wow so much misinformation and "DO NOT KNOW" in this thread.  basically noobs with no clue talking out of their ass.

Everquest was "so great" because of a number of things:

1) for the first time introduced the concept of "grouping" to the masses.   you had games like Gauntlet and Diablo where you played BESIDE other players but introducing a game where you actually PARTIED with other players, where you could heal others and division of labor like tank, healer, dps opened the door to another level of player interaction where you were playing the game WITH other players, not just parallel playing along side them.

2) this grouping, and increased player interaction led to a COMMUNITY like none has existed since.  you could literally walk into Guk or Seb, meet someone at a camp one night and make a friend for life.  back in EQ the player base is literally the top 1% of what you have in WOW.  stop a moment and think of the top 5 guilds on your server.  then think of the top 5 players in that guild.  those 25 players FROM YOUR SERVER are the people you'd meet and group with in EQ.  the best of the best.

3) emergence of guilds.  previously "guilds" were basically social networks out-of-game for nerds with no IRL friends or RP in-game as in UO. because  the importance of grouping in EQ, for the first time guilds became significant for in-game progress of individuals and became extremely important in terms of gameplay.  this is where you see the emergence of basically every important first generation guild: Afterlife (inventor of DKP) FOH, LOS.

4) raids.  EQ introduced epic encounters with Nag and Lady Vox, and epic quests, and raid zones.

5) truly 3D perspective.  other games like M59 had limited Doom-like view but EQ was the first truly open 3d world, emphasized by the first person perspective.  visually, there was NO game like it ever seen by the masses.

6) a truly mature, tuned and balanced combat system.  99.9% of the noobs dont know this but EQ was NOT a ground up game.  it "borrowed" the combat engine from MUDs which had been refined and balanced for decades.  basically they took an existing MUD and put graphics on top of it.  in fact it was so similar that Sony (989/Redeye at the time) was sued for using stolen code by the developers of DIKU mud and reached an out of court settlement where Smed and other Sony Interactive execs signed a statement stating they'd used the code.  so out of the gate the game was "balanced" something that no subsequent game can say... so EQ was addicting out of the gate

7) unparalleled complex combat/casting system.  EQ had 20 years of MUDs to look at and only took the best spells and combat systems from its predecessors.  Geoffrey Zakin who was an acknowledged genius singlehanded integrated these spells (along with creating something no one had ever seen: the BARD system) into a rich vein of race/class combinations that was unparallelled in its complexity, balance and intricacy to that time.  in many ways the combat system was SUPERIOR to pen and paper systems.... something NO ONE thought possible then or able to replicate today even with 10s of millions of dollars in development investment

 8) impact.  many games literally stole from EQ.  DAOC is one example which the exec producer (mark jacobs in this case) admitted freely they took combat systems, balance, grouping from EQ.  Blizzard took it a step farther, actually hiring EQ developers and guild leaders in addition to stealing game components.  Pardo, Jeff Kaplan etc were from EQ.  Blizzard devs have said numerous times how WOW 's class system and raids are directly from EQ

9) the game was HARD.  EQ self-weeded the noobs out.  if you met a dude who was a full level 40 or 50 or whatever the max was... you KNEW he was good.  noobs simply could NOT MECHANICALLY max out.  the game simply would force them out of the game.  also the pace of PVP rewarded STRATEGIC thinking... PVP took many many rounds, there were no lucky instagibs or lucky wins... if someone beat you they beat you because THEY WERE BETTER... either their skills, their strats, or a combination of experience and gear they were better.  in EQ , if a guy beat you... 9 times out of 10 they would beat you in a rematch... whereas in WOW and other games it comes down to 1)what class you play 2)what consumables/cooldowns you use (wow pvp is fun too... that's why I'm a 2 season gladiatior and old rank 14, but FACTS are that EQ took less luck... in wow a lot comes down to RNG which you do plan around but which is still fucked up)

