Over the years, I’ve probably spent too much time obsessing about my obsession for one particular MMO: which of course is EverQuest. What is it about this enigmatic game/experience/world that keeps haunting me? Pondering EQ’s past, present and future has been somewhat of a fixation for me and many other MMO veterans who long to recreate those heady, magical days we ventured forth into an unknown and foreboding Norrath.
So the news of the announced development of EverQuest 3 or EverQuest Next has been a fascinating addition to this mental hobby of mine. The people that brought us the first 3D MMO, have a great opportunity to put into practice all of the lessons of successful MMO development that have come to light in the past 10 years.
Let me be blunt: as far as I’m concerned, this is SOE’s last chance to get it right.
I’ve been jotting down my thoughts about what I as a game designer would do if given the chance to recreate and reboot the world of EverQuest. It would probably take far too long to create a new series of polished articles on what made EQ great in the first place (search my website for previous articles on EQ for that) and I’m not naive to believe that simply recreating the original EQ would even work given today’s market. Rather I’d like to publish my thoughts in no particular order in a stream of consciousness format.
First let me recap how I feel about the original EverQuest.
How I Feel About EverQuest in 17 Words
Danger. Risk. Survival. Freedom. Mystery. Fantasy. Discovery. Camaraderie. Community. Escape. Defeat. Victory. Gain. Loss. Excellence. Skill. Excitement.
Great art makes you feel something. EQ made me feel many things. Contrast that to today’s heavily scripted MMOs that don’t make me feel anything except contempt. These new breed of slick MMOs are largely a cold, lifeless, predictable and repetitive series of scripted experiences dressed up with beautiful artwork and exquisitely detailed animations.
Like the movie Groundhog Day, today’s MMOs lack capacity to change. And the worst crime of all is that players are not allowed to impact the world as per the decree of the autocratic game designers. Instead of having your own experiences, you must experience their world, their way. Take it or leave it. Not much of a choice is it?
The Magic of EQ Explained
The initial attraction of MMOs for me was that they allowed you to experience many deep and visceral emotions while safely and vicariously playing via an avatar. EverQuest made all of that possible.
In a way MMO’s are akin to the experience of watching a horror movie at the cinema (except that you are a spectator). There you are scared out of your wits but in the back of your mind you know it’s not real and you can leave you seat and resume your safe and predictable life.
EverQuest’s Norrath was a fantastical and unforgiving world where fellow adventurers banded together to try to gain victories over enemies with impossible odds. Nothing was ever easy in Norrath and we liked it!
You had everything to lose and everything to gain. Player reputation actually counted for something.
Nobody would dare behave like an idiot in public because they knew word would get around and they’d be treated like a pariah and they’d be unable to find groups and advance. And unlike the MMOs today, levels actually meant something. Loot was actually earned not doled out like a welfare check.
Players also had the freedom to self-actualize and to create emergent gameplay. As noted previously, players created their own stories and memories. Contrast this with a tightly scripted and totalitarian philosophy of control that is exemplified by MMOs like Blizzard’s WoW.
If SOE can incorporate 20% of what the original EQ had then they will be on the right track.
Why did SOE Get it Wrong with EQ2?
Those who fail to learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. SOE needs to take an honest post-mortem look at why EQ2 failed to generate the success of EQ and why it paled in comparison to WoW.
SOE needs to resist the temptation to create a sanitized, newbie friendly world where player freedom is so restricted that drama and conflict have been erased. Many of the features of EQ that gave us so many memories were unwittingly created by the competition that ensued as a result of a limited supply of mobs and scarce resources.
In their desire to create a MMO utopia, the naive EQ2 designers failed to realize the importance of conflict. Blizzard with it’s over-reliance on instancing, also has failed to appreciate the importance of creating a virtual world where there are struggles that need to be overcome. The best struggles of course are between players; after all, massively multi-player games are all about people. How tragic that today’s MMO’s have lost this focus.
The developers of EQ3 should see conflict not as a problem but as a good and noble thing; the glass is hall full if you design it right and have the courage to follow through.
Allow players to change the world. Player created trains were an act of desperation and a cry for help from players who wanted to find a way to impact the world and other players. Players today are frustrated that they don’t really have an impact on their worlds so they end up misbehaving in chat channels.
This idea that struggle and conflict must be replaced by entitlement and convenience is misguided and has infected most MMOs today and made them dull and predictable. This design philosophy was meant to solve many customer service problems inherent with EQ but the result was that ended up discouraging cooperation among players.
Reinventing the MMO Wheel
SOE needs to forget the quest directed on-rails, theme park approach made popular by Blizzard; we already have enough of these paint by numbers MMOs in circulation. Enough is enough.
SOE needs to create a world that is fantastic and magical yet harsh and unforgiving. Players must again fear the unknown and respect the wilderness. Wild means wild. MMOs should not feel like a miniature golf course or a McDonald’s restaurant for kids. Those that want safety and guaranteed outcomes can play Farmville and Frontierville.
For SOE to succeed they are going to have to introduce enough new features to take MMOs to the next level. Simply making a WoW facsimile for Norrath is unacceptable. SOE needs to create shock-waves throughout the MMO world.
SOE needs to propel the MMO experience to the next level if they have any hope of taking the MMO by storm. SOE is going to have to do what Apple did for cell phones when they released the iPhone if they truly want to make an impact on the video game industry.
Analyzing the Competition
Everyone in the business world must do a thorough analysis of the competition. Success is based finding weaknesses in the current market or creating an entirely new market.
SOE should play to their strengths:
- Respect the established EQ lore not enslaved to someone else’s intellectual property (i.e. Lord of the Rings).
- Adopt the original vision of a world where anything can happen — read the mind-blowing and inspirational original official EQ manifesto currently only available at my website.
- Get off the rails and return to less linear, more open-ended gameplay.
- Take advantage of the goodwill of your existing fan community – we have thousands of gamers that have played and loved EQ over the years.
- Cater to adults and adult niche markets (mature adults, female gamers, family guilds, etc.) instead of focusing on pre-teens and teens like Blizzard does with WoW. Players who want a dumbed-down shallow MMO experience already have enough options.
Capitalize on the weaknesses of Blizzard’s WoW:
- Offer player housing as WoW has no player housing.
- Offer role-play support and mechanics. WoW has almost zero support and mechanics for role-players.
- Offer live GM events as WoW has no Live GM events.
- Provide more opportunities for player freedom and player impact contrasted with WoW’s reliance on heavily scripted quests and narratives — those MMOs will be dead soon anyways
- Community is a commodity! Blizzard doesn’t understand this. Promote a good community by enforcing chat rule in contrast with Blizzard’s shameful and horrible mismanagement of WoW community which is a cesspool.
- Implement the original EQ’s accelerated day/night schedule — WoW does this horribly and sentences players who play late at night to a lifetime of eternal darkness.
