Ideas for next expansion

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by teecee, Jan 23, 2020.

  1. teecee New Member

    I have been thinking a lot about what I would like to see with the next expansion. Hopefully, others will weigh in and the new DEV team will listen if enough of us discuss what we would like. After all, I feel that since so many of us pay the subscription fee or buy Krono, we should at least have a say on what we are paying for.

    1. Upgraded graphics for our characters. While NPC graphics keep getting upgraded, we are still playing with characters with graphics from Luclin. I am not saying anything major, just perhaps sheathing weapons, visible items like cloaks/masks.

    2. Actual flying mounts or illusions.

    3. Return of actual useful tinkered items. Example would be an item that produces throwing weapons, an imbued bracer that casts a healing spell, or a range item that casts a DS. The items of course would need to be relevant to the current character level. Also, no level restriction, but the effect would progressional based on the the level of the character using it and no ridiculous long recast time.

    4. New Epic weapons quest and add Epic Armor as well. So tired of each expansion having raid gear...people grind to get it...then that's it. There is a reason Sony called it "EVERQUEST." There is the word quest in there not "EVERRAID."

    5. Other interesting quests that don't involve raid forces or raid equipped people. Every expansion since around Secrets of Faydwer has been about progression and RAID.RAID.RAID. People loose interest if you just keep doing the same stuff over and over. That is what Everquest has become. What set the game apart from WoW was that there were so many different things to do.

    6. Merge low population servers and provide a pay to move feature for free trade servers like FV. I understand that it can be an unfair advantage for someone who is end game geared on FV to leave to another traditional server, but I feel that person has the opportunity to better help others on that type of server. Once they move, their gear becomes no trade anyway. Place a penalty on the move, say for 6 months to a year, that they cannot request another move.

    7. More variety of ornaments like EQ2 has. Give people the opportunity to have more freedom to change their look. If I want a BST to look like he is wearing plate armor I see nothing wrong with that.

    8. Fix the look of certain weapons. I mean after 20 years of development why does a set of claws in the right hand look normal, but in the left hand its backwards?

    I will stop at 8 topics. Perhaps others can chime in and a Developer will see this thread.

    Teecee Siamphomia
    109 Beastlord
    Firiona Vie
  2. Qbert Gallifreyan

    While I would say your items 1, 2, 7 and 8 might be desired by some people (not me), I do not think they should have anything to do with an expansion. If they were implemented, it should be a regular monthly patch thing, or perhaps marketplace features in the case of 1, 2 and 7.

    Similarly, I think your number 3 and 5 need not be restricted to being expansion-specific (though they fit more closely in my opinion, if for example there were to be a gnome-centric expansion in the case of tinkering).

    As for 6 . . . there was mention last year of hope for mergers of almost all servers this year or soon (I think they excluded two? from likely mergers). Again, not necessarily related to an expansion, and in fact I think it would be an exceedingly horrible thing for a merger to happen very close to an expansion release date (before, during or after). If/when this happens, hopefully they do it in the summer/early fall.

    4: eh, I think most if not all players would welcome new epics and epic quests but with the amount of time investment (on the developers' part) versus the duration of the items' intrinsic value seems out of whack for most classes.

    I hope the development team continues to develop new expansions and continues to apply/evolve lessons gained from recent expansion design. I have no specific hopes of anything in particular, in fact I would prefer to be surprised by something new/unique (at least partially).
  3. smash Augur

    1: Will not happen, there not devs to do it
    2: Game not built for it
    3: Maybe
    4: Will not be done, because epic story as expensive as expansion
    5: EQ is build on raids, so will not happen.
    6: Will cost income and servers should not be like it.
    7: ..
    8: ...
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  4. Tucoh Augur

    1. No more collections

    2. No more level increases

    3. Build a system that can relatively easily increase and decrease the level and difficulty of arbitrary zones (you already have some form of this this for the heroic adventures).

    4. Create a large number of high level zones from existing zones. No need for custom loot tables for each zone, art or spawns. No need for even quest lines in each zone. Just add hunter achievements.

    5. Create alternative zones that have substantially increased difficulty from the base zones with their own hunter achievements. Use the same gear drops, but increase XP and make the hunter achievements worth getting (doesn't have to be huge, just something).

    6. You've got writers, designers and artists on staff, so you'll have to make some quests and new art somewhere. That's fine, but just don't feel like you need to populate every zone you release with the same 1 mission, 3 merc quest and 3 partisan quest archetype. EQ players mostly just want to group together and go fight stuff.

    An expansion with ~20 revamped zones that each have a normal and a hard-mode and no quests would be way more enjoyable than 5 revamped zones that are either too easy or too hard for most of the population and come with collectibles and quests that players don't enjoy all that much.

    Bonus: Use your system for easily generating hardcore heritage zones to boost zones during low-subscriber periods and are only available for a month or two. Create a system that gives substantial rewards (heroic AAs or evolving hunter aug) for getting the hunter achievements in those zones. This will motivate players like me to that subscribe to EQ during expansion releases and anniversary months to stay subscribed so we don't miss out.
    MasterMagnus and enclee like this.
  5. enclee Augur

    Great list Tucoh.

    I'd love to see collections disappear. I'm tired of sorting through the seemingly infinite number of collection items.

    I really thought they were getting close to having scaling instances via the heroic adventures. It feels like the idea made it 90% of the way there.
    MasterMagnus likes this.
  6. Tucoh Augur

    Thanks.

