Death of a Game - Everquest franchise

I've heard over the years the leadership at SOE was pretty realistic about it, they knew MMOs had more potential but felt EQ's IP and mechanics were limited in appeal. They hoped that Star Wars Galaxies, with a tie-in to a major and very popular IP, was the ticket to taking stuff to the real next level.

So much of this video is just opinion and general feelings. I don't know that he talked to anyone with knowledge of EQ2, Landmark, or EQNext. Without any facts and figures in this video, it just comes off as a 30 minute rant.

Wynn said:

I've heard over the years the leadership at SOE was pretty realistic about it, they knew MMOs had more potential but felt EQ's IP and mechanics were limited in appeal. They hoped that Star Wars Galaxies, with a tie-in to a major and very popular IP, was the ticket to taking stuff to the real next level.

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If there's one thing everyone can agree on, it's that EQ had intelligent leadership that truly had its finger on the pulse of the industry

Lunis said:

Who was responsible for the spammy combat system?

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No idea.. I hadn't joined SOE until much later in EQ2's life. It's insane that in the video, he keeps saying EQ2 was simpler than EQ1.. EQ2 has so many abilities per class that it was out of control.

One of the things that WoW did better than either EQ game was give each class a sense of identity. They all had function, and while others could do the same core role, each class felt unique and such. All these games that talk about 40+ classes and shit are missing the big picture by trying to throw numbers at people. You think balancing 15 classes was hard, now triple that. Good fucking luck.

pharmakos said:

i wonder how the big wigs at SOE felt when, first they thought they were so amazing and were king of all things MMORPG, and then World of Warcraft came along and showed them that they had only achieved maybe 10% the potential of the genre at best

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EQ did EXTREMELY well for a basically untested/unexplored genre (3D first person MMO world), but EQ also was lucky in the fact that there was nothing else like it for competition. Even back in the beginning, there were aspects of EQ that people hated, but it was the only game in town at the time.

WoW blew the genre wide open. NOBODY thought it could be as big as it was. WoW also had the benefit of years of IP familiarity. People LOVED the Warcraft world, so it was an easy sell for them to try out the new MMO. WoW took the good from EQ and improved upon it, as well as stripping or fixing the bad, and wrapped that in lore that people really cared about. EQ combat was never engaging. WoW combat made you feel like every action mattered.

Eq2 is still my fav mmo. It was also my first so plays a big part. Something about it I just love. So sad what its become that I cant last more than a few days on it because id have to drop 2grand to be relevant pretty much it seems.
Still love logging in and running around in it. Something about controlling the character feels so free and less blocky than any other game.

I still find WoW to have some of the most boring mmo combat ever. The 1 or 2 moves you spam over and over and the fucking aids ass global cooldown. Also currently theres some bug where you hit the ability and it doesnt cast I just think it makes the global cool down cycle and never activates what you clicked.

Vanilla WoW combat wasn't anything special it was simply a sped up version of EQ and downtime was diminished due to food/water recovery. They traded out camps and rare named spawns for gathering and the player economy shifted with it. Then for TBC they radically decided to go with the 10/25 raid switch + extreme heroic dungeons, went too complex on the potions, and the multiple overcorrections dictated the course from there.

EQ also had the distinction of releasing GoD unfinished without a level cap raise to 70. If you had the perseverance to stick with it through the fixes and clear Uqua then you saw some daylight but the majority of the playerbase was fed up. There's a lot of denials about OoW that came after but solo and group players widely hated the changes in that expansion which funneled even more WoW's way.

Calbiyum said:

I still find WoW to have some of the most boring mmo combat ever. The 1 or 2 moves you spam over and over and the fucking aids ass global cooldown. Also currently theres some bug where you hit the ability and it doesnt cast I just think it makes the global cool down cycle and never activates what you clicked.

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WoW is like chess compared to melee in EQ1's "turn on auto-attack and AFK".

Dom said:

The strength of WoW's combat has always been due to the responsiveness of it IMO. Other MMO's always feel janky, floaty, and disconnected to the gamestate to me. Little things like FFXIV's autopilot to position when you use melee skills just kills my enjoyment. Otherwise, yeah, the stand-in-place rotation adherence shit is pretty damn boring.

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FFXIV autopilot? For what class?

For monk I have to manually move myself to take advantage of the bonus positional damage (front/side/back). I've never seen anything that auto-moves you into position?

Neranja said:

The irony is: Smedley once said SOE wanted to be the "Blizzard of MMORPG games". Can't find the statement, though.

In hindsight his greatest fault was that he was trusting people too much when they were bullshitting him, and not clamping down hard enough when it became obvious that they did. You can't have that in an upper management level in an industry full of armchair level developers with (drug induced) "visions".

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I'd argue that a bigger fault of Smed's was not doing a better job of pushing quality over quantity.

To be fair, I'm not sure if it was Smedley's decision or the execs higher than him (maybe Elidroth knows?) but from 2000-2004ish, EQ was pushing out new content basically every 6 months - content that was consistently untested, unbalanced and in some cases downright broken - culminating in the disaster that we all know as GoD. Had leadership taken a different approach in taking more time between expansions to deliver higher-quality content that was complete, more thoroughly tested and more accurately balanced at release...who knows how things might've shaken out.

Now, I'm by no means suggesting EQ would've been WoW or WoW wouldn't have had the success it had, but that approach undoubtedly would have affected the legacy of both IPs. Regardless, I'm sure WoW would've still been in the millions subs and EQ would've still been in the sub one million subs.

Cybsled said:

WoW is like chess compared to melee in EQ1's "turn on auto-attack and AFK".

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Yeah EQ1s combat is insanely easy. Really felt like I was flipping a coin will it be heads or tails or in this case a hit or a miss. Too many misses and I die.
People hate on EQ2 for having too many abilties, which I agree is excessive, but id prefer hitting multiple buttons instead of 1 or 2 80% of the time.
My favorite types of combat are chained together abilities based off of other moves being used or critting etc

Dom said:

My experience with FFXIV is limited, so correct me if I'm missing something, but every time I've tried the game out and played a melee, if I use an ability but I was off-centered with the target by a little bit, the game would move me into the correct position. I couldn't just stafe around while hitting my abilities, or if I was, then it was being hidden behind the animations. It felt a little bit like what combat in Dragon Age games did.

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What class was it? I mean, it is a tab-target combat system, so like 90% of the combat abilities actually require a specific target to use and you stay "locked on" with the target. However, I don't recall abilities moving you into odd positions.