- Have different NPCs and mobs spawn during the day and at night – WoW completely misses the boat here.
- Resist the temptation to regurgitate the sophomoric pop culture references that WoW has in your MMO.
It’s also worth noting that by the time EQ3 is released Blizzard may be releasing their 2nd gen MMO. By the time SOE releases a MMO that can compete with WoW, Blizzard may well be advancing the genre even further into the stratosphere. Other MMOs by 38 Studios and ArenaNet will also be out by then as well. It’s anyone’s game to win.
More Features and Concepts I’d Like to See in EQ3
Here are some additional thoughts that I’ve put into bullet points regarding EQ3 that I’m too lazy to organize but I figured they might be worth putting out there (Warning: WoW forum posters, ADD and TLDR people skip ahead as this is a long list — you have been warned):
- Death should mean something. Players won’t respect your world if death is meaningless. Failure without loss or penalty not only makes bad players it removes a sense of risk and excitement from your world. The fear of death is a time-tested way to create community and player interdependency. It brings people together in the real world and it does the same in the virtual world. Death penalties can be gradually introduced into the game.
- EQ promoted group interdependency — give players reasons to band together. Give all classes castable buffs and unique skills that make every feel valued and wanted.
- Allow for more freedom and chaos as that creates drama, tension and conflict which are essential to give a world meaning and immediacy. Don’t fall into the WoW trap of limited player freedom.
- Allow soloing but don’t promote it. Promote grouping and player interdependence but don’t penalize soloing.
- Do not blindly accept the notion that your MMO needs to have instancing in order to be a success. Instancing is bad and lazy game design.
- If you are going to capitulate to instancing at the very least dungeons should have a communal and competitive aspect.
- The idea of quests as done by Blizzard WoW needs to be completely avoided as the prime focus of gameplay.
- Quests should be rare and special. No player should be able to have 25 quests running at once.
- NPC’s need to be vastly improved with regard to interactivity with players.
- Raids in MMOs are akin to learning how to do a complex dance routine. This is a MMO, not Riverdance. Give mobs better AI which will keep players on their toes and make them think.
- Stop leashing NPCs. No more Stepford Wives NPC behavior.
- Don’t allow addons to do the players thinking for them. If your MMO is too complicated that it needs addons then reduce the complexity. Points at Blizzard.
- Resist the temptation to shower players with too much loot. Loot should be earned, not bestowed.
- Possibly a browser MMO? Free Realms engine proves it can be done.
- Planning a MMO these days is an advantage based on the past 10 years of successes and failures.
- Bring back a need to socialize and to build up community — good community not chaotic community. Good communities don’t happen by accident. Besides, a good community is a great selling point.
- Ensure that volunteer guides have a place in the world — empower the kind players in the community.
- Bring back the warmth and magic of Milo Cooper’s stylized original character artwork that was a big part of the magic of EQ.
- Hire real GMs (gamemasters) that actual proactively police the server and watch out for gold spammers, hackers and player harassment.
- EQ was largely a work in progress with very little planning ahead for expansions. Also many decisions were made at the beginning which affected how the game would evolve such as zone borders, trains, camping, open dungeons
- One thing is certain the graphics have to be outstanding. The days of ugly avatars that look like androids are over.
- Confuse and befuddle the powergamers and min-maxers — they are the angels of death of your MMO. By creating new paradigms for EQ3 everyone will be equal at the start.
- Figure out a way to make spoiler sites irrelevant. Perhaps procedurally created quests/tasks and loot.
- Bring back live events, random events and unique event experiences.
- Keep Station Money out of the game as much as possible. Not only is begging for your customers money shameful, it also destroys immersion. Remember immersion?
- SOE you need to figure out: who directs the player experience? The game designers or the players? Questing vs. player freedom? Hopefully you answered correctly.
- Slow down the speed of player advancement. Advancement is not a right, it is a privilege. Players will grind to the level cap and then complain that they are bored and this creates a top heavy world and a ghost-town in the lower levels.
- Resist the temptation to create disposable content that lacks replayability. The problem with many new MMOs like WoW is that when you are in a new zone, you feel like you are just passing through as you’re there briefly much like a tourist; you complete a few quests then it’s on to the next zone. Let players live and settle in a zone; make them feel like they belong. Let them get involved in the local culture and delve into factional disputes.
It’s Time to Change the Rules of the Game
More importantly EQ3 has to be a game changer. It should challenge and revolutionize everything we know about MMOs. That’s the only way to get the magic back. Magic after all is no longer magic once you know how the trick works. But in a risk averse world can SOE come up with something as compelling as the DIKU MUD in 3D formula that the original EQ had? It may take a miracle.
We need to be truthful and honest about the state of MMOs in 2010 and it’s this: MMOs are predictable and lifeless. This has led to the state of affairs where they have become completely deconstructed and demystified by most players. A symptom of this is that the practice of Theorycrafting has become the prime MMO player preoccupation. Players agonize over stats. Mathematics is not exciting. We are supposed to be adventurers not accountants!
SOE needs to create a sense of mystery all over and completely redefine and bury the equations and formulae from the curious eyes of the power gamers. As Raph Koster has said and I’m paraphrasing: when we learn, we have fun. Discovering and learning a new code needs to be part of the new EQ3. That’s going to take a lot of bold thinking in a MMO world dominated by the success Blizzard’s WoW.
Reflections from the Evercracked Documentary
After watching the entire Evercracked documentary I could not help feeling that SOE got lucky with EverQuest. It was a unique MMO that came out at the right time with many converging trends in technology such as graphic cards capable of 3D (remember 3DFX video cards?) and the ascendancy of the Internet and online gaming itself.
Luck aside, I do believe it was the backgrounds and experience of the people who created EQ who really made the difference. They were people who played MUDS, they played pen and paper games like Dungeons & Dragons. They really seemed to understand and appreciate the importance of role-playing and immersion. Contrast this with the people who are presently creating WoW and there is a universe of difference. There seems to be a generational shift and it shows.
Many of the older RPG’s used classic fantasy archetypes and of course character classes. These were well defined elements that were perfected over the period of many years. EQ needs to get back to the basics of what works. As one person at the Fanfaire EQ Next panel said:
With the original EQ I had 7 spell buttons, with EQ2 I had 52 buttons.
Today the average class in a MMO is swamped with too many abilities and buttons to press. Less is more. Simplify.
Lessons from Blizzard
There’s a big difference in simply copying WoW and making a clone and copying the Blizzard development philosophy. Here are things that Blizzard does well that any MMO company including SOE should copy:
- Easy to Learn Hard to Master – This mantra is a given in the industry. Failure to design your MMO this way means certain failure. (Note: this design philosophy was in fact coined by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell (not Blizzard) the father of video games many years ago which self-appointed custodians of all knowledge Wikipedia completely fails to mention.
