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Is EQ just nostalgia, or was it really that good?
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EQ was of course the first MMO I ever played. I started just after the Luclin expansion and played for years, it is one of only two games that I ever found myself so engrossed in that 48 hours passed and I was still to into it to go to sleep. (The other was Guild Wars.) I was a bit of an oddball for EQ...a Soloer. I loved exploring and seeing just how much my lil necro or druid could handle. Kiting-soling giants actually felt like an amazing accomplishment. Once in awhile I get nostalgic for various aspects of EQ. Killing in the Commonlands only to get hit by the annoying griffin, finding you can't move because of the weight of the coins in your purse, that literally 20 minute boat ride from Butcherblock to Freeport. (Ok I only sort of miss that.), Ldon pick up groups that were often some of the best groups, not bitchy, people knew what they were doing (usually lol.). Hell I even miss the bazaar once in awhile. Trying to find the gnome under the ogre that has the item you want.
However sadly while I do have EQ2 among my many games, and look forward with great anticipation to EQNext, I only very rarely log onto the original. No one ever does Ldon runs anymore (at least not when I have been on.) and while I love the huge zones and endless exploration, I have to admit I am a graphics geek. If they brought an updated EQ with a high end graphics engine I would be rolling out a new smurf in no time.
WoW attracted many non gamers and social gamers, if you stand at any city gate ingame you'll see that most spend a small amount of time actually playing the game instead they use most of their time socializing in chat while hanging out in a central location. The point being most that play WoW only play it, not MMOs in general.
As for EQ they didn't have feedback from the general public on what they wanted in a game. When it was designed they only knew what they thought would work with the technology they had. If they had today's tech, do you think it would have been the game it turned out to be?
I don't think thay every design choice that was made was exactly as they wanted it, but was necessary due to the tech of the time.
I didnt get in on the ground floor of EQ but early enough taht I got to see the makings of the game......I always thought it was really cool that we were just thrown into the world.....No quest givers, no tutorial (at that time), no easy mode, just a huge world and plenty of exploration.......EQ wasnt my first MMO (tried UO for a week in 98) but Ifell in love with the game immediately.....Met some really friendly people who showed me around and a Druid that ported me all over the world so I could see what things looked like.....What made it great was there was no rush to do anything...I didnt feel compelled to level quickly as I wanted to raise my skills, get my spells, and make some money.....
To me it was a great game until about 2004....SOE really started getting greedy with the expansions and were starting to demand alot financially from the playerbase.....Also at this point I was falling too far behind as they were just cranking out expansions so fast I couldn't keep up.....I was also getting tired of paying 15 bucks a month (plus expansion price) and it just wasn't worth it anymore....To answer the OP the game was great for most of us, but we all have different times where the game was no longer fun....If you go back today you really dont see what we saw unless you have someone take you there....There's a tutorial now and if you skip that and start in Crescent Reach (also wasnt around in early EQ) you level very quickly.
To everyone always posting stuff like "rose tinted glasses", "nostalgia" and "your first mmo", it may be so for You but I am tiered of having that bull pulled on my opinion. I am perfectly able to compare experiences without letting nostalgia interfere, and I played plenty games before and after Everquest. I also replayed Everquest for a year on progression servers lately, and it only reinforced my views.. not that Everquest progression servers are what eq really were, guess [mod edit]
So my opinion is that the only game that could ever compare with Everquest in experience has been WoW, and that comparison I personally put at WoW beeing half as good, while more or less all other mmorpgs doesn't reach any standards worth trying to make comparisons. This is my opion and it is based on the experiences I had with Everquest, the expansion and the period I played it (1999-2004), and others may have other experiences because Everquest has changed so much.
Some don't like Everquest Luclin, PoP and Ldon expansions but for me those were great expansions that really made Everquest shine over all others. AA was the single best innovation in mmorpg history. I never felt fast book travel or the other complaints ruined anything important. Kunark and Velious were awesome too, but it had to develop from there. LDoN introduced instances and I loved running those missions and didn't do anything bad for my eq experience.
