EQ Never

oh and another difference. when you get done leveling and questing in a zone in rift or wow. unless you are crafting you never go back to that zone again. in everquest even after you maxed levels you still go back to your favorite zone and continue camping with your friends even if nothing good drops in a crappy camp. why? because your friends are still leveling and they helped you so you WANT to help them. i couldnt tell you a name of a goddamned single person from rift or wow i played with. i could list hundreds of names of people i knew in EQ and i havent played live in ten years.

It's been tested before. The majority of gamers do not like really smart AIs in their game. Most of the time people get frustrated if they lose and then quit the game.

This is obviously from the perspective of a more niche crowd (us, really) but I wouldn't care if the mouth-breathers got frustrated and left. I'd like a game with some challange and thought involved, that kept me interested beyond a month. I realize, however, than the companies making the games don't see it this way and want something to appeal to everyone, which is a shame. Niche games for niche crowds do work.

One thing I really enjoyed about the original Everquest was that you didn't need to upgrade gear constantly to level. I know there is an exception for casters, but I remember using my training robes and cloth for tons of levels. This made twinking way more fun because you became so OP. Now when you play MMO's you get some dumb green item upgrade for every quest you do, and you see that you now are getting +1 str/stam upgrade to your head slot item. It makes getting upgrades feel less rewarding and important. When you raid in WoW now all you do is look at the ilvl and if it is higher than what you are wearing you equip it for the minor increase to your character. I have no idea what any of my gear is named in WoW, but in EQ you knew what most the gear was named and what it did. I will grant an exception to classic WoW when they made weapons more rare, and drop off end game bosses. You respect the players that are running around with Rag's Hammer or Epic Weaps.

Vanilla WOW was still really about the journey (tm) and large quests. BC was a gear reset and a big fuck you to the journey.

Mick_sl said:

They don't have to be really smart, just something more than the intelligence of a turtle.
I really can't explain it, just needs to be more.

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I agree and I know what you're saying, I'm just repeating what devs say, time and time again. Instead of investigating how much to do, they ignore it to a certain degree. However, I can tell you that Arenanet did a very good job testing their own UI which is why a lot of their NPCs are fun to fight.

I don't think we are ever going to get that original EQ feel or gameplay ever again. It's not profitable for the companies out there to make it that way anymore. Most of the masses were in diapers when we were all playing EQ and they grew up with easy mode games. They do not have the patience or the skill to really sit for hours/days on end using the phone to call friends up when a spawn pops to get 1 piece of gear. To them, all they need is gold and an AH and they can have anything they want.
Gone are the days of camping spawns, and gear that is recognizable when someone walks by. I remember in EQ you would see someone from a distance and you knew who they were by what they were wearing... now every other player looks identical, there is no personal feel to any of it.I don't remember looking at anyone in WoW and saying.. OMG WTF is that! But i do remember the first time i saw Lockjaws Staff on someone, and i remember the first time i saw someone with a last name (as this was earned in EQ when you hit level 20).
Gone are the days of "hey, on Fridays raid night is to get so and so their epic piece for their quest, they've been waiting for weeks for help". Gone are the days of walking into a "zone" and seeing small groups of people all over the place waiting for mobs to pop as you walk around saying... need a monk?
If you want to craft, there is no more finding your mats, you need 10000 cloth bolts to level up, go buy it... anyone can be a master craftsman in less then 4 days, wtf is that shit. I was an enchanter in EQ, and lord help me if getting my bars and gems were easy.

