[Opinion] EQ Next - Game Changers/Breakers

[Gadwen]

An MMO with a truly dynamic world would be amazing, I always wanted to see an MMO where the landscape would change and cities/forts etc would change hands and players could play parts in wars that broke out.

Ignoring the technical aspects, I don't really know how well a game that allowed those kind of significant changes to take place in the world would do. Let's say Player A and his guild help the Dwarves overthrow the Troll city. I know it sounds awesome, but when player B spent the last 2 weeks trying to finish a quest in that Troll city right before it got taken over, well there is going to be some anger there.

Now sure, this could be avoided by making those cities and forts meaningless cosmetic lumps in the landscape, but that would take all the fun out of the battle for the city to begin with.

Ultimately, I think people just want what they are comfortable with. People LOVE logging into this server and seeing Kelethin, or Freeport looking exactly the same as it was when they first logged in 14 years ago. Many of us were infuriated by the changes they made when they overhauled zones and let the Froglocks take their city back. Now imagine this happening constantly, I just don't know how well it would go over with todays average MMO gamer.

[Jerin]

I don't care how large this sandbox world is going to be, they need to
put the kibosh on Translocators and Plane of Knowledge/Nexus type zones.

Druids and wizards should be the only way to travel long distances.
Or Boats that you have to wait for.



EQ Next needs to be hard...which it wont be

[Ahldagor]

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

An MMO with a truly dynamic world would be amazing, I always wanted to see an MMO where the landscape would change and cities/forts etc would change hands and players could play parts in wars that broke out.

Ignoring the technical aspects, I don't really know how well a game that allowed those kind of significant changes to take place in the world would do. Let's say Player A and his guild help the Dwarves overthrow the Troll city. I know it sounds awesome, but when player B spent the last 2 weeks trying to finish a quest in that Troll city right before it got taken over, well there is going to be some anger there.

Now sure, this could be avoided by making those cities and forts meaningless cosmetic lumps in the landscape, but that would take all the fun out of the battle for the city to begin with.

Ultimately, I think people just want what they are comfortable with. People LOVE logging into this server and seeing Kelethin, or Freeport looking exactly the same as it was when they first logged in 14 years ago. Many of us were infuriated by the changes they made when they overhauled zones and let the Froglocks take their city back. Now imagine this happening constantly, I just don't know how well it would go over with todays average MMO gamer.

Darkfall man

[TarukShmaruk]

Hell I think most of us would love to see a remake of EQ1 with new graphics - stylized after the original graphics (ie. a bit cartoony as to have personality yet good performance) and 50/50 split on old vs new in terms of features.

Make that sucker F2P - a model proven to be highly successful with MMOs and in some cases done very well - and you don't even have to compete with WoW anymore, you're just raking in cash in your own little segment of the market.

Nostalgia has been a *proven* winner in our generation.

If anyone wants an example of the kind of remake I'm talking about - look at the new XCOM:Enemy Unknown game. Fantastic job of blending old concepts with the modern age and having a fantastic game that captures the essence of the original.

Dynamic world

This never turns out as fun as it sounds. It will all boil down to "oh, the dwarves won this zone today? dammit, I needed to kill the orcs" and it gets old pretty quickly.

[Kiwaukee]

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

I don't care how large this sandbox world is going to be, they need to
put the kibosh on Translocators and Plane of Knowledge/Nexus type zones.

Druids and wizards should be the only way to travel long distances.
Or Boats that you have to wait for.

EQ Next needs to be hard...which it wont be

I didn't mind the Nexus much at all, because you still had to wait and it made sense with the lore of the combine. How else were we supposed to get to the moon?

Having books on the ground that instantly transport you anywhere and back just for the sake of convenience is garbage.

[Alawen]

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

I don't care how large this sandbox world is going to be, they need to
put the kibosh on Translocators and Plane of Knowledge/Nexus type zones.

Druids and wizards should be the only way to travel long distances.
Or Boats that you have to wait for.



EQ Next needs to be hard...which it wont be

I agree with you about the first part, but I think even druid and wizard transportation is way too easy. If the mechanic is in the game at all, I think it should take an elaborate ritual by a large number of players to open a portal, and the portal should have a limited duration depending on the number and their cumulative power.

I'd like to see that as a mechanic in other magic as well--multiple casters combining powers to create large effects.

[Gadwen]

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

I agree with you about the first part, but I think even druid and wizard transportation is way too easy. If the mechanic is in the game at all, I think it should take an elaborate ritual by a large number of players to open a portal, and the portal should have a limited duration depending on the number and their cumulative power.

I think something like this would ultimately be even easier, people would keep a portal open all the time at every major city or wherever large numbers of players gather.

[Growlers]

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

I'd like to see an MMO that puts the RP back into MMORPG.

I'm not talking about people writing up elaborate backstories to their characters or speaking in ye olde english or whatnot. No no. I'm talking about removing the focus on esport PvP and PvE, about taking the some of the harsh reality aspects from PNP RPGs and from survival horror games and weaving them into an MMO.

On p99 you park your dwarf cleric and your ogre shaman and your iksar monk in tube room for 3 weeks at a time, logging in one at a time as needed to get the pixels from king. Your characters are living in a wet, slimy, damp, dark 10x10 room with a goo waterfall in it, right around the corner from their enemies. There's no RP there!

I want to see characters who are soft-capped on playtime because the characters need rest, because the characters don't get much rest when they are sleeping on slimy stone floors in the bottom of a dungeon with their enemies patrolling just feet away. I want characters to stay ingame when offline, obeying scripts from the player, etc. I want druids to plant trees that grow into a forest, gear to decay (but that not be a OMG HORRIBLE thing because it is designed to decay and be repaired and replaced and that's no big thing), weight (and volume, omg) limits to exist and be meaningful, PvP actions to have reprecussions with NPCs and PCs alike, etc.


Might be asking for a bit much for this decade, but god knows no MMO is going to convince me to spend a dime on it until a lot of these sorts of things are put into one.

Hell yeah man!

[Jerin]

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

I'd like to see that as a mechanic in other magic as well--multiple casters combining powers to create large effects.

That would be pretty awesome

[webrunner5]

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

One scenario I've always wanted to play out is following a nomadic race, picking off their scouts and stragglers until they were croaked. I'd also like to see off-road travel a lot more difficult and dangerous than following maintained pathways. I'd also like to see mob wars that change the terrain and population. Maybe the dwarves are good and sick of the trolls and they kill every last one of them and rebuild on top of the smoldering ruins.

I think the way forward for MMOs is more realism, more detail, less clunky things. I don't want to know about the server load or any of that. I want the world to feel really huge and full, not endless flyover space that's nothing but an inconvenience. If I'm crossing from one side of the world to the other, I want danger and adventure along the way. If we agree to meet in the middle, we should both have things to talk about when we get there. I think convenience is grossly overrated.

I have a very poorly formed idea of devs having tools to implement things organically, too. Does anyone else remember the mindless wars between Southshore and Tarren Mill before there were battlegrounds in WoW? That happened by itself and it should have been built up in real time.

Forward, not rehash.

I thought WoW was pretty cool in the beginning. But as you got higher that flying crap for what seemed like 10 minutes to get back to a zone sucked big time. Was not a fan of not being able to twink like hell either. But I like your ideas.