EQ Never

Wait how am I full of shit again? Or do you just need to be angry at someone to fuel your post count? I never said I needed voice overs and cut scenes, in fact that's not really necessary in games. I usually skip over all of that. I'm not a fan of most instancing these days at all. I haven't raided in over 1.5/2 years because I dislike having to run through scripted hoops with X other people. Especially when those hoops are designed horribly like some of the Rift raid developers. I hate BG pvp. The only PVP I've really taken part in since vanilla wow pre-BG is in WvW in GW2. The rest has been garbage, especially Rift's PVP. That shit was awful, and I've been saying that for years.

Side note: Rift had a ton of content within the first three months of launching. 10x HM dungeons, 2x Raids 1x 10 man I think. Maybe the 10 man came later. Rift is the only MMO out there that constantly adds content. Whether or not you like the game around the content is another story (I don't really play anymore), but they do add quality content pretty quickly. Also, Rift was pretty inexpensive to make actually compared to shit like SWTOR and other MMORPGs.

I particularly don't want easy content, I want engaging content. I hate levels in these games. GW2 is the worst with 80 of them.

A sandbox style game is the opposite of that. You build the same world, but then just fill it with mobs and let the players loose. They don't need 2000+ quests because they are happy to just grind mobs for XP and loot, they don't need PVP and battlegrounds because they are happy just doing PVE, they don't need finely tuned instances because they are happy to just pick a room in a dungeon and farm it, and they don't need cutscenes or hollywood voice actors because they are more interested in a blank canvas to roleplay with.

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This is just silly. If you make a world and just drop static spawning mobs into the game just to grind on, that's just a waste of development. Make NPCs do shit. Make them build things, Make them group up and fight other shit. Rift has a system that does this, but they don't use it. GW2 scripted a system like this and it's fun if it works, but it usually doesn't. I agree, quests are stupid, but if mobs just stand there waiting to fight, then grinding mobs for loot and xp is boring and dumb. However if NPCs are doing shit like I said, then it becomes fun because you are interacting with a moving environment and having an effect on it. Good games create a focus for players to do things. Focus is not sitting in one spot killing npcs over and over as they spawn. Focus is: Holy shit there are 50 npcs over there that created a town and I'm going to go blow it up. Oh shit I just killed them all and gained a half a level and the elite npc dropped a cool hat.

That's a good sandbox game. You need systems where your world evolves with or without you. Fuck quests and phasing technology.

You don't seem to like PVP so I won't comment on that, but a lot of people do and it's an important element in any game. You can argue to the cows come home whether or not your supergame should have it. It just comes down to likes and dislikes in the end and no one is wrong.

Gecko_sl said:

There's absolutely no reason why current MMO companies should take five years for a new project. A company like SOE already has the tools, databases, QA, and customer service setup.

How long did the original DAOC take? That was from Mythic, a very small company and they did quite well with that.

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I agree there is no reason why, but it does. Defiance has taken a very long time and their using their own engine that is shared with Rift, but they are porting to Playstation and Xbox so that might be some delay. Plus Syfy.

It probably comes from poor upper and middle management and poor project planning and design bloat. SOE took a long time developing the engine for PS2. That should lend a lot to EQN and shave off time for sure. We'll see how much.

But I agree with you. If you're a big dev house with all the backend stuff in place, MMO development time should be cut by a decent amount.

qwerty_sl said:

Vanguard already did that in 2006 you clueless bastard.

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Woah bro. Woah. You're a feisty one.

I didn't say it's never been done before.

mmos do nothing but usher you through dull narratives and instanced dungeons. developers should start focusing on co-op campaigns. they'd be much more fun and cheaper to create.

Draegan_sl said:

How am I arguing for a WOW clone?... etc

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Haha.. good post. But your argument that only 20 people would play a EQ1 clone for a start, as well as your attacks on people who dispute that baseless claim.

Much of your post I can agree with, some in modified form. Harsh death penalties can easily coexist with no penalties. As I suggested before, make the core zones easy and safe. While making the outlying areas dangerous and harsh. Put good loot (or abilities like GW1) in both types of areas. Think of a ski slope where you have bunny slopes for beginners, green, blue, black diamond and double black diamond (for the extremely dangerous). Ski slopes are very popular for everyone and they cater to all types of people (if you can afford it). MMOs can and should do the same thing.

