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Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Ehud posted:

I want to play whatever Brad mcquaid is making because I grew up on Everquest and I don’t like things that are different

:same: but i, like everyone else in this thread, also want to be 12 years old and happy again. that being said i am desperate for either a truly good group MMO like brad "opium pipe" mcquaid's stuff or anything thta captures the vitality of early SWG.

Frog Act fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Aug 20, 2018

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Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



i want everquest online adventures 2

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



i'll tote around satchels of bear butts if I'm taking them across a dope and immersive world that has things like boat rides, unique zones, and secret passages (everquest)

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



EQOA was really good because it was like an EQ lite that I found extremely graphically pleasing on account of its use of bright primary colors (presumably to accomodate the slowness of the PS2). It had a lot of stuff that was just taken directly out of EQ classic, like the general zone of Norrath, the classes, the cities, and many of the abilities, but the gameplay was fundamentally different. It was made to be played with a controller so you had a tight rotation of spells that functioned like the regular spellbook, but both physical and caster classes had a nice array of them. Every class had a unique and useful role like in regular EQ and they were mirror versions slightly tweaked - like Shaman had better debuffs and a set of very cool pets (bears and wolves instead of just one wolf) and they had both SoW and a spirit wolf travel form.

The world was also, imo, better than PC EQ. It looked better and felt more like WoW than the high fantasy of EQPC but was still consistent with the overall aesthetic of Norrath. The racial home cities were loving great and there were always players in them. The zones were big and had really unique color palettes that were consistently bright and cheery. Best of all, it had a dope fast travel system that imo was a good compromise for the period and basically presaged wow's flight paths - a coach system where most settlements had a coach but you had to walk there to get the route first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgDdxVP5U3k

^Here's a nice tour of all the home cities and I honestly still find it really compelling

The combat was clunky compared to modern stuff ofc but the group dynamics were great, everyone had a role and the overall difficulty was balanced somewhere between FFXI and WoW. For instance, dying wasn't a huge disaster and you didn't have to go on corpse runs, you just revived back at what was basically a bind point in any settlement (no player binding iirc but the map was thickly settled with NPC hubs that served as gathering points for groups, there was a version of Highpass Hold and settlements outside Qeynos, etc, and they all had bind points). Plus, instead of losing exp on death, you gained an exp debt, which overwrote a percentage of your current exp requirement with a little green bar over the usual yellow that represented the debt to pay off. Then it filled before your regular exp until it was full and you went back to wherever you were before that in the level. It was typically a 10% penalty.

It had leveled loot, unlike EQPC, and (iirc, again, its been over a decade) there were varying tiers of it, like in WoW and later MMOs. I think this system was awesome insofar as it mitigated twinking considerably compared to EQPC. There was useable vendor equipment and drops but principally your best loot would come from class quests, sorta like in EQPC, only there were a lot of them and every class did several at different level intervals. At level 15 you might get a weapon, then at 25 you might get pants/gloves/boots/helmet followed by a chest at 30, then the whole thing over again once or twice until you have the top notch stuff for you class. Each quest required participation from other classes too I think. There might even have been crafting because I definitely remember relying on some random people in Freeport to supply me with items I needed for my class armor.

More important than anything though, it had that sense of a broad, living world that EQ games in that era tried so hard to manifest. Boat rides, mysterious cities, secrets, extremely detailed and lovingly put together cities, etc etc. I played when I was maybe 11 or 12 and only got to level 35 as a Shaman and again as a Monk (they were my hands down favorite monk class in any game - they had a sort of Eastern flavor, obviously, but it was well articulated as an intersection of like Qeynosian virtue and foreign martial arts, and all the abilities you got felt very substantial - kick for instance acted like a regular hotbar ability with a recharge and it was buffed like hell for monks, very cool) so I didn't experience the supermajority of the content the game had to offer. I'd honestly pay full price and a sub fee for a mobile version of EQOA or something that let me go explore Neriak and Ak'Anon and especially all the Barbarian areas with a full population again.

