Originally posted by fozzie22 

QFT!!

 

In defense of SOE at the time they DID make the right call becuase if you recall when they set about making the game we where at the height of the gigahertz wars i think if we had a crystal ball back then no one could really see the c-change that came about a couple of years later..i mean back in what? 2002 who would have thought we'd have still been using 2 gig processors as the standard (ok with multiple cores),i think most of us would have assumed we'd be well into double figures gigahertz wise by now.

 

They flipped the coin and it came down the wrong side for them one of those things i suppose as for DX 11 cant see it making a jot of difference to the game becuase as you say the games will have to be coded for it from the ground up.

I don't think they made the right call at all.   The is a very good reason PCs were designed to use video cards and designing a game to ignore that resource is rather stupid.  Every other game on the market was going to benefit from CPU & GPU and I fail to see how ignoring that can be called the right decision.  

Early on the EQ2 devs said they used the processor to run the graphics so that people with low end video cards could play the game on low settings.  That is sort of a cheap shortcut to get the low end market. 

Instead of designing a graphic mode to compensate people with low end video cards soe ignored the basic designs of PCs and hedged the games performance on future technology. 

Did this design choice make the game run well at release?  No.

Did this design choice make the game run well long term?  No.

I just don't see anything that makes this look like a good decision.  Honestly it looks rather stupid to bet the health of an mmo on future technology resolving current issues. 

Originally posted by fozzie22

Originally posted by ethion

There isn't any magic bullet that is gonna help the eq2 engine...  The problem with the eq2 engine is a case of bad design decisions.  Eq2 devs decided to do most of the graphics in the CPU instead of GPUs.  The mistakenly assumed that CPUs would continue to get faster and by sticking with CPU they didn't have to worry about GPUs being incompatable or having to make changes to accomidate different hardware.

Course that decision was wrong as CPU speeds pretty much stalled when eq2 was released and other then minor improvements moved to multicore which wasnt' something EQ2 devs designed for either.  And redoing the engine to take advantage of GPUs has been slow.  The good news is they are incrementally adding this stuff and the shader 3.0 engine upgrade looks awesome and will probably make the game run faster as well since it is going to largely be GPU based offloading some work from the CPU.

Directx 11 won't help much since it requires code changed to use it.  And for the same reasons it is a major change.

 

 

QFT!!

 

In defense of SOE at the time they DID make the right call becuase if you recall when they set about making the game we where at the height of the gigahertz wars i think if we had a crystal ball back then no one could really see the c-change that came about a couple of years later..i mean back in what? 2002 who would have thought we'd have still been using 2 gig processors as the standard (ok with multiple cores),i think most of us would have assumed we'd be well into double figures gigahertz wise by now.

 

They flipped the coin and it came down the wrong side for them one of those things i suppose as for DX 11 cant see it making a jot of difference to the game becuase as you say the games will have to be coded for it from the ground up.

Exactly.

The game engine for EQII was written from the ground up using DX 9.0c. A change to DX11 would require a complete rewrite of the game engine and probably require a substantial portion of their art assests to be revamped as well.

An example of this can be seen in EQ. They updated the graphics engine once. The artwork that has released since GoD takes advantage of this engine, but the older artwork still looks the same as it did before.

The engine is not the biggest thing tho. Biggest thing is marketing, I mean, ask that friend that that started his/her mmo-career  with WoW or something. Has he heard about EQ2? Probably not. That's the case here in Europe at least. (From my experience)

The game is huge and has lots to offer imo. The problem is that people that doesn't follow mmo news/forums doesn't even know it exists.

Another issue is that SOE keeps fu***** their current players is the a** with all kinds of shit like the cards for example. Like it or not, it was not popular. And after all, the current players is all they have since they done get alot of new blood.

This might sound a little negative but FYI im playing EQ2 because i haven't been able to find a replacement that even nearly compares with content. I do not use the shop and all that shit because i hate it but the game is still good.