- Do Not Release It Until It’s Ready – This is another standard that needs to be adhered to. The days of releasing barely tested, buggy garbage are over. SOE has been guilty of violating this rule on many occasions. In the past they emphasized quantity of expansions over quality and it was the cause for the demise of the original EQ.
- Stylized Art Direction – Realism is not a substitute for art direction in MMOs — especially for fantasy MMOs (Vanguard MMO screwed up here). SOE seems to have learned this lesson as evidenced with Free Realms and the exhortations of SOE employees at the recent Fanfaire EQ3 Panel.
Is SOE’s Corporate Culture Up to the Task?
With SOE over the years I’ve never gotten the feeling that it was a company that wanted to take gaming to the next level — something that Blizzard did with a culture of polish and development. Rather, SOE has seemed content to play it safe and “stay the course” so to speak.
I’m also very concerned about the corporate culture at SOE. I’ve heard horror stories from former employees over the years of overly aggressive and arbitrary managers. I’ve experienced direct outright incompetence, misconduct, favoritism back when I was a Senior Guide for EverQuest and heard of stories of cronyism perpetrated by certain SOE employees from impeccable sources.
The old boys club corporate culture at SOE where office politics and brown nosing is rewarded and people rise to the level of their incompetence hardly seems conducive to fostering the kind of environment where great video games are created.
Another requirement for EQ3 to succeed is that SOE will have to abandon the old ways of thinking that put all of their resources into placating established hardcore players with content and forgetting newbie players. This is the tragic mistake that characterized most of the expansions of the original EverQuest. The days of creating content that requires you to raid for 4-6 hours every night are over if they ever hope to entice a bigger demographic to play their new MMO.
Concluding Thoughts
Ten years ago the MMO universe was completely dominated by EverQuest. EQ was practically the only game in town. As EQ matured it developed some serious problems along the way which I chronicled in my 2004 Open Letter to SOE. Little by little what made EQ a masterpiece has been gutted in favor of appealing to the lowest common denominator.
SOE needs to reclaim EQ’s past greatness and legacy — only if they show courage and fortitude to stop relying on the focus groups, the bean counters, the metrics and the demographics to design their MMO.
Despite the odds being stacked against them, I’m very bullish on SOE and EQ3. I want them to succeed because we need serious alternatives to the Blizzard stranglehold of this industry.
EQ3 is SOE’s last chance to finally get it right and put SOE once again in the forefront of MMO development. For SOE to once again make magic they’re going to have to be able to compete with Blizzard Entertainment dominance of the MMO genre. This means that at the very least, SOE’s development philosophy (see Blizzard lessons above) will have to match and exceed Blizzard’s if they have any chance of succeeding.
Not only does the MMO need to be invented, SOE needs to be reinvented and EverQuest3 is a good chance to do it. There is no going back to the old ways of releasing buggy, unfinished, lackluster content. SOE will have to substantively change the way they make MMOs if they ever hope to dominate the market once again and produce a MMO worthy of the EverQuest name.
It’s time to lead, not follow. The ball is in your court Mr. Smedley.
-Wolfshead
I think a lot of that can be summed up in that MMOs lost their direction. Even as far back as the text MUD era, we saw a glimpse of the promise that the medium carried. For all its flaws, EQ did realize a bit of that promise, just as other games before it realized part of it. (And, yes, even if we ignore the smaller games, UO was still a significant contemporary of EQ. Ignoring UO is like a WoW fanatic ignoring EQ.)
I think the biggest problem is one I’ve talked about before: short-term vs. long term. Blizzard has mastered the art of short-term focus, and has enough resources to keep focusing on that goal. SOE doesn’t necessarily have that luxury. So, it’s a question of where to do the balance. You need short-term focuses to attract players, but then need to pay attention to the long term health of the game to keep them around without spending a ton of money like Blizzard does. I think a lot of your points are great for the long-term focus, but it can’t be what you rely on to drag people into the game.
I wish SOE the best, and I hope EQ3 does well for them. I actually did like EQ2, even if it secretly seemed to want to be WoW. We’ll see how things go.
Took a lot of what I was hoping EQ would do and described it in great detail. Hopefully the people who are making newer games and/or EQNext read this. Because if they want to capture people’s imaginations again this is exactly what will have to happen. Thank you for putting time and effort into this.
“The days of creating content that requires you to raid for 4-6 hours every night are over if they ever hope to entice a bigger demographic to play their new MMO”
Yes, I think this is the main issue. Is it possible to make a game that is ‘hardcore’ in terms of challenge but not hardcore in terms of the time required to play or master.
A game that needs/ rewards grouping but is still friendly to the needs of older players (with more commitments) and parents who might not always be able to guarantee their schedule in advance.
The “Player vs Developer” blog discussed “Cinematic Storytelling” a while ago and I fear this is going to be a trend. Basically, Dragon Age and Mass Effect online (I love those a single player games, but I don’t think is is a good model for a MMO).
Basically, players become passive consumers instead of actively shaping their world and role playing experience. The demand for new content to consume this way is so high that not even a huge studio like Blizzard can keep up with.
MMOs have become slacker games. Easy to learn, and… not much to master. Be it Guild Wars, WoW or Star Trek Online, I notice the following trends:
1.) People play alone. In STO I notice many people who have blocked any kind of team invite for months and do not seem to desire to play with anybody. GW is also often played rather with henchmen than real people, only the slackers need a “real player” to help them to overcome things that are too difficult for them.
2.) Players call themselves “casual” and are horrible slackers. MMOs are very easy, nothing to master nowadays. In STO people don’t know some basic functions of the UI and many game mechanics, and it is not only because Cryptic’S UI is not the most intuitive. And this after they reached higher levels up to max rank. Why? Because there is no real death penalty and no real difficulty.
It is not only STO, all MMOs seem to be designed to cater to the very lowest common denominator, the slacker. No wonder that we get more and more content that is more or less experienced in a passive way.
I am not against people being able to play solo if they want, I often do it myself (winks to Tesh). I am also not advocating the powergamer or min-maxer playstyle.
I want to point out how a MMO gets down if it gets designed as a single player game for slackers, then the virtual world is doomed from the very beginning and gets replaced by the Theme Park with cinematic storytelling.
As much as I am excited about GW2, I already noticed a huge trend to dumb down the game to make it more “accessible”. This might appeal to the sad MMO player crowd of today, but picking the right 8 skills for the challenge ahead for yourself and synergize them with your team was a huge part of the appeal of GW1. It is hard to tell just from videos how much my fears might come true, but 5 of 10 skills are already determined by your choice of weapon. Seems to be an assurance to make sure people don’t gimp themselves totally.
“Players who want a dumbed-down shallow MMO experience already have enough options.”