So when sum up all the features and endless little details and qualities I found while playing eq, there is just no game that can compare. Everquest had loads of problems, and some later mmorpgs have adressed these and improved on it. Many games have features that beats Everquest, but no game has ever offered that amount of features, details, adventure, excitement, lore, diversity in gameplay and so on and on and on, that Everquest has offered me. It is not one single feature or lack of, it is the totally massive sum of all things. This is just my opinion, so I am not going into any discussion about what you think; this is my experiences with games, mmorpg games and Everquest and therefore it can only be the fact for me.
It is also my opinion that a game just as good can be made today, it only requires understanding what is great mmorpg mechanics and what is not. Todays MMOG are not role playing games and the audience for actual mmorpgs are not many, but we are still around and new players are also there, they just aren't playing mmorpgs because .. there really are none.
"I am my connectome" https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HA7GwKXfJB0
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
How about playing sports?
How does one find time for family game nights?
Or seeing the kid's school play?
How about reading a book?
One makes time for what they desire to do.
- Al
Personally the only modern MMORPG trend that annoys me is the idea that MMOs need to be designed in a way to attract people who don't actually like MMOs. Which to me makes about as much sense as someone trying to figure out a way to get vegetarians to eat at their steakhouse.- FARGIN_WAR
EQ is definitely a good game, but there is also a lot of nostalgia elements to it as well. It had some solid mechanics, but also some very dated / bad ones.
The thing a lot of people don't seem to do, is go back and replay old games to see if they still hold up to their own standards. It's not something you can really do in a play session either. Whenever I go back and play old games I immediately go into nostalgia mode, even if I'm not trying to. I start thinking about how stuff 'used to' be, instead of really thinking about it in a modern context.
Many of the older MMOs were not nearly as robust as the ones we have today, even though most players feel like modern MMOs generally have less content / complex features / etc. In truth, most modern MMOs actually have more of both than the average MMO when MMOs were still new, but we've grown to consume content & mechanics at a much quicker rate, and we require much more unique features to even remotely hold our interests.
In the past, people were impressed with having a map with stuff to kill on it, playing with other people. Now, people seem to want to expect every game to be a complete reconstruction of the universe with no bugs, lag, and the freedom of minecraft. It shouldn't be a surprise that games aren't able to keep up w/ such inflated expectations, and yet here we are.
Agreed.
Many MANY aspects of it were damn good.
It had critical design flaws though. WoW kept a good deal many of those design flaws, or bandaided them with instances. Whereas DAoC rejigged the design and fixed them in such a way that instances weren't needed.
EQ's grind, for me, was a bit too long, the death penalty a bit too harsh and unforgiving of accidents. The mechanics that really screwed the game were the items. Dungeons had a boss mob that dropped a powerful item, and the only way to get that item was to kill that boss. The boss was on a long respawn timer. This caused camping. Lots of camping, and griefing, pulling trains of mobs into other parties.
Raid mobs were similar, lots of camping and waiting in line. The raiding system was tierred so you HAD to do x raid before y raid and you had to do it enough times to equip you whole raiding party.
WoW fixed this at the expense of the game world, with instancing.
DAoC fixed this by not making an all important raid mob at the bottom of a dungeon, giving you bonuses for moving around, and making the best loot in the game come from crafters. Quests and mobs dropped some cool looking items, and now and again, they were on par with crafted items, but you did NOT need to camp those mobs and dungeons to get the best items, you could craft them. So, people went through dungeons not to fight to the boss, but for fun. Same for raids. The AI was more reactionary in DAoC, so you could have 200 people fail a dragon raid, and 40 people succeed. There was no tierred item dropping so anyone could just jump into a raid and hope for a shot at the loot so long as they participated.
I also didn't like how linear the class system in EQ was (almost no differences between various warriors) and how the game just kept adding more and more levels and tierred raids instead of horizontal expansion.
All that aside, it was a masterpiece in most other areas. Specifically, in mechanics that encouraged community and made you feel like you were part of a virtual world, not an arcade game.
The thing I remember the most is how everyone hated SOE and all the annoying crap in the game. People really HATED SOE so much they said they would never play an SOE ever again, lol.
EQ was fun. It was good because of the player base. The game was a serious time sink, so it took forever to progress.
