What would it take for a new mmo to recapture the feeling of eq?

[Othniel626]

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

1: No instancing - nothing kills a community like instancing.
2: No leashing - knowing a mob will chase you until either you or it die gave a sense of trepidation to making that 50/50 pull.
3: No hand holding/spoon feeding, discovering an obscure item then figuring out what to do with it was part of EQ questing. Personally I hated seeing a bright yellow "!" mark above NPC's then the progression to getting more XP from questing than out fighting on top of that.
4: In general the higher you get the more you grouped be it for that rare spawn/rare drop camp or just plain XP'ing which in turn feed back into that thing called community
5: Respawning naked, nothing made death more challenging than the naked corpse run. It also forged reputations of those that would take the time to help out and those that ignored pleas for help. Once again leading into that fable community thingy.

Without delving into too much of the philosophical/abstract side of it, these things are what make EQ different than most of the other MMOs I've played, especially the tether/respawning naked aspect.

It adds a ton more challenge to people doing at least those two things. Played on an emulator WoW server for a couple of years (never got the live experience), and the tether thing made the game a joke. Oh crap, I pulled 3 dogs, lemme just run 40 feet away, they'll forget everything.

Not to mention all the hand-holding that occurs throughout the entire game in most MMO's. The !'s and ?'s above NPC's heads kinda kill the immersion and mostly lead to me skipping entire conversations because I knew it would just tell me what to do and send me to the right person on the map afterwards.

Lastly, as much as EQ has it's grindy parts for levels, it's got close to 10 different places (less at some levels) where I can go to get exp. It doesn't boil down to running heroics on a list of 4 different dungeons for your level that you can insta-teleport to if you queue into Group Finder.