Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Question: why was EQ2 created?
MMOExposed
Member RarePosts: 7,387
in Everquest II
What goal was SoE trying to achieve?
Looking at their past two hits, (EQ and SWG) why did they spend all that time and money to make a game like EQ2?
seem like it took at 180 turn around when you look at the trend that they were heading.
what was it designed the way it was following the success of EQ's original model?
looking at the future of EQNEXT I really would like a better understanding of SoE's method of trending the genre of MMO gaming.
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Comments
EQ2 was a full on theampark and totally different audience than EQ or so smed thought at the time. He always said that EQ2 was not aimed at the same audience as EQ.
SWG was a sandbox of types and everybody back then wanted to make a Star Wars game.SWG was a huge ip but in the end the price was too high with GL/LA in charge of how the game developed.
I'm with keenber.
Pretty sure SOE wants everyone playing their games, not just the "EQ crowd."
How is that difficult to understand. This is not complicated.
I was there all through the Beta, and even let out a loud "Squee" when I got my late Alpha Invite.
Here's what went down, SOE decided to make a game with an insane graphics engine that, for its time, was insanely awesome. At least so we thought until we actually got our hands on it. To make the game look anything near good you had to have a custom build $3k PC (that's coming from a PC builder whom scoffs at people whom buy Dell's or Alienware's for "Gaming").
The original concept of the game was to be EQ-Lite. Essentially, a complete redesign on how EQ functions when it comes to Spells, Leveling, and more importantly....equipment.
Lastly, they concentrated too much on instancing to resolve some of the "open world" issues they had in EQ1. Yet, that backfired too because it cheapened the overall feel of epicly creepy and extremely well designed dungeons.
Did I mention that EQ2 wasn't supposed to be an EQ sequel? It was a new MMO that, during Alpha, they decided to cash in on the EQ franchise's fan-base to increase potential sales & appeal. This is most notable by the fact that the continents were not even designed in any way shape or form (in some cases....land locations) from EQ1. They copped this out by saying that a HUGE disaster "reshaped" the world. Thereby saving them from a world redesign to at LEAST make it look something like old Norrath.
TLDR;
Drastically broke away from:
-How certain classes work
-How equipment functioned compared to EQ1
-How getting new spells wasn't a hassle anymore, except for the fact that the version you got from leveling up was a terrible jock-strap situation. You had to get a "Crafted" or "Dropped" version that literally leveled up that spell to a higher quality so it actually was worth a damn. This pissed a LOT of people off!
-Too much instancing!
-Too much focus on a weird engine that made everyone look like Wax unless you had a 3k+ PC at the time (custom built, not bought from a large corp that rips you off)
-Complete disregard for actually tieing EQ1 landmarks/locations to EQ2 until early Beta. This rolled over into launch making the world feel, disconnected?
Then, WoW got HUGE success 6months post-EQ2, and SOE was like "what in the actual f....", and then cloned a LOT of elements, including future content mechanics/designs, around WoW which further destroyed EQ2 from it ever being a true sequel.
All in all, a 5/10 when it comes to MMOs, but a 1/10 when it comes to being a proper product of the EQ franchise.
My 2cents,
-Bear
ps: As others have mentioned that i completely forgot to mention, is that EQ2 was turned into a super heavy quest-based game post 6months. Literally a copy & paste of how WoW does their leveling by following lame quests that you never read nor care about. There were only a handful of spotty quests here and there at launch, and almost none in BETA. Take that for what it's worth.
You know, that's weird, and I'm not saying that you aren't being factual Bear, just saying that (and I wasn't in the Alpha so I defer to you on it) those of us playing EQ1 heard about EQ2 a long, long, time before it ever came out.
Saying that to say, if it was a completely different game that just ended up being EQ2, they must have made that decision a long, long, time ago.
My version of the story goes more like this. Blizzard announced that they were working on an MMO based on their Award Winning Warcraft franchise, and almost within months Everquest began talking about EQ2. EQ2 then, me and my friends assumed, was an attempt to hold on to the players of EQ1, with new, updated graphics, while literally copying just about everything that Blizzard was doing in an attempt to steal customers away.
