Quote:
Originally Posted by heartbrand
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Still strikes me as bizarre the Luclin/PoP hatred.
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i don't know why it's so surprising. SoL and PoP marked a pretty profound shift in the design philosophies of the game. lots of flavorful game elements were removed or trivialized because they were too inconvenient, such as travel time; trading/selling; and evil/good factions. zone progression was streamlined so that 50% to 75% of the old world zones were completely and shamelessly bypassed--why waste time in a "subpar" area when CB is just two loading screens away? the graphics upgrades had higher poly counts but were pretty ugly aesthetically. it also created this really awkward visual discrepancy between certain zones/models, because they never went back and re-did the old zones.
SoL/PoP was also around the time EQ's engine was really starting to show its age. animations were stiff and awkward, controls were rudimentary, clipping was terrible, and the UI was dreadful. going from EQ to WoW, it was almost mind blowing to me just how terrible EQ's UI and gameplay really were.
Classic EQ was far from perfect, and had a lot of holes (despite what its many fans might try to argue), and not everything from Luclin forward was terrible. still, SoL represented a key divergence from the "old style" that was maintained from Classic->Kunark->Velious. it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone why fans of the original game draw the line at Luclin.