Quaid
Trump's Staff
- 11,543
- 7,847
Don't even respond to him. I'm pretty sure all 200 of his posts are regurgitating the same bullshit idea. I'd put good money on a bet that says he hasn't even played Mortal Online.
Pan'Theon: Rise' of th'e Fal'Len - #1 Thread in MMO
- Thread starter gogojira_sl
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Big Flex
Fitness Fascist
- 4,314
- 3,166
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
- 2,091
- 312
You were Poopsicle on FoH? If so, your posts gave me MANY laughs as you railed on their holy grail MMO!
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
- 2,380
- 276
That McQuaid dismissed WoW entirely during Vanguard development (according to rumor, anyway) is one of the reasons I'm hesitant to embrace this project. Even if you take all of it as lesson on what not to do, you'd have to experience it first. Shrugging it off and basing all your knowledge on whats right and wrong with the obvious giant in the industry on forum posts is a recipe for failure.
+1 for forced 1st person btw, embrace the niche.
+1 for forced 1st person btw, embrace the niche.
wolfshead
Molten Core Raider
- 18
- 6
I remember the Vanguard forums fondly. It is my understanding from his many posts back then, that at the time both Brad McQuaid and Jeff Butler (along with a majority of the community) felt that the WoW model was unsustainable and that players would grow tired of it. I did an extensive interview with Jeff many years ago and he gave me the impression that he was well acquainted with all of the flaws in inherent in the WoW design.
What they didn't account for was that Blizzard are masters of execution and polish. No studio has been able to rival them since. This has given WoW an almost surreal sense of immortality.
As someone who hasn't played WoW what is that made it so popular and what are the good points of the game that should be carried on in brad's future project? The WoW numbers are just amazing I wonder if people will be calling WoW's success a fluke as people seem to think EQ1 was a fluke.
Blizzard had the Starcraft crowd in the pocket before the race even started. Considering it sold 10 million copies in 10 years they have a pretty good base of players who know the company name. That is no way discounts WOW, but it sure helped.
It's just McDonalds of MMO's. It had cartoon graphics that meant it would run on little 9 year old kids dad's laptops and people whose household just had some old pentium for emails or whatever, they could all play WoW because it was so low tech. It also was made really well so it ran smooth, the animations were flawless, and the bugs were fixed really fast.
And also, you need zero skill to play it. The raid scene is a different story so that's something for the decent players to play. But the actual levelling process, literally anyone could play it, little timmy, his nana, his 7 year old cousins, and his older dude bro 13 year old brother. Everyone could play. You can engage auto attack with a mob and then go AFK, and you will easily win. If you can manage to press a few hotkeys in any order, you kick mobs asses. It gets a bit tougher later on but for a long time, that's what its like. Also if you do die, you respawn nearby as a ghost which the mobs can't see. So you can just run back to your corpse and recover and you are back fighting again barely losing 2 minutes, unlike EQ which busted your balls.
And everything else was simplified too. You didn't need to be able to talk to people or have any social skills at all, because all trade is done via an in game shop, and the game can automatically join people in to groups and teleport them straight to a dungeon, you run through the dungeon in silence, takes like 10 minutes or whatever, and then you pop out the other end with your bag full of lootz.
Happy Meal gaming. So easy for me to be snobbish about because it really is a lower class of game. Yet it's only fair to admit that in business terms, they did exactly what made sense to make billions of $. They are masters of streamlining and casualising gameplay so it's accessible to EVERYONE.
shabushabu
Molten Core Raider
- 1,408
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I can't imagine what "else" from WoW you would want in a vanguard . . . there's quite a bit in there.
Uh, is thatnotwhat people could do (and did do for the most part if they were melee) in classic EQ?
Big Flex
Fitness Fascist
- 4,314
- 3,166
Absolutely! I mean.. unless it was something more difficult than a fire beetle, then no.
Even those fire beetles packed a mean bite to a noob. CRACK CRACK oh fuck don't die kill it kill it CRACK
Big Flex
Fitness Fascist
- 4,314
- 3,166
Thats my point guys. Firebeetles will send you hauling ass to a guard. Therefore something of firebeetle difficulty or above is not afk faceroll. Fuck I've been killed by a bat as a level 1.
I'm soloing in Oasis as a cleric in cloth and rawhide as we speak, don't give me dat rose-colored glasses shit lol.
I'm soloing in Oasis as a cleric in cloth and rawhide as we speak, don't give me dat rose-colored glasses shit lol.
Mr Creed
Too old for this shit
- 2,380
- 276
Skeleton with a sword or staff ... run. Anyway some things in WoW would screw you up just the same (in 2004, no idea about now). Defias mages come to mind for example. And there's no way you could go afk while killing a mob in current MMO, unless you jump off your chair it would be dead before you got up.
No way! Well... maybe a warrior but auto attack is all they had
But all the classes I played (casters and melee dps) pretty much struggled to survive a fight with a level 1 even when they played well. If you just did auto attack it would beat you to death and you would have done about 10% damage to the bat. You had to actually use every spell you had if you wanted to win, unload your entire mana bar in some cases (because you had so little of it), and you also had to time the spells perfectly or the mob would hit you and keep interrupting (therefore cancelling) your spell cast.
At level 2 you at least had a tiny advantage over what is now a lower level level 1 bat, but still, the fights were hard. And there were plenty of other complications too, like resists, fizzles, wandering aggro mobs that were much higher level, and mobs that were placed in groups like at Orc Hill. The game was all about busting your balls. For better or worse, I hope this at least gets remembered.
And I don't care how tempting it is.........DO NOT HIT A NOBLE. You will be running for the guards............
Schags
Bronze Knight of the Realm
- 140
- 28
Or a willowisp because they required magic weapons which was unheard for at least 20 odd levels. Even in a good fight with a wasp or bat or whatever, where everything went your way, you would still usually end up totally spent, low on hp and low or completely out of mana. Then you had to sit for a good minute or two to recover to full again for your next wasp fight.
But most of the time, fights didn't go your way. A wandering wasp would not take kindly to you attacking one of its buddies so it would join in. Or some wolf would sneak up behind you. Or even against just one mob, all it took was a couple of fizzles and a resist and you wouldn't have enough mana to finish the fight. You would end up spent while the mob is still at 50% and you could do nothing but run. And if you run.... chances are the mob will just chase you and beat you to death unless you happened to be right by some guards.
Early EQ was a brutal biatch. I think a lot of people had a love/hate relationship with it. But looking back now, it deserves to be preserved somehow because it's completely out there on its own. I've never played any other game even close to it in terms of player vs mob difficulty. The only thing that came close was the early versions of GW2 before it got nerfed to hell in Beta1/2.