Luclin had some nice things, but it was the first and biggest step towards the downfall. I don't care about the updated graphics, it's not as if EQ could have kept going with the original graphics if it wanted to be competive with other games coming out. I can even get past the horrible and unfinished lore and how weird and un-EQish the zones and mobs were, though I still think Ssra was one of the best raids in the history of the game. AAs was a good concept, although I disliked the near-unlimited nature of it and prefer how they did it in EQ2. However, Luclin had two huge problems:
1) It was the first of many steps toward the utter removal of the sould of EQ. Nexus scions, the bazaar, basically the way it made the game world less real and meaningful. These two things alone did not have a huge impact on the game, but they went on and on with each expansion, adding PoK, assembly-line instanced dungeons in LDoN, maps and armor dye and completely unimpressive content in LoY, and eventually stated to produce expansions seemingly with a random content generator from GoD and onwards. It basically set in motion the progression toward the theme park style of MMORPG, the model that WoW has perfected because that game is meant to be that way, but the model that destroyed Everquest because it wasn't. EQ was about living in the world of Norrath, how the game world made sense (for a video game, anyway) and how every aspect of the game promoted community and socialization. Suddenly you could travel and trade without interaction, and while these two things alone had a relatively minor impact on the game at first, it slowly but surely impersonalized the game and changed the atmosphere for the worse.
2) Whoever came up with the bane weapons and key grinds needs to be drowned. That timesink was so obscenely ridiculous, so far beyond what a guild should have to go through to see the game's content, and had absolutely nothing to do with skill or diligence. Countless guilds stagnated and perished not because they weren't good enough for the content but because they couldn't get everyone to spend hundreds of hours acquiring access to it. It was absurd and completely unreasonable. Access to content should be limited by your ability to defeat it. If there should be a key/flag/attunement thing at all, it should be something that takes a reasonable amount of time and a guild effort, not endlessly camping trivial things for 0.1% drop rate shards and crap like that.
Other than those two things, Luclin did not kill EQ, it was just one of many steps in the wrong direction. And it wasn't the amazing act of brilliance and beauty that the first three eras were, it was merely decent.
|