[Opinion] EQ Next - Game Changers/Breakers

[Cheeb]

With the official announcement of EverQuest Next just a few weeks away the game has been coming up a lot at work lately. Since myself and a couple coworkers play on the P99 server I thought it would be fun to bring our most recent conversation to the boards.

We started talking about what would be some game changers (positive) and some game breakers (negative) in terms of features included in EverQuest Next. Changers would be categorized as something that isn't currently in the P99 era of EQ that you wouldn't mind seeing incorporated in EQN. Breakers would be features that you most associate with the P99 era of EQ that, if they weren't re-imagined in EQN, would keep you from purchasing the game.

Here is my list, I would love to see what you guys think!

Changers:
*Non instanced player housing
*Race/Faction based PvP system
*Robust and rewarding crafting system

Breakers:
*Instanced zones
*Class based characters (no one class fits all)
*Smaller server/community sizes

Sound off!

-Cheeb

[Gaffin Deeppockets]

Aggro meter.

[August]

I don't understand the hate towards instanced zones. Just because WoW instanticized the dungeons doesn't mean that it was a bad idea.

I mean, look at the way we (or at least, I) play P1999. I look for zones that are not that populated so I can get a group / get decent EXP. I skipped unrest almost entirely this leveling up path because often times there were too many people. And, if I had a group, some 6 people, that was awesome. Usually, though, I was wishing that we were the ONLY group in the zone so we could have more pulls. Sure, the higher level camp is there and that's fine, as long as they don't pull from us.

This extrapolates into the end game as well. We have a bunch of 'hardcore' raiders out there who want to slay dragons, and we all can't. Well, if things were instanced, we certainly could.

Instances that were difficult, and that produced loot on a weekly cadence, allows for a healthy server size without the need to grief each other and the necessity of a RnF board that plagues this forum. Do I think that being able to teleport and get assigned to random people from a pool of 50,000 is a good idea? No.

But, then again, if you want EQNext to be a success, and I'm going to assume you do, you are going to need subscriber bases reaching into the millions (hopefully). When talking about how to fit all those people in there - do you make 1000 servers with 1000 people each in them? That's way too many servers! And the bad ones get vacant and waste those peoples time. You need consolidation - you need higher numbers to have a community thrive if there are multiples. P1999 works because this is only 1 private server - not a brand new MMO catering to the multitudes.

The answer to this is instancing. Instance the dungeons because let's face it, at level 10 there will be thousands of people all wanting to go do those dungeons. Can you imagine 100 people in a dungeon like unrest? Can you imagine 1000? And if you don't instance, what is the answer? Make the dungeon HUGE!! But then the dungeon becomes out of scale for your world, with so many camps. You won't be able to memorize the layout or kill the choice rare because there'd have to be so MANY of them - enough to maybe satisfy 200-300 people at any given time.

The alternative to that, if you don't instance, is to make the WORLD huge - make everyone so spread out that we don't have this problem. Instancing gives us virtual real estate without the cost of spreading out the world to it's limits.

If I was going to redo it, I would certainly do instancing, with the following caveats:

24 hour timer on any instance - you go in, you're locked to it for 24 hours, no massive clears & reclears
No teleportation to instance - you have to find it.
No dungeon finder - you have to find your group.
Death = bind point, naked, none of this pansy spawning at the ent and walking back in.
Drops are not guaranteed - loot tables exist, but the item you want / any item doesn't necessarily have to drop.

I added the last one because the problem with instancing is item bloat. In WoW, everything is bind on pickup or bind on equip - very few things don't bind! Trading items is one of the best things about EQ to me, and I'd like to keep that going forward. If you want to keep items rare, then there needs to be thresholds to how many of X item can drop in a given day. This is already done by the laws enforcing p1999 (spawn rate, loot table, etc) and can be done in a more sophisticated way in the present day. THis way, FBSS are still awesome, they drop just as frequently, and are still tradeable. Giving everyone a FBSS per run sucks - and that's why instancing sucked in WoW - you are no longer special, just another toon.