I don't really know what people here mean with "EQ Classic", but i can wager a guess: It was inaccessible. It was unwieldly, confusing and convoluted. It was a game you could only really enjoy if you spent a lot of time figuring out how things work and getting used to how it plays.

Now i see people think that the classic EQ formula will mean a big success. That's wishful thinking at best - it's a stereotypical game for the basement nerd, it gave rise to almost every single preconception about MMO's and MMO players. Nostalgia colours your view considerably, people should keep this in mind.

There's a reason why so many people flocked to WoW when it was released - It was simply the better game, in the eyes of those who took it up. If EQ (or any other game for that matter) was such a huge success, people wouldn't have left it for WoW. Classic WoW is far from being anything like classic EQ, yet still people would rather play the former than the latter. Again, nostalgia colours your view.

Vanilla WoW held a lot of good memories for me, talking from my own perspective, but after i thought about it the game was a thousand times worse than it is today. It's not the "good game" that i missed from way back, it's the feeling that everything's new and exciting. Many people seem to confuse the two.

The only way forward is... Well, forward. EQ3 will be something different than both EQ1 and 2, because those games already exist. Many people accuse SoE of moneygrubbing which they hate. However, isn't asking them to remake an old game a little hypocrit, as remakes are the very essence of milking the cashcow in videogame land? Not to mention the matter that they'd be asking people to leave the old EQ or at least pay double the monthly fee to play both?

I could go on and on, but the shop's closing soon and i need to get my food. Point is that whatever the new EQ will be, it won't be the old one. That's called "moving forward". Nothing has ever been gained by maintaining a status quo. Think on that one.

Originally posted by ChromeBallz

I don't really know what people here mean with "EQ Classic", but i can wager a guess: It was inaccessible. It was unwieldly, confusing and convoluted. It was a game you could only really enjoy if you spent a lot of time figuring out how things work and getting used to how it plays.

Now i see people think that the classic EQ formula will mean a big success. That's wishful thinking at best - it's a stereotypical game for the basement nerd, it gave rise to almost every single preconception about MMO's and MMO players. Nostalgia colours your view considerably, people should keep this in mind.

There's a reason why so many people flocked to WoW when it was released - It was simply the better game, in the eyes of those who took it up. If EQ (or any other game for that matter) was such a huge success, people wouldn't have left it for WoW. Classic WoW is far from being anything like classic EQ, yet still people would rather play the former than the latter. Again, nostalgia colours your view.

Vanilla WoW held a lot of good memories for me, talking from my own perspective, but after i thought about it the game was a thousand times worse than it is today. It's not the "good game" that i missed from way back, it's the feeling that everything's new and exciting. Many people seem to confuse the two.

The only way forward is... Well, forward. EQ3 will be something different than both EQ1 and 2, because those games already exist. Many people accuse SoE of moneygrubbing which they hate. However, isn't asking them to remake an old game a little hypocrit, as remakes are the very essence of milking the cashcow in videogame land? Not to mention the matter that they'd be asking people to leave the old EQ or at least pay double the monthly fee to play both?

I could go on and on, but the shop's closing soon and i need to get my food. Point is that whatever the new EQ will be, it won't be the old one. That's called "moving forward". Nothing has ever been gained by maintaining a status quo. Think on that one.

"That's called "moving forward". Nothing has ever been gained by maintaining a status quo. Think on that one."

I was going to agree with you up till this point.  The MMO Genre has maintained the status quo for about 5 years now.  Different skins on the same gameplay.

Vanilla WoW was fun but EQ1 was way more fun, more challenging and alot more content to explore.  WoW was about hitting max level and then "playing".   EQ1 was about the journey to max level.   I rather have the journey be fun not just the end game.

The first year of EQ was about exploring, community and the journey.  It soon became a game of rush to level cap and then the game starts.  After kunark the game was all about raiding 24/7 with small bits of non-max level content tossed out.

The same thing happened to wow.  The first year was about exploring and enjoying the content until you run out of levels.  Now it is about end game content, but it isn't just restricted to raiding. 

