Haha, I wouldn't know about that. I played EQ for a good 2 years and never got past like level 34. Spent too much of my time exploring. Saw so much of that game a level 34 character should never see. Western Wastes...Cazic Thule.....aaah, great times.
I fooled a good many people trying to kill me on the PvP server by turning my druid into a tree in Kelethin. Sure they could still click on the tree and target me, but who clicks on a tree?
You're not gonna be able to recapture the magic of UO because you can't force PvE people to play in a PvP environment anymore.
And you're not gonna be able to recapture the magic of EQ because you can't force PvE people to fight like rats over a_rare_spawn or zone control anymore.
Part of what made those games special was that they were the first of their kind. Rolling back rulesets might be nostalgic, but games like that are probably more defined by their community than a ruleset. And there are enough options now that there's no way to get that community back.
Ya the community is definitely one of the major things what made EQ what it was. In fact, all the other factors actually tied into community as well. IE the one thing that set EQ apart was the danger that exsisted in EVERY zone. For example, The Oasis was a primarily teen level zone but it had the specters and giants all over the place that were mid thirty level mobs that would put the ass beat down in a second. Where as in WoW you had a similar zone in Westfall, and the worst you faced were the level 18 elemental things. You had to stay together and then hope some high levels would come in and keep the high level stuff busy.
You tie that in with other community stuff like the way stuff was bartered in (pick whatever zone your server used for the buy/sell place), required grouping, dependancy on other classes for certain spells like invis, sow, and what not and you had communities that were tight knit.
The problem is tho, even tho all that stuff really made the world feel like a world and everyone was part of an overall community, if you stop and really think about it, it also makes for what a lot of people would consider tedium. Especially in today's climate. Most of that was mundane and not really "fun" so a lot of people used to being able to go out on there own in Azeroth and do what they want and how they want would get fed up. Heck I've even just tried going back to EQ to just fart around and after WoW, a lot of stuff just seemed slow.
I also think it would be cool if they made a "offline" version of EQ... maybe added some wow esque questlines and stuff to make some deep story lines to interact with, and retool the classes a bit so you can handle stuff in a solo or small group situation and release a game that played like diablo with the massive world of EQ.
Namon on
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INeedNoSaltwith blood on my teethRegistered Userregular
Ya the community is definitely one of the major things what made EQ what it was. In fact, all the other factors actually tied into community as well. IE the one thing that set EQ apart was the danger that exsisted in EVERY zone. For example, The Oasis was a primarily teen level zone but it had the specters and giants all over the place that were mid thirty level mobs that would put the ass beat down in a second. Where as in WoW you had a similar zone in Westfall, and the worst you faced were the level 18 elemental things. You had to stay together and then hope some high levels would come in and keep the high level stuff busy.
Sons of Arugal, man.
And "Shit jumps out of nowhere and one-shots me" isn't a good thing.
I remember getting my wizard high enough to goto the Oasis and killing the shit out of them.
I hope they do this and its a hit. Perhaps this will lead other, older MMO's to put up classic servers. I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard. But EA/OSI said they lost the code.
suadeo on
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
eh maybe not for you but most of my fond memories were from those "shit one shotting me" moments. With EQ i didn't care how long it took me to level because I was gonna be playing it 24/7 reguardless so who cares if level 25 took a couple hours longer because of deaths?
But see that was my point. Alot of that stuff was what was the allure with EQ... at the time. Now a days in today's MMO climate most of that stuff would totally be snorted at.
Oh, Sand Giants, how I miss you!
I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard.
Well, so would I. but if I'm really being honest, what I want is the ability to kill miners, and hang around the bank and steal, and stomp through roleplay events wreaking havok. So it's not the pre-trammel ruleset (although maybe precasting) but the pre-EQ, pre-WoW, pre-anything else community that would be fun.
Oh, Sand Giants, how I miss you!
I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard.
Well, so would I. but if I'm really being honest, what I want is the ability to kill miners, and hang around the bank and steal, and stomp through roleplay events wreaking havok. So it's not the pre-trammel ruleset (although maybe precasting) but the pre-EQ, pre-WoW, pre-anything else community that would be fun.
I know what you mean. But when Trammel came out in UO, the community began to fall apart slowly. When it was just Fel, you would travel in groups, hunt with friends just in case a group of PK's came. EQ was kind of the same way, it was easier getting somewhere with other people.
suadeo on
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
And "Shit jumps out of nowhere and one-shots me" isn't a good thing.
Sons of Arugal were hillarious fun, but not quite as scary as SG beach trains. The funny thing about EQ was the "won't stop chasing your ass until you fucking zone" code.
I'd resubscribe if they came up with some good alt rulesets. I don't mean a new style of PVP either. I mean some real changes.
For instance - make every piece of equipment into a crafting recipe and no more armor/weapon drops from mobs. Or make the crafting into a value based system where all recipes are just a pattern plus X value of loot (ie. gauntlet recipe + [any armor/weapons totalling 20pp in value]=bronze gauntlets worth 15pp).
They could change the respawn rates to all be 3 hours long (besides newbie zones) and triple the XP per mob to completely make over the style of play so camping an area isn't nearly as profitable as being mobile.
Create projects to bring the players in the community together. An altar for your god that you sacrifce to which gives bonuses depending on what % of all sacrifices your god receives, and what % of those sacrifices you made yourself. Or bounties for mobs in a city that allow the city guards to give out better and better buffs depending on how many bounties are turned in.
In short - I wouldn't go back for a trivial change, but I would certainly re-subscribe if the change could make Norrath different enough feel like I was exploring a new, interesting world.
I remember getting my wizard high enough to goto the Oasis and killing the shit out of them.
I hope they do this and its a hit. Perhaps this will lead other, older MMO's to put up classic servers. I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard. But EA/OSI said they lost the code.
horseshit. I've got a t2a disc they can borrow. I know I'm not the only one either.
I remember getting my wizard high enough to goto the Oasis and killing the shit out of them.
I hope they do this and its a hit. Perhaps this will lead other, older MMO's to put up classic servers. I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard. But EA/OSI said they lost the code.
horseshit. I've got a t2a disc they can borrow. I know I'm not the only one either.
I haven't played either of the two main games being talked about in this thread, but it doesn't quite work that way. The most you could pull out of the binary executable is a bunch of Assembler. They need the source code.
