Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO
- Thread starter Flobee
- Start date
Quaid
Trump's Staff
- 12,044
- 8,427
Why did you put "brutal world" in quotation marks, when you are the only one who has said it?
Nobody called the world "brutal". We are calling it retarded.
Lodi
Blackwing Lair Raider
- 1,528
- 1,606
What amount of time do you think is reasonable to get a group, get exp, and actually get something done because I think even if the game had LFG tags, summon stones at every dungeon entrance, and coth a hour and a half is really jack and shit time to play. I barely got shit done in WoW in a hour and a half and that was usually solo questing (WHICH IS SO MUCH FUN AMIRITE). When games involve other people it will always be a time sink.
Weather effects are fine as long as there are ways to counter them later like druids dispel or crafted goggles or some shit. If you gotta sit there for hours waiting for it to stop then yeah its retarded.
Weather effects are fine as long as there are ways to counter them later like druids dispel or crafted goggles or some shit. If you gotta sit there for hours waiting for it to stop then yeah its retarded.
Last edited:
Quaid
Trump's Staff
- 12,044
- 8,427
The only dungeon in classic wow that took more than an hour was BRD. Maaaaybe UBRS if you sucked.
Flobee
Vyemm Raider
- 2,918
- 3,410
jayrebb
Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
- 15,489
- 15,517
They should keep it as is, but toss some rare spawn mobs in the middle of can't see shit to go hunt down. Well ok maybe it lasts a tad too long.
Kharzette
Watcher of Overs
- 5,764
- 5,763
Ooo that's a good idea. Special deadites that come up out of the sand to eat souls
- 2
Quaid
Trump's Staff
- 12,044
- 8,427
I know Shawn has already said he reads Quaid's post but I think the team is reading Kirun's posts too, so you guys should keep posting.
Of course they read this thread. I imagine the perpetual knob-gobble of their discord gets boring eventually.
I’m very curious to see how discussion in their channels changes once EA launches and the audience broadens.
- 1,334
- 3,561
There are 10 great MMOs out right now with all the cooperation you could ask for. And none of them have any sense of risk vs. reward. There is no such thing as losing, there is no penalty, and the only challenge involved is sitting in LFG queues. You can bash on outdated mechanics like corpse runs and xp penalties all you want, but there was a significant and noticible shift in MMOs as the genre moved into EQ2 and WoW, as you train through hordes of mobs with zero fucks given because, why not, die and you will probably res closer to your destination with no penalities. And the genre became worse because of it. Like someone earlier in the thread said, you cannot recreate EQ, it was a different time, with different players, but discounting the impact that the "friction and inconvience" has on creating a sense of risk is a bad take. The risk is the fun for a lot of people.
- 1
Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 43,916
- 154,927
You say that, but it's been a quarter century and no games have had any success with that model, and that's including EQ who also dumped most of it.
Hell, EverQuest even dumped stuff like retarded long travel as early as Planes of Power, just 3 years in (years before WoW was released). Imagine that, having stupid large zones that took hours to traverse only lasted 3 years, before they realized how fucking stupid it was.
Things like AAs to reduce friction from run speed, or constant eating, were added in Luclin, just over two years in.
Kithani
Blackwing Lair Raider
- 1,620
- 2,244
Gravel
Mr. Poopybutthole
- 43,916
- 154,927
Fucking casuals, am I right?Exploring your dust storm in third person mode?!
- 2
Kithani
Blackwing Lair Raider
- 1,620
- 2,244
If I wanted to watch a bunch of Goblins running around the desert, I’d watch Dune!
- 1
Kirun
Buzzfeed Editor
- 20,577
- 17,276
So then the real question becomes: was EQ's success ever truly about corpse runs, hell levels, or punishing downtime? Or was it simply a product of its era? An era where exploration wasn't instantly trivialized by YouTube guides, Discord servers, and wikis? It's hard to ignore that no MMO has ever managed to meaningfully replicate that "old school" formula since, no matter how many times people try. Every so-called "hardcore" throwback either flames out, gets abandoned, or ends up dismissed as "not real EQ" by the same crowd who cling to their Polk High glory days.
That alone suggests the magic wasn't in the mechanics, it was in the timing. EQ hit when the genre was new, the internet was young, competition didn't exist, and we simply didn't know any better. Of course it felt monumental, but that doesn't mean the design holds up under scrutiny. Nostalgia convinces people that the friction was what made it special, when in reality the fun likely came from novelty, community, and youth. Now that the curtain's been pulled back and we've seen what meaningful gameplay actually looks like, the "magic" people remember is just how it felt to be 18 with no responsibilities, not the tedium itself.
If "friction and inconvenience" were truly what made EQ magical, then riddle me this: why has no MMO built around those same mechanics ever succeeded since? Why do TLPs and EMUs only hold people for a nostalgia hit before they bail again? Why, when given the choice between tedium-as-risk versus actual fun, do players always gravitate to the latter?
It's not because "gamers today are soft." It’s because those mechanics were never actually fun. They were just tolerated because the internet was new, competition didn't exist, and most of us were teenagers with zero responsibilities. That's what people are nostalgic for: their own youth, not corpse runs and hell levels.
If corpse runs, XP loss, and all that "friction" were genuinely the heart of the experience, why has no one chosen them when they've had other options? Why has every attempt to "bring back the old ways" fizzled out? If tedium and copious friction was fun, you'd see players voting with their time and money to support it. But they don't. Because deep down, everyone knows those systems were just clunky bandaids of the era, not the reason we logged in night after night.
Honestly, if you think corpse runs, hell levels, exp loss, etc. were the "fun," what you really loved wasn't EQ’s design. What you loved was being 19, with no bills, no YouTube spoiling everything, and all the time in the world. That nostalgia doesn’t prove the mechanics were good. It just proves you were young - and that's the part no developer can ever code back in.
- 1
FFXI was actually a pretty successful EQ clone for its era, i think it had x5 the pop at its peak? Wasn't EVE something similar? I never played it. FFXIV 1.0 was like a weird twisted alternate reality WoW/EQ hybrid with copy pasta zones so I don't count it.
To be fair there havent been that many EQ clones to even try to play. Vanguard is the only other one I can think of and it was designed poorly out the gate. The rest have been quest hub WoW clones or Korean grind till you die.
To be fair there havent been that many EQ clones to even try to play. Vanguard is the only other one I can think of and it was designed poorly out the gate. The rest have been quest hub WoW clones or Korean grind till you die.