|
Speaking of AAs, did your guys' EQ1 servers back in the heyday have Wizard Manaburn Mafia like my server did? One of the wizard class AAs in Luclin that you had to be heavily invested for was an ability called Manaburn. When you used it, it completely emptied your mana bar completely and did something like 6 damage for every single point of mana burned this way. It was absurdly strong, but it came with the problem that you would expect from the single largest attack in the game that left you completely defenseless afterwards. It could knock like 20% health off of the Kunark era world dragons if you were geared well. If you were fighting something that could survive it, and it survived you were in for some poo poo.... Unless, of course, you coordinated with 5 other wizards to all synchronized manaburn that dragon into a smoking crater. So the wizards on my server got together and organized to run a racket on world spawn dragons like Wuoshi, Gorenaire, Trakanon, and the like. It was almost impossible to compete with them when they ran timers on the boss spawns. The moment the boss would appear they'd be manaburnt into oblivion. If you needed one of the world spawn bosses for epic drops for a while there, you had to deal with the manaburn mafia because you could not compete with them. This got nerfed pretty quick, all things considered but it was still around for a couple of months after Luclin's launch. They changed manaburn so that once a monster got hit with it, it was immune to it for like 3 minutes, functionally ending manaburn squads because they couldn't just evaporate a boss instantly anymore. I mained wizard back in the day and for as bad as they were considered in Kunark / Velious, it was absolutely hillarious to be king poo poo of gently caress mountain in Luclin. Luclin was kind of the hayday for them because they got a bunch of really nice quality of life changes (natural spell crit built in like warriors for melee, Familiar line of spells gave you always on stackable mana regen to help feed the spellcasting and reduce downtime, they really leaned into wizards having consistent high efficiency low resist nukes that no other class could compete with, and they didn't completely cut the nuts off of making money selling teleports like they did with Planes of Power.
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 06:09
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 08:38 |
|
|
there was a manaburn mafia on my server too, i'm pretty sure everything in classic and kunark had a hardcap of 32k HP because of code limitations so the barrier to becoming a manaburn man was "has the manaburn AA" and "has some gear equipped in a couple of slots if you want I guess" the kunark dragons that you could kill in this manner dropped some extremely valuable spells so I have to imagine this was insanely profitable, not to mention if you got a Trakanon kill he had a chance of dropping the Mana Robe - a tradeable caster robe where if you right click it, it converts some of your HP to mana at a rate that wildly outpaced the ordinary ways to regenerate mana so it was fairly sought after. I think it was one of the crazy early items that sold for multiple hundreds of dollars but I never got into that market so i'm not 100% sure on the price or how long it stayed that expensive on the topic of everquest dragons, the kunark expansion had one named Faydedar who was kinda interesting - he was a water dragon clocking in at about two feet tall and as long as a brown bear, spawned in the rear end-end of the ocean once a week right on top of this secret portal room that was originally the only way to fast travel to distant cities without having to pay a player to teleport you, then he would just swim off to shore and get immediately loving destroyed by some random npc on the beach resulting in no loot and another week of waiting to kill him however, if you were "lucky" and managed to find the secret portal room right after the expansion launched, you could set your respawn point inside and have fast travel forever! except if your luck ran out faydedar would be around when you were teleporting, he would then glitch around for a minute spamming AOE fear and dragon breath damage everywhere until you died, then he would very VERY slowly waddle back to the ocean and because his aggro range was enormous he'd aggro you as soon as you respawned and he'd kill you again. this is in a game with exp loss so bad you could actually go down in levels if you died enough, which means if you ever found yourself AFK at your respawn point and he just happened to be around you could conceivably lose literal months of progress before you got back to the keyboard also if you got caught in the faydedar respawn death loop, chances are you couldn't even rally a raid to kill him because he would eventually break free and commit suicide on that npc I mentioned earlier, all around stunning design choices
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 07:05
|
|
|
blatman posted:…if you ever found yourself AFK at your respawn point and he just happened to be around you could conceivably lose literal months of progress before you got back to the keyboard This really was the best game ever.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 09:07
|
|
|
Faydedar was the coolest looking dragon and conceptually since he swam. I was bummed when I looked up a video of him recently and saw how small he was when I'd seen screens I assumed he was this long eel guy.