I honestly miss these things, and while they were annoying, i would LOVE to have them back... i want to play a game where i have to group and not worry about PVP, i want the PVE MMO. PVP while fun does not seem to have the same feel, there is not enough focus on the PVE when that happens... there are too many babies out there crying about their nerfs because so and so can kill them easier now.
I miss and want back death penalty... yes, EXP and Corpse retrieval ... .lord knows i lost a few corpses in EQ and had to pay to have them summoned... I miss being a useful monk corpse runner... there is a sense of actual danger in helping others get their crap back, not a respawn in a town ready to rock n roll after resting for 5 minutes because you died... but instead keeping a 2nd set of gear in the bank just for corpse running
a few small things will make a new MMO long lasting once again, and while annoying, they are what made EQ so great (death penalty, spawn camping, no AH (work for your shit), gear you remember when you see it, and ... Hell levels, make us work for it, we'll bitch but it was a right of passage and we could all relate to those going through it)...
anyway, my reminesing is done for now, i look forward to what EQNext brings, but if they baby it up.. it'll last 6 months and then taper off as most of these MMO's do now a days

What the fuck is car effect?

"Most of the time people get frustrated if they lose and then quit the game"

I understand completely, and if you had people that could design a really good AI that would be ideal. Unfortunately MMORPG companies aren't developing really good AIs and instead are relying on heavily scripted events.

Shit, every MMORPG still relies on static spawn points for the most part.

Blackyce_sl said:

Although your first point is correct, FFA PvP servers are all about ganking and griefing, your second point is incorrect. Not all games change their PvE to balance PvP. Asheron's Call didn't and we PvPers didn't care.

Also who the fuck says you can't have unique classes? That's one of the best parts about playing on an FFA PvP server in a skill based game, finding that unique skill set that nobody else has that's very good.

Try actually playing some FFA PvP MMO's before you spout shit again thanks.

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And how long did that "unique" skillset last before every little Timmy had the same one and it was FOTM? Skill based games are not what I'm talking about. I'm addressing games that already have a class structure, like EQ. The tacked on PVP doesn't work in those games because the classes are inherently imbalanced in PVP. All the changing of the spells for PVP leads to a reduction in effectiveness of said spell in PVE. Eventually, you get classes that are all about the same. Very homogenized and little flavor or "uniqueness" left.

If Asherons Call got it so right, why aren't they lauded and modeled after? Why does everyone hold DAOC up as the best PVP in MMOs? They all seem to miss the mark trying to balance PVE/PVP.

I would still be playing mmos today if they made a game that more than just 2 months worth of content before you had to start crafting worthless shit, pvping for crappy armor or joining a guild to pass the time. None of these games care about building a community. They just want a 1player console game with virtual chat.

I think true AI isnt needed at all, just different behaviour patterns for different monsters. That can be small scripted actions like the root-flee-nuke from EQ caster mobs or the "flee 5 seconds when one of your buddies dies" from Diablo Fallen. Or specific spells for some mobs (this is done to a degree in most MMOs) that suit the monster. GW wolves that summon adds and with the moving usually happening in a GW2 fight you might get an add that summons another wolf and so, it kinda feels like the wolf pack trying to overwhelm you. Contrast that with wolves pacing back and forth solo or in pairs and just standing there in melee until they die in other games, the GW2 wolves arent really complicated, but it just feels right. Same with the cyclops knock-downs, etc. I havent really played WoW for a long time but the best I remember from it was some monsters having charge, maybe they have more diversity in monster behaviour these days. I guess whats needed is more attention to detail when it comes to making a monster and giving it a quirk or two to set it apart, aside from having the same skin as last zone but this time blue.

Edit: Now that I wrote this I think I sad the same thing 10 pages back. Thread is hunting its tail without any new info =/ So here's a thought with at least some basis in facts: Since they are using the PS2 engine which already has decent day/night cycle and afaik weather is planned for it too, how important do you rate different and changing weather for the EQNext? Personally I think it is very important to have, It's one of the things I always missed from anything post-EQ.

Ukerric_sl said:

Cheating? Where? The AI uses normal data, it doesn't have any underground access to hidden stuff. All the elements I have mentioned are available either on your client (location, action, casting, player inspect), or on the web (detailed spell list, statistical models). The AI is only cheating because it has a micro-second ping that is impossible to attain outside of the server farm itself and runs on silicon at electronic speeds rather than on protoplasm at chemical propagation speeds.

And that AI is buildable. Today. No problem. So when people want "improved AI", what they want is not better AI. They want an AI that might be more fun to play against, but is beatable as easily as the previous ones. I.e. an AI that is as exploitable and predictable as today, except differently.

