K. In fact, as I would insist on a ridiculously distant clip plane since I love immersion so goddamn much, the terrain in my game would have to be less detailed than in modern games anyway.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
So you agree with me that leveling is WoW is terribly terribly boring. Perhaps you should play another game.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
A lot of people, however, have differing tastes and enjoy that single player quest grind on rails experience; which is why WoW has all those millions of subscribers that have yet reached the level cap and never will.
You took me too literally. I meant that EQ carrots were like a filling, tasty 5 star restaurant meal-- not a second carrot prepared in a restaurant.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
Zynga's IPO raised $1 billion a few months ago. (Google's was $1.6 billion) This is a company with the literal motto of 'do evil.'Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
Hey Elidroth, Valdis says your game is dead.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
You can make a game more 'user friendly' without making it a solo quest grind on rails with a level cap reachable in 5 days.
Wanting to kill mobs for exp with your buddies isn't anywhere near as tedious as clicking poop on the ground by yourself and running back to a NPC 1000 times over. That's what you spend half your time doing in modern MMORPGs. Running to a !.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
A MMORPG having forced grouping isn't hardcore. You know what's hardcore? Master league SC2. Ninja Gaiden 1 on NES. Getting battlemaster in WoW circa 2005. That's hardcore.
For the record.. Project 1999 and other such emulators aren't recreating the 13 year old game. They'd like to say they are, but in reality they've fixed/changed a bunch of the things that made EQ what it was including hell levels, racial penalties, run speed, and other things. I've very quietly talked to the P1999 guys over the past couple years, and the funny thing is Smed would rather hire them to work on EQ than shut them down.
I 100% agree on our UI being crap. When this whole F2P thing was proposed, the 1st thing on our list of MUST HAVE was a new UI. And we were shot down by upper management due to the resources required to do it. As far as why old code exists, it's because we have players who still use Windows 95 of all things, and as long as they're paying money, we'll support old, stupid, horribly shitty code.
The biggest liability we have with EQ is it's a 13 year old game with 13 year old systems, and anything we'd want to do in a grand scale has to play nice with all of that previous work. OK.. I lied.. the biggest liability with the game is we're out of design space on the systems side. The designers before me never imagined the game would last this long, and so when they handed out power/systems increases, they did so in HUGE chunks leaving those of us working on it now with VERY little to give. Combine that with not enough coding resources to make big NEW systems, and we're just basically screwed. Yet we keep putting out expansions and content that our current players enjoy, and keep spending money on, so upper management sees us as profit, and doesn't mess with us. I'm burned out on the game. Badly. Unfortunately, when I get to EQ Next (which I'm sure I will at some point), everything to make the game what it is will already have been decided.
What we're really hoping now is, at some point, Smed will just decide that EQ is time for maintenance mode, and let the entire team as it is now start working on something completely new.
Zynga's IPO was a HUGE flop initially. It IPO'd at $10 and was well below that for over a month. It's recovering now, but I know several people who left SOE for the gigantic money fight that was promised at Zynga who've come running back with their tails between their legs when cash didn't literally fall from the sky. The REALLY sad thing is, my old producer on Free Realms came back as he put it "Because Zynga made him work too hard!". Nice, so you basically came back to SOE so you could fuck off all day and collect a giant paycheck.Quote:
Originally Posted by Torrid
A note I hate doing the separated quote thing and I know you follow along with me so...
1. While graphics are a distant third place on my scale of whats important in a game having 90s graphics they are somewhat important. I don't know if I could really immerse myself in a game with crap graphics unless the story and gameplay were just absolutely mind blowing. For example Xenogears terrible graphics but every so often I still sit down and do the whole 80 hours of the game all over again.
2. It's not that I don't like leveling I love leveling in WoW, I have many 85s. However take for example my friend who loved the game once he caught up to the level cap in the weeks prior to Cata release but had started right when LK released. He got into BC and just couldn't keep going cause right as he was getting to the level cap it raised and he said fuck it. IF you are a new sub to WoW than not hitting the level cap is a big deal.
While I agree with a lot of what you said about it and it's why I've been following Secret World so closely, I don't find the leveling boring per se as I love following the actual story of whats happening. I'm unaware if there was an actual story to follow in EQ while leveling but if it was just grouping up and slogging through enemies like a (and I know this is probably a horrible comparison) D2 Cow Level run then I would have fun but I would hardly care about the game it would only be about the fun I had with friends. I loved D2 for the story and the gameplay but stuff like grinding for loot was only to hang out with friends not for any other reason.