[t0lkien]

Originally Posted by August [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't understand the hate towards instanced zones. Just because WoW instanticized the dungeons doesn't mean that it was a bad idea.

This has been talked about elsewhere infinitum and those who don't understand are never going to I don't think. What we are talking about are two fundamentally different game experiences and preferences. Instances change the game from open world to something else. You won't have the frantic spawn competitions you have in EQ, you won't have a contiguous game world. The game experience and the game world is fractured. For many of us, it gamifies things in a bad way. The implications are deep and far reaching and impact every aspect of the gameplay in one way or another (including the community and the economy by the way).

If you like instancing, good for you. But these are two different types of game. I can tell you I hate instancing with a passion and won't play a game that implements it for very long. Instancing is a bad (I would say lazy) tech solution to a tech problem that overrides core gameplay, which is always a bad idea. Gameplay is king. Forcing core aspects of the game in a direction because of tech imperatives just means you didn't think hard enough about the problem, and is an example of why coders should never drive design. True open world is one of the reasons I'm on p99, and one of the reasons why even a 14 year old game is still better than those released in the past few years.

As for EQN, I don't hold out any hope for it. They have already abandoned the original idea of upgrading Classic EQ, thrown everything out, and come up with "novel ideas" that are going to "push the genre" further. For anyone who has been around games for any length of time, that rhetoric is the mark of death. You watch, it's going to be a steaming pile of mediocrity - again. SoE can't make great games. They are the ones who fubared the original EQ after strong arming it from Verant.

So for me it's back to p99 until someone manages to put out a game that isn't polluted by mercenary, clueless business heads and politically, career, security motivated "company men" designers. For an example of what such designers do to great games, see Diable 3.

[Kiwaukee]

I envision an open-world setting with NPCs that change with the playerbase, sort of like Guild Wars 2 did with the dynamic event system.

When players camp the shit out of the frogloks in Guk, they adapt and move to another nearby location. When a big raid boss is taken down, his underlings flee the dungeon briefly and infiltrate nearby areas.

Stuff like that keeps the world instance free, but at the same time allows for dynamic content that breaks up the monotony and forces players to adapt, rather than sitting in a tunnel for 2 months.

[enr4ged]

Originally Posted by August [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't understand the hate towards instanced zones. Just because WoW instanticized the dungeons doesn't mean that it was a bad idea.

I mean, look at the way we (or at least, I) play P1999. I look for zones that are not that populated so I can get a group / get decent EXP. I skipped unrest almost entirely this leveling up path because often times there were too many people. And, if I had a group, some 6 people, that was awesome. Usually, though, I was wishing that we were the ONLY group in the zone so we could have more pulls. Sure, the higher level camp is there and that's fine, as long as they don't pull from us.

This extrapolates into the end game as well. We have a bunch of 'hardcore' raiders out there who want to slay dragons, and we all can't. Well, if things were instanced, we certainly could.

I'll give you some reasons why I love NON-instanced content.

1. I LOVE seeing other people in the game... it's an MMO... "Fuck me, right?" I don't like going into a dungeon and suddenly I'm in my own world, this is also precisely why I can't play single player RPG's anymore.
2. Instance crowding can be solved in some ways that games have come out with recently. I think the best trade off between instance and non instance that I've seen thus far is games that incorporate limited number of instances. For example say Lower guk has a capacity of 45 with an over fill of about 15. You could start splitting it up into a separate instance once you get to around 45 and the overfill can choose a new instance or the main instance. You lose some of the non-instance feel, but you can still get into a dungeon with other people.

3. Dungeons are more fun to me with a lot of people/groups doing their own thing at different parts of the dungeon. I like encountering other people and seeing what they are up to or just having some fun chats with random people.

