Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Smedley: "EverQuest Next will be the world's largest sandbox-style MMO ever made"
This discussion has been closed.
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Comments
Well hopefully that 15 year plan is an honest developer desire and not a statement falling into the 'over-hype and lofty promises' category. It seems developers know what players want because they say all the things the players want to hear. It's the actual delivery or lack of delivery on those promises... there's the problem. How many times I have heard developers promise features to come post-launch and those features never ever materialize. We do get a lot of excuses though.
The core game play style makes the themepark/sandbox, not tacked on features.
Tabletop RPG gaming since Chainmail and D&D was a blue book with some cheap plastic dice and a crayon. MMORPGing since MOOS/MUDS, when forums were just bulletin boards and players actually roleplayed their characters.
EQ was more of a hybrid even though sandbox and themepark were not really used to discribe certain MMOs in those days. EQ2 is without a doubt themepark in every way, it is as far away from EQ as can be. It's game like Vanguard and the soon to be released ArcheAge that are hybrid.
EQ was also a skilled based game.
EQNext will be a hybrid MMO imo.
I just have a very difficult time buying into anything Smedley says at this point.
He always seems to be showing you something pretty in one hand while wrapping his hand tightly around the dagger he's planning to put in your back in the other hand.
www.greedmonger.com
Did you like Ultima Online? Then you'll LOVE Greed Monger!
Fortunately, we'll be able to tell before we spend money.
Once upon a time....
i agree. They have the most to lose. If they fall in the trap of the same old tired raidcentric level grind they only have themselves to blame really. If they cant do it, someone else probabally will.
1. Being able to build the character you wanted, since it had a skill-based system.
2. Playermade cities governed by player Mayors
3. Being able to own your own house
4. Player made economy, complete with full-time crafting professions. Almost everything you wore was player crafted. It wasn't a loot based game.
5. Clothing, lots and lots of different kinds of clothing, so you could look unique.
6. Flag yourself PvP system.
7. The community. Very helpful, and almost everyone RPed every once in a while. Image Designers, Interior Decorators, Crafters, and Entertainers all acted the way you'd expect one in their respective professions to act. Some people, encouraged by the freedom the world offered, RPed 100% of the time.
8. Entertainers and other non-combat full-time professions.
God damn it, why do I have to wait a year to see this shit. I want to set a forest on fire and craft a badass axe and fish in oasis between duels with a troll warrior right now.
In conclusion, it was the game systems that made SWG great, not the "guided content" (although that had its place as well). And not only that the systems were there, but how they all worked together.
That said, Raph Koster was the architect of the game systems that made those great in SOE.
He was the one most responsible for putting the "sandbox in SWG".
Koster is far removed from SOE and MMOs at this point and it is not likely he'll be coming back to that game space any time soon.
So, anyone hoping for a good sandboxish game from SOE, should remember that the guy that made that happen is long gone.
i have a serious doubt that youll be seeing a pure skillbased game. I would put a small bet on it being a class based game, but the classes would be very flexible.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out. I'm hoping EQ Next involves taking the EverQuest timeline to a period where it's more Sci-Fi than fantasy but that's probably a long shot. If they can make another decent sandbox that takes many of the elements that they had in Star Wars Galaxies I will be quite happy.
Despite what people say about SOE, they do seem to be the only mainstream studio that is prepared to make MMO's outside of the usual style.
Either way, it seems it'll be another long year or two before I have a new MMO to play - hopefully this time next year The Repopulation will be getting ready to launch.
Lets put this "eq was the origonal themepark" argument to bed with a simple fact.
There was no such term in mmo's as themepark back in 1999 and i challenge each one of you to find one.
EQ had a big open world that did not take you on a path progression. it not have quest hubs.
It was simply a world to play in. it was like you were given a world and a few tools to play inside with......wait a sec, outside my son has a big sqare box full of sand with a few tools to play in too. he cant take these tools apart and build them again but he can build the sand in any way he wants to.
