[Opinion] EQ Next - Game Changers/Breakers

[Tecmos Deception]

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

The only difference is that mobs don't RESPAWN. I find it funny that you will complain about a 'competitive linear dungeon' and then sit in the same spot for 4 hours killing the 11 spawns your group can claim.

Again, I say that you're talking about the old take on old mechanics when that is definitely not exactly how things would be re-done in a modern MMO. There's no reason that a non-instanced dungeon needs to be so static; that's just how it was done ages ago when EQ was created.

[Tecmos Deception]

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

I want a persistent world, that has dungeons that are instances, that's all. I just hope it gets done right.

I suppose there is also no reason that a game would need to have ONLY instanced dungeons or ONLY non-instanced dungeons.

/shrug

[stormlord]

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

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

Wurm Online is the closest thing IMHO to old school EQ in a sandbox. While Wurm Online doesn't have strong NPC scripts (lore/quests) and lots of factions and lots of story and complex dungeons, it does have players that do their own thing and join together and make their own stories. The mechanics are similar too. Literally, there're corpse runs. There's no in-game map. Gaining skills is slow. Monsters aggro and can train you. Terrain can be dangerous if you run on steep areas. Etc. The harshness is one of the major reasons I've liked it so much. It's massively better than anything I've played so far. Way better than EQ1, in terms of its impact on me. The only downside is that the skills are undeveloped and so the result is a lot of grinding. But then again making something like Wurm Online is a massive undertaking. Imperfection is just part of the business.

Immersion. When I made my ranger in surefall glades I remember wandering around in the dark. I remember danger. I remember everything being new. That feeling hit me with Wurm Online, and it was bigger. God, I sit here and type and I don't think it's getting through. Wurm Online is tough and a lot of people won't like it. Classic EQ was tough too, but people only played it because there wasn't much else available. But some players like it when things are tough. I'm one of them. But Wurm Online is freeform. Things just happen. Trees and creatures move around. Players change things. On the pvp servers, players have wars. Wurm Online is so much more than the punishment people associate with games like that. No pain, no gain, though.

If you haven't tried Wurm Online and any of what I said appeals to you, TRY IT! This is especially true if it's not the nostalgia that attracts you to classic EQ but the unforgiving gameplay mechanics. There's too much for me to say in this small post. I could go down a long list of s***, seriously. Let me just shorten and say beautiful moments happen in Wurm Online and none of them are preplanned. They emerge from the unplanned sandbox environment. For example, I played a ranger in EQ1 and play something similar in Wurm Online. When I made my first house I was unaware that there was a (rare) Willow tree a few steps away. Willow trees are good wood for bows. Man, I can't go over all the things that have hit me like a ton of bricks with that game. The immersion is like nothing else. When I am in that world, it's another world, not a game. It's special.

(btw, i made my house in august 2012. I last logged out in late april and that tree was STILL there. keep in mind that you can kill trees by chopping up the stump. wurm online is persistent open-world sandbox.)

The problem is you can't compare EQN to classic EQ. It will be NOTHING like classic EQ. It'll have more in common with the newest MMO's. That means virtually nothing in common with old school EQ. So when I see this thread, I just shake my head. EQ Next is not EQ, it's more like the newest Star Trek movies. They're pluggin into the sandbox stuff in minecraft and freerealms and second life and adding it their re-envisioned EQ.

EQN is EQN. Take it for what it's. Don't compare it to EQ because it's like apples and oranges.

[Kiwaukee]

The developers mentioned something during the Everquest Series panel at E3 that I thought was very interesting, and could possibly be a hint at their stance on instanced content.

They mentioned that EQ2 was moving to a system where there is open world competition for bosses, but there are also instanced "practice arenas" where guilds can hone their skills against avatars of the bosses for lesser rewards. You'll still want to compete for the open world boss, but if you don't get it, you'll still have content.

I can see the same type of thing for instanced zones. Have the open world camps for the good loot, and instanced zones as back up for those who want competition free experience camps.

EDIT: The devs have also mentioned that EQN will be a "do what you want" kind of character experience, so I'm assuming you'll be able to level off of crafting and possibly other forms of gameplay, like diplomacy, trade, or even farming (crops, not loot... /puke).

[Rhuma7]

I would like EQN to basically be a new fresh MMO with Everquest 1 classes/mechanics with un-instanced dungeons/leveling areas and instanced end-game raids.

Slow enough leveling to make friends and learn your class. Items that are rare enough to give meaning/rewarding feeling when acquiring them. I also feel there should be world-dropped items, so while grinding out the levels and making friends you have a very slim chance of getting a very nice item for your level range.

Death penalty can be bad but EQ really needed to have more availability to rez and corpse summoning spells much earlier than when they were given to classes.

EDIT: I dont really want them to reinvent the wheel but to give a breath of fresh air to the Everquest franchise with a few fixes to some of the mistakes they made over the years and give the fans that made them a success in the first place something to come back to and enjoy playing a new MMO.

[Cheeb]

Instanced zones ruin the community IMO. I can remember very few player names from my time playing WoW because everyone was just a body. People really didn't need to talk to each other, after a while it felt like everyone was the same just with different letters above their characters head.

I can remember countless people that I played with in the first few EQ expansions due to the smaller numbers per server and the fact that you'd have to actually go to the zone you wanted to hunt in and try and get a group together or join one that was already going.

I know EQN won't be anything like EQ was or is currently. The way people play MMO's these days isn't remotely close to how we played them 10-15 years ago. I'm just curious, if it was up to you, what would you add and what can you not live without?

[Tecmos Deception]

I'd like to see an MMO that puts the RP back into MMORPG.

I'm not talking about people writing up elaborate backstories to their characters or speaking in ye olde english or whatnot. No no. I'm talking about removing the focus on esport PvP and PvE, about taking the some of the harsh reality aspects from PNP RPGs and from survival horror games and weaving them into an MMO.

On p99 you park your dwarf cleric and your ogre shaman and your iksar monk in tube room for 3 weeks at a time, logging in one at a time as needed to get the pixels from king. Your characters are living in a wet, slimy, damp, dark 10x10 room with a goo waterfall in it, right around the corner from their enemies. There's no RP there!

I want to see characters who are soft-capped on playtime because the characters need rest, because the characters don't get much rest when they are sleeping on slimy stone floors in the bottom of a dungeon with their enemies patrolling just feet away. I want characters to stay ingame when offline, obeying scripts from the player, etc. I want druids to plant trees that grow into a forest, gear to decay (but that not be a OMG HORRIBLE thing because it is designed to decay and be repaired and replaced and that's no big thing), weight (and volume, omg) limits to exist and be meaningful, PvP actions to have reprecussions with NPCs and PCs alike, etc.


Might be asking for a bit much for this decade, but god knows no MMO is going to convince me to spend a dime on it until a lot of these sorts of things are put into one.

[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.

[Vondra]

I never saw item camps as being a big problem, that people couldn't get things.

On live classic, there were many things I never did loot off the corpse myself. But people traded and sold back then (more trading on my server) just as they do now.

It's not like "Oh i'm screwed, there's a line waiting to camp x" was a big deal. At least not when it came to tradeable dungeon loot.

[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.