I only agree with the combat pacing in the original post. Theme park is always a ridiculous criticism to me. There are things to do. I don't see how a bunch of random drops with no indication of what they are for and some of which are for quests that were never implemented or finished was better. It reminds me of how some people complain open world single player games have too many things, or how the collect-a-thon platformers somehow became a criticism when that's the entire point of the genre. Modern travel respects real life time. To younger people when EQ was new taking an hour for a group to get somewhere may have been adventurous, but the player base is older more of which have children and grandchildren many more real world things to care about. It reminds me of how one of my guilds collapsed when all the kids had to go back to school after summer ended. I admit I'm making sweeping assumptions there, which is something I typically criticize. I just think game design that outright ignores finite real world time should stay in the past. EQ combat had issues long before the current state of everything kills almost everyone instantly though. HP pools far outclassed player DPS to the point solo play for many if not most classes wasn't viable for most of the game's history. I don't have a solution. Slower combat will just feel super easy.
All good points, but I think there's more to it than even that. Perhaps for those "pro-travel", they remember things differently than I do. For me, first trip was amazing, seeing the size of the world, and the sights along the way. Second time was pretty cool. By the third or fourth time, I was thankful I'd rolled a druid, and would soon be able to skip the boring trip by porting there instead.
This is because travel is seen as an incovientnt time sink rather than content in itself. For instance on TLPs in early eras where you start is a significant choice. Some people choose somewhere near Commonlands so they have easy access to the center of commerce. Others choose Faydwer for its abundance of early game content as it hosts some of the most popular early game experience areas. Still other may choose Odus or West Antonica for its less competitive and isolated nature. Each area is a different experience with different Monsters, loot, and even class diversity. It adds a ton of replayability to the game. In these eras often servers have a whole chat channel dedicated to finding other for transportation "Taxi" and while it is a small thing it adds a lot of flavor and contributes to the economy. Certain people spend time just traveling around the world helping people get from once place to another. A much more extreme example of this can be found in EVE Online. Travel in this game is quite time consuming and often dangerous. There is an entire guild in the game (Red Frog) and their whole purpose to to take peoples goods from one place to another. These perceived inconvicences are all opportunities for unique forms of content and these unique forms of content bring more people to the game and make it feel more alive. EQ has only catered to a small set of the MMO population by only making content for a very very narrow niche of people which is reflected in its player base. People who want to log on and raid are the only people who not only get new content but any other playstyle has been removed. Think of if in some parallel universe. Had the devs decided to instead of giving us easy to access fast travel they gave certain classes more robust traveling abilities and in turn created zones and a world with treacherous landscapes that needed navigating. These abilities could have been then built into raids. For example wizards could have an abilities that allow them to transport party members to target locations and to protect their party members from dangerous AoE abilities they need to teleport the group to safe locations every so often. Outsourcing these QoL improvements to generic easy assessable systems instead of players not only removes chances for more unique and interesting content but also removes players from your game.
The above sounds fine and dandy until thinking on the fact that sitting around porting people etc for hours is only going to be "fun" for a very niche section of the players. I like how RoF and CotF did it. You have to run on foot at least once.
Because it is an inconvenient time sink. The purpose of EQ (and other MMO's) isn't for players to travel around the world but for them to do quests and slay monsters in areas. People would rather do that then spend valuable game time trying to get from place A to place B yet another time.
Travel used to be content. It used to add to the "danger" and "challenge" of EQ when corpse runs were a thing, and forced you to assess the risk of running content based on the time it would take to get back if something went wrong. Now you respawn with gear and can summon your corpse, the travel aspect doesn't add to that anymore. EQ isn't structured in a way where travel as content makes sense, mostly due to how it's broken up into small zones. I don't mind a griffon ride in wow because it takes like 5 minutes, it's a seamless experience, and you're generally looking at aesthetically pleasing scenery, swooping through towns, it's fairly engaging. Norrath is full of narrow tunnels every mile or so that break up that seamless travel as content experience. Travel in EQ is just a chore and doesn't really add anything as far as content goes. We need less time sinks as content in general.
Corpses runs were not "content" or "challenge" all they did was reduce the amount of risk that players were willing to take. Some players might have gone as far as keeping backup gear to do a corpse run but that didn't add any value to the game either.
I generally agree with you. Maybe content is the wrong word. I do feel like it used to be an integral part of the game's design. I kind of miss the notion of decisions having consequences, but those consequences being just lost time feels kind of shallow at this point.
People losing all their gear and having to gear up isn't just a simple consequence and it is something that makes people take less risks and do less challenging things.
EQ2 has a "Call of the Veteran" which can either call someone to the group or let someone call themselves to a group member with a one hour re-cast and can only be cast when out of combat. It's one of the items in the 6 yr vet reward. It's an item I really wish was in EQ even if it had a 24-hour recast. There have been many times, even now, when we know a member of our regular group will be late (due to real life and time zones) so will chose a location it's easy for them to get to (sometimes with a 2nd account wizard on hand at our PoK meet up spot) after we've started so we both don't have to wait for them and can include them when they're available. I remember back in the day on a non-caster, you had no way to easily get to a safe banking/rest zone. It definitely limited the places you could solo and/or group without a teleporter. With the teeny tiny (by today's standard) inventory space, you ended up leaving most stuff behind because you had no way to carry it with you. Half a session was spent getting to and from where you wanted to actually do stuff. I love exploring and I will do exploring on my own often without any of the fast travel options. But if I am joining a group, I want to have consideration for the time of the people I am going to be with. When I am looking to solo for XP, I don't necessarily want to spend most of my game session time just travelling. Fast travel allows me/us to get there to the spot for the purpose. It's like the difference of taking a meandering trip just to spend time on the journey or taking a direct route to get to the job. You wouldn't "take the scenic route" to work (unless it's not terribly out of the way) especially if you have other things to do before and after.