EvE is a very good model to follow in some respects, except make EQNext PvE focused. EvE's PvE is pretty bad, but SoE has a lot of experience in creating PvE so that shouldn't be an issue. And EQNext could also make some of the outlying zones PvP enabled, perhaps with resource nodes to be controled, like EvE.

GW2 has some good ideas to copy. Level scaling is a good thing. Except ANet didn't go far enough with it. You still are too powerful in lower levels in GW2. So EQNext should also have level scaling but also give players a reason to come back (high level resources nodes, mobs, quests, raids, etc).

GW2's lack of a trinity is also a good idea but they didn't come up with a very good alternative. That is still evolving though. What you do about aggro mechanics decides the nature of class combat. Changing aggro to be more realistic such that mobs do intelligent things like avoid the tank and attack the healer pretty much destroys the classic trinity also.

Instancing is bad, at least in the form it is done today. I would use Vanguard's shard model, multiple named intances but not unique to the player / group / raid. In fact I would expand that to include all zones / servers.

Get rid of the standard server model. GW2 almost had it right. Everyone should be on overflow (shards). Give those shards a name and let people travel between them freely, with queues if they fill up. You can then always find a shard to play in and always find your friends or others to play with. To stop exploits of resources across shards, make each one tied to the other shards such that if you harvest a node in one shard, you are locked from the same node in other shards for the duration of the respawn timer. The same would be true of rare mobs, etc.

One mega-server of shards that can be expanded or contracted depending on the player load. So the stigma of server mergers never becomes an issue. You can even plug shards into the lore by calling them separate planes. The multi-verse is well known concept now. Then you can expand on that concept by giving different gods ownership of different sections of shards that still have the same geometry. These gods would have different rules for living within their influence. PvE, PvP (Team and FFA), etc can all be created while sharing the same art assets.

etc.

So there are a huge number of ways to create a game that can cater to the hardcore player who wants EQ1 and the WoW lite player. This can be done useing existing technology already used in current mmo's. It just needs to be taken to it's logical conclusion and not half-assed like it has been up to this point.

Oh lord. Here we go.

1) You're assuming that a mainstream MMO has to have cutscenes and voiceovers. I disagree with that. That's your assumption that no one else brought up.

2) I didn't say Neckbeard MMOs are too big of a project. I'm saying Neckbeard MMOs are not worth putting a ton of cash into so they can delivery a AAA experience. That means current graphics, sufficient customer service, good network infrastructure, future content development. If a Neckbeard MMO is going to be made, it will be developed on a smaller scale that might not have all the bells and whistles an average gamer expects. If that's ok with you, then good.

3) I don't think you even read anything I wrote.

-I think all PVP is garbage? I don't see where I wrote that. I said I dislike instanced PVP and every MMO out there has been mostly instanced PVP since vanilla WOW. AOC has some good stuff, but the game is a bust. GW2's WVW is pretty equivalent to open PVP which I enjoyed.

-I don't like dialogues? I don't see where I wrote that. I said games don't need expansive voice overs, doesn't mean I want to make a game with zero sound files.

What the fuck am I doing on this forum? Apparently wasted my time talking to people like you who can't seem to engage in a decent conversation.

Grim1_sl said:

Haha.. good post. But your argument that only 20 people would play a EQ1 clone for a start, as well as your attacks on people who dispute that baseless claim.

snip

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I agree with everything in this post. I've advocated for most of it, especially on clever ways to make megaservers and how you handle shards. My arguement wasn't that only 20 people would play EQ1, I just grouped all the pro EQ1 people in this thread as those 20-30 people. I'm sure a lot of people would play EQ1 redid with graphics. I'm just not sure there is enough people that an investment of 20-30 million is justified.

Mick_sl said:

What is a sandbox MMO?
People seem to define sandbox differently.

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At minimum, it's simply a game that's unstructured, where you're dropped into the world and told to have at it, rather than the game leading you around.

More ambitiously (and more ideally), a sandbox is also a place where you can make sandcastles, or knock them down. It's a place where the ability to do whatever you want in the game world extends to the ability to alter the game world, for players to make a permanent(ish) mark on the game.

Draegan_sl said:

...What the fuck am I doing on this forum? Apparently wasted my time talking to people like you who can't seem to engage in a decent conversation.

