Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

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Nirgon

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Interesting points. I think you could solve some of that by making the requirements a little more generic. Instead of having to kill the Guk Lord specifically maybe they could require you to kill any boss mob of a certain tier of dungeons. Other goals could be to use a certain skill a number of times, kill a certain number of "elite" mobs, reach a specific gear level, travel a certain distance, visit a certain number of cities, etc...

I like some of Sylas' ideas, but they don't necessarily have to be fulfilled to the letter in order to accomplish the general goal he's proposing.


Maybe some but not all items, sure.

More ultra random nameds with seldom seem items is cool.

T-staff in Kunark comes to mind, but make that spawn rarer so it cant be neckbearded as hard. Then its almost like its spawned via GM event? Almost completely a random thing that seldom happens.
 

Kaines

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Maybe some but not all items, sure.

More ultra random nameds with seldom seem items is cool.

T-staff in Kunark comes to mind, but make that spawn rarer so it cant be neckbearded as hard. Then its almost like its spawned via GM event? Almost completely a random thing that seldom happens.
Alright, I'm calling BS now. You never actually played EQ and just rode the coattails of other people's logins. You can't make this post with a straight face knowing things like An Ancient Cyclops and Hadden existed and were perma-camped....
 
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Nirgon

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Alright, I'm calling BS now. You never actually played EQ and just rode the coattails of other people's logins. You can't make this post with a straight face knowing things like An Ancient Cyclops and Hadden existed and were perma-camped....

I camped ancient rings on Rallos to sell plenty.

Someone was usually out there in sro too.

He'd torpedo himself into the merchants a fair amount too if you weren't diligent. Saw that happen at least twice.

The emulators were behind on this classic experience :D.
 

Kaines

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I camped ancient rings on Rallos to sell plenty.

Someone was usually out there in sro too.
And if the spawns were even rarer they would have still been camped. Just stop trying to fool us into thinking you actually played this game and didn't just log into your friend's account when he had to go to class.
 
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Nirgon

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And if the spawns were even rarer they would have still been camped. Just stop trying to fool us into thinking you actually played this game and didn't just log into your friend's account when he had to go to class.

The t-staff wasnt permanently camped on Rallos and far, far, far fewer existed.

It is rarer than the ancient cyclops (ring of the ancients).
 

Cybsled

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T-Staff was pretty hard to purpose camp from what I recall. The mob would spawn near the Karnors entrance, but that place was a mob pathing nightmare
 

Secrets

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One of the most exciting prospects of M&M will be discovering a new world.
I'm sure with their design that there will be stuff like the t-staff, fungi, AC ring, jboots, etc - but finding out all new effects and how to get those items will be part of the fun.

Will it be trivialized like P99 is? Probably. But those initial few months/years where we have to figure out an entirely brand new game similar to EQ, and a game that isn't limited to what EQ has/had for design philosophy will be incredible.

I'm looking forward to playing it for (mostly) those reasons alone.
 
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Nemesis

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has anyone seen Pantheon's 8 year retrospective and progress summary?



LETS GOOOOOOOOOO M&M!
I'm so stoked.
 
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Torrid

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Aka what Everquest did originally- they didn’t want to remove the “mystery” of what stats did

It ended up that players wore sub optimal gear because of rumors or bad data, some stats did fucking nothing, and some players just parsed the shit out of stuff. I remember a monk in my guild spent hours attacking dummies in free port wearing different stat load outs to try to figure out what actually boosted his damage

Players would crack that shit in very little time now. People like mystery until they figure out the “mystery” is causing them to gimp themselves
EQ did it somewhat. The MUDs they copied hid more. It's why EQ's character skills list shows "Bad, Good, Master" etc along side the the number. Back in the day when you hit a mob, the game would say "Your slash <*><-><*>EVISCERATES<*><-><*> an orc peon!" or some such. I kind of want to see a 3D game like that: more descriptive with visual queues and less math class. I think it would help a lot with encouraging players to focus more on exploration and adventuring instead of doing the most efficient but tedious min/maxing activity. Even if that's an impossible design goal I still think we should chase it.