This post got way too long so please someone read it, EQOA was so good. To get a sense of the world, maybe just click around in this video, with some scrubs running halfway across the bottom of one of the continents:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY-GlyoSya0

ed: I haven't finished this video yet but it also seems to be a pretty good explanation of what made EQOA so great as essentially a simplified version of the extremely complicated PNP-inspired MMOs of the late 90s early aughts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFyzwxUbpoE

Frog Act fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Aug 22, 2018

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



TESO was a buggy mess with some of the most floaty and inconsequential gameplay I've ever experienced, and on top of it, the currency, inventory, and daily systems were downright insulting. TESO is legit one of the worst MMOs of the past ten years if we're only looking at non-scam ones, imo

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I played last year and subscribed and stuff, got to level 40ish i think, and gave up after hitting the same dungeon finder bug for the hundredth time while attempting to run the same generic buggy dungeon for the thousandth time. I had fun once in the hundred and fifty or so hours I played, when me and two friends beat a boss at the end of a dungeon by cheesing him completely via kiting for 15 minutes straight. It involved abusing some bugs and stuff so it wasn't even like a legitimate experience in the sense that it was actually created for players to enjoy.

It just felt so horrible, bland, and overwhelmed by repetition and bad decisions vis-a-vis things like crafting and premium currencies. Thats on top of how it basically wasn't an elder scrolls game, which doesn't fundamentally mean it can't also be a good MMO, but was disappointing

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



GW2 had a lot of good things about it but lmao at the dungeon system, holy moly, it was like they looked at WoW dungeons and thought "how could we do this, but for toddlers that have just been hit on the head with a mallet". the hardest bosses had like, one move that was an aoe they telegraphed, the whole thing would consist of maybe three or four pulls which were always just totally inconsequential, they were this incredible feat of non-creation. Just these bland forgettable fifteen minute areas where a group of people mindlessly button mashed until everything was dead because they balanced them in a way that ensured players would never have to heal, root, move, debuff, or think even once

God those were so fuckin bad I quit after doing them all and never logged back in once. Ill grant part of it might be my own love for the holy trinity but they can still make things hard without having stuff do damage for healers to mitigate. Shame cus the PvP was okay and the leveling PvE was actually really good

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I cried on the log flume when I was eight

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Anyone else play Fallen Earth? It had potential before it went totally belly up

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Mormon Star Wars posted:

It got bought by a new company who's CEO considers it his personal pet project. He's being pretty upfront about the problems they are having trying to get it to a point where they can even consider improving it, it is interesting to see.

can you elucidate? I really liked the game's basic conceit vis-a-vis skills and crafting, driving cars and doing pvp in the desert was dope, and it honestly had an excellent loot system. when did that happen

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



the thing where the chimera just kinda wiggles in the beginning while three people climb around on top of it at various glitchy angles doesn't inspire a lot of enthusiasm in me, but I couldn't even beat Dragon's Dogma single player so maybe its just me

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I want vanilla with a 1.5x exp rate, no rep grinds, a dungeon finder, and some other QoL systems with the same treatment applied to old content as it gets released. It won't play out that way though

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Isn't wow classic already confirmed to be progression? Like it'll start out at 1.12 Drums of War or whatever but then they'll release BC and whatnot after a year or so

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Mormon Star Wars posted:

Little Earth bought it so that the CEO could basically make it a pet project. After he bought it, he posted this:


Updated a little later:


and


(Screenshots are here)

There's also a Q&A that has some pretty candid reveals, including an admission that, even counting non-steam players, the population is so low that other MMOs closed shop reaching that level.

Besides trying to re-develop the game, they are also having a heck of a time trying to access records about who was banned and why!

Hell yeah! Fallen Earth deserves this kind of treatment, it was an ambitious and pretty well executed game despite its many flaws

I had a friend who played the endgame for about two years, and he played a lot, as a member of one of the two active pvp guilds that sustained the entire server. If they could make that combat model not so janky I think Fallen Earth could be a moderate success

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



MMOs are like when they banned clove cigarettes when I was 14. I loved them and was addicted to them, but its probably for the best and all you can get these days is a lovely ersatz anywho.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



puberty worked me over posted:

Xsyon was sorta Wurm 2.0 (Minecraft of course being the real Wurm 2.0) and heavily highlighted how good Wurm could have been with less grind and actual animations for everything. Xsyon also had dynamic ecosystems based on player and animal behavior. Unfortunately it also had zero meaningful PvP, strange native american + trash people aesthetic, and zero marketing so basically no one played it.