That is what EQ has become but not what it was founded on. Killing mosters was only part of the game there was a lot of the game that was exploring, talking to NPCs, and learning the stories of the world. Now yes EQ is just kill some stuff for a bit then wait for the devs to make more stuff for us to kill. But this method of creating content requires a lot of effort and as we can see it has diminishing returns. I think it would be good for the game if we began exploring different ways of creating content.
There is a big difference between traveling around the world to explore and traveling around the world in order to do most anything after you have already explored the world.
Several years ago I went and played on a TLP while live was down ( don't recall the reason now ) There is pretty big difference in the feel of the game when you are level 5 and killing a mob takes 4-5 minutes. Its more about resource management and timing. Will I squeak this fight or do I need to run back to the guard. Is that CH going to land or will the tank splat. You have time to actually thing about. In modern EQ its more about making sure I've mashed all my buttons or oops you blinked and now you're dead. Traveling around EQ required you to think more about how to get around. I created a druid specifically for SoW and ports. That has a certain charm/appeal. It doesn't mean I want to go back to waiting 10 minutes for a boat or bugging people to catch a ride.
Several of you commented about my comment about websites back in the day, and I want to clarify what I wanted/meant to say and did so poorly. Yes, there were internet sites out there. And Prima strategy guides (I bought the Kunark one). But maybe I wasn't paying attention to the websites back in the day, but I don't remember an EQ Resource that would have step-by-step of every quest/task an expansion would have on Day 1 of release, coupled with hunter locations and information. I don't remember Day 1 having maps of every new expansion zone complete with collection /loc if you wanted it. Essentially nowadays, everything is 100% hand fed and spoiled for you if you desire. I don't remember that happening with Kunark, Luclin, Velious, Power, etc on Day 1. Am I wrong?
Sadly with static content this is going to be the case. I really dream of playing a truly dynamic game, even better if it's an MMO, at some point. Imagine orcs around Freeport having motivations and building up infrastructure. Imagine NPCs requiring resources, and migrating if there is scarcity. Imagine NPC communities determining that the area they've settled is not safe any more and moving to more and more remote areas. Responding to weather patterns. Player actions influencing weather patterns, resource availability, etc. NPC clans engaging in warfare, dungeons being cleared out and taken over by other NPC types. Getting rid of respawns, what if NPCs reproduced, aged. To get away from everything being known, everything needs to be dynamic and unable to be known. I'd love to play a game like this but the investment and time to make it would be massive. The world would have to be truly massive. The cost of running such a game would be massive with the power needed to effectively run all of those systems. It's bound to happen at some point, and needs to happen to get away from the everything is known, everything is on rails dynamic that you're describing.
What is this rose-tinted nonsense nostalgia? What content are you experiencing waiting on a boat? What content is there to experience in large, empty zones like most of the Karanas? No, no it wasn't. You weren't experiencing anything other than anger or frustration if you died and had to make a corpse run through gigantic zones with no runspeed buffs. There is no content to be had running from Point A to Point B unless you stopped somewhere and actually did something. Timesinks are not content, they are the antithesis of it. I don't know what EQ you were playing, but it wasn't the same one the rest of us were playing. EQ was always about killing stuff, it was the only way to get exp, since quests gave next to no real exp (and those that did were nerfed)
This is just inaccurate. There is many MMOs out right now and some even in development that traveling is a point of content in the game. Its not content in EQ because the path they took made it that way. When you force every player to walk a certain path yes travel is not a great feeling as you are forced to engage in a time sink for no reason, however in other games and in early EQ you are not forced to go to anywhere. You made a choice if waiting for that boat was worth it or if you rather do whatever you needed to do in the region you were in. Regionalism opens a lot of door for interesting gameplay and its something EQ used to have but instead of expanding on it they developed out of existence.
Such as? Pointless 30+ minute boat rides is not the reason people played Everquest. That crap was cool ONCE and never again. What I've never understood about the whole "travel used to mean something" argument is that people act like there was some sort of danger in traveling in most of the world when that just wasn't true. The main part of travel that was dangerous was lack of knowledge; the unknown. Once you learned to always follow the zone walls, travel became infinitely easier and safer. And even then you mostly only needed to be weary if you were lower level. For the most part when you are traveling to a dungeon, the zone outside is a bit lower level than you and could barely pose a threat if it tried. After you learn that hey, there's an evil Troll town over there that wants to kill me, so don't go that way, the potential for danger is extremely low. One of the first things anyone will teach you about EQ is "con" and to "con everything." And doing so completely alters the difficulty of the game. Don't get me wrong, I prefer a dangerous world and EQ's was/is certainly more dangerous than modern games, but I also believe people exaggerate about how dangerous EQ actually was.
As a wizzy I'm thankful they never went down this route. Nothing worse than being pestered every time you log in for a port here or come and pick me in X zone. Players sending you abusive tells when you say no. Worse one I had was someone asking me to port them from about 10 zones away when I was in the middle of a raid. EQ is too big now to not have more convience of travel for everyone. Back in the old days there were far fewer zones and you could almost guarentee you would get a group in a zone which was only a short distance away. But once PoP hits the choice of zones is so massive, I'm not surprised they added some convience. Fast forward to today, many people only have an hour or so to play, why would they want to spend half of that travelling?
