What EQNEXT should have looked like

So many strawmen in your post you must be a farmer. Basically your rant is wrong. Yes I can get a comp today that can run skyrim in high graphics mode for under 1k. But why? Skyrim is awesome in average graphics and lets face it the current EQN graphics scale to about Saturday morning CARTOON graphics. There is plenty of room to improve the realism "stylistically." Also the gameplay with 8 skills is way less complicted and way more mechanics limiting than nearly any of the current MMO gaming mechanics. This imo takes EQN a step BACKWARDS in gameplay, not forward.

The game appears designed to grab a younger less sophisticated audiance, using appealing demographic imagery and simplified controls, and trap them in a mirco transaction gameplay mode similiar to what you see on ipads and smartphones.

SMURFBERRIES!

If anyone got that reference, good for you.

Not my fault that SOE want's to censor my words, and your reasoning for bringing it up contributes what to the conversation?

No you can not play Skyrim on a $400 computer, it's just NOT going to happen. Sorry as much as you want to sit here and try to tell me that it is fully possible, it's not. To build a PC capable of playing that game where it looks good enough and doesn't get slowed down due to FPS takes a $900 or more computer. Even when I had a friend of mine help me try to build a cheap PC that would run Skyrim the price range we came up with was $900 to $1,300 and he works at Microsoft.

Secondly you said nothing different about the skills then I did. I said I am more concerned about how they are dumbing the game down with those features, and yet everyone here is worried about flipping graphics. Minecraft made BANK on it's game with its horrible graphics, so lets all get off our high horses and worry about things that really matter, like how they removed classes from the game and dumbed the mechanics of it down.

Minecraft offered a unique adventure/crafting system where the only real limitation was a players creativity. With the number of mods for it the possibilities are even bigger.

EQN currently has one big thing going for it in my view from a design standpoint: Dynamic World.
What I mean by this is that enemy placement, action and to an extent the world itself such as city locations, camp locations, types of quests and the landscape are all based on player action meaning the world really will be ever-changing. Say a "kunark like" area exists, well that area may be totally different in two years from it's addition to EQN. This is an amazing concept if they actually pull it off it will be a form of "new ground" in the MMO market, something that has been needed for quite some time.

Sadly I hear and read on the EQN Forums that people are just crying for more of the same content wise. I don't agree with their removal of the Trinity Class System, however you can build a game where players may choose to build into a Trinity Roll or to build outside of it. This is something they have not done. The big issue is they have followed GW2 for combat design, many who I know/talk to who have now quit GW2 since it came out all said it was due to lackluster combat at Endgame, which didn't exist. You could get the best gear by showing up to a world event and doing nothing.

EQN's current combat system if indeed they have remained steadfast on 4 Weapon Skills and 4 Class Skills is blindingly restrictive. David Georgenson even said at SOE Live that they wanted to add 70+ Classes to the game to allow players full customization of their experience. This is good in theory but without the availability we cannot customize it. There should not be enough skill slots to allow people to basically be 9 classes at once all mashed together. However we should have the ability to "cross-class" as it were. David also wanted players to not be watching spell timers all the time, which is true of most DPS Classes in Everquest 2. Tanks not so much since their roll is hyper-proactive instead of reactive.

As it were, Everquest Next probably would to well to have 16-24 Abilities. They probably went the restricted route to make each class more defined but I do worry that there as usual will be an "Alpha Warrior" and "Alpha Mage" build of multiple classes and not much else. Which will lead to swathes of class acquisition content being not used down the road. Limited Customization is good when you have a lot of options, Restricted Customization is bad.

That's what I mean. I think the dynamic world will be really fun but it sucks that they will take this game further from EQ then EQ2 did. If EQN manages to become the next best MMO out there, we will love it despite the graphics. I however doubt EQN is going to be the next best MMO.

It's not supposed to be the next Everquest 2 or Everquest. It's supposed to be it's own vision of Norrath that is similar but different. It's supposed to have things that trigger nostalgia in old players and excite new players. I frankly want them to keep to that. If they are going to go a different direction then stick to it.

As I said, my worry is the Combat will become very "samey" quickly due to restricted ability choice. Tera Rising, Aion and a few other Korean based MMO's have proven multiple times that Action Oriented Combat with a bit of Trinity Classingcan be done with 1 or 3 hotbars and you don't really need any more than that.

I dont get the comptuer power = how real it looks talk.

Actually Cartoon shading effects and voxels need more GPU processing power

Rendering with the toon effects in maya kicks my pc *** than it does with the HDRI lighting file or a standard game quality non ray trace lighting.

Benchmarking with toon effects in real time kicks my geforce titan *** more than most other shaders and lighting.

There are many extra rendering passes to detect edges and things that is why everquest next dont use it and went with watercolor texture and standard lighting. how real something looks is not really an issue you can have someting look like a fake drawing and cripple a PC.

most renderings from computer animated films that would be disney like such as Bolt would take hours or maybe even days for your standard decent crysis 3 running PC even in GPU powered IRAY it would take minutes or an hour..

