Quote:
Originally Posted by Aveenia
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Luclin never felt like EQ to me. It just felt off.
I love some aspects of PoP, like the Plane of Nightmare.
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The thing is, Luclin was about half done when it was taken over by a different developer philosophy. You can see what Luclin was supposed to be like by examining its underused zones/lore and also examining EQ2, where the original dev philosophy went to. Luclin was supposed to be about the opposing views of Sanctus Seru and Katta Castellum. It was obviously envisioned as a new factional balance separate from "good vs evil" in vanilla and "dragons vs giants vs a few other people" in Velious.
Had that expansion been finished with that in mind, from a design point of view it probably would have been equal to or better than Velious (but from a play point of view, it wouldn't have even come close thanks to the absurd hp/armor/resists of the mobs in raid zones, turning VT and others into endurance slogs only the masochistic would enjoy, and Luclin was the start of full embracing of tiered stats on itemization, something that did a lot more damage to the game than is generally realized.)
But, it changed. Those people making it that way moved to EQ2 and put that fingerprint on that game instead (Freeport vs Qeynos). Sanctus Seru and Katta both became extremely underutilized (not helped by the fact both were nearly unplayable for many people at release thanks to being unoptimized). Many of the classical elements of the game were undercut by Shadowhaven and the belief that the game was "too hard for casuals". The concept of regional differentiation was lost with the Nexus and the exp fast track (especially Paludal).
Still, between Luclin and PoP the game's endgame had enough content for anyone. That was the second peak of EQ's time in the sun. LDoN was the sign of the lugnuts starting to go missing, an expansion that presented itself as a casual oriented content expansion, but actually was responsible for the far-themepark turn of the game, a precursor of what mmorpg players are stuck in today. The wheels fell off with GoD and pretty much everything from then on was dreck responsible for us pining for a project 1999 in the first place.