Cleric here - and I think I camped something like a total of 6 months 8 hours a day for my watersprinkler. Though I had the full set of Donals armor, with the sprinkler it made for what was at the time a very good combat cleric setup. [my guild once did an all cleric party for a saturday of fun and had a blast. 5 hammer pets can do some damage.]
But yes, I would call EQ brutal when you combine the loss of xp on death [one guy in our guild fell asleep accidentally bound next to a mob and lost 3 levels by the time he woke up :eek:] and the grinding, and the insane respawn timers [some of them were on a 30 freaking day respawn timer :(] And some of the insane raid guilds [cough afterlife cough] that made people make alts on a different server just so they could have some peace and quiet without having to do a mandatory raid - mine was on Solusek Ro, I did tradeskills on her. I made one of the first sets of velium inlaid cestus on my server for my game husband.
One of my absolute favorite things about EQ was the ability to ‘marry’ in game, I had 5 different marriage ceremonies macro’d on my GM toon, and always showed up loaded down with wedding cake and bottles of milk and magic cookies [I was Winterskiss the Cookiemaker, I always had at least a pack of milk and cookies to give out]
Oak, weren’t you the guy that started or at least posted here about, having three guilds on a PVE server at commercial release that were perpetually at war with one another? I was on the wrong server but thought that sounded like fun. I eventually realized that the mechanics of EQ, at least early EQ, would’ve made that more of a pain in the ass than it was likely worth though. ?
1: No. I also wouldn’t play a game forcing me to play instanced pvp. That’s why I haven’t tried GW2, for example. I prefer open-world FFA pvp, without safe-zones and with risk, combined with role-playing and player-driven content, which is why I haven’t tried out Planetside 2.
2: I don’t really care.
3: Probably not. I prefer a more dynamic career or class system.
4: Yes. I generally enjoy difficulty, even if I’m not particulary good at it.
My dream would be an open-ended, player-driven sandbox, with opportunities for any kind of play, be it casual or hardcore, role-playing or player-killing. Well, in that dream I would also have the time to commit to playing too… Doesn’t seem like any of it is happening anytime soon, so back to weird puzzle-games and old-school single-player rpg’s for me.
I got to thinking about PvP, and one of the things I hate - and I meant hate - is when PvP uses different state or mechanics, thus meaning there’s a complete disconnect between PvE and PvP content. In those cases, I won’t ever touch PvP under any circumstance.
I’m not interested in PvP (although there is a separate area for it in LOTRO.)
You can make your own Potions in LOTRO, to give all sorts of healing.
The classes are certainly different in LOTRO, but you can finish the game either solo or in a group. (There are also many one-off adventure options for 2, 3, 6 + 12 players.)
Of course LOTRO has a magnificent backstory, so taking time over ‘difficulty’ doesn’t bother me.
N.B. Playing a hobbit exploring the Shire is a wonderful experience…
The reason this happens is that MMO mechanics are inherently absolutely CRAP for PvP; To this day, I fail to understand what anyone sees in doing this. If you want to play PvP, you should play a game in which PvP is good, rather than just trying to make your MMO do everything.
And I agree with glee on all points. I love LotRO.
No, that wasn’t me. I mostly played on Karana server, and my main (Oakbrow Farwalker) was an officer/raid leader for the guild Watchers of the Night for a while.
Yeah, I mean I loved my time in DAOC and the PvP involved there, but if PvP isn’t the main focus of the game, I’d actually prefer it be left out. Warzones/Battlegrounds/whatever tend to be inherently kind of silly anyway (the two factions in this game have a genocidal hate towards one another. They shall display this hate in a rousing game of Capture the Flag with rules set up to try and ensure only evenly matched teams will compete!)
Plus it just tends to end with a lot of whining and class modifications/nerfs when people find the FotM PvP class, even if it’s balanced fine for PvE.