I would love to play this game! I'd even upgrade my computer for it. I hadn't seen that video in ages and I still love it and remember exactly how it ended. The current EQN character style is well done for the style it is, but I'm mystified at the design choice for an adult game. On the bright side, I recently saw the Iksar character concept art and I thought it looked really good.

i agree with you for the most part. however, one of the big stumbling blocks for games that use real skill trees (SWG for instance), is balance. there is no reasonable way they could predict all of the various combinations of skills/abilities unless they limited the number of shared skills to a very small set.

even then, i think you are right that it will still be possible for someone to figure out an alpha build. but for the devs to fix it they only have to deal with 4 class skills and 4 weapon skills. that's quite a bit less than say Darkfall, SWG, or others.

Agreed. I still personally as a player and designer prefer more options but having more "flavor" to them. Anyone can make a spin-slash for example however various classes may do it differently with minimal differences. The goal of that style of approach is to offer customization that doesn't weaken the player for really doing so.

Take the Armor System in Dark Souls for example, while I am aware the games are massively different there is something to be learned here. Armor unless it has a stat called "Poise" is largely irrelevant. Even those that do have weakness, high poise armor is heavy and thus the player is slow. A fast player may exploit this weakness. The thing is it doesn't really matter if I am wearing Giants Armor or Stone Guardian Armor or even Black Iron Armor. All sets have minor bonuses but they are all "Heavy Armor" so I can freely mix these armor's for the look I want without worry that my customization will "weaken" my character.

Going back to EQN with this analogy, while they are very restricted in abilities if they make them unique across various classes it won't seem so restrictive. The drawback of this approach that I can see is such a system requires more Animation and Art Asset Generation than the path of reusing as many animations/particles as one can to make more content at the expense of more unique content. It's a quality v quantity thing when looking at it in that form.

I am still trying to figure out how anything that looks like a animated cartoon is automatic not for adults as some of these post say. I have seen plenty of things that looks like a cartoon made for adults.






(also all those other so called "real games" are quite cartoon like nobody real has skin face or a body like that" no game ever has unless it is objects that can follow light and psychics science AKA project cars.)

So what you are at basic asking for is you want it to be another style of animate....I mean cartoon?

They stop being cartoons when you can no longer tell it is not a real human and or a real creature on the screen and it looks like live action footage. No game has done it.

and it's one reason i hope they include not only useful skills with a class twist to them. but i also hope they create some fun types of spells, or spells that are unique to a class.

of course the problem with that is, who's going to use up one of the 4 class slots for something like that.

it's one of the really big drawbacks of a limited character skill implementation as well. everything becomes a utility and the world is not fun with only utilities.

this is something else i have had issues with and wasn't quite sure how to approach. in stating that 'cartoons' are only for kids there lie a number of problems.

1. there are plenty of cartoons that are not meant for children at all.

2. you are excluding an entire genre on the supposition that anything to do with children is not for adults. (Hayao Miazaki anyone?)

3. finally, in a sense it's a strawman argument: in that you aren't arguing the real virtues or drawbacks for the art, and in direct relationship, the technology involved. instead you are attacking it for being childish. that's not a real argument, especially in aesthetics.

Very much agreed. That's why I keep repeating that there should be more ability slots but not so many that players will quite literally be able to do everything. When your too limited one of two things happens in my experience:
- Everyone builds the same because it's the "best" for what they do. This happened in Warframe before the damage system was completely redone. Now all weapons are viable but building them is not so easy to see.
- A guild takes the time to coordinate who does what, this can lead to very powerful players who rely on the others... the problem is the removal of the Trinity hints at this being somewhat impossible.

Other games that are Action MMO's with "tanks" pretty much just have the tank as the person who can soak the most damage while dealing damage, tradeoff being they don't deal as much damage but they have a very small selection of abilities that force the enemy to target them for 1-4 seconds maximum and they have 30 second or more cooldowns. This is to prevent chain-locking even with 4 "Tanks"

I don't care how wonderful the game play is - if my character looks like a Disney cartoon, I'm not playing it. Yes, there are plenty of adult cartoons out there - South Park, Futurama, etc - but that does NOT mean I want my character to look like one.

/shrug

Then don't. Expecting them to scrap everything* again at this point isn't really reasonable. Just realize that you don't happen to be in the demographic for which the game is intended, and then get on with your life**.

* Even just scrapping all the character models isn't really that reasonable, either, this late in the process. And anybody that has managed projects knows that scope changes get more expensive the later they are introduced into a project. Especially scope changes of the magnitude that you are suggesting that it would take to get you to play the game.
** These are, of course, merely suggestions. You can do whatever you want.

and i completely understand that. i was really more addressing people who equate a particular art style with 'childishness'. for folks who just have preferences, i have no argument. it's a preference. just some people seem to want to critique the art style by attacking it in an ad hominem sense. they call it childish rather than making a statement of preference.

I know - I was just expressing my sadness and disappointment at the way they've gone with EQN. I was very, very excited about it when I first heard it was being developed...now just very disappointed.

To those thinking that "Cartoon like = Kiddie" I personally think the EQN art style also look more like this.



You can hardly call that show kiddie. What will make the game "for kids" or not is not the art style it is the content and the game play, both of which we know NOTHING about.

[quote="my hope for eqnext bein the next eq2[/quote]
I am not very fond of the Disney like look of EQnext either. I don't wanna play Pokahontas and the Lion King.
and I really hope they bring back realm vs realm .