Groovelord Neato fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Oct 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 13:52
|
|
|
Groovelord Neato posted:Faydedar was the coolest looking dragon and conceptually since he swam. I was bummed when I looked up a video of him recently and saw how small he was when I'd seen screens I assumed he was this long eel guy. i got u covered: Cobalt Scar sorta easy boss "Kelorek`Dar":  Temple of Veeshan (North Wing) murdersnake "Lord Koi`Doken":  and the comedy option! Crystal Caverns 1 foot tall babby snake "a velium crawler":  all pictures ripped from allakhazam because i'm lazy as all heck edit: all of them have the same sound effects so the velium crawlers make this STOMP STOMP STOMP noise while they chase you and then blast your eardrums out with their mighty roar as they autoattack your ankles, however since they're all reskins of Faydedar they also have rad swimming animations and also all have a bit of water to swim around, Kelorek`Dar patrols the waters in his zone, Koi`Doken has a little bathtub he spawns in and the velium crawlers just sort of shimmy around the underground rivers of CC blatman fucked around with this message at 18:20 on Oct 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 18:17
|
|
|
I played maplestory back in the day but never got high enough level for this, but I recall a system by which you would max out your possible HP by spending real-life money to reset your level up stat points in a certain way, intentionally leveling with bad stats to be more survivable at endgame.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 18:46
|
|
|
blatman posted:the kunark dragons that you could kill in this manner dropped some extremely valuable spells so I have to imagine this was insanely profitable, not to mention if you got a Trakanon kill he had a chance of dropping the Mana Robe - a tradeable caster robe where if you right click it, it converts some of your HP to mana at a rate that wildly outpaced the ordinary ways to regenerate mana so it was fairly sought after. I think it was one of the crazy early items that sold for multiple hundreds of dollars but I never got into that market so i'm not 100% sure on the price or how long it stayed that expensive blatman posted:however, if you were "lucky" and managed to find the secret portal room right after the expansion launched, you could set your respawn point inside and have fast travel forever! One of the things that EQ developers often did is leave old, overpowered versions of items in game but make them no longer drop. Most famous would be the Manastone, which like the Mana Robe gave you a clicky for mana conversion. Some others: Mosscovered Twig (3/10, incredibly fast and broken weapon) replaced by Mosscovered Branch (slower but slightly better ratio) Circlet of Shadow (instant invis clicky), replaced by Circlet of Shadows (5s cast time added) Some items they retroactively buffed, and they retroactively nerfed more items than I previously thought. There's actually a good list here: https://wiki.project1999.com/Removed_Items There were also a number of especially rare "ARTIFACT" items floating around, given out exclusively at GM events. https://wiki.project1999.com/The_Prime_Healer%27s_Bulwark https://wiki.project1999.com/Crystal_Claw_of_Veeshan https://wiki.project1999.com/Shrouds_of_Earthen_Shadow I feel like these sorts of items and how they handled them lent a lot to the world feel. cmdrk fucked around with this message at 19:30 on Oct 1, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2021 19:27
|
|
|
there is a goon who posted stories in the blizzlols thread about being on the team that did live events and handed those artifacts out they were good stories
|
|
#
?
