Dear Robin Flodin; Community Feedback

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Atomos, May 2, 2021.

  1. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

  2. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Well, the planetside2 engine is designed from the ground up as an MMO-engine. It is being developed/maintained in the same building as EQ1(afaik), allowing for good communication between the 2 dev-teams. It is getting DX12 support soon?(if it doesn't already have it?). Licensing between "sister-dev-houses" is probably not an issue... and EQ1 needs a new engine...

    If it is technically feasible, it would make a lot of sense...

    Of course EQ1 might be SO archaic, that no "off the shelf" engine could ever work...but in that case we are probably not getting an upgrade anytime soon...not before the EQ1 team start hiring some GFX-devs at least...

    Im just speculating though...:)
    Skuz likes this.
  3. OlavSkullcrusher Augur

    Thanks. I stand corrected.

    It does look like those changes are quite far in the past, though, so I would say that the game is several years overdue an update to the graphics engine.
    Skuz likes this.
  4. OlavSkullcrusher Augur

    Let me focus on what I want to see from EG7/DBG regarding EQ1 and its future. As I said above, what I see from EQ's 22 years is a lot of sloppiness in the game design, as they jumped around between different models of itemization, spells and abilities of classes, quest design, and misc features. I still play this game, so I obviously enjoy it enough to spend my time here, but that doesn't mean I won't call out its problems.

    There was a lot of "Hmm, this could be cool, let's try it!" that ended up being poorly implemented, poorly received by players, and/or ended up being technically challenging, so it got abandoned or otherwise given short shrift. I could spend hours going through examples like I did with the TBM point aug system, but I already have a bad tendency to write novels when a short poem would suffice.

    To boil it down to one topic and question that I have for the leadership at EG7/DBG:

    What is going to be done to improve the consistency and quality control with how things are implemented, in terms of addressing outstanding issues and going forward? One short clarification: I am referring to everything: technical game performance, quests and other content, itemization (including tradeskills), class abilities and balance issues, secondary features, item storage and housing, etc. All of it.
  5. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I think EQ had a lack of stability in the team & direction for a while, videogaming moved a lot in even the first 10 years and many of the expansions could be said to have had expansion specific teams.

    I think the team has stabilised a lot in the past 5 years (or at least after the major layoffs) and Daybreak has even grown the team, so the scope of a stable team to deliver a higher degree of consistency is fairly recent when you think about it. When it was sold by SoE Daybreak was actually losing money so it has turned that situation around and is now profitable again.

    With the EG7 purchase I think this puts EQ in a decent position to see it benefit from being under a secure umbrella and game-minded business direction.
    Really the way I think of EQ is as a quilt of both teams & content that somehow has stayed together despite the stitching being of a whole range of different techniques & styles.
    I actually give the current team a lot of credit along with some criticism for what they have been able to do under the circumstances but with the team growing now I think we will see a better product in time, will we see the start of that improvement in the 2021 expansion? I don't know, maybe some but I would definitely expect better things of the 2022 expansion.
  6. Fanra https://everquest.fanra.info

    No to cartoon graphics. This is not WoW.

    As for the buff limit, there is a lot of discussion about it in the past that I don't want to try to find now. But I believe the problem was that they cannot set the buff limit differently for raid mobs than other mobs. And setting it higher on all mobs would drag the servers to their knees.

    I do not believe that SOE/Daybreak/Darkpaw ever said the limit was there to avoid "easy button". It's there due to the limits of the server.

    The best answer within current limits would be to reduce/combine debuffs/DoTs. They sort of started to combine/reduce the DoTs for some classes. There is a lot more that can be done. For example, on raid mobs, as a druid, I cast the following debuffs: Blessing of Ro, Icerend Breath, Restless Frost, Season's Wrath.

    There is no reason I can see that Restless Frost and Icerend Breath cannot be combined into one spell. They both lower attack and armor class. Icerend Breath also lowers cold resistance and adds damage to cold based spells. And they both heal the target's target.

    Of course, the best solution is to somehow make raid mobs have a much higher limit than all other mobs. And by raid mobs, I do not include the "trash" in raid instances, as they usually die quickly.
    Barraind and Skuz like this.
  7. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    I don't think anyone is asking for cartoon graphics. EQ1 has its own visual style. :)

    Currently, EQ is a mismatched visual chaos, spanning different styles and qualities due to the difference in age between all the assets. I would like them to change that. I prefer visual consistency.:cool:

    For example, the current character models looks out of place when compared to the newer monster models, and the newer npc's.

    Another example: the character select screen has a level of detail that is unmatched in most of the older parts of the game, but it is still very much EQ1's own style. A revamp of older zones could attempt to settle on that visual detailed style. The newer expansions seems to aim for that style.


