General Discussion

Community Manager Laura Genender has been playing on the EverQuest Progression Servers and takes some time on this New Year's Eve to give us a full report of the good, the bad, and the ugly side of this interesting approach from the makers of EverQuest.

p>On March 16th, 1999, Sony Online Entertainment opened the virtual doors to the world of EverQuest – one of the most successful and popular games of its generation. While comparatively small next to the modern EverQuest world, consisting of over 400 zones and 14 expansions, the game at release contained a large amount of content for such a relatively new genre of gaming. Many gamers began their MMO careers in Norrath, and many still reside there today.

 

On June 28th, 2006, Sony introduced two new EverQuest servers. These newest additions – Combine and Sleeper – operated under a whole new rule set not seen in EverQuest or any other game. Known as the progression servers, Sleeper and Combine opened up with original EQ content exclusively. Ruins of Kunark, Shadows of Luclin – all expansion content had to be unlocked by the defeat of raid targets and the completion of quests.

While my article in April discussed the server (by then Combine and Sleeper had merged)’s first 9 months of existence, I’ve now had a year and a half to form opinions about the concept and the reality of progression.

Read the whole thing here.

Progression servers sound cool.  It's awesome they have this capability. 

Maybe it's possible to have Precu SWG servers after all

The Progression idea drew me back to EQ but at a stage where I was too far behind the main guilds to actually take part within the unlocking of content, so I would be extremley happy if they went with another Progression server based on the idea of each guild unlocking the content rather than server wide, this would bring some real challenges to each guild and perhaps draw in more players as they won't feel they are going to be left behind by the big guilds.

Originally posted by Terranah

Progression servers sound cool.  It's awesome they have this capability. 

 

Maybe it's possible to have Precu SWG servers after all

The thing with Progression, though, is even right at the beginning with no expansions unlocked, the Progression game was exactly the same as the standard game.  All the bug fixes, tweaks, updates and upgrades were present, they just locked off expansion territories and features.

I think PreCU SWG would be impossible to do now.

Originally posted by Delameko

Originally posted by Terranah

Progression servers sound cool.  It's awesome they have this capability. 

 

Maybe it's possible to have Precu SWG servers after all

The thing with Progression, though, is even right at the beginning with no expansions unlocked, the Progression game was exactly the same as the standard game.  All the bug fixes, tweaks, updates and upgrades were present, they just locked off expansion territories and features.

I think PreCU SWG would be impossible to do now.

From what i remember sony devs never kept the code from pre-cu and cu swg all they did was write over it which is why swg nge is so bloody hard to  change basic things like the ui and makes it near impossible to add fresh content..unless offcourse they recycle from the existing game *cough cough* new ships cough cough.

A classic EQ server asap plz.   

Nice article.

Nostalgia is a very tricky, and some would say fickle, thing to work with. Sometimes it clicks with people and some times it doesn't.

I started playing on the Classic Dark Age of Camelot servers with, admittedly, too high of expectations that it would be just like the good old days. While not having ToA expansion did indeed help, too many other things had changed and I couldn't make myself like the changes.

From what I've heard from others Everquest had a similar problem. It was a lot like the old, but not enough. It didn't feel like you were back in 2001 playing old school Elf crack.

If you want to give your old player base a nostalgia shock, I suggest saving the game exactly like how it is on launch and bring it back after a few years (fatal or really crappy glitches aside). More then likely, these developers have no need or want otherwise to keep the game in it's completely original form.
I'd go back and play original versions of any of these:

Dark Age of Camelot
Asheron's Call
Everquest
PlanetSide
Star Wars Galaxies

...I'm sure the list has a few more, but I got to head out. Peace!

Yeah, there were a lot of things that slipped through the cracks, and a lot of things that were intentionally left different.  For example, old-school EverQuest meditation (mana regeneration) required the caster to open their spell book, which blocked their entire screen.  Later in the game they allowed casters to meditate via the /sit command, without blocking their view...but the progression servers started out with /sit meditation.

When I'm sitting, I like to be able to at least watch everyone else fight.  I'm glad they left this change out - while more hardcore veterans wanted spellbook meditation back.

Unfortunately you can be caught in the catch 22 situation of having to cope with bugs that shouldnt be there, or imbalances that only got resolved later on in the game.

Actually if you resolved those bugs/balance issues then what content do you miss out of including in with the game for these standalone 'classic' servers.

The only time in which something like a 'classic' server could work would be if some GAME changing took place (Starwars NGE being my only experiance with). And although the code might not be there, 90% of the time, the game changes get rolled through several patches... and unfortunately you are then left with 2 or more SAME games to develop for (unless of course you allowed people to transfer characters from 'classic' to 'current' servers)