I disagree with an earlier post about the grind nowadays though–it’s just, if not more, grindy than it was in the old days–they just changed the perception of the grind. Now, instead of taking a week of nonstop killing of the same mobs in order to tick your XP bar a third of the way to the next level, you do daily quests where you kill the same mobs every day to get tokens so that in a week you’re a third of the way to being able to buy your next piece of gear.
LotRO PvP was original and fun for the first four months or so. Then it became obvious that Turbine didn’t know what to do to balance it once the number of bored, end game PCs far exceeded the number of people wanting to play the monster side. The wheels fell off fairly quickly after that and I don’t know if they ever found a way to salvage it (I left right after they introduced Rangers & Trolls as one-shot purchasable characters).
It’s recently gotten a lot of revisions, but you can’t fix the fundamental problem, namely: 95% of the people playing LotRO don’t give a CRAP about PvP, but MAY still wander out into the Ettenmoors anyway. Only the 5% of people who DO give a crap are at all likely to create monster characters, and even of those 5%, not all of them will do so.
It’s not that people aren’t interested in it because it’s a sidelight. It’s a sidelight because people aren’t interested in it.
While I approve of the implementation, let’s face it - PvP (well, PvM) in LotRO is in the game because “MMOs need PvP” was the prevailing and stupid design logic at the time it came out, not because having PvP in LotRO was a good idea.
Obviously, “Food is a health potion” is a really silly idea. But so is the idea of realistic food, and sleep, and bathroom breaks, and on and on. And so is “Well, you got bit by a polar bear and almost died, but stand in a quiet spot for an hour and you’ll be fine”.
In pen and paper RPGs it is fine to require a month of recuperation time after being mauled by a polar bear, because that’s handled by: “Your characters spend a month at the inn healing up from your polar bear bites. OK, on the 32nd night you’re all lounging around the common room drinking mead when suddenly the door slams open and a wounded ranger collapses on the floor, clutching a sealed letter…”
In other words, it is fine to require a cost for the player to achieve a result. But it is extremely poor game design if that cost is boredom. Requiring sitting at the screen watching a progress bar slowly creep from 15 to 100 over an hour is poor game design, because if you punish players with boredom they’ll switch to another game.
And so having cheap heals that don’t work during combat makes sense–you can eat food, or slap on bandages, or drink from a healing fountain, or whatever, and boom, you’re back to full health. Or, you don’t allow any heal-over-time mechanism, like in most FPS games you need to run over a health pack or find a medic to heal, sitting in the corner for an hour won’t help.
I haven’t played EQ in ages, but I recall that I treasured every damn thing I got in that game. Every death was a catastrophe, and every victory was worthwhile.
And yes, sometimes I just sat in one spot for hours swatting flies and hoping the damn Gewgaw of Power would pop.
Still, I’m sick of WoW’s pointless, inevitable progression. I might have to go back to EQ and see if I’m ready to work for it again.
That’s something that got me about these replies too, Dzeiger- people hate grind, and I agree, Grinding sucks and in my developing opinion, it has no place in MMOs. It is the result of a search conducted by lazy developers for a recyclable pattern in which they can still create a World large enough to explore, but “data” wise, a small enough workload to be able to just repeat. And yes- I don’t see how people find Everquest “grindy” but not, Guild Wars 2, WoW, or, as a matter of fact, any other MMO of today.
[ol]
[li]Spot the Exclamation Mark[/li][li]Gander at requirements[/li][li]Accept Quest[/li][li]Finish Quest[/li][li]Repeat[/li][/ol]
= Grindy.
This is in essence what I was actually asking, without trying to make it too obvious, Airk. I am a Game Developer, and I am designing a game. In essence, I want things to be like EQ again in the sense that you felt not like you were playing this “Kewl Ranguhr gai furm anudder dimenshun” - but that you were another Person, in another World.
