so i have been exploring

[magnetaress]

eq2 neriak...

every building is the same its all reskinned

the only cute place is queen 'christ'anos palace which has mansevants and faeries

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there is no maidens fancy anywhere that i can obviously tell

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the cool waterfall with the eye is an afterthought

i mean it has some charm but its like 1% the charm of EQ 1 and I can see how modern 'design' and 'production' have really hurt the lore aspect of it

the only secret i could find seemed kind of intentional and it was for chocolate chip cookies above the rogues guild

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apparently all the vampires in the FQ of the FQ are trans people competing for biggest thigh gap. seems like the designers were more interested in those guys than the dork elves

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I could find some more compelling dark elf, tier'dal, evil lore on second life, in fact i once visited 3 towns there that kinda blew anything online/mmo/'game' out of the water but those were peoples crusty old rp villages were they wierded out with other lonely 40 yr old males

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oh and there are absolutely precious tidbits of preciously cute dialog sprinkled about, and a theatre for the bards that dark elves can be now, that was ok, the theatre play almost ... almost... needed some more depth and a better 'flow', but the building and the 'projection' on the back wall was a cool concept and worked...it explained all the faeries

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its clear the raw fresh art talent went to vanguard and then got scarfed up by wow and made to capitulate to 'real production rules in order to ship on time'. Vanguard had some tasty artistry. For a late in the game MMO churned out. It didn't follow the rules. Much like EQ1 was an adventure in making a new kind of game and it didn't have any rules to follow. Redundant mazes in the city where totally OK to spend hours and hours on making.

For any MMO to be succesfull u have to let the level designers and artists have absolutely free reign to just go apeshit, and not allow them to copy, rotate, and repaste the same stuff, and drop a different skin on it. Look to the quake community for level designers, they make visually compelling and interesting flow maps through multiple vectors.