The biggest thing missing in MMO's today is the pretentiousness that EQ had. If you went to Hate, everyone knew it and drooled over your armor. You looked cool and were "elite". People love that crap. Nowadays even the noob armor looks awesome. It shouldn't.
Vanilla WoW was just as awesome.
Unfortunately your friend is utterly wrong. Turbine was a team that came together from various groups of friends at two schools in Boston and started a company to build an MMO. They rented out a full house in the beginning where everyone worked, but it wasn't even close to one guy I believe the initial team was made up of either 14 or 16.
There was a postmortem on both AC and AC2 on Gamasutra from a long time ago but unfortunately since the site reindexing I can't find them to link for you.
EQ was that good a game, for me it still is a great deal more entertaining than many new releases (graphically it's very very dated though, but if you can look past that you'll find a great game, if a little clunky at times). The only thing I found improved in some modern games in my opinion is the movement controls for your characters, and even then only some games. It's not nostalgia as I still play...I'm not saying it doesn't have it's problems, it does and not all graphical, but name one game that doesn't have issues.
To say MMOs now are more robust is not truly accurate. Modern MMOs have offered two new things to the genre, phasing and cross server interactions beyond chat, and most don't even offer one of those. Pretty much every other system existed back with the older games. The most noticeable differences in modern and old MMOs is graphics and the 'difficulty' (not only telling you were to go, and what to do, but showing you in an environment where failure is harder to achieve than success).
I agree though than many expectations are way over the top, but really the genre has not really changed much beyond the graphical fidelity in over a decade.
I remember my first time making a character back in 1999 about 1 or 2 weeks after the game went live. I had made a Human Enchanter. Not know anything about the game and put all my points in STR because i wanted to cast spells and punch harder lol. There i was in North ro at night, lost and punching shit haha. Humans can't see nothing at night. So someone came by and gave me a greater light stones so i can see at night and after asked me where did i put my points in so i said "STR so i can Hit harder" well the story ended with the both of us laughing our asses off by the inn and later he explained what each stat does for each class.
Yes i was young and stupid then but i learned how to play fast. Thanks to the community EQ. Its hard to find people like that in other MMOs.
Somebody, somewhere has better skills as you have, more experience as you have, is smarter than you, has more friends as you do and can stay online longer. Just pray he's not out to get you.
Originally posted by DMKano
I beg to differ. It would be a wild success... for those who enjoyed EQ1 (millions of people) and those who would still enjoy it today.
However, if a game launched today with EQ 1 gameplay mechanics thinking it would be the next 10 Million sub game, it would fail by that standard.
This sort of thinking is what is crushing and strangling the MMO market today. The standard that a game has to be a WoW-killer to be a success. Games need to strive to become a niche and stop trying to please everyone! No one is going to beat WoW at themepark. Its time for SOE and the rest of the big name MMO companies to reassess their approach to game development.
I read through most of this thread.
I just wanted to put in my 2 cents.
EQ1 was insanely awesome at the beginning because there was nothing like it at the time.
I met some really cool people when I first started playing and realized as a cleric I was the suck...I ran into 2 wizards and an enchanter and we grouped up on Orc Hill, Over the coming months the chanter and myself played together learning our characters. My friend was probably only 1 out of 20 enchanters on the server at release. I have to say we sucked hard core for a long while as we had almost no dps.
The corpse runs were awful but you have to admit they help immersion and eq1 probably had the highest anxiety level by the masses ever in a game that did not include mass-pvp.
SOD - separation of duties on classes, sure a shaman could heal but a cleric kicked his arse at it, a warrior was the end all be all at tanking. A bard was great at a lot of things in a group but sucked arse at everything but running while solo. This sucked at times but it helped forge many friendships and made raids uber fun.
Nothing like camping a cleric out before a wipe
.
The entitlement mmos that give everything to you are fun but they are so easy to give up on as you did not really earn much of it with tears, blood, sleeploss, frustration.
I am not sure anyone can bring back what eq1 offered to us. But I can say that if EQN has the same class setup and similar game play. I will certainly try it.
You know you are old when the dev's on the games you play are almost young enough to be your grand-kids.