    Quick note on HAs: Whatever zones you boost, do NOT make them scale with level. If you release a collection of boosted zones at level 115, they should remain there permanently. There is plenty of content for levels <115, and having zones increase in difficulty as you level makes the entire thing seem pointless.
    enclee and smash like this.
  7. Ashian Augur

    I would like to see more things come in the form of “kill credit.” I really liked the Slayer achievements as it gave me a reason to kill everything I walked past. Perhaps a good replacement to collections could be an “Expansion Slayer.” Using ToV as an example, it could look something like this:

    3 Achievement Chain: Slay 1,000 / 5,000 / 10,000 Spiders.
    3 Achievement Chain: Slay 250 / 1,000 / 2,000 Kobolds.
    3 Achievement Chain: Slay 50 / 200 / 1000 “rare creature” NPCs.
    Achievement: Slay 25,000 creatures in The Great Divide. (Repeat for each zone).

    The reward for completing all of the Slayer achievements would be a trophy, acting as a replacement to the Collector trophy. You could also make it improve your banestrike so that banestrike scales with each new expansion. Could also rewards Hero AAs.
  8. Tharnkiss Journeyman

  9. smash Augur

    Basically no to all, because should not carter to the top people, but to the normal people.
    Also the devs lack the resources, just take a look how delayed the expansion were.
  10. bortage spammin lifetaps

    The ability to use old models on mounts with the models actually animating properly

    Alternately, if you mount with an old model, have it sit your dude down instead of standing straight up

    edit: repeatable quests for xp and currency for the group vendor, who now sells T1. also, old zones scaled up using the HA technology, don't revise the drops but have the namers give group vendor currency or something. good time to toss in old zones that got revamped into oblivion
  11. Tucoh Augur

    A big challenge with EQ design is that it has a bimodal distribution of lethality in the playerbase.
    [IMG]

    On the left side you've got soloers, moloers, returning/new players, players on less active servers or players that can otherwise not easily put together a group that can do much of the content in ToV. On the right side you've got raiders, top-shelf box teams, organized regular group players etc that can easily put together a strong group.

    Aiming toward the center creates content that's either too easy or too hard for most of the playerbase. How many people didn't see Veeshan's Peak in RoS, beat Stange Magic in TBL and won't see the top floors of ToFS? Way too many, and they all paid $35 for it. Meanwhile, highly lethal groups will roll over the group content with such ease it makes them wonder why they spent the last year grinding out their chase items.

    Creation of a normal and hard mode creates content for both sides of that distribution and allows the left side of the curve to see all the content they paid for while providing a goal for them to aspire to and provides the highly lethal groups with content that justifies staying subbed all year to perfect their characters for the next expansion.
    Vumad, Sancus and Ashian like this.
  12. bortage spammin lifetaps

    I feel like a good compromise for tuning is by making optional hardmode versions of missions for overachieving groups and leaving the rest of the expansion tuned the way this one was
  13. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    Some of these are great ideas but won't be realistic, not because they cannot be done at all, but because they cannot be done affordably with the amount of people the game has available to work on it.

    Devs themselves would love to be able to do many of these, they just don't have the resources.

    Let's take Epic Weapons, what these suffer from is available time to make them, I think the Rain of Fear "3.0" weapons were a great idea, tie into the expansion but didn't require a huge amount of class-specific lore, quest, dialogue, items etc. which the 1.0 & 2.0 Epics did do. Also the Epic weapon ornament quest was very economic in how they were attained, a 4.0 Epic Weapon could be done with those things in mind where players got a way to obtain a new Epic Weapon but without a massive amount of work (for the devs), the Epic 1.0 & 2.0 were huge quests that were built when EverQuest was in the hands of a company that not only had more resources but also a much bigger team than what Daybreak has today, that kind of content is simply more work than they can handle without it impacting on everything else they need to do to make the game viable.

    New Character models - yeah I would love them too, but we have to bear in mind how difficult it is to do, take Drakkin, when they are stationary they look fine, but as soon as they start running through their combat animations they start looking bad, particularly melee classes - but my opinion is subjective, some like the Drakkin animations but plenty hate them as they seem stilted & don't flow in a way that makes them look natural & skilful, animating 3d characters is a difficult thing to get right, and that's before you get into the aesthetics of each race, there are so many players who even now still prefer the old models over the Luclin ones, many of the original models have animations that the Luclin ones do not have or whose combat animations look very different between them, an updated set of character models would be highly likely to run into the very same issues.
  14. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    Doing normal and hard modes of missions that only give coins as a reward (basically LDON) I could agree with, giving better loots/gear I don't, that just further seperates those who can and those who cant, those who want hard can get theirs quicker but both can still obtain the same rewards.

    I'd like to see the viability of soloing returned to the original soloing classes, currently with all the summoning and bad dots/DDs from NPCs those who traditionally used to quad/root rot can no longer do so.

    Personally I'd like to see a change to quests.
    1. Scrap mercenary quests, they are totally useless and give no real rewards. 200pp is nothing these days.
    2. Leave partisan quests for progression.
    3. Add quests with useful rewards - it has been a long time since we have had quests which give us useful rewards that aren't included in achievements. Take a look at TSS there are many quests which give useful rewards, like the aug from Underworld, symbol clicky, familiars, etc

    Give us some useful research recipes, while spells would be nice (last done RoF, I think), so were the DD clickies. I'd love to be able to make a stack of 1000 books that I could throw at NPCs (can't remember the last time we had a new throw summoning item)

    Give us somewhere new to die!
    Been there done that! That was so X amount of years ago.
    Take us to Drinal, show us what Norraths other moon has that the rest of Norrath doesn't. Show us somewhere new, don't make me help a bunch of NPCs I killed 19 years ago 'cause I killed them then and I'd rather be killing them now!

    TBL was fantastic in the respect of somewhere new! Sad to see so many didn't get to see it all. All of the zones were new and fresh and had the old EQ feel to them. TBL is my favourite recent expansion. Give us more zones like Aalisha, Empyr and Estanti, those zones were beautifully created.