Edit: There ARE programs that can transform binary into pre-compiled C (which is most likely what UO was coded in), but
1. The code will be difficult to read due to all programmer given names (variables, functions, objects, etc) being replaced with weird stuff
2. The resulting code implementations will likely look nothing like the original, and not be arranged in a good way to facilitate development.
I remember getting my wizard high enough to goto the Oasis and killing the shit out of them.
I hope they do this and its a hit. Perhaps this will lead other, older MMO's to put up classic servers. I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard. But EA/OSI said they lost the code.
horseshit. I've got a t2a disc they can borrow. I know I'm not the only one either.
I haven't played either of the two main games being talked about in this thread, but it doesn't quite work that way. The most you could pull out of the binary executable is a bunch of Assembler. They need the source code.
Edit: There ARE programs that can transform binary into pre-compiled C (which is most likely what UO was coded in), but
1. The code will be difficult to read due to all programmer given names (variables, functions, objects, etc) being replaced with weird stuff
2. The resulting code implementations will likely look nothing like the original, and not be arranged in a good way to facilitate development.
The fan community built accurate servers from the binaries and clever reverse-engineering. That's probably what the guy you replied to meant.
i wonder if they could turn back the models I really liked my troll that looked like a jeep.
I wish the AC devs would do this...
Fixed that for you. *sigh* I can dream, can't I?
That's not fixed.
You must be referring to the fact that is not green nor large enough.
I wish the AC devs would do this...
There we go.
;-)
Ewewewew, tell me you don't actually want to combine tapers for hours on end hoping to possibly maybe discover a crappy spell?
I mean, buffbots, and macroers sucked, but I rather liked many of the mods, and Marae Lassel was pretty damn cool.
Tapers were fine, you pansy.
But, really, I think people are talking about going back to the beginning of the story. Being able to wander the world with only a few levels under your belt was cool, too, though that's gone now...
I remember getting my wizard high enough to goto the Oasis and killing the shit out of them.
I hope they do this and its a hit. Perhaps this will lead other, older MMO's to put up classic servers. I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard. But EA/OSI said they lost the code.
horseshit. I've got a t2a disc they can borrow. I know I'm not the only one either.
I haven't played either of the two main games being talked about in this thread, but it doesn't quite work that way. The most you could pull out of the binary executable is a bunch of Assembler. They need the source code.
Edit: There ARE programs that can transform binary into pre-compiled C (which is most likely what UO was coded in), but
1. The code will be difficult to read due to all programmer given names (variables, functions, objects, etc) being replaced with weird stuff
2. The resulting code implementations will likely look nothing like the original, and not be arranged in a good way to facilitate development.
The fan community built accurate servers from the binaries and clever reverse-engineering. That's probably what the guy you replied to meant.
I see. Now that I look at what's been said more closely, that does really seem to be what's needed (and indeed, fan-made server clusters aren't exactly unheard of).
Thing is, when someone mentions "losing the code", they almost always mean the source code, since the original source is almost always pretty much only kept for archival purposes and doesn't see much use after the game has gone through post release development (IE patches).
Edit: At actually add something to the discussion on the tangent of random higher level nasties wandering a zone waiting to smack you, I actually think it's very valuable to have, provided it's done correctly (which should be easy, as I'll outline below).
It works like this. Take any given zone, and populate it with a level range of mobs WoW style. Group similar level mobs together to facilitate grinding ("Go kill 15 NightShade Worgen!") and questing.
What are you left with? A really boring, generic zone that probably isn't particularly remarkable. Maybe it's a needed level range in a region, or perhaps one or two of the quests are interesting/give good rewards. I don't know about you, but that actually strikes me as a pretty boring game.
The fact of the matter is, the standard MMO setup is incredibly boring. It's an exercise in tedium, and when soloing is really encouraged, it just gets worse. And it gets better. Anytime craziness gets added to increase the difficult, it rams against the set "If Your level >= mob level + 3, you win. Else, lose", and people bitch about you interrupting their grinding.
Now, I think this can be helped by adding some random danger. Let's take a generic zone and add a wandering boss monster. He's several levels higher than the surrounding mobs, but still not strong enough to go one shotting anybody who has any real business in the zone. For kicks, lets make him give a lot of XP, and some really good drops. This all by itself makes the area a hell of a lot more interesting. Questing and grinding is no longer always just business as usual. Groups need to keep an eye on their surroundings, and if they get careless they may find a really big nasty trying to shove something uncomfortable up their rears. At the same time however, he's not unavoidable, and he's not gonna kill everyone so fast they can't get away. Some groups might even elect to stay and fight it out, and will be rewarded with some nice stuff should they succeed. Will some people die? Yeah. But you know what? In all the MMOs I've played, I don't remember all the instances when everything went according to plan. I don't remember the 329587th time I killed a raccoon. I remember when shit hit the fan. I remember when something fucked up somewhere and suddenly I'm running for my life. I look back on that stuff fondly, because that's what really makes the game. Not camping in a single spot, not grabbing quests and running them to try and reach the next level. It's when the game throws a wrench into your plans and you have to improvise, try something new, and maybe get a little exercise.
My favorite times in this game were pre-kunark. I think I played for 3-4 years and was a part of a larger raiding guild and all, but I'll leave the raiding experience to others now, I just don't have the time to commit.
I remember hag pet trains, lizard trains in cazic thule, 100+ people in unrest, ogres buying and selling weapons in cazic thule (one was like level 20 and earned enough to buy himself full rubicite armor).
I also remember a 20 some hour camp for a ghoulbane for my paladin.
Fun times. A friend of mine wanted me to join a progression server when those came up some time ago, sounded like a lot of fun, but I just didn't have the time to put into it.
EQ2 was fun for a while, it ran out of content quickly though. The one thing I wish other games would take from EQ2 was the mentoring system. For those of you that don't know, you could 'mentor' someone in your group, which gives them an exp bonus AND curbs your stats and equipment to that of someone of their level, effectively making you a slightly more powerful level X class.
This was great because you could, if everyone in your group mentored the same person, give them a 15% bonus to exp (5% + 4% + 3% + 2% + 1%), you could fight in old haunts and you never had to worry about being too high level to fight with your friends.
Vanguard was a neat game, I enjoyed their diplomacy system for a short while, but there were a lot of things that needed to happen to bring a better life to the game, I only played for a few months before quitting.
My favorite times in this game were pre-kunark. I think I played for 3-4 years and was a part of a larger raiding guild and all, but I'll leave the raiding experience to others now, I just don't have the time to commit.
