EQ Never

etchazz_sl said:

how do you know? it's never been done. WoW has been redone a hundred times; all of which have been colossal failures. EQ, on the other hand, has never been redone (and don't give me VG either. that game was a broken mess).

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Even at its height EQ had 500k subs. And let's not forget, when anyone on this board refers to EQ, they are referring specifically to the 'golden age' that occurred between Kunark and Velious. So when people clamour for a 'remake' this is what they mean.

How many thirty-something hangers on do you still think there are? How many even remember, or for that matter care about EQ 12 years ago? 5000 playing various EMUs? Lets be really generous and say this EQ classic remake canibalizes all 100,000 from Current EQ, and somehow draws another 100,000 former EQ players from the basements of the world.

200,000 subs ain't worth anyone's time to develop a AAA title.

Zehn I distinctly remember you loving how you got gear from quests back in the day. Obviously your opinion has changed and quest rewards have become bloated and almost useless these days. But I think the contrast is funny to point out.

But you're right, gear has turned to shit and needs to become limited. Playing LOLover the last 2 months has really influenced my opinion. I used to think a Diablo like system of gear would be great. Tons of random gear, finding that perfect roll, hunting down sets would be entertaining. I don't think so (unless you turn an MMORPG into a Borderlands style action game).

I think we need to move back to limited specific gear sets like DOTA/LOL. Whether the game is a persistent world that never wipes and you just collect items where you eventually "have them all" until an update, or it's a full loot PVP system with gear degradation. Or it could be a game on a finite life cycle where it runs in the space of weeks/days/months and resets where you start over again. Think old school Alterac Valley stretch out over a week or two crossed with LOL/Dota influences.

That would be a different game and probably fun.

A true eq sequel would probably appeal to those in high school or college the most as far as new blood and having the time necessary to really fuel it. But then you're competing with all manners of social media, stupid app games, consoles, etc. I think that age range is almost too distracted for a game like eq. Even vanilla wow. And that's why we are where we are.

Colin Cowherd has an interesting theory on that very phenomenon happening with baseball in sports. It's not a bad analogy. Baseball is a slow and sometimes tedious game to watch. People look at it and shrug and hit up the NFL and to a much lesser extent NBA. You can add college football in there too.they place more value on the more instantaneous entertainment of those sports than baseball.

That's the problem with trying to design games to have an infinite life cycle out of the gate; it immediately devolves into a diablo-esque loot system, +x to all stats, from low levels on. And that's not to say that's the wrong way to design a game to last. The problem is, it devalues individual items, characters, and thus the desire to even play the thing. Everquest had a good few-years-long stretch of not being that way. It's also one of the worst offenders of it, 14 years later. I think its clear people are wanting an experience closer to years 2-3 of everquest, not so much month 2 or year 12.

Convo_sl said:

hah come one.. You gotta give a little more than that.. You don't think a true EQ sequel would appeal to a new player just picking up MMO's? What it comes down to is just being good. if the game is good people will play it. EQ was a GOOD game...

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If a game is a good game, people will play it, but the discussion is what is considered a good game in 2013. EQ was a decent game when the majority of people were on a dialup modem so things had to be simple. The online gaming space is dominated by faster pace games like League of Legends, World of Warcraft, various FPS and FPS-like games and Starcraft/Diablo stuff.

What do they all have in common? You can log in and get into a match, play, and log out. You can log in WOW, do a raid/dungeon through the group finder for an hour or two and log off. In the space of an hour you can play one or two matches. The same thing with any FPS/RTS game. Even Diablo allows you to do designed runs with other people that don't take long to either set up or do yourself.

So I find a game that relies on longer gaming sessions, with strict dependence on other people without a matchmaking system a very hard argument to make if you're targeting a very large mass market audience.

That's not to say the game needs to be easy, solo-only and full of casual WOWtards who can't jump out of fire either. You can make a game that is tough, difficult and challenging that has harsh penalties for failure that varies on the difficulty of what you are attempting, however you need to create a modern system surrounding it.

You need some sort of match making system that puts players together to have fun. That doesn't necessarily mean a simple group finder, you can create all sorts of social incentives in a game (I won't go into them) that gets people together organically.

You need both difficult content and solo content (in LOL think bot games vs. normals vs. ranked games including the different tiers). You need to provide content for people to log in for an hour and have fun. You need to provide content for people that log on for 4 hours.

It's tough to do if you're going to mass market with these kind of principles, but it's essentially what EVE did. Unfortunately the game is not fun to actually, physically play. It's fun to be part of though.

Soygen_sl said:

What would be some suggested methods on how to avoid the gold farmers ruining the worth of droppable items without punishing the regular users?

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Tough to do. One thing that could help is to make some gear account bound at least instead of soulbound. I think only top end raid gear and epic quest items should be soulbound.

But ideally I would like to see more dropable items like fungi tunic etc again also. You can't stop farmers totally, but to discourage them and to give others a chance, the drops could be randomized around a few named mobs in a local area or dungeon, along with their spawn locations. That would force players to continually move about and hopefully cut down on the static camps. Which would help everyone have a chance at good loot too. One of the main problem with EQ farmers was the ability to static camp mobs 24/7.

I'll help you with that experiment. Write up a one page outline of Everquest in a vacuum. Do not refer to EQ, Sony or any other game in the industry. Don't assume the reader knows what an MMORPG is. Don't refer to WOW, don't input any personal bias or nostalgia.