Oct 2, 2021 18:56
|
|
|
A classic story from the EQ days, which did not happen to me, is that back in the day, it was possible to get knocked into negative hit points so you were "unconscious," but not dead. If the mob did not finish you off, and because EverQuest is from an era that said "gently caress you for trying to play" it usually did, you could eventually naturally heal and stand up, and then limp your broken rear end to somewhere safe (or, this being EQ, probably get jumped by some pissant mob and die because, again, gently caress you for trying to play). Now, when you were in this state, you couldn't actually type. Makes sense, you're out cold, right? And you won't be in that state for long, you'll either heal up and be back on your feet able to talk, or the enemy will kill you. Now here's where the problem comes in: there were enemies that could disease you. This disease would shut down your natural regeneration, and because EverQuest actively disrespected your time, this disease could last up to forty minutes or more. So what happened was the person who told this story was fighting enemies, got diseased, got knocked out, and then their party members killed the enemy. They clearly assumed the story teller died, because they were sending tells and wondering what was taking so long, and all the while the person who got knocked out was lying there, unable to move or talk, for forty loving minutes until the disease wore off and they could naturally regen to get back up. The ability to type while knocked out was added, although for some reason I never figured out, the ability to backspace was still disabled while you were in this state, but at least you could call for help. As I always say when telling stories of the old days, "they don't make 'em like they used to, usually for a drat good reason!"
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 10:20
|
|
|
^^^ That brings back memories and is awesome. I miss EQ and also know I will never have the time as an actual adult to play a game like it again, even if one were to magically exist.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 15:33
|
|
|
Cithen posted:^^^ P99 exists now and fully recaptures the magic. You may quickly find yourself making time as you neglect your work and personal relationships, speaking from experience.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:01
|
|
|
MechaCrash posted:A classic story from the EQ days, which did not happen to me, is that back in the day, it was possible to get knocked into negative hit points so you were "unconscious," but not dead. If the mob did not finish you off, and because EverQuest is from an era that said "gently caress you for trying to play" it usually did, you could eventually naturally heal and stand up, and then limp your broken rear end to somewhere safe (or, this being EQ, probably get jumped by some pissant mob and die because, again, gently caress you for trying to play). This was also the reason they added in the pain and suffering mob. If you got in a state like that it would spawn and kill you to put you out of your misery. Problem is, that in some places it was targetable and could be killed. Think SolB was a place you could do that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:04
|
|
|
Zil posted:This was also the reason they added in the pain and suffering mob. If you got in a state like that it would spawn and kill you to put you out of your misery. Problem is, that in some places it was targetable and could be killed. Think SolB was a place you could do that. also the paineel newbie yard (the one inside the actual city zone with skellingtons and rats, not outside in toxxulia forest), I want to say it was up a little clump of grass polygons on the north side but I also don't really feel like checking there was a lot of weird pseudo-scripting done by spawning invisible mobs in that game but my favorite was the timer mob that popped as part of the horse island in Plane of Sky, brace yourselves because this is purestrain eq design choices: the Plane of Sky was the third raid zone added to the game (Plane of Fear and Plane of Hate came first) and it was by far the shittiest thing on the planet. Picture this, your wizard starts teleporting groups, you all appear on this tiny little floating island surrounded by other floating islands and you had to progress from isle to isle by completing some sort of murder-related task. You'd get a quest item from killing something, then killing something else would trigger "Sirran the Lunatic" to spawn and you'd hand him the quest item to get the key to teleport to the next stage (these keys were only usable if you had them on you when you click the transport pad, if you died on island 3 then you're gonna have to get a necromancer to summon your corpse because you no longer have the keys necessary to get to where you died) The first 3 islands were pretty straightforward, you kill some faries, then you kill some imps, then you arrive at a temple and you kill a bunch of random poo poo but then isle 4 is where poo poo gets really dumb Your raid is deposited on the edge of isle 4 and the only thing you can see is a windmill and a handful of flying horses + griffons so you start killing them. The mobs split into multiple adds when they die and those adds split further so you'd better have some mad coordination in your pre-voicechat game with a text box the size of a pack of gum and no proper raid interface (raids were just a ton of 6man groups loosely clumped together, iirc communicating in zone chat), but you persist and your tenacity pays off, the island is cleared! everyone has their quest items and you're ready for the next island but where's the boss? here's the eq jank: when you killed your first isle 4 mob, a naked human male named "Nottap Ekim" (mike patton backwards) spawned roughly in the rear end end of nowhere, floating inaccessible in the air and impossible to attack. Nottap is your timer for the boss to spawn and the timer is a loving hour and a half now let's say you clear the island and everyone takes a breather until the timer finishes, now assuming it didn't glitch out (it sometimes glitched out) you get to contend with the isle 4 boss - the Keeper of Souls! he has the same graphic as the trash flying horses and the max hp a mob can have during this era but he has the added zest of "whoever he is targetting instantly and unavoidably dies at regular intervals". your reward for conquering the large trash mob that insta-gibs your tank several times throughout the fight is a collection of quest items for quests that require drops from the whole goddamn zone and you're at the halfway point