I remember hag pet trains, lizard trains in cazic thule, 100+ people in unrest, ogres buying and selling weapons in cazic thule (one was like level 20 and earned enough to buy himself full rubicite armor).
I also remember a 20 some hour camp for a ghoulbane for my paladin.
Fun times. A friend of mine wanted me to join a progression server when those came up some time ago, sounded like a lot of fun, but I just didn't have the time to put into it.
EQ2 was fun for a while, it ran out of content quickly though. The one thing I wish other games would take from EQ2 was the mentoring system. For those of you that don't know, you could 'mentor' someone in your group, which gives them an exp bonus AND curbs your stats and equipment to that of someone of their level, effectively making you a slightly more powerful level X class.
This was great because you could, if everyone in your group mentored the same person, give them a 15% bonus to exp (5% + 4% + 3% + 2% + 1%), you could fight in old haunts and you never had to worry about being too high level to fight with your friends.
Vanguard was a neat game, I enjoyed their diplomacy system for a short while, but there were a lot of things that needed to happen to bring a better life to the game, I only played for a few months before quitting.
Yeah, pre-Kunark was the best. Befallen pre-level 10. Unrest later on. Then the big farm-fests in Lower Guk and even Plane of Fear. There would be 24-7 PoF camps on my server with 80-man public breaks. It was nuts.
Heh, nobody ever went to Kedge Keep until much later. What an awesome place, though.
A lot of EverQuest's appeal was discovery. It had a very D&D Chronicles feel to it, like if you looked hard enough you'd uncover some deep-shrouded mystery in some nook or cranny.
That feeling slowly eroded as more and more expansions came out.
I was in a variety of guilds, but on my server there was a very strong communistic/public presence, almost as strong as some of the main guilds. Tagging along on those uber-public raids was neat.
EQ1 is an experience I think I'll never, ever recapture. It was, in many ways, my first love. At least as far as MMOs go.
I love seeing the same people post every time an EQ1 thread pops up.
Part of me would love to see this happen, and part of me knows it wouldn't matter. I barely have any time nowadays for gaming, and like it was mentioned earlier, we all know how to do everything in the original world. It's all nostalgia right now. I tried to poke around in EQ a year or so ago. First thing after I made my character was, damn, I thought I installed the updated character models from Velious. Oh shit, I actually did. Then it was very quickly realized that I didn't have the patience to solo one mob, wait 5 minutes to rest, rinse and repeat 50 times to get from level 7 to level 8. Granted, that's a product of too damn many expansions and being the only one in the newbie zone.
Having said that, if this was played like a D&D campaign (I'm guessing, haven't had any tabletop experience) wherein a balanced group of 6 met up and played until whenever say, every Tuesday at 8pm, I'd like to think I could enjoy that. You know, we log in all in NRo and say hey, lets go wander through Upper Guk and see what we can do. It's all about the people and community.
I know, I know, it's nostalgia. EQ popped my MMO cherry, and nothing has been the same since that first experience.
I remember my first character on everquest, a halfling rogue. I had somehow ended up in the greater faydark at level 10 (I guess I just explored that far and got lucky enough). One day I teleported with a higher level wizard to west commons, it was nighttime and it was like teleporting into the middle of a battlefield. Spells were flying all over, there were druids, both npcs and players, apparently a dark elf dragoon was on a rampage. The wizard just told me to stay close to her, and we'd run to freeport. On the way we hid from a hill giant, she torched some ghouls that tried to knock me unconscious, and she showed me a hidden entrance disguised as a wall that led to an underground cavern. She said that somewhere in there I would find my guildmaster, but she couldnt come with because she wouldnt be able to protect me from there on out.
My hiding and sneaking got me to the rogue guildmaster eventually, it was exciting, running through passages, not knowing if a dark elf would attack me if I came out of stealth to talk, having no idea where I was.
Years later, knowing spawn timers, having memorized much of the game, and most importantly, having things like thottbot or allakhazam has ruined any sense of discovery and excitment. The only thing left is enjoying the gameplay itself, which everquest never had much of. I would love them to make a single player rpg, something with more meat to it than champions of norrath, maybe a morrowind kind of game but with the charm and feel of the old everquest.
I just couldn't be pulled back into that world. I should have realized from the first week that this game was made purely to torture the fuck out of you. My first character and only character was my wood elf ranger. Within the first 15 minutes I ran over the rails of Kelethin to my death. Near the end of the week in Crushbone someone convinced us that since CB was so crowded he knew a place in lesser fay with orcs that had to have the phat lewts. Too bad they beat the fuck out of us so we ran away. Only to run into a brownie scout that look so harmless, but was about 30 levels higher then us and proceeded to root me and demolish my level 9 ranger. This was of course before they bumped the ability to respawn with all your equipment to level 10. I spent around 3 hours that night looking for my corpse. Of course I went back at level 60 to completely wreck the brownie village or well at least killed a few of the farmers and killed the scouts.
I do have to say that even after all the annoying shit I loved the game I made some great friends and had some interesting adventures. I also think that what made EQ so interesting was the server boards there was so much damn gossip to keep you entertained while you weren't playing. You got to see the small beefs like players trade scams all the way up to uber guilds fighting over spawns and you could tell that some people took it way too personal.
The only thing I really regret was not completing my epic set of swords. Hell never seeing a shattered emerald of corruption dropping from a mini boss in hate is the real kicker. Of course Inny could have been holding it the whole time, but I never knew anyone besides a ranger who wanted to take the time to kill him for his lame loot.
Worktruck on
Someday they'll be a cure for pain, That's the day I throw my drugs away, When they find a cure for pain
What they need to do is stop making goddamned yet-another-fires of heaven-"OhMyGod, Sword of GodSlaying+15!" wank expansion and go back and redo that piece of shit client.
There is no fucking excuse for a game that's what, 10 years old, to be as MEH as that damned thing is.
I went back recently to give it a try on a new server, and... ugh. It freaking hurts.
Things I'd like to see them change:
1. Add a fucking Minimap. "It's not realisti..." FUCK YOU. Add a minimap. And a fucking radar system. But but but, Blubber Blubber Blubber, I'm sick of walking around like an asshole with my dick in my hands trying to find quest NPCs and store NPCs for hours because some Comic Book Guy clone likes to get a hardon because he's memorized the Elf towns.
2. Add quest tracking like WOW. With OSD listing your quests on the screen. The Task system is "ok". Make it "good."
3. Add random shit spawning around the world, like barrels and whatnot. "But people will farm them..." Here's a surprise assholes, all the farmers moved on to WOW. No one cares about farming EQ anymore.