Now in EQ back in 1999 you could not build the sand in anyway you wanted to, so it was not a complete sandbox, but it was coser to a sandbox than a themepark because we could go and do what we wanted ( with obvious mmo restrictions )
Another cheeky point about a sandbox is that if my son cuts his hand with one of those tools, it hurts him....almost like he is being punished for a mistake lol....but thats another argument haha!
If they could do a hybrid i would be happy....full sandbox? boring for me. i went sandbox crazy a few years ago and tried many. i soon found out that there was just no excitment for me. unless they throw tools into that big pit then i am not going in.
I like your real sandbox analogy, I'd like to expand upon it if thats alright.
The idea of "building the sand however you want" ... You need water to make anything that would retain its structure in the sand, and for the most part these structures are created with a mold of some kind and can take many shapes..
In game resources/territory control = Water
player initiated content (designed by Devs) = Mold
World = Sandbox
Its really murky when you get into trying to define what a sandbox is. If you broke it down i guess even a real life sand box environment could be considered a "thempark" since whatever is being created is just a repetition of molds, and so if something is created it becomes an "attraction" and anything created afterwards is just a copy of that original in a different scale since it has to use the same tools and molds, just as "themepark mmo's" keep creating the same content with variations.
You are wrong about that. EQ was called a Themepark back even before it was released. But that sort of conversation took place mostly on message boards and long gone blogs. Trying to find proof of that would be exceptionally hard to do.
However, I did put a few minutes into it just for the challenge.
I took what I hoped would be the easy way, since I don't want to spend a lot of time on it. You see, once upon a time, there was this blogger who was staunchly defending the Sandbox ideal and pointed out many times the deficiencies of Themepark games. His name was Lum The Mad, known in real life as Scott Jennings. In time, he was to become the great betrayer to Sandbox gamers everywhere, just as soon as he was hired into the Themepark industry. But before that momentous placement and twisting of the knife, his blog might have offered the proof you are demanding. Since you won't take my word for it.
While I didn't find a specific statement "EQ is a Themepark game" from that time of 13 years ago, I did find this...
This is in an article about twinking in EQ. In the very first paragraph...
"Twinking's a complex issue. I'm not going to pretend to be the almighty scholar of the MMORPGs and say it's part of an obsolescence process that's natural to any themed world. (although I can agree with such postulates) I choose to look at it from a different angle entirely – just who does it harm?"
<span meta-prep-author"="">Posted on December 31, 1999 by Scot Jennings
So you can see here, in 1999, Mr. Jennings using the term "themed world" as if everyone knows exactly what he means.
And if you read the rest of the article, you can clearly see the Themepark nature of play in EQ.
And just a little side note here. Mr. Scott Jennings always had a problem finding a job in the MMO industry. Up until the time he turned tail and ran with open arms into the Themepark camp. I'll leave it to you (or any other readers) to decide if that means you have to be a Themepark enthusiast to work in the industry. That may very well explain why we've had so much trouble getting them to make a good Sandbox game like we want. I myself have no doubts about this.
Once upon a time....
Just about all sandboxes are open world. But there are open world themeparks too like daoc and indeed eq1.
The defining feature of a themepark is it has a leveling phase followed by an end game phase.
True sandboxes like eve and uo do not have endgame.
I think we're getting hung up on definitional problems rather than focusing on what we do in fact "know" about EQN
PVP will be more than an afterthought.
Player ability to create items and *more*
Player ability to destroy terrain
Raids existing
etc
I am hoping they do the right thing and make the raiding game a guild level game as it should be and not a personal level game.
for instance rather than give out sword x for player x as a reward for beating raid x, they give out item x which the whole guild can utilize, whether they raid or not. Building a guild forge, guild teleporters, guild communication, guild halls.
community activity and community rewards.
How is it a problem exactly. Im not saying that every aspect of a guild requires a raid, what i am saying is that it is far preferable to make the rewards for raiding match the level of organization for the activity.
you may not like raiding, but you might be more inclined to participate when your trying to get something that improves your whole guild in the process. I personally have no time for raiding in its current form because it fosters eliteism and greed and those arent things im interested in.
a teleporter for the guildhall is something im interested in and thus i would participate in that raid for sure.
