Regarding Brad,  heard rumors of the addiction; but not the extramarital affair.

Ok, who is Chris Shilling?  Is he working on AoC or something?  I suppose I will google this immediately after posting... :P

/edit oo I found some info on his fantasy-mmo named Copernicus, which is slated for release in 2010.

http://www.joystiq.com/tag/copernicus/

Originally posted by Arclan

I've thought long and hard about this months ago.   To know the answer, you must ask what core emotions and needs did EQ1 fulfill in the millions of players who played it, especially early on.  A new game needs to simply stir those emotions and perhaps new ones.

Fear, Wonder, Excitement, Comradery, Accomplishment, Happiness, Sadness, Curiosness, Anticipation, Anger.

It's late (12:30am) so I'm tired.   Please add to this list.

As someone put it so well, happiness is not simply the constant supply of pleasant things.  It is the change in emotional state that matters.  Going from sad to happy is a much bigger emotional effect than going from happy to happier.  EQ1 stirred so many emotional states, I think.  Current games just don't do that.  For one, you know what to expect with MMOs; Two, mmos are so easy now that most of the emotional range isn't even touched upon. 

Excitement:  underconned mobs, wandering mobs, changing zones (i.e., in the daytime, the forest has low level bumblebees, at night it has high level undead)

Comradery:  the world outside the towns is so dangerous, that grouping is wise

Accomplishment:  levels and good gear takes time, effort, and maybe risk.  See "Fear" category above.  No pain, no gain.  Without "fear", every achievement seems like a gimme.

Happiness:  You have to love your character and love the game world.  Community helps.  There should be beauty and bounty in the game world, meaning there should be happy places of mirth and revelry, bountiful farms.  Food and drink need to have in-game impact and be a necessity to your character.

Sadness:  Areas of poignant beauty that tell tales of bygone times.  Ruins of an elf or dwarf kindgom perhaps (Note: Not like EQ2 where EVERYTHING was in ruins).

Curiosity:  The yellow exclamation points above quest NPC's have to go.  Every town shoud have some hidden passages, hidden areas, and a few undiscovered quests.  Each time you enter a town, you should feel like you have never really completely uncovered all its mysteries.  Perhaps this should be true of every zone.  (I know, I never completely explored or understood Kithicor Forest in EQ1).

Anticipation:  Eagerness to see what others (in guild or just friends) are up to when you log on.  "Where's the fight tonight?  Mistmoore?  Nagena?"

Anger:  And Grief, the sting of dying or falling victim to some fool's train, is a must to really feel alive in a game world.  Otherwise, the game world feels like it's on training wheels with an in-game customer service rep every 10 yards to ensure folks "play nice."   Like the scaling of a popular mountain side during a public free-climbing event, our mistakes have to put others at risk as well as their mistakes put ourselves at risk.  We "share" the game world and our actions impact others.  Just as we can stop and heal someone to keep them from losing a fight with a monster, our overconfidence could pull a train which could disrupt several players and bring their ire down upon us.

What I would add to all of this is that sometimes the things folks gripe about being in a game are the same things they miss the most when a game has been "idiotized" (i.e., removed of trains, of player impact outside your group, etc...).

Awesome breakdown.  I like the game world on training wheels, lol.  Great analogy to climbing; our mistakes put others at risk, and vice versa.   These things make the game world real.

Now if I can figure out a way to post without my auto sig spam, that'd be great.

About the fear of death, I think you are more or less right.

However, EQ deaths stop scaring me after level 60.  And you can't put enought XP penalty to scare me without driving out 99% of the player base.  Most of my friends where crippled by EQ deaths, which was bad.

I recall having MANY corpses standing by zone-in and refusing an offer for MANY rezs, cause it would have made me OOM and stop my hunting process...and that was in a poor day where I died a lot.  Later on I get a few rez (2 timed out) and I was still not really caring for them...yet I was ending my gaming sessions, so might as well get back some XP so I can work on AAs completely without the need to turn back the XP to levels.