so you see there's so much that EQ introduced that noobs had never seen.  it's like the matrix.  some 12 year old might say... "what's so great about the matrix? I've seen that wire-fu on Sci-Fi network blah."  but if you're more than 16 years old and know more than 2 things in your life you understand how revolutionary it was when it came out in 1999 and blew ppl's minds.  of course if you're another level of intellect you understand how behind that revolutionary impact there's a precedent... Ghost in the Shell, Hong Kong action, Japanese Anime etc etc. (but that's too much to ask of noobs to know)

now for noobs talking out of their asses

I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding fathers of MMORPGs

3 games preceded Ultima Online.  Not the least of which was Meridian 59 in 96.  Also Ultima Online had no impact on the development of EQ, both of which were in production before the others' release.  UO is an outgrowth of the RPG genre gone to an online application.  EQ (therefore WOW and Aion) is an outgrowth of the MUD genre.  They have nothing in common except for the payment plan which OSI introduced and Sony Interactive copied

What exactly was Evercrack?  Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory...but during a time when there was no real competition?

You've learned today how EQ was in fact groundbreaking in many ways noobs do not realize, and in fact NOT groundbreaking in many ways noobs assume that it was.  EQ in fact had numerous sources of competition, including UO which from your post you are at least cognizant of (but like noobs have somehow conveniently "forgotten" as you spew noobsauce). EQ is significant precisely because it EXPANDED the category.  Before EQ publishers thought only noobs would be loser enough to pay $10 a month to play online.  It's retarded to try to turn the fact that it CREATED some market space by QQing that it "had no competition" lmao.  these other games "compete" in the space that EQ CREATED

Then my question is why not go back and play?

You dont need to.  If you play WOW or Aion these games are based on EQ.  They're basically 2nd and 4th generation iterations of the game (admittedly dumbed down and made more mass-friendly).

Nothing it sucks now and it only had like a year or two of being good before SOE ruined it.

Wrong. 1) The golden age of EQ was SOV which was the 2nd expansion, the best year of EQ was its 3rd year.  2)SOE didn't ruin it.  There's nothing about renaming a company that's going to inherently ruin a game

 ADMITTEDLY EQ had some issues... sadly MOST of these issues had to do with the fact that John Smedley was a bad manager IRL than with game issues.  Smedley was visionary in assembling his team from 96-98 when he developed the game but he couldn't hold on to his talent.  Within a couple years he lost EVERY ONE of his key players which in turn seriously weakened the ability sony had to address bugs and game issues as well as seriously devasted sony's ability to deliver quality expansions.   In the end Smedley was more concerned with playing with the stock, constantly renaming, reorganizing, spinning off his company from 989 Studios to Redeye to Sony Interactive to Verant to SOE etc etc than in running his game.  THAT's what actually killed the game and prevented them from continuing the franchise with EQ2 and onward

In the end what's MOST significant of EQ is its legacy.  It occupies that sweet spot of SO FEW GREAT games where its legacy is established and lives to this day.  On one hand you have SEMINAL PC games like CIv and Xcom that occupy such a unique space that, while greatness is admitted, no one can really build on those games.  On the other hand you have a game like Diablo which was great in many ways but carries such a heavy imprint that every subsequent games appears basically as a "clone" without any significant advancement even 15 years later.  EQ on the other hand exists in WOW and now in Aion which their producers all freely admit the inlfuence of EQ, but they're different enough that they exist freely and which will in turn influence more games.  EQ is the basis of all that.  There's very few games... maybe Doom/Quake off the top of my head which has expanded into FPS via CS and Unreal etc to FPRPG like Halflife etc which has had similar success with its progency

wow trash blog with trash talkback revolving around the same hackneyed comments.

the truth is that these female avatars have big boobs for the same reason they have tight asses and strong arms.  everyone, men AND WOMEN prefer their characters to look striking and attractive.  how many WOMEN played troll females in EQ , what's the ratio of women who play TAUREN females versus NE or BE in WOW?  the metrics prove beyond doubt that women themselves prefer these attractive characters OVERWHELMINGLY to a degree equal or passing male preference when they roll these characters.

the same can be said about men.  basically MMOers are losers.  they might be social but honestly the higher income/athletic/get laid type of male demographic doesn't have the time to play MMOs.  likewise human male avatars are strong or intimidating because 180lb 5'9" dudes dont want to log into a game where their guy has a pot belly is bald and looks as lame as they do IRL.

