I like the sound of all this. But how to you stop from being a cow? I really really hate that kind of stuff. When I choose a character at char creation THAT's what I expect to be, not a cow or some illusion cast on me by somebody else. I remember when I played EQ2 I had to hunt down an option to shut off illusions cast by my abilities on myself. In EQ enchanters can change how you look and there's no option.
So what about this game is like classic EQ? One poster comment said there're no glowing paths or automatic things or radars? I definitely like that about classic EQ. On p1999, I like hte lack of hand holding - like no GPS in the in-game map. I even like how some of the zones don't have an in-game map. And how some of the maps are maze-like even! And cliffs you can actualy fall off. I also like first person and ocassional surprises like invisible walls. This stuff makes the world feel more engaging to me.
But how bad is the grind? Grind has always been one of my enemies. My definition of a game which has low or no grind at all is one wherein you go to different places, and things generally aren't always hte same whatever you do. I'll give examples using classic EQ. You're in Crystal Caverns for 6 days, 4 hours each day, doing the SAME camp, and you're still level 45. You've mostly mastered all your spells and have them all, so there's no new spells or techniques to keep you interested! Another example I can think of is when you're camping to complete stages of your epic quests. Some of the stages are notorious for having you sit for an hour waiting for a spawn that MIGHT pop. And you might be coming back to that spawn for weeks or months! Something similar happens with many of the quests in EQ. What makes it worse is the game gives you so little information. You're ENCOURAGED to use allahkazam or one of the p1999 helper sites. And even if you find the info, you still probably have to camp the spawn or zone. This wouldn't be so bad if getting the needed items or named to pop wasn't as time consuming and repetitive, but it often is, painfully so.
So it's not necessarily bad that it takes time to level or that it takes time to do quests in classic EQ. What's bad is there's so much grind (re: repetition) in the time you consume to do those things. I have no problems with slow leveling if I feel like I"m occupied and learning things. It's when I'm stuck doing the same thing and not learning that it becomes unbareable. In classic EQ's case, I was not always bored or not learning things. Many times I had new things to learn or was going to new places. That's why I kept playing.
EDIT: I went to the website for Project Gordon and like what they say on the welcome page. I very much like their comment about how picking up items other players dropped on the ground is missing from some modern games. If you think about it, being able to drop items is taking a lesson from sandbox games and giving players the ability to change things in the environment.
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