    That said, I don't think a throughout visual revamp is coming in the near future(if at all), but a revamp doesn't have to mean cartoon graphics...
    Skuz and Fanra like this.
  8. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    After Freeport and Tox Forest I don't trust them to revamp any zone. Totally ruined the marble effect on the entrance to Erudin and Freeport is just a huge half empty mess.
  9. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    But you still have faith in their ability to make new zones for new expansions?
    I think they have learned a lot since those revamp attempts, Darkpaw deserves another chance imho. :cool:
    Many of the later expansions have beautiful zones, Im convinced they have the skills to do it right...
    Skuz likes this.
  10. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    It is much much much easier for everyone to cast all their dots with no problems. The current system forces you to pick and choose what dots you want landed for maximum effect. Regardless of the reason for the limitation it does force a raid to strategize on what dots they want to land for maximum effect and that allowing every buff to land indeed does make the raids easier.
  11. Szilent Augur

    What seems "easy" is describing as strategy something that keeps other players, but not you, from playing their classes to their potential.
    Eryndhel likes this.
  12. KrakenReality Augur


    It doesn't work like that, raids don't pre-plan DoTs. The fact is its just bad design to create so many usable debuffs and only leads to frustration for the end users. No guild is micro-managing their debuffs, and no guild wants to take the game to that level of misery.

    It's not fun, it's the perfect example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.
  13. Corwyhn Lionheart Guild Leader, Lions of the Heart

    Maybe raids should be planning dots. But I get what you are saying. Everyone just throws out their dots and its random whose dots stick.

    How I would deal with that is maybe break the dots up into groups. Then start casting Group 1 dots..... then group 2 dots etc... first group would be the ones you want to see stick the most. That way you fill up the buff slots with the most preferred dots.

    Or

    Only have certain folks cast dots so the rest are casting other things and not wasting dots. I would at least try and figure out how many should be cast to optimize the dot effects and reduce excessive casting of dots that can't stick. I get you can't be precise but there must be a way to be more efficient then just everyone casting and letting luck decide it all.
  14. Visitor Augur

    To get upgrades, it is going to cost $. Before they spend the kind of money to bring Everquest up to a more current standard, they will almost certainly look at what kind of increase in game population. 10k more paying accounts would bring in about 1 million/year, 100k more paying would bring in 10 million/year. There are lots of people who would play EQ, but, enticing them and keeping them for 10 years or more would require some serious effort. Obviously, if there was to be some wondrous plan to boost EQ and gain several 100k paying players, would probably mean more servers, but i am not up on just how much brand new servers can handle (or almost brand new).
  15. KrakenReality Augur


    You're not going to do any of that. You're going to have to track every debuff timer then figure out who would be next, who died, who's in the area, so and so on for every raid attempt. It'd be damn near impossible to even script something like what you're describing.
    Corwyhn Lionheart and Barraind like this.
  16. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Well, if they don't keep the game up to date technology-wise, we will eventually get to a point where it simply won't work on modern computers in a satisfying manner...
    We already see people who can't run the game in their monitor's native res, without readability problems on hotbars... GPU drivers are probably not being tested for directx9 compatibility forever, etc... sooner or later it will be a problem, maybe not now, but within a few years...
    Eryndhel likes this.
  17. Barraind Grumpy Old Bastage


    So much stuff adds debuffs that shouldn't add debuffs. So much stuff should be combined into 1 effect.

    I can add 6 or 7 as a paladin tanking something. Its really just nonsensical.


    Honestly? I hate the way the new bits of ToV and CoV look. The best parts of them are the parts they reused from 19 years ago. Zoning in to ToV and exploring EW is migrane inducing eyeball bleach.
    Elyssanda and Corwyhn Lionheart like this.
  18. Jumbur Improved Familiar

    Heh, I always thought EW and GD, were visually the weakest zones in ToV, but that is because they retained their old "polygonal" landscape look from the original zones(and just lazily added restless ice on top). I prefer the more modern look of WW in CoV.

    I agree that "low poly art" can look charming as a visual style, but in EQ I prefer visual consistency across the different zones. :)
  19. Skuz I am become Wrath, the Destroyer of Worlds.

    I would dispute that.

    At least my own guild in the recent past stipulated that there was a bunch of stuff that should not be used on raid bosses to increase the damage we output as a raid.
    It's not even that hard.
    Corwyhn Lionheart likes this.
  20. Yinla Ye Ol' Dragon

    In a lot of the new zones the lighting is horrid and the mist is a pain. I much prefered the original Vellious zone graphics, but the new models were nice, apart from the glowing Othmir.

    The Burning Lands zones were far better with bright but not glaring lighting.

    I'd also like to go back to being able to turn off the fauna.
    Marton likes this.