This is why EQ2 is the far more "accessible" EQ. The only thing they didn't try to copy right out was the cartoony and almost puffy child-like graphics of WoW. And that was actually their mistake. They made EQ2 so graphics intensive, listening to the video card boys who back then were calling anything that didn't look like real water and human flesh suck graphics, that no one could really run the thing. Meanwhile Bliz had settled on some cartoony looking graphics that "lo and behold" the majority of the world didn't mind dealing with because not only did the lower video consumption allow them to make a really detailed, although cartoony world, it actually ran better on everyone's rig.
I will never say anything bad about EQ1 or EQ2. Those games own you all and are the reasons for everything that have come after, but in this particular situation, in this particular conversation, I believe that EQ2 was truly (just like Vanguard) way before it's time resource-wise, and proof of this is that you can hop on to either of those games right now, with your big ole modern rig, crank it up way high, and be freaking amazed at how intense those worlds really are.
So in conclusion, it is my belief that EQ2 was initially made to be a more realistic, visually satisfying, readily accessible, updated copy of the original, but due to it's massive resource requirements ultimately had to canibalize itself down to it's competitions level. The proof of this is the SOGA graphics, which came out later and were almost carbon copies of WoW's artwork. The original models actually BREATHED, and when you looked at one of the female characters with her mid-section all out, it looked like an actual person.
It was way overboard.
And also, let me add that I have had a ton of fun playing EQ2 on two or three different year or two long occasions. That game is rich in lore and entertainment value and anyone calling it a piece of crap is doing so for suspect motives.
My info is vastly different from what others are saying here. I believe there was an article about it on mmorpg.com about a year ago...
EQ2 was greenlit pretty shortly after EQ1 was released (I think 2000 or 2001), because EQ1 was more successful than they expected, and they wanted a sequel. At the time, they had no intention of keeping EQ alive for more than a few years, so EQ2 was intended to replace it.
Obviously that changed after a couple years of development; but that is originally why it was created.
All I know is that WoW was announced first but those two games shipped within weeks of each other, in the same month, with EQ2 being the first to go out. Yet another faux pas as WoW was able to skeeze up on all the people who were having opening day jitters.
Also, as I also recall, there was a HUGE bs campaign out there about how the developers at Blizzard, who up to that point had never made an MMO, were so great and so cool, and could slice bread with their eyes and all kinds of cool stuff.
Quotes like "I'll play WoW over EQ2 because I trust Blizzard" were so contrived since, like I said, these guys had no foundation from which to make that claim lol, but apparently they worked.
Not hating on WoW, just talking about the different things that had to do with the creation of EQ2 and it's subsequent changes over the years.
That was a tit for tat business strategy game for a long time.
i rember atleast a year before EQ2 came out about most of the graphics and game design and although it looked great i had no intention of leaving my mates and guild in EQ. The first time i heard about WOW was about 3 months after the release of info about EQ2 when blizzard poached 2 if not 3 of EQ2s design team. I didn't think anything more about it till EQ2 was launched and then a little time later WOW came out and that changed every mmo out there if they wanted to stay competitive they had to go easy mode. I don't blame WOW i blame EQ for not aiming at a bigger audience and do some proper marketing and i belive both WOW and EQ2 was rushed trying to beat each other to launch. This time SOE has kept quite about EQN and that is the right way to do it but i hope they do some real advertising this time.
no foundation to believing more in Blizzard that SOE? if you think EQ2's failure was a simple propaganda victory by Blizzard, you either werent around at that time or just blind or dumb.
Diablo and Warcraft were far FAR bigger games than Everquest. Many players accurately saw that just because Blizzard hadnt done a "mmo" yet, they obviously had the talent to succeed in developing just about anything... and time has proved that. At the time of Warcraft's and EQ2's releases, Everquest players had been grumbling for years about SOE's pathetic cash grabs with rapid and shallow expansions and poor support. The playerbase was rife with ill will and SOE's community relations were just awful and ignored it all. SOE did eveyrthing to push players away, including the top guild's and the most dedicated fanboys. Then they vomit out EQ2.... lame rehash of EQ lore and gameworld but with fucking awful game engine and game designs that were polar opposite of EQ. hmmmm ya, that was gonna do awesome.
Years before the EQ2 embarrassing turd was birthed, players had already been migrating away... DAoC, SWG, Anarchy Online, Final Fantasy XI, City of Heroes... all decent games... but Blizzard were the makers of HUGE hits and MMO fans and gamers were right to be excited about Warcraft because Blizzard makes high quality. SOE makes mediocrity. Blizzard breaks sales records. SOE struggles to keep its niche games barely alive.