For the time the player made towns and cities were fairly neat:


Still waiting for a Minecraft but it doesn't look like piss game.

every once in awhile I like to look through the community hubs for dead MMOs, and Xyson is one of the ones that makes me :psyduck: the most. it still appears to have maybe a dozen players still inexplicably doing things and theres just hundreds of videos and images of these weird settlements people meticulously crafted and then abandoned

I know there's at least one museum dedicated to digital objects but I hope one day there's some kind of a virtual mausoleum that saves all of these virtual worlds as like explorable artifacts. it sucks to think all this creativity is just gonna be lost.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Glenn Quebec posted:

So, I finally found a MMO without hotkey garbage called Gloria Victis on Steam. It has mixed reviews but the most recent are mostly positive. I think I'll take the plunge since its only 20 bux.

How did this work out for you, I've looked at GV many times but always moved on because of the poor reviews

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



every single discussion of vanilla wow seems to be 75% people insisting nobody actually ever liked it or will enjoy it, and 25% of people who played nostalrius recently and still enjoyed it

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



nazca posted:

Stop pretending player interaction alone can't make a good game. Ever played counterstrike or call of duty? You literally get put into a room with other players and interacting with them is the only thing you can do.

Player interaction is a requirement for me to determine a game is good.

I don't play any single player stuff really.

That really isn't the kind of player interaction I think of in MMOs, though, you can't do anything out of tightly prescribed limits which are basically shoot them, talk in chat, or drop a weapon for them to pick up. in an MMO that has unique class roles (instead of just the holy trinity) like Everquest there are a huge number of possible options for interaction, even SOW and ports were more unique than anything most MMOs have these days

just seems like a bit of a wide definition for player interaction


Zaphod42 posted:

Counterstrike has more rules and systems which drive players to interact with each other than DayZ or Rust do though. Counterstrike guarantees you're going to get a tense match. DayZ maybe you get lucky and have a tense day, maybe you spend hours wandering around in the field.

Don't get me wrong, I think if you're making an MMO it should focus on player interaction; that's my big complaint about theme park mmos, that other players are obstacles and can be avoided. The old days of EQ and FFXI the world was so harsh, you were forced to interact with other players just to survive.

Any MMO should have features that drive players to depend upon each other. That's the problem with DayZ/Ark/Rust though, all players are basically identical and only band together to form powerful alliances so you don't get your poo poo kicked in by some other alliance. Needs more role playing where different people each have their own skills and have to combine them, things like that.

that kind of stuff doesn't feel too interactive to me because, as you noted, the players are all identical and competing with one another. I guess what I really think is best is pve with discrete enough character roles that it feels like a big reciprocal thing with the environment, your party, and your enemies, like how you'd need to cloak and crouch to get to a camp where your puller would then have one task, mezzer another, and so on. surely this can be done in a way that isn't soul crushingly tedious

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I said come in! posted:

An MMO that I miss that I wish were possible to play today was Everquest Online Adventures.

:same:, mega :same: quoting a post i made earlier in this thread about how awesome EQOA was and why

Frog Act posted:

EQOA was really good because it was like an EQ lite that I found extremely graphically pleasing on account of its use of bright primary colors (presumably to accomodate the slowness of the PS2). It had a lot of stuff that was just taken directly out of EQ classic, like the general zone of Norrath, the classes, the cities, and many of the abilities, but the gameplay was fundamentally different. It was made to be played with a controller so you had a tight rotation of spells that functioned like the regular spellbook, but both physical and caster classes had a nice array of them. Every class had a unique and useful role like in regular EQ and they were mirror versions slightly tweaked - like Shaman had better debuffs and a set of very cool pets (bears and wolves instead of just one wolf) and they had both SoW and a spirit wolf travel form.