4. Loot - With instanced dungeons you generally get an overflow of loot since all players can do their own instance as many times as they want to get an item. Loot becomes less rare, and plus its not even that valuable at that point. If the game is created with TRADEABLE loot (I LOVE when all/most loot is tradeable) then you can BUY stuff from others, so its not so bad when you can't "get your camp"

5. non-instanced dungeons kind of create a system where you know which camps are better and they feel more dynamic as suddenly it's not a "queue for instance, plow to end with the best/fastest route, rinse, repeat" you get dynamism in the dungeons, where people are excited when they get better/more fun/camps. And if not they go to a sub par camp and wait.

[August]

Originally Posted by enr4ged [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I'll give you some reasons why I love NON-instanced content.

1. I LOVE seeing other people in the game... it's an MMO... "Fuck me, right?" I don't like going into a dungeon and suddenly I'm in my own world, this is also precisely why I can't play single player RPG's anymore.
2. Instance crowding can be solved in some ways that games have come out with recently. I think the best trade off between instance and non instance that I've seen thus far is games that incorporate limited number of instances. For example say Lower guk has a capacity of 45 with an over fill of about 15. You could start splitting it up into a separate instance once you get to around 45 and the overfill can choose a new instance or the main instance. You lose some of the non-instance feel, but you can still get into a dungeon with other people.

3. Dungeons are more fun to me with a lot of people/groups doing their own thing at different parts of the dungeon. I like encountering other people and seeing what they are up to or just having some fun chats with random people.

4. Loot - With instanced dungeons you generally get an overflow of loot since all players can do their own instance as many times as they want to get an item. Loot becomes less rare, and plus its not even that valuable at that point. If the game is created with TRADEABLE loot (I LOVE when all/most loot is tradeable) then you can BUY stuff from others, so its not so bad when you can't "get your camp"

5. non-instanced dungeons kind of create a system where you know which camps are better and they feel more dynamic as suddenly it's not a "queue for instance, plow to end with the best/fastest route, rinse, repeat" you get dynamism in the dungeons, where people are excited when they get better/more fun/camps. And if not they go to a sub par camp and wait.

I don't disagree with you, and if you read more than just that one snippet you would see i've made the same points, and how to solve them in an instanced environment, specifically I have mentioned (2) - and btw, that is still an 'instance'. Once again, most people are comparing 'instances' to post-TBC WoW linear instances that are a 15 minute joy ride of face rolling. That's not what I'm advocating for.

[t0lkien]

Originally Posted by August [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't disagree with you, and if you read more than just that one snippet you would see i've made the same points, and how to solve them in an instanced environment, specifically I have mentioned (2) - and btw, that is still an 'instance'. Once again, most people are comparing 'instances' to post-TBC WoW linear instances that are a 15 minute joy ride of face rolling. That's not what I'm advocating for.

Time limited instances in a "world" - what is the justification within the game world for it? It breaks the 4th wall without even acknowledging it - as the instances themselves did. Notice how the "solutions" created to solve the problems the original bad "solution" created get more and more inelegant and more and more "gamey"? This is what those of us advocating no instance worlds are saying. This breaking of immersion goes on and on. It's an ugly solution to a non-existent problem by people who don't understand, respect, or care for the game world. Any instance does this - it is an illogical, de-immersive departure from the continuity of the game world. An exception would be where the game world supports it, as in a sci-fi or overtly "online" setting such as we had in the now defunct Otherland game, and where it makes perfect sense and instead of fracturing the world actually strengthens it.

Mind you, once gamers accepted bright yellow question marks and exclamation marks hovering over NPC heads, it was all downhill in that sense. As I know I keep saying, we are talking about fundamentally different types of games. This is why many of us are back in EQ - the "modern" mindset of game design has lost its way.

