So the other thread was closed cause it went way off-topic, but i think this is an interesting topic that doesn't concern only today's EQ but many mmorpgs in general. I'd just like to ask everyone to not go into "personal mode" this time, before we start... ...okay, so what comes to my mind first: a moving world that felt dangerous at times. Or actually, very often. Why...well for starters we had so-called sweeper mobs. Roaming nasties like Griffins, Hill Giants, unicorns (Lfay...), Kithicor is what i remember currently. When those guys did hit you as lower level player, you died. So you very often watched your back and surroundings. You also lost your stuff and corpse run it was if things went wrong, so you really didn't want to die in the wrong place. This was realistic. It created a feeling of being a small fish in a big pond, and that you are not invincible no matter how skilled or good you are. You entered their world...not the other way round. This leads us to point #2: Companions were always useful and welcome. Back then classes had unique strengths, like Necros and SKs can help you recover corpses. Druids and Shams made you run faster. Also ports, real tanks needed and so on. This made the whole community very important to you and everybody, man i remember how easy it was to find friends in EQ back then. My point #3 would be: real faction system, and how it adds to a living world. I often see threads where things like "how many starting cities does a game need?" are discussed. Well, maybe Eq had more than actually needed or maybe it was just right. But what i do know, places where races "come from" add to a deeper atmo just cause they exist. This was also very much connected to the feeling of danger you had when you travelled to the opposite faction of good or evil. Just being here and there was sometimes an adventure, and neither loot or exp were always on your mind. Of course there was also places to explore and venture deep into. Dungeons like Chardok, Velk and Sebilis (yep i think when Eq really became great was with the addition of Kunark and Velious). First you travelled there, often already exited especially if it was with "your" group of peeps, and then it was crunch time. I actually wanted to avoid comparison to the current game, but i cannot resist saying that porting from GH and then hailing a NPC is simply not the same thing for me. I think that's enough from me for now...but yeah, raids (which seems to be the major topic nowadays) mattered very little to us back then, in what made EQ great to play daily.
I think this is one thing everquest definitely seems to have lost. The game while it has a ton of zones feels pretty small. I can click here there or everywhere on my screen and be in just about any zone in a matter of minutes sometimes seconds. The game just felt bigger back in the day and people might say well we don't have time anymore to making big trips to places or this or that. I would say that there is a lot of complaining of having nothing left to do as everything is farmed out, quests finished.
I think one of the things that made it so great for me was that the answers weren't available at the tip of my fingers via a quick google search or known websites. Not that I'm complaining, but it did sort of change it too. That meant rumours, hearsay, and put simply a community. The closest thing we had recently was the epic 1.5 and epic 2.0 quests that were unsolved for a while, with the community as a whole running around trying to unravel them and figure it all out. You really do feel then that it's us against the game. It's not something you can rewind though. TLP even if it was identical game to the original EQ still wouldn't feel the same. There's also the point that back then I had plenty of free time, as did most EQ players I guess - we're all older and *on average* I predict with more committments now than before, or at least less patience
Faction was nice, and reached a peak IMO in Velious. It's incredible to think now that someone would design a game where the quest NPCs are also raid bosses and the NPCs actually want each other killed. (Ie dwarf, giant, dragon.) What if your quest NPC is down? Tough! That's just the way it is - someone else playing the game has a direct impact on you. People can't stomach such things now and demand it all to be instanced, eg see the long rants on TLP about instancing all the old encounters because actually when it comes down to it nostalgia isn't as good as they think it is. I can see the benefits to instancing for sure, but somewhere along the line you lose that feeling of being in a living, breathing world and transition over into a personal sandbox. If there was more dev time I'd love to see a combination of things, eg like in SoF, where there are instanced progression raids (meaning you can't get blocked deliberately by other guilds) plus a handful of contested non-instanced raids. Add in some quests and factioning that MEANS something other than just a grind-grind-grind until you're done - ie choosing sides - then you have some of the old spirit while retaining the modern game.
The size and scope of norrath was a huge reason (pardon the pun) that eq was great. I remember being asked what I was going to do one night, I answered "I think we're gonna try to get to loio." Travel was truly a journey, even with the help of a porter in most cases. I'm willing to bet that more than one dev regrets pok stones (I know atleast one does).