I'm not sure which is more LOL, the fact that Sanya complains about BOOBIES in MMOs as pandering when her very article is doing the same thing... sensationalizing tits to drive eyeballs.  except what Blizzard is doing is a hundred million dollar business and her sellout involves like 500 more page hits lol.

this doesn't even ignore the fact that going back 100 years to dime store serials, there's a historical aspect of scantily clad women AND MEN in this genre, this isn't something SOE or Blizzard invented.  like class archetypes, random dice rolls, grouping etc it's part and parcel of the genre.  if you think BOOBS are why an 16 year old plays WOW... lmfao.  guys play MMOs for social grouping, for killing other players, for accumulating digital wealth to compensate for the lack of it IRL etc etc.  if you drew a list of things that motivate MMOers, tits would be about 25th on the list.

in truth every MMO from UO to WOW to KOTR SUBLIMATES the inherent sexuality AND violence in the genre.  it's a disneyfication of any whisper of sex in a game that involves the SOCIAL INTERACTION of millions of adults.  if anything Blizzard and others have purposefully repressed and whisper of sex in the game to move more product and appeal to kids and a wide audience.  you have it ass backwards

The most successful game was Everquest by number of subscriptions.  And also my influence and impact... every MMO has been heavily heavily influenced by it.  EQ introduced the concepts of raiding and grouping (as opposed to solo or "hero" play of RPGs).  The developers of WOW such as Rob Pardo and others have publically stated they based their gameplay on EQ and until this year the top 3 guys on the WOW team including Jeff Kaplan got their jobs at Blizzard specifically because of their experiences end-game raiding in WOW (both guildleaders of FOH and LOS got jobs designing the raids in WOW).

UO was also influential.  Despite what the cluessless nerd above wrote, UO is the game which introduced subscription based MMOs to the mass market (although primitive pay to play MMOs like Meridian predated both UO and WOW).  In fact those of you who have been around and know your history distinctly remember the public dialogue that Starr (Long, the Garriott's right hand man) about pricing plans in UO beta:  options being game free, monthly sub.  high game price + no sub.  etc etc.  Obviously they netted out on the option where you pay the box and then also pay out the ass every month... which maximizes revenue but back in 97 most analysts thought the general public was not loser/nerd/desperate enough to actually pay up to $200 a year to play a game that costs them 10 bucks a year to actually run (aside from development costs).

UO is also important because the Koreans ripped it off to make the first Lineage.  The entire genre of Korean and Chinese MMOs are basically versions 2,3 and 4 of the UO client.  In the US UO gameplay has been heavily dominant in "pvp" MMOs although those have not been successful as a genre.  Everything from Shadowbane back in the early 2000s to Mortoal Online which in is development now follow closely the open world/ player driven/ skill based game design of UO.

