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Originally Posted by Byrjun
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And finally, like Sanctus Seru, make the zones interesting. How many people have interesting stories from Marus Seru, The Scarlet Desert, Echo Caverns, Grimling Forest, Hollowshade Moor, etc? No one - and a similar amount of people most likely never went to these zones unless they were doing their VT key or had to get to a connecting zone.
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Not everyone entered Luclin as a NtoV-geared raid guildie. So I can say I played in these zones, and I had fun in... almost all of them. marus Seru is about the worst zone ever designed.
ever. And that's counting gates of discord.) Running around Hollowshade trying to jigger the war with my guild, hanging out camping bandits with the (vain) hope our beastlord would be a server first epic, and the Scarlet Desert and Twilight Sea were just frankly
gawjuss-looking. And there was the hideous fun / frustration time of farming nameds in the Umbral Plains.
There was plenty of good stuff in the pre-raid section of the expansion, in terms of both content and story (or at least, as far as story ever goes in Everquest...) and while not without its bogus content - including the two worst zones in the entire game, bar none (Marus Seru and Mons Letalis) it was thoroughly enjoyable.
If you came in as a raid-geared 60, in a raid guild, yeah, I can see where the expansion would pass you by - your experience would have pretty much consisted of fighting other groups over three mushrooms in Fungus Caverns for three weeks for AA, then moving on to competing for shards and bane weapon drops.
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I've seen these zones used well on custom servers - they can be fun, but the biggest disconnect between Velious and Luclin was how uninteresting and dead the world felt. Comparing those two expansions in that regard is like night and day.
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Luclin's big flaw
was immersion.
First off, it looked very plastic, and the zone design was very clearly using a set palette across the board. Velious armor textures were abandoned for the new models, when a better idea would have been to update them
and add new Luclin textures. It was also jarring to travel between old content and Luclin - you're traveling from a world painted in straight line and angles, and entering one that has discovered curves and circles. A little more individual zone design would have been an excellent direction. I can't rag on the new models, since the old ones aren't exactly eyecandy either.
Second - and this is actually huge - it was mostly silent. There's some cued ambient noise - crickets, rocks falling, tavern noises, wind and water... but they all started abruptly and ended just as abruptly when you left the cue area. But worst of all? There's no music. Unless VT has some, at least - I never made it there - the only music is some nasty stuff in Grieg's End. I think one of the reasons I hold a soft spot for Scarlet Desert is because I played the soundtrack from the Sci-Fi channel
dune movies when I hunted there.
I liked Luclin. It was odd, but it was mostly good - the bazaar was wretched (though admittedly convenient) and Paludal set EQ down the path towards its modern system of everyone having the same newbie zone... but still, mostly good.
In fact i think Everquest kept being pretty strong right up until Gates of Discord - that was the expansion that took a hatchet to Everquest. Aside from all the rampant bugs and failed QA, it was just
bad content - drab, and catered exclusively to progression raiders - an the one bone thrown to non-raiding players was a class so broken as to be unplayable for another two expansions. Omens of War was almost good... but then DoN, DoD, and Prophecy of Ro just made it all feel like SoE was secretly working for Blizzard.