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Metrohunter posted:also jfc these EQ1 stories are making my sock drawer overflow with poop just from reading them I recall a time when my guild was trying to clear one of the planes, I can't remember which, and I went to bed at like 10 PM cause I was a young teenager. School was out the next day, and I got up and we were still clearing trash, so I was able to get in on the god kill. They had someone holding loot on corpses (with accounts shared between guildies so they could log in and take over with the loot holding without risking the corpse decaying) and had been waiting to see if any people who went to bed wanted any of it. Oh, yeah, EQ had it so if you looted the corpse and didn't move away from it, no one else could loot it, because after you looked it had a timer to where it would become open loot, and then the corpse would just disappear if you left it alone long enough. So people would be designated to hold the corpses so the other groups could get loot from it or whatever, because it had no loot system. You just went to the corpse and clicked on the poo poo you wanted and it bound to you. Sometimes you'd have loot ninjas hovering around the corpse, waiting to click it to steal loot when the master looter backed away to let someone else take an item they won by /random 1 100. Most loot wasn't tradeable either, at least from the raids; that may have changed later on but I know in Kunark and Velious it was like that. You had people designated to hold the corpses, as well as people who would just pull monsters or drag corpses back to where people could be resurrected. NPC pathing was ridiculous, too, as someone metioned; sometimes the zone was coded so badly that the NPC wouldn't think there was a straight line to you, due to a change in elevation or even textures clipping together wrong, and would bolt off in another direction to make a convoluted loop to you. Pets had it even worse for whatever reason, and yeah, most NPCs had pets just because it made them more difficult to fight. You could also move faster by running diagonally. It was either a similar glitch with the terrain or something about combining the two movements that made you move fast enough that you could lose NPCs who were of normally equal speed that way. There was also a huge quest chain in Velious that took a lot of loving work and items that if you hosed it up you had to start over completely, and someone could steal your work if they knew the right way to do it. I may be wrong on the Ring quest one, though; I never finished mine but I heard horror stories.
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Jul 6, 2015 18:18
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Nobody that has ever said anything good about the art, style or direction of this game has any right to be a human being.
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Jul 6, 2015 18:30
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Pierson posted:Garrisons sounded like a great idea (your own personal fort!) and even felt like it for a month or two at release, but then afterwards when you had built it a whole bunch of stuff happened! What I really get from the whole wow situation is that unless blizzard comes out at blizzcon this year and says the new wow expansion will actually give you a blowjob and it'll be in beta right after blizzcon and released in time for christmas they're basically screwed. Which is just lol.
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Jul 6, 2015 18:42
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:What I really get from the whole wow situation is that unless blizzard comes out at blizzcon this year and says the new wow expansion will actually give you a blowjob and it'll be in beta right after blizzcon and released in time for christmas they're basically screwed. Nah, there's probably 3m or so mouthbreathers that will perpetually stay subbed to the game because their 13k internet points mean a lot to them. Plus the 2m or so (admittedly me) that will buy a new expansion expecting it to be different.
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Jul 6, 2015 18:44
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John Dyne posted:You could also move faster by running diagonally. It was either a similar glitch with the terrain or something about combining the two movements that made you move fast enough that you could lose NPCs who were of normally equal speed that way. you could also jump at the same time to get a little bit more speed than that!!
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Jul 6, 2015 18:46
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Here's a question for old-timers: Before WoW, when EQ was in its prime, did you ever think it would be beaten? Or did you think about it the way we thought about WoW for the last decade; an unstoppable juggernaut that other MMOs would smash themselves against?Orcs and Ostriches posted:Nobody that has ever said anything good about the art, style or direction of this game has any right to be a human being.
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Jul 6, 2015 19:23
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Enemu posted:Nah, there's probably 3m or so mouthbreathers that will perpetually stay subbed to the game because their 13k internet points mean a lot to them. Plus the 2m or so (admittedly me) that will buy a new expansion expecting it to be different. Yes, it will keep going and make money well into the future. Even with it showing its age and turning off lots of players with a steaming turd of an expansion, they have a lot of loyal followers yet. It just won't be as massively successful as before.
