The sense of fear and wonderment on the first run from Kelethin to Freeport.
The first time I made the run from Freeport to Qeynos, so that I could find Surefall Glade.
Taking a group of role-players and getting them to work together to kill dragons in Velious, and being told by one of the hard-core roleplayers that it was the most fun they had ever had.
getting bound in highpass, as a total noob. I think I was level 12 at the time. I wanted a bronze scimiar on my little druid and heard they could drop there. Went on over with a few stacks of food, drink, bandages and batwings looking to trade for a scimitar to ppl not wanting to leave to sell/buy. I bound in a nice empty spot incase I died....well, I died and the spot I bound at wasn't normally cleared, it was the spawn point for 4 gnolls. death loop, ened up having to delete the toon after crashing my comp from Loading Please Wait...you died...Loading Please Wait...you died...Loading Please Wait...etc
what a blast )
Grouping in Old school mmo's: meeting someone at the bar and chatting, getting to know them before jumping into bed. Current mmo's grouping: tinder. swipe, hookup, hope you don't get herpes, never see them again.
So many of the design choices made in early EQ seem so foreign now, you'd never see them in a current era game. Oddly many have mentioned them as things they miss about EQ. Take for example zone design.
- A xp zone that if you fight in as a dark elf you could get KOS to your own home city. Mistmoor
- The Hole where 90% of the zone is inaccessible unless you 'drop' in and once you drop in you can't zone out - only port out. And on top of that none of the melee/hybrid classes could port by any means without special items that weren't originally available. Quite a few other "one-way" dungeons in the game, many of them some of the best in the early game.
- As mentioned many outdoor xp zones with roaming insta-death mobs. "Gornaire to KC!" Gotta love roaming dragons, combined with never ending hate-list propagation this could cause some crazy events.
- West Karana, omg could it be bigger for no real reason other than to add 'distance'?
- The whole Sleepers Tomb saga. (once done per server, it changes forever (changing the loot table as well))
- etc etc.
EQ tried many different things - not all of them worked. But I think many developers have consolized their MMO's to much. We must remember MMO's derived from Muds, which when you were dead - you were dead. Ever play Merdian 59? Now talk about a death penalty!
That element is also in Spellborn and I love it! Also, there is so much "I miss EQ threads" why don't you go and play it? It runs, it's alive and its gonna have new expansion next month. Or some patched ruined it or what?
No nothing like that. Playing it is a bit clunky, and it is not very responsive on the whole. Also, it takes one hell of a time commitment, and you can't solo, or really even duo through to cap. I am not a big grouper these days. The farthest I ever managed to duo to was level 51, and that was my warrior and my wifes shaman. And we were crazy decked out in twink gear, and that was with attunable stuff from whichever expansion it was that added the stuff. Bother of us in Fungis and everything. Things are great early on, and you can powerhouse a lot of it, but you eventually get to the point that you NEED 3-4 people to get anywhere, and that is just not what I want these days. Not to mention the crazy amount of time to level. :P
That still doesn't change the feelings I get just thinking about the game though, or that they had really cool ideas. You can have a game that you don't want to play, but has really fun stuff about it. Another example for me is EVE. I go back all the time, and get bored quickly, but I am constantly thinking about it and it's wonderful economy.
err you can in theory duo to 85 . some dont consider mercs as duoing either .most call it soloing.so ya you can solo to 85 with mercs.i seen just last night a druid an a cleric players with froglock warrior mercs .the mercs did the tanking an they healed an doted.fairly effective team.no slows but you dont always need slow now.
atm i got a 63 troll warrior with merc healer at highborns in veksar. solo the room an even get to the named spawns up top.its just slow.hes even usen old wepons fleashgrinders in both hands.but hes got 126 aa tho.aa is as big of a edge as gear as you level up.now if your talking epics an 1.5 epics an 2.0 epics ya your gona need some help or a guild.
shame devs have killed the idea of epic 3.0.oh yeah if your getn bored playing a warrior with all their discs try a difrent class, sk or paladin. or a ranger.combat is dry when comparing it to say age of conan but its still fun .fights get longer tho but if you an your wife played with say a healer merc an tank merc your dps would open up alot.
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." Robert E. Howard, The Tower of the Elephant (1933)
That element is also in Spellborn and I love it! Also, there is so much "I miss EQ threads" why don't you go and play it? It runs, it's alive and its gonna have new expansion next month. Or some patched ruined it or what?
