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I really don't get this hate towards instances. MMORPG.com now has an article "What we don't want in EQnext: Instances".
I don't know who this "we" is. People who never played EQ?
The best expansions in Everquest were the heavily instanced ones.
LDON-OOW (proving grounds trials+pizza instances)-DoN-DoD (amazing expansion, also the best looking one imo)
Let alone all the raid instances, which were actually a huge improvement over the mob ganking and drama caused on the server.
GoD group instances, one of the most fun and rewarding content you could find. Ask anyone what the most fun group content was and many will say LDON, DoD, MPG trials and the freeport Badge Arena battle. All instanced.
I have no idea why some people don't want instances. If done right, they are great.
Comments
They yank you out of the world, and remove the MMO elements while you're in one. They represent disbalances in game design. Some instancing technologies can have really bad and unimmersive side effects (parties getting split in SW:TOR; STO players split along a grid).
Generally, they take away from the feeling of a virtual world. I think they're acceptable in themeparks, but not in sandboxes.
Favorite MMO: Vanilla WoW
Currently playing: GW2, EVE
Excited for: Wildstar, maybe?
what are you talking about?
that's what they were...LDON, DON, DOD whole expansion were like that, they are 90% instanced private zones
OOW , GoD, PoR, group instances, they were like that
Everquest had completely instanced expansions. And they are fondly remembered as some of the best grouping and best expansions by plenty.
Zones are fine... instances within zones are pure bad.. anything that seperates the player from the world is bad..
its a MMORPG your suppose to play and compete with other people.. if you dont want to do that then there are many really good SP RPGS out there..
Still i think open world games are a lot better than games with zones..
There's a reason those expansions were at the very end of the popularity of EQ. It's because those instanced expansions ruined the world. The challenge remained, but the world was gone because they instanced it giving players a game that played like a first person shooter with no permanence.
Instances are great if what you want is to play a single player game until you win and then move on, but they're not great if you want a long term place to explore.
Asdar
that was part of the fun competing with other people to get certain things.. it was a great rush in EQ fighting my way down to the mushroom king just to find someone else doing the same thing.. and on the PVP servers that was even better..
Well considering RoK or SoV are universally considered the best expansions for EQ, you are mistaken. Open a poll, you'll see Competition over mobs and spawns are good for mmos. It forces people to group together or go somewhere else and find other players. [mod edit] People's problem with instances is that it stops becoming "you're in our world now" and becomes "our world is a joke" because nagafen gets killed 100 times per hour. Who gives a shit about killing an epic boss then?
People on this forum are the minority, most MMO players are treadmill loving, lfr wow fans, thats why every game tries to copy it since 2004. Most people like instances. The people on this forum played MMOs way before they got like this. Back then it was more about the immersion, the lore, the community, and the experience. Not splintering the community into 100 instances so everyone can have everything anytime.
I personally can't stand instances. It feels like a mini-game to me, and not an actual part of the rest of the game as a whole. You have this huge elaborate place, and only 5 people are running around in it?
I like open dungeons to explore. I like competing over spawns. I like respawns after you get to where you need to go. I like stumbling upon something interesting while exploring, someone else is already there, and you talk to them about it, and possibly join them in the experience. I like interacting with the rest of the player base while trying to do what I want to do at the same time. I like helping other people in trouble. I like the potential for other people to screw up what I am trying to do.
Gives me a reason to pay attention to what is going on around me, and actually care about what I am doing. Once you do an instance once, you pretty much know what to expect every time you do that instance. It becomes mindless. All you worry about is whether the people in your group know what they are doing so you can complete it as fast as possible and move on.
When a dungeon is open, there is always the chance of things not going as planned (for multiple reasons, good and bad), and I like that.
Balony. EQ introduced heavy instancing in PoP, only 2 years into the game. The game has been alive and kicking for 14 years.
LDON was one of the most played expansion of all, thousands of people played it, and it was 100% instanced.
It doesn't have to be black or white.
I thoroughly enjoyed spawn PvP in Age of Conan. Just as long as there is plenty of leveling spawns to choose from, as well as alternate advancement available, so you are never locked out of doing what you want to do.