4. While you're at it, add fucking HEAL POTIONS. "But, But, But, people might do shit without a group of 5 people backing them up..." Well, no shit. Some people actually LIKE playing a MMORPG without having to spend hours finding people to do shit with. Some people have about 2 hours an evening to do shit in. Not all of us are geeky college students skipping class to play EQ.
5. Go back and have someone who's not 80 years old and who remembers the good old days of DOS redesign the UI. Seriously, look at this shit. This is the UI a newbie to the game gets:
No labels. No explanations. And it's laid out like a ferret with ADHD shit on the screen. "Hi. Welcome to EQ. Hope you put up with this long enough to figure it out and actually join the real game." There is no fucking excuse for this crap. There's 13 expansions out for this game. Each one retailed at about $20-40 USD. That means that anyone addicted to this game and who has stuck around since release has paid over $530 + monthly fees. YOU COULD HIRE AN INTERN TO MAKE A BETTER UI THAN THIS.
6. Speaking of new players... Hey, the tutorials great. But after that.. well, good luck. Go find a place to grind for the next 65 levels. They need to revamp OLDER zones not keep adding raid content. Go back and re-do every single newbie zone. Then go back and redo every L10-20 zone. Then 20-30. Add a quest hub to each one, with quests, tasks, and gear.
"But it's too hard..." Oh well. WOW HAS it, so you NEED it. Get over it.
As for new server ideas... Who knows? I wouldn't mind seeing some weird form of PVP-Lite. Like... tag or something. I donno. Capture the flag with old zones. Just find 6-7 spots each zone and add flags, and a neutral NPC hiding in the center.
6. Speaking of new players... Hey, the tutorials great. But after that.. well, good luck. Go find a place to grind for the next 65 levels. They need to revamp OLDER zones not keep adding raid content. Go back and re-do every single newbie zone. Then go back and redo every L10-20 zone. Then 20-30. Add a quest hub to each one, with quests, tasks, and gear.
They had an entire expansion, with a new player race, a new starting city and entirely new leveling zones for levels 1-70 a year or so ago.
I sort of wish they'd release a new expansion that went back to the original art style. Even though it's massively outdated, it had character. If they released an expansion with graphics on par with Kunark, I'd probably have to buy it out of principle. They could even be kind and update the old player models with new animations and armor designs and such. Stop trying to compete with the graphics of modern games already! Go back to your roots!
6. Speaking of new players... Hey, the tutorials great. But after that.. well, good luck. Go find a place to grind for the next 65 levels. They need to revamp OLDER zones not keep adding raid content. Go back and re-do every single newbie zone. Then go back and redo every L10-20 zone. Then 20-30. Add a quest hub to each one, with quests, tasks, and gear.
They had an entire expansion, with a new player race, a new starting city and entirely new leveling zones for levels 1-70 a year or so ago.
I sort of wish they'd release a new expansion that went back to the original art style. Even though it's massively outdated, it had character. If they released an expansion with graphics on par with Kunark, I'd probably have to buy it out of principle. They could even be kind and update the old player models with new animations and armor designs and such. Stop trying to compete with the graphics of modern games already! Go back to your roots!
TSS supposedly is tolerable, and every single new player is pushed towards it, but what if I really want to level in GFay? They need to get around to fixing it.
I know where you're coming from, but the truth is, a lot of these things aren't really feasible without a heavy rework of the entire game.
The problem is, even though EverQuest was technically a big production game at the time, it's still very much coded like it was built in a garage by a bunch of high school computer nerds. There's a lot of things that wouldn't make much sense today, and probably little documentation to help anyone to figure out what things do. I don't think anyone from the original Verant team is still doing any programming, but I could be wrong.
Here's a good example of the unintuitive design that went into EQ:
You know how the skill system works? You have a list that pops up that you see when you go to a trainer, yeah? You can buy your skills by spending your points at that list. Certain classes have access to certain skills, some races do, too.
Let's say you wanted to open up Tinkering to all races, instead of just gnomes. Great, okay, fiddle with the code to let the server know everyone can do it now...oh wait, the client is hard coded to only display the Tinkering skill to gnomes, and to only allow gnomes to tinker.
Likewise, it sure would be nice if you could get the entire number bar mapped to hotkeys, yeah? Can't, client is hard coded to just support six. Etc.
(Maybe some changes like this HAVE occured, but I haven't played EQ in a long time, so I don't know.)
Basically, EQ looks like an octopus playing cat's cradle, from a programming perspective. There's a lot of things you just can't do because it's hard coded into the client and things are all tangled up and not properly documented.
If you wanted to change some things about EQ, you really do need to rewrite the entire client from the ground up. The problem with this is that it would be a monstrous task for the development team because it would mean digging through a lot of the old client code to figure out what it does.
I'm pretty impressed that they were able to do some of the things they're doing in terms of questing and instancing, considering how difficult it is to worth with what is basically a relic of a game.
Still, they've obviously resigned themselves to not drawing in new customers in any significant number. This means that chances are, no big changes will be made to the game to improve it.
Too much of my life was lost on this game. Although one of my favorite moments was when my friend who was much higher level than me and actually got me hooked onto the game, told some other high level guy he would hold his loots for him while he switched characters. He of course stole it. He gave me his account password and made another account to launder the good or some shit( i think it was a fungal tunic or some kind of regenerative chainmail lookin thing that was uber powerfull at the time) I started running like crazy.. then I spawned and a GM was standing right there.. I took off like a madman and all of the sudden got teleported to a 2x2 foot room with no doors and just a sewer grate at the top in the freeport sewers. I was then interrogated by a GM for a longass time. Afterwords he told me he would teleport me anywhere in the game I wanted to go and I of course told him some crazy location where I died immediatly. I ended up with the fungal tunic on my main account at level 20 and was crazy powerful from there on out. This was so long ago but I'll never forget the sheer terror of zoning and having a GM standing right on the other end with golden armor.
While you wait for alternative ruleset EQ servers, come play EQ2. It's good. By all accounts it's changed a lot from when it was released, with major improvements. The leveling and questing is quite sane and friendly so far in my experience. The game is wall-to-wall quests, if you want... or sit in dungeons and grind if you want. Solo or group, your choice; soloing is very viable for most classes.
See KiTA's list? EQ2 has pretty much all of that. Though the map still isn't great, and it doesn't lead you by the nose on quests. There's plenty of opportunity to explore, and not everything is handed to you on a platter.