3. I know and I was being intentionally sarcastic. :rolleyes:
4. The morality of making money aside, I defy you to find a game made for public consumption where no one gives a damn if it makes money.
5. Fine EQ is on it's deathbed, it led a long illustrious life and is quite clearly in its twilight years and there's nothing wrong with that. Every game should wish to leave behind a legacy like EQ, whether you like EQ or not it's fingerprints are all over the modern MMO scene and thus it's legacy is secure. I wonder if SOE would have even kept EQ1 alive if EQ2 had been what WoW became?
I agree you can make a game user friendly without it becoming a solo quest. However if a game requires level cap or at least to be within the current expansion in order to have fun and see enough other players that you don't feel like it's a single player game you need to have a level cap that is easily achievable. This is clearly an area EQ did well as from my understanding the level cap and expansions didn't much influence who could do what, obviously the dungeon boss design limited all but the best from being able to do anything which frankly feels like a big middle finger to most casual players.
6. Those are obvious and completely different levels of hardcore. SC2 and WoW are RTS and Ninja Gaiden 1 on NES is lucky it didn't cause an outbreak of young people killing damned birds but the dozens. But killing things in a group over and over again can actually be described as tedious. Going around to various ! can also be tedious, for me the ! is less tedious because I actually read the stories and enjoy the story. I like it best when the two concepts come together in a wonderful blend like the Warhammer Public Quest system.
Your problem with all new MMO's seem to stem entirely from the social aspect of them. Every time I see you talk about EQ1 everything always seems to come back to the "forced" socialization that it had. I can understand enjoying that the most as I said earlier once I finished the story and the three difficulties of D2 and was just grinding loot the game sucked unless me and my buddies were playing together. So I get that but I don't see how a game not forcing you to be social at all times makes that game worse. To do anything worthwhile in WoW, SWTOR, Warhammer etc you still need a group of people and while PuGs can work lets be honest any of the really fun stuff requires a group of people who know each other and are willing to work together.
As an aside I still don't consider Zynga to be a game developer.
Also I noticed you said instancing caused some of the death of multiplayer in WoW and yet you can't solo an instance. We can argue about how much multiplayer is necessary or whether forced grouping is important but you can't say something that is multiplayer only killed multiplayer, at most it killed some type of multiplayer you preferred.
No but now well for awhile now anyhow you can just click a button and que up solo without knowing who/what you are grouping with. I fine killing mobs for exp to lvl less tedious then running around gathering up a bunch of quests then turning in and moving along the "path". Perhaps Torrid is thinking as I do about how instancing also killed the social experience etc and that is not just in terms of instancing dungeons but raids and the like. I do not necessarily think talking about a MMO or EQ' specifically that social experience means multiplayer grouping. Multiplayer does to me means just that multiple people together not necessarily promoting any type of social behavior. All I ever see is thing like you said about the middle finger to the casuals. Yet there is never talk about the middle finger to those who are beyond casual yet not hardcore or even to the hardcore. Considering the middle finger is given to those two groups far more then the casual.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
For instance even when blizzard released content such as ulduar for example it was to initially cater to both or at least attempt to. But nope in comes the bitching that the hard modes of it etc. need to be toned down. What the hell for? So more could access it apparently. My problem is not with there being great fun content for the super casual. My problem is when all the content seems to be designed for them or worse adjusted for them. I just do not understand where it written or thought of that all content is supposed to cater to that one group. The usual stupid answer is they pay so they should be able to do all the content regardless of being casual etc. I always thought with a mmo you were paying to access the game and have the chance depending on what you work toward to access/consume/fight all said content.
How it can be thought that it is so much fun for all, if everyone can do everything and attain everything no matter the playtime/style/skill etc is beyond me. Like I have said before everyone has different preferences. I always see the arguments that not everyone has the same goals or its not always about the loot or hardcore raiding or raids in general. Yet those same people are the one clamoring for easier access to said items/experiences. Well my only question is why in all hell do those who have or at least say they have no need for that type of loot or experience need easier access to them or want them more readily available? Just confuses me as they usually are the ones saying its not all about that so why want it? Those types of items in any game have never been needed to enjoy the "pre-hardcore raiding experience/game".
