Do you guys actually play with new character models on?

I like both in their own way, and honestly I switch between them randomly. Right now my main PC has Luclin models on and my 2nd PC has old models. IM about to change to Old models on main again but will switch it back sometime in later xpacs.

I dunno, I appreciate them both to be honest.

That's a stretch. If asking the P99 crowd then yes, definitely. I think live servers prefer Luclin and TLPs might be more balanced, but even then more seem to prefer Luclin there too. If polls were accurate I'd love to see the results.

Consider the source. Dude just spews out the mouth on every topic.

I'd imagine Luclin models are overwhelming more popular across the board. Take a stroll around live servers or late TLPs and observe how many people enjoy dressing their character up. Original models are mostly a TLP thing.

My point (for the third time) is simply because it's in the INI file doesn't mean it was implemented in the EQ code exactly as the OS would. How can you not understand that? You are saying, "It's in the INI file and INI files are used for configuration so it must work" like it's magic or something.

Yeah it's not at all based on these forums, Discord, in-game channels, streams, videos, or this very thread.

If you need me to apologize for honoring facts over opinions, just say so.

They used the old non-GaaS software development studio strategy of ploughing most of the money from their hit game (EQ) to attempt to make their next big hit, had they siphoned off a lot less to finance all of the failed attempts then EQ could have kept pace for sure, up until 2004 they upgraded the engine every 1-1.5 years. That said there were a couple of minor hits (Free Realms had 14 million players at one point, EQOA had a small but devoted following, EQ2 was not as successful as it could have been without some massive competition), but there were a lot of failed projects, The Agency alongside a bunch of unannounced stuff.

Debatable, EQ has a very large "Lapsed player" pool it could appeal to with some big updates.

I disagree and EQ / EQ2 revamps are already in the planning stages going from what the CEO has said about them and what has turned up in the investor presentations, EG7 seem very keen to bring them up to date to make them fitter for long term success.

I didn't like it either, the only real reason to do stylized graphics is if you plan on doing next to no updating of them, stylized has a longer shelf life than the "quasi-realistic" style EQ/EQ2 has used, and I prefer the latter for EQ as it's more on brand, the stylized look has to be unique and EQNext was straight up borrowed/copied and looked way too generic for my tastes, if EQ goes stylized I think it needs something a lot more unique/radical in its art direction to stand out from the big bunch of cartoony MMO that are already out there.

It made perfect sense for realising a fully destructible environment and multiple geological layers with mineable terrain, the main issue EQ ran into with it was the pathing system was not up to navigating a terrain that could change on the fly, they needed a more intelligent adaptive pathing system and nobody had the tech for that and the coders had not been able to invent something that worked.
They had a way to select some voxel to not be destructible and path with those as "waypoints" but the inbetween destructible parts caused a lot of problems.

Mob behavioural AI, alongside better combat AI is certainly an area of development that is likely to have a lot of rewards in terms of creating interesting situations and outcomes, EQN had some very cool plans for that.

I just cannot see that ever happening.

The unannounced MMO is being developed by Dimensional Ink Games, it will use the Marvel IP which Daybreak already hold a license for.

A new EQ is not in production, there were conversations about what a new game in the franchise would be and some planning around what they would like to see in the game but not much else.
A new EQ is at least 7-10 years away I reckon.

They couldn't get us to leave EQ1 for EQ2, how would they get us to leave EQ1 and EQ2 for EQ3?

Making a new MMO is the one thing the MMO industry now knows is the worst option. Maybe that will change in time, but right now it's a guaranteed failure.

I wouldn't go as far as saying a guaranteed failure, certainly its a huge risk though.

Yeah, maybe I should have qualified it as "nearly guaranteed." Even when they do succeed, that success isn't the same as when EQ or WoW launched though. So it's higher risk and lower reward than what it would have been in the past. MMO's have been failing heavily for a long time now. EVE Online and the FF MMO's are the main ones to have broken loose and succeeded post EQ/WoW. So many since then have failed, and no new ones have really taken the crown. WoW checks too many boxes for too many people, and anything that is niche enough to be different is too obscure to get much attention.

I think WoW and possibly even EQ would need to die off before the MMO cycle could start again. It's possible that a move to VR could open up a lane in the MMO space that isn't currently occupied though.

