EQ Never

My favorite dungeon design would be a zone like Sebilis or Guk (both parts) or Blackrock Mountain (all of it together), public and not instanced but with a focus on massive size so it can sustain a certain amount of groups. Then you design it around a group moving through by having incentives for them to not stay in one spot. You can tinker with respawn timers or mobs calling for support if they find you camping, make mobs have better loot/xp the longer they are up to reward moving instead of sitting and various other ideas towards that goal. Then players can play they way they want and each has its up and downsides. Camping a spot is safer and if you are after specific loot probably more productive, roaming is more rewarding xp but risky with constant room breaking and better loot but not the specific item you were looking for unless it drops while passing through there.

They'd also need to make enough dungeons and have some plans that make them all worthwhile, like the above suggestion about more loot/xp if a mob hasnt been killed a while. I leveled in Charasis for much of the 50-60 time in EQ and that place was deserted compared to Seb and Karnors. Roaming through the wings was sure more fun then sitting in Karnors though, but people gravitate to the best or safest xp/loot (Charasis was fine if you knew your group, but not exactly inviting to people that didnt know it or went with strangers).

Zeus_sl said:

THIS, is what makes your palms sweat, your heart starts racing, your fingers trembling on the mouse as you navigate a dangerous area, hoping,PRAYINGyou don't get spotted by a mob. THIS, is what made EQ great. The fear of death, and the complete fist pumping exhilaration when you finally make it through alive.

This is dead in today's MMO's. Who cares if you die? It's a few minutes and your back up and rolling. Nothing lost yes, but nothing gained either. The death penalty is vital to the entire experience of a great MMO.

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Yeah, you can have those games. My life is not set up to carve out hours of time to play games these days where if I fuck up I can easily sit around for another 2-5 hours to do a CR. I'm not a 22 year old that really don't have to go to class tomorrow anymore.

there really isn't a lot you can do to keep people playing your mmo outside of having ample endgame content and developers just aren't doing that for whatever stupid fucking reasons.

i'm perfectly ok with the mmo genre dying. i'd honestly like to see full co-op campaigns in games like dark souls or fallout. playing a 50-hour campaign with someone else would definitely be more entertaining than the mmos we're getting today.

Draegan_sl said:

If you are making a mass market game, you can not cause players to lose experience, levels or gear as long as A) xp is a large portion of the game that takes a lot of time to recover and B) Gear, for the most part, takes a long time to get, is rare and hard to come by. If loot is like Diablo, you're fine. If it's like EQ or WOW, then you're marketing your game to a very small audience or designing an element of the game that is going to make people potentially quit.

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I think you are wrong about the need for mass market games to be stupid easy pablum.

Without danger there is no fear, challenge or fun. How that danger is introduced is a design decision, but it has to be there in some form or players get bored and lose interest very fast.

How I would do it is to make the core zones relatively easy to play and level in. Much like all mmo's are now. But make some of the borderlands dangerous with huge signs telling people to beware. Some (not all) of the best rewards would be gained from those zones. These zones would have varying levels of danger up to and including losing everything.

The mass of players could stay safe in the core zones, protected and mindless. While the truly adventurous could take off and risk it all, if they want to. Both markets could be catered to and you have an even bigger audience of potential customers.

Draegan_sl said:

My life is not set up to carve out hours of time to play games these days where if I fuck up I can easily sit around for another 2-5 hours to do a CR.

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Says the guy with three fucking screens set up for gaming with a TV right behind them so he doesn't need to move too far. You probably shit all over yourself and scrub with a stick.

qwerty_sl said:

It's comments like that which make you so annoying. Gear in Vanguard is fucking meaningless. Every quest I do I get a new item. My characters are in their 40's and I can't tell you the name of a single item any of them have. And most modern MMO's are the same.

Back on EQ Mac, I spent the first 20 something levels being part naked, and partly wearing a mishmash of cloth and raw hide. So when I finally got my first proper item, a Polished Granite Tomahawk, it was a very big deal.

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Oh please, I said relatively. EQ is one end of the spectrum where you have static loot tables all over the world vs. WOW that has static loot tables all over the world plus randomly generated gear to fill in the gaps.

But gear matters because it effects the power of your character. Your problem or concern is that one of two things: A) You level too quickly and content is easier, thus you don't become attached to specific gear items. or B) There is too much gear thus you don't form an attachment to a specific piece.

That's just during leveling though in any case. The majority of games now have end game gear that "matters'.

Draegan_sl said:

Any MMORPG at this point that tries something new is worth playing for at least a month.

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Disagree on two levels 1) it allows developers and poor game development to thrive knowing they will receive attention and return on investment for even shitty games, unfortunately this mindset is all too prevalent today. 2) If a game is without substance it is easy to tell from the get go if it is worth your time. It is of course a personal preference but bad games are bad - shallow, lifeless, community deprived, themepark worlds are not MMORPGs, they are single player entertainment parks - sorry its true. From the get go with Rift you knew it was a WoW clone, yeah it had cool new shinies and events but I am not interested in the empty void of themepark/faux MMORPGs.