I wish a company had the bones to do that! MMOs are basically like movies that are suitable for the whole family. That’s why they are so often boring for everybody.
TL;DR version:
SWTOR does not seem to become anything else but WoW 2.0 reloaded in space, so my hopes are on GW2 which unfortunately also seems to make huge concessions to the Joe Slacker.
In the end a “Cataclysm” will happen that actually changes nothing. and people will love it. Though I still hope that both gamers and designers wake up, it is about time.
I do not see SOE advancing the genre in a direction I would appreciate. They rather seem to have an even younger new target group, kids & casuals.
*chuckle*
Aye, as much as I play solo, I’d not want an MMO to punish grouping. Brian had a great article up a while ago on that.
These games really aren’t single player games, and they shouldn’t be designed as such (including the Movie Envy syndrome). That said, as a “virtual world”, an MMO isn’t Team Fortress, either, only and ever dependent on multiplayer for variety and playability.
I don’t believe EQ3 has a chance of doing anything truly radical that I’d like. (My list is somewhat different, but has some overlaps.) I just don’t see SOE caring enough.
This is one of those times I’d be happy to be proven wrong, though. *shrug*
“I do not see SOE advancing the genre in a direction I would appreciate. They rather seem to have an even younger new target group, kids & casuals.”
Well I’m a huge SOE fan (in the past they have been groundbreaking with games like Planetside, and the sheer scope of EQ2 with the the detail of characters, motion captured etc).
But sitting through the EQ Next seminars I would have to agree with you, I hope I’m wrong but I think they have learnt well the lessons from Blizzard (they did say stylized graphics, heroic characters, instanced dungeons only etc) and are going to release a very WoW styled game. Guessing too that we’ll see RMT from day one, and probably support for the PS3, its using the free realms engine and that’s going on the PS3 soon.
Maybe EQ4? We’ll see, I fear though that they have learnt the lessons and are going to release an awesome game, well at least for 2004 😛
Thanks for posting the original EQ manifesto.
I think the reason we don’t have such games now is because of the way in which the industry listens to players.
Let me digress. I formed my early ideas on how referees should handle a game by playing Rugby. No one in Rugby argues with the refs. This is because if you argue the ref will not answer you, he’ll simply penalise your team 10 yards. And if you still want to argue, another 10. Your own team mates will manhandle you away from the ref if you look like arguing.
The polar opposite is modern MMOs. Companies like Sony that originally sold tape recorders have a customer service ethos that suits such businesses. Something wrong? Replace it. Customer not happy – give them what they ask for, the Customer is always right.
Now what works for Customers works much less well for Players. And in MMOs of course we’re both.
But you will never have GMs in-game making radical changes as long as you have the philosophy that if customers complain it’s bad and you must make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Instances are a way of dealing with customer complaints about mob-stealing. Dumbing down is a solution to customer complaints about difficulty. Complaints drive the innovations, we’re a whine-driven genre.
It will be hard to go against that. It will be almost impossible to go against that if you’re a big company with many managers all owning a piece of the pie. It’s also against what is now the prevailing culture.
It may happen that someone dares to do a game that some people find wonderful but many people hate. Darkfall and Eve have done it to some extent. But it will be quite a departure for a big game company to do it – they literally have to tell a whole department not to do what they think is their job.
Totally agree with you Wolfshead.
The problem is that corporations think in terms of profit. WoW makes money hats for everyone, and realistically if you want to get millions upon millions of players you HAVE to dumb down the game. In my opinion, where satisfaction is higher on the chart than profits, game companies should be looking at CCP and EVE instead of Blizzard and WoW. EVE is a small, profitable, constantly growing, fiercely loyal community. Even when EQ was king of the hill, EQ, and UO before it, had more in common with EVE than WoW. The initial failings of EQ2 was in their attempt to be WoW (well, insane PC requirements followed by trying to emulate WoW). Only years later did they start to shift focus to the players they had over the players they wanted. Even EQ suffered at the hands of WoW as they tried to shoehorn in Quest/Task overload like the current market dominator.
I have to agree with this entire article AND I hope that SONY prints this article out and uses it as a checklist or blueprint as they finish up EQ Next.
If the game does not have challenge, danger, and a little pain (for failing), then any rewards or accomplishments will be meaningless (like they’d kind of come to be in games like WOW).
I’d add that I would love a world that was worthy of exploring. i spent 6 months in Ashron’s Call just wondering around, finding many dungeons and interesting places, sometimes, i’d be the only one in the place. Now adays, zones are tiny and except for the instances, pretty much useless places to search.
Also, as to grouping, i’d like to see grouping, but less reliance on guilds. Now adays, players are very isolated by guilds. With practically no reason to know/care about anyone outside your guild. It didn’t always seem that way.
I think you forgot one bullet point that’s an important one. While yes the graphics do need to be spectacular, and not be the creepy puppet world that EQ2 is, it also need to be able to be very playable on Mid level gaming machine when released. EQ2 still bring the most powerful system of today to it’s knees. That’s ridiculous. I think the bar for next gen MMO’s is set with Guild Wars 2, they should shoot for at least that level.
A fantastic read which echoes so many of my own wishes and concerns for the current MMOs on the market. I have only had a sneak peek at EQ back in the days, but I know UO very well and I always find it ironic that the MMOs with the most depth ever were those two so ancient games. It seems somewhere along the way the focus on the ‘rpg’ was lost – you can see it in so many genres today, style and grafX over content and story. but the MMORPG genre suffers from this more than others.
while I love the world of warcraft, playing in that world has lost more and more of its meaning over the course of the years. Blizzard wanted to open the game to more subscribers and there’s certainly the financial aspect but also a few other reasons for that. the problem is that if you try to accommodate everyone, give everything to every class, make it all solo-able, erase all sources off downtimes (not just the unnecessary ones), you’re basically killing the genre. the world in wow is static and what we do is of no consequence. there is no conflict, there is no competition and the challenges have come down too – now even the loot looks the same. players can log on and be inside a party in 10secs, run 2 dungeons in 1 hour and then log off again – with hardly any interaction required anymore. you can pretty much solo your way through wow like this or just use it as a chatroom with shinies.
I miss consequence – I miss the more ‘authentic’ adventure feeling in the game. I miss the need for cooperation, for having your friends come and escort you somewhere. I miss deaths having any meaning. most of all I miss the feeling of being scared shitless when entering a new map or attempting to travel where you got no business traveling. nothing in wow scares me anymore and hasn’t for years. If I think back of my best and funniest MMO experiences in the past and other MMOs, it was the tough things ad obstacles we overcame as teams that I remember. you dont remember the easy bosskills and rushing through a zone – you remember challenges, random events that startled you or achievements you felt had an impact on you and the world around you.
it’s a pity that nobody seems willing to venture there anymore and create a game that balances this true, epic MMO experience with things like playability and ace design.
