My opinion over the months and years has changed in slight ways. Kind of an evolution. I think I already stated it in this thread but it might have changed in some way so I'll state it again. The temporal differences are enough, I'd think.
What did I think of luclin back then and what do I think about the conventional views here about luclin?
Conventional Views:
1) Bazaar destroyed player trading
Somewhat agree. But I also disagree. I think what EQ really needed was auto-traders that would stay in-game even when we logged out. UO had that back in 1999, so why couldn't EQ? Not only that, UO had houses and you could put your merchant in your house. UO kicked the pants off EQ with respect to sandbox features. But part of me liked the open markets we had with the EC tunnel and whatnot. Trading was more fluid. Since you had to talk to the other player you could often get a better deal. Bazaar, by comparison, was robotic and cold. It even had banker robots and other things to feel our addiction.
2) The luclin spires destroyed travel
This is the one that gets me the most. Why do EQ players consistently ignore the problems EQ had back then? There were a huge numbers of zones, a population that was increasingly bulky at the top, less and less new players coming into the game, so what do you think that all means? It means no druids and no wizards and no convenient groups. It's not rocket science. The reasoning for the spires and pok books is MTH 60.
3) The cat people don't belong in EQ lore
I actually think I agree with this one. Something never felt right about the cats. This feeling was the same for the GoD and OOW expansions and others. They added stuff and lore, but it didn't fit in very well. That was how it felt to me. Everything felt hands off (the game seemed to get harder and harder with mobs hitting like trucks and non-tanks getting softer) and alien, like Frodo and E.T in the same sentence. The game started out feeling like a conventional medieval kind of adventure in a tolkien-like world. I liked it. But it morphed into a crazy fantasy steampunk psychedelic cesspool. It also seems that, as they added expansions, the home-city feel got worse and worse. All we had was PoK. The game lost more and more substance until it felt like a vendor machine or a mall that you might go to that's filled with shoppers. It didn't feel like an adventure in another world. It felt like convenience for convenience sake with no regard for anything else except that alone. Robotic. And for the benefit of developers, not players. They were too lazy to make a world. Or they were incapable of doing it. So they dragged their feet and shat on norrath.
What did I think back then:
1) Higher poly models and zones
The graphics slow down was the most noticeable thing. I couldn't run all of the models and had to turn it down. I usually kept the models on for barbarians and a few others, but most of the time old models remained. For a long time the new models never much crossed my mind because I didn't have them turned on. My opinion nowadays is that the newer models are too muscular and even messed up - like the half elves. I remember the first time going to dawnshroud peaks the framerate was horrid. View distance too high.
2) I didn't go to luclin until later
Believe it or not, but I spent a lot of my time in other zones. I didn't like the graphics slow down and luclin was tough compared to velious or antonica zones. So any bad feelings I have about luclin came later. I do remember not liking it that players all went to kill the recondites in Paludal Caverns. That was one of my first exposures to mudflation in an overt, in your face kind of way. SOE got very blatant, and increasingly indifferent. That was around the time that I started to grow bitter about SOE and its mentality.
EQ in all its glory still reminds me of a house that's all dressed up (vainly) but nobody is in it or wnats to be in it. That's the feeling I get from it. This is especially true for EQ between 2004-2009(10). Only reason I played it then was because of friends I had. EQ, for the most part, had lost a lot of its magic and was only about getting more money and items and staying with friends. Simple loyalty. But I just got more bitter and angrier with time. It was miserable. EQ lost substance like an aging crack whore that has given up.
To be honest, the only thing that interests me right now about EQ are the houses they added in HoT. The rest of the game turns me off. EQ is too much like patchwork for me to love anymore. It's too old. It's an old man that has had so much plastic surgery that he's no human anymore. But owning a house in a fantasy world.... nothing beats that. But UO did it so much better. Why go to EQ, if I can go to UO player run?
Maybe EQ just got old. It lost its zoooom. It lost its purpose after that. Everything dies...
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