Aradune Returns to EQ aka the EQ Nostalgia thread
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Royal
Connoisseur of Exotic Pictures
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Whats happening here is a death-profit rejuvenation of EQ through Brad for the sole purpose of luring what will be a mass exodus of current EQ players to EQ Next.
this and a thousand other things like it are why looking for an MMORPG to do what vanilla EQ did is basically chasing the dragon
Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Itlan
Blackwing Lair Raider
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If they did, it sure as fuck wasn't during Luclin. I used to farm the shit out of AC dual-boxing and a lot of that place was completely fucked up. Pathing was almost as bad as Plane of Innovation.
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Like I said... it was a few years later. I want to say at the end of PoP or maybe even after.
You can't go back to EQ, we have all tried multiple times. The mystery is dead, and some of the game mechanics that made the game so addictive would never work today. However, you can make MMO's more difficult then the current games, there is a niche for games like EQ.
I think they missed the moment for a true EQ sequel, EQ2 should have just been a graphics and ui update to EQ with some of the "Vision" toned down a bit. If it had come out about a year after WOW, more polished and as a clear alternative to WOW's gameplay, it could have been viable. Then we could have had two strong franchises shaping the future of MMO's. EQ2 would have been the lesser of the two but it could have chugged along creating a another faction of games instead of just WOW clone after WOW clone. I actually think the failure of EQ2 set us up for the crap we have gotten the last 9 years.
The one thing the genre needs is to handcraft small worlds again and then release content in 3 month segments. Many of the games i tried after eq were enormous, but i had no attachment to the places. It was all cookie cutter and spread out without meaning. Quantity over quality. I mean shit right now we have millions of FPS players playing the same "zones" over rand over again and then paying good money for a few more maps thrown at them every 6 months.
Why not force MMo players into a small world where they can be forced to play together and then funnel them along with content updates every 3 months? Some people will get bored quick but as long as the game is fun and the carrot big enough we can have them comming back every 3 months. If these games are really costing 100 million+ i think they can afford content, the whole industry seems to run like the us government now, wasting money and resources.
Anyhow i do not hold out much hope for this game, i hope Aradune is really the lucky charm some think he is.
I think they missed the moment for a true EQ sequel, EQ2 should have just been a graphics and ui update to EQ with some of the "Vision" toned down a bit. If it had come out about a year after WOW, more polished and as a clear alternative to WOW's gameplay, it could have been viable. Then we could have had two strong franchises shaping the future of MMO's. EQ2 would have been the lesser of the two but it could have chugged along creating a another faction of games instead of just WOW clone after WOW clone. I actually think the failure of EQ2 set us up for the crap we have gotten the last 9 years.
The one thing the genre needs is to handcraft small worlds again and then release content in 3 month segments. Many of the games i tried after eq were enormous, but i had no attachment to the places. It was all cookie cutter and spread out without meaning. Quantity over quality. I mean shit right now we have millions of FPS players playing the same "zones" over rand over again and then paying good money for a few more maps thrown at them every 6 months.
Why not force MMo players into a small world where they can be forced to play together and then funnel them along with content updates every 3 months? Some people will get bored quick but as long as the game is fun and the carrot big enough we can have them comming back every 3 months. If these games are really costing 100 million+ i think they can afford content, the whole industry seems to run like the us government now, wasting money and resources.
Anyhow i do not hold out much hope for this game, i hope Aradune is really the lucky charm some think he is.
i keep hearing people say "the game mechanics that made EQ so addictive wouldn't work today." why the fuck not? you mean making loot meaningful, harder to obtain and having a death penalty that made you want to play smarter and actually care about staying alive wouldn't work today? having no hard factions and not hand holding people and telling them exactly where to go and what to do next wouldn't work? why the fuck wouldn't it? someone please explain to me why it wouldn't work today. maybe what it is that people don't realize are that all these "game mechanics" that people think won't work today is exactly what made the game so addictive in the first place?
iannis
Musty Nester
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Because no one's gonna poopsock a 48 hour paw of opella camp anymore. Actually that's not quite right. To be more specific: Some people WILL poopsock a 48 hour camp, but not enough people will to create a large enough semi-stable online society to bring back ye olden days of progress quest that we all so fondly remember. "Paw of Opella" isn't literal here, it's a metaphor for the over arching tone of the game design. Do you remember how long the VP key quest actually took to complete? That shit was an epic time investment. And the reward for that was VP itself -- which was a lot of fun, true... that zone was everquest on meth. But once SoV came out, we never went back to it.