Even though I'm generally not a high-fantasy MMORPG kind of guy, I'm really enjoying EQ2. We have a thread in the MMO subforum.
HarshLanguage on
> turn on light Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
KiTA, you're basically saying EQ needs to become WoW. Just about everything you listed is part of the reason why WoW is so boring and lame - it's made to be easy so any six year old tard can get the best items in the game in 12 days.
A complete lack of a mini map was fantastic, it made the game world interesting. You got to explore. If you're new, thats fun, and it's a feeling no game since ever gave BECAUSE they all have minimaps and tell you exactly where to go and where you should be at all times.
The quest system was awesome (though the way you turn stuff in was annoying) because, again, it made you explore. No big yellow exclamation telling you exactly what you need. You had to walk around, talk to NPC's, think of things to say to them, and then usually they'd be vague in what they wanted and you'd just have to figure it out.
Exploration, finding things on your own, challenge, risk vs reward, a death system that made fighting in a dungeon actually exciting, and some of the most intense "uber battles" of any game ever pretty much sums up EQ up until Velious.
And after that is when it turned to shit, and every MMO since has been easy mode designed for little kids.
Ok, let's say they implement every think you mentioned. UI issues aside, why would I play this game over WoW at this point? You just outlined a WoW clone, that's it. No reason to play it over what has become the standard, and at least if I subjected myself to WoW, I get to play with my friends.
The last 2 posts are further proof of how much damage WoW's success has done to the MMO gaming industry. Any changes to make an MMO more humane and player-friendly also makes it a WoW clone and thus "kiddie"? Riiiight.
Heaven forbid a game do simple things to minimize tedium and frustration, and add interesting and fun gameplay elements instead.
HarshLanguage on
> turn on light Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
KiTA, you're basically saying EQ needs to become WoW. Just about everything you listed is part of the reason why WoW is so boring and lame - it's made to be easy so any six year old tard can get the best items in the game in 12 days.
A complete lack of a mini map was fantastic, it made the game world interesting. You got to explore. If you're new, thats fun, and it's a feeling no game since ever gave BECAUSE they all have minimaps and tell you exactly where to go and where you should be at all times.
The quest system was awesome (though the way you turn stuff in was annoying) because, again, it made you explore. No big yellow exclamation telling you exactly what you need. You had to walk around, talk to NPC's, think of things to say to them, and then usually they'd be vague in what they wanted and you'd just have to figure it out.
Exploration, finding things on your own, challenge, risk vs reward, a death system that made fighting in a dungeon actually exciting, and some of the most intense "uber battles" of any game ever pretty much sums up EQ up until Velious.
And after that is when it turned to shit, and every MMO since has been easy mode designed for little kids.
Now finish it off with a "Worst. Genre. EVER~~." comment and we have our Comic Book Guy moment.
Seriously, people didn't "figure it out", people got a quest list as Allakazam's and maps at EQAtlas and they worked around the shitty design decisions (like setting up sense heading to toggle when you hit one of the left or right keys) as best they could. All decisions like that did was mad people like IGE rich.
Sorry, I don't buy the whole "We can't update EQ to match modern gaming standards because then it would make it "teh kiddy". Just... no.
A minimap, some kind of radar, a camera system that doesn't belong in a Itagaki-style wetdream (oooh, I can make it so they can't see shit behind them... but they can change the camera so it's randomly appearing head of them... or I could make it orbit them like a moon...), a UI that's actually enjoyable to use, a spell memorization system that's not liquid monkey ass, etc etc. You could keep the game just as hard as it is and still not make part of the difficulty the actual interface to USE the damned game.
These kinda things wouldn't screw up the precious "vision" (Protip: The Vision was to get us to waste as much time as possible, and pay by the hour on an AOL/Compuserv style BBS.) and actually make the game, you know, tolerable to play.
Now, I think this can be helped by adding some random danger. Let's take a generic zone and add a wandering boss monster. He's several levels higher than the surrounding mobs, but still not strong enough to go one shotting anybody who has any real business in the zone. For kicks, lets make him give a lot of XP, and some really good drops. This all by itself makes the area a hell of a lot more interesting. Questing and grinding is no longer always just business as usual. Groups need to keep an eye on their surroundings, and if they get careless they may find a really big nasty trying to shove something uncomfortable up their rears. At the same time however, he's not unavoidable, and he's not gonna kill everyone so fast they can't get away. Some groups might even elect to stay and fight it out, and will be rewarded with some nice stuff should they succeed. Will some people die? Yeah. But you know what? In all the MMOs I've played, I don't remember all the instances when everything went according to plan. I don't remember the 329587th time I killed a raccoon. I remember when shit hit the fan. I remember when something fucked up somewhere and suddenly I'm running for my life. I look back on that stuff fondly, because that's what really makes the game. Not camping in a single spot, not grabbing quests and running them to try and reach the next level. It's when the game throws a wrench into your plans and you have to improvise, try something new, and maybe get a little exercise.
It seems like the genre tends to lean towards making it difficult to die but penalizing you when you do. Anyone have any thoughts on how a game would work out where there's no death penalty whatsoever but dying in an encounter is always possible unless you're way stronger than it?
Seriously, people didn't "figure it out", people got a quest list as Allakazam's and maps at EQAtlas and they worked around the shitty design decisions
Weird, since we had one of the first warrior epic 1.5's in EQ. My best "gaming" pal was the guy getting it and we spent a lot of time, effort, and deaths trying to figure it out. It wasn't easy, it was frustrating at times, but it felt amazing finally getting it and actually feeling like we accomplished something in the game.
When we played WoW and got to the top tier everything felt boring. Every single guild had all the best gear in the game, and there'd be 20 of them on one server. It lacks any semblance of a challenge, plain and simple.
Fact is I don't play WoW OR Everquest since they take up WAY too much time to play but I played EQ during the more recent progression server release and powered my way up to the top and it was still one of the most challenging and fun experiences I've had.
Whether you like it or not, EQ doesn't need to become "easy mode." Even if they did everything you said, no one from the WoW community is going to start playing it, nor is anyone new to the genre. WoW is the big game. EQ will do best just catering to the crowd it has - the "hardcore" crowd, and the nostalgic.
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That has yet to work in another game.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
And you're not gonna be able to recapture the magic of EQ because you can't force PvE people to fight like rats over a_rare_spawn or zone control anymore.
Part of what made those games special was that they were the first of their kind. Rolling back rulesets might be nostalgic, but games like that are probably more defined by their community than a ruleset. And there are enough options now that there's no way to get that community back.