No nothing like that. Playing it is a bit clunky, and it is not very responsive on the whole. Also, it takes one hell of a time commitment, and you can't solo, or really even duo through to cap. I am not a big grouper these days. The farthest I ever managed to duo to was level 51, and that was my warrior and my wifes shaman. And we were crazy decked out in twink gear, and that was with attunable stuff from whichever expansion it was that added the stuff. Bother of us in Fungis and everything. Things are great early on, and you can powerhouse a lot of it, but you eventually get to the point that you NEED 3-4 people to get anywhere, and that is just not what I want these days. Not to mention the crazy amount of time to level. :P
That still doesn't change the feelings I get just thinking about the game though, or that they had really cool ideas. You can have a game that you don't want to play, but has really fun stuff about it. Another example for me is EVE. I go back all the time, and get bored quickly, but I am constantly thinking about it and it's wonderful economy.
err you can in theory duo to 85 . some dont consider mercs as duoing either .most call it soloing.so ya you can solo to 85 with mercs.i seen just last night a druid an a cleric players with froglock warrior mercs .the mercs did the tanking an they healed an doted.fairly effective team.no slows but you dont always need slow now.
atm i got a 63 troll warrior with merc healer at highborns in veksar. solo the room an eve get to the named spawns up top.its just slow.hes even usen old wepons fleashgrinders in both hands.but hes got 126 aa tho.aa is as big of a edge as gear as you level up.now if your talking epics an 1.5 epics an 2.0 epics ya your gona need some help or a guild.
shame devs have killed the idea of epic 3.0.oh yeah if your getn bored playing a warrior with all their discs try a difrent class, sk or paladin. or a ranger.combat is dry when comparing it to say age of conan but its still fun .fights get longer tho but if you an your wife plaed with say a healer merc an tank merc your dps would open up alot.
I have been soloing all around PoN since level 62 (now 64) with my merc and it is going great. What i do is go to the guild lobby and afk for 30 mins. When i come back, Im fully buffed with 3-4 hours duration on these buffs. Im talking mana regen, cleric hp buff, shaman buffs, thorns... all of it. Then I head over to PoN and take on like 4-5 mobs at a time. If i position myself right, I can be in a fight for 30-40mins becuase the mobs keep aggroing. Its great and the exp moves fast. With my merc i get just less then 1% of a level per kill on light blue mobs. My merc and i can down a mob in 30-45 seconds.
Wait wait wait... Back up.. EQ has mercs? When was this added? Back when I played, there were no mercs, and CERTAINLY no soloing passed about 40 in great gear unless you were a kiting class...
everything that you mentioned. I just can't go back now because of all of the changes they made to it. Corpse runs ruled! It gave you a real fear of dieing and that added another amazing element to the game. I play EQ2 now just becuase my wife loves it and there is nothing else to play, but it is truley garbage.
Loved EQ Classic and hates that carebears had it changed.
1. No silly race/class balance! Being a PvE world (excluding the PvP servers I never played on) allowed races and classes to be unique. Nothing had to be a mirror of anything else, and you were free to completely mess up your own stats as you went along.
2. One toon per account on RP servers. This ment there were actually social consequences for being a jerk. We didn't need a loot system becuae if you were a ninja word of it would spread so fast you might as well just reroll.
3. Iksar infra vision and regen and Dark Elf ultra vision. A human monk I knew always complained about not being able to see and I didn't know what he was talking about until I made a human to check it out... wow, sucks to be you. I had an Iksar warrior whose regen was so fast you could see his health climb back to full between hits in combat- before PoP anyway.
4. The random tells I could count on everynight between 2 and 3 am from people begging my necro to come to some middle of nowhere zone and do a corpse summon. I made a LOT of money this way- I made them pay 50% up front and 50% when we got into the zone I had to summon from and traveled nearly naked lest I needed my own corpse summoned.
5. Going somewhere with a friend and suddenly stopping dead in your tracks... they were safe here because they had faction, but you had been working on an oposing faction and were KOS here.
6. Being able to turn in faction items while invis or stealthed behind the NPC and slowly removing your KOS status (though I think this eventually got nerfed).
7. Having someone be a complete **** to you then training half the zone to them and FDing. Don't mess with the necro chum.
8. It was really a better class of people that played these games back then (yes, I'm old, and you kids suck =P Now get off my lawn!). We didn't grow up learning our social skills from the consequence free anonymous nameless interwebz. We grew up dealing with everybody face to face and that basic and freely given respect carried over to the new world of MMOs. This for me is why EQ or anything like it could never be the same. And I'm willing to bet this is why so many people just prefer to solo now.