Essentially use some technical writing skills.

I'll see if I can get some traffic from my other websites to get people to fill out a poll.

Quaid_sl said:

Even at its height EQ had 500k subs. And let's not forget, when anyone on this board refers to EQ, they are referring specifically to the 'golden age' that occurred between Kunark and Velious. So when people clamour for a 'remake' this is what they mean.

How many thirty-something hangers on do you still think there are? How many even remember, or for that matter care about EQ 12 years ago? 5000 playing various EMUs? Lets be really generous and say this EQ classic remake canibalizes all 100,000 from Current EQ, and somehow draws another 100,000 former EQ players from the basements of the world.

200,000 subs ain't worth anyone's time to develop a AAA title.

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Too many assumptions in your reasoning. One thing you fail to realize is at it's heyday the mmo population was much, much smaller. Most people didn't even know what a mmo was. I had never heard of EQ or mmos until one of my friends who worked at Sony told me about it. And most players were still on dial-up. So that 500k playerbase is HUGE. Adjust that number for player inflation and it changes everything. The modern mmo playerbase is massive compared to 2000.

So your only argument is a subjective one and deals with whether or not the modern mmo audience would enjoy it. Since there isn't any modern mmo out that mirrors EQ Classic's basic design metric (harsh, unforgiving and slower progression) that means you are just spouting an opinion. Given the popularity of EQ progression servers, EQMac and games like Dark Souls we think your opinion has no merit. Especially, since every WoW clone has failed miserably.

mkopec_sl said:

Well thats the problem right there. The mmorpg got turned into a lobby mini game instead of what it was supposed to be. A persistent world, open world mmo-rpg that you could play for years at your own pace and slowly, over time claim your stake in that world.

The very large audience thing is kind of fucked up as well. Because WoW was, and still is, an anomaly and will probably never happen again in that scope. and I do blame WoW for watering down the entire genre since every one now is chasing that 12 million sub thing which will never happen. So any mild success is deemed a failure, same as EQs success is deemed a failure now because, shit, it only had 500K subs, fucking peanuts compared to the REAL MMO, WOW.

This is why I have no hope left, even in this game. Lets face it this game will be nothing resembling EQ. You are only fooling yourself if you think this. The genre is dead, it got decapitated and gutted by Blizzard. And sadly it will take some small grassroots company with fresh ideas and real gaming values to resurrect this dead genre.

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Few things:
1) Lobby game syndrome - You don't need to create a game like WOW, because I agree. If you are world building, you really don't want to have that type of match making system. You can create organic systems to get players to play together. I just takes some creativity. We can talk about it another day.

that you could play for years at your own pace and slowly, over time claim your stake in that world

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This statement will get you in trouble every time you try to make your argument. It's so laden with passionate abstract concepts based on nostalgia and fantasy that it has no context in any discussion on game mechanics.

2) Large audience thing is not fucked up at all. Look at how many people play League of Legends world wide. Call of Duty. Starcraft. There are key games out that that attract a shit load of players. You're right though, you will probably never see another WOW game that requires a $15.00/mo sub. At least not in the next 5-10 years.

The lesson here is not that it's impossible to make a hit, because you can. It just hasn't happened in the MMO space because devs keep putting out shitty games where there is zero innovation.

My fear is that what is deemed "successful" has been redefined thanks to WoW. Back in EQ days 1 Mil subs was amazing...now publishers barely bat an eye at that number. Everyone is so concerned with chasing the proverbial dragon =\

GW2 might have over a million players playing regularly but I can't think of any other mmo that does (except WoW of course). There probably is but I just can't think of them off hand. RuneScape maybe. EvE is considered a huge success at 500k.

Most mmos would be happy to have 200k plus subs.

Draegan_sl said:

Zehn I distinctly remember you loving how you got gear from quests back in the day.

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I remember being floored with WoW early on how random mobs could drop shit you could use after 5+ years of non-named mobs in EQ being pointless but that novelty wore off fast.

For what it's worth original WoW was pretty close to an EQ clone. I know it hurts to hear it but original WoW was at it's core just EQ minus the downtime and with a fresh coat of paint on top.

Eonan_sl said:

My fear is that what is deemed "successful" has been redefined thanks to WoW. Back in EQ days 1 Mil subs was amazing...now publishers barely bat an eye at that number. Everyone is so concerned with chasing the proverbial dragon =\

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Realistic expectations are what they are. Keep in mind there's something like 200+ games that fit the MMO category now and the number keeps on rising quick. Rift made fucking bank at launch because they kept the team size small and didn't waste money on things like 'original thinking.' Darkfall makes money because it's a dude and his inbred step-sister running the game despite having a subscriber base of 27 people. Then there's Nexon which keeps making the same game over and over again but changing the skin and they make money hand over fist too.

I mean if VanGuard wasn't making money they'd have shut it down by now. Keep that in mind.

Honestly I think the problem is less with developers and more with the player base. There will never be a straight up EverQuest clone that investors dump 75+ million to make a triple-A version of. There are however a half dozen games with concepts similar to EQ but with such a limited budget that you rarely seem them discussed let alone advertised.

I mean here:

http://www.planeshift.it/download.html

It's the only game being currently worked on that I can think of where you still have to chat up NPC's to get quests.