You tie that in with other community stuff like the way stuff was bartered in (pick whatever zone your server used for the buy/sell place), required grouping, dependancy on other classes for certain spells like invis, sow, and what not and you had communities that were tight knit.
The problem is tho, even tho all that stuff really made the world feel like a world and everyone was part of an overall community, if you stop and really think about it, it also makes for what a lot of people would consider tedium. Especially in today's climate. Most of that was mundane and not really "fun" so a lot of people used to being able to go out on there own in Azeroth and do what they want and how they want would get fed up. Heck I've even just tried going back to EQ to just fart around and after WoW, a lot of stuff just seemed slow.
I also think it would be cool if they made a "offline" version of EQ... maybe added some wow esque questlines and stuff to make some deep story lines to interact with, and retool the classes a bit so you can handle stuff in a solo or small group situation and release a game that played like diablo with the massive world of EQ.
Sons of Arugal, man.
And "Shit jumps out of nowhere and one-shots me" isn't a good thing.
I remember getting my wizard high enough to goto the Oasis and killing the shit out of them.
I hope they do this and its a hit. Perhaps this will lead other, older MMO's to put up classic servers. I would kill for a Pre-Trammel UO, hell even a Pre-Pub-16 shard. But EA/OSI said they lost the code.
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
But see that was my point. Alot of that stuff was what was the allure with EQ... at the time. Now a days in today's MMO climate most of that stuff would totally be snorted at.
Well, so would I. but if I'm really being honest, what I want is the ability to kill miners, and hang around the bank and steal, and stomp through roleplay events wreaking havok. So it's not the pre-trammel ruleset (although maybe precasting) but the pre-EQ, pre-WoW, pre-anything else community that would be fun.
I know what you mean. But when Trammel came out in UO, the community began to fall apart slowly. When it was just Fel, you would travel in groups, hunt with friends just in case a group of PK's came. EQ was kind of the same way, it was easier getting somewhere with other people.
My 360 is [strike]back[/strike] [strike]bricked[/strike] back!
Sons of Arugal were hillarious fun, but not quite as scary as SG beach trains. The funny thing about EQ was the "won't stop chasing your ass until you fucking zone" code.
Ewewewew, tell me you don't actually want to combine tapers for hours on end hoping to possibly maybe discover a crappy spell?
I mean, buffbots, and macroers sucked, but I rather liked many of the mods, and Marae Lassel was pretty damn cool.
That, or it did.
For instance - make every piece of equipment into a crafting recipe and no more armor/weapon drops from mobs. Or make the crafting into a value based system where all recipes are just a pattern plus X value of loot (ie. gauntlet recipe + [any armor/weapons totalling 20pp in value]=bronze gauntlets worth 15pp).
They could change the respawn rates to all be 3 hours long (besides newbie zones) and triple the XP per mob to completely make over the style of play so camping an area isn't nearly as profitable as being mobile.
Create projects to bring the players in the community together. An altar for your god that you sacrifce to which gives bonuses depending on what % of all sacrifices your god receives, and what % of those sacrifices you made yourself. Or bounties for mobs in a city that allow the city guards to give out better and better buffs depending on how many bounties are turned in.
In short - I wouldn't go back for a trivial change, but I would certainly re-subscribe if the change could make Norrath different enough feel like I was exploring a new, interesting world.
Pokemon Pearl Friend code: 0688 2191 3355
horseshit. I've got a t2a disc they can borrow. I know I'm not the only one either.
Sadly, no... But here's a list of what you will get out of Rock Band:
[too much to fit in a sig, thats what]
I haven't played either of the two main games being talked about in this thread, but it doesn't quite work that way. The most you could pull out of the binary executable is a bunch of Assembler. They need the source code.
Edit: There ARE programs that can transform binary into pre-compiled C (which is most likely what UO was coded in), but
1. The code will be difficult to read due to all programmer given names (variables, functions, objects, etc) being replaced with weird stuff
2. The resulting code implementations will likely look nothing like the original, and not be arranged in a good way to facilitate development.
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Tapers were fine, you pansy.
But, really, I think people are talking about going back to the beginning of the story. Being able to wander the world with only a few levels under your belt was cool, too, though that's gone now...
So it sucked. After Velious. Velious was really the beginning of the end for the "good" community that existed.
I see. Now that I look at what's been said more closely, that does really seem to be what's needed (and indeed, fan-made server clusters aren't exactly unheard of).
Thing is, when someone mentions "losing the code", they almost always mean the source code, since the original source is almost always pretty much only kept for archival purposes and doesn't see much use after the game has gone through post release development (IE patches).
Edit: At actually add something to the discussion on the tangent of random higher level nasties wandering a zone waiting to smack you, I actually think it's very valuable to have, provided it's done correctly (which should be easy, as I'll outline below).
It works like this. Take any given zone, and populate it with a level range of mobs WoW style. Group similar level mobs together to facilitate grinding ("Go kill 15 NightShade Worgen!") and questing.
What are you left with? A really boring, generic zone that probably isn't particularly remarkable. Maybe it's a needed level range in a region, or perhaps one or two of the quests are interesting/give good rewards. I don't know about you, but that actually strikes me as a pretty boring game.
The fact of the matter is, the standard MMO setup is incredibly boring. It's an exercise in tedium, and when soloing is really encouraged, it just gets worse. And it gets better. Anytime craziness gets added to increase the difficult, it rams against the set "If Your level >= mob level + 3, you win. Else, lose", and people bitch about you interrupting their grinding.
Now, I think this can be helped by adding some random danger. Let's take a generic zone and add a wandering boss monster. He's several levels higher than the surrounding mobs, but still not strong enough to go one shotting anybody who has any real business in the zone. For kicks, lets make him give a lot of XP, and some really good drops. This all by itself makes the area a hell of a lot more interesting. Questing and grinding is no longer always just business as usual. Groups need to keep an eye on their surroundings, and if they get careless they may find a really big nasty trying to shove something uncomfortable up their rears. At the same time however, he's not unavoidable, and he's not gonna kill everyone so fast they can't get away. Some groups might even elect to stay and fight it out, and will be rewarded with some nice stuff should they succeed. Will some people die? Yeah. But you know what? In all the MMOs I've played, I don't remember all the instances when everything went according to plan. I don't remember the 329587th time I killed a raccoon. I remember when shit hit the fan. I remember when something fucked up somewhere and suddenly I'm running for my life. I look back on that stuff fondly, because that's what really makes the game. Not camping in a single spot, not grabbing quests and running them to try and reach the next level. It's when the game throws a wrench into your plans and you have to improvise, try something new, and maybe get a little exercise.
