EQNext Discussion

[melkortshea]

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

Back in the day, a CR could be a fun extra challenge just as easily as it could be a royal pain in the ass. Players viewed CRs as part of the game to overcome just as much as the encounter that got them killed.

Nowadays players view CRs as nothing but a pain that holds them back from doing the stuff that they think they really want to be doing. But that mindset is mostly due to the fact that a 2-hour CR nowadays really would be impossible. I mean, in classic EQ the only classes that were truly powerless on a CR were warriors and rogues (who didn't want to keep a couple spare weapons in the bank I guess). Casters were at 80% power naked, and even hybrids like paladins and rangers still had pretty potent spells to use even if they weren't doing any killing with their bare fists. But now, when gear is like 90% of your character's power, being naked on a CR is just out of the question... hence players hate the idea of naked, 2-hour CRs and hence CRs in modern MMOs consist of a 15-second run from a graveyard back to an instance where you instantly have your gear on again.


It's just like the mechanics of item decay and permadeath. 99% of players see those terms and freak the fuck out because they can't imagine anything outside of a WoW-like game that suddenly had their epics decaying and their characters permanently dying. But in a game where a 2-hour CR or item decay or even permadeath is contemplated from the start and built into the very framework of the game, those mechanics COULD work just fine. No one flipped their shit in Shadowbane when their armor needed to be replaced eventually because the game was built for that to happen; it didn't take days /played of raiding in order to get a weapon, and that weapon wasn't 100% crucial to your success in the game, so having to go find another weapon when your current one fell apart wasn't a huge deal... in fact it put you out there in the world trying to replace it, resulting in more pvp chances... it required you to protect your city so that your merchants could forge you up a new weapon... etc. And in Eve. Yeah it sucks to get your awesome ship asploded, but it also rocks to asplode your enemy's awesome ship and to have real choices to make between the pros and cons of flying expensive+effective vessels vs. cheap+weaker ones. And the brutal CRs of EQ1 made sense back then. You get the idea (I hope).

I remember one of more intense classic experiences came from a CR. I was playing my Wizard and had just leveled high enough to get the CZ port. I had never been to CZ before and as always when I got a new place to port I would teleport there to check it out.

I ported into CZ and hit some major agro and died. When I spawned at my bind point I also realized that I had de-leveled and couldn't return to get my corpse.

A higher level wizard who was a total stranger to me agreed to port me in to get my corpse. I remember the tense feeling when we ported in and this dude holding off the mobs while I grabbed my gear. He was barely hanging on while I looted and then we both got the hell out of there.

It is was a memorable moment and a prime example on how Corpse Runs can be seen as an accomplishment just as much as killing a named NPC.