I guess I am in some ways thinking along the line of torrid. Not saying a specific type of game is wrong, just saying that all games going or turning into said type is wrong. As I said earlier in the post all I keep hearing is casual casual casual casual. Who can define casual exactly? Someone who plays less, someone who does not raid so many views on what a casual or hardcore is. One of the biggest issues I have which is already in full effect and seems to be growing among the player base of games. This being that assuming equal skill someone who plays less should be able to attain the same or essentially the same gear/items/money including the same amount of said thing as someone who does play more even a slight bit more. I am talking both of equal skill here as some argument I see that is common being the "I cant play as much as that moron with no life but I am so much better then he is". I see that so much its a wonder to me that there are not endgame uber casual guilds that kill everything in one night and why every guild doesn't clear everything as all the players should be awesome without fail.
I am not saying someone who can not play as much should not be able to attain good/best gear. I do however think assuming both that player and a player who is a bit more "hardcore" assuming equal skill that the hardcore should have something available to him and not make him feel as his accomplishments are less important. After all I thought the goal of a game was to make all feel as they accomplished something, right? And even if that would be near impossible I could understand this and even accept this from a developers/marketing view. However what I can not accept is when those who are not so good hell even at times admit such have the ability to gain gear that is equal to or as good at as fast a pace as those who well do not suck. Allowing everyone to see all do all and achieve the same exact shit regardless of playtime/playstyle/views on gaming just diminish the achivement one can feel from raids and what not involved in mmo gaming.
Well sorry for all the text I am sure some will not agree at all with me or even bash some of what I say (which is all cool an welcomed). Just needed to talk and vent and why not vent and discuss a topic that interests me? For all I know none of it will make any sense to anyone but hey who knows atm I feel like shit in pain, and meds (lack there of) arnt really working. Later~
I don't really disagree with much or any of that. From what I remember the hard modes of Ulduar were not nerfed much or at all beyond fine tuning and or bug fixes. Heroic mode which replaced it has proven that you need a solid guild to truly progress into them, at least in 25 man. 10m is just by it's nature far easier on almost every front. But overall we all agree about the fact that WoW is great for what it is but that it is not great for all types, ala Torrid, and that's fine. There is no game that will ever be built that has universal love and acceptance that's just not possible.
In regards to the middle finger thing, last I checked since casuals are 95% of a games customer base you need to beyond all else not push them away from the game. Hence MoP introducing Challenge Modes to 5 mans, the Skirmish system where its little 3 man groups, the Pokemon system, the little Farmville setup, and the return of the Nether Drake ala Cloud Serpent quests. Last I checked the truly hardcore still have Heroic Modes which is pretty much entirely devoted to those people, at current less then 500 25m guilds have killed Heroic Deathwing, the beyond casual but want a challenge ala most of the regular guilds have downed regular DW which numbers into the tens of thousands. The merely casual either from time constraints or lack of skill, have LFR. While I understand the need to make sure you don't give a big middle finger to the semi-hardcore and the hardcore it takes far less to keep them happy in most cases. Hell I'm actually impressed by Blizz in Cata in that regard as I don't believe any Cata final Heroic Mode boss was beat within the same 30 day period of it's release.
My basic point when I mentioned this in regards to EQ was that in WoW everyone gets a chance at everything whether they are good enough to pull it off is there own problem. In EQ however one high end guild, whether because they had a phone chain to wake everyone up in the middle of the night for a clear or because they were just so big they could clear regardless of the time, could basically hose everyone else on that server from getting to experience content if they truly wanted to. There's no way to not feel like you got screwed in a system like that, especially if you can't get into those few guilds who have monopolized the content.
But again I do agree with almost everything you said. Enough so that the differences are entirely personal preference anyhow.
I guess, my happiest times were racing for mobs etc. I felt such accomplishment after downing a boss that has taken time to beat and not able to be beat by just about everyone (do not necessarily think clicking a mode counts as content designed for those who are more hardcore just personal pref on that though). As I said I do not believe there is any concrete % of player base that has been proven to be one type or the other. Especially in a game such as WoW unfortunately. If someone doesn't like doing hardmodes but is on everyday with only his one character and raids everything but only in normal what is he then? Is he a hardcore, hardcore casual (oxy?), high playtime casual? Kind of what I was getting at about definition of said groups. On Ulduar they nerfed it several times. As I said I think they did a fantastic job with Ulduar initially. Further nerfing ulduar normal modes, ok its normal perhaps you wanted that to be easily consumed. However when you then nerf the hard mode content you designed from the get go to be really really hard for well being really really hard annoys me personally. Great you did what you said you were going to do then you decimate it, but again that's my view on it.