Beyond that, wow is trying to revitalize that journey with the next expansion which is still moving the genre forward.

Not forward like a new game would, but in 5 years someone else should have done that already. 

Originally posted by Daffid011

Not forward like a new game would, but in 5 years someone else should have done that already. 

Pre-CU Star Wars Galaxies, a game where you could not "rush to max level" because it didn't have any levels.  But the boneheads threw out that system and imposed the same-old-same-old like everyone else.

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by fozzie22 

QFT!!

 

In defense of SOE at the time they DID make the right call becuase if you recall when they set about making the game we where at the height of the gigahertz wars i think if we had a crystal ball back then no one could really see the c-change that came about a couple of years later..i mean back in what? 2002 who would have thought we'd have still been using 2 gig processors as the standard (ok with multiple cores),i think most of us would have assumed we'd be well into double figures gigahertz wise by now.

 

They flipped the coin and it came down the wrong side for them one of those things i suppose as for DX 11 cant see it making a jot of difference to the game becuase as you say the games will have to be coded for it from the ground up.

 

I don't think they made the right call at all.   The is a very good reason PCs were designed to use video cards and designing a game to ignore that resource is rather stupid.  Every other game on the market was going to benefit from CPU & GPU and I fail to see how ignoring that can be called the right decision.  

Early on the EQ2 devs said they used the processor to run the graphics so that people with low end video cards could play the game on low settings.  That is sort of a cheap shortcut to get the low end market. 

Instead of designing a graphic mode to compensate people with low end video cards soe ignored the basic designs of PCs and hedged the games performance on future technology. 

Did this design choice make the game run well at release?  No.

Did this design choice make the game run well long term?  No.

I just don't see anything that makes this look like a good decision.  Honestly it looks rather stupid to bet the health of an mmo on future technology resolving current issues. 

 

Thing is, EQ2 didn't played well on release because it had way too good graphics for its time. Even with GPU support, you wouldn't be able to max and play the game with anything higher than 5 FPS. Even today, EQ2 has better graphics than most new MMO's (exception is Conan).

Building a CPU based game isn't ignoring the basic PC design, its actually a smart choice, even World of Warcraft is CPU based and only recently started utilizing GPU with its new shadows. Its common knowledge that people have more powerful CPU than their GPU.

Here's the catch. No one without inside information would have predicted the turn CPU's was going to make at the end of the Gigahertz war. Even Valve built their Source Engine around pure single-processor power. Only recently they started supporting Dual-Core processors.

So where SOE and EQ2 failed? They failed at supporting it. EQ1 had so many engine changes, they built the EQ2 engine so that they would do as little modifications as possible, if at all. This resulted in NO engine modification whatsoever. Game continued to perform poorly because of the sudden standardization of multi-core processors. They should have started multithread and GPU support few years after launch.

Still, this is trivial to the real issues EQ2 had, I could write a book on what SOE should have or shouldn't have done, but thats for another time. In short:

Was it a smart choice to make the game CPU dependent at the start? Yes

Was it a smart choice not to support and expand it after? Hell no.

---

Originally posted by drbaltazar

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Originally posted by Eneldin

---

the main thing going for eq2 is the engine age very nicelly you ll see what i mean when dx11 is avail then eq2 will be very smooth dont forget no other game work like eq2 they use the processor so the faster the processor the faster and better looking the graphic 
and now that dx11 will make use of all processor even the main or the graphic card processor you ll see a big jump in performance i think ,we will probably be able to crank graphic way higher then we could ever have done before 
1 problem dx11 is only avail in vista and window 7

---

 
Can you repeat that in English?

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dx11 will help everquest 2 a lot 

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Just to touch on this quick: EQ2 does not and never will use DX10 or 11.

It's been made with dx8 as a base, relying heavily on the cpu. It seems to me that it doesn't even do hardware t&l, but i'm not sure. The new shadows are, as far as i know, dx9, though they may still be dx8. With the next expansion, a lot of shaders will be rewritten and added for dx9, which is a relatively small jump. Most likely they're going to use sm2.0 for the most part.