This music alone has owned every other MMORPG:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKj36GJj_i8
It's funny a game from 1999 has better music than anything since:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0C0OXhgGFw
And I still remember the location of virtually every scene here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_b9n76F5KQ
Most other MMORPG's I can barely remember my character let alone the zones!
Between all the different ways you can affect mobs, players, solve encounters and the depth in some of the classes is unmatched in current MMOs. If you want depth in gameplay thats been skimmed off from current gen MMOs, get into P99.
My youtube MMO gaming channel
There was a lot to explore.
There was real danger.
There was a real community.
And it was fun to be apart of those things. Keeping notepad track of quests may seem like a pain in the ass now, but it kept kill quests and fedex quests from feeling like a box to be checked.
I didn't care for the mob grind and that was one of the first things to make me dislike MMOs. I was ready for quests and exploration and other things to do.
But I blame tech scope as the main problem here. Really MMOs now look prettier than EQ1, but there hasn't been a lot of progress since.
I think it'll be 15 to 30 years from now before we'll ever see a true 'next-gen' MMORPG. Cuz WoW, RiFT, and rinse & repeat just didn't bring that much more to the table. And in a lot of cases (like spell crafting) there's been a lot of ground lost.
a yo ho ho
To be fully honest I have never, and most likely will never, have the stories I can tell about any mmo like I did with EQ. In many ways, yes it was better. The GM run events, the community, the need for people to watch your backs, and so many little things made EQ great. The gameplay, the grind, and all that made it what it was, a pain to play, but the fact people still talk about it the way they do, even to today, says something more about the game than can be understood by many who never played it, or picked it up recently.
EQ was one of those games that really called on the player to do a lot of the magic for it. The graphics were crap, the quests were a pain to find, and you spent a lot of time looking for your corpse. I mean it, half your game play could be corpse runs if you sucked. On the other side, there were your friends, your faction, even your enemies that made the game worth playing. There were boat rides where you taught each other a new language. There were stories to be made, adventures to be had, and things you don't find in other mmo's today, a sense of needing other players.
There was a magic that EQ and it's brother and sister mmo's of that era had, and that magic has not quit been found again. It came with the events, the players making their own way, and the stories. The half hour boat rides where we told eachother tales about the things we have done.
To this day, you ask people I know what they have done in mmo's they don't throw out WoW stories, or ToR stories. No they throw out this one time in EQ, or back in UO, or man I got to tell you about this one time I was up a tower in AC and the bunny of death had me treed. Those are the stories I hear. Ask anyone and they will say everything they did in those games were hard one, were a pain to do, and no one would want to really do it all again, but we did them.
If I had to put it into a definition it would be explorer tales, or soldier stories. Because in a way those games, and the people in them, were fighting the first contact wars on a new frontier. Because that is what it was, a new horizon for us all, all be it a virtual one. Many of us played those games when they weren't cool to play them. We explored those worlds, and did those things, and now suddenly, we look out and it's not lonely wilderness anymore. There aren't a half dozen games, and a few hundred thousand players. It's thousands of games and millions of players.
The wilderness is settled, the world has moved on, and we who walked these places long ago, we have settled down in our chair, topped off our mugs, and we tell stories. We talk about the days back when, and we don't really care if anyone listens. We don't care, because those that do listen, those that lift their mugs, they were there too. Everyone else is just new, they weren't there, and no matter how many times they hear the story they never will be there.
Be it explaining chat room rps from the early 90's, or M.U.D.s, or the first MMOs, those days have long since died out. All that remain are the mainstream echos. We watch them, we move through them, but we never really feel a part of them. The magic has faded and the world has lost a bit for it. At least that is what I think.
So no, it's not nostalgia, there was something about it that made it good even though the game was simplistic, repetative, grindy, and above all else frustrating as hell. Yet never in all my years since have I had the stories, the memories, the laughter and the tears, that I had with those first mmo's. Maybe that is because the horizon is gone, it's all the same now, nothing is new, nothing is out there on the edge. Or maybe it's because I don't feel the connection I did then with the people in the games now. I'll never be able to explain that, so all I can say is, "you had to be there, you had to live it, you had to walk those halls back when they were new, to understand."
Sadly if you watch the reveal video you learn very quickly that EQ next is nothing like EQ1.