Quote:
Originally Posted by Ephirith
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Difficults manifests itself differently in WoW than it does in EQ. A lot of EQ's difficulty lies in inconvenience and being unforgiving. If you fuck up and die in EQ, you lose hours of xp and have to find your way back to your corpse from wherever you were bound. When you want to travel, you need to engage another player. When you want to buy or sell nice items, you need to engage another player.
Most classes can't solo, and most things worth doing aren't soloable even by most solo classes.
In World of Warcraft you can have down syndrome and end up 60 in full epics. But beyond that, boss fights in WoW have mechanics beyond "ZOMG zerg the dragon", and pvp has the most potential for difficulty than any other mechanic, ever. Players can think and adapt, and some of them will be smarter or better than you whether you like it or not. I imagine PvE won't really present much of a challenge. Pvp is, by nature, always going to have some challenge.
That said, I don't feel the same nostalgia for vanilla WoW I did for EQ.
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You make a good point about -where- WoW is challenging. At the upper levels! That's another reason that WoW has bred a generation of players that think the game is at the max level.
Classic EQ is challenging all the way from level 1 to max. That's the main large scale difference. As you state, classic EQ has many hard consequences for messing up. It has a lot of repetition too. I think it's undeveloped, especially in the mid-level range and higher. I enjoy the low to mid-level range much more. Thing is, I like corpse runs and all the mechanics in EQ. What I don't like is that they're never developed and grow stale and the penalties become a reminder of its lack of depth. Rather than removing corpse runs and death experience and many of the other things like they did later in EQ's evolution, I think that if someone had taken a good hard look at it all and tried to preserve it while giving players options to overcome plus bonus, it could have worked.
The #1 problem with classic EQ is it didn't reward a player for doing a successful corpse run or surviving a colossal train or successfully managing 3 adds while surviving with just a sliver of hitpoints remaining. Classic EQ has a lot of non-linear challenge that derives from its aggro and pathing and kiting mechanics, but since it doesn't reward you for doing those things successfully and instead rewards you for camping the same spot over and over and over again, it fails to realize its potential. The fun in classic EQ was not in camping the same spot over and over again to reduce dying and/or corpse runs and/or the unknown, the fun in classic EQ was despite itself. It would have been a much better game if it had a viable method to reward players who actually adventured and died and recovered their corpses, rather than penalizing them irregardless. Understandably, since these things were non-linear, it's hard to test them and to figure out what kind of reward they deserve. But figuring it out is worth it since non-linear gaming offers an answer to repetition in emergent gameplay.
Classic EQ encouraged us to avoid the unknown to stick with familiar camps. The problem is that when it became an equation it lost all its dynamism. Camping is the worst kind of fun of all!
When I say dynamism I mean adds, kiting, corpse runs, dying, trains, etc. Those kinds of things added variety to what otherwise would have been a very drab game. But it needed more to make it work.
Basically, EQ "died" when it became about the camping and the game was too well figured out. Maybe if the camps had moved around it would have helped. But I'm not fooling myself. This problem is complex. I also believe that the amount of experience players lose in the higher levels becomes detrimental to taking on risks and exploring. So rather than having some courage, players will mn/max and be too cautious and make the game boring by doing the same things. If the amount of experience lost was somehow reduced or they could gain it back by completing certain things plus bonus, it would encourage them to tackle more challenges. This is the exact reason children don't play cops and robbers with real guns. Real guns would be too detrimental.
The mistake many modern mmorpgs make is to remove the non-linear aspects like trains, corpse runs, aggro-chaining, kiting, open-world zones and so on. Obviously, they do this to better control the variables so that players are rewarded correctly and the risk/reward system is not sabotaged, but the problem is that it reduces emergent gameplay and increases repetition and without large amounts of new content it collapses.