Anomander Rake
Golden Knight of the Realm
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As we both mentioned previously, my toon in Vanguard is Pinip. What you still haven't told me is your toons name in VG.
Aradune Returns to EQ aka the EQ Nostalgia thread
- Thread starter Fuvi_sl
- Start date
Braen
<Medals Crew>
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- 543
Don't be so harsh on Aleks, he's just tired. I hear tending to the mumified corpses of your wife and 23 daughters really wears down on you.
Punko
Macho Ma'am
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I played EQ from original (hi Neric) until about 2 years ago.
The latest raid, in the incarnation I did it (when it was new & endgame) was something with 15-20 different emotes, firing one every 15 seconds, and the fight took about 40 minutes.
After 7+ years in the same guild, winning that event once, I decided right on the spot to quit & never looked back.
It was one of the must unenjoyable gameplay experiences I ever had. Of course it was nerfed afterwards.
Who the fuck thinks doing a 40 minute "simon says" event, where 1-2 failures in the entire raid will fail an event, is fun? Or even good?
Srsly, screw that.
"unequip your ring"
"unequip your primary"
"stick a fork in your eye"
Timmy has failed to put a stick up his ass, inciting the rage of the oracle!
The oracle hits you for 78.000 damage!
You have been slain!
They simply ran out of interesting* mechanics to add, so instead they kept adding more and more emotes to events, up to the point it was just plain fucking annoying.
* interesting is a really far stretch here.
The latest raid, in the incarnation I did it (when it was new & endgame) was something with 15-20 different emotes, firing one every 15 seconds, and the fight took about 40 minutes.
After 7+ years in the same guild, winning that event once, I decided right on the spot to quit & never looked back.
It was one of the must unenjoyable gameplay experiences I ever had. Of course it was nerfed afterwards.
Who the fuck thinks doing a 40 minute "simon says" event, where 1-2 failures in the entire raid will fail an event, is fun? Or even good?
Srsly, screw that.
"unequip your ring"
"unequip your primary"
"stick a fork in your eye"
Timmy has failed to put a stick up his ass, inciting the rage of the oracle!
The oracle hits you for 78.000 damage!
You have been slain!
They simply ran out of interesting* mechanics to add, so instead they kept adding more and more emotes to events, up to the point it was just plain fucking annoying.
* interesting is a really far stretch here.
Brad is excellent at what he does. It's a limited set of skills, sorta like a pinch hitter in baseball or a kicker in football. Long as he sticks to his field and not try to get involved in management he will do fine. I wish him the best. EQ still stands as the best MMO ever produced in my eyes and he was a big reason for that. I hope he does well.
Utnayan
F16 patrolling Rajaah until he plays DS3
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Are you two trolling?
Brad brought forth Diku-Mud's graphically (from a world persepctive) into the mainstream via affordable means. (Shadows of Yserbius, Neverwinter Nights, etc) were all around before hand, but had high barriers to entry due to outrageous costs and were also much on the lower end of the immersive scale. He can be commended for that. But 65% of the "features" that wove around EverQuest were unintended to begin with and they just went with it. For that you can credit the players and the development team for not knowing what the fuck they were doing.
Brad was also a genius at making sure (from a top town perspective) people chased their tails and was quite a master at using a long content consumption cycle to stretch out content milestones after launch, and that made the final product suffer. As we all know from the rants of our past lives who played this game, seeing and being rewarded with broken content and empty loot tables because they thought they would be able to get to it before players reached it. Unethically selling expansions that were shipped with about 20% of it's content missing.
He was at the right place at the right time, and while I believe in Sophomore Jinx and that definitely really hit the guy hard during Vanguard, he is firmly stuck in 1999 and unable to move the cheese and adapt.
Genius is not the word. More like, lucky opportunist, if given a complete 30,000 foot view of the history of EverQuest.
Brad brought forth Diku-Mud's graphically (from a world persepctive) into the mainstream via affordable means. (Shadows of Yserbius, Neverwinter Nights, etc) were all around before hand, but had high barriers to entry due to outrageous costs and were also much on the lower end of the immersive scale. He can be commended for that. But 65% of the "features" that wove around EverQuest were unintended to begin with and they just went with it. For that you can credit the players and the development team for not knowing what the fuck they were doing.
Brad was also a genius at making sure (from a top town perspective) people chased their tails and was quite a master at using a long content consumption cycle to stretch out content milestones after launch, and that made the final product suffer. As we all know from the rants of our past lives who played this game, seeing and being rewarded with broken content and empty loot tables because they thought they would be able to get to it before players reached it. Unethically selling expansions that were shipped with about 20% of it's content missing.
He was at the right place at the right time, and while I believe in Sophomore Jinx and that definitely really hit the guy hard during Vanguard, he is firmly stuck in 1999 and unable to move the cheese and adapt.
Genius is not the word. More like, lucky opportunist, if given a complete 30,000 foot view of the history of EverQuest.