This is an amazing article full of depth and detail. It’s very close to how I hope it goes too. Sony could do a lot worse than take a good hard look at this and bear it directly in mind during the design process.
There seem to be some critics around the blogsphere who think it’s a bad thing to look backwards and try to reimagine the successful parts in a next generation MMO and for the life of me I cannot understand why that is. Don’t pay them any heed Wolfshead, your enthusiasm is palpable and that’s no bad thing!
Once again a great article. Sure, it is an old topic, but that is because that topic is important: Nowadays MMOs have evolved, but on the way they lost a lot of things.
This is not just nostalgia, like too many bloggers write. There is a massive difference between classic EQ and todays EQ and classic WoW and todays WoW. These are completely different games !!
I don’t get it, why the companies don’t use a little bit more product segmentation to cover the whole market. Many, many people I know don’t play WoW any longer, and a majority of them doesn’t plan to play any of the current type of MMOs ever again. These are well situated people. They would easily pay some 50€ a month for a really good MMO that includes learned lessons as well as the feeling of virtual world, risk and adventure.
I feel like living in communism. I want to buy bananas, I have the money, but somehow nobody wants to sell me any !!
Loved this article. I would definitely play the game you describe.
Just want to thank everyone for their support of the sentiments expressed in this article. EverQuest occupies a very special place in my heart and I like so many others out there really want to see the “next” EQ blow the doors off the competition. 🙂
Almost every single point in this was done in FFXI. Why didn’t you play it?
“Stylized Art Direction” Bah, no thanks, in 2004 that made more sense, today the cheapest PC has multiple cores and future low end ones will have powerful AMD graphics on the same die.
At the same time stylized graphics do not improve much, WoW has put a lot more work into their engine yet I’m not seeing much difference due to the diminishing returns.
And as for the “Capitalize on the weaknesses of Blizzard’s WoW:”, that list below had every feature supported currently by EQ2 such as the day night schedule (Castle ruins even has the mobs change with it). The only one I don’t know about is player freedom, although what that actually entails is a hard guess, I’m free to pick my own diety – is that enough of an example?
At the same time though you said that EQ2 failed, yes it did fail to catch the sub base that WoW has.
I’d put the reasons as many, too many bad mechanics came over from EQ1, like camping. Its seen as competitive, yet I find it a total waste of time and completely lacking in immersion. Dungeons were all uninstanced, a few are good but one lesson they have learned is that players can get a more interactive experience with an instanced dungeon (open ones too have their place).
Out of everything one of the few things I can agree with is to get rid of the whole website paint the dots guides with some sort of different quest generation.
Personally to take MMO gaming to the next level for me I want more then you are describing which sounds too much like just EQ1.
Here I want
1) An interactive world, if I tradeskill and create 6 shields for the local Froglok faction I want to see 6 guards pick them up and equip them. I want to see PVP and PVP/PVE change boundaries. I want NPCs to approach me to go on quests that will change the world, if only in a small way.
Thinking here of a simple example, Frogloks and Trolls both ends of a swamp, the ground inbetween can alter day to day, so each time I log in I have a different experience.
2) Realistic graphics, none of this cartoon crud. Big chests, steriod muscles and tiny legs are for the kiddies. Ditto for schoolgirls and male beauty models drawn in strange pastel hues. EQ2 and AOC currently are the only ones out there I’ve seen with western styles and a noble attempt to actually draw the world well enough to feel it. I’m not saying EQ2 is perfect, but at times it really does move me, that never happens with a stylized world.
3) AI. Every single computer game out there today is sorely lacking here, even your example of trains is just wrong, and I’m bored with mobs just allowing themselves to be rounded up and AOE’d down (maybe some AOE should hurt the players too). NPC’s shouldn’t be mindless, they should be fearful of their lives, they should gang up on us, use tactics (oddly enough EQ2 had this on some groups of mobs, but only level ~25). And above all they should have the magic ingredient added to them that Julian Gollop used so well in Lasersquad – randomness, just enough and people read more intelligence in then is truly there.
4) Non linear quests. I want choices, for example in EQ2 I was disguised as a pirate on a boat, another boat of Frogloks came alongside and attacked. Supposedly I was supposed to attack them to maintain my disguise, instead I should have had the option to help them and change the storyline. Quests should be a byzantine mess to try and plot out being influenced by your race, faction, previous events and current world events, probably with a hint of randomness – that would kill these spoiler sites.
5) Depth of gameplay. This I believe is the reason that WoW beat EQ2, EQ2 has tons of complexity, but for all of that not a lot of depth. I should have to decide on one ability or another, I should have to decide whether to try to follow a combination of abilities or act defensively. Wow does very well at this to a point, and then its 7 buttons used over and over again and gets boring. I want that but at least 15 or so abilities and tons of depth.
6) A world economy that isn’t inflated each expansion, I’d just nerf gold earning for higher levels from low quests and leave it as that. A broker/auction house is a must, but also player generated writs would be top on the list.
7) I’d live to ditch levels completely, but as a tool to guide players through the story they still work. However I would like to see them change so that they can make new expansions offer new content but fold older expansions down to just provide new paths to level on. This would keep the path 1 to max level the same without needing to speed up levelling in certain areas.
SOE needs to take an honest post-mortem look at why EQ2 failed to generate the success of EQ and why it paled in comparison to WoW.
It’s kinda obvious, isn’t it? Regardless of what your long almost-rant says, Blizzard make the experience fun for a large number of people. Enough fun that people not only were willing to make the purchase, but continue to support WoW by paying money each month.
The kind of MMO you propose will never have the popularity of WoW. That isn’t saying it’s better or worse, it just won’t be as popular. I hear people complain all the time about how much better WoW was in the beginning. I was there — I’ve been playing WoW since about 3 weeks after it began. First mount at level 40, and cost of almost 100 gold. I worked for weeks to get that kind of money up. Now get your first mount at level 20. No problem for me. Then, I leveled without doing a single instance, now I rely on them. All changes for the better, in my opinion, and all changes to make WoW more accessable to more people.
Even death has become nicer, because you move more quickly as a ghost than you did in the beginning.
I suspect that the makers of EQ3 don’t want a game limited to the hard core players — they want a game that will appeal to the widest variety of people available. But that game isn’t the game you describe.
I played EQ1 from the day it released. It was magical and awe-inspiring. Why? Well for me it was the perceived danger. As a lowbie in those days there were countless ways to die. Can’t find your way out of the water in Felwithe and you die. Get caught out in the pitch black woods of GFay at night and you will wander aimlessly until something squashes you and you die. Get an add on you while fighting an orc pawn and you die. Miss a bridge in Kelethin as you are running from platform to platform and you die. Dying is BAD. It makes you pay attention, and develops interplayer relations (safety in numbers, help me find my corpse, need a rez, etc). Specialists also encouraged interaction … need clarity? need a port? need a rez? need a tradeskill? … then hire a specialist.
