People that played EQ1 generally didn't like EQ2 for a reason, it was designed for a different generation of players.. it was next Gen at the time and a very different game. It's weird to hear the EQ1 players say things like.. the graphics were only a little better, they didn't bring anything new to the table etc.. that could be farther from the truth. EQ2 was a very innovative game at launch and there was a massive amount of change to the game.
The graphics were incredible for it's time, but the design decisions that Sony made doomed the game from a technical perspective. Back then Sony made the bet that the CPU would handle the computations for the graphics and not the graphics card.. sounds odd but remember back then graphic cards were nothing compared to today. They didn't foresee that NVida and others would put CPUs on the card its self and take on all the responsibilities. That single decision still haunts EQ2 today.
The end result was you could buy the best graphics card in the world and it didn't matter at all for EQ2, many people did that and were very disappointed in the graphics. For EQ2, you needed to put all your money in the CPU and get the biggest one out there.. if you did that EQ2 looked incredible.
As for that game though, Sony's biggest mistake was listening to the EQ1 crowd and it doomed EQ2. At launch Sony brought some of the mechanics of EQ1 into EQ2 to try to win that crowd over.. what they didn't realize was that their EQ1 user base which was the largest at the time was actually very very small, and they shouldn't have listened to anything that they had to say. End result was you had death penalties in the game, corpse runs and mechanics that made the game not fun. They really kicked in around level 10 which is why most people quit between level 10 and 13. This decision doomed the game. WoW came out just a couple weeks later and had none of those bullshit mechanics in the game.
This is when the world learned that players don't like:
1. Lose xp on death. 2. Have to pay money on death. 3. Have items decay to a point where they can't be used. 4. Get into xp debt 5. Lose your items on death. 6. Have to go back to where you died to get your items, the next gen players hated this.
In general, the 'death' penalties that first gen players seemed to love were not acceptable to the next gen. WoW proved that for most players, the act of death was enough to make them not want to die. That time lost just to run back to where you were was penalty enough. Combine this with WoW correctly predicting that all graphics should be ran on the graphics card helping enable WoW to run on most computers.. well the rest is history.
Sony rushed to update their game, pulling out the EQ1 BS but it was too late. They missed their window and WoW dominated. It's actually a sad story because EQ2 had many more features than WoW, better quests, crafting, housing and raiding. It kicked WoW's but in almost every way accept the barriers that the EQ1 crowd put up and the graphic concerns.
People that played EQ1 generally didn't like EQ2 for a reason, it was designed for a different generation of players.. it was next Gen at the time and a very different game. It's weird to hear the EQ1 players say things like.. the graphics were only a little better, they didn't bring anything new to the table etc.. that could be farther from the truth. EQ2 was a very innovative game at launch and there was a massive amount of change to the game.
The graphics were incredible for it's time, but the design decisions that Sony made doomed the game from a technical perspective. Back then Sony made the bet that the CPU would handle the computations for the graphics and not the graphics card.. sounds odd but remember back then graphic cards were nothing compared to today. They didn't foresee that NVida and others would put CPUs on the card its self and take on all the responsibilities. That single decision still haunts EQ2 today.
The end result was you could buy the best graphics card in the world and it didn't matter at all for EQ2, many people did that and were very disappointed in the graphics. For EQ2, you needed to put all your money in the CPU and get the biggest one out there.. if you did that EQ2 looked incredible.
As for that game though, Sony's biggest mistake was listening to the EQ1 crowd and it doomed EQ2. At launch Sony brought some of the mechanics of EQ1 into EQ2 to try to win that crowd over.. what they didn't realize was that their EQ1 user base which was the largest at the time was actually very very small, and they shouldn't have listened to anything that they had to say. End result was you had death penalties in the game, corpse runs and mechanics that made the game not fun. They really kicked in around level 10 which is why most people quit between level 10 and 13. This decision doomed the game. WoW came out just a couple weeks later and had none of those bullshit mechanics in the game.
This is when the world learned that players don't like:
1. Lose xp on death. 2. Have to pay money on death. 3. Have items decay to a point where they can't be used. 4. Get into xp debt 5. Lose your items on death. 6. Have to go back to where you died to get your items, the next gen players hated this.
In general, the 'death' penalties that first gen players seemed to love were not acceptable to the next gen. WoW proved that for most players, the act of death was enough to make them not want to die. That time lost just to run back to where you were was penalty enough. Combine this with WoW correctly predicting that all graphics should be ran on the graphics card helping enable WoW to run on most computers.. well the rest is history.