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Jul 6, 2015 19:25
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Enemu posted:Nah, there's probably 3m or so mouthbreathers that will perpetually stay subbed to the game because their 13k internet points mean a lot to them. Plus the 2m or so (admittedly me) that will buy a new expansion expecting it to be different. The only reason I say they're screwed is because it's a publicly traded company and stockholders don't give a poo poo about any of that. I'm pretty jaded when it comes to capitalism and the kinds of people who make investments significant enough to matter in this kind of thing.
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Jul 6, 2015 19:38
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Pierson posted:Here's a question for old-timers: Before WoW, when EQ was in its prime, did you ever think it would be beaten? Or did you think about it the way we thought about WoW for the last decade; an unstoppable juggernaut that other MMOs would smash themselves against? EQ was never unbeatable or some massive juggernaut in the same vein as WoW. EQ peaked at 500k subs or so and it's closest competitors all sat at around 2-300k. Eventually FF11 hit a higher peak than EQ (550k) but I can't remember if this was before WoW came out. That should really help put into perspective how insane WoW is. They hit 12 million subs while their closest competitors had peaked at 500k.
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Jul 6, 2015 19:47
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If nothing else, EQ set the table for the other MMOs to follow. It was the first one of its kind that had fully 3D graphics, in a fully 3D environment, and it served as an example of what was possible (and profitable). It only looked unbeatable for a time because no one else was putting out much better, but not in the sense of the gulf that now exists between WoW and everything else.
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Jul 6, 2015 19:56
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Pierson posted:Here's a question for old-timers: Before WoW, when EQ was in its prime, did you ever think it would be beaten? Or did you think about it the way we thought about WoW for the last decade; an unstoppable juggernaut that other MMOs would smash themselves against? That wasn't even on the horizon. EQ was the only MMO most people had played (UO was around but was almost a different 'type' of MMO, And I think Asheron's Call was out/about to be out but again it wasn't very much like EQ). The whole paradigm of the 'WoW Killer' came into being after WoW became the first real MMO juggernaught.
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Jul 6, 2015 19:57
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EQ did have some stiff competition from the likes of DAoC, Asheron's Call, and (eventually) FFXI, but it was an overall very evenly-matched market, at least in the West.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:00
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Yeah I forgot about DAoC, it was probably the closest to being 'like' EQ of that generation. Never touched FFXI but I hear it was very EQ-like in that you couldn't do poo poo without a group.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:02
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LITERALLY MY FETISH posted:The only reason I say they're screwed is because it's a publicly traded company and stockholders don't give a poo poo about any of that. I'm pretty jaded when it comes to capitalism and the kinds of people who make investments significant enough to matter in this kind of thing.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:10
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As Vermain mentioned, that it was in 3D was a massive selling point and its pen-&-paper roots sure as poo poo helped. EQ demanded you have a video card at the time too, and they were mostly optional so a lot of people didn't have them. Initial investment for the game asked quite a bit from people who never touched computers before (they were still a bit on the niche side) and to pay a monthly sub. If I were to make a current comparison it would be the advent of 3D headsets that are coming out with the expense required from the consumer and the gamble from devs for an install base that is currently unknown. EQ's initial success helped cement the genre for good or bad. edit: comma happy Mayor McCheese fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 20:20
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Mayor McCheese posted:and to pay a monthly sub. EQ's sub fee was $9.89, simply because of 989 Studios. And all the MMOs of that era had~$10 sub fees because that was the standard. I forget which one first started charging $15 (was it WoW?) but I guess the market decided people would pay that.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:28
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Asimo posted:WoW isn't going to shut down ever, barring Blizzard themselves going into bankruptcy or something. Even if it drops down to "only" a million subscribers, that's still a million people giving them regular money every month and income is income. All you'd really see happen is massive shakeups in the staff due to the poor performance, and probably a reduction in patch quality and frequency once it becomes clear it's unrecoverable. I think it's fairly clear some sort of staff shakeup already happened. Patch quality and content, other than art which is top notch, has p much gone down the pooper