If this stuff were so easy to crack then I wouldn't have had a job at the emus for almost a decade. (perhaps why I'm enamored with the idea) We've also been lucky in that Sony left a lot of it in the client needlessly for us to decompile and we've had some small server code snippets to review. Without that stuff we'd be stuck with crude approximations. There are still some EQ details that are unknown. AI behavior in particular is difficult to precisely decipher at times. If a game gives you 4 of the 5 pieces of the puzzle then it's easy to figure out. But when you have 2 of the 5 pieces it's much harder.

Players trying to figure it out with experiments and spreading rumors is part of reason for it. Even if short lived it's at least novel. Since it would likely be a niche game in the first place, you reduce the autist pool considerably anyway. The game should be designed to give descriptive hints so it's not blind. Games like Elden Ring show some stuff that 'obviously can't work' can in fact work. People are way too confined in their thinking nowadays.
 

Rezz

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Trying to hide stats or relative incremental growth just means more 3rd party stuff or places like Icy Veins having a full breakdown on what stats do within a couple of days. It's only really hidden from the extremely small subset of players that don't google or reddit. Especially if it has any real impact on gameplay (say, int is the best stat for a wizard, but the difference between having 10 int and 100 int is a 5% increase in damage, so even dumping points in it isn't that useful outside of extreme edge cases. If that 10-100 differential is like 30%? Then people that didn't immediately test out stats or read up on it will be very underpowered and less likely to get groups. It basically forces people to utilize 3rd party/out of game sources)

Leveling -is- a linear path, especially in any game released in the last 23 years (including EQ) It is linear growth. Changing leveling from "You really need to be level 30 to kill this boss, with all the skills and abilities players have at level 30 to do it" to "You need to have cleared the previous x dungeons/bosses/achievements to have the abilities to kill the boss" is basically having the same type of progression. You level to unlock abilities/stats that give you enough power to defeat something. If you gain those abilities/stats another way because there's no leveling, then it isn't changing what you need to beat the encounter, so you end up with the same effective system.

Class/race specific quests or grinds or whatever to unlock specific things? That's cool - Life Leach for SK (the 49 quested spell) was a fun little thing to get. The Iksar SK Kuhkri stuff (now -this- is something I wish would be implemented in some form for every class. Progressively increasing power and difficulty on attaining, resulting in an actually kind of useful weapon outside of big raid drops at the time) or other quested/epic type weapons that then grant semi-key abilities would be an interesting way to go about it as well. But just going "no levels!" doesn't solve any type of progression based issues. It just changes filling the bubble to filling the checkbox.
 
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Rezz

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This immediately reminded me of the multiple armchair dev threads from the previous forum incarnations - I legit think that all the pros/cons/whatever discussed in this or most threads here on the forum that talk about mechanics or the pros/cons of whatever WoW-like or EQ-like feature was, were already in those threads. Repeatedly. Sad times they went away.
 

Kirun

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Leveling -is- a linear path, especially in any game released in the last 23 years (including EQ) It is linear growth. Changing leveling from "You really need to be level 30 to kill this boss, with all the skills and abilities players have at level 30 to do it" to "You need to have cleared the previous x dungeons/bosses/achievements to have the abilities to kill the boss" is basically having the same type of progression. You level to unlock abilities/stats that give you enough power to defeat something. If you gain those abilities/stats another way because there's no leveling, then it isn't changing what you need to beat the encounter, so you end up with the same effective system.
Actually, the latter is a WORSE system (imo), because not only is it still "linear", it now also creates a "YOU MUST!" gameplay loop whereby you're defacto FORCING the playing down a certain track. At least in the EQ/leveling method of progression, if you design the world right, you're free to gain progression power from many locations - which allows the player greater choice. Sure, players will likely still choose the couple locations which are the "easiest"/most accessible, etc.(Old Seb vs. Howling Stones, for instance), but it at least does allow for some semblance of "go anywhere, do anything". This is exactly why the Mischief server was such a great idea/concept in a game like EQ, because it vastly expanded on the "freedom of choice" aspect - whereby you can still get good loot in dungeons that had great layouts/design/ease of access, but were itemized like dogshit.

