[Roth]

You know, I always come back to everquest every so often and play it for a while no matter what other games I play. And every time, there is this "feeling" I get when I make a newbie and go into the newbie area for the first time and start leveling. Even on higher level characters just playing them for a little why there's an experience there... it's not necessarily the same thing as "fun" because it's different from being fun, the combat is actually pretty boring. But the entire experience feels meaningful.

When I see all this about pantheon, I'm afraid it will miss the mark of what made eq good because people always say the challenge is what made the game. But I disagree. I don't think the challenge on its own is what made people love the game, personally I found corpse runs extremely frustrating. To me what always made the game good was the feeling of being in a real world, the mystery of not knowing what will happen next, the feeling of knowing that you can do anything you want and you may discover greatness or be forced into a horrible death with consequences.

When you start a new character, the game does not tell you what to do. You are free to do whatever you want. There is no set way to play the game. No quests, no guidelines, nothing. And I love this. You just go out into the world and start doing whatever you want to do. You go outside and start killing some monsters, maybe die a few times and learn... but you don't know what will come next. Even if you know what's out there because you played before, to your newbie character all of that is dangerous and you can only imagine going out there. You don't know what will come next because the game doesn't tell you what you do next.

Secondly, I think the consequences are not what makes the game but more like the rule enforcers. You have to care about doing things properly because of travel time, monster difficulty, leveling speed, and corpse runs. They force you to play the game properly. When these things are gone, it's too easy to lose immersion because you can bypass all the rules and start finding shortcuts to beat the game. I love being forced to travel, because it gives meaning to my location. Every area gains it's only value and the choice of where you go makes it interesting.


To summarize what I'm trying to say, if a dev wants to make a new eq they need to recapture the freedom, immersion, and mystery of eq. It can't just be oh groups, slow grinding, difficulty, etc. because that's not what made eq good. What made eq good was being put into this game world with some strict game rules but you were free to play it any way you wanted. No one told you how to navigate this world and that's what I think new mmos are lacking.