Things Older EQ Did Better

Discussion in 'The Veterans' Lounge' started by Shakara, Jan 28, 2023.

  1. Shakara Augur

    As someone who has played EQ on a TLP from Classic to CoF I have gotten to experience the evolution in a fairly condensed time period and these are some things that I realized aged poorly with time and were more fun in the past.

    1. Fast Travel.
    Fast travel definitely has a place in EQ and back in the day it was mainly gated behind player interaction. Certain classes had abilities to fast travel to certain locations and most classes had the ability to at least fast travel to their bind. In modern EQ not only are there many ways for everyone to acquire fast travel but they are too easily assessible. Not only that but the world is designed in a way to make traveling across the world obsolete. Expansions are unlocked with a hub zone that is connected to all the other zones with similar level content. In Classic-Luclin EQ Content was spread over a much larger area and you were heavily rewarded by interacting with players by getting to your destinations much quicker.

    I think personalized fast travel really needs to be limited more. Having certain classes have it as a utility bonus is a great design but also letting it be part of personal progression. For instance your personal house/guild hall has a limited number of portals it can house that can be attuned to specific locations and once attuned have a significant time before they can be attuned to another location. This attuning can be done by a quest line or grinding faction.

    2. Combat Pacing
    Modern EQs combat pacing is just horrible. Its so bad that it really limits design and warps balance. Mobs do so much damage compared to a players HP that certain abilities and stats are made obsolete. Players do so much damage that mob HP pools have scaled to ridiculous levels. What use are HoT spells if you can go from 100-0 before they even tick once? Not only this but it also contributes to game functionality as there is just too many things happening too quickly for a game built on such old software to compute accurately.

    3. Open World.
    Lets be honest EQ became a theme park MMO. Every xpac since Luclin has had a pretty liner progression path that leads up to a big boss at the end. In moden eq its even more streamlines with a list of missions and quests. In your classic EQ progression was a mix of group and raid content. There were many powerful and iconic items that were completed through group content as well as powerful items only attainable by raiding. Now the modern EQ missions do I feel have a place but it seems to come at the cost of OW content which was a big selling point of EQ.
    Buds and ChiiChii like this.
  2. Fanra https://everquest.fanra.info

    Fast Travel - Spending 20 minutes just getting to the place you want to play in is not fun. I don't understand how anyone could feel it is.
  3. CatsPaws No response to your post cause your on ignore

    Sounds to me like a lot of good endorsements for playing on TLP.

    Not sure where this is going
  4. Nennius Curmudgeon

    When I first started playing EQ the long travel times added to a sense of bigness for me. It made the gaming world seem more like a real world. I actually enjoyed the fact that I wanted to plan ahead for the next evenings battles. It was a selling point for me.

    But now...I would absolutely hate it. I have changed and the EQ world has changed. I don't have as much time to play. I am also a bit more impatient. So, I think the EQ world has largely changed for the better. Not wild about boxing armies, but I digress.

    Change is good.

    P.S. Corpse runs sucked.
    code-zero, Skuz, Yinla and 2 others like this.
  5. Shakara Augur

    Travel for many games especially open world games is a feature. Typically in RPGs you travel to a location of content and spend a few day, weeks, or even months in that location. Then when you have achieved your goals you travel to the next location. Traveling to the next location may cause you to encounter dangers and its its own little adventure on planning your path and preparing for the upcoming obstacles. I have many memories in games where there was the intense dash through enemy territory or the nerve wracking feeling of being in constant danger. Then the relief and feeling of accomplishment of getting to my destination. A great many games take advantage of this feature and it is content for the game all by itself.
    Annastasya likes this.
  6. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Travel in a solo RPG is different then travel in multiplayer RPG. It never is fun having to spend time traveling or waiting as people travel to get things done only to have people need to leave shortly after you start.
    Sivispacem, Shanarias, Skuz and 6 others like this.
  7. Shakara Augur

    I think these are features that should be brought back. These were good features that were lost over the years
  8. Shakara Augur

    I do not think that is true in general but it may be the case for EQ. Perhaps EQ doesn't have the population destiny to have a "large world" but plenty of multiplayer games have large worlds where traveling quickly to locations is not easy.
  9. KushallaFV Playing EverQuest

    People can only handle so many repeated runs to groups that fall apart by the time they get there or breaking up a group because the closest person is 30 minutes away.
    Duder, code-zero, Skuz and 7 others like this.
  10. Shakara Augur