But if you speed everquest up to make it more attractive to people with actual jobs, it's just not everquest anymore.
EQ1 is still going. P99 went. Vanguard went. Obviously there is a market for an eq-alike... but that market is vanishingly small, and the budget for a game to fill it would be equally small.
But if you speed everquest up to make it more attractive to people with actual jobs, it's just not everquest anymore.
EQ1 is still going. P99 went. Vanguard went. Obviously there is a market for an eq-alike... but that market is vanishingly small, and the budget for a game to fill it would be equally small.
Erronius
<WoW Guild Officer>
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EQ2 is really amazingly similar to WoW on a number of levels when you get right down to it. Both EQ2 and WoW addressed what each thought were failings with EQ1 and tried to make a "better" game. And they both didn't just try to improve upon EQ1 because they were bored and had millions of dollars to burn, there had been a cottage industry of complaining and bitching about EQ1 for years and both probably took in a lot of the complaints and ran with them. At the time, I think very few (if any) players wanted a reskinned EQ1. The failings of EQ1 were still fresh in my mind, and when I heard details about WoW I was ready to jump ship at the drop of the hat (and EQ2 if WoW hadn't come along). People need to remember that we're sitting at a much different place now than we were when WoW and EQ2 released. If you had suggested something like EQ2 just being a reskinned EQ1 at the time, you would probably have been laughed at by everyone but the most hardcore of EQ1 fanbois. We all know entire guilds that pulled up stakes and left EQ1 like they were leaving Eqypt with Moses, and there is no way on earth that just a "graphics and ui update" would have stemmed the tide at all. Nowadays such a concept sounds much more palatable, but it's also been just over 8 years (8 years!) since both EQ2 and WoW were released and people have had time to get burned out on those MMOs.
But I don't think that people getting burned out on the current crop of MMOs means that a reskinned EQ1 would suddenly be some kind of smash hit. Even amongst the EQ1 vets, few go back and many who do leave again. And the people that never played EQ1 at all, the newer players, they would probably try it and lose interest fast.
No way, a year after WoW's release wouldn't have worked. WoW was still going gangbusters and for many Vanilla was WoW's best period - it would have been crushed if they had held off a year and released right in the middle of Vanilla WoW. 2 years later or so when BC hit,maybe, but even then that might have been too soon to expect to have pulled many people away. More polished? Sorry, there is no way that an SOE product had a prayer of being more polished than a Blizzard product at the time, and even with Blizzard's current status (MoP, D3) I wouldn't give SOE much of a chance to out polish Blizzard even now. Go check out EQ2's last few expacs for example, some of that shit was pathetic. And as a clear alternative to WoW's gameplay? I mean, c'mon. EQ1 is still out there, it's now F2P, and it isn't raking in millions of players who are all like"OMG WHERE HAS THIS GAME BEEN ALL MY LIFE?". Yeah it's changed, but just being a "clear alternative" really doesn't mean much of anything.
No, EQ1 set us up for what we are seeing, because the natural progression of level and item based, burn-through-content-for-loots paradigm led us here. EQ2 and WoW had parallel development and were frighteningly similar in many regards once you remove the bias and groupthink, and current games aren't "WoW clones", rather they're just the latest games trying to figure out where to go with the current paradigm and how to tweak it to find the "magic formula". I do think it's funny that everyone uses the label "WoW clone" as a catchall descriptor though for any game that is trying to do exactly what EQ2 and WoW tried to do: to further develop and refine the fantasy MMO genre as we know it.