As you stated there is so much stuff being released that caters to casuals and they will enjoy which is great. But what is wrong with some content designed for those who are more serious? Beyond that of clicking a button to switch modes but fighting technically the same content. Guess seeing content being chewed through and becoming obsolete in a blink of as a certain type of gamer that I am bugs me. Especially when its more to do with it being designed or readjusted to be that way, and not because all the players are just that skilled/dedicated/whatever
But like I said before i'm babbling a bit still. Further this just happens to be how I feel and view things.
Exactly there is nothing wrong with your feelings. However if you don't count Heroic mode as something for the hardcore only, than I wonder what kind of content you would count? Would the new outdoor raid bosses be hardcore they won't be as difficult as a heroic mode boss but only the ones lucky enough to be online and camping it during a spawn will get it. It won't matter if it's the best guild on the server or the worst. From stories you guys have told me of EQ1 you basically controlled your server as far as what other guilds got to kill content because you built up a lead and had the manpower to enforce that lead. While this gave you guys great memories and a justified sense of accomplishment my guess is the smaller guilds who had to wait 4 months or more to see a boss let alone kill that boss probably sucked a bit. I know that WoW isn't the best way to handle things, I also know EQ1 isn't the right way. Like Torrid said the way EVE handles it is pretty interesting but if most of the stuff really worth doing is player created I dunno it feels kinda like a cop out by the dev to some extent even though it isn't...
Oh come now. No reply to post #63? It's a totally awesome idea!
Just a reminder-- as interesting as your posts are, this is a public forum.
That's not true at all; at least for project 1999. Hell levels are certainly in the game. I kept fairly detailed exp logs, and I can tell you with certainty that hell levels require exactly 2x normal exp. Class and race exp penalties are also in the game. Run speed is handled by the client, so unless the titanium client has people run faster, then it's the same. Mob run speed is server side however, and I can tell you that mob run speed on P99 is actually slightly FASTER than what it was on live. Specters in particular run much faster. Project 1999 is actually quite well done. I wouldn't have played there otherwise.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
A lot of us are certainly grateful Smed isn't shutting them down, because there is no goddamn alternative for people who want that kind of gameplay. I'm kind of miffed he decided I can't play eqmac without buying a mac though.
Any idea when more information about this is coming out? I'd rather my hopes be crushed sooner rather than later.Quote:
Originally Posted by Elidroth
Just going to reply to this one item, as explaining EQ to people who only know of WoW would be a book.
Sure I can. In WoW, there is zero interaction beyond your group. Zero. You might as well be playing a 5 player game. Or a 10 player game, if you 'raid.' In EQ, your groups have to interact with other groups. This is not always a negative fighting-for-resources experience, either. Often groups exchange buffs; or resurrect each others dead; or when one group falls apart another group might pick up one of them; or two groups might combine forces to tackle harder content, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by Valdis
Getting to know who is on your server by interacting with them like this is how guilds form without some retarded job application process. This is how you make friends in a social game. You'll make 10 times as many friends playing classic EQ than you will in WoW. You'll recognize half the names you see running around in the world every day. And being an asshole to people can have severe social consequences.
When WoW went live it was a lot closer to EQ than it is now. It was a lot harder to down things and there was no chance in Hell a casual was gonna see the content that raiders worked towards. Seems they crunched some numbers and decided using resources on pets and mounts was a whole lot better than using them on raid content and it's worked for them to keep subs high. But I've lost all respect for them as an actual game company which is why I've tried every MMO that's come out since then only to come to the crushing realization that they are just WoW with a different story and while sometimes they are polished they cannot hit all the nails the WoW does and I return to WoW if only to pay them instead of the company trying to copy them.
EDIT:
It wasn't until TBC launched and I saw in horror that it was basically a new game that started at 60 and made everything I had done the last two years both irrelvate and a real waste of time that it hit me that they were moving away from the EQ model in a bad way.
This is the number one mistake Blizzard made, more than any other thing they did.Quote:
Originally Posted by Lonskils
Nothing like being in full tier 3 and finding better green con gear dropping from pigs in Hellfire to make you feel like shit for all the hours you just wasted putting together raids and learning content.Quote:
Originally Posted by Allara