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:22
|
|
|
Death touching is such a bullshit encounter gimmick.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:29
|
|
|
oh while my brain is in EQ mode, here's a short one also about the Plane of Sky: so there's 8 islands but if you were to just follow the obvious progression from island to island you'd reach 7 and never spawn the boss - this is because you have to trigger the boss spawn by talking to Sirran the Lunatic on island 6 first but what do you do? target him and type "?llaw eht htiw eno I ma" and hit enter, this spawns the Sister of the Spire on island 7 and you can proceed from there if you fail to spawn the isle 7 boss before reaching it, the isle teleports are one-way so the only way to backtrack is to somehow survive jumping off of 7 onto 2 (some classes have invincibility spells that you can use for this) or jumping off of 7 and landing in freeport and getting teleported back up by one of your wizards who also jumped off with you, meanwhile Sirran has a despawn timer so it's conceivable that you may have ruined your raid by failing to remember that you have to trigger the 7 boss by typing "am I one with the wall?" backwards for some ungodly reason edit: yes deathtouch is the laziest way to make a fight harder and it's garbage, which I assume is why it was so heavily used in early eq
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:31
|
|
|
When I first started playing Everquest it was right after the launch of its first expansion The Rise of Kunark. I bought the game and expansion and went home onto my crap computer and created a Woodelf Druid. I was in way over my head and never saw anything like this before. Someone saw me struggling and gave me 4 platinum, a Wraith Bone Hammer and cast a few buffs on me. With spirit of wolf I was running so fast that I ran from Greater Fay through Butcherblock Mountain and into Dagnors Cauldron. I had no idea where I was and ran into an Aqua Goblin who swiftly killed me. I never did recover that body, and to this day I won't tangle with Aqua Goblins. Just going to add this rather than add yet another post to this amazing thread! I was working on leveling that first druid and I was level 8. My friend got me a port or a boat ride over to the Commonlands and I went into Befallen with his new Ogre Warrior. I think he was level 10 at the time so we could group. Well I was never in a dungeon before and had no idea what I was doing, but we ended up agroing a room and they rushed over me like a wave. I turned to run and because you can't clip characters, his massive frame blocked the entire hallway. As I'm trying desperately to climb over or around him, he just stood there with his back to me and didn't even realize I was in trouble. Just as I died he started turning around and it was too late, I was back in Greater Fay  So, I was able to level this Druid rather quickly and learned the ropes. Me and that Ogre Warrior were duoing down in Kaesora. A nasty little dungeon in Kunark. Well, we wiped out down at the deepest part while trying to pull Xalgoz. We both had to leave and so we left our corpse run for later that day. So we jump on the phone together and start talking (Before voice chat servers were big) We both run down to Kaesora and just say "the hell with it, lets just loot our bodies and evac out. the hell with the lost exp, we can get it back" So that's what we did. We ran all the way down there with him in the lead just pulling the entire zone down to the lowest level. I loot my corpse and stand against the wall and start casting evac. I'm on the phone with him still and yelling for him to hurry up. I watch him take a wrong turn and go into the Xalgoz room with all the enemies in tow, then he runs back out getting just wrecked. I yell for him to run to me at the wall and just as he reaches me I finish casting and he starts yelling "poo poo poo poo poo poo" We never grouped up
Floob fucked around with this message at 20:17 on Oct 7, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:31
|
|
|
Cithen posted:I loved playing as an NPC for that brief moment in time. I wish they did something more with it. I barely remember this... I know that you were placed into a random NPC. the couple times I remembered doing it was first when I was a Rattle Snake in East Common lands. I think at the time you could level up, so I was going around looking for weak players. They caught on once they saw a snake slithering backwards while fighting. The other time I was placed in a dungeon and nobody was there, so I just got bored and logged out. I need to go look to the specifics because I do remember being excited about it, but then it went away.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:40
|
|
|
Frog Act posted:Oh wow, thanks for this, I’m gonna have to keep my eye on it - I’ve seen a few revival attempts come and go on Reddit over the years, but I always hold out hope someone will crack the code, as I recall it was pretty amenable to solo play I got into EQOA too late, but I did the usb keyboard thing for logging in and chat, and played with the controller. I remember that game allowed movement while casting spells, and at the time it was just a feature, but you know drat well it was to deal with rubber banding and server lag. I remember a large bee hive you could pull bees from and kite them all over the grass areas. It was a decent game, but ahead of it's time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 19:46
|
|
|
blatman posted:oh while my brain is in EQ mode, here's a short one also about the Plane of Sky: How did people know to say that?