In regards to the consequences of a time intensive game, I no longer have to the time to be competitive gamer. However I do not need be competitive to enjoy and appreciate a meaningful, community driven game. I would prefer knowing the game has longevity and I have a shot at actually having arolein the environment than be rewarded with trivial loot and levels, that's just me though.

I was a super noob when I played EQ and didn't even fully understand stats and all that jazz. I don't think I even experienced a "drive" to level up, I was a total social player. If anything, seeing players cast new spells and going to new zones far away, were what kept me playing.

I know we have been focusing on game mechanics, graphics, and economics in this thread but one the one piece that has always puzzled me about SONY/SOE is their soundtrack development. SONY is a giant in the music industry and I would expect any game from SOE to leverage that to the max.

B.M.R.C
Batman: Arkham City

Ok, there was death penalty talk interspersed in the last page or two, so here's what I was thinking for it:

When you die, your gear (or a portion of your gear) is left on your corpse; similar to EQ1, your corpse lasts for x amount of time, then it rots away. Unlike EQ, however, once your corpse rots, the gear isn't lost, but will then be retrievable at a graveyard, or something similar. There would be no option to somehow buy your gear back early, you need to either go out and retrieve your corpse yourself, get rezzed by someone, or deal with being crippled until your corpse rots.

I'd also bring back the EQ system of having players respawn at their bind points, so depending on how far you've traveled from your bind point, you could end up with a serious trip on your hands.

Maybe toss in an exp debt system as well.

Not nearly as harsh as EQ's death penalty, but much more severe than what we typically get nowadays. I feel like it makes death feel like a real risk, without making it a character-destroying event if you can't get back to your corpse in time.

jello_sl said:

Disagree on two levels 1) it allows developers and poor game development to thrive knowing they will receive attention and return on investment for even shitty games, unfortunately this mindset is all too prevalent today. 2) If a game is without substance it is easy to tell from the get go if it is worth your time. It is of course a personal preference but bad games are bad - shallow, lifeless, community deprived, themepark worlds are not MMORPGs, they are single player entertainment parks - sorry its true. From the get go with Rift you knew it was a WoW clone, yeah it had cool new shinies and events but I am not interested in the empty void of themepark/faux MMORPGs.

In regards to the consequences of a time intensive game, I no longer have to the time to be competitive gamer. However I do not need be competitive to enjoy and appreciate a meaningful, community driven game. I would prefer knowing the game has longevity and I have a shot at actually having arolein the environment than be rewarded with trivial loot and levels, that's just me though.

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Who the fuck cares if they waste money. The more people who try something new, the more chance we get a good idea. It's not my cash.

One area that EQ did a fair job at (at least for the first several expansions) and to a lesser degree even WoW pulled off was spreading out the casual and elite. What I mean by this is if you were hardcore, you had content to master (control?) and played a different game than the casual gamer who likely was months (expansions?) behind you. MMO game design could go a ways to understand that they shouldn't be designing a game solely for "end-game" content. This model tends to make the in-between become obsolescent and leaves even the casual gamer coveting the elite gamer's experience, which ironically compromises the top tier game into something less -- even though Heroic mode fights in WoW are admittedly extremely challenging, the fact that you've already done the same bullshit in LFR and regular mode psychologically cheapens the experience.

Others have said the same thing, but I just don't have the time I used to. At the end of the day, this doesn't really matter provided I can play in a world with a thriving community and still have something meaningful to do to advance my character. Maybe (hopefully, if the game were designed right) I would never be comparable to someone dropping 80 hrs a week into the game, but that shouldn't be what it's all about. What needs to happen is thoughtful design throughout. Why waste development resources on something that players just skim through? Slow it down, make advancement hard (low tier raids meaningful?), and keep content viable and challenging at all tiers.

The trick is to finesse your development to match your customer base such that it's not so top heavy that everyone reaches the "end-game" and screams for nerfs to complete it, or so level oriented that your hardcore push to the end and find nothing.

Agree with that in terms of player spread. It was VERY common in EQ to see some guilds one, even two expansions behind with still farming old content. This was definitely the case with Vex Thal, Plane of Time, etc. Gates of Discord reached such a level of ass fuckery that some guilds couldn't even break into the entry raids. Not that I'm saying that latter part is great for MMOs. But I do agree with how WoW has become a bit top heavy with LFR. In one sense it is great that players can all easily see ALL content developed, instead of what you had in Black Temple. At the same time, it does diminish that feeling of "Wow, I'm feeling pretty ?ber just being here" sense that I got when I was in places such as Temple of Veeshan, or really any raid zone in Planes of Power as our guild was progressing.