Corpse decay is a bad idea in a Progression game, the need for a CR could be neat, but the corpse decay idea and losing all your earn...bad, bad and bad.  :)  For a player such as me, I already think of a death penalty which would work...a death penalty which would sting...yet would left the casuals not caring at all (you can scare the casuals with debt or xp penalty, that is working indeed for them).

See, for a player such as me, what could make me afraid of dying?  XP lost?  Forget it, to get a significant amount, you ruins the game of 99% of your player base.  Permanent Death?  That is too much for me, I would be too afraid and not playing.  Lifes per month, temporary unable to play my character, now that freaking sting!  You must make sure that a casual cannot runs out of lives, no matter how often he died.  So maybe you can lose a life only once per 3 hours of played session (you still lose XP, maybe extra XP if you can't lose a life).  Now, if you have 20 lifes per month, that mean at LEAST 60 hours of playing the game in the whole month and dying in an "optimal way".  15 hours per week isn't casual.  And it would keep me in check.

See, a death penalty must be scary, yet not crippling.  A tiny debt penalty or XP loss works for most of your players.  Then, for everyone that play a LOT, an amount of lives per month would work.  Of course you would get unending drama and bitching, but that doesn't mean it isn't working.  You could then later on adjust the amount of lives each RACE has, which I find is extremely nice.  A race is weaker, give it more lives.  A race is much stronger than intended, remove it lives.  Also, don't forget, the resurrection spells become incredibly interesting in a lives per month setting, and allow you a LOT of fine tuning, would a rez spells restore a life?  Give it restore it partially (2 rez = 1 life back, or 5 rez = 2 lifes back, or whatever more refined).

The death penalty must sting, there are no question here.  But it can't cripple the players.  If a player which play 60+ hours in a month (most likely 120+ hours if no rez...or 200 hours in the month with the rez taken into account), if this player can't play his favorite character for a week or two where all his lives are refreshed...this sting, yet not cripple.  Maybe he will bitch, maybe he will complains...but I am willing to bet he will be back on the day lives are refreshed.

what would it take?

A complete break from tradition.  You would need a game that was so unlike other games that it would be completely new.   Graphics are nice, but as long as they do not hinder gameplay they don't have to be photo realistic.  And without the game play, a photorealistic game doesn't mean anything.

People grow, learn and evolve, thus so should our games and not just graphically, but in all things.

Soloing should be possible but not the most efficient way of doing things, but there are times when people NEED to solo.

Grouping shouldn't be penalized as much as it has been in more recent games.  I like the way AO did this, where the more time a group spent together, the more of a bonus they got.  Shadowbane was also good, but in a level based game had serious exploitation features (everyone got the full xp whether groupped or solo)

Raiding needs to move on from the 24 person zerg fests to more challenging concepts like needing to split up to accomplish seperate goals that lead to the same end goal.  something other than a mob with 100x hitpoints and a special move or two.  Something other than what can only be done by a selective few.

Now, raiding in and of itself isn't bad.  I was a raid leader in EQ2 and I was in a family guild and most of my raiding was either through them or an alliance of family guilds.   I didn't tollerate the bad attitudes and demeaning speak that is so rife with the stereotypical raiding guild.  We went to have fun.  Just like anything else, raiding can be looked at casually and hardcore.  Or as I like to put it, you have raid guilds and you guilds that raid.  The former is more serious about it and tend to fall into the stereotypical group and the later is more casual, laid back and raid for the fun of it and often with outsiders too.

Something AC did that has been done limitedly is the story line concept, where each month would have an update to the story arc and the world can and would change.  Spawns would move, new creatures show up, etc.  I think this is something that definately ups the replay value of a game.

Questing...  Questing is fine, but questing should be something left upto the players.  I had more fun with my self imposed quests in AC than I ever did with anything I ever did in EQ2/DAoC/etc/

IMO, one of the key things that needs to be there is the removal of a level based system.  UO did this well and there are several PnP games out there that do this exceedingly well as well.  Levels just induce grind and grind is bad.  Games should be fun and progression should be in the story, not the character.  Oh, don't get me wrong, there should be character progression, just not 50-60-100-200 levels of it.  Use a skill system with a set number of points to obtain, but make the increases more than simply level up.  Force people to find others (PC/NPCs) to train them.  Make the skills have a serious diminishing curve to them, so the difference between a 4 skill and a 5 skill isn't as much as that between a 3 skill and a 4 skill.