Or, if you want, the goal for a MMORPG mob AI is not to have the AI beat you more often - which would normally why you'd want a "better AI" in a game - it's just to have more fun in a combat, but still beat the mob 99.99% of the time in the end.

Now, people have experimented with better AI. Use a more sophisticated model for deciding targeting for example. All those models ended up looking... weird. The mob would switch targets, and it was baffling. When you really looked under the hood, it was perfectly understandable why it acted that way, but, from the outside, it looked more like the mob was changing targets arbitrarily (or, sometimes sticking to targets obstinately) without rime or reason. Ultimately, it might have been a better AI, but it didn't feel smarter for the player. It's an unfortunate side effect of the "car effect".

The "car effect" is what you get when you want to travel from point A to point B. If you want travel to look "natural", you need a horse-looking thing. But we don't ride to work on a steel donkey, we get this absolutely unnatural wheeled contraption with seats. Which works better than a steel donkey in fact.

A truly efficient AI is not anything remotely like a human. If you want an optimal AI, you're going to get totally non-human, unnatural-feeling behavior. The current AI is unnatural, but it's simple enough that human understand it, and thus, they feel comfortable with it.

It would also be a lot more difficult, if the opponents were more tactically and strategically designed.

Take your goblin wizard example. Let's add a simple rule for this: run away from the melee until you're far enough that you can cast and it completes before the guy get in range. It's devilishly simple... and it turns your game into an exercise of frustration for every melee player. Because suddenly, every casting mob has learned to kite. And it's going to do it far better than you do.

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What Im saying is that a good AI designer wouldnt design the goblins to kite players all day. The mob would have a few skills, maybe 3-5,and would just be more clever about using them. The monsters toolset wouldnt be quite as robust as the players, but enough to make it more enjoyable, challenging, and fun to fight than the stuff we get now. Theyd have a root, a few different nukes, a few buffs as well. We could sit here all day and talk about how monsters could be made more interesting. You could make the goblins have a lower AI, maybe they are just smart enough to try and not get hit by a sword, and make something like a Demi-lich a rare spawn in a dungeon, who would cast silence on a caster, root a melee dps, have a higher resistance to casted stuns, ect ect.

At the same time, the player would have the tools to deal with the AI, assuming they were intelligent enough. Not to mention the player would likely be grouped with a buddy. Nobody in their right mind would want to engage the demi-lich mentioned above by themselves. Having smarter AI that is tougher to kill fosters the grouping mentality and that's a large point of why I brought it up. If you really wanted to, fuck, you could design all goblin wizards to "lol root kite u all day im fun AI rite?", but if you bring a friend, and make the exp worthy to group with other players, well then that goblin wizard aint so bad if you have an enchanter friend to cast a stun on him or whatever while it tries to root the player.

A warrior by himself is going to be scared shitless of the goblin wizard that can root-nuke him, and on the other hand, caster players would be worried by the paladin mobs that can stun them while they are melee'd down. Mix up these different classes of mobs, put them on a faction together or something, and have players go at them. This type of environment would recreate the whole EQ/Dark Souls type of feeling where players are legitimately intimidated by the world around them, as opposed to most EQ mobs that couldnt be soloed solely because they have too much hp or hit too hard. That type of difficulty is boring. If you take the difficulty in the direction where mobs are tougher to solo because they don't just roll over while you smash their face in with a maul, then the game would be much more interesting.

Id likely restrain most of these higher AI mobs to dungeons or space them out in outdoor zones, they would likely drop better stuff too, to reward the players for dealing with a harder encounter. You can always keep bears/wolves/snakes ect at around the same AI level to the outdoor zones and let them do the standard ole run-up-growl-and-slash routine, because well, thats what bears/wolves/bats/other animals do for the most part. Make the humanoid enemies more creative and harder to deal with.

Edit: Yeah, the kinda stuff like what Mr. Creed said above would be nice to see made the norm. All this being said, I dont think we'll be seeing anything like this for awhile if ever.