So many of the design choices made in early EQ seem so foreign now, you'd never see them in a current era game. Oddly many have mentioned them as things they miss about EQ. Take for example zone design. - A xp zone that if you fight in as a dark elf you could get KOS to your own home city. Mistmoor - The Hole where 90% of the zone is inaccessible unless you 'drop' in and once you drop in you can't zone out - only port out. And on top of that none of the melee/hybrid classes could port by any means without special items that weren't originally available. Quite a few other "one-way" dungeons in the game, many of them some of the best in the early game. - As mentioned many outdoor xp zones with roaming insta-death mobs. "Gornaire to KC!" Gotta love roaming dragons, combined with never ending hate-list propagation this could cause some crazy events. - West Karana, omg could it be bigger for no real reason other than to add 'distance'? - The whole Sleepers Tomb saga. (once done per server, it changes forever (changing the loot table as well)) - etc etc. EQ tried many different things - not all of them worked. But I think many developers have consolized their MMO's to much. We must remember MMO's derived from Muds, which when you were dead - you were dead. Ever play Merdian 59? Now talk about a death penalty!
Exactly! This is why I am incorporating such features, along with some other ideas I have that I haven't seen implemented yet...at least in the way I thought of them. And I'm not looking at things from just my own personal enjoyment view, but for EVERY player that actually enjoys challenge, etc.
In school for my BA in Game Art & Design..finish in 2012...so I have been working on a concept to pitch whenever/wherever I may get hired (Hopefully).
Don't ask for me to share details either. Keeping this one under my hat. As the saying goes, "loose lips sink ships". But hey...even if it gets rejected, it is still fun to do, and good practice. =P
The absolute nessesity to play as a team if you want to overcome more than 50% of the content. The extremely limited solo play. The challenge of fighting your way in, for hours, deep down into a dungeon. 3 day long raids. Quests that really made you try hard, and that you realy feel like you had accomplished something when you finished it. The drastic level curve...and the feeling of accomplishment that you obtaineded when you passed a "hell level". Under water raids/fights with no underwater breathing items...so that the caster had to keep "EB" on you at all times. The need to fight like hell and pay extra close attention to EVERY single fight because the risk of dieing meant that you loose exp, and may even loose all of your equipment (pre graveyards). The challenge of playing an old school mmorpg.
Should they ever bring the graphics up to date on EQ1 I will play it again, but until then I just cant look at 32 colour, 15 frame animations all night long. Yeeech.
I miss caring about my gear. I play LOTRO now, and enjoy it, but I don't really pay attention to gear much. When I played EQ1 there was always a piece of gear I was working for, and a general idea of what was good and what was not so good. Just doesn't seem to matter in a lot of these games. Haven't bee excited about a drop in years. I like that LOTRO is very much quest based, but I miss running into that rare name on occasion that dropped something worth talking about.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.
Comments
Grouping in KC and the Hole were the best.
The sense of fear and wonderment on the first run from Kelethin to Freeport.
The first time I made the run from Freeport to Qeynos, so that I could find Surefall Glade.
Taking a group of role-players and getting them to work together to kill dragons in Velious, and being told by one of the hard-core roleplayers that it was the most fun they had ever had.
I wish I had time to play, honestly.
Tuvan - EQ1 (Vazaelle), DAOC, WAR
Tu-Van - SWG
Malakim - CoH
getting bound in highpass, as a total noob. I think I was level 12 at the time. I wanted a bronze scimiar on my little druid and heard they could drop there. Went on over with a few stacks of food, drink, bandages and batwings looking to trade for a scimitar to ppl not wanting to leave to sell/buy. I bound in a nice empty spot incase I died....well, I died and the spot I bound at wasn't normally cleared, it was the spawn point for 4 gnolls. death loop, ened up having to delete the toon after crashing my comp from Loading Please Wait...you died...Loading Please Wait...you died...Loading Please Wait...etc
what a blast )
So many of the design choices made in early EQ seem so foreign now, you'd never see them in a current era game. Oddly many have mentioned them as things they miss about EQ. Take for example zone design.
- A xp zone that if you fight in as a dark elf you could get KOS to your own home city. Mistmoor
- The Hole where 90% of the zone is inaccessible unless you 'drop' in and once you drop in you can't zone out - only port out. And on top of that none of the melee/hybrid classes could port by any means without special items that weren't originally available. Quite a few other "one-way" dungeons in the game, many of them some of the best in the early game.