The problem with 'handcrafting' as it were, is that you then would end up with an even worse content shortfall. Know what that would then lead to? Even more egregious timesink usage as developers would be desperate to buy the time in order to handcraft new content to begin with. Remember all the bullshit in EQ1 with timesinks and unfinished content being released and the playerbase being lied to in the hope that they wouldn't notice? You would be setting yourself up for that all over again.
He isn't.
Go back and look at all the guilds that did move over to WoW / EQ2 though. Many of them were end game guilds that were sick of the GoD expansion. There is only so much killing of the same mobs over and over throughout raids that you can handle, retention was at an all time low, and the flagging process meant that you had to keep recruiting and regearing doing the same shit for months which led to the core member burn out.
That expansion was tuned for level 70s, while everyone was still 65....you had mobs and creatures that made no sense. Nothing like killing mobs with names like X'satew'erewroodusyyy'taz to pull you out of immersion. You had entire raid zones made up of nothing but ghosts and golems over and over adnausem....GoD was terrible in almost every facet back then.
At that point you had the uber guilds ready to jump ship to something new, and then you had all the other players that would love to progressed and seen content in EQ1 but missed out for whatever reason, wanting to get a fresh start with EQ2 as well.
EQ2 was terrible in almost every sense of the word, and it still is. EQ2 killed itself by releasing half ass, with an engine that could barely chug along even on the most powerful computers of that time, a crafting system ( spells ) that didnt work, a world that was fragmented and it was just clicking bells all over the place, boring content , shit graphics, shit engine, and a spamfest with 30 hotbars of recycled abilities. To even suggest that EQ2 addressed EQ1s failings is retarded.
Not only did it not address any failings that I can think of , it added a ton more.
Ukerric
Bearded Ape
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Oh but it would.
The problem isn't that it wouldn't, it's that all the neckbearded around that clamor for that game want it also to be an AAA game, with lots of content and graphics at least better than Neverwinter. And that's where the problem lies. You can have your hard, deep game. Or your AAA game. But not both.
(or the studio folds three months after the game goes live because they can't repay their 150M$ loan to investors, and it's picked by SOE who decides that one fifth of the servers should be enough to run the game)
Asmadai
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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Karazhan/Magtheridon/Gruul was Tier 4. SSC/TK was Tier 5. Hyjal/BT/Sunwell was Tier 6. (Tier 6 was an 8-piece set, the extra 3 pieces came from Sunwell)
Back on topic...man...I had forgotten all about the whole Clockwork Dragon Underneath Ak'Anon rumors back then. But people are saying it right, it was these kinds of rumors and shit that made EQ great back then.
Erronius
<WoW Guild Officer>
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Whether they were successful or not is arguable as it's largely subjective, but it isn't a mystery that WoW and EQ2 share many of the same design traits. From soloable content starting at level 1, less content teiring and character power "resets" at certain points, to expanded combat systems (even if EQ2's was garbage) and revised and revamped quest and quest tracking systems, we could probably write up a pretty healthy list if we wanted to. If you think that this is retarded, then I don't know what to tell you, but I kind of thought the same thing when I read your post FWIW.
Personally, I don't think any of this is mutually exclusive to anything I said, and if anything, was probably complementary. In other words, for many it was the straw that broke the camel's back. The sentiment that EQ1 was shit after "expansion X" is heard all of the time, maybe with a few different xpacs being discussed but usually they predate GOD by quite a bit.
GoD wasn't "THE" reason people up and left, and to argue as if it was is laughable at best. Furor's 14 day rant for example, I am sure most here are familiar with it. That was over Rathe Council iirc, and that was PoP. GoD was the 3rd xpac after that, and Furor was threatening to up and leave well before GoD. For some, PoP wasn't even the onus behind their grumblings and many were already dissatisfied with SOE/EQ1 before that. IIRC Furor's rant was early 2003 sometime. EDIT: Furor made that post on 2003-05-09 at 18:50:26, to be exact, approximately 9 months before GoD even released.