Sony rushed to update their game, pulling out the EQ1 BS but it was too late. They missed their window and WoW dominated. It's actually a sad story because EQ2 had many more features than WoW, better quests, crafting, housing and raiding. It kicked WoW's but in almost every way accept the barriers that the EQ1 crowd put up and the graphic concerns.
Agreeing with everything you wrote. Except the graphics part, I thought it was hideous at launch with some decent textures plastered all over it. I hated their art direction and the way everything was animated even more. Didn’t stop me from playing though.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
EQ2 Art was really nice in certain places, it just wasn't consistent. For example all the areas in and around the cities were amazing. However once you got to Antonica for example, it just became sparse and ugly. The character models are another example, the animal creatures looked amazing, but the Human ones were horrible. Armour as well was amazing in the Alpha, but none of those pieces made it into the final game, suddenly everyone was wearing the same thing each level group.
Although I do remember all the EQ players saying WoW was for Babies. Go play EQ2 or WoW today.... you can just tank everything without a thought. If you play Classic WoW, you end up finding it hard because you're not used to any challenge these days.
Although I do remember all the EQ players saying WoW was for Babies. Go play EQ2 or WoW today.... you can just tank everything without a thought. If you play Classic WoW, you end up finding it hard because you're not used to any challenge these days.
WoW is for kids, old timers, and casuals. Except for the raids I guess. But I don't like raids. If I have 20-40 powerful player characters gathered together, I would rather be looting a dragon's hoard (with enough gold, jewels, items, and gear to set us all up for years) or sacking a city. None of this let's just get 2 or 3 items that people have to do several raids in order to earn enough points so they eventually have a chance of looting something useful. It's ridiculous. Raids were just designed to keep people busy until the next expansion. Expending so much time and energy getting gear that will eventually be rendered obsolete by upcoming expansions? Whatever, man. Not my cup of tea.
"If everything was easy, nothing would be hard."
"Show me on the doll where PVP touched you."
(Note: If I type something in a thread that does not exactly pertain to the stated subject of the thread in every, way, shape, and form, please feel free to send me a response in a Private Message.)
Although I do remember all the EQ players saying WoW was for Babies. Go play EQ2 or WoW today.... you can just tank everything without a thought. If you play Classic WoW, you end up finding it hard because you're not used to any challenge these days.
Classic WoW is no match for P99 Everquest. The only game I respect for challenge is P99 Everquest.
EQ2 Art was really nice in certain places, it just wasn't consistent. For example all the areas in and around the cities were amazing. However once you got to Antonica for example, it just became sparse and ugly. The character models are another example, the animal creatures looked amazing, but the Human ones were horrible. Armour as well was amazing in the Alpha, but none of those pieces made it into the final game, suddenly everyone was wearing the same thing each level group.
EQ2 was pretty successful in Japan and so to go with their client, they made some more Asian looking character models for the non-animal races. You can pick which model you want to use in game. Hence the titles underneath :P
I just want to say that trying to belittle EQ2 characters or whatever is NOT the reason,Wow's graphics/texture use is horrible and it made a lot of money.
The reason inside of the two mmorpg's is >>>fanbois. SOE's fanbois was steadfast on the EQ side and despised anew kid on the block EQ2. Blizzard's fanbois is tied to Warcraft,hence WOW a success. Was it a mistake to do EQ2,nope imo on release day,a week apart from WOW,it blew the doors off of Wow.
Eq2 simply didn't have a market to attain,EQ had some,Wow took a lot of the NEW players and FFXI had some and then a spattering of other games had some.
However i still can't help but wonder,WOW got mostly NEW players,so how did that affect SOE,i mean it would affect EQ2 since it was competing directly versus Wow for that new player crowd.
Thing is EQ2 didn't do too bad,i remember very well a lot of people and groups early on.I guess when EQ became dated and everyone left EQ2 around 2007 SOE was out of bread winners.So then he scrambled with various attempts,the cash shop to the point it was no longer a viable business.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
Biggest mistake SOE did was making EQ2 which cannibalized EQ player base without adding new ones and doubling the costs in the process.
They thought the whole EQ player base would move over to EQ2 so they could shut the older game, but it didn't go according to plan and found themselves with 2 games to manage but with the same player base (even less aftet WoW launched).
That wad the first big mistake SOE did that eventually brought it to its knees.
Biggest mistake SOE did was making EQ2 which cannibalized EQ player base without adding new ones and doubling the costs in the process.
They thought the whole EQ player base would move over to EQ2 so they could shut the older game, but it didn't go according to plan and found themselves with 2 games to manage but with the same player base (even less aftet WoW launched).
That wad the first big mistake SOE did that eventually brought it to its knees.