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Jul 6, 2015 20:29
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WarLocke posted:Yeah I forgot about DAoC, it was probably the closest to being 'like' EQ of that generation. DAOC was the most polished and arguably best of the post-EQ pre-WoW MMOs, but like AO and Shadowbane (and EVE, really) it spent a lot of its energy chasing the UO grognard PvP crowd. WoW's success is due to its polish and accessibility, but it was also the only contender that really set out to beat Everquest at its own game. FFXI was basically a Japanese Everquest clone. It innovated in some ways (its crude implementation of instancing is much closer to what WoW standardized than the load-balancing measures Guild Wars and AO used) and borrowed a lot from Final Fantasy to give it a unique flavor, but it's EQ through and through.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:08
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Vermain posted:If nothing else, EQ set the table for the other MMOs to follow. It was the first one of its kind that had fully 3D graphics, in a fully 3D environment, and it served as an example of what was possible (and profitable). It only looked unbeatable for a time because no one else was putting out much better, but not in the sense of the gulf that now exists between WoW and everything else. Yes it set the gold standard for developers, that farming for ultra-rare loot for hundreds of hours was a totally valid substitute for fun gameplay, which remains with us to this day and will for the foreseeable future. Almost no MMOs ever tried to deviate from this notion, thanks to players being desperate to take whatever came out and developers being unwilling to step away from a proven winner's model. COH and Champions tried, at least at first, not many others I can think of. e: AO was another now that I think of it, but that too passed (Shadowlands). Flesh Forge fucked around with this message at 21:39 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 21:37
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FFXI was explicitly Square-Enix's attempt to make their own Everquest. The producer assigned the development team to play EQ for about a year and take notes on what they wanted to copy.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:39
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Funnily, debate focused more on whether or not there were enough potential subscribers out there to support another MMO, rather than whether something could dethrone EQ. There were a decent handful of active games, and a broad assumption that there were... maybe a million or two users in the West, some of whom might subscribe to two games at once, while the rest would move about as they got tired of one or another. Contact with the Korean market and its then-weirdness was basically limited to Lord British raving about Lineage and predicting $20/mo sub fees, and very occasional dirt-budget imports like Fallen Age. When World of Warcraft was announced, people tried to fit it into that paradigm. Nobody expected it to take long-running assumptions and tear them into confetti.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:47
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Yeah, WoW's never gonna Die, but it'll sure as poo poo be "dead" in terms of players at some point soon unless they really buck their ideas up. FFXIV's 3 month patch cycle has really dropped a huge load on Blizzard's work pipeline for being, still, 5~ times bigger subscriber wise. WoD was really, really good until you got to the end game which consisted of absolutely loving nothing, and had one of it's two patches be content cut from the original release of the expansion.
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Jul 6, 2015 21:50
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Pierson posted:Here's a question for old-timers: Before WoW, when EQ was in its prime, did you ever think it would be beaten? Or did you think about it the way we thought about WoW for the last decade; an unstoppable juggernaut that other MMOs would smash themselves against? EverQuest was the king of the hill back in its day, and there WERE games that came out claiming they'd be the EverQuest killer. And then all of those failed and EQ slipped quietly into the night when WoW bust onto the scene. I think Shadowbane even claimed to be an EverQuest killer. I wish there was a wiki page for 'games that claimed they would kill EverQuest.' There were SO many games out back then and during the mid to late 2000's, the market just got hit with a deluge of them and some ones that seemed they'd be decent were offed because they had to compete with WoW, or were released during a time when they MMO market slice wasn't big enough. Earth and Beyond, Tabula Rasa, Matrix Online.. just a poo poo ton of MMOs that wanted a slice of the pie but didn't know how to compete. I'm probably one of the few people who actually played MXO and I kinda liked the combat.