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 20:37
|
|
|
30.5 Days posted:How did people know to say that? I don't remember exactly but his dialogue makes some sort of reference to Sirran being related to the guards outside the halfling city of Rivervale who patrol a large wall that keeps the goblins out, and I *think* there's a quest that gives a bit of a vague direction but the practical answer is "some of the devs had characters in the top guilds and would leak poo poo like this"
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 20:56
|
|
|
Zil posted:This was also the reason they added in the pain and suffering mob. If you got in a state like that it would spawn and kill you to put you out of your misery. Problem is, that in some places it was targetable and could be killed. Think SolB was a place you could do that. I don't know the full context of Pain and Suffering spawning. On EQMac it was like a badge of honor if you ever managed to feint and survive. I soloed the Shissar Magister and manage to feint and regen back to standing as I was mezzing it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2021 21:00
|
|
|
blatman posted:target him and type "?llaw eht htiw eno I ma" and hit enter How is this sort of stuff initially discovered by the players? Are there hints in the game, or did devs leak to favoured players, or what?
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 00:45
|
|
|
Floob posted:I barely remember this... I know that you were placed into a random NPC. the couple times I remembered doing it was first when I was a Rattle Snake in East Common lands. I think at the time you could level up, so I was going around looking for weak players. They caught on once they saw a snake slithering backwards while fighting. The other time I was placed in a dungeon and nobody was there, so I just got bored and logged out. I need to go look to the specifics because I do remember being excited about it, but then it went away. I played it a handful of times. As I remember it, you had a button on the character select screen that would randomly spawn you in as a mob, and you'd have the appropriate skills and spells for them. I remember playing as a rattlesnake, a skeleton, and a goblin, though I think I cycled through a few others. It was a pretty wild idea for the time, but I don't think it ever got a proper implementation outside of the test server.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 01:55
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:How is this sort of stuff initially discovered by the players? Are there hints in the game, or did devs leak to favoured players, or what? it seemed like the same groups kept figuring things out first back in the day so a lot of people assumed devs were leaking info to their guilds edit: guy who posted after me owns blatman fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Oct 8, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 02:28
|
|
|
Subjunctive posted:How is this sort of stuff initially discovered by the players? Are there hints in the game, or did devs leak to favoured players, or what? Was curious about this & looked it up: http://drexxell.net/eq/amionewiththewall.html Regardless of how players actually got it, at the point where you got stuck, the NPC started talking backwards. If you hailed him backwards, he'd say, backwards, a line very similar to a line a halfling NPC uses in a low level quest. In that low level quest, you are meant to respond "am i one with the wall?" (and this is made much more explicit, there)
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 04:05
|
|
|
I was killing evil eyes in the gorge one day all alone and just trying to earn some plat. The highest level eye spawned and I think it was blue to me, so not a big deal. Anyways as I'm fighting it I lost control of my character. The first time I had ever been charmed. Well, not a big deal, my character starts regening health like a pet would and I'll just wait it out. All of a sudden I start running from the evil eye and through the gorge away from where I was hunting. I thought it was odd, but sat there and watched. I came upon a group of lower level players, still unable to do anything. My character starts killing them one by one... After they were all dead my character runs straight for the zone line and crosses back into East Karana where I am left wondering what in the hell just happened. I catch up with the group I had wiped out and we all laughed, and they decided they wouldn't hunt there for a while. Everquest was a brutal experience to learn for the first time. I have some amazing memories and it's been so much fun sharing.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 14:20
|
|
|
Gorge was the first place I'd been blinded and I thought my monitor broke since it blacks out the whole thing (it didn't help that our old monitor did gently caress up when I was camping orcs in EC at a lower level).