DX10 and 11 are a completely different api in many ways. For games to make use of it they would have had to be made with those api's in mind from the start, it can't be added after the fact - Not without considerable investment in any case, both time and money, since you're essentially making a completely new game.

When you start the game in Vista or 7, Windows will actually emulate a DirectX 9 mode so that EQ2 can run. DX10/11 isn't actually used at all for games which weren't designed to use it.

Originally posted by Nickless_man

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by fozzie22 

QFT!!

 

In defense of SOE at the time they DID make the right call becuase if you recall when they set about making the game we where at the height of the gigahertz wars i think if we had a crystal ball back then no one could really see the c-change that came about a couple of years later..i mean back in what? 2002 who would have thought we'd have still been using 2 gig processors as the standard (ok with multiple cores),i think most of us would have assumed we'd be well into double figures gigahertz wise by now.

 

They flipped the coin and it came down the wrong side for them one of those things i suppose as for DX 11 cant see it making a jot of difference to the game becuase as you say the games will have to be coded for it from the ground up.

 

I don't think they made the right call at all.   The is a very good reason PCs were designed to use video cards and designing a game to ignore that resource is rather stupid.  Every other game on the market was going to benefit from CPU & GPU and I fail to see how ignoring that can be called the right decision.  

Early on the EQ2 devs said they used the processor to run the graphics so that people with low end video cards could play the game on low settings.  That is sort of a cheap shortcut to get the low end market. 

Instead of designing a graphic mode to compensate people with low end video cards soe ignored the basic designs of PCs and hedged the games performance on future technology. 

Did this design choice make the game run well at release?  No.

Did this design choice make the game run well long term?  No.

I just don't see anything that makes this look like a good decision.  Honestly it looks rather stupid to bet the health of an mmo on future technology resolving current issues. 

 

 

Thing is, EQ2 didn't played well on release because it had way too good graphics for its time. Even with GPU support, you wouldn't be able to max and play the game with anything higher than 5 FPS. Even today, EQ2 has better graphics than most new MMO's (exception is Conan).

Building a CPU based game isn't ignoring the basic PC design, its actually a smart choice, even World of Warcraft is CPU based and only recently started utilizing GPU with its new shadows. Its common knowledge that people have more powerful CPU than their GPU.

Here's the catch. No one without inside information would have predicted the turn CPU's was going to make at the end of the Gigahertz war. Even Valve built their Source Engine around pure single-processor power. Only recently they started supporting Dual-Core processors.

So where SOE and EQ2 failed? They failed at supporting it. EQ1 had so many engine changes, they built the EQ2 engine so that they would do as little modifications as possible, if at all. This resulted in NO engine modification whatsoever. Game continued to perform poorly because of the sudden standardization of multi-core processors. They should have started multithread and GPU support few years after launch.

Still, this is trivial to the real issues EQ2 had, I could write a book on what SOE should have or shouldn't have done, but thats for another time. In short:

 

Was it a smart choice to make the game CPU dependent at the start? Yes

Was it a smart choice not to support and expand it after? Hell no.

Let me sum it up another way.

Was it smart to ignore the GPU at release of the game: no.  The game ran like crap at release and it .

Was it smart to ignore the GPU for the long run of the game: no.   GPUs increased in performance and price, neither of which EQ2 benefits from.

Furthermore, what has soe done to resolve their failed gamble?  As you pointed out, very little.  

The reason soe pushed the graphics onto the cpu is so that they could capture players with low end systems, because the tech to run eq2 was uber exspensive and very few had those resources.  It wasn't to get super duper graphics to run at max.  

So soe gambled that cpus would increase in single core power and they were wrong.  On the other hand they completely ignored the fact that GPUs would also increase in power (and decrease in cost), which they have.  That is a rather stupid gamble and it doesn't take rocket science to predict that GPUs would increase in performance. 