The problem with modern EQ is that it is so old, it binds the hands of the developers that work on it very tightly. Removing features from a game (or any product really, but games in particular) is difficult to impossible, so EQ is burdened by all the crap they added in the last 12 years. Any bad ideas they implement have to stay there because you'll end up pissing off long time subscribers (even if a small minority) and new ones don't come easily to a 12 year old title. Of course what is bad and what is not is extremely subjective. This is why you have to be very careful when adding new features.
I am also convinced that the more game developers 'know better', the more they ruin games. Classic EQ was amazing because they didn't know what the hell they were doing. If they did, SoW would have been Scale of the Wolf from the beginning; FD splitting would never have been in the game; PBAoE groups would not have been possible; etc. This is why I call recent Blizzard games sterile -- because anything and everything remotely overpowered gets nerfed to oblivion. (SC aside) But if you look at all of the best games, they are FULL of overpowered shit. Diablo 2 for example has ridiculously overpowered spells and items. Overpowered is FUN. I'd rather play a game with useless abilities with overpowered ones than a game where every single ability is mediocre. Developers who 'know better' would make a MMORPG where every single player had to play with a tank, healer, and dps to do anything. Yes, kiting lets you kill mobs with zero risk. But seriously, imagine EQ without kiting. Also, there is a risk vs. reward balance with OP stuff like charm and PBAoE groups that made it acceptable. EQ gave skilled players avenues to advance more quickly, which is sorely lacking in modern MMORPGs. You can't click sparkly shit on the ground and run to NPCs much faster than the next idiot.
You wanna know why I still play classic EQ? This is why:
You would never see shit like that in a new game.
And of course there is the marketplace-- also known as the kiss of death to MMOGs. EQ 1 is unsavable. Luckily the Emus and eqmac live on. (at least for now)
I am also convinced that the more game developers 'know better', the more they ruin games. Classic EQ was amazing because they didn't know what the hell they were doing. If they did, SoW would have been Scale of the Wolf from the beginning; FD splitting would never have been in the game; PBAoE groups would not have been possible; etc. This is why I call recent Blizzard games sterile -- because anything and everything remotely overpowered gets nerfed to oblivion. (SC aside) But if you look at all of the best games, they are FULL of overpowered shit. Diablo 2 for example has ridiculously overpowered spells and items. Overpowered is FUN. I'd rather play a game with useless abilities with overpowered ones than a game where every single ability is mediocre. Developers who 'know better' would make a MMORPG where every single player had to play with a tank, healer, and dps to do anything. Yes, kiting lets you kill mobs with zero risk. But seriously, imagine EQ without kiting. Also, there is a risk vs. reward balance with OP stuff like charm and PBAoE groups that made it acceptable. EQ gave skilled players avenues to advance more quickly, which is sorely lacking in modern MMORPGs. You can't click sparkly shit on the ground and run to NPCs much faster than the next idiot.
You wanna know why I still play classic EQ? This is why:
You would never see shit like that in a new game.
And of course there is the marketplace-- also known as the kiss of death to MMOGs. EQ 1 is unsavable. Luckily the Emus and eqmac live on. (at least for now)
What I did appreciate about the original everquest was a commitment to back stories. Which made the world something you could invest in.
They followed that up with Kunark and Vellious but it started to fall apart in Luclin.
I loved the fact that each race had it's own home city as well.
For the above I credit to Brad, and I think he excels at that aspect.
They followed that up with Kunark and Vellious but it started to fall apart in Luclin.
I loved the fact that each race had it's own home city as well.
For the above I credit to Brad, and I think he excels at that aspect.
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Funny because Blizzard has done this since the beginning. You'd think the people over there in charge of making WoW would have realized what a shit thing it is to do. But now it's even worse than back in EQ. When you buy a WoW expansion you're not getting 60% of the game.
Guess thats the difference between telling your customers that a feature was cut before they buy and doing what EQ did, which usually was to just BS and lie about the expansion being feature complete.
Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Which WoW expansion was it when they scraped an entire raid dungeon that was promised? Blizz isn't without their faults especially nowadays.
I still consider EQ1 the best MMO I've played and DAOC comes in at a close second. DAOC is the only game that made me actually give two shits about PVP and I generally hate PVP.
MMO's need to learn to give players freedom like in EQ1. Everything is way too restrictive nowadays. This is what I thought was a major failure of EQ2 and the way it tries to restrict their playerbase on how the game should be played. Soon as I saw linked mobs with no chance of splitting them I knew that game was doomed.
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Everything near Halas." In fact, some of my first work as a game designer on the team will be working on areas that have been alluded to since launch."
Any ideas?
McCheese
SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
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Wasn't most of that stuff already added in that dragon people expansion several years ago? I feel like pretty much everything on the original EQ map is in-game at this point in some form or another.
I thought Brad was alluding to game systems when he said "areas" and not actual zones.