I want to remove the link between Person - Character, and make it between Person and World in which that Person finds himself. Characters will be able to progress to “max” without assistance, but some will find it much easier than others and others will be downright bad at it. You will need help in some quests if you are, say, a “Cleric” (just an example). Another thing- why the f*ck are people trying to find a “Max” in every game? What made EQ cool was the fact that you could hardly ever attain Max.
I read a post on the Rift forums two years ago: “If LOTR was directed and adapted for screen by modern-day MMO developers, the journey to Mount Doom would be summarised in the first two hours of viewing- the remaining 10 would consist of Frodo’s climb upwards and the events that followed.” It just seems so senseless. In every MMO I play these days I find myself asking the question,“Why am I doing this ~action~ ?” and the answer is, irrevocably - “So you can do the next ~action~…”
The problem MMOs have is finding things for high-end characters to do. Once you get to maximum level, what then? Well, you generally try and find the best gear. And then you may try and get gear that looks good, or is rare, even if it’s not the best.
What this generally means is that new content tends to be concentrated at the high end. And that tends to mean that the more interesting content is for the high end, and so you get the situation you have at the moment where new characters race to the high end so that they can get to new content.
Guild Wars 2 almost avoids this, and I do wish they’d been brave enough to keep with their originally intended system of matching character levels to zones up as well as down, and keeping progression purely down to gear and unlocking of abilities.
I read you Teuton, but my point is, and, this is very loosely put so please don’t burn me at the stake for saying this, ,but MMOs should have the sort of lifespan that “high-end” characters should almost, and again, loosely put, almost be the end of the game for that character.
If you’ve reached max level and you’ve attained powerful items, the sheer goal of playing should be to explore the World or to build houses, or to whatever. This is all from the very top of my head so, again, please don’t hold me to it, but you get what I’m saying more or less?
Point being, the game should be long enough and time-consuming enough that you can finish it alone, but that you can’t just get max level in a month. That’s the issue with “finding content for high end characters” - people can reach “high end” in no time- which means having to find content for those players. And when it comes to doing the same thing over and over, I’d much rather stick to another genre.
An MMO creates a new world. Nothing less, nothing more. It should be an adventure. No where in watching or reading the Lord of the Rings did you feel like,“Hey, this happened before.”
Which is, irrelevantly, why I kind of don’t like Game of Thrones as much as everyone else seems to But that’s just my hipster opinion, and best left for another thread.
I personally found almost all the fantasy MMORPGs I tried to feel like shallow EQ knock-offs. Part of that was a depth in EQ’s spells and skills that I haven’t seen in any other games. Heck, I’d love to ever see another class with as high a skill ceiling and as rewarding as the old EQ bard before they nerfed anything interesting about it or automated anything that took skill.
But, grind-wise, I think part of it with EQ was that you didn’t even repeat quests and have cause to move around. You would literally spend ours at Orc 2 in the Eastern Commons until it was time to spend hours sitting at Derv 1 in North Ro until it was time to spend hours sitting at Orc Highway in Oasis. And that was the most efficient way to level in the game. Not that running quests for 25 boar pelts is fascinating either but at least you see a little more of the world.
Something I thought of that could be interesting or could backfire horribly is this:
Undead cause final death.
Or if not undead, some other specific flavour of enemy which must be limited to specific, known regions, but represent an existential threat to your character. The game would have to be designed so that you never needed to venture into such regions, but could be richly rewarded if you did.
There are MMOs where all death is final - Wrath of the Mad God did it particularly well, but it’s not the only one which does it. In WofMG, your account gains rewards when your individual characters do well.
I’ve not seen a full 3D MMO do the final death thing. Would be interesting.
I agree, Final death could be interesting. I think it might be a liiiittle hard to pull off though, and you’re effectively throwing away 99% of players, but interesting nonetheless. That’s what I enjoyed of EQ. Death wasn’t final but it was definitely a right pain in the ass.
I think we can all agree, we’d like to see an MMO of EQ’s magnitude surface, today
But that’s just my hipster opinion, and best left for another thread.