This is actually one of the best aspects about BDO. It's really about the only "recent" MMO I can think of which isn't completely on rails and gives a pretty vast quantity of choices at the "endgame" for loot/progression.
 
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Nirgon

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People be like "that game sux the only places to level are solb or lguk"

And I start in with reminding them about Kedge, the upstairs of Highkeep, all the guards, sea fury Island etc

And get called a try hard incel or some such

There's really only a handful of people that know all this stuff that are also willing to have a discussion about it instead of nose down dominating emu servers
 
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Sylas

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It actually doesn't. In your "dream" scenario, everyone is filtered through a particular path - it's linear as fuck. I like the concept of no-levels, but your world would be completely devoid of exploration and quickly turn into "checklist" style gameplay.

People have complained in this very thread about EQ "lacking content" or the "artificial" timeflation that levels added. In reality, EQ had a pretty decent amount of content for the number of players in the game. The larger issue with EQ was entire dungeons went almost completely unused because itemization sucked there, mobs had pain in the ass abilities that weren't worth dealing with (charm, fear, etc.), and designers just didn't talk with each other at all. Guys were responsible for their own little "sections" of the world and that was it. So, you got zones with amazing layouts and great itemization and then you got others with terrible layouts and horrible itemization.

Your example ramps that up to 11, because what it essentially does is FORCE you go go kill the Guk Lord to get X ability or Y piece of gear before you can even step foot into Old Sebilis. So, now you've potentially even eliminated SolB as a possible progression path. And the idea of, "Well, you just have to create more mobs that give that ability, hur durrrr!!" doesn't work with an indie MMO that has 10-15 dudes working on it. Because now we're back to the problem of having to generate 3-4x more zones that are all exact mirrors of each other - an even more cut/paste version of LDoN, essentially. Otherwise, you end up with the SAME problem as EQ had, where people are going to take the path of least resistance every time. Or you have to switch to a predominately instanced game - which means you've essentially created WoW, but replaced the leveling path with even more linearity.

If that's your thing, great. Some of us prefer the "do and go wherever the fuck you want..good luck!" style of MMOs.
No I chalk it up to me not really explaining it all that well, my posts are already long enough as is and some people don't have the attention span. i'm advocating for the opposite actually, the same as you. Yeah I used some generic examples of having to do specific things but that has nothing to do no levels, that was a separate issue about making everything tradeable, getting rid of nodrop shit. for the most part having a high skill req (aka AAP) is what would keep people from twinking raid/bis dungeon gear on brand new twinks (or more realistically, ebay). Having to defeat a specific mob to gain a skill to equip something or do something would probably be either raid tier stuff or epic quest related, not dungeons/experience grinding. You can have kinda generic uses though, like say there is a skill for +20% disease resist, which is helpful against all the different types of mobs in the game that use disease attacks. it can be locked behind a quest or behind a handful of thematically appropriate dungeon bosses. It isn't required to fight disease using mobs but it helps. just an example.

How you itemize and populate the game is what will determine how linear it feels. If you only create one path then there is only going to be one path, if there is only 1 lguk then yeah everyone will end up there. An example I used was paladin epic but take FBSS for example. You can have hand crafted loot that drops off specific named if you want, you just want to spread it out. So instead of it dropping off "Frenzied Ghoul" it drops off "Frenzied Ambassador." He can spawn in Lguk, or SolB, or the Hole. He has place holders in each dungeon so you can camp him if you want but you cannot monopolize the item. the dungeons are geographically isolated away from each other so that one group cannot move between all 3. He is just as likely to spawn in any of the dungeons but he can only exist one place at a time. (That is so you can control the frequency that items enter the world, and also, several expansions down the road it's easier to farm when that content isn't as populated, just check to see if he's up in each dungeon, and if he isn't just pick one and farm it)