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Jul 6, 2015 22:01
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BARONS CYBER SKULL posted:Yeah, WoW's never gonna Die, but it'll sure as poo poo be "dead" in terms of players at some point soon unless they really buck their ideas up. WoD's leveling was the best they've ever done, and both the raids and the dungeons are extremely well done (though the difficulty curve is kind of funky). Outside of that though, there's basically nothing else to do. That's honestly the most frustrating thing to me; the expansion started out with so much promise but then just falls apart once you get into the end game. MoP was so much better that it's not even funny. Bieeardo posted:Funnily, debate focused more on whether or not there were enough potential subscribers out there to support another MMO, rather than whether something could dethrone EQ. There were a decent handful of active games, and a broad assumption that there were... maybe a million or two users in the West, some of whom might subscribe to two games at once, while the rest would move about as they got tired of one or another. Contact with the Korean market and its then-weirdness was basically limited to Lord British raving about Lineage and predicting $20/mo sub fees, and very occasional dirt-budget imports like Fallen Age. Oh man, Fallen Age. I remember Beta testing that, and still have a t-shirt somewhere I got from when it flopped. Mostly all I recall about it now though is that it ran like poo poo on my PC, and some of the early enemies looked like slugs.
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Jul 6, 2015 22:33
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Pierson posted:fell victim to that thing Blizzard does where lore-important characters will do and take credit for things players really wanted to do themselves. FF14 did this too, you clear an entire dungeon and fight the last boss. When the boss is about to die it goes into a cutscene and a npc rides it in the air and pulls it's heart out.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:16
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Even stuff that sounded cool they managed to drop the ball on. I would have loved Timewalking if they had taken it even further. Let us run every dungeon from Classic to Warlords and give us generic transformation buffs to make us look like we're wearing gear from that era. Don't even bother dropping gear that scales up, the nostalgia trip alone would have been worth it. Just dump some Apexis on us at the end once a day, like the old dungeon system used to, and like FF14 still does! I'd have marked the gently caress out to run Deadside Strat in Valor gear again. Instead no, it's a few dungeons, once a month, for items almost certainly obsolete by the time you get them. What a loving waste. EDIT: Tenzarin posted:FF14 did this too, you clear an entire dungeon and fight the last boss. When the boss is about to die it goes into a cutscene and a npc rides it in the air and pulls it's heart out. Pierson fucked around with this message at 23:23 on Jul 6, 2015 |
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Jul 6, 2015 23:16
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BARONS CYBER SKULL posted:Yeah, WoW's never gonna Die, but it'll sure as poo poo be "dead" in terms of players at some point soon unless they really buck their ideas up. the moment WoW drops to like 2 mil subscribers, something that would be good numbers for any other game but bad for WoW, they'll just do a F2P conversion and the playerbase will balloon to huge again look at ToR's pre-f2p numbers compared to post-f2p. or even wildstar, a game nobody really plays, and how much interest has spiked since the f2p announcement. i know people in this thread like to poo poo on the game but there is a lot of renewed interest in wildstar due to this. when WoW does it, it'll kill like two or three other MMOs instantly because people will just go to Free WoW
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Jul 6, 2015 23:17
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HahahaStephan Frost posted:Day one at Blizzard has been awesome. I'm excited to start work as the Design Producer on WoW. \m/ This is the "Wildstar is for the hardcore" guy. The next WoW expansion is going to be so much fun!