SOE designs an mmo with graphics so advanced it goes far beyond current technical limits, but they code the game in such a way as to NOT use the the entire processing power of the players computer?  That is about as smart as running a marathon with your legs tied together. 

People laughed at Brad MacQuaid when he talked about "future hardware" solving vanguards problems.  Yet somehow it is smart that soe intentionally underutilized the client computer on a bet that future technology would solve its problems? 

Long story short, the decision to make EQ2 ignore the GPU never helped the game, ever.  How that can be looked at as a smart decision just boggles my mind.  For all we know CPUs could have reached 10ghz and the game could still run like crap.

P.S. A GPU upgrade would always increase your performance in wow, since the release of the game.  A GPU upgrade, even today in EQ2 does almost nothing.  

Originally posted by Daffid011

P.S. A GPU upgrade would always increase your performance in wow, since the release of the game.  A GPU upgrade, even today in EQ2 does almost nothing.  

 

 

I agree completely. If anyone wants to see FPS improvement on EQ2 just overclock your CPU.

First of all, with the current improvements on GPU on EQ2 engine, you do get improved performance with a GPU upgrade.

Second of all, World of warcraft on pre-wotlk was almost entirely CPU dependant, there is no need to discuss about this as this is a fact.

Now, I didn't expected any of you to understand MMO development cycle, post release support and acceptable risks. When you are making an MMO, you really need to think ahead and somewhat predict what future hardware might do.

I said this million times and will say again, the mistake SOE made was never touching the engine ever again. They only very recently realized their mistake and implemented experimental multithread and GPU support.

On todays market, its a death warrant not to support all kinds of hardware since post-wow people become too touchy about stability and speed. Back then, it was a whole different story.

Hope it has the same art style as EQ2.

Vanguard was a bit too dark and too brown/green.

Hopefully it won't be like the generic new mmos and will have that magical feel that EQ and EQ2 had.

More armor styles than the ones we got in EQ2.

Keep the EQ2 music don't change it into some crap.

Better animations for running and sort out that anti kiting system, things look so retarded when they run faster than they should.

To be honest, I'd be happy if EQ3 was same as EQ2 just uses a better optimised engine with better character/spell animations.
 

All I ask is they put back the fear, games these days are too easy with no risk.

Originally posted by Nickless_man

First of all, with the current improvements on GPU on EQ2 engine, you do get improved performance with a GPU upgrade.

Second of all, World of warcraft on pre-wotlk was almost entirely CPU dependant, there is no need to discuss about this as this is a fact.

 

Now, I didn't expected any of you to understand MMO development cycle, post release support and acceptable risks. When you are making an MMO, you really need to think ahead and somewhat predict what future hardware might do.

I said this million times and will say again, the mistake SOE made was never touching the engine ever again. They only very recently realized their mistake and implemented experimental multithread and GPU support.

On todays market, its a death warrant not to support all kinds of hardware since post-wow people become too touchy about stability and speed. Back then, it was a whole different story.

1) 5 years later and EQ2 uses SOME portion of a GPU upgrade.  The game is still primarily focused on the CPU of the machine. 

2) I've never heard anything like this. Care to share your source?

SOEs first mistake was rushing EQ2 to market before it was ready.  That set the game off to a horrible start and created cascading problems.

The second mistake was pushing all the graphics onto the cpu to capture the low end market.  Combined with trying to create graphics that were so far ahead of current technology it would kill any machine without the best of video cards.  Please read that again before talking about looking how hard it is to predict the future.  Soe wanted the game to run well on low end machines, but somehow have the graphics that were years ahead of their time.  It is complete idiocy to design a high end graphics game and then code the engine to ignore the resources a computer offers (The GPU). 

Third, the eq2 engine actually caused problems for people with the biggest systems of the time (8800).  The choice to push graphics onto the cpu alienated the market that could actually benefit from their advanced graphics. 