- As mentioned many outdoor xp zones with roaming insta-death mobs. "Gornaire to KC!" Gotta love roaming dragons, combined with never ending hate-list propagation this could cause some crazy events.
- West Karana, omg could it be bigger for no real reason other than to add 'distance'?
- The whole Sleepers Tomb saga. (once done per server, it changes forever (changing the loot table as well))
- etc etc.
EQ tried many different things - not all of them worked. But I think many developers have consolized their MMO's to much. We must remember MMO's derived from Muds, which when you were dead - you were dead. Ever play Merdian 59? Now talk about a death penalty!
No nothing like that. Playing it is a bit clunky, and it is not very responsive on the whole. Also, it takes one hell of a time commitment, and you can't solo, or really even duo through to cap. I am not a big grouper these days. The farthest I ever managed to duo to was level 51, and that was my warrior and my wifes shaman. And we were crazy decked out in twink gear, and that was with attunable stuff from whichever expansion it was that added the stuff. Bother of us in Fungis and everything. Things are great early on, and you can powerhouse a lot of it, but you eventually get to the point that you NEED 3-4 people to get anywhere, and that is just not what I want these days. Not to mention the crazy amount of time to level. :P
That still doesn't change the feelings I get just thinking about the game though, or that they had really cool ideas. You can have a game that you don't want to play, but has really fun stuff about it. Another example for me is EVE. I go back all the time, and get bored quickly, but I am constantly thinking about it and it's wonderful economy.
err you can in theory duo to 85 . some dont consider mercs as duoing either .most call it soloing.so ya you can solo to 85 with mercs.i seen just last night a druid an a cleric players with froglock warrior mercs .the mercs did the tanking an they healed an doted.fairly effective team.no slows but you dont always need slow now.
atm i got a 63 troll warrior with merc healer at highborns in veksar. solo the room an even get to the named spawns up top.its just slow.hes even usen old wepons fleashgrinders in both hands.but hes got 126 aa tho.aa is as big of a edge as gear as you level up.now if your talking epics an 1.5 epics an 2.0 epics ya your gona need some help or a guild.
shame devs have killed the idea of epic 3.0.oh yeah if your getn bored playing a warrior with all their discs try a difrent class, sk or paladin. or a ranger.combat is dry when comparing it to say age of conan but its still fun .fights get longer tho but if you an your wife played with say a healer merc an tank merc your dps would open up alot.
"Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing." Robert E. Howard, The Tower of the Elephant (1933)
No nothing like that. Playing it is a bit clunky, and it is not very responsive on the whole. Also, it takes one hell of a time commitment, and you can't solo, or really even duo through to cap. I am not a big grouper these days. The farthest I ever managed to duo to was level 51, and that was my warrior and my wifes shaman. And we were crazy decked out in twink gear, and that was with attunable stuff from whichever expansion it was that added the stuff. Bother of us in Fungis and everything. Things are great early on, and you can powerhouse a lot of it, but you eventually get to the point that you NEED 3-4 people to get anywhere, and that is just not what I want these days. Not to mention the crazy amount of time to level. :P
That still doesn't change the feelings I get just thinking about the game though, or that they had really cool ideas. You can have a game that you don't want to play, but has really fun stuff about it. Another example for me is EVE. I go back all the time, and get bored quickly, but I am constantly thinking about it and it's wonderful economy.
err you can in theory duo to 85 . some dont consider mercs as duoing either .most call it soloing.so ya you can solo to 85 with mercs.i seen just last night a druid an a cleric players with froglock warrior mercs .the mercs did the tanking an they healed an doted.fairly effective team.no slows but you dont always need slow now.
atm i got a 63 troll warrior with merc healer at highborns in veksar. solo the room an eve get to the named spawns up top.its just slow.hes even usen old wepons fleashgrinders in both hands.but hes got 126 aa tho.aa is as big of a edge as gear as you level up.now if your talking epics an 1.5 epics an 2.0 epics ya your gona need some help or a guild.
shame devs have killed the idea of epic 3.0.oh yeah if your getn bored playing a warrior with all their discs try a difrent class, sk or paladin. or a ranger.combat is dry when comparing it to say age of conan but its still fun .fights get longer tho but if you an your wife plaed with say a healer merc an tank merc your dps would open up alot.
