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Unfocused Time, Revisited
Amathe
Member LegendaryPosts: 7,630
EQ was my first mmo and I didn't have any idea what I was doing when I played it. By the time I stopped playing EQ I was still pretty clueless.
This resulted in me spending a great deal of my EQ time on things that did not help me level or get better gear. I also wandered around lost a lot. Certainly I was not fighting any dragons lol.
It was the most fun I ever had in a video game.
Since that time, my game playing has become more focused and purposeful after 15 years of mmos.
The questions I ask myself are, have I eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge? Is the fact that I now play in a more focused, informed manner going to ruin Pantheon for me, preventing me from experiencing it in the wide eyed "omg!" way I experienced EQ? If I actually know what is going on, more or less, will that make the game just like every other game (maybe a bit harder)?
I think what attracts me most to Pantheon (beyond my respect for the talent of its team members) is the possibility of re-experiencing something I have lost, while at the same time fearing that what has been lost can never be recaptured (through no fault of the game itself).
I want a fantasy world that overwhelms, baffles, frightens and amazes me.
Is that still possible?
This resulted in me spending a great deal of my EQ time on things that did not help me level or get better gear. I also wandered around lost a lot. Certainly I was not fighting any dragons lol.
It was the most fun I ever had in a video game.
Since that time, my game playing has become more focused and purposeful after 15 years of mmos.
The questions I ask myself are, have I eaten from the forbidden tree of knowledge? Is the fact that I now play in a more focused, informed manner going to ruin Pantheon for me, preventing me from experiencing it in the wide eyed "omg!" way I experienced EQ? If I actually know what is going on, more or less, will that make the game just like every other game (maybe a bit harder)?
I think what attracts me most to Pantheon (beyond my respect for the talent of its team members) is the possibility of re-experiencing something I have lost, while at the same time fearing that what has been lost can never be recaptured (through no fault of the game itself).
I want a fantasy world that overwhelms, baffles, frightens and amazes me.
Is that still possible?
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Comments
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I say yes, 50%..... And that's still a lot.
I ponder this same question.
My first was Vanilla WoW. I had no clue, no one in RL to talk to about it. I had to upgrade my video card and Ram just to make it playable.
I was plopped on the Island of Teldrassil as an Elf Rogue. Slowly I moved to the level 5 area where I experienced my first group encounter in the group cave on that island trying to follow along and figuring out how to play with others..... I could go on with my story in detail but it was an amazing the feeling.
Can I regain that part, NO !
But the other 50% I can !
I look at it this way:
Thinking about off line games like Skyrim, Fallout 4, the Witcher 3, Dragon Age....... I can still be sucked into an environment. Add people and bam, a new mmo
Give me a community where I can really make friends and it could last for years.
I can once again daydream "how can I pull this off" I know, "I'll ask my friends to help". How can you daydream when so called mmos have 30 days of scripted content, meant to be soloed ?
And this is what we got for the last 10 years !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
It's not nostalgia, it's a lack of an mmo.
I got the hang of EQ1 pretty quickly but I still experienced that same feeling I think you are describing. There were days when I would concentrate on leveling and other days when I would just explore the world around me. But I was never in a hurry to reach the level cap because I just had fun playing.
Is it possible to experience that kind of feeling again in a future MMO? I don't know. I'd like to think that it is. It depends on whether that feeling is a one-time experience you get when you first play an MMO or whether it depends on the quality of the MMO itself. I mentioned on another thread that I felt that "in world euphoria" in EQ for about six months which is a pretty long time. That gives me hope that, if done right, it can happen again.
On the other hand, as good as the game was, I also thought it had a lot of flaws and could be improved in many areas. The fact that those flaws didn't affect the fun-factor makes me wonder if it was just the fact that EQ was also my first MMO.
The problem for devs is that, as the MMO population has expanded, everyone's idea of the perfect game is different. I think gamers probably need to be a little more tolerant in their preferences, which I know is not easy. I'd say if Pantheon gives me about 80% of what I'm looking for, I should be pretty happy.
That is the $100,000 question - and it is why there are a number of people that are quick to jump to 'rose-colored glasses' and 'first mmo' nostalgia as their view on why Pantheon won't do well. I'll probably play when (if) it releases and I'll go in blind (except perhaps for some of the lore) to try to get that 'fresh mmo' feeling
The developers have a hard task. They have to design and implement a game that I will want to play without any input from me - an old EQ1 bard that played from 1999 - 2004 that didn't raid much (halfway keyed to Time when I quit).
EQ, more than any other game I have ever played, truly did begin once you were max level and in an active raiding guild, raiding everyday for multiple hours. Leveling was basically the tutorial.