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 15:19
|
|
|
Groovelord Neato posted:Gorge was the first place I'd been blinded and I thought my monitor broke since it blacks out the whole thing (it didn't help that our old monitor did gently caress up when I was camping orcs in EC at a lower level). I'm sure I wasn't the only one that alt-F4'd thinking that blind was your game crashing. There was a wandering necro in the zone just outside Qeynos, basically still a newbie area, that would get a lot of people with this. EQ overall loved the design of "what if a really high level aggressive monster also liked to wander around this low level zone."
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 16:19
|
|
|
Bybus Slago posted:I'm sure I wasn't the only one that alt-F4'd thinking that blind was your game crashing. There was a wandering necro in the zone just outside Qeynos, basically still a newbie area, that would get a lot of people with this. EQ overall loved the design of "what if a really high level aggressive monster also liked to wander around this low level zone." Varant really were bastards. If I were designing a game with blind mechanics I feel like I would process it around the character. Make it so they can't target things and can't look at things, like in their inventory, but the player would know their character was blind and could experience the game as they waited it to pass. Nope, here's an idea! Lets just black out the players screen, easy peasy!! Done!
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 18:02
|
|
|
The old debate around Warriors being poo poo solo I get, but you have to remember, early EQ for casters wasn't a cake walk either. Sitting around looking at your spell book back when it occupied the entire screen was fun... Now be a Druid trying to kite something. You can't see the enemy as it walks toward you, you have no idea when the dots will end without counting the tics, so meddling was almost impossible. If the thing managed to get into melee range you had moments to get away before being balled up like tissue paper.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 18:06
|
|
|
Floob posted:Varant really were bastards. If I were designing a game with blind mechanics I feel like I would process it around the character. Make it so they can't target things and can't look at things, like in their inventory, but the player would know their character was blind and could experience the game as they waited it to pass. Nope, here's an idea! Lets just black out the players screen, easy peasy!! Done! Wanna say it was some sort of technical issue with how the UI was drawn back then (since it would make sense for you to still be able to see the chat window even if blinded). So it was an all or nothing deal.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 18:33
|
|
|
would this be a good thread to request stories about how like the early boats were just creatures with no animations so that they could move, meaning people could give them a ton of heavy poo poo to break them. Or that one goons' story of giving someone a ridiculous amount of money in small change which made them super heavy, but the bank was down a set of stairs and taking the first step down made the dude take a ton of fall damage due to his weight and he died instantly I'm p sure those were both early EQ. I like stories like that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 18:58
|
|
|
Babe Magnet posted:would this be a good thread to request stories about how like the early boats were just creatures with no animations so that they could move, meaning people could give them a ton of heavy poo poo to break them. Or that one goons' story of giving someone a ridiculous amount of money in small change which made them super heavy, but the bank was down a set of stairs and taking the first step down made the dude take a ton of fall damage due to his weight and he died instantly I used to mess with my one high school buddy by being grouped while he was running around PoK and I would grab a large amount of copper from the bank and do a /split which would dump half right into his inventory. This would weigh him down and the next step was pretty much death. I was kind of a dick when I was younger.
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 19:13
|
|
|
This is a really nice walk down memory lane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqhvTlR1WSc
|
|
#
?