I remember hag pet trains, lizard trains in cazic thule, 100+ people in unrest, ogres buying and selling weapons in cazic thule (one was like level 20 and earned enough to buy himself full rubicite armor).
I also remember a 20 some hour camp for a ghoulbane for my paladin.
Fun times. A friend of mine wanted me to join a progression server when those came up some time ago, sounded like a lot of fun, but I just didn't have the time to put into it.
EQ2 was fun for a while, it ran out of content quickly though. The one thing I wish other games would take from EQ2 was the mentoring system. For those of you that don't know, you could 'mentor' someone in your group, which gives them an exp bonus AND curbs your stats and equipment to that of someone of their level, effectively making you a slightly more powerful level X class.
This was great because you could, if everyone in your group mentored the same person, give them a 15% bonus to exp (5% + 4% + 3% + 2% + 1%), you could fight in old haunts and you never had to worry about being too high level to fight with your friends.
Vanguard was a neat game, I enjoyed their diplomacy system for a short while, but there were a lot of things that needed to happen to bring a better life to the game, I only played for a few months before quitting.
Yeah, pre-Kunark was the best. Befallen pre-level 10. Unrest later on. Then the big farm-fests in Lower Guk and even Plane of Fear. There would be 24-7 PoF camps on my server with 80-man public breaks. It was nuts.
Heh, nobody ever went to Kedge Keep until much later. What an awesome place, though.
A lot of EverQuest's appeal was discovery. It had a very D&D Chronicles feel to it, like if you looked hard enough you'd uncover some deep-shrouded mystery in some nook or cranny.
That feeling slowly eroded as more and more expansions came out.
I was in a variety of guilds, but on my server there was a very strong communistic/public presence, almost as strong as some of the main guilds. Tagging along on those uber-public raids was neat.
EQ1 is an experience I think I'll never, ever recapture. It was, in many ways, my first love. At least as far as MMOs go.
Part of me would love to see this happen, and part of me knows it wouldn't matter. I barely have any time nowadays for gaming, and like it was mentioned earlier, we all know how to do everything in the original world. It's all nostalgia right now. I tried to poke around in EQ a year or so ago. First thing after I made my character was, damn, I thought I installed the updated character models from Velious. Oh shit, I actually did. Then it was very quickly realized that I didn't have the patience to solo one mob, wait 5 minutes to rest, rinse and repeat 50 times to get from level 7 to level 8. Granted, that's a product of too damn many expansions and being the only one in the newbie zone.
Having said that, if this was played like a D&D campaign (I'm guessing, haven't had any tabletop experience) wherein a balanced group of 6 met up and played until whenever say, every Tuesday at 8pm, I'd like to think I could enjoy that. You know, we log in all in NRo and say hey, lets go wander through Upper Guk and see what we can do. It's all about the people and community.
I know, I know, it's nostalgia. EQ popped my MMO cherry, and nothing has been the same since that first experience.
My hiding and sneaking got me to the rogue guildmaster eventually, it was exciting, running through passages, not knowing if a dark elf would attack me if I came out of stealth to talk, having no idea where I was.
Years later, knowing spawn timers, having memorized much of the game, and most importantly, having things like thottbot or allakhazam has ruined any sense of discovery and excitment. The only thing left is enjoying the gameplay itself, which everquest never had much of. I would love them to make a single player rpg, something with more meat to it than champions of norrath, maybe a morrowind kind of game but with the charm and feel of the old everquest.
I do have to say that even after all the annoying shit I loved the game I made some great friends and had some interesting adventures. I also think that what made EQ so interesting was the server boards there was so much damn gossip to keep you entertained while you weren't playing. You got to see the small beefs like players trade scams all the way up to uber guilds fighting over spawns and you could tell that some people took it way too personal.
The only thing I really regret was not completing my epic set of swords. Hell never seeing a shattered emerald of corruption dropping from a mini boss in hate is the real kicker. Of course Inny could have been holding it the whole time, but I never knew anyone besides a ranger who wanted to take the time to kill him for his lame loot.
Someday they'll be a cure for pain, That's the day I throw my drugs away, When they find a cure for pain
What they need to do is stop making goddamned yet-another-fires of heaven-"OhMyGod, Sword of GodSlaying+15!" wank expansion and go back and redo that piece of shit client.
There is no fucking excuse for a game that's what, 10 years old, to be as MEH as that damned thing is.
I went back recently to give it a try on a new server, and... ugh. It freaking hurts.
Things I'd like to see them change:
1. Add a fucking Minimap. "It's not realisti..." FUCK YOU. Add a minimap. And a fucking radar system. But but but, Blubber Blubber Blubber, I'm sick of walking around like an asshole with my dick in my hands trying to find quest NPCs and store NPCs for hours because some Comic Book Guy clone likes to get a hardon because he's memorized the Elf towns.
2. Add quest tracking like WOW. With OSD listing your quests on the screen. The Task system is "ok". Make it "good."
3. Add random shit spawning around the world, like barrels and whatnot. "But people will farm them..." Here's a surprise assholes, all the farmers moved on to WOW. No one cares about farming EQ anymore.
4. While you're at it, add fucking HEAL POTIONS. "But, But, But, people might do shit without a group of 5 people backing them up..." Well, no shit. Some people actually LIKE playing a MMORPG without having to spend hours finding people to do shit with. Some people have about 2 hours an evening to do shit in. Not all of us are geeky college students skipping class to play EQ.
5. Go back and have someone who's not 80 years old and who remembers the good old days of DOS redesign the UI. Seriously, look at this shit. This is the UI a newbie to the game gets:
No labels. No explanations. And it's laid out like a ferret with ADHD shit on the screen. "Hi. Welcome to EQ. Hope you put up with this long enough to figure it out and actually join the real game." There is no fucking excuse for this crap. There's 13 expansions out for this game. Each one retailed at about $20-40 USD. That means that anyone addicted to this game and who has stuck around since release has paid over $530 + monthly fees. YOU COULD HIRE AN INTERN TO MAKE A BETTER UI THAN THIS.
6. Speaking of new players... Hey, the tutorials great. But after that.. well, good luck. Go find a place to grind for the next 65 levels. They need to revamp OLDER zones not keep adding raid content. Go back and re-do every single newbie zone. Then go back and redo every L10-20 zone. Then 20-30. Add a quest hub to each one, with quests, tasks, and gear.
