A different sort of development mentality

[Diggles]

I remember people from WoW in my raiding guild. That's it. If I raided with you, chilled out in Vent with you while we slayed the dragon/lich king/undead dragon, and we interacted, I know you. If I met you in a battleground and you said "thx for heals lets do another match" i have no idea who you are

[Tokai Saikutsu]

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

No lol, I meant I started playing EvE when the population was maxxin around 2000 players, that was around 2003. Pretty much kept to myself as a pirate war deccer ore thief although I founded Privateers.

Social aspects are really priceless in games imo, EQ felt great because you really needed others to succeed and the xp was slow enough I still remember my good friends from eq 10 years later. EvE was totally different, people I interacted with hated me but I remember them fondly because it was such genuine hate. I hardly remember anyone from wow. . .

Lol nice, i was helping an alliance against Privateers in a high sec war. Fun times scaring the n00bs when a battle rages at multi gates. [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[stormlord]

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

Today I went out and bought a brand new pc, a year ago my motherboard blew up and due to a lack of decent online games I didnt feel it necessary to get a new pc as I have a laptop for non-game related computing. Last week I started playing EQ1, a 12 year old, horrid graphics (by todays standards) game via project1999.

It strikes me as strange that such an old game would attract the approximately 400 to 900 I see online every day, strange that of all the offerings available online with their cutting edge graphics, instances, ease of play, fast leveling and microtransactions an old game like eq1 would be the trigger to make me go out and buy a 1k+ pc for gaming.

I think its pretty unlikely Im that out of the ordinary which makes me ask the following questions - why are developers not picking up on the elements of eq1 that made eq as addictive to some players (like me) as a high quality gram of coke? Why are developers so obsessed with the wow model. While its easy to see the attraction of 11 million casual players, its a lot harder to develop a game to poach some of those players from wow than it is to attract players who are not as easily pleased with content that wow offers anf who are looking around for something more challenging.

So why are there no EQ1 type games out there?

Well, to start with, a lot of things in EQ are just plain outdated, bugged, and/or not favored by most players. So I'm afraid to say that either you have nostalgia or you're part of a minority population.

In modern MMORPGs, there's a lot more hand-holding than in EQ. This is mostly because MMORPGs have become more mainstream. It used to be that it was only the computer geeks who bought computers and then only the extreme nerds would play games of this sort. Back then they would pay on a per-hour basis, so it was quite expensive. If they were smarter then they might play on a local area network. The rest would just play solitaire or something. But it did not remain that way. Costs came down, the internet came into being, people educated themselves and computers started to appear in almost every home. From then on, it wasn't just the nerds and technical-minded that were playing these games. It was the mom and pops, the kids, the over-worked and the people who could barely start up windows without calling a technical support service for help.

Regarding the hand holding, I'll agree with you. I don't like the hand-holding, either. However, modern MMORPGs improve on a -lot- of other things. The user interface, the graphics, voice-overs for NPCs, more interactive environments, more feedback and new features. Bottom line, the weight of these other things increasingly draws people like you and me to them. Innovation will inevitably win.

There're MMORPGs that're more like EQ, they're just not common and none of them are commercial giants.

Here're a few MMORPGs I keep an eye on (not in any particular order):
http://www.dawntide.net/
http://www.fallenearth.com/landing/
http://www.linkrealms.com/
http://www.wurmonline.com/
http://www.eveonline.com/background/
http://www.xsyon.com/features
http://www.atitd.com/
http://www.ryzom.com/en/

This one used to be interesting, not sure if it's now:
http://www.uoherald.com/

I tend to like Sandboxy MMORPGs, btw. Therre're many others out there. Some are asian.

This sums up sandbox MMORPGs fairly well:
http://tobolds.blogspot.com/2011/01/...x-mmorpgs.html

A lot of people confuse things in EQ with How things should be. They don't understand how bugged and ill-thought many of the things in EQ are. These people need to understand that making RPGs is complex. You can never get it right no matter how many times you do it. Additionally, these kinds of things evolve and change in response to trends and technology. For example, many of them blame Sony for adding POK books. They think that Sony added the books because they wanted to make the game easy or something. This is partially incorrect. What happened is that, over the years, EQ added more and more zones. It also became top-heavy. The numbers of new incoming players continued to shrink. All these things combined to make traveling MORE difficult. So when Sony added POK books, they weren't actually making the game easier, they were just balancing it. Now, Sony really did have a mission to steal players from WoW, in many cases, but this example is not necessarily one of them. So, you see, it's easy to mistake a design alteration that's purely technical in nature for something completely different. None of this addresses HOW Sony did things, which may or may not be smart. My only point is to say that players attach spurious meaning to things.