I've never understood why mmorpg studios try to do these 2s and 3s. That works in single player franchises because they're not meant to be 24/7 worlds. People get attached to their worlds.
They'd be better off overhauling their games with better graphics and features to modernize them than doing sequels.
It didn't work for Asheron's Call 2 either.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
Biggest mistake SOE did was making EQ2 which cannibalized EQ player base without adding new ones and doubling the costs in the process.
They thought the whole EQ player base would move over to EQ2 so they could shut the older game, but it didn't go according to plan and found themselves with 2 games to manage but with the same player base (even less aftet WoW launched).
That wad the first big mistake SOE did that eventually brought it to its knees.
Speaking to the Producer of Planetside back in the day, the biggest mistake SOE made was going with the Star Wars licence with SWG. Apparently SOE had to make deadlines or Lucas Arts would sue them etc.... then Lucas Arts pulled their weight with the NGE and CU. Apparently that game took so many resources away from their other games.
Biggest mistake SOE did was making EQ2 which cannibalized EQ player base without adding new ones and doubling the costs in the process.
They thought the whole EQ player base would move over to EQ2 so they could shut the older game, but it didn't go according to plan and found themselves with 2 games to manage but with the same player base (even less aftet WoW launched).
That wad the first big mistake SOE did that eventually brought it to its knees.
Speaking to the Producer of Planetside back in the day, the biggest mistake SOE made was going with the Star Wars licence with SWG. Apparently SOE had to make deadlines or Lucas Arts would sue them etc.... then Lucas Arts pulled their weight with the NGE and CU. Apparently that game took so many resources away from their other games.
My reports from folks working there said that some upper management types were a drag on the system, drew huge salaries, and sent a lot of that up their nose. Altogether too many SOE folks drawing big pay for next to no work.
Though LucasArts had their own issues.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Too bad I never played Vanguard. I tried to play it before I started Everquest 2, but it had too much lag. Only had a computer with 4 gigs of RAM back then.
Post edited by Ancient_Exile on
"If everything was easy, nothing would be hard."
"Show me on the doll where PVP touched you."
(Note: If I type something in a thread that does not exactly pertain to the stated subject of the thread in every, way, shape, and form, please feel free to send me a response in a Private Message.)
Too bad I never played Vanguard. I tried to play it before I started Everquest 2, but it had too much lag. Only had a computer with 4 gigs of RAM back then.
Vanguard was poor, the open world was really all it had going for it.
Too bad I never played Vanguard. I tried to play it before I started Everquest 2, but it had too much lag. Only had a computer with 4 gigs of RAM back then.
Vanguard was poor, the open world was really all it had going for it.
Won't agree with you there. Vanguard had some spectacular classes that worked with very interesting mechanics. Blood Mage and Disciple along with Dread Knight comes to mind. Their crafting system was splendid as was their housing and I enjoyed Diplomacy. The game had some very unique things.
even if they had a hobbit of releasing too early, then ruining a good thing even if they had it lol.
This is funny because Daybreak publishes LOTRO :P
The problem is that independent development houses have become a temporary entities. If they don't get swallowed up by the old guard of mega publishers from the 80s (Blizzard, Bioware, Mythic, Ect), they wind up becoming a portfolio of aging game services that get swapped around by corporations and investment firms looking to expand their investments (Turbine, Trion, SoE, Ect).
Too bad I never played Vanguard. I tried to play it before I started Everquest 2, but it had too much lag. Only had a computer with 4 gigs of RAM back then.
Vanguard was poor, the open world was really all it had going for it.
Won't agree with you there. Vanguard had some spectacular classes that worked with very interesting mechanics. Blood Mage and Disciple along with Dread Knight comes to mind. Their crafting system was splendid as was their housing and I enjoyed Diplomacy. The game had some very unique things.
I found it buggy, boring, the art was terrible... the Crafting wasn't anything special and the Diplomacy wasn't either tbh It was a very generic boring game, and the combat sucked as well in a post WoW world.
Comments
The graphics were incredible for it's time, but the design decisions that Sony made doomed the game from a technical perspective. Back then Sony made the bet that the CPU would handle the computations for the graphics and not the graphics card.. sounds odd but remember back then graphic cards were nothing compared to today. They didn't foresee that NVida and others would put CPUs on the card its self and take on all the responsibilities. That single decision still haunts EQ2 today.
The end result was you could buy the best graphics card in the world and it didn't matter at all for EQ2, many people did that and were very disappointed in the graphics. For EQ2, you needed to put all your money in the CPU and get the biggest one out there.. if you did that EQ2 looked incredible.