DOAC, despite the hatred for Trials of Atlantis, did it right. I loved grouping up for those open world boss encounters. Having to take large raids in order to even get to a boss. Very, very rarely did you ever find a boss being camped by another group when you got there, simply because it was so difficult to get there. They weren't like WoW open world bosses, where a neutral boss is roaming a zone that is solo friendly. Bosses in DAOC roamed raid zones, where solo players had no chance of survival.
Sandboxes are supposed to reward you for your hard work and patience. The harder you work, the greater the reward. Themeparks are about instant gratification. So if you've only played themeparks, or you've grown up where WoW was your first MMO, you may not understand the concept of 'immersion'. Or you simply may not care about it, I have a friend that can really care less, so I get it. I personally don't feel the same way, but I get it. Then again, my first MMO was Ultima Online. Followed by EQ and DAOC.
I dislike anything that takes community out of the game or anything that breaks up the world. Seamless immersion is what I love. No instancing, no layering, no phasing, no zones unless otherwise necessary. No LFG tools, dungeon finder tools, quest finder tools, that teleport you directly to a destination. I like traveling the world to get to where I need to be. The tools themselves are fine, but the instant gratification of not making your travel to your destination is immersion breaking, unless a class or spell allows for player porting. It's just what I like. I like the idea of a virtual seemless world, not a world broken up into shards.
I even feel the same way about instance PvP arenas. I don't like it. It doesn't make sense. PvP should mean something. It doesn't matter if it's faction war, guild war or PvP in the open world. Arena PvP, the way it is implemented now, is immersion breaking. Now, if certain cities had arenas, and you had to travel to that city, stand in the registration area of the arena, and wait for your queue to pop, then that would be fine. However, now, you can queue up anywhere in the world, no matter what you are doing. You can be grinding, and in the middle of a fight, poof, off to PvP in a pointless engagement. You're not fighting over territory or anything that really matters. You're just fighting to get better gear, and for what? To PvP more for no reason?
I don't know if this helped you understand. I hope so.
I stopped playing EQ shortly after POP came out.. I didnt see instances back then.. If they patched in instances and expansions after that had instancs then that sucks....
I completely understand where Waterlily is coming from. I played EQ up to early 2006 and yes it had some great open world dungeons which I loved and the game wouldn't be the same without them.
However, instanced content such as LDoN and GoD made for parties of 6 or raids of 54 (?) allowed for some great scripted events and you couldn't just 'run around' in these areas. You had to be on your toes at all times otherwise you wiped.
Don't get me wrong some of my best memories are from the open world dungeons like HHK, Splitpaw and Unrest, but I count completing the GoD expansion probably one of my greatest achievemenst before I retired from the game.
He's talking about PoTime. I think it was the first time Everquest introduced an instance into the game. It was not patched in.
The first instance that I know of from Everquest was Plane of Time B. They instanced it after the top raiding guilds on the servers could not agree on sharing the spawn timers and fixing a solid rotation so they instanced it so all the guilds could raid it. After that came the Ykesha expansion where only 1 or 2 more instances were added. After that they decided to release an entirely instanced expansion, Lost Dungeons of Norrath.
Needless instancing only separates the population. Sometimes it can be good, sometimes not so good.
I don't recall any of the planes being instanced. If they were then that was done after I left the game. I remember that the bosses respawned every few days and that you have to talk to other guilds to arrange which of them them would be running it.
PoP was not instanced and LDON sucked balls. Give me open world and open dungeons!
I spent a lot of time in LDON HARDS because of the stupid point system but Kaesora, Howling Stones and Seb are 10000 times better than the experience in LDON dungeons.
Plane of Time is fully insanced. A and B. It happened during PoP, some of the expansion might have not been fully ready at the start though, but this was the case with all expansions, they were still changing things on launch often.
For the 3rd time. Plane of Time was instanced.
It didn't happen until ykesha bro. I remember pvping in PoT on VZ because everyone wanted to raid it. It was a cluster fuck. Original PoP was not instanced anywhere.
My guess is they did it because Ykesha was garbage and people just stayed focused on PoP. I could only imagine the competition on more populated blue servers
Yeah I admit I didnt see all of the POP planes.. The ones I did play in were not instanced.. So there could have been instanced planes I didnt get to in PoP.. like I said I stopped playing shortly after PoP came out...
It was to fix camp spawning and griefing. PoP is around when Sony introduced play nice policy. Instancing can fix a lot of problems, if it was not for instancing, Everquest would have died.