Fourth, they gambled the future of the game on a technology that did not exist.  Even if soe did not have the forsight to see multicore coming, they had NO exit strategy if anything went wrong.  Their entire plan was "this will work, because we have no other plan".  That in itself shows that their deicision was not a smart choice.

Now through all of this I fail to see where the "smart" comes in.  It looks like management followed a recipe for failure, made poor choices, did not resolve those issues, had no contingency plan and the results are clear.  Imagine just for one second that Crysis was their with an engine to ignore GPUs and forced all the graphics onto CPUs with the hopes that someday 16 or 32  core cpus would bring the game to an acceptable level of play. 

I just don't see how anyone can say it was a smart choice and then whimsicly dismiss the results as "things just didn't work out like soe thought they would".  That is the regurgitated excuse some developer gave as to why the engine could not be fixed years after it was clear they could not resolve the issue. 

Your last line somewhat confuses me.  I understand that prior to the wow era, most mmos released in bad shape and managed to get subs, but I don't think that was smart business either.  To actively plan to release poor performance and expect people to pay for it doesn't make a sound strategy.  Perhaps that is why so few people (in comparison) joined the genre back then, because developers ran around with the mentality they could push any crap out and people will pay for the final stages of development post release.

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by Nickless_man

First of all, with the current improvements on GPU on EQ2 engine, you do get improved performance with a GPU upgrade.

Second of all, World of warcraft on pre-wotlk was almost entirely CPU dependant, there is no need to discuss about this as this is a fact.

 

Now, I didn't expected any of you to understand MMO development cycle, post release support and acceptable risks. When you are making an MMO, you really need to think ahead and somewhat predict what future hardware might do.

I said this million times and will say again, the mistake SOE made was never touching the engine ever again. They only very recently realized their mistake and implemented experimental multithread and GPU support.

On todays market, its a death warrant not to support all kinds of hardware since post-wow people become too touchy about stability and speed. Back then, it was a whole different story.

 

1) 5 years later and EQ2 uses SOME portion of a GPU upgrade.  The game is still primarily focused on the CPU of the machine. 

2) I've never heard anything like this. Care to share your source?

 

SOEs first mistake was rushing EQ2 to market before it was ready.  That set the game off to a horrible start and created cascading problems.

The second mistake was pushing all the graphics onto the cpu to capture the low end market.  Combined with trying to create graphics that were so far ahead of current technology it would kill any machine without the best of video cards.  Please read that again before talking about looking how hard it is to predict the future.  Soe wanted the game to run well on low end machines, but somehow have the graphics that were years ahead of their time.  It is complete idiocy to design a high end graphics game and then code the engine to ignore the resources a computer offers (The GPU). 

Third, the eq2 engine actually caused problems for people with the biggest systems of the time (8800).  The choice to push graphics onto the cpu alienated the market that could actually benefit from their advanced graphics. 

Fourth, they gambled the future of the game on a technology that did not exist.  Even if soe did not have the forsight to see multicore coming, they had NO exit strategy if anything went wrong.  Their entire plan was "this will work, because we have no other plan".  That in itself shows that their deicision was not a smart choice.

 

 

Now through all of this I fail to see where the "smart" comes in.  It looks like management followed a recipe for failure, made poor choices, did not resolve those issues, had no contingency plan and the results are clear.  Imagine just for one second that Crysis was their with an engine to ignore GPUs and forced all the graphics onto CPUs with the hopes that someday 16 or 32  core cpus would bring the game to an acceptable level of play. 

 

I just don't see how anyone can say it was a smart choice and then whimsicly dismiss the results as "things just didn't work out like soe thought they would".  That is the regurgitated excuse some developer gave as to why the engine could not be fixed years after it was clear they could not resolve the issue. 

 

Your last line somewhat confuses me.  I understand that prior to the wow era, most mmos released in bad shape and managed to get subs, but I don't think that was smart business either.  To actively plan to release poor performance and expect people to pay for it doesn't make a sound strategy.  Perhaps that is why so few people (in comparison) joined the genre back then, because developers ran around with the mentality they could push any crap out and people will pay for the final stages of development post release.