How much of a focus there is on raiding is part of what I'm waiting to hear more about as well. And as someone belonging to a casual guild whose members don't enjoy raiding, I wouldn't want guild items such as guild halls and the other suggestions restricted to guilds that raid. That would turn me away from the game even more so.
I concur. I love many aspects of EQ, it's even the only game I gave a shit about Lore and the world. Having said that, I've only answered a bat phone once, and I won't do it again lol
Maybe it's an issue where other playstyles want rewards too, not just raiders or even guild raiders? Did that ever occur to you? If you lock up all the high end rewards, be they components or guild rewards, you are denying any other kind of playstyle / guild access to those rewards, just like they currently do in every raiding game to date.
There are a couple of issues here.
EQ next will have raiding in some form. Whether that is traditional raiding or worldmob raids or something else is unknown. Traditionally eq style raids made all the best items in the game raid items. If this turns out to be the case, given the fact that the game will also have pvp and crafting in some form i would call it a game limiting factor, since you would need raid gear to compete in pvp and crafting would largely be useless (raidgear by its nature doesnt wear out, its too hard to get...).
Now if EQN raiding gave out guild based rewards instead, they would have an impact on your guild, but they would not have an impact on pvp since the best weapons and armors would come from crafting and dungeons, which everyone would have access to. Since this is a sandbox game, crafting will probabally have a larger infleuence and thus crafting would not be affected either.
I am not a raider myself, but i do concede that raiders have a right to content as much as anyone else, and i think that it only makes sense that they be offered something interesting for their efforts. I am not saying every guild item has to come from a raid, but there must be some level of reward that would make that activity worthwhile. You cant give them the best equipment because it would destroy the game, so you have to concede something.
in order for a true sandbox to succeed all playstyles have to make a few consessions. Raiders concede the personal rewards, and non raiders concede the best guild rewards. Similarly hardcore pvpers have to concede FFa and full loot, and hardcore pvers have to concede a little pvp in the game. Thats what it takes to have it all.
As far as the guild rewards are concerned the average player isnt giving up much, and theres no reason why you cant hire a raiding guild to help you or get the items for you, if you choose not to do that content. Beyond that i think the odd raid would actually be a good community building exercise as long as the reward was something the whole guild could find to be useful. Perhaps the raid reward has the best class of teleporter, but lesser range teleporters might be achievale from other avenues, and of course there is always the possibility of going out and pvping someone elses teleporter.
Nobody is going to leave WoW to PvE and Raid in another game, its not happening, ever, and if they do they go right back to WoW after the first month. They've already discussed that they aren't going to stick to the PvE/Raid content standard that EQ and WoW have right now, it would be foolish to think anyone wants to give up 7 years of MMO progress to repeat the same thing in a different title.
"Raiders" as you call people, or anybody not looking for something drastically different than what is currently offered have no stake in the success of a new MMO and should not even be considered let aloned catered to.
So stop Idealizing what current MMO's offer as the only form of content.
EQN was in development.... Suddenly when PS2 is annouced and in development, EQN is scrapped and being remade using PS2's engine.... If you want to see the TYPE of content EQN will probably offer then look at Planetside, look at territory control, recource management, player initated missions, cert grinding, RMT skin's etc. Use those mechanics that we know are in place and emphasis their idea of "sandbox content" and expand upon them.
the man said himself there would be raid content. He never mentioned what form it would be in.
Arrr but sandbox uses a skil system which EQ also had aswell if you remember correctly there was a skill that lvled for every skill/spell you used. 1h sword skill the higher it was the more accurate and more dmg you did with swing, Evocation skill reduced the amount of fizzles and increased effectiveness of the spell that used the Evocation skill. Meditation skill the higher it was the faster your mana regenerated, Some were class only based skill other everyone got. EQ has alot of sandbox element but it also has alot of themepark it is a theme of its own, its neither completly sandbox and its neither a complete themepark.