    I think that is much less of a problem in modern EQ than in old EQ. You do not need a full group of players to clear content and with mercs you can be much more flexible with your group makeup.
  11. Rijacki Just a rare RPer on FV and Oakwynd

    Back when I was first playing in the early 2000s, I lived on the west coast and most of the people I knew lived on the east. By the time I got home, I didn't have 20+ minutes to travel to the place the others had gone. They didn't have time to wait for me (i.e. their play time was limited by the need to get up in the morning for work). Many times my only option was to solo because of the travel restrictions. (I have a social anxiety that generally makes pick up groups not an option for me.) When I ran out of places I could "safely" solo (as in not be dead more than alive to the point the XP bar would be going in the wrong direction every night), I got my 2nd account to make a wizard. Without the wizard, I would have quit.
    Banhammer likes this.
  12. Tyranthraxus Grognard

    Of course you want to eliminate fast travel Shak you play a bard!

    Tbh though, I totally agree with you. Fast travel is an unfortunate part of the game in it's current state. For me the world loses the feeling that it is one, about the time pok pops into existance. After than it become a sequence of ever more increasingly convenient instances. A few later expansions give a small taste of the feeling that the world exists. But at no point after luclin do you feel the fear that if you die in the bottom of a dungeon, your done for the next hour, cause it will take you that long to get back. Yeah it sucks, it's inconvenient, but thats what made it good.

    I'm enjoying CoF too, this is the farthest into "modern eq" I've played (mangler). I didn't want to play catchup on a live server when I came back from a 10 year quit. So I chose to ride a tlp to live. But while the contents still engaging, and challenging, it always feels like there's something missing that oldschool had.

    Thankfully CoF is actually entertaining me, as the last few expansions, HoT through RoF were hot garbage imo, and had me seriously considering a reroll late on a diff tlp.

    In summary, yeah, it's a theme park. I wish it wasn't, but there's so much content now I don't think there's a way back.
  13. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    And many of them also have ways to get around faster that does not depend on a couple of classes helping everyone else out. WoW is a good example in having a large world but also being able to instantly travel anywhere in the game to join up with a group or raid.
  14. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    That doesn't change the fact that people don't want to have long waits for players to show up especially when it means having to repeat things for quests.
    Skuz, Svann2 and Rijacki like this.
  15. Shakara Augur

    I agree and it makes sense to have systems in the game to make it easy to group with others, however I think there is missed opportunity in just allowing players instantly travel to the corners of the earth. Fast travel as a concept is not bad I just feel its in overabundance. Things like Fellowship campfires for instance make a lot of sense as you can quickly bring friends to a location and begin an adventure. PoK books on the other hand just cheapen the world and removes opportunity for interesting content.
  16. Svann2 The Magnificent

    Original EQ was a much smaller world so limited fast travel made sense.
    Imagine having to take the boat to get to Luclin!
    Skuz and Tatanka like this.
  17. Waring_McMarrin Augur

    Being able to get to a group faster to join your friends and possibly meet new people is a bad thing? Having to spend chunks (possibly large chunks) of time just traveling and not actually playing the game is a good thing? I am all for world exploration in games but not at the expense of being able to join others in a timely manner so you can experience the main parts of the game and traveling is not a main focus of the game.
    Sivispacem likes this.
  18. Svann2 The Magnificent

    Traveling the roads seeing the sights is a solo game.
    Its not that interesting while in a group or traveling to the group.
    code-zero, Skuz and Rijacki like this.
  19. Ravanta Suffer Augur





    Bro, you play elf_sim_103? We should totally play together, that would be awesome. I'm in Mordor, let me know when you're on next!

    I'm in Kala`dune. Sorry. Maybe in a few months?
  20. Hdizzle Augur


    1 and 3 are the same thing kinda in your description. In classic, you have planes with gods, dragons, a sea horse! and none are really connected. I get it.

    You have a 4 hour raid time and 45 mins is spent gathering for ports, so and so's gate collapsed, Joe the solo paladin doesn't know how ctrl+find works and never used an AOC before.

    That's not the game at lvl 120. I want to raid for 4 hours of the 4 hours of raid time. Because i'm old now, thats all the time I have! Lol.

    2. I don't mind the combat. But I box with raid gear and AA's.