I have been soloing all around PoN since level 62 (now 64) with my merc and it is going great. What i do is go to the guild lobby and afk for 30 mins. When i come back, Im fully buffed with 3-4 hours duration on these buffs. Im talking mana regen, cleric hp buff, shaman buffs, thorns... all of it. Then I head over to PoN and take on like 4-5 mobs at a time. If i position myself right, I can be in a fight for 30-40mins becuase the mobs keep aggroing. Its great and the exp moves fast. With my merc i get just less then 1% of a level per kill on light blue mobs. My merc and i can down a mob in 30-45 seconds.
Wait wait wait... Back up.. EQ has mercs? When was this added? Back when I played, there were no mercs, and CERTAINLY no soloing passed about 40 in great gear unless you were a kiting class...
everything that you mentioned. I just can't go back now because of all of the changes they made to it. Corpse runs ruled! It gave you a real fear of dieing and that added another amazing element to the game. I play EQ2 now just becuase my wife loves it and there is nothing else to play, but it is truley garbage.
Loved EQ Classic and hates that carebears had it changed.
1. No silly race/class balance! Being a PvE world (excluding the PvP servers I never played on) allowed races and classes to be unique. Nothing had to be a mirror of anything else, and you were free to completely mess up your own stats as you went along.
2. One toon per account on RP servers. This ment there were actually social consequences for being a jerk. We didn't need a loot system becuae if you were a ninja word of it would spread so fast you might as well just reroll.
3. Iksar infra vision and regen and Dark Elf ultra vision. A human monk I knew always complained about not being able to see and I didn't know what he was talking about until I made a human to check it out... wow, sucks to be you. I had an Iksar warrior whose regen was so fast you could see his health climb back to full between hits in combat- before PoP anyway.
4. The random tells I could count on everynight between 2 and 3 am from people begging my necro to come to some middle of nowhere zone and do a corpse summon. I made a LOT of money this way- I made them pay 50% up front and 50% when we got into the zone I had to summon from and traveled nearly naked lest I needed my own corpse summoned.
5. Going somewhere with a friend and suddenly stopping dead in your tracks... they were safe here because they had faction, but you had been working on an oposing faction and were KOS here.
6. Being able to turn in faction items while invis or stealthed behind the NPC and slowly removing your KOS status (though I think this eventually got nerfed).
7. Having someone be a complete **** to you then training half the zone to them and FDing. Don't mess with the necro chum.
8. It was really a better class of people that played these games back then (yes, I'm old, and you kids suck =P Now get off my lawn!). We didn't grow up learning our social skills from the consequence free anonymous nameless interwebz. We grew up dealing with everybody face to face and that basic and freely given respect carried over to the new world of MMOs. This for me is why EQ or anything like it could never be the same. And I'm willing to bet this is why so many people just prefer to solo now.
Exactly! This is why I am incorporating such features, along with some other ideas I have that I haven't seen implemented yet...at least in the way I thought of them. And I'm not looking at things from just my own personal enjoyment view, but for EVERY player that actually enjoys challenge, etc.
In school for my BA in Game Art & Design..finish in 2012...so I have been working on a concept to pitch whenever/wherever I may get hired (Hopefully).
Don't ask for me to share details either. Keeping this one under my hat. As the saying goes, "loose lips sink ships". But hey...even if it gets rejected, it is still fun to do, and good practice. =P
The absolute nessesity to play as a team if you want to overcome more than 50% of the content. The extremely limited solo play. The challenge of fighting your way in, for hours, deep down into a dungeon. 3 day long raids. Quests that really made you try hard, and that you realy feel like you had accomplished something when you finished it. The drastic level curve...and the feeling of accomplishment that you obtaineded when you passed a "hell level". Under water raids/fights with no underwater breathing items...so that the caster had to keep "EB" on you at all times. The need to fight like hell and pay extra close attention to EVERY single fight because the risk of dieing meant that you loose exp, and may even loose all of your equipment (pre graveyards). The challenge of playing an old school mmorpg.
Should they ever bring the graphics up to date on EQ1 I will play it again, but until then I just cant look at 32 colour, 15 frame animations all night long. Yeeech.
FINBAR
-------------------------------------------
I miss caring about my gear. I play LOTRO now, and enjoy it, but I don't really pay attention to gear much. When I played EQ1 there was always a piece of gear I was working for, and a general idea of what was good and what was not so good. Just doesn't seem to matter in a lot of these games. Haven't bee excited about a drop in years. I like that LOTRO is very much quest based, but I miss running into that rare name on occasion that dropped something worth talking about.
parrotpholk-Because we all know the miracle patch fairy shows up the night before release and sprinkles magic dust on the server to make it allllll better.