Once again, you are ignoring what I said. EQ2 was released on a highly competitive year for MMO's. SWG, FFXI and EQ1 already had strong player-base in those days. Ultimately, WoW and EQ2 was released on the same month. It was pretty obvious 2 were going to be the major competitors in the market. Then, WoW just blew away EQ2 and became the giant monster it is today by having a better marketing campaign and a better development team, but I digress, this is not the issue.

Concentrating on CPU support enabled EQ2 to work on much wider variety hardware and bought SOE much needed time against their competitor, they weren't able to use that time but that was an entirely different story. Once game started to show the signs that its getting behind, SOE started spending less and less on EQ2.

Crysis example doesn't apply since its not an MMORPG, it doesn't have to be designed for years to come. It has been meant as Single-Player benchmark enthusiast game since the development started.

Problems with biggest systems of the time (8800 as you call it) happened 2 years after the release, by that time I'm assuming SOE didn't allowed engine modifications. Which is, as I've said million times earlier, was stupid choice. As I said;

Was it a smart choice to make the game CPU dependent at the start? Yes

Was it a smart choice not to support and expand it after launch? Hell no.

On the WoW being CPU dependent... Well, this is common knowledge. Just google it and you'll have tons of "source" about it.

I have wished for awhile that eq2 would have reworked their engine to better utilize the hardware that we have now. They started with putting shadows on the gpu if you choose and they are updating the shader 1.0 to 3.0 by the end of this year. I have issues with the walk ten feet zone walk ten feet zone but overall I think the game looks nice and runs well for me. (Now that I run it on windows 7) I had Vista issues but that was Vista. EQ2 is still a deep game with alot of options for the player. I love the game and look forward to the 'next' Everquest.

Originally posted by Nickless_man 

 

1) Once again, you are ignoring what I said. EQ2 was released on a highly competitive year for MMO's. SWG, FFXI and EQ1 already had strong player-base in those days. Ultimately, WoW and EQ2 was released on the same month. It was pretty obvious 2 were going to be the major competitors in the market. Then, WoW just blew away EQ2 and became the giant monster it is today by having a better marketing campaign and a better development team, but I digress, this is not the issue.

2) Concentrating on CPU support enabled EQ2 to work on much wider variety hardware and bought SOE much needed time against their competitor, they weren't able to use that time but that was an entirely different story. Once game started to show the signs that its getting behind, SOE started spending less and less on EQ2.

3) Crysis example doesn't apply since its not an MMORPG, it doesn't have to be designed for years to come. It has been meant as Single-Player benchmark enthusiast game since the development started.

4) Problems with biggest systems of the time (8800 as you call it) happened 2 years after the release, by that time I'm assuming SOE didn't allowed engine modifications. Which is, as I've said million times earlier, was stupid choice. As I said;

5) Was it a smart choice to make the game CPU dependent at the start? Yes

Was it a smart choice not to support and expand it after launch? Hell no.

 

On the WoW being CPU dependent... Well, this is common knowledge. Just google it and you'll have tons of "source" about it.

1) EQ2 had just as much marketing and soe intentionally cut development short to beat blizzard to market. That was their choice, not something forced on them.  Wow blew EQ2 away, because it was a better game and EQ2 hemmoraged players to the point they were forced to merge servers.  Wow marketing didn't force that, people left EQ2, because it wasn't good and the competition was far better.  Recall the ad campaign of "EQ2, no waiting lines" shortly after release, when people would rather wait in line for hours to play wow than play EQ2 with no wait times.

2) EQ2 has been soes biggest focus for many years.  Putting the graphics on the CPU was a cheap shortcut that made the game run aweful no matter what system was used.  It was a completely opposing design to cut out the GPU and at the same time aim for graphics years ahead of technology.  How stupid is it to create ultra high level graphics and not use

3) The crysis example isn't perfect, but it got the meaning across.  The point was that crysis had cutting edge graphics for its time, just like eq2 did.  Would you call it smart if the crysis engine intentionally didn't utilize graphics cards?  I don't think anyone could make that a compelling argument and neither is the EQ2 choice. 