It's important to note that EQ and UO themselves have totally separate geneology.  UO is a direct outgrowth of traditional PC RPGs that were popular in the 80s and 90s... that took the evolutionary step of going online.  This is why UO based games stress open gameplay (open classes, skills based leveling instead of classes, interactivity of worlds through housing, etc) all things that popular RPGs stressed.  EQ-WOW-Aion is an outgrowth of text-based unix MUDs that go back to the 70s.  In fact SOE was sued by DIKUMUD and others for actually stealing code for the combat engine (basically everything in that little "box" that tells you what's going on) from existing MUDs.  Going back and stealing class archetypes from past games led to a diversity and complexity in classes that's so good it's still being used as the template for Wow, Warhammer and Aion today and its MUD antecedents are reflected on the stress of distinguishing between range/melee combat, and between spells and melee.   Back in the day all you had were words on the screen and keeping the classes distinct was very important.  It also is reflected on the emphasis of teamwork/party interaction as the central hub of gameplay (back then all you had to entertain yourself was talking to ppl in your party there were no graphics)

Heh talking about skill or "bad at PVP"?  WAR is just a really really dumb game... meaning it has really really dumbed-down gameplay.  The entire PVE experience lvl 1-40 is zerging Public Quests with 15 other noobs until you get max rep and gear then moving 100 yards down the zone to the next PQ location to rinse repeat.  PVP it's about spamming and zerging together with your team in instanced and pointless scenarios or tank and spank on extremely boring keep guards and bosses with a laughable battering ram minigame that looks like it should be running on a 386 from 1984

Simply put there's very little room for skill in this game.  Some of the class design ideas are kind of cool, and of course the IP and Lore is great courtesy of Games Workshop but the combat engine is extremely poor and the gameplay is just straight noob, especially if you're coming from a high-level (2200+ arena/Rank 14) WOW or any sort of competitve FPS environment.

To give an idea to those of you who haven't tried WAR, first of all, the way the game handles packets is extremely unresponsive (aka laggy).  To compensate for this, WAR has an extremely LONG buffer... I've been playing PVP MMOs 10 years ago starting with UO (then EQ then DAOC then WOW, GW etc etc) Warhammer Online is the first game where server lag is distractingly noticable in every aspect of gameplay.  Anything you do in game you feel lag before your avatar responds in-game.  You literally press attack or mount up or any action and can literally count off "one and two and..." before you see the action in game.  Sure in other games you can occasionally see the same effects (for example summoning a mount in WOW or casting a long 6 second spell you can cheat and start moving 200ms before the client registers it on-screen... now imagine that EVERY action in the game has that same lag x10.)  This has ramifications on gameplay beyond normal annoyance.  For example interacting with mobs... if you're running through some mobs and you drop a root on them as you run past, the game doesn't register it until it updates your and their locations a couple seconds later.  In every situation they'll continue to beat on you within melee range for those 1...2...3... seconds until the server registers the proper positions of the mobs... then they ghost back to being rooted in the proper location 30 yards behind you....  and yes the game REGISTERS the damage it's done to you.  If they kill you during that time of latency with those "ghost" hits, when the game updates you'll ghost to dead.  If they do something like knock you back or otherwise interact with your location, the client will drag you back to THEIR location and knock you back/down starting from that location.

If you're a noob and you're just standing there toe-to-toe not moving with the mobs it's not such a big deal... but if you are executing intricate fine-motor manuevers like spinning around and knocking back that tank that's on you then whirling around and DPSing the caster you're after is basically impossible... the game updates after you've done both actions and will basically default to whichever movement you executed last.  Things like running behind someone to knock them back in the oppostie direction back to your team (a pretty basic manuver in a game like WOW or FPS) is impossible since the game autofaces and lags... you'll simply end up hitting them in the same direction you were running before you turned your character around to do the knockback (basically you'll appear to knock them BEHIND you opposite the direction you just turned)  For all the criticisms WOW has as a true E-sport at least the game mechanics are smooth... you can quickly target enemies, execute moves and the client responds smoothly like in a FPS... Warhammer is extremely crude its PVP will never evolve beyond the rudimentary team tactics of early DAOC.  I mean, I've played from 3 different locations all with <100ms ping and the game is laggy as hell because of the poor game engine and server architecture... and this is supposed to be a PVP game...