"But it's too hard..." Oh well. WOW HAS it, so you NEED it. Get over it.
As for new server ideas... Who knows? I wouldn't mind seeing some weird form of PVP-Lite. Like... tag or something. I donno. Capture the flag with old zones. Just find 6-7 spots each zone and add flags, and a neutral NPC hiding in the center.
They had an entire expansion, with a new player race, a new starting city and entirely new leveling zones for levels 1-70 a year or so ago.
I sort of wish they'd release a new expansion that went back to the original art style. Even though it's massively outdated, it had character. If they released an expansion with graphics on par with Kunark, I'd probably have to buy it out of principle. They could even be kind and update the old player models with new animations and armor designs and such. Stop trying to compete with the graphics of modern games already! Go back to your roots!
TSS supposedly is tolerable, and every single new player is pushed towards it, but what if I really want to level in GFay? They need to get around to fixing it.
I know where you're coming from, but the truth is, a lot of these things aren't really feasible without a heavy rework of the entire game.
The problem is, even though EverQuest was technically a big production game at the time, it's still very much coded like it was built in a garage by a bunch of high school computer nerds. There's a lot of things that wouldn't make much sense today, and probably little documentation to help anyone to figure out what things do. I don't think anyone from the original Verant team is still doing any programming, but I could be wrong.
Here's a good example of the unintuitive design that went into EQ:
You know how the skill system works? You have a list that pops up that you see when you go to a trainer, yeah? You can buy your skills by spending your points at that list. Certain classes have access to certain skills, some races do, too.
Let's say you wanted to open up Tinkering to all races, instead of just gnomes. Great, okay, fiddle with the code to let the server know everyone can do it now...oh wait, the client is hard coded to only display the Tinkering skill to gnomes, and to only allow gnomes to tinker.
Likewise, it sure would be nice if you could get the entire number bar mapped to hotkeys, yeah? Can't, client is hard coded to just support six. Etc.
(Maybe some changes like this HAVE occured, but I haven't played EQ in a long time, so I don't know.)
Basically, EQ looks like an octopus playing cat's cradle, from a programming perspective. There's a lot of things you just can't do because it's hard coded into the client and things are all tangled up and not properly documented.
If you wanted to change some things about EQ, you really do need to rewrite the entire client from the ground up. The problem with this is that it would be a monstrous task for the development team because it would mean digging through a lot of the old client code to figure out what it does.
I'm pretty impressed that they were able to do some of the things they're doing in terms of questing and instancing, considering how difficult it is to worth with what is basically a relic of a game.
Still, they've obviously resigned themselves to not drawing in new customers in any significant number. This means that chances are, no big changes will be made to the game to improve it.
See KiTA's list? EQ2 has pretty much all of that. Though the map still isn't great, and it doesn't lead you by the nose on quests. There's plenty of opportunity to explore, and not everything is handed to you on a platter.
Even though I'm generally not a high-fantasy MMORPG kind of guy, I'm really enjoying EQ2. We have a thread in the MMO subforum.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
A complete lack of a mini map was fantastic, it made the game world interesting. You got to explore. If you're new, thats fun, and it's a feeling no game since ever gave BECAUSE they all have minimaps and tell you exactly where to go and where you should be at all times.
The quest system was awesome (though the way you turn stuff in was annoying) because, again, it made you explore. No big yellow exclamation telling you exactly what you need. You had to walk around, talk to NPC's, think of things to say to them, and then usually they'd be vague in what they wanted and you'd just have to figure it out.
Exploration, finding things on your own, challenge, risk vs reward, a death system that made fighting in a dungeon actually exciting, and some of the most intense "uber battles" of any game ever pretty much sums up EQ up until Velious.
And after that is when it turned to shit, and every MMO since has been easy mode designed for little kids.
Ok, let's say they implement every think you mentioned. UI issues aside, why would I play this game over WoW at this point? You just outlined a WoW clone, that's it. No reason to play it over what has become the standard, and at least if I subjected myself to WoW, I get to play with my friends.
Heaven forbid a game do simple things to minimize tedium and frustration, and add interesting and fun gameplay elements instead.
> turn on light
Good start to the day. Pity it's going to be the worst one of your life. The light is now on.
Now finish it off with a "Worst. Genre. EVER~~." comment and we have our Comic Book Guy moment.
Seriously, people didn't "figure it out", people got a quest list as Allakazam's and maps at EQAtlas and they worked around the shitty design decisions (like setting up sense heading to toggle when you hit one of the left or right keys) as best they could. All decisions like that did was mad people like IGE rich.
Sorry, I don't buy the whole "We can't update EQ to match modern gaming standards because then it would make it "teh kiddy". Just... no.
A minimap, some kind of radar, a camera system that doesn't belong in a Itagaki-style wetdream (oooh, I can make it so they can't see shit behind them... but they can change the camera so it's randomly appearing head of them... or I could make it orbit them like a moon...), a UI that's actually enjoyable to use, a spell memorization system that's not liquid monkey ass, etc etc. You could keep the game just as hard as it is and still not make part of the difficulty the actual interface to USE the damned game.
These kinda things wouldn't screw up the precious "vision" (Protip: The Vision was to get us to waste as much time as possible, and pay by the hour on an AOL/Compuserv style BBS.) and actually make the game, you know, tolerable to play.
It seems like the genre tends to lean towards making it difficult to die but penalizing you when you do. Anyone have any thoughts on how a game would work out where there's no death penalty whatsoever but dying in an encounter is always possible unless you're way stronger than it?
Weird, since we had one of the first warrior epic 1.5's in EQ. My best "gaming" pal was the guy getting it and we spent a lot of time, effort, and deaths trying to figure it out. It wasn't easy, it was frustrating at times, but it felt amazing finally getting it and actually feeling like we accomplished something in the game.
When we played WoW and got to the top tier everything felt boring. Every single guild had all the best gear in the game, and there'd be 20 of them on one server. It lacks any semblance of a challenge, plain and simple.
Fact is I don't play WoW OR Everquest since they take up WAY too much time to play but I played EQ during the more recent progression server release and powered my way up to the top and it was still one of the most challenging and fun experiences I've had.
Whether you like it or not, EQ doesn't need to become "easy mode." Even if they did everything you said, no one from the WoW community is going to start playing it, nor is anyone new to the genre. WoW is the big game. EQ will do best just catering to the crowd it has - the "hardcore" crowd, and the nostalgic.