As for that game though, Sony's biggest mistake was listening to the EQ1 crowd and it doomed EQ2. At launch Sony brought some of the mechanics of EQ1 into EQ2 to try to win that crowd over.. what they didn't realize was that their EQ1 user base which was the largest at the time was actually very very small, and they shouldn't have listened to anything that they had to say. End result was you had death penalties in the game, corpse runs and mechanics that made the game not fun. They really kicked in around level 10 which is why most people quit between level 10 and 13. This decision doomed the game. WoW came out just a couple weeks later and had none of those bullshit mechanics in the game.
This is when the world learned that players don't like:
1. Lose xp on death.
2. Have to pay money on death.
3. Have items decay to a point where they can't be used.
4. Get into xp debt
5. Lose your items on death.
6. Have to go back to where you died to get your items, the next gen players hated this.
In general, the 'death' penalties that first gen players seemed to love were not acceptable to the next gen. WoW proved that for most players, the act of death was enough to make them not want to die. That time lost just to run back to where you were was penalty enough. Combine this with WoW correctly predicting that all graphics should be ran on the graphics card helping enable WoW to run on most computers.. well the rest is history.
Sony rushed to update their game, pulling out the EQ1 BS but it was too late. They missed their window and WoW dominated. It's actually a sad story because EQ2 had many more features than WoW, better quests, crafting, housing and raiding. It kicked WoW's but in almost every way accept the barriers that the EQ1 crowd put up and the graphic concerns.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
What ever happened to this armour set from the alpha? http://pcmedia.ign.com/pc/image/eq2_101503_028.jpg
Why did the Humans end up looking like this?
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/eq2/images/1/1d/Soga_human_female.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20080710185137
Why did they all gain horrible acne skin in the beta that SOE never fixed?
I cannot find the image now but Humans looks like Humans before.. https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1yvxYD3GskE/hqdefault.jpg?sqp=-oaymwEjCNACELwBSFryq4qpAxUIARUAAAAAGAElAADIQj0AgKJDeAE=&rs=AOn4CLCYT4F5lmRTo0ZpoOaf2FLteLlGdg
WoW is for kids, old timers, and casuals. Except for the raids I guess. But I don't like raids. If I have 20-40 powerful player characters gathered together, I would rather be looting a dragon's hoard (with enough gold, jewels, items, and gear to set us all up for years) or sacking a city. None of this let's just get 2 or 3 items that people have to do several raids in order to earn enough points so they eventually have a chance of looting something useful. It's ridiculous. Raids were just designed to keep people busy until the next expansion. Expending so much time and energy getting gear that will eventually be rendered obsolete by upcoming expansions? Whatever, man. Not my cup of tea.
I just want to say that trying to belittle EQ2 characters or whatever is NOT the reason,Wow's graphics/texture use is horrible and it made a lot of money.
The reason inside of the two mmorpg's is >>>fanbois.
SOE's fanbois was steadfast on the EQ side and despised anew kid on the block EQ2.
Blizzard's fanbois is tied to Warcraft,hence WOW a success.
Was it a mistake to do EQ2,nope imo on release day,a week apart from WOW,it blew the doors off of Wow.
Eq2 simply didn't have a market to attain,EQ had some,Wow took a lot of the NEW players and FFXI had some and then a spattering of other games had some.
However i still can't help but wonder,WOW got mostly NEW players,so how did that affect SOE,i mean it would affect EQ2 since it was competing directly versus Wow for that new player crowd.
Thing is EQ2 didn't do too bad,i remember very well a lot of people and groups early on.I guess when EQ became dated and everyone left EQ2 around 2007 SOE was out of bread winners.So then he scrambled with various attempts,the cash shop to the point it was no longer a viable business.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
They'd be better off overhauling their games with better graphics and features to modernize them than doing sequels.
It didn't work for Asheron's Call 2 either.
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Speaking to the Producer of Planetside back in the day, the biggest mistake SOE made was going with the Star Wars licence with SWG. Apparently SOE had to make deadlines or Lucas Arts would sue them etc.... then Lucas Arts pulled their weight with the NGE and CU. Apparently that game took so many resources away from their other games.
Though LucasArts had their own issues.
If you are holding out for the perfect game, the only game you play will be the waiting one.
Vanguard was poor, the open world was really all it had going for it.
This is funny because Daybreak publishes LOTRO :P
The problem is that independent development houses have become a temporary entities. If they don't get swallowed up by the old guard of mega publishers from the 80s (Blizzard, Bioware, Mythic, Ect), they wind up becoming a portfolio of aging game services that get swapped around by corporations and investment firms looking to expand their investments (Turbine, Trion, SoE, Ect).
I found it buggy, boring, the art was terrible... the Crafting wasn't anything special and the Diplomacy wasn't either tbh