Another huge issue is related to the way WAR handles latency and how it compensates with that huge ass buffer.  The game eats keystrokes... basically EVERY discrete action in the game locks out EVERY other thing in the game.  So if you dismount, click stop moving on your mouse and press attack on the run you'll end up running past your target as the game eats your mouse click in order to process your attack keystroke.  Good news is now your attack (the last thing you pressed) is on... bad news is the game ate your mouse click and you're running with your attack on in the opposite direction of your target.  Basically  every single thing in the game even looting has a .5 second lockout.  What that means is that things like Chosen auras and Chosen attack moves which are technically on separate cooldowns, in reality all share a .5 second game-global cooldown (in addition to sharing a global cooldown with everything from moving to looting in-game).   So something like looting can't be done without lag... if you click click click on 3 corpses the game basically only recognizes the last thing you clicked... so now you're standing there spamming click to loot to make sure you loot everything.   If you suck, this is actually kind of good... means no one can actually do anything quicker in-game due to better reactions but this in effect dumbs down PVP and makes skill even less important.  Even a 60 year old retard can click on something every .5 seconds or so while the game auto-faces you in the direction of your opponent.

 As for the PVP bugs and imbalances... it's hard to believe this game was in beta for...what? 15 months?  I'm averaging 6+ bug submissions a day and that's not including issues with quests or art.  The things people are bitching about like problems with Tab targeting, flight masters crashing your client etc are mere inconveniences that will eventually be fixed some time into release... that combat engine though... it's going to ensure the game hovers around 300-500k for its entire life and never makes it into the big time.  It's simply not fun enough to draw in casuals console players like WOW did nor is it responsive or complex enough to entice hardcore skilled PVPers.  It's a sort of middle of the road, dumb, spammable PVP like EQ and DAOC were.  Honestly you'd rate it below WOW which was released in 04 or Guildwars, Lineage 2, and even UO which is 10 years old but at least was a decent PVP game.  I'd honestly rate it at about Everquest Zek quality in terms of complexity and responsiveness... which isn't great considering that EQ was basically built on a MUD text-based engine from 94 and EQ was released in 1998

You seem to have taken the entire thing personally.  And all their "crying" has made you as cranky yourself as a 2 year old with collic.

If we were talking about server instability or hardware failure due to stress loads... maybe even if we were talking about items disappearing on zoning or continuous server failure causing rollbacks you might have a point.. all par for the course in beta.  But the issue here is login serverlol.  Regardless of all else,  the first rule of Open Beta is to GET TESTERS IN TO TEST.  Anything less is corporate malfeasance... you're burning thousands upon thousands of dollars and not even getting any feedback from testers on the stuff you need to test.  All that hardware and extra staff during a crucial period going to waste, all for an issue that should have already been addressed before you even thought of open beta.

I'm pretty sure neither Mythic nor GOA thought the entire point of Open Beta was to test whether they could keep a straight database on their login server and/or can mail out the proper codes and not "saturate" their beta keys.  Keep in mind that it's not even a question of stress on the login server... simply no one checked the data... since OPEN BETA is to test all the crap that you cant test internally and in Alpha... database management 100% definitely indubitably isn't on that list of "to do" in Open Beta.

I dont have to deal with GOA being in the US, but LOL@U.  Take a page from your own playbook and QQ about QQ.   As someone who's been in dozens and dozens of these, beta (and alpha) is a 2 way street between the contributions of both testers and devs... neither is "giving" anything to the other they're both working together equally towards the same goal.   Only noob testers take the attitude that "it's beta and it's free so dont say nothing about nothing... just kiss their asses."  As a tester you're THERE to CALL OUT the crap as you see it.  Not even being able to log in certainly qualifies as the above.  The most important thing as a beta tester is to comprehend which snafus are unavoidable and which are assfuck retarded/totally unnecessary issues.  You fail.

Originally posted by Bane82

If Jim Lee is no newb to MMORPG's, hasn't he kept much contact on SOE's recent developments? Hasn't he heard about SOE's "management" of not just SWG, but also VG, MxO, EQ2?