Free Realms was a newer generation of tech than any of the other examples you mentioned. It was built using the cross-platform engine SOE licensed from another division of Sony right around when the PS3 was introduced. It's the same engine that was used for DCUO and Planetside 2, both of which are still with us.

I think VR is still a fad myself. Very few Killer apps & the control scheme for an MMO to work in VR would need to be either very basic or work completely differently to what we are familiar with (centred around gesture recognition perhaps), an ARPG I could see working in VR really well though.

WoW, FFXI & FFXIV - even ESO are fairly formulaic MMORPGs they borrow a lot from EQ's basics mechanically, and they are doing pretty solid numbers, FFXIV is even growing.
EQNext was aiming to raise the bar by a whole lot, and maybe was too ambitious in trying to do that at the time but maybe a few years from now it could be ressurected in some form if some of the roadblocks were found solutions for.

Daybreak pulling a hit out of the bag unexpectedly is not impossible, they've done it before a few times.
The biggest thing EQ could do to draw players in would be a solo path though, done right it would open up the game to a way bigger audience, but I would do that after a graphics & UI overhaul.

Unlike hardware limitations that limit how detailed the characters are, the animations however seems to be simply a reflection of the skill of the animation / motion capture team.

This is from an MMO from 11 years ago, that's a pretty low polygon model, but the animations are crazy good, even by today's standards.

You’ve literally manually chosen a new model for your avatar on this forum. Odds that you found it aesthetically pleasing.

Single player MMO's like this is are a terrible example, maybe that's a bad capture used as a GIF but the frame skipping / FPS lag on it is pretty horrendous for so few models on screen.

Your target audience is bias in every single one, notably tilting toward p99/TLP mindset. A vast majority of my live guild is new models, without question. Most people I see on Cazic are using ornaments so they for sure are on new models.

rofl what. Yeah man, no one on Live streams or makes videos, or talks in the Veteran's Lounge on Forums/Discord. Or plays TLP.

Yet here you are.

Don't underestimate VR, its failure to take over is not due to a lack of feasibility or interest, it is purely a problem of cost. VR will take over the moment it's affordable by the average person. Control schemes will adapt, game mechanics will adapt. The system will change to follow the new technology. Part of the problem is that innovative things like the controllers that come with the Valve Index are still on the high end of cost for VR. So even if an Oculus Rift gets as low as $100, the control schemes will have trouble adapting without better options being more affordable.

Voice commands could help with that, and I bet we will see that to some degree. There will certainly be things we didn't expect that will come into existence to support the move to VR gaming. As time passes and the possession of these devices becomes more ubiquitous, games will find a way to migrate to them. Combat will certainly become more interactive, as that is an easy incentive for moving to the platform. I mean at this point I would buy one just for Beat Saber, that game is really fun. Now imagine fighting like that in an MMORPG, and healing or casting spells using arm and hand movements. It will be like a computer assisted LARP session. I'm excited at the prospect of it developing that way.

Before you start rofling, you need to learn to read and comprehend. I never said nobody on live does those. I'm stating a vast majority of what you find in those environments are P99 and TLP. For example, my live guild literally just migrated from TS to Discord this year. And we aren't some no-name guild. We are consistently competing as a top 5 serverwide guild.

Twitch? Heavily tilts towards P99/TLP from what I see in terms of streamers. I only find a few live streamers and only when they are raiding. Most of which either have char models completely off, as sticks, or luclin.

Veteran's Forums posts regarding this were 50/50 at best. You're sitting here talking on a TLP thread. Most of the people probably didn't even play much further than the original luclin graphics release. What do you honestly expect their answers to be? I'll clue you in: Not luclin graphics.

"Tilting toward X mindset" doesn't mean the other mindset is completely nonexistent. Keep pushing that narrative though, let's see how far it takes you. You're sitting in an echo chamber and wondering why all you hear are people agreeing with you and old models.

Well when the population of Live is so much lower than TLP, you're obviously not going to see as much dialogue from that community, whether it's the forums, the Discord, or anywhere else. Though your guild's inability to switch to a vastly superior communication platform says a lot about why they still play Live.

Nostalgia plays a big factor in why people do the things they do. Live players don't have nostalgia for classic models, and I'm willing to bet a great deal of them don't even know they exist.

Iksar Luclin models are by far the best upgrade from the original models. Best animations in my opinion as well.