General Discussion

I played EQ in 2000 and thought it was crap personally, mmorpgs today though havn't moved on from them EQ days and the ones that did have been ruined.

Originally posted by gillvane1

 

Originally posted by dcoleman07

Like many others who will read this post, EQ was my first mmo...

haters, if your bored, feel free.

 

I agree. The difficulty was what made for a good community. You NEEDED friends and help in that game. It wasn't like WoW where you could just play the game by yourself to max level.

There were some things, however, that were ridiculous. Things like a 30 minute real time boat ride across the ocean, or sitting down to learn spells and being able to see nothing but your spell book until the spells were learned.

There's a happy medium between EQ and Wow, IMO. A few more time sinks than WoW, and few less than EQ.

I used to bitch about the time sinks in EQ, but then I played CoH and it has almost zero time sinks. You don't shop for gear, you don't spend time healing, and in combat there's almost no downtime at all. In fact there's not even time chat while you're traveling, because you're zipping around, flying around obsticles, making super jumps, or teleporting.

the pace is so fast, you join a group, kill, kill, kill, where's the next mission?, kill, kill, kill, and then it's, thanks for group, cya. There's no time to chat unless you're using voice chat.

But like the above poster said... a 30 minute real-time boat ride with nothing to do but have a spamming conversation with someone you paid to learn a foreign language, was not needed.

Balance... something between WoW and EQ.  Not all time sinks and death penalties are bad... they can promote a good, helpful community of players that learn from their mistakes.

Originally posted by Neanderthal

 

Originally posted by steuss

EQ gave the user a feel of a WORLD.

I think, in this regard, people are looking through rose colored glasses a bit too much.  Now I'll admit that I got swept up in the immersive "world" feeling too, in the early days.  But I know that for myself it was mostly a product of my own imagination and had little to do with the actual game.

 

I truly believe that the "world" feeling that a lot of us got was just a by-product of our awe and wonder at this new experience.  We didn't know what to expect.  It was all still new to us.  We weren't familiar with the whole mmorpg experience and jaded yet.  We got caught up in the magic of this new thing and our imaginations filled in the blanks.

But if you look at what EQ was in a dispassionate and objective way it really wasn't a WORLD type of game.  In fact it was very shallow and linear.  I mean, what did we actually DO in EQ?  We leveled up, went to the next tier of zones, leveled up again, went to the next tier of zones and so on.

The game wasn't sandboxy at all and it was extremely static.  You couldn't build anything and any creatures you killed would respawn after a set period of time and usually in the exact same spot as before.

It was a linear game for the same reason that all level based games are linear.  It's a one way street.  Content that you out-level becames obsolete as if the world is desolving behind you (what I call disposable content).  That's why all the starting towns and low level areas were empty and forgotten after a while.

UO was my first game; it was unplayable.  I don't know if it was lag or frame-rate; but the game was like a slide-show with NOTHING to hunt.  Vast wasteland with huge loadtimes (thanks to player made housing), and tunnel vision, showing you only a teeny portion of the map in top-down view.  It had an utter lack of immersion because you couldn't look around other than that 10x10 square surrounding your character.  Lost interest very quickly.  When Second Age came out, I planned on buying it and giving it another try.  But I went to gamecenter.com to check out the review; and EQ was front page news.  Bought EQ and was overwhelmed.  Here was a game that played fluidly, had mobs to hunt, and was a world that I could look around and see from first person perspective.

Why EQ was.. what it was..

Many just have to do with when it came out.  The market was still new, there was very little competition etc

You had to actually figure stuff out.  There wasn't 100 different websites that could tell you everything.  It was in general beneficial to group...

At launch there were very few cleric.. I happened to play one.  If I was online I had a group or was being asked to join one.

The only thing I really liked about EQ... if someone acted like a total ass... I wouldn't group with them.  Yes I kept a list.. no group.. no ress.  (remember ress was the only way to get rid of some of that xp debt and think of all the hell levels at launch).

I got asked to join a group.. oh sorry I won't group with that person.  "we kicked them from group will you join..".

It was the only time you had some power to punish that bad element that is so common in todays games.  Oh other than UO where you could just kill them and take their stuff.

I played UO longer than any other MMO out.. as far as consecutive time goes.  My experience from launch until when I quit doesn't really mesh with some of the description I've seen here but... that's not what the OP was talking about.

Short version... EQ was what it was.. because of when it was launched.

I think it was pretty outstanding for its time. It basically layed out the foundations for the success that is WoW with all its incorporated concepts. I know a lot of it stemmed from muds- but taking a game merely from text form into a visualized world as well as on top with all the technical challenges is an impressive achievement- let alone having almost real-time combat and providing an addictive quality to the game.

I also think it contained a certain taste which naturally wasn't popular to all- with which there was the inevitably going to come along a bigger rival that would encompass a more popular taste(In fact, I predicted this at the time). I think that niche taste is what some EQ fans still kind of yearn after.(being not really replicated at all- being not exactly very popular)

In fact, an example of this is a warcraft mod called Dota. There started the first Dota and then there came a more popular Dota. The second Dota everyone knows about(Dota Allstars). Dota Allstars was based and copied many aspects of the original Dota but the original Dota still retained a distinctive appeal. -It is generally more team-work based than the following Dota.

To the carebear OP.   THere are 928392832 mmorpgs on the market that are just like EQ, i dont' see what you have to complain about. If anything there is a severe shortage of hardcore PVP mmorpgs.

You should be in World of Warcraft right now raiding, that is what you people do best.

Originally posted by Celestis1000

To the carebear OP.   THere are 928392832 mmorpgs on the market that are just like EQ, i dont' see what you have to complain about. If anything there is a severe shortage of hardcore PVP mmorpgs.

You should be in World of Warcraft right now raiding, that is what you people do best.

 

Obviously you didn't play on a red EQ server.

Originally posted by altairzq

Originally posted by Celestis1000

To the carebear OP.   THere are 928392832 mmorpgs on the market that are just like EQ, i dont' see what you have to complain about. If anything there is a severe shortage of hardcore PVP mmorpgs.

You should be in World of Warcraft right now raiding, that is what you people do best.

 

Obviously you didn't play on a red EQ server.

Exactly. Celestis is clearly uninformed. The team PvP server was mad fun.

I played and loved much of EQ and yep, EQ was the 1 that started it all....

All the grinding, all the camping, all the timesinks, all the work with little play, the 4+ hour raids full of lag, the generic craft skills that produce items nobody wants by the time your high enough to make them, the acceptance of dueling as a form of pvp, the generic class system, the everybody who plays "X" class looks alike system.

Yep, pretty much everything bad about MMos came from EQ. Everything these boards are flooded with complaints about. They all originated with EQ.