I hear from so many people who say they "played" EQ but, in actuality, they barely scratched the surface. Then they wonder why we have a different perspective...
If Pantheon turns out to be like EQ, having a greater focus will open up the game to more options and greater enjoyment.
It wasn't until much later that this end game focus became a thing in EQ.
This ^ wasn't my experience at all. I can't comprehend how you could have time enough to be a member of 2 different raiding guilds on 2 different servers simultaneously? Maybe if one was on an opposite time schedule (euro guild or something)...and you never slept. Even then, sometimes the time would overlap. But it seems basically impossible. How could we have such a difference of opinion on that when we played the same game?
There was rarely a day when we couldn't find a target. At the high end there was generally only a couple other guilds at most that could actually complete some of the more difficult targets for starters, then it's just about having your trackers camped out in all the zones and checking them everyday...and then having your guild be efficient enough to have all 100ish (or whatever number) people able to mobilize everyone to the same spot in 5-10 mins from anywhere in the world.
It was usually about how efficiently you could mobilize everyone because at the highest end the few guilds that were checking the targets all had a general idea of when the major targets respawn was. It was a race to the target. (Sometimes we mobilized and were waiting for the respawn before it poped)
Sure, there are times when you are a bit to slow...you have to take your next best options. Every now and then there would be nothing up worth killing, like you mentioned and we would have to resort to grouping but that was the exception, not the norm.
The scenario you gave Dullahan is very different from my experience. That is just another example of what I was talking about in the post above.
Maybe it's the definition of "raiding guild" that is the issue? I take that to mean those guilds that are able to do some of the highest level raiding content from the most current expansion...basically everyday (should be a given when talking about EQ and raiding guilds, no?). I think we are on the same page with that but maybe it needs clarification? If not I'm unsure why there is so much discrepancy in the various perspectives people have of the game if we were all experiencing similar content during a similar time period.
I got off on a tangent there but, the fact that you say you were in 2 raiding guilds simultaneously is a huge red flag to me. I find that to be an impossibility.
The people who raided on a regular basis in EQ were a teeny tiny fraction of the people who played EQ. In most games I've seen the 10% figure is thrown around. Based on my experience, it was even lower than that in EQ. That of course changed over the years as the game was slanted more and more towards end game focus and raiding.
I very much agree with your last sentence:
Dullahan : "That of course changed over the years as the game was slanted more and more towards end game focus and raiding."
That ^ is exactly what I'm referring to. Kunark was only the start. It progressed from there. In a similar sense that leveling was the game tutorial in EQ, Kunark was like the raiding tutorial. It was the start of the raiding focus and molded what the game would become. It grew from there.
It was the begining of a new style of play. A type of play that allowed you to log in night after night and go after raid targets on a consistent basis. It made it so you only had to play in a single group scenario very minimally. I prefer the large raiding group style of play. Raiding everyday with 60-100+ "friends" is a major part of why I found EQ so enjoyable. Personally, I consider Velious to be the best expansion of any game I've ever played. Though I enjoyed Luclin raids as well...SSra/Seru/Vex Thall etc.
Velious/Temple of Veeshan was the high point in the history of mmorpgs imho.
The percentage of people who raided consistently doesn't matter (which I would estimate at much higher than 10% of the population, like you allude to in the quote above, once velious-luclin came around.) It did take a bit for the raiding populace to grow.
I just find it strange that I seem to see a lot of people that say they played EQ or that they raided in EQ (which from my perspective is the same thing...as you barely scratched the surface of the game if you didn't raid from Kunark and beyond), but they have a very different perspective of what the game was.
...Could be because they played EQ during a later time frame? I'm usually referring to pre-Pop. I quit during GoD. Or maybe they played from release and quit before Kunark so they didn't experience EQ once it became raid focused?... that is less likely.
Rambling again...
Back to the original point, if the OP was more focused in their style of play I think that would have opened up many more options (primarily raiding), that would have given them added enjoyment of the game.
To me the fun is the journey and making new friends on the way. And I did experience the raiding game early on up until I left the raiding guild after the Plane of Sky came out.
We did get some server firsts there and it was fun raiding from the aspect of getting their first and having to figure things out as you go.
On what grounds is p99 not comparable to live? It remains the same, the focus of the game revolved primarily around group play at that point, and the raid focus became popular later. I don't really consider farming stuff like chardok royals or planar armor raid content. On the server I played on, I got that stuff in pick up groups. Big targets were pretty highly contested and not something that you could depend on being there every week... because that wasn't the point of the game. And I personally think the game was better for it.