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Jul 6, 2015 23:17
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Kelp Plankton posted:when WoW does it, it'll kill like two or three other MMOs instantly because people will just go to Free WoW What other MMOs will it kill? No one's making them anymore because it's a dead genre. They're all making MOBAs (and even that trend is dying out)
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Jul 6, 2015 23:22
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BARONS CYBER SKULL posted:What other MMOs will it kill? No one's making them anymore because it's a dead genre. They're all making MOBAs (and even that trend is dying out) i dunno man, whatever ones are barely scraping by 5 or 6 years from now. MMOs aren't a dead genre but they're not a huge marquee one anymore. i wouldn't be surprised to see a few new ones over the next couple years but they'll never be huge things. either way stuff like Star Trek Online or whatever else is still turning a profit will be destroyed by f2p WoW and yeah nobody's making more MOBAs, that stopped earlier this year. some genres just dont have room for niche games i guess
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Jul 6, 2015 23:27
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Tenzarin posted:FF14 did this too, you clear an entire dungeon and fight the last boss. When the boss is about to die it goes into a cutscene and a npc rides it in the air and pulls it's heart out. Granted that particular character's shtick was talking up how he was going to murder that particular boss, AND having your character sit aside for the final blow goes along well with the context surrounding that event. It's not like he came out of left field to save your suddenly not-strong-enough PC from being killed like a chump and then jack the kill.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:29
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Hahaha Maybe he brought an index card with all of Wildstar's good ideas for Blizzard to Oh, wait: 'every class can do something besides DPS' was alright.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:29
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The F2P MMO market is so crowded that pretty much all of the 'big' ones have a feature that WoW won't really impact so much, whether that's a killer IP or a genuine niche.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:30
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Pierson posted:I know exactly which boss and NPC you're talking about and get your point, but I'd argue it happens way less and that for most of the base game and expansion every important NPC is totally aware that it's you doing all this amazing poo poo. Hell one of the big plot hooks for 3.1 is that (minor spoiler) the player character is so drat strong it's upsetting a universal balance. Except in FF14 when you kill the big bads only you get credit no one in your group. It makes all the bad guys seem like weak bad guys. In WoW, they have main characters killing big bads because you are not super lore character. They don't make the player character out to be some kind of god, and they address all the players in the group.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:33
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i am tim! posted:Granted that particular character's shtick was talking up how he was going to murder that particular boss, AND having your character sit aside for the final blow goes along well with the context surrounding that event. It's funny because that NPC wanting to kill the poo poo out of that boss is that NPC's entire backstory since the beginning of ARR. It would actually be a really dick move if he didn't have the honors. Comparing it to Varian 'chilling in a basement on Alcaz Island for two years' Wrynn being made the canonical slayer of Onyxia is just stupid, but never let that get in the way of a false equivalence.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:34
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Francis posted:It's funny because that NPC wanting to kill the poo poo out of that boss is that NPC's entire backstory since the beginning of ARR. It would actually be a really dick move if he didn't have the honors. Sucks that Onyxia was going to kill his son.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:38
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WoW will switch to the Hearthstone expansion model of $20-$25 per new raid. Why should they spend money designing all this new poo poo if only a fraction of the playerbase even bothers with it, but 100% of the playerbase pays them $15 a month? Make the premium players pay more. At least, that's the conclusion I assume Activision has come to: content patches are lost revenue as they aren't having dramatic enough effects on player population to justify R&D time.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:39
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Kelp Plankton posted:i dunno man, whatever ones are barely scraping by 5 or 6 years from now. MMOs aren't a dead genre but they're not a huge marquee one anymore. i wouldn't be surprised to see a few new ones over the next couple years but they'll never be huge things. either way stuff like Star Trek Online or whatever else is still turning a profit will be destroyed by f2p WoW Honestly I don't think that World of Warcraft going free-to-play is going to have the staying power that you are projecting. The thing about that game is that a lot of people quit after they were truly done with it. Many of these people will never go back and most of those that do only stick around until they are sick of whatever the next expansion is just like they do now. What I'm trying to say is that most people didn't quit because they felt that $15 per month was not worth it. Worth it. Also, I find that the main reason people try and MMO witch is gone free to play isn't so much the fact that it is free. It is because they are interested to try out all of the new changes which they have missed out on.. Being free health of course because that makes the game easily accessible but if that ends up being the only reason that someone is playing then they usually quit within a month or two. With World of Warcraft you have the potential to be introduced to a lot of new content that you did not experience before but the problem is that this game and its content he comes mostly obsolete after each expansion.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:41
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Tenzarin posted:In WoW, they have main characters killing big bads because you are not super lore character. They don't make the player character out to be some kind of god, and they address all the players in the group. They did in WoD, though. You're literally the commander of the army taking the fight directly to the big bads since you're so awesome you ended numerous other campaigns.
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Jul 6, 2015 23:42
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Xavier434 posted:With World of Warcraft you have the potential to be introduced to a lot of new content that you did not experience before but the problem is that this game and its content he comes mostly obsolete after each expansion. What games content has not become obsolete after an expansion?
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Jul 6, 2015 23:45
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