That being said, grouping was not forced on you (and this was part of EQ2’s demise when it launched), there were some viable soloing classes that provided outlet for the more group shy players (necros, druids, etc) but they had their own drawbacks mostly in the form of higher downtime than playing in a group. On the whole they could get more exp per kill than a grouped toon, but the interval between kills was much longer. In their own way they could level about the same rate of a grouped toon, but it kept the more lucative ventures out of reach as well (lower guk?) because it is impossible to solo in there. Pick your path and risk/reward comfort zone.
There were no express routes from place to place and it made Norrath feel *huge*. If you want to get a lowbie Barb Shammy from Halas to Freeport … then put all your goodies in the bank (danger of loss) and do the naked run run run!! N Ro and the Gorge were especially scarey to get through in those days (as mentioned above about danger and consequences). But it was exciting and FUN!
EQ1 at the time of “Shards of Velious” was at its Zenith. It was everything I wanted in a MMO and more. Shadows of Luclin was the “jump the shark” event for EQ1 in my opinion and although I continued to play it never recovered … it just sank deeper and deeper into ez-mode cookie-cutter oblivion. If EQ3 captures the spirit of EQ1 at the time of Velious and then polishes that further (player housing, etc) then they will SHINE …
Thanks for the post Tom. I really enjoyed reading it and I completely agree with what you say. It’s nice to meet a fellow traveler who appreciated the early EverQuest like yourself 🙂
Thank you for the time an effort you put into this. I totally agree with your views and also want SOE to succeed if on principle only.
I agree with alot i have read on the above posts, but there is a point i havent seen mentioned anywhere.
Why does each expansion need to raise the max lvl? Every expansion wants to make everything bigger and better but all it does is makes the earlier content irrelevent.
Why not let an expansion add new challenges or add new mobs that require new strategies to defeat? Find new ways to keep older zones populated. At some point, even with a huge population, the number of new zones will spread the population way too thin.
Dont get me wrong. i dont want to see the end of higher lvl caps. Its something that can be done sparingly. It is just really silly(comming from an old man who plays fantasy games lol) to have lvl 500 toons that can solo gods or tottaly wipe a zone with 5000 mobs in a minute or two.
100% AGREE IN EVERYTHING, DUDE!!!
Some of your ideas remind me the days of Ultima…
What a great article. Just reading this article got my heart pumping. You nailed just about everything that I want in a game. I am so SICK of these easy-mode games flooding the market currently. I also HATE the quest rails that we are shackled to these days.
One thing that you didn’t mention though … I want MASSIVE raids again like early EQ. I really miss large-scale raids alot. I hated it when EQ put that 72 person limit on raids. No stupid artificial limits!!!
And anyone that argues that large raids are just giant cluster flops that are impossible to organize, I call BS. In EQ, we had 60-90 person raids up and running in under 15 minutes. I was involved in much smaller WoW raids that were real cluster flops because most WoW players seem to have serious A.D.D. and are all geeked up on Mountain Dew and Red Bull.
EQ was by far the best MMO I have ever played, and I have played them all. SOE, please stay true to what made the original EQ the best MMO ever when you create EQ Next. Just read this article and throw in massive raids! Don’t listen to the WoW players that want every game to be just like WoW. Just because they whine the loudest doesn’t make them right.
I am optimistic about EQ3. I played EQ for nearly 10 years, GM’ed, hell did a hell of a lot in the world. I really enjoyed the game when 989 Studios was involved. I enjoyed some of the expansions. I did not like the fact that they did not have the foresight to leveling and I felt slighted when it took so many expansions just to be able to get from lvl 50 to 55 and so on. When EQ2 came along I gave them the 1 finger salute. I am not going to start over after being loyal to EQ1, my character, my friends and guild members.
I even remember all the downtime. There should have been some compensation for the downtime we all had to face. If they had tested out the patches well ahead of time it would have saved a lot of heartache. I had to buy a new keyboard because I wore a hole in my enter key for trying to get into the server/world. Ok that last part was a joke 😛 But I do have stronger fingers! and I learned to type by playing EQ. I had to learn well and fast to communicate. Damn I miss those 3 to 5 day marathons.
I tried WOW. Was fun for the first couple days but did not have the epic feel and experience that EQ had. I left 2 months before my membership was up. The people were not as personable as the first few years of EQ.
I will give EQ3 only one chance. They let me down, I will drive down to San Diego and accidentally trip on the power cord :p
See you all there … you will know me by my rotation! Muhahahahah
AFK!
I guess unlike a lot of folks I hated EQ2, mainly because it seemed a bit confined, at least for awhile. The graphics were nice, but at the time I got the game my comp could hardly handle even the lowest settings.
Everquest like a number of people was my first mmo, and I played it for many years. Once things got too cookie cutter I left the game. The excitement of the original was bar none the best, there was no other game that could make my heart pound every time I explored a new area from sheer fear alone. It was something I was hoping that D&D online could have accomplished. That game was nothing but quests and dungeon crawls….I was so upset that they ruined my favorite pen and paper game. I wanted it to be what EQ had, factions, cities, and vast areas to roam where strange and magical beasts could be lurking around the next corner. The one fact that truly was a wonderment to me in Everquest was the fact that certain higher level zones there was some great beast like a Dragon or Giant that would cause havoc to an unsuspecting traveler, and it certainly wasn’t easy to get away. I never had a problem with getting some decent loot easily, but I agree the ultra weapon, or armor should certainly be very hard to obtain.
Bringing back the special class quests for gaining special armor, and weapons should be a must. I felt it brought a sense of lore to the game. Where being of not only class but faction specific was really neat, and quite fun. The only time it was frustrating was trying to gain enough faction with the Erudites to get that great Paladin armor and weapons.
I hope SOE can get it right this time. I say bring back the original concept of EQ, and just update the graphics, but not the point of needing a computer that is 10 years away from being available.
Here is a crazy idea. How about toons that age?
I think it would be interesting to start out as a lvl 1 teenager then as i gain in levels, start to turn older. Maybe let each person choose what age they will be when they reach maximum lvl. That way it would be easy to spot lower and higher lvl toons just by sight.
And scars. Dont let anyone choose to have them at startup. Let people earn them from some epic encounters. The players that have accomplished the most in the game will look like battle tested veterens.
Or maybe im just crazy.
I have never played Everquest in my life. And, the MMOs I have played can probably be categorized as themepark. However, I have some experience with chat room RPGs and more open-world, player-driven MMOs such as Face of Mankind.
And, despite my complete lack of knowledge about Everquest, this article sums up just about every opinion I have about the current generation of MMOs and what they should be.