You have that backwards.  Jim has been close friends with Brad Mcquaid since the late 90s.  He did the EQ comic for Brad as far back as 2001.  In fact along with Curt Shilling were the most 2 visible early celebrity proponents of MMO

So Jim's involvement with SOE goes back to the late 90s.  Jim also was close to Mcquaid when he moved to Sigil during the development of Vanguard.

But that's the old school ass-kicker in me talking.  Most of you guys probably started playing MMOs in 2006 and never heard of anything before WOW.   Maybe 2-3 smart dudes among the 1000 noobs who read this article actually "got" that FA reference by the writer

In truth Lee is overrated.  He's got an unparalleled mastery of proportions but his drawing is one-dimensional.  His storywork sucks.  His dialogue is laughable and there's 0 evidence he's qualified to be a creative director for an MMO.  HOWEVER there is one hope... it's that in a world were everything is dominated by WOW, and you cannot get a game into development which doesn't begin and end with World of Warcraft as a reference, Jim Lee is an OLD SCHOOL MMOer.  Back in the day of MUDs/EQ each game had a different flavor, were HARDER and much more intelligent than MMOs today.  DCU online is the one game that has a chance to do something different solely based on Jim's expertise with the genre. as opposed to ANOTHER WOW clone.

Originally posted by Agent_X7

 

Originally posted by knives22

I didn't know you guys had high schoolers in your staff.

But seriously, that was probably one of the most poorly written reviews I have read in a while.

Do you consider it "poorly written" because you disagree with it, or because you actually have some point of grammatical contention?

 

 

it's poorly written because it does sound like a high schooler wrote it.  you know those posts on the forums at wow.com where everything is a comparison to some other game they just played or movie they just saw without even a modicum of knowledge or experience with the genre.

"Here's a plot ripped straight from the pages of The Lord of the Rings! The Dwarves and Asura dug too deep"

first of all that's not a "plot" Lord of the Rings isn't about dwarves digging into Moria, it's just something that happened in the course of the story.   and of course it's not as if  the idea of dwarves living in massive chambers under mountains hasn't been a stable of fantasy literature for 100 years...  "OMG THERE ripping of WOW lol.  OMG LOTR keke.  WOW lol my tank should be like 300 "

And let's just forget that in the BOOK the dwarves are not the ones who release Balrog, it's something peter jackson added for the movies... but let's just call the movie the book... if you've seen the movie it's the same thing... you can just say you read the book

His comments on the graphics are just as LOL hilarious.  Was there a new engine for this expansion no one knows about?  He's complaining the graphics look the same as prior publishes of GW... "but but but I sat here a hole year!  I want new stuffs" NM that technologically there's only so much LOGICALLY you can do with teh same engine, he's been sitting here at my computer and the graffix are meh.

"This one time I saw Hellgate, and it was cool.  And this one time I saw a video of CONAN on youtube and that looked awesome I wish this game could be like that.  this sucks"

That's about what this review read like...

why are all the idiots posting?

first of all, guildwar is an ALL AMERICAN game. it's made in Washington by 3 guys from Blizzard who made battlenet, warcraft 2/3, starcraft and world of warcraft.

fyi, NCsoft is GW's PUBLISHER. a publisher doesn't make the game, they're primarily responsible for logistics: hiring trucks to move boxes to your mall, doing advertising, pressing the disks, and funding. saying something retarded about NCsoft's games being same is like refusing to play a game bought from walmart because you didnt like some game you bought there earlier. it's ignorance. there's no other way to put it.

as for wanting a mmpog that's real-time. retarded. simply there is no technology to support this. why dont you bitch that you want a 3D game that lets you have electrodes attached to your head so you can see the game in your head and not use your hands. why dont you wish for some more crap that is impossible for today's technology

GW is awesome. the hardest thing is to balance pvp... it's got balance. it rocks