The way I see it.... If it's a LARGE mmo like they used to make, it doesn't matter if people rush to end game.
LARGE mmos can be do as you feel..... This lost it's way among other things.
With newer games like ESO, FF14, their scripted and follow the story line. No reason to take it slow, their just fast paced video games. In a LARGE mmo will have groups running to end game and others taking their time, and everything in between.
Fast story:
I joined a well known Guild for GW2. I had so much fun with them that I stuck by them for FF14.
However they insisted that everyone be on Voice Chat. I had no problem with that. Well, they were well organized for release (too organized). They were insisting all players rush from the first few minuet's, it was actually irritating and people began turning the voice off, including me.
This was over zealous and players were doing as they please. Never the less both GW2 and FF14 ended up being scripted game anyway.
But what I was trying to get across is that the wonder brought about by an amazing new world, when it is as rich, majestic and as well done as EQ, and before it is reduced to a progression mill, is a great feeling and one that is hard to recapture. I am hoping Pantheon can pull it off. Things look promising so far.
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
I disagree.
After being in a top-tier raiding guild for nearly ten years, I realized I was having much more fun playing on low level alts, randomly exploring the world, and generally wandering around randomly.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
I think most people consider PoP the drop off that started the decline and that was only 3-4 years after EQ came out.
When I, and others, talk about the highlights of raiding in EQ it's usually in reference to the Kunark through Luclin expansions (with velious being the primary focus that is often referenced). The game changed so much over the years. I'm sure you understand how it needs to be discussed differently based on what time frame we are talking about.
Also, the amount of loot that is available on P99 servers isn't what it was in early EQ. It makes gearing up your character easier...which makes content easier.
But more so, the point was about raiding in EQ during its prime and you seem to be focusing on Kunark for some reason? Like mentioned above, Kunark was just the beginning. Raiding in Kunark was just getting your toes wet. It was the start of what EQ would evolve into...but it was only the tip of the iceberg. The game didn't fully evolve into the raiding game that it became known for, (and what some future mmos would model much of their game design after) until Velious. So, why so many Kunark references instead of focusing on when the game was more evolved as far as raiding?
That was my only point. That raid content was limited, because that wasn't the primary focus of the game. Most progression was geared towards group play. That guilds could combine a few of those groups and raid something now and then was just icing on the already delicious cake. After those occasional, highly contested raids, it was back to farming group content. That was the bread and butter, especially once players had alternate advancement.
Sure better computers make the process easier. The prevalence of loot also eventually trivialized the experience on p99, hence the reason I no longer play there. The game was never meant to be left in an expansion for 5+ years without any real system to combat mudflation and remove old items from the economy. Neither of those things directly address or refute the point I was trying to make.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Hi DMKano,
Both you and I go head to head on this topic. We seem to oppose each other strongly.
I would like to ask if you can agree with me, even just a little. That their is an outside chance new players could embrace a game like this ?....... After all its just a guess how people will react.
Also, Pantheon could be totally different than we think. Their was a major difference between EQ1 and Vanguard..... Pantheon may be very different than both..... We still don't know this.
Interesting you brought up Vanguard. I recall playing at launch and one day thinking, so this is what EQ1 was like.
I had never previously played EQ but was familiar with what MMOs I had tried before borrowed from it and what was left behind.
DAOC, SB, WOW and even L2 to a lesser extent all bore strong vestiges to EQ1 so when Vanguard came long it was very familiar.
I tried EVE shortly afterwards and found a game very different from all I had played previously and rediscovered the sense of wonder I felt with L1, DAOC and even vanilla WOW with its quest centric progression system which was refreshing from the camp grinding design.
This may end up being a fun and enjoyable game but that is really the only surprise I'm expecting from it.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
However, I remember sitting in a movie theater in 1977 being BLOWN AWAY by Star Wars. At the time I had read and watched quite a lot of science fiction, but Star Wars took it to another level.
That has not kept me from having many OMG moments while enjoying subsequent works such as Blade Runner, Alien, The Matrix, etc.
So I guess I am hoping that, even if I have seen and read a ton of fantasy themed works before, there might still be room for some surprise, amazement and awe. *crosses fingers*
EQ1, EQ2, SWG, SWTOR, GW, GW2 CoH, CoV, FFXI, WoW, CO, War,TSW and a slew of free trials and beta tests
Still possible? I dont think that ever was possible.
EQ1 vanilla wasnt like that. It was fun alright. But nothing like the above.
If you mean can a game still surprise old gamers with new tricks then yes there can still be tricks you can learn just like the old EQ1. It will never be the first game you ever played if you are an old timer, obviously. But every game can have its own tricks.