I especially identify with the concept of a world created and driven by developers vs. a player created and driven by the players. Just that one simple idea completely changes the game. Great article, you’re officially on my RSS.
Great article, and I agree with lots of it.
I don’t think there’s any chance of SoE doing what you would prefer. The trouble is, the demographics are all different from when EQ was a hit. In the early days, the players were mostly students, people with time on their hands, and fairly intelligent types. Now it’s those people grown up, with jobs, etc., therefore only able to play casually; plus loads and loads of kiddies. Blizzard showed that you could make tons of money by hooking kiddies and casuals, and that’s where the big investment is going to go.
Of course there are always some people with time on their hands, so the kinds of MMO you would prefer will continue to be made, but they won’t be made big budget, AAA. They will be made niche (like EVE Online, Darkfall, Fallen Earth).
It’s vaguely possible that a hardcore type of MMO could be as big a hit as WoW, but corporations just won’t take that risk when they could be raking it in with a more foolproof design.
Great article, just found it today.
For me EQ3 represents my last hope for the stagnant genre. Here’s hoping they get it right.
I think the biggest problem the industry faces and the underlying cause of most of the problems we have is this. The old games Ultima, Everquest were designed by programmers who were also roleplayers they cut their teeth on the old games like Gurps, Dungeons and Dragons, Rolemaster etc. The current crop of programmers are gamers they cut their teeth on Zelda, Doom, Half Life and Mario. If the encountered a roleplaying game it was only in the form of a mmorpg. So they have already lost the intial foundation.
the old school programmers were trying to take elements from the pen and paper game and make them work as a online game. The new programmers are trying to take the different elements from other video games and make them work for their mmorpg.
This I believe is the problem we face we need to get the pen and paper roleplayers back into the loop.
Just my 2 cents
gadareth
Awesome post, I’ve had the same thoughts for years but have not been able to express it as eloquently. I hope this receives more views and shakes things up.
Personally I believe there is an element of technological progress required to win the community. That is to say, virtual reality will be the form of the next game changing MMO. Read “Otherland” by Tad Willians to see what I’m getting at.
Not only will they have to make a game right, but they’ll have to put it on a new level for human processing. EQ did this to UO. It was the first real 3d environment and blew MY mind at least.
Kudos to the OP and thank God I’m not alone in my feelings on this 🙂
I’ve been harsh on Smedley over the years & also have high hopes for Everquest3.
That said, I do not believe John Smedley has Brad’s vision. John is about money, he always has been. If EQ3 has zones, or instancing, then we already know Smedley has failed.
I know this, if you gave me $40 million, I will make you a billionaire. As your blog indicates, there are many people who loved original EQ, I was one of them. (still have my Beta 1.2 CD’s)
Understand, I always looked (cross-reference) formats, abilities, mechanics, from a technology stand point. Of how & what was actually being delivered to the end-user. So, even though I do agree with nearly everthing within your blog, I don’t agree with the root cause of many of the problems.
I also will not share what those are, because I feel my take, is the (simple) secret sauce that will revlutionize the MMo industry.
Please SOE… don’t waste any more of your money on zoned games, open world please. How incredibly embarrasing and terrible for the SOE franchise when they released EQ2 with loading screens & zones. Not only that, but they flag’d starting zones to protect newbies from hurting themselves.. which they soon changed.
So I wish them luck and would love to put all my convictions to rest and find a new home for the next 11 years.
Unfortuneatly, watching the panel video I am not impressed by their responses to the questioned asked. Some of those Dev’s look perplexed, or unable to grasp people pleas, in context of simple game mechanics.
Great Blog… just found it.
-Sylvain Feldwythe (Cazic Thule; march 16th 1999)
I miss EQ1 , it was my first MMO, and I do have so many more memories in the 5 years I played EQ1, then the 6 other MMO’s Ive played since.
I miss the challenges a game would give you. For example, I remember certain spell books were so rare, but when they dropped it made you feel amazing, more powerful because it wasn’t handed to you at a trainer once you leveled.
Or how about the questing for EPIC Weapons, you needed to the help of a group or guild on some parts. The Quest was also epic, something that wasn’t done in a day, or a week.
How about the excitement of going into an instance like FEAR, you would get raped if you went into Fear alone usually.
Or how about the fact that even though I had a great guild on Cazicthule that I knew about 100 other people outside my guild because the game was designed for people inter-action, not just soloing.
I can go on and on about all the cool things about EQ1, and the world was amazing, you actually wanted to go back to the older zones, you know why, because you actually felt part of the game.
I am looking forward to this next installment, and hope it brings some of what EQ1 as a game was.
People want that same feeling they got when they played the first game in the series.
I have an idea. Perhaps each zone could have its own starting level and level cap. For example, a wood elf starts in the greater faydark forest at level 1 and can only max at level 5 for the zone. The player can go to lesser faydark and can level to 15. However, when the player returns to greater faydark, the player is back to level 5 for that zone and still has to be mindful of orcs and wasps. When the player returns to Lesser Faydark, he returns to his lesser faydark level of 13 to continue working towards 15. If the player finds a level 10 to 15 zone, the player will start as a level 10 in the zone, even though the player is a 13 in lesser faydark. However, if a player’s highest level is 7 and ventures into a level 10-15 zone, the player will be 7 in the 10-15 zone and had better watch out.
Basically, each character will have different levels for each zone, allowing the player to enjoy the experience there. It also scales the player to the zone so that lower level zones still have to be taken seriously by every player.
SOE needs to forget the quest directed on-rails, theme park approach made popular by Blizzard; we already have enough of these paint by numbers MMOs in circulation. Enough is enough.
QUOTED FOR TRUTH
I can’t tell you how this annoys me.
Your article is great and I agree with the majority of what you said. However you never mentioned FFXI and how it was actually a success without the cookie cutter blizzard-esq questing format. FFXI was hard, stayed hard and because of that, not many noobs stayed in the game. People who stayed formed strong friendships and were able to progress in the game faster, having more fun because of less drama.
Great article, I sincerely miss original EQ. After trying almost every MMO and single player RPG since EQ I really believe SOE could take a lesson away from the elder scrolls skyrim. Questing in that game is dynamic due to the radiant AI and there is no endless deluge of mindless quests but a comfortable number of interesting, plot developing quests that take quite a while to complete. Instead of having hundreds of inane fetch and kill quests such as wow I would love to see a model like skyrim with fewer, more involved quests that actually grab your attention and imagination as well really impact your world. If EQNext can really reform the awful questing atmosphere in MMOs I will be behind it full force. I may try out TOR but unless SOE comes out with something brilliant I will most likely stick to something vastly more entertaining such as skyrim.
OMG I am so glad i stumbled on this. Great read op! Best thing I have read about mmo gaming in years tbh. It brought me instantly back to how I felt during my 5+ year stint in EQ. Spot on. I honestly hate whats happened to mmos these days to the point that if the next game I choose to play fails I think im done with mmos.