The world was also, imo, better than PC EQ. It looked better and felt more like WoW than the high fantasy of EQPC but was still consistent with the overall aesthetic of Norrath. The racial home cities were loving great and there were always players in them. The zones were big and had really unique color palettes that were consistently bright and cheery. Best of all, it had a dope fast travel system that imo was a good compromise for the period and basically presaged wow's flight paths - a coach system where most settlements had a coach but you had to walk there to get the route first.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgDdxVP5U3k

^Here's a nice tour of all the home cities and I honestly still find it really compelling

The combat was clunky compared to modern stuff ofc but the group dynamics were great, everyone had a role and the overall difficulty was balanced somewhere between FFXI and WoW. For instance, dying wasn't a huge disaster and you didn't have to go on corpse runs, you just revived back at what was basically a bind point in any settlement (no player binding iirc but the map was thickly settled with NPC hubs that served as gathering points for groups, there was a version of Highpass Hold and settlements outside Qeynos, etc, and they all had bind points). Plus, instead of losing exp on death, you gained an exp debt, which overwrote a percentage of your current exp requirement with a little green bar over the usual yellow that represented the debt to pay off. Then it filled before your regular exp until it was full and you went back to wherever you were before that in the level. It was typically a 10% penalty.

It had leveled loot, unlike EQPC, and (iirc, again, its been over a decade) there were varying tiers of it, like in WoW and later MMOs. I think this system was awesome insofar as it mitigated twinking considerably compared to EQPC. There was useable vendor equipment and drops but principally your best loot would come from class quests, sorta like in EQPC, only there were a lot of them and every class did several at different level intervals. At level 15 you might get a weapon, then at 25 you might get pants/gloves/boots/helmet followed by a chest at 30, then the whole thing over again once or twice until you have the top notch stuff for you class. Each quest required participation from other classes too I think. There might even have been crafting because I definitely remember relying on some random people in Freeport to supply me with items I needed for my class armor.

More important than anything though, it had that sense of a broad, living world that EQ games in that era tried so hard to manifest. Boat rides, mysterious cities, secrets, extremely detailed and lovingly put together cities, etc etc. I played when I was maybe 11 or 12 and only got to level 35 as a Shaman and again as a Monk (they were my hands down favorite monk class in any game - they had a sort of Eastern flavor, obviously, but it was well articulated as an intersection of like Qeynosian virtue and foreign martial arts, and all the abilities you got felt very substantial - kick for instance acted like a regular hotbar ability with a recharge and it was buffed like hell for monks, very cool) so I didn't experience the supermajority of the content the game had to offer. I'd honestly pay full price and a sub fee for a mobile version of EQOA or something that let me go explore Neriak and Ak'Anon and especially all the Barbarian areas with a full population again.

This post got way too long so please someone read it, EQOA was so good. To get a sense of the world, maybe just click around in this video, with some scrubs running halfway across the bottom of one of the continents:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY-GlyoSya0

ed: I haven't finished this video yet but it also seems to be a pretty good explanation of what made EQOA so great as essentially a simplified version of the extremely complicated PNP-inspired MMOs of the late 90s early aughts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFyzwxUbpoE

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I said come in! posted:

I know there were attempts to bring the game back, John Smedly was on board with doing this back in 2015 but then controversy surrounding him forced him to resign. Now he works at Amazon.

theoretically it is happening, but it will obviously never, ever happen. there are probably a total of like a hundred people on earth who give enough of a poo poo about EQOA to even bother googling it.

https://www.projectreturnhome.com/

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Groovelord Neato posted:

i remember when swg was first getting press my friends and i were thinking up the characters we'd play and the ship we'd all hang out in and i envisioned us chilling in our ship as it went world to world and there weren't ships on release and i don't even know if there were ships that you could actually hang out and walk around in.

there were eventually you could do just that, including like, shooting tie fighters from your luxury yacht you decorated with trophies and unique items from planets. they worked like player owned homes and thus had infinitely customizable interiors with fixed non-alterable places like turrets and stuff

i didn't enjoy the jump to lightspeed combat much but it was a super impressive feat of immersiveness

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



just another posted:

I resubscribe every now and then but it's just not the same with such a small player base. All the battles feel small and static.

