Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[nenjin]

I don't want to let my glasses get too rose-tinted about EQ; a lot of what happened in the game is what people now would call bad design and inconsistent, buggy performance. Back then it was revolutionary though (along with DAoC, UO, ect...) and players worked around, with or through the quirks to arrive at ways to deal with content that the devs never foresaw.

And then Verant did something very few companies today do: they let the weirdness and somewhat buggy things stay. So there was a real sense of "yeah, we kind of created the game as it's played today" from EQ players, because we were responsible for devising the mechanics that all players operated by. Feign Death pulling as an example. Or like, learning how to pull without aggroing things through the walls and floors was an art form, not because Verant planned it that way, but because their code was pretty rocky. But in being rocky and quirky and somewhat buggy....players took it upon themselves to make it work by understanding the game and it was taken as a challenge, not as "fuck this buggy, imperfect system."

And then WoW rolled in and provided people with this highly structured but very polished and consistent game play model....and people traded some freedom for a different, more highly managed experience. EQ1 was designed around MUDs in spirit and the game really felt that way. And while things like sharing a dungeon with 30 other people led to TONS of problems, it also made for a dynamic, living experience. Basically no content was experienced inside a sterile instance and that gave the world a believability and life that you only really see in the "open" zones of games today.

[Sonlirain]

Text.

You probably have NO idea how much nostalgia you have wrought upon me.
I never played EQ myself but what you typed in just reeks of early World of Warcraft emulator software.
God i miss those days when both horde and the alliance fought over the right to kill Ragnaros in the middle of MC.

As for EQ2.
I guess EQ "vets" decided the game was too simplified while the "newbs" saw it as a less polished WoW.
This and some odd ideas http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG36yC2e5QY&feature=g-logo-xit combined with going more towards WoW with every patch that probably turned away the remaining "vets".

[darklord92]

I actually liked the idea of integrating RP more into the game. Though i can see why that feature alone can pop up with a fair amount of rage on eq2's own forum as it was there E3 presentation, I know it feels big but, hell a voice chat is not going to cut an E3 presentation I can understand why the fans are mad about that.

[fenrif]

I played EQ1 at launch for a while, and EQ2 too. Enjoyed both games immensely, though for different reasons.

One of the most enjoyable things about EQ1 for me was that there was a lot of mechanical gameplay mechanics that didn't relate to combat. Stuff like wizard spells that were just fun little nonsense things. Enchanters had a spell that made them look like a random nearby piece of furnature or item. Necromancers could cast a spell to see through their pets eyes I think. Each race had it's own language which you learned by speaking and hearing that language. You could get seriously drunk, which would make your character sway and distort your vision... Which caused me at least one death in that Wood Elf city suspended way above ground in the trees (Kelethin I think?)

Also, and it was probobly because EQ was released before data mining and such were a big thing, but the world really felt like it rewarded exploration. All the zones had loads of hidden secret things to find, and you could seriously spend hours just wandering around a city finding secret passages and quests.

EQ2 defintly leaned more away from it's MUD roots and lost a lot of what made EQ1 unique, which is a shame. It was still a really fun game though. Probobly the best thing about it is all the different races you could play. Not enough games let you be frog people or ratmen.

I've never really seen much hate for it though? I wasn't aware that was a thing. :S

[darklord92]

I've never really seen much hate for it though? I wasn't aware that was a thing. :S

best check out the official forums then, it seems very hostile from what I've read namely any topic about soemote right now is filled with both rage at the devs and conflict between hardcore raiders and rpers.

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/forums/list.m

[fenrif]

You get that if you go on any MMO forums though. Any game in general really? I just checked out the general forum and it didn't really seem that bad at all? Though apparently theres something going on with the pre-paid payment cards with people not getting the amount they payed for, judging by thread titles at least (I'm not masochistic enough to inflict a game-specific MMO forum on myself).

[darklord92]

I believe one of the other issues was soe removing single month gold accounts from the store because it can be abused on discount days and triple sc days. But i digress from topics of another forum, I've just seen so much disapproval about it, it's probably just a vocal minority than, a lot of the people I've met generally seem friendly in the game, and the chat isn't regularly spammed with rage hmmm..