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Trust me, it is much nicer to have qwerty and supertouch on ignore for the purpose of perusing this thread because they are both pretty retarded. Save yourself some sanity, even if it isn't the normal thing you think a mod should do with posters. Most the rest of the EQ1 guys (barring Zeus/Merlin showing back up talking about how travel in EQ was no problem since he was a wizard, thus it was no problem for anyone else or Dumar telling everyone that all games are shitrarrrgarglbarblge! ) are Ok. But qwerty and supertouch make threads nigh unreadable.

Also, there's a pretty big distinction with Eve and fantasy mmos in general. With eve, you have 5000 zones. But they are 5000 zones of lots of blackness, white dots and a few planets/gates that by and large look fairly identical. Kelethin looked nothing like Neriak looked nothing like Ogguk looked nothing like Felwithe. To compete on scope, they would have to add a serious generic bent to the styles of most the fantasy races which would seriously water down the individual identity. So yeah, I don't think EQ:N is even beginning to look for competition in Eve when it comes to pure "size" of the world. It's easy to make big zones when you can just put in larger amounts of Empty in between stuff in them hah.

Rezz_sl said:

Trust me, it is much nicer to have qwerty and supertouch on ignore for the purpose of perusing this thread because they are both pretty retarded. Save yourself some sanity, even if it isn't the normal thing you think a mod should do with posters. Most the rest of the EQ1 guys (barring Zeus/Merlin showing back up talking about how travel in EQ was no problem since he was a wizard, thus it was no problem for anyone else or Dumar telling everyone that all games are shitrarrrgarglbarblge! ) are Ok. But qwerty and supertouch make threads nigh unreadable.

Also, there's a pretty big distinction with Eve and fantasy mmos in general. With eve, you have 5000 zones. But they are 5000 zones of lots of blackness, white dots and a few planets/gates that by and large look fairly identical. Kelethin looked nothing like Neriak looked nothing like Ogguk looked nothing like Felwithe. To compete on scope, they would have to add a serious generic bent to the styles of most the fantasy races which would seriously water down the individual identity. So yeah, I don't think EQ:N is even beginning to look for competition in Eve when it comes to pure "size" of the world. It's easy to make big zones when you can just put in larger amounts of Empty in between stuff in them hah.

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A strict copy of EvE's zone system would never work for a fantasy based PvE game like EQNext. You can't create that many zones with unique art assets for one thing. Sure maybe with proceedural type stuff but it would still be bland and lifeless because mobs would be scattered and simplistic. And never mind creating quests for all of that content. Also, PvE zones require players, lots of them generally, to be fun. Getting players to all spread out amongst the different zones would be a monumental task.

EvE's 5000 zones works for EvE because it is primarily a PvP game where you usually don't want to run into too many other players at any one time.

Where EvE can be copied is in it's philisophical take on safe vs dangerous zones and the harsh penalties for dying in low sec areas. Rare resources and other loot could be spread out amongst the dangerous areas. That system could be adapted to PvE EQNext with modifications and it would be a nice change of pace from the pablum we have now. However you don't want to put the best stuff only in dangerous zones or the people who don't like that sort of thing will get frustrated and leave. Balance is necessary.

Other areas could also be considered, like the skill system. Although, I'm not really a fan of it, it does work for EvE. Plex works, so do GW2's gems and Lotro's TP. Implementing more of EvE's sandbox elements would also be good. But not sure how you would do that.

So the point isn't to copy EvE but to take from it some things that could be modified to work within a fantasy PvE context.

Ukerric_sl said:

EVE Online has about 5000 zones in the base game; each zone has twenty-forty points of interest (stations, planets, moons, belts, etc) and it takes a couple minutes to move from two distant ones. So, in terms of fantasy-themed real estate, I'd say an EVE-type zone would a largeish (slightly under Uldum size) WoW zone. And you have 5000 of those.

Just like EVE, those zones would have to be procedurally generated. The designers would put special touches on zones who look "the best" to make them the Seat of Empire or somesuch, and you're done.

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I did not know that, thanks for the info. Though I think you're a little too easy on the making ~5000 zones. At the very least the install size will be quite interesting, if you're going current/next gen graphics.

I'm quite sure Smed was talking hyperbole, but if EQN tries something in that vein, it'll be interesting to see and worth a try.