I remember downloading this onto my iMac in 2003/4 and thinking this exact thing as a teenager. It's astonishing to me that it's still going and they haven't attempted to modernize it somehow, but I suspect that they'd bump up against engine limitations / impossible starting costs that a tiny company like them could never afford if they attempted to do so. Shame, though, because I loved the dynamism and the few times I did get into battles over the years when I sporadically played they were fun, but by modern standards it's basically a blurry incomprehensible mess with baffling mechanics.

ed: lol it's on steam now and it's aggressively bad monetization has resulted in a deluge of negative reviews, even from people who have a personal nostalgic fondness for the game. RIP

Frog Act fucked around with this message at 01:15 on Jan 7, 2020

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I played the alpha and it was boring garbage where you scampered around samey forests gathering resources to craft into generic gear and it had no interesting mechanics whatsoever except for pvp

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



heck, NWN persistent worlds launched like 19 years ago have a higher population than pathfinder online

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



found a pathfinder sourcebook thing with a big section on pathfinder online at the end of it. it was from like 2010 and had these hilariously detailed predictions about pathfinder online's content and "high poly models" and it was like ten pages long. i almost bought it just to post in this thread because as far as i can tell P:O is, in it's current state, the most contentless and absurd MMO to still be technically for sale, including star citizen

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I said come in! posted:

Another kickstarter MMO bites the dust, this is a few days late but the Pantheon Rise of the Fallen devs posted a blog post about how they no longer have the money to finish Pantheon, that without a big time investor the game will likely be canceled. This is a pretty major admission of guilt as they have been insisting for years now that they have all of the funding that they needed in order to finish the game to launch. https://www.pantheonmmo.com/news/producers-letter-october-2020/

the mmorpg subreddit has a discussion about this and it's full of people who are certain it's going to come out and that this is cause for optimism

https://www.reddit.com/r/MMORPG/comments/je30wo/pantheon_producers_letter_prealpha_5_funding/

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012




Fallen Earth may genuinely have been the jankiest MMO I ever played and I feel certain they won't properly revive it, but I kinda hope they do. I had a friend who was in one of the main PVP guilds - there were only like five - and it was one of the most absurd, buggy, poorly balanced, incredibly amusing PVP systems imaginable, where everyone drove around in these stupid Mad Max cars and used broken builds to plink at each other with very silly guns over resource deposits. FE was a fascinating idea that was never really properly built or maintained and there's still space out there for a proper post-apocalyptic MMO

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Kevin Bacon posted:

https://www.gamersfirst.com/fallenearth/

Here we go! Who's ready for some extreme jank?

I loving loved this game when it launched. My friend and I bought it on the first day and spent like a year just loving around in the most pointless, broken, empty but incredibly fun world I've seen in almost any MMO. It's an off brand synthesis of Mad Max and a little bit of Fallout but PVP and crafting centric and the end game in the original version was medium scale organized PVP over resource nodes, but since everyone had the same silver mad max style roadster, it largely manifested itself in these absurd fleets of almost sci-fi cars rolling around in groups and then silly looking people leaping out of them to spam totally broken abilities and try to claim what, if I remember correctly, were basically just concrete squares and parking garages that spawned crafting stuff required for higher level items.

FE was a truly bizarre game with a lot of strange systems but I absolutely loved it for awhile. My buddy loved it for longer than I did and ended up in one of the three PVP guilds that dominated our server, played for six months longer than I did until it became evident that the game was completely dead because the only people playing were the same 200 people in those three guilds and the other straggler guilds. also at one point the devs directly intervened in stuff on behalf of certain players and guilds which really pissed people off.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Elendil004 posted:

How is Myth of Empires?

It's such a bummer that MMOs got replaced with open world survival crafting games. I can see why most people like them more but they're all the same loving thing (which is true for MMOs too, really) and appeal to people who play in groups with friends and have the time/inclination to punch trees until they have a giant castle from which to grief other players. I'm in a bit of a genuine personal funk because I can't find a single MMO that lets me be a collaborative team player in the traditional model where support or healing classes are essential for success.

I guess I should just resubscribe to FFXI or something

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



same I've never found one I actually enjoyed outside of the early ones like The Forest which had an actual overriding singleplayer gameplay goal. I think they might be tolerable in the context of a really good setting with lots of lore and worldbuilding like the Conan game but that's like $120 and still has all the same problems every other game in the genre has. I just want a normal MMO that isn't WoW or FFXIV, it's a drat shame there aren't any other options and there probably won't be for the forseeable future.

