[t0lkien]

Originally Posted by August [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I don't understand the hate towards instanced zones. Just because WoW instanticized the dungeons doesn't mean that it was a bad idea.

This has been talked about elsewhere infinitum and those who don't understand are never going to I don't think. What we are talking about are two fundamentally different game experiences and preferences. Instances change the game from open world to something else. You won't have the frantic spawn competitions you have in EQ, you won't have a contiguous game world. The game experience and the game world is fractured. For many of us, it gamifies things in a bad way. The implications are deep and far reaching and impact every aspect of the gameplay in one way or another (including the community and the economy by the way).

If you like instancing, good for you. But these are two different types of game. I can tell you I hate instancing with a passion and won't play a game that implements it for very long. Instancing is a bad (I would say lazy) tech solution to a tech problem that overrides core gameplay, which is always a bad idea. Gameplay is king. Forcing core aspects of the game in a direction because of tech imperatives just means you didn't think hard enough about the problem, and is an example of why coders should never drive design. True open world is one of the reasons I'm on p99, and one of the reasons why even a 14 year old game is still better than those released in the past few years.

As for EQN, I don't hold out any hope for it. They have already abandoned the original idea of upgrading Classic EQ, thrown everything out, and come up with "novel ideas" that are going to "push the genre" further. For anyone who has been around games for any length of time, that rhetoric is the mark of death. You watch, it's going to be a steaming pile of mediocrity - again. SoE can't make great games. They are the ones who fubared the original EQ after strong arming it from Verant.

So for me it's back to p99 until someone manages to put out a game that isn't polluted by mercenary, clueless business heads and politically, career, security motivated "company men" designers. For an example of what such designers do to great games, see Diable 3.