Make attributes mean something other than how much weight you can carry or how hard you can hit.  Make things like int derive how many skills you easily you can learn skills and wisdom determine how many you can learn.  Make charisma matter in dealing with NPCs or in how many can be in a guild.

Make the world seem real...  again, it doesn't need to be photo realistic, but stationary mobs don't make sense either.  Have the intelligent mobs outside the city have occasional (and seemingly random) raids on the nearby cities.  Have the world designed such that the players have some impact on it.  Nothing irritated me more than places like stormhold in EQ2...  3 years later the same damn undead are in it, even with nearly every qeynosian lowbies killing them regurarly.  How long until we reclaim it???  The world has to be evolving and changing and it needs to be driven by the players.

gah, that's enough for now me thinks :D

Sony has already confirmed that Everquest 3 is a project that will come to market.  They have also stated that Everquest 3 will be much more like the original then their unsuitable name for Everquest 2.

I hope there is an EQ3 in the works.  If it's closer to the design of EQLive than EQ2, then I"m in.

The main thing is they need to keep the old world alive in the next version.  No matter how many expansions or new dungeons pop up, there should always be a reason to take the occasional trip back to Freeport, Halas, Qeynos, or Kelethin (and other starting cities).  Also, the newbie experience needs to always start in a home zone and not in some ethereal tutorial instance.

It is an interesting question though leads to some design questions? For instance,
(i)how do you keep people in a dungeon? (without camping?)
(2)Would dungeons now have to be more like WoW or LDoN in having to be move-move-move dungeons? (ie. moving away from its camp foundations)
(3) How would spells work and what kind of spells would there be? Would they still be appealling after all these fantasy clones?
(4) Is the game revolvant around grouping?
(5) What do you do at the endgame?
(6) Does the game add in item rarities and rare spawns?
(7) How much of the game will lead by quests?
(8) Will there be a death penalty?

These questions aside, I think it'll be true to say that some of the essential appealling aspects would be:

(i) graphically updated areas of the last game
(ii)a grouping emphasis, but not a sole emphasis
(iii) a living, breathing world
(iv) appealling dungeons and interesting areas you want to explore
(v) an indepth but accessible crafting system

Honestly.

Why make another EQ?

Why not re-release the game with just Ruins of Kunark expansion, or Without it.. The beautiful world, that was EverQuest, before the Planes of Power... No instancing, No Binded Equipment, No Auction house, Countless hours spent in East Common Lands shouting WTS, or WTB..

Or just normal EverQuest, Where you would spend days upon days trying to clear the Sky plane, Mindless hours in Hate.. Lord Naggy runs.. Ah I miss it all.

So.. Why not re-release the game? ^^

How I honestly.. Would love that ^^

Originally posted by Chrysaor

Sony has already confirmed that Everquest 3 is a project that will come to market.  They have also stated that Everquest 3 will be much more like the original then their unsuitable name for Everquest 2.

Oh great, there goes another couple of years from my life.

You guys rool!!!!

Anofalye, your raise a VERY interesting possiblity; My only concern is that depending on the timer, I can see a lot of raids failing.  Raids cost a lot of lives; and if suddenly half your raid is locked out, then the raid is guaranteed to fail.  Perhaps that is the way it should be??  Preventing sloppy or "zerg" raids.

Raston, A raid that forces the group to split up to attain its goal?  INCREDIBLE!  A hint of this was probably Dain Frostweaver; as one group had to be in the pit to keep it clear for when Dain banished people there during the fight.  But, take it a step further and require two sophisticated raid targets to be killed within 10 minutes of each other (and guarantee that the same raid force can't get there soon enough).  That's awesome.

pencilrick, I could not agree more !!!

Zurmabik, lots of us have been wanting that very same thing!  Have you posted in the Everquest Forums?  it's in the newbie zone room, under the thread "classic server."