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



PyRosflam posted:

Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen - (Cough Cough)

But your right, no one is going to make Everquest, Crafting games are like taking the big "see a living world" but we don't have the budget for a story.

The tech behind New World is kinda exciting. The actual game was meh but they built that game with no vision at all.

We are hitting the Era where you can have a massive on demand CPU handling an MMO world, a 2nd CPU for combat, 3rd (Or more) for NPC behavior to the point you could put very different concepts together just by tweaking what you want your game to be. Like take New World, but each time you hit the edge of the world your just moving to a new CPU and put all players on the same uber map.

Some visionary could build this back end on today's tech, like a version of Unreal for MMOs where the map can generate out forever like Minecraft, NPCs could actully have brains and access to the same stuff as players etc.

But of course most of the market just likes to tell the boss "It's like WOW!" so we never get anything cool.

yeah it just feels like such a tremendous waste. we're finally in a place, technologically, where the absurd promises of pie-in-the-sky early 2000s MMOs could realistically manifest themselves and instead the entire genre is moribund. though this post is a fun reminder that i was banned from the Pantheon subreddit for making a post about how I don't think it's ever going to come out and the devs appear to be spinning their tires, which is self-evidently true and it will never come out. even if it does they seem to have denuded it of all the old-school elements that were supposed to be the main attraction and it's pretty clearly just another WoW-lite with a boring "unique" fantasy setting.


Senator Drinksalot posted:

The Long Dark and Don't Starve are the only good survival games. Isn't Ashes of Creation supposed to be a return to more old school MMO design?

my understanding of Ashes of Creation is that it was a grift run by a known scam artist (the Sharif guy who bought it) but apparently it's in alpha right now and the first gameplay video I looked up actually seemed...good? there are mixed level mobs in areas (guy gets a level 1 and level 15 quest from dialogue with NPCs near the starting area), the world is pretty open and it apparently describes itself as a sandbox and according to whoever this player is, the exp system appears to be balanced in a way that requires grinding and questing. that's all cool and honestly I had dismissed the game ages ago as just another failed MMO that would never materialize but it looks cool and I'm hopeful now, which I'm sure will come to nothing

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I think my main issue with games like Valheim is they assume players will come prepared with a static group so there aren’t any organic methods for making friends or grouping up. Everything is just designed assuming you’re on discord with a bunch of pals and it really sucks

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I don’t have any friends who game because I’m a lonely millennial and it effectively locks me out of 90% of survival games, but if I went and resubscribed to FFXI or reinstalled P99 I’d have people to group and chat with immediately because it’s necessary. I desperately want a happy medium with those systems intact but also in a modern game that isn’t dead or requires ten thousand hours to progress

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



cmdrk posted:

Monsters and Memories is coming along nicely.

https://monstersandmemories.com/updates/update-15-art-progress

They have rats and bats and sneks.

man this looks cool I really like the aesthetic which I guess means, like Pantheon, it will never materialize because the playerbase that already exists for these games are rotting in their chairs like the god emperor of man, locked into P99 raid schedules

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



cmdrk posted:

They seem to have some EQ and EQEmu vets working on this one, I really hope they succeed. From what I've seen on the streams they're taking a really practical and conservative approach, rather than the usual "Hello I'm John Videogames and you may remember me... behold dreams.txt" approach that 99% of these scam MMOs take.

I sincerely share your hope, went to their Twitter page and realized I was already one of their like 85 followers and felt a pang of loss for my favorite genre. The in-progress screenshots really remind me of EQOA which is easily my favorite MMO ever - it has that sort of smoothness that EQ lacked combined with the lower-poly but open environments - so I’ll have my eyes on it and will probably spend money when I can because I’m a sucker

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Jazerus posted:

ffxi added npc party members so you don't have to group and i would bet nobody groups to level anymore. i understand the motivation behind it but also it's extremely hosed up. you'd have to go for the one classic private server with an appreciable population to get the actual ffxi experience

yeah I played retail last year and while trusts do take a lot of the grouping out, they don't remove it entirely and I was still able to find infrequent leveling groups. plus the storyline stuff still generally requires some friends. you're right though, the actual experience with camping and grinding is only available on Nasomi and I'd be playing there right now if I was unemployed and single because it is the best

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



I think there's definitely something to that, but I also think that there's a big untapped market of people who either used to play MMOs and yearn for a return to the golden age, and a big contingent of younger gamers who have never been introduced to the genre but would probably go bonkers and spend the ten thousand hours they'd have otherwise spent in LoL or something playing Everquest 3. The formulas aren't timeless exactly but I really think with proper marketing and some good luck a game like Pantheon (but not Pantheon lol) could be a major success or at least a flavor of the week that tops steam charts and gets tons of annoying facecam twitch freaks to stream it.