Well here is what i know and remember
basically SoE aka verrant always wanted to do a sequel fairly soon from the launch and as early as 2001 a leaked blueprint about a sequel to EQ2 came out(if i recall a developer had his laptop stolen and info leaked).
Now they may have scrapped it and come back to it ,this i do not know.Remember around this time verrant got absorbed there was work on star wars ip aka SWG etc.
SWG was even redesigned with the help of koster to give it a sandbox and different feel.
Smed did recognize early the need not to drag a crowd from EQ and the competition from WoW.
However unlike WoW who wanted the average joe to play it and only listened to the hardcore raiders from EQ1 about raid encounter boss(and they only took some advise not all),SoE decided to fully listen to a few hardcore from certain guilds like FoH(who incidenctally all moved to WoW after lol on SoE).
I was in early early beta ,basically friends and family and to be honest despite some of us posting numerous times about what needed changing we NEVER got a single thing and soe decided what few hardcore wanted.
The system requirement was way too much .You needed a real expensive rig to run it and that immediately gave round 1 to WoW and took the masses out.We complained about this and only once or twice did the developers say "we will tweak it but we building for the future" and i remember typing if the present is bleak then the future of this game will be same .Guess i was right!The hardcore insisted we all go buy $$ thousand rigs.
Group shared exp debt.This again was a feature we said needed to go.i had a 20+ page i kept alive for a long time on the beta forum .By the time it was last stage of beta i had loads of support,initally since mostly raiders were in the beta in F&F stage i got told learn to save your team and why must the cleric or chanter die first.You see despite the mechanism working differently this people thought like EQ1 essentially killing the idea of a fresh approach .
I was so against this feature that i even emailed SoE numerous times saying this was ground breaking and got only 1 reply that the feature will stay.
Let me not get into the crafting at launch which was again a form of "forced interaction".
Soloing anything as a guardian was a joke 5 mins to kill 1 mob in thundering steepes haha.My dirge at launch barely could solo.
Basically they wanted to appeal to a different crowd but listened to a few hardcore raiders and essentially brought the undiserable from EQ1 into EQ2.
Strangely enough the core gameplay of EQ2 was actually good but they really messed up by using brad's formula for EQ1 which essentially was few gamers know whats good for the game and should be build around them.Test server in EQ1 only their views matters and because it worked in EQ1 in 1999 they thought it would work in 2004 but mistake there .
In 1999,there was not much choice but in 2004/2005 there was a much better option it is called WoW.
Few stubborn and narrow minded developers and few no life raiders = killed EQ2 and despite efforts to repair it there was little hope of a comeback.
SoE hope you read this and understand what to do with EQnext!
this.pretty sure they always wanted to make EQ2 right from when they found EQ1 was a hit.
Well, for one, I'd say EQ2 is more of a hit than SWG ever was.
But Scott Hartsman at a EQ fanfaire said this to us (I was in the audience):
EQ2 was made to capture the casual audience that left EQ due to its hardcore nature. Sony wanted a game for casuals, and a game for hardcore and a game for those who needed to transition from hardcore to casual due to 'growing up' and not having time for EQ.
It combatted the major complaints against EQ. Downtime, difficulty grouping, non-existant solo content, dated graphics, etc.
Scott said they specifically were trying to address the concerns of people who left EQ.
Their miscalculation was that Blizzard was concurrently trying to combat the complaints against EQ - and did a better job.
EQ2 was hardcore at release compared to WoW. Compared to EQ, it was casual friendly. They missed the mark for their target audience by quite a bit I'd say - WoW hit the bullseye.
I think the tedium grind-fest of the early crafting days - those are things that we remember as being hardcore, yet it turned off the casual crowd - as WoW found with its 1-2-3 ITEM system.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not placing a value judgement on either game necessarily - I just remember at the SOE convention in Vegas at the big EQ2 reveal, it was very apparent that the target audience was eerily similar to that of WoW.
It was apparent that they were trying to re-capture lost EQ players who didn't want or no longer could play a hardcore game while bringing in a new crowd into a more stream-lined 'noob' friendly game.
Not compared to WoW mind you, compared to EQ.
How would you describe the differences between EQ and EQ2 when asked, which is casual friendly?
This made sense for SWG crafting, because the stats and qualities of the components affected the stats of the final item. When the components are generic, then they're a waste of time and effort.