Oct 8, 2021 23:46
|
|
|
hey I have a request for you beautiful goons: there's a thread in the retro games sub about cut content - areas, characters, enemies, storylines etc that were removed from games before launch either partially or entirely with some of the old unused content still present in the game files does anyone know of any of that kinda cool stuff in MMOs? that sort of "this barely didn't make it to launch" thing fascinates me and I know of a few things in EverQuest that fit this bill but not really enough for individual compelling posts, so i'm gonna dump them in here in bullet point format because that's about all the info i've got (this isn't in chronological order, sorry!): -someone leaked a zone list for EQ in the early days that included something called "Abbey of Innoruuk" which I think might have become the Plane of Hate, there was also "Tower of Rot" which eventually did get conceptually used in one of the later expansions -the Rain of Fear expansion was going to have a remastered Plane of Mischief, the zone file exists as "pomischief" instead of "mischiefplane" like the original but if you attempt to open the zone in an emulator or a zone viewer it's just glitchy garbage -the Shadows of Luclin expansion was originally going to have at least two additional zones - Firefall Keep and the Tower of Luclin, the latter is present on the original box art  -the Seeds of Destruction expansion was a doctor who esque romp through time and space and they were going to have the big bad from Omens of War, Overlord Mata Muram, come back for another showdown in the end raid -supposedly Lake Rathetear had a world boss called "The Megalodon" which was a big glitchy shark that didn't make it past one of the testing phases because it was too glitchy, this was conceptually reused in one of the Shaman epic quest chains, here's a picture I stole of the Shaman quest version (it's still glitchy as all heck):  -for some reason, the Plane of Sky zone file contained a lego-lookin'-rear end mob graphic for the god of the sun Solusek Ro, this was later reused as a graphic for his puppet in the Plane of Mischief, pictured below is the puppet: 
|
|
#
?
Oct 9, 2021 07:09
|
|
|
Floob posted:This is a really nice walk down memory lane. this video owns, also check out this guys content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAyxdS1SSoo
|
|
#
?
Oct 9, 2021 07:09
|
|
|
blatman posted:hey I have a request for you beautiful goons: -Plane of War originally intended for PoP launch, an open battlefield that could be opened in zone emulators I think? Cut entirely, but they didn't remove the stone you were originally supposed to click to enter it from PoTranquility -The original Inner Acrylia was never properly explored on PC servers because most people skipped the Grimling War due to it being a huge time sink not worth the effort compared to Seru/Ssra/VT. It was also buggy as all hell because we all know Luclin was rushed. It was completely revamped during PoP at some point, making the Mac server the last place the original Inner Acrylia existed. We didn't get a chance to run many of the events in there because it was a large undertaking to get enough interest to do it, but there was a lot of interesting stuff that were clearly rough drafts of encounters. -Plane of Underfoot entrance put in place when they originally added The Hole, but added as an expansion I think a decade later, lol The Firefall Keep thing is interesting because there was a portion of Shadeweaver's Thicket with a lot of fiery mobs, one who drops a key, that had a zone line going to nowhere. You hate to see stuff like that.
|
|
#
?
Oct 9, 2021 13:20
|
|
|
blatman posted:-for some reason, the Plane of Sky zone file contained a lego-lookin'-rear end mob graphic for the god of the sun Solusek Ro, this was later reused as a graphic for his puppet in the Plane of Mischief, pictured below is the puppet: I was long gone by the time they were added by I was bummed when they'd add gods like Solusek Ro and Bertoxxulous and didn't make them look like the manual.
|
|
#
?
Oct 9, 2021 13:22
|
|
|
In EQ, there was also tons of little things in the game that suggested deep lore. I would certainly love to hear what folks actually figured out based on the little in-game clues. I'm sure most of it was incomplete, incomprehensible garbage, but I found it fascinating at the time. Like the neon graffiti in Neriak or the weird stuff with Mayong Mistmoore. Oh, and Tower of Frozen Shadow, that place captivated me, but felt unfinished and forgotten. Cithen fucked around with this message at 13:36 on Oct 9, 2021 |
|
#
?
Oct 9, 2021 13:32
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 7, 2024 08:38 |
|
|
30.5 Days posted:Was curious about this & looked it up: http://drexxell.net/eq/amionewiththewall.html Amazing, thank you.
|
|
#
?
Oct 9, 2021 15:07
|
|