I remember a few years ago some big name person streamed FFXI Nasomi while I was playing and the server population literally quintupled overnight, it went from taking ~20 minutes to get a Dunes group together to the Dunes being too full to play and people spilling over into the adjacent zones where nobody had levelled since retail launch. If a single big streamer streaming one of the most punishing and counterintuitive old MMOs could achieve that level of hype I feel confident it could be done for something more modern but with similar design principals regarding mandated socializing, slower paced play, etc

Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



jokes posted:

That hope leads to madness

Honestly, the worst/saddest thing about MMOs as a genre dying is that people don’t get to experience that built-in community that we all took for granted in the early/mid 2000s. Where people remembered your (character’s) name and you had a reputation to uphold. When you have pick-up-and-play games with short sessions, small (by comparison) lobbies, and randomized participants you really miss out.

A young coworker of mine didn’t understand what I was talking about when I mentioned the cooler/better server communities (especially in shooters), because he played games only on console and on PC games he pretty much only plays via matchmaking.

In FFXI if you were a poo poo to everyone, eventually your reputation would precede you and it would be very awkward for you to group later on. Early WoW too. If you’re a poo poo in battlefield or CoD or Fortnite there’s a minimal chance anyone will remember.

I blame WoW. Some people blame the LFD tool but I don’t buy it. WoW broke everything down to where players were just numbers and you needed a certain amount of numbers to cross a numbered threshold to increase your numbers, and toxicity became commonplace because the toxic people were validated by the game: we shouldn’t waste time and we should increase our numbers even if it meant bullying or kicking under performers. It all became very inhuman which is (was?) good for business.

You’re probably right and I think that the inexorable tendency of capitalist business practices and a short term emphasis on juicing games as a service as much as possible precludes the reintroduction of that lost “human” element on any large scale. That being said we’re also in a moment where niche media things that previously wouldn’t have been considered worth pursuing by even smaller companies can be successful enough - things like Elite Dangerous might never have mass appeal but can exist in their own genre space in a self sustaining way. My hope is that in the same way streaming audiences have fractured but sustained a ridiculous growth despite that might be mirrored in the revival of dead genres like MMOs and RTS games

Maybe I just can’t face the bleak future of nothing but soulless GAAS poo poo like Destiny or COD or <survival game of the week> or whatever being the only extant genre of high population multiplayer game because it seems so absurdly lame, like, the tech is there, more people are online than ever before, gaming is big business, etc. though really the last point is probably why there won’t be a good MMO again, the cost of entry is super high and the returns are unlikely or too risky next to just churning out a MOBA.

I hope that myths and monsters game up thread comes to fruition at least, I really like the look of it

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Frog Act
Feb 10, 2012



Sachant posted:

This looks cool as an SWG spiritual successor: https://galaxiesofeden.com/, I hope it does better than The Repopulation did.

Also a reminder for anyone pining for an EQ successor, this is worth checking out: https://evercraftonline.com/ -- Smaller scale/budget project compared to Pantheon and even M&M, but it's definitely trying to do a lot of things right and stick to the niche.

Both of these look dope, especially Galaxies of Eden, since SWG wasn't necessarily good because of the IP, it was just a major draw. the basic gameplay systems could be applied to any generic sci-fi game and be extremely fun and cool. that being said they were also exceptionally complicated and had lots of interrelated systems that, even though were poorly balanced in many ways, would be pretty hard for a small dev team to replicate.

Anyway, the trailer looks great, if they manage to implement player housing with 1:1 decorating and objects from in-game like in SWG along with the basic politics, harvesting, and non-combat specialization systems I will subscribe to this game until the end of time

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