New Player Experience

[lumin]

First of all, I'm new to EverQuest in general. I was never around for the original game back in 1999, although I've always wanted to play it. About a year ago I heard a nostalgic podcast about someone's experience with the game back in the day and thought it sounded amazing.

I've always been a huge fan of hardcore MMOs. I love the ones that punish you, and help you feel like you're in a real sandbox, not being led along by the hand. The idea of losing all your equipment upon death and all of the other fun quirks of the game sounded very cool to me.

So my mistake was going out and sub-ing to SOE's Live EQ. As you all know, the old-school game experience is gone on the Live servers. This disappointed me, so when I heard about Project 1999 I thought I'd give it a try. I even went out and bought the old Ruins of Kunark Prima Strategy Guide and the Maps of Myrst Atlas on eBay since I love collecting old game documents.

I've only played for a few days, but am having a blast so far. Almost everything seems to be what everyone said it was back in 1999. I do have a few questions though, as I've been doing a lot of research on what the old-school game was like, I'd like to know why those features are not here.

1. Was there an in-game atlas/map in the original EQ? If not, did this come out during Velious (I'm using the Velious UI)? I was under the impression that, since this is emulating the old-school game, it wouldn't have the built-in auto map. This sort of renders the "get heading" skill useless.

2. Is the Velious UI supposed to be completely transparent, or did I do something wrong when installing it? It's just very difficult to read the text on the menus (changing the opacity doesn't do anything).

3. When will ships be working? If I'm not mistaken, this is one of the best parts about the old-school game. I've heard that it originally took up to a half hour sitting on a boat, chatting with and meeting new friends. This sounds like a "must-have" feature if Project 1999 is to emulate the original game. I would be disappointed if it isn't, at some point, worked into the game.

4. When I rolled up a character the first time, I believe I had the "tutorial" button pressed, but there was no tutorial and I still got the "Entering Mines of Glooming Deep" message. This should probably be fixed.

Anyway, I think that's all for now. Overall I'm impressed at how much work has been put into this project and thank the devs for the great work they have done so far. Looking forward to Kunark and Velious!

[Yellow]

most of the issues you mentioned are client related if im not mistaken and you cannot mess with a client because that would be breaking the legality part of this server.

i would like to see the boats in the game along with the guild war feature :]

[Fawqueue]

Questions 1, 2, and 4 are all issues with the client that is used. The titanium client includes all 25 expansions, and many of the non-classic things you'll see in-game are just physically built-in and either cannot, or are overly difficult to remove. As for the boats, I believe they aren't working correctly on any of the emulated servers. So I wouldn't expect to see them for a while, but honestly...the translocators are even more of a hassle to pay attention for than the boats were. So you're getting an even more punishing experience now than you would have on live.

[km2783]

Getting to Timorous Deep via the "evil" route out of Oasis once Kunark launches will be... interesting using Translocators. I can't remember if there are guards on the dock the raft or whatever drops you off at, but I remember jumping off of it and swimming to shore for some reason as a good character hehe.

[Yellow]

yeah the devs will prolly do something to keep that sort of thing from killing us all hah

[Trojanman]

I remember back in 2000 when i first played EQ the boats were not working in live until a few weeks later.

[Yellow]

hmm ive never heard of this any confirmations?

[Bumamgar]

The maps only work in cities or newbie zones. Once you venture forth beyond those safe areas, you won't have a map and will be glad for max sense-heading. This is a client issue and it's not really possible to disable them. That said, if you want, you can always delete all the .txt files in your Maps folder :)

the UI has a variety of settings for transparency and when to fade in and out of being transparent. You may have to use the right-click menu on each window and set it's transparency settings individually. I can't remember for sure.

As others have stated, working boats are pretty much impossible. The reason for this is that we're using a post-DirectX9 client, and even Verant/SOE admitted that old-school boats can't work with this client and replaced them all with translocators. The only EMU I know of with working boats is Shards of Dalya, but that is because they use a much older (pre-DirectX9) client.

That said, the devs have done a good job with the translocators, by having them spawn and despawn on a schedule that matches when the boats used to come to the docks back in 1999 on live. So although you don't get to enjoy the ride on a boat itself, inter-continental travel is still fairly slow and arduous without finding a player to port you. This is one case where the 'spirit' of 1999 is kept alive, even if the actual details are different.

[km2783]

I remember back in 2000 when i first played EQ the boats were not working in live until a few weeks later.

I rode the boat to Butcherblock many times in 1999

As others have stated, working boats are pretty much impossible. The reason for this is that we're using a post-DirectX9 client, and even Verant/SOE admitted that old-school boats can't work with this client and replaced them all with translocators. The only EMU I know of with working boats is Shards of Dalya, but that is because they use a much older (pre-DirectX9) client.

That said, the devs have done a good job with the translocators, by having them spawn and despawn on a schedule that matches when the boats used to come to the docks back in 1999 on live. So although you don't get to enjoy the ride on a boat itself, inter-continental travel is still fairly slow and arduous without finding a player to port you. This is one case where the 'spirit' of 1999 is kept alive, even if the actual details are different.

I just hope the Oasis to TD Translocator drops people off a ways away from that little outpost for baddies :D Also, how lazy of SOE to not update the boats for the new clients.

[Yellow]

That said, the devs have done a good job with the translocators, by having them spawn and despawn on a schedule that matches when the boats used to come to the docks back in 1999 on live. So although you don't get to enjoy the ride on a boat itself, inter-continental travel is still fairly slow and arduous without finding a player to port you. This is one case where the 'spirit' of 1999 is kept alive, even if the actual details are different.

Yeah and the wonderfull part is there is a bit more struggle for us Evil chars thent he goods/nuets due to locations of the translocators, which is fine by me i just like complaining about how i have it just a wee bit worse. xD

[Bumamgar]

I remember back in 2000 when i first played EQ the boats were not working in live until a few weeks later.

Old-world boats were always problematic on live. They were working on-and-off throughout 1999 and 2000, but this was during the 'admit nothing' dark days of EQ when the devs refused to acknowledge bugs, so players were forced to simply deal with broken boats (ie: no translocaters... The boats were in game, even if they consistently dumped you into the ocean instead of zoning you, or got you killed by cyclops etc..) It wasn't till a full month after the DirectX9 client update that SOE finally admitted that old-world boats were broken and couldn't be fixed, and replaced them with translocators. (April 24, 2004)

[lumin]

Could someone explain how translocators work exactly? Are they just periodically spawning NPCs? How often do they show up? Do they just instantly teleport you to the other continent for free?

[Malrubius]

Could someone explain how translocators work exactly? Are they just periodically spawning NPCs? How often do they show up? Do they just instantly teleport you to the other continent for free?

http://www.project1999.org/forums/showthread.php?t=1002

[Yellow]

wow so is a blessing thta boats don't work huh hahahah

[Alifeyl]

It's just not quite as much fun to yell "TRANSLOCATOR" as it was to yell "BOAT!!!" :p