Lemme restate the obvious, except for DooM-like clones (and they were nearly pure shooters) EQ was the first first person 3D multi-player game for most of us. That was the initial draw but for many of us that alone wasn't enough to keep us beyond a month or two. It also had noobie quests in your home city. These helped to introduce you to other facets of the game, gave your race a different flavor from someone playing the same class starting elsewhere, and made your starting city a familiar "home". But by the time I finished the noobie quests I felt that I needed more than grinding group mobs and turning in Orc Belts instead of bringing lunch to a guard. Yes, sweepers made things interesting and so did camping a named mob, but nothing really got my blood pumping anymore - I thought I had seen it all. Then I attended a raid! WOW!! It's all anybody talked about. When can we do another? I've got to get that armor!! I was SO scared!!! The group game felt like I was in a street crew that was mugging the locals. Raiding was going to war with an army. Loooong runs - a negative. Corpses rotting along with gear - a negative Paying a taxi or playing one - a negative Group grind - a negative. Been there done that (too much). Until raids came along EQ seemed like a glorified chat room to me and frankly I just wanted to have fun rather than talk about having fun. After my first raid I went from seriously considering dropping the game to hooked. Increased server stability, cable instead of dial up, porting instead of running or taking the boat, an end to corpses rotting, and raids, raids, and more raids making the boring group game sufferable while waiting for the next raid told me EQ had a future measured in years and not months. And so it has.
Lets see what do I think made EQ great. -You need to group, but with the slower pace of the game it allowed you to make friends. This made your rep important and if it wad good you got groups faster. - Big World feeling. When I first rolled my Paladin in G Fay Free Port was a long way away and Qeynos was an Epic adventure. Heck the first time I went to FP I got a group real quick and they told me to come to the Hidden Inn which I had no clue where that was. When I got to the group they were shocked to see a High Elf since I was the first they had ever grouped with. -You didn't want to die. I know this sounds strange but when you are afraid to die it puts some excitement into the game, and when you succeed its even better. -Classes covered different areas and could really help each other out. By this I mean things like how a Necro will trade Health for mana and just loves a regen. Now of course any of these taken to extremes suck so you have to be careful.
Yeah i agree, raiding was the perfect next step. However, today it's not much more than a chat room for ~54 ppl either. I stil have nightmares with cloaked figures telling me "ARX it is, move out!"
Back in 1999, EQ was really the only huge MMORPG around so people had no choice but to play it. That was the only big advantage the game had at the time. A lot of the things people that loved classic see as a great things, corpse runs, running around for hours, no maps, horrible UI, are things that would not have been tolerated even back then if there was any competition at all. There are plenty of things that I like about old EQ though and I will list a few of them. 1. No mercs- I dislike mercs and prefer real people. Also it made it easy to solo all content and that is not part of the original vision of the game at all. 2. Reputation and community- Way back when I started playing reputation mattered. You could not solo everything with boxing and mercs. You needed to be in a group and know your role or you would get blacklisted. None of that exists today at all. We had the best community ever and now its just raid raid raid with your guild. 3. LFG tool- we had the first good LFG tool. It's not used today but it was years ago and it was really amazing and easy to find groups. WoW pretty much copied and pasted ours when they developed that game. 4. LDoNs- These were awesome. You got to see who the good players were by the window showing how many wins each player had. They were very dangerous. One bad pull or 1 running mob = a wipe usually. You needed a puller unlike today where anyone can single pull. The timer was the best part made it very fun and interesting. 5. Sweeper mobs- These were fun mobs were usually killable by about 3 groups to a raid depending on what classes you could muster up and gear. They made the game more dangerous which was a good thing. 6. Challenging raids- Raids used to be a grand challenge that only the most uber all of guilds could do, let alone beat the whole expansion. Now everyone that can field 54 people can raid and beat all content. It used to be a grand sense of accomplishment to win raid and get rare gear most cannot attain, but now it's just a yawn because everyone has it that can raid.
Everyone seems to have their own opinions it. For myself I loved it until Luclin. Won't go into the why of each thing. I loved because of: Felt like I was exploring a world. Corpse runs Boats Raid Wipes Community Reputation Fighting groups of mobs at a time with the possibility of surviving. Freeport market Danger of losing what you achieved (exp, gear) Factions Slower leveling process As a caster having to look at spell book in the beginning and having to listen if something was sneaking up. Down times in a group for medding and chatting. Sweepers in zones. Basically everything before Luclin. That is what made EQ great to me. D&D imagination right in front of my eyes. Others don't like a lot of those things but I did. Oh and last of all classes standing out for uniqueness. That all started to disappear for me at Luclin. Raids of now are more enjoyable and favorite still is King Odeen raid but I know I'm in the minority of that one.