I think you are focusing on the wrong part of what I was saying. The ideal is a group of players fighting things which are challenging enough to give a sense of accomplishment, results in the optimal progression. Some nights maybe you wanna be lazy and farm easier shit, you can, you still gain exp (less) but the gear they drop isn't much to write home about. Or maybe you get a bug up your ass and wanna live dangerously and you convince your group to go tackle some shit that you will struggle to survive. Risk vs reward, go for it. Without levels, you only have the /con system. Everything in the world exists on a scale from red, yellow, white, dark blue, and light blue. there is no green cons. This only works because player power is linear instead of exponential, which is what happens with levels. If you have 100 hp at level 1 but 5000 at lvl 50, then there is no way to make level 1 content that will ever remain relevant to level 50 players. But if you have 100 health naked and 300 health in full gear with full skills (equivalent to lvl 50, maybe 400-500 for tanks due to special skills), then you can keep that content relevant, and you can add things or adjust it at any time. Not to mention, again, every games algorithms use level, so it becomes mathematically impossible for level 1 and level 50 to interact in any meaningful way. keeping power creep small and linear opens up everything.

So think about it like this. You have original EQ, all the content that existed then. you create a character and start out in newbie zone of freeport for example. Every mob in the world /cons red to you, except moss snakes. They con white. They are a tough battle but winnable, you generally end each fight with 50% health but it can vary depending on rng, but if you get greedy and attack a 2nd one before your fully healed and get unlucky, you can die. eventually you gain enough experience for a skill up and that skill is a 2nd attack (lets pretend you're a warrior). So instead of just autoattack and swinging your rusty short sword once every 3 seconds or whatever, you can now auto attack and Power attack (made up skill) also every 3 seconds. you are doing twice the damage basically and now moss snakes /con dark blue, but goblins nearby they now /con yellow. You can either keep killing moss snakes, they're easier, or do more challenging goblins, which drop rusty armor.

Eventually you get to the point where (what would of been around level 5 or so) that you need to start grouping in order to progress as far as gear drops are concerned. Yes you can always kill the moss snakes and gain (less) exp, and eventually gain enough skills to do more challenging shit, so technically yes any class can solo and progress, but realistically most classes need to start grouping up.

Here's the major difference though. mobs don't have levels either. They have proportionally more health and deal more dmg than players, just to ensure the game is group focused, but they aren't scaling up exponentially either. They don't have a level to look up on WoWhead of allakazam. Everything is light blue to red. shit is either easy enough to solo (but still challenging) to dangerous as fuck and prolly going to die. Your group isn't lvl 45, and limited to sol B or Lguk. Your group could be gorge of king xorbb or south karana at the aviaks or sol B or rathe mtns or castle mistmore or befallen or kedge keep or wherever. Some places will be a little easier than others, some you may have to stay on your toes not to wipe, but there isn't that huge disparity between mob difficulty that there is with levels.

Interesting points. I think you could solve some of that by making the requirements a little more generic. Instead of having to kill the Guk Lord specifically maybe they could require you to kill any boss mob of a certain tier of dungeons. Other goals could be to use a certain skill a number of times, kill a certain number of "elite" mobs, reach a specific gear level, travel a certain distance, visit a certain number of cities, etc...

I like some of Sylas' ideas, but they don't necessarily have to be fulfilled to the letter in order to accomplish the general goal he's proposing.
Yeah you could do counters (kill x # of elites) or whatever. Again i'm just talking about a framework, do with it what you will.
 

Cybsled

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And I start in with reminding them about Kedge, the upstairs of Highkeep, all the guards, sea fury Island etc

Those were good places to level, but they had higher barriers of entry

Kedge: You needed a fishbone earring or a caster that could cast a breathing spell for you (and recast it when it got dispelled). A lot of players also hated the underwater aspect, which seems to be a common thing in MMOs today

Highkeep: If you didn't give a shit about rep, sure lol

Island: Middle of nowhere when you jumped off the boat. Non-casters needed a viable way to escape, which is why you virtually never saw non-casters level there

I helped write the guide for Kedge Keep back in the day because I knew that place inside and out and spent an insane amount of time there. I also knew how to stealth murder other players. All you had to do was taunt the super nova fish, swim past some players AoEing, then the AoE would pop the super nova fish and basically gib the players there unless they had insane fire resist.

Solo pull Phinny was also easy as pie
 

Nirgon

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You can buff stack junk like see invis or endure disease to block your breathing spell getting pelled.

Sea fury Island is right across from sister island (go a little past the AC one in between).