Lol where to begin? I feel like i’m having an acid flashback or somthing. But even tho i never played D&D I still grew up during Atari and the Nintendo generation. And like someone said “Easy to learn hard to master” it is so true its scary. But back to the point EQ when it hit the scene was unlike anything I ever expected. Its shaped the bar for what I expected the mmo industry to follow. Man was I mistaken.
From the start it was surreal. It had cutting edge graphics and controls. You felt like you had complete control over everything you did. If you lived or died. It was all up to you. Risk getting better exp by taking on multiple mobs or take them on one by one? Death was always there in the back of you mind. But most of all you learned from your mistakes (hopefully).
But it taught you alot about strategy to the point that depending on who you were with you knew what you could handle. Not only that but depending on what zone you were in there were classes you absolutly needed to have that edge and you got more exp for fighting those mob types and fulfilling the role you were meant to play.
But failing had real consequences. You learned early on that storming in was never a good idea. You needed a plan. And without one you were most likely going to die. And you did die alot. But when you did you were faced with multiple factors that made you want to be just that much of a better player not just for yourself but also for those who trusted that you would not fail them.
The first was corpse retrieval. If you got too deep it could be easy or in some cases you would need to rely on your fellow player to help you out. /corpse was the best thing ever. Or even /consent to allow people to loot your stuff to get you up and going again. There was just such a level of trust involved and there were so many people who were nice and willing to take the time to help you out.
Corpse summoning was also a really nice feature. If all else failed you could pay a necro the cost of a coffin to get your corpse back.
And last but not least was exp loss. You felt the sting of your mistakes and that made it painfully real. Whole days or even weeks of grinding could be lost especially in hell levels. But this i feel gave rise to the elitism we still see today.
More then death was the rewards at the end of it all. You knew what you could get. And that created such a drive that all the time you spent was well worth it. Risk vs Rewards in those days actually made sense. You knew damn well it would take effort to get those great items you saw when you inspected people. But there was just so many different items you felt unique when you got them.
Even though most of it was completely luck based the long hours were well worth weeks of long drawn out quests. Lol 400+ hours in the raster room for instance (I could still picture every pixel in that room in lower guk). Most of all was the class specific epic gear you got that really felt epic.
You knew full well you couldnt do it alone. Above all else you needed people skills to get you there. It made for a really complex community. If you were an ahole you werent going to get very far unless you knew what you were doing or top geared person of the server. You got black listed. Or you had to talk your way out of camp stealers. Work out solutions to problems. Sure there was alot of drama but it added to the flavor.
The dungeons were many and each had its own unique quirk to them. Bosses were all challenging as well. But each dungeon had things you needed and spending all your time in just one was ill advised. But the best part was even though they were instances in themselves they were open instances. And you could go to them whenever you wanted. The downside was spawn times on mobs with good loot. Or placeholders.
If i remember correctly the spawn timers were around 28 mins. To me though it was great. You formed a group and picked a room for the item you wanted. People usually wanted that item too. So once you got the the spot you broke the spawn so you dont get jumped by the full room. Once you got the timing down you could pull from other rooms nearby decreasing your downtime.
They also gave many class tools for mana regen. That helped you keep your exp flow constant. So the downtime really wasnt that bad when you think about it. Plus unlike most games since you actually had lows in which you could talk to your group and learn about them and forge real lasting friendships.
And that in itself is crucial to a living breathing world. In learning game design I learned about Bartle Quotient. This is the four main types of mmo players the enhabit the mmo worlds proposed back in 1996. They are the Achievers, explorers, killers, and most forgotten the socializers. Each of us displays a combination of these traits.
But mmos today forget about the socalizers in lieu to the model of instant gratification. And it makes most mmos now feel segrigated since you dont need other players. Most content is so easy you can solo it if you learn or know how.
But that was not the case with EQ. You could solo to a point if you were a pet class or caster. But most of the content was tailored for the group mechanic. Then there were other small things to do in groups like learn languages. I wish they would have dont more with it but oh well it was still fun to learn new languages.
Then you had the raid mechanic which I think made the game. You needed lots of people to take down a dragon. Not the 6-40 people raids now. It was quite epic to get all the people together and keep buffs up and put the raid into motion. Even better was the loot afterward. It was worth the effort.
The world felt large and unforgiving. There was so much to see and experience. There was no right way to get to cap. Even if you got to cap there was just so much still to do. And you could still go back and get items in old dungeons. And they never kicked you out till you wanted to see other parts of the world. Played for 5+ years I still felt like I had only seen 40% of them.
And all the gm run events made the game even better. All of a sudden you would recieve a zone wide message like “you hear a loud growl” and you knew somthing was happening. And all of a sudden a named mob with a ton of hitpoints goes on a rampage. Or the world events. It made it alot of fun.
All in all it was such great fun while it lasted. But all of a sudden most good items got nerfed. Level requirements got added. No drop put on. Dungeon keys. And all the crap that started the decline for me. Not only that but it felt like you bought more expansions then groceries Coupled with the fact that each one made all others before it null. Then came the hackers.
But alas after wow came out the flavors been watered down again and again until none of the original fun of mmo gaming remains. Its all dull and lack luster now. Its only meant to keep kids and people who dont take their prozak. Before the rise of casual gaming mmos required some form of loyalty to the game which meant time and effort were needed to overcome the games obstacles and get ahead.
Now people expect insane results in 20min instance based windows. This presents a huge problem. Everyone deserves a right to the same loot. But instances just overflood the market. And the chances are actually much worse then they used to be. I would rather wait 400+ hours for a 50/50 shot then run 300 dungeons until I outlevel the place and dont get the item i want and the game tells me to move along.
So what happened to the fun in mmo gaming? Its been made into a super drawn out RNG monster that just screws you over in hopes that youll play till your eyes bleed with no result. I miss the freedom of UO and how awesome it was. You used to want to play games like UO and EQ because it was fun and had so much content that you never got bored.
And lastly about EQN I honestly wouldnt mind if they rereleased EQ1 with slightly upgraded graphics with an action oriented combat system. We all sit here and say how much we miss it. I think what everyone really wants is just old EQ with a facelift which reflects the technology we have now. Especially with the Skyrim model. Huge and open with room to build houses or towns.
Im just so tired of mmos today that are built to fail paying homage to wow. It worked for wow but then again its only one way to do things. Dumber isnt always better.
This article is right on! every point. The dumbing down of games will be the death of MMORGs. I was amazed in eq2 that my character could not fall off the dock into the water. Or a yellow trail that tells you where to go? what is that?. Or instancing, yep a private little computer program to go into completely removed from the game..
Just an example of anti-immersion, no consequences, “quest on rails” brillant! exactly.