4) You have me there that it wasn't the 8800 series.  It was the 6000 series and I think the 6800 card that had massive issues?  I don't recall the specific top of the line card at the time, but I do recall that people with those cards had performance issues over those who didn't use them.

5) How was it a smart move to ignore the gpu.  That is the part the goes unanswered and the part that gets ignored is that the game WOULD run better if they had included GPUs.  

Did ignoring the GPU make the game run worse at release, yes.  Not smart

Did ignoring the GPU help the future of the game, no.  Not smart

Did ignoring the GPU provide any benefit other than some speculated potential benefit that no one even knows if it would have happened?  No. 

Somehow people are concluding that the game would run better if everything was crammed onto the cpu.  It didn't and it doesn't.  Cramming the graphics onto the cpu was an attempt to get more marketshare, which did not work.  That is not smart, regardless of what might have happened with cpus. 

The end result is that soe designed a graphically intensive game and intentionally coded the game to not take advantage of the one resource specifically designed to increase performance of graphically intense games.  To me that is a clear display of a choice that is pants on head retarded. 

"as well as the dedicated legions of fans who made the EverQuest franchise timeless. I hope we'll see you there."

I'm not holding my breath, but if you want to see me there, your gonna have to stop copying WoW for one.

Originally posted by Daffid011

Originally posted by fozzie22 

QFT!!

 

In defense of SOE at the time they DID make the right call becuase if you recall when they set about making the game we where at the height of the gigahertz wars i think if we had a crystal ball back then no one could really see the c-change that came about a couple of years later..i mean back in what? 2002 who would have thought we'd have still been using 2 gig processors as the standard (ok with multiple cores),i think most of us would have assumed we'd be well into double figures gigahertz wise by now.

 

They flipped the coin and it came down the wrong side for them one of those things i suppose as for DX 11 cant see it making a jot of difference to the game becuase as you say the games will have to be coded for it from the ground up.

 

I don't think they made the right call at all.   The is a very good reason PCs were designed to use video cards and designing a game to ignore that resource is rather stupid.  Every other game on the market was going to benefit from CPU & GPU and I fail to see how ignoring that can be called the right decision.  

Early on the EQ2 devs said they used the processor to run the graphics so that people with low end video cards could play the game on low settings.  That is sort of a cheap shortcut to get the low end market. 

Instead of designing a graphic mode to compensate people with low end video cards soe ignored the basic designs of PCs and hedged the games performance on future technology. 

Did this design choice make the game run well at release?  No.

Did this design choice make the game run well long term?  No.

I just don't see anything that makes this look like a good decision.  Honestly it looks rather stupid to bet the health of an mmo on future technology resolving current issues. 

 

Its very easy to sit back years on and say yeah they got it wrong of course they did..but back then the graphics we're seeing today where nothing but a pipe dream.

I started the game at around LU 11 and given i was coming from SWG the game was a breath of fresh air on my (moderate pc at the time) it ran ok,nothing spectacular but it did the job SOE made many no countless mistakes with EQ2 the countless changes in the very core game itself being far more damaging than wether or not it can run on an old pc or not,thats been the games downfall for my money at least.

But i'll say it again when they sat around the table back in 2000ish and talked about how to base the game they made the right call go with the CPU not the GPU becuase at the time the cards just werent there to support its over ambitious graphics but i suppose given the gigahertz wars they thought they could get away with throwing it all at the CPU.

The devs are not oracles..they cant see into the future..niether can i and i'm damn sure you cant either becuase if we could i'd be sitting on an island somewhere after winning millions on the lottery and Daffodil you'd be my neighbour :)

Like i say they got it wrong and you're right the game should in no way shape or form have been released when they did,it needed another year dev time simply they got it wrong (that word again) but lets be fair getting it wrong is what SOE does best