A dev might have referred to these as sweeper mobs. I've always called them roaming nuisance mobs, a sub-category of the more challenging mobs in a zone that require special handing. They are mobs that are more difficult than other mobs in the area (usually because they were more resilient and hit harder) and roam. Therefor they can surprise a puller (or group depending on where they choose to fight) who might be trying to avoid them if possible. "Roaming nasties like Griffins, Hill Giants, unicorns (Lfay...), Kithicor is what i remember currently. When those guys did hit you as lower level player, you died." Others include Ravishing Drovarg, Jord Kreiger, ...
the uniqueness of eq to me starts with the feeling you're in an immense world. (port stones make the world feel smaller) ...suggestion... what if an expansion had a storyline in which a great deal of the POK stones broke? heck, there could be serverwide quests to reopen a few of them. it would be fun to make friends with a wizzi or druid and be able to booty-call them for a port other games that did/do this well: ff11 and eve the next unique part of eq was, and still is, diversity of classes. i think they are still doing well with this. in (the mmo that rhymes with cow) a healer is a healer, a dd is a dd and aa tank is a tank. multiple classes can give a group the same buffs. in eq each class is unique. other games that did/do this well: LotRO next, EQ was special to me in that it took a lot of effort (from a lot of people) to do some things. epic quests for example... still my favorite moment in any pve game was getting spear of fate done. suggestion: more long quests that take a while to solve and at least a group or 3 to finish. the longer and more convoluted the better! and what a great vehicle to introduce the game's lore. other games that did/do this well: swg, lineage 2, eve can eq make changes in future content to bring back the old magic (well, bring back mre of it; some never left)? in the words of mark thompson, hell to the yes!
I've got to reiterate that this game would be 10x better if there were audible fart animations that you could not turn off, once every 3 minute for all classes, except half that time for high elves and erudites. This is free money that you guys are turning away by not doing this. Imagine you are raiding Arx, it's a full raid so that's 54 people farting once every 3 minutes. On average, every 3.333 repeating (of course) seconds, someone farts. On paper it sounds mundane, but the magic can only happen when you make it real! If you can imagine this; if you truly have any imagination at all, you'll know for a fact that you have to do this. I ask you devs, do you have any imagination at all?! -Keep in mind that a fart from someone wearing plate would sound different than that of chain, leather, or cloth. The acoustics vary drastically and this should be reflected. When that level of detail is used to increase the realism, the comedic effect skyrockets. -Vary the duration of the fart reasonably so it's not just one boring sound file played over and over. Make it a bit random without ruining the overall mood. -When two people fart at the same time, which there will need to be a check for, make sure it is two separate notes of fart. This massively increases how funny it is. Trust me. -Ideally, you could make it so that the farts do different notes in an order that plays a classic song. Imagine your sense of accomplishment when you realize that your raid force is farting out "Electric Avenue", and explaining to people "See listen We're(fart)... go(fart)...na(fart) walk(fart)... down(fart)...and then we take it higher!" You'll be the coolest guy in your guild in no time. -Corpses would let out a much sadder, longer death fart. This still happens every 3 seconds or so, and it helps clerics to know that they need a rez. -Don't make any other noises to try to explain the farts, like they have stomach aches or something. It's got to just be farts. Completely unexplained farts. Don't ruin my creative vision with anything less. You don't have to thank me Daybreak, just tell me the check's in the mail for making your company better than you ever thought possible.
Hm, could make some GINA triggers to do this pretty easily. Even using a few different sounds by including the last letter of the slain character's name in the search string. I think I could provide the triggers, but you'd have to provide your own fart sounds.
Farts are funny because you can't control them. If you give it an on off switch it's only about 8% of what it could be. Also if I do it on my end, it's not the same. Half of the comedy value comes directly from daybreak doing this as a design decision. I have faith in you daybreak, and in the expert farters that I know you retain under your employ. Together, we can have people laughing and saying "God ****it Reval" across all of the servers. This will increase revenue.
I'm not entirely convinced that reintroducing ODIUS features that were in earlier EQ and thankfully fixed like: Running for hours to get somewhere/boats (before the first expansion a dev wrote they they intended to add more mounts to shrink an already too large world) Corpse runs/corpse rotting/loss of gear A slow leveling grind instead of experience happening naturally while you enjoyed a rich variety of adventures. 15-20 minutes of medding between named mob engagements or after a res. would "make EQ ". Nor ODOROUS suggestions. But there has got to be some value in noting that there is no "everybody agrees" opinion. on what makes a game great. And that EQ contains enough stuff that people like and doesn't include too much stuff they hate that it's been around for 16 years.
I didn't mind travelling in early Eq. Let's say i am a Darkelf and want to "visit" treehugger central for whatever evil reasons ^^ , i totally expect a not so easy journey. Especially in early levels, and if i'm going alone. But the game offered a fair amount of help, like runspeed buffs and ports. So i have to ask someone if i want a shortcut? Great, it's why i play online with others. Same goes for "slow leveling grind", this can be looked at in many different ways. Some will say "cool, i can expect this game to really last a while". Some will not look at their xp bar much, and just take what they get while doing what they want. And some will grind away. But nobody forces you to play just for character progression. I think if the world would have been smaller, and if there were all these shortcuts we have now, and if leveling would have been quicker, and if there were no real penalties for messing up aka dying, it would not have been this succesful. Now i dislike taking TLP as example because DBG is doing important things wrong there (so far), but the sheer amount of people interested tells me that i'm not alone in thinking "things used to be more unique in EQ". Notice i avoid saying better, just unique.
