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#1
06-12-2013, 09:34 PM
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[Opinion] EQ Next - Game Changers/Breakers
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 | ||
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#2
06-12-2013, 09:40 PM
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Aggro meter.
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#3
06-12-2013, 09:50 PM
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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. | ||
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Last edited by August; 06-12-2013 at 09:52 PM..
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#4
06-12-2013, 09:54 PM
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#5
06-12-2013, 09:59 PM
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An instance typically means a repetitive linear dungeon with little to no exploration. Even though trains are annoying, I'd still rather have trains than instances. Your experience in an open world dungeon is normally somewhat different every time, unlike the usual instance. I think it's neat to run into other players that you may or may not know in open dungeons. The lack of exploration in instances seems to be the main reason that EQ type players dislike instances. Compare a dungeon like Lower Guk to Hellfire Citadel for example... I mean come on.
__________________
Atomos Human Ranger <Divinity>
Atomos Human Bard | ||
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#6
06-12-2013, 10:00 PM
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Quote:
I absolutely loved WoW instancing back in the day. BRD took a solid 3-4 hours and gave me purpose to my grind session without relying on quests - a true dungeon crawling experience. Often times in EQ you get to a camp and just sit there and that's fine and all, but doing something with purpose can be way more rewarding. SoE realized this w/ LDoN. WoW popularized this and is the most popular MMO to date. Instancing was integral to that success, because everyone could do Wailing Caverns, everybody thought it was somewhat hard, and everyone thought it was fun. A lot of what Classic EQ brought to the table was a lack of technological innovation. You just can't support a large playerbase without instances. The only reason EQ lasted as long as it did with as high subs as it did is because the world spread out so bad and the top end content was so hard, whether it was the content itself or the keying process, that not a lot of people had contention in the top end. I remember raiding VT while other guilds were in PoP, others in eles, and others in Time. I remember climbing that ladder and thinking how much it would suck if there was fierce competition - there just wasn't because the world had gotten so huge and stratified. A new game, with the appropriate amount of players, can't survive uninstanced. It just really can't. GW2 tackled this problem by having phasing instances so zones could expand and contract based on how many people were using them - everything was an instanced zone. I didn't like that method because you didn't really get to know people that way. I want a persistent world, that has dungeons that are instances, that's all. I just hope it gets done right. | |||
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#7
06-12-2013, 10:03 PM
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Quote:
WHy don't you compare Lower Guk to say, Blackrock Depths. Blackrock Depths was huge - way more spawns compared to lguk. It was difficult to do (at appropriate level) and the rewards varied. 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. While I agree the TBC and onward dungeons are far too linear for my taste, I think a lot of the old world WoW instancing was done properly and doesn't deserve a bad rap at all. If you added true respawns, they would outclass anything in classic EQ by a mile. | |||
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#9
06-12-2013, 10:09 PM
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What I most love about instanced gameplay, is that it is like you and the pug you assembled in 10 minutes over the ww channels have an entire server to yourself. Then you get totally immersed and bam, 40 minutes later yer done and locked out till the next day, and able to settle in for whatever is on TV.
That is how you design a deep, involving game.
__________________
go go go
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#10
06-12-2013, 10:25 PM
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Quote:
I... hmm. I feel like you're talking about apples and oranges here. Talking about unrest being busy and so we need instances? OF COURSE unrest is busy. It's a tiny-ass zone with an amazing XP mod that everyone is told to go to if they don't want to be in MM. Couple that with the fact that even untwinked players on p99 have amazing gear compared to untwinked players on live and that twinked players would have made live-kunark-era 60s jelly and... well... yeah, of course unrest is too busy. But a new MMO doing a modern take on the old EQ mechanics wouldn't need to be like that. There'd be many ways to fix the problems of non-instancing without all the negatives of instancing. Speaking of negatives of instancing, I think Rooj captured most of my sentiment on the subject: Quote:
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Linear Mode