The "can't get XP" flatbrains are the worst.
 

Sylas

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Leveling -is- a linear path, especially in any game released in the last 23 years (including EQ) It is linear growth. Changing leveling from "You really need to be level 30 to kill this boss, with all the skills and abilities players have at level 30 to do it" to "You need to have cleared the previous x dungeons/bosses/achievements to have the abilities to kill the boss" is basically having the same type of progression. You level to unlock abilities/stats that give you enough power to defeat something. If you gain those abilities/stats another way because there's no leveling, then it isn't changing what you need to beat the encounter, so you end up with the same effective system.

Class/race specific quests or grinds or whatever to unlock specific things? That's cool - Life Leach for SK (the 49 quested spell) was a fun little thing to get. The Iksar SK Kuhkri stuff (now -this- is something I wish would be implemented in some form for every class. Progressively increasing power and difficulty on attaining, resulting in an actually kind of useful weapon outside of big raid drops at the time) or other quested/epic type weapons that then grant semi-key abilities would be an interesting way to go about it as well. But just going "no levels!" doesn't solve any type of progression based issues. It just changes filling the bubble to filling the checkbox.
I missed this before. You guys are imagining a world where new characters have 100hp and 5000hp at max power/gear facing a world of moss snakes with 50hp and raid mobs with 32,000hp. Where dps goes from 0.3 to 100dps.

With that kind of scaling then yes all you are doing is leveling, even without levels. But you are scaling waaay too high. With that kind of scaling you could not create content that is just outside impossible for the 100hp 0.3dps guy but challenging for the 5000hp 100dps guy. Unless you just scaled the mobs down to each person which is a horrible solution (see elder scrolls online).

Heres another way to crack the egg if it makes it easier to visualize:

You start up a new character in eq1 but you are already level 50, level cap. You start with some generic gear but there is better shit out there, different tiers of gear, locked behind content. Theres new spells available which are better than what you have but they are locked behind content. Its like you bought a boost to cap and now you gotta go farm the aap (yeah yeah doesnt exist yet in eq1) and farm the gear, but with one major caveat. Instead of only having lguk and solb as content, the entire world is content for you, you start with the moss snakes and you move up from there. There isnt 50 different "tiers" of enemies. Goblins all over your world could all be the same difficulty for example.

When youve finished all the content slain all the dragons you arent 50x stronger than the fresh lvl 50, you are proportionally stronger yes, you have maybe twice his health and do twice his damage, enough to show progression, to feel proud of your accomplishments, but if you are a melee dps for example neither of you are soloing an even con mob.

They've already done this btw. Its called velious. A full continent of content and progression and best expansion ever released for eq which featured zero leveling. Giants were stronger than dwarves which were stronger than spiders in velks you started the expansion killing, and you felt progression as you moved up killing the harder ones. But they were only slightly, proportionally stronger, maybe 10-20% more health/damage at each tier. And each of them provided a challenge at any point no matter how geared you were.

Now instead of designing 1 continent, you design 3 continents youve got eq1 vanilla release.
 

TJT

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Alright, I'm calling BS now. You never actually played EQ and just rode the coattails of other people's logins. You can't make this post with a straight face knowing things like An Ancient Cyclops and Hadden existed and were perma-camped....
I remember KSing the cyclops in Sro looting the ring then running off. Bitch petitioned me and I just told the GM I didn't see the druid who was killing it and lol.
 
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Kaines

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I remember KSing the cyclops in Sro looting the ring then running off. Bitch petitioned me and I just told the GM I didn't see the druid who was killing it and lol.
I could be wrong about this, but I could swear Verant (before SoE took over) specifically stated they would not enforce "camps" and would only enforce Kill stealing (and I may be wrong on even that one) and ninja looting. It's been way too long since I've read those PNP rules.
 

Cybsled

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My memory is hazy as well, but I do recall that GMs would enforce player calendars for raid rotations early on. The general idea being that if all the respective guilds had agreed to it, it was a binding agreement. At least on our server.

I remember our GM was pissed that we didn't have a Nagafen kill yet and basically old all the bickering guilds to STFU and work together because he didn't want to be the last server with a Nag kill lol