This isn't just rhetoric, at least for me. I spent 3 years on a next-gen MMO arguing continually these points, and from this perspective. During one heated discussion on a design point, I had the epiphany that we were all talking about different types of games. Developers now look at game design as a "craft". You have a bunch of mechanics and tools, like little blocks, and your job is to fit them together to suit the project. There are accepted structures and mechanics. If you dare to question the "industry practice", and point out that maybe some of those blocks are questionable, you are a pariah. I'm not kidding, it's really that way. It's now a bunch of pompous nerds enforcing intellectual and creative reductionism. There are exceptions, but they are viewed as mavericks.

Unfortunately, the only MMO that plays by the rules that I want (or close to it), is classic EQ. And there are a lot of people who feel the same way.

[ajellis6976]

Originally Posted by August [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't understand the hate towards instanced zones. Just because WoW instanticized the dungeons doesn't mean that it was a bad idea.

I mean, look at the way we (or at least, I) play P1999. I look for zones that are not that populated so I can get a group / get decent EXP. I skipped unrest almost entirely this leveling up path because often times there were too many people. And, if I had a group, some 6 people, that was awesome. Usually, though, I was wishing that we were the ONLY group in the zone so we could have more pulls. Sure, the higher level camp is there and that's fine, as long as they don't pull from us.

This extrapolates into the end game as well. We have a bunch of 'hardcore' raiders out there who want to slay dragons, and we all can't. Well, if things were instanced, we certainly could.

Instances that were difficult, and that produced loot on a weekly cadence, allows for a healthy server size without the need to grief each other and the necessity of a RnF board that plagues this forum. Do I think that being able to teleport and get assigned to random people from a pool of 50,000 is a good idea? No.

But, then again, if you want EQNext to be a success, and I'm going to assume you do, you are going to need subscriber bases reaching into the millions (hopefully). When talking about how to fit all those people in there - do you make 1000 servers with 1000 people each in them? That's way too many servers! And the bad ones get vacant and waste those peoples time. You need consolidation - you need higher numbers to have a community thrive if there are multiples. P1999 works because this is only 1 private server - not a brand new MMO catering to the multitudes.

The answer to this is instancing. Instance the dungeons because let's face it, at level 10 there will be thousands of people all wanting to go do those dungeons. Can you imagine 100 people in a dungeon like unrest? Can you imagine 1000? And if you don't instance, what is the answer? Make the dungeon HUGE!! But then the dungeon becomes out of scale for your world, with so many camps. You won't be able to memorize the layout or kill the choice rare because there'd have to be so MANY of them - enough to maybe satisfy 200-300 people at any given time.

The alternative to that, if you don't instance, is to make the WORLD huge - make everyone so spread out that we don't have this problem. Instancing gives us virtual real estate without the cost of spreading out the world to it's limits.

If I was going to redo it, I would certainly do instancing, with the following caveats:

24 hour timer on any instance - you go in, you're locked to it for 24 hours, no massive clears & reclears
No teleportation to instance - you have to find it.
No dungeon finder - you have to find your group.
Death = bind point, naked, none of this pansy spawning at the ent and walking back in.
Drops are not guaranteed - loot tables exist, but the item you want / any item doesn't necessarily have to drop.

I added the last one because the problem with instancing is item bloat. In WoW, everything is bind on pickup or bind on equip - very few things don't bind! Trading items is one of the best things about EQ to me, and I'd like to keep that going forward. If you want to keep items rare, then there needs to be thresholds to how many of X item can drop in a given day. This is already done by the laws enforcing p1999 (spawn rate, loot table, etc) and can be done in a more sophisticated way in the present day. THis way, FBSS are still awesome, they drop just as frequently, and are still tradeable. Giving everyone a FBSS per run sucks - and that's why instancing sucked in WoW - you are no longer special, just another toon.

After reading this post it became obvious, quickly, that although you play on p1999 you didn't or don't remember the early days of eq. Instances can easily be done without and as for tons of people wanting to instance in the same zone, you'll adapt.

[Tecmos Deception]

I don't like you anymore Tom.

Saying nice things about instancing. Get a load of this guy! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

They may help fix a problem, but god damn they ruin my immersion! [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]