EverQuest

[Roland]

Having never tried an MMO before, I tentatively (on a whim, at that) bought Planetside. I plunked down on my computer, fired it up, and about 2+ hours later, I was online and playing it. It's prone to crashing a lot, and was a pain to RE-install (1st installation went smoothly, but I ran out of HD space for the updates, hence what led to all the problems - including, to date, _6_ BSoDs on Windows 2000, when I had NEVER had one before), but thus far it's seemed quite fun.

The other day, I was in the store and saw a good deal on Everquest - Evolution. Basically it had ALL the expansion packs to date, except the latest one. For $30, I thought I'd give it a whirl, since I'd only be paying a little bit more to gain access to all SOE's games, instead of just Planetside. Installed it (with some minor hassle, but nothing worth noting), got it running (with a bit more hassle, but I think that was more out of sheer confusion - a point worth noting, for later), and logged in.

Boy, what a MESS. The interface is quite possibly one of THE WORST I have ever seen. The in-game help is utterly USELESS (seems to be a SOE trademark, along with buggy, crash-prone games - not good), and most players I was able to find were too new to offer any help. I finally found someone who was willing to teach me a bit (sorta), but by that point I was going to quit - for good. The interface is just that bad. I ended up relenting, for awhile, and spent the next hour or so running around with this guy, but I barely learned anything - except that my gripes with the interface do NOT get better with time.

Let me ask all of you a question - if you played an FPS, and the only way you could look around in the game with the mouse was by holding down the right mouse button, how would that affect your gameplay? How would that affect your willingness to play? Your enjoyment of the game? That's exactly what EverQuest forces you to do. In order to look around, I either revert to the old 1980's style of keyboard movement, or endure the excruciating madness of having to hold down the RMB just to do something as simple as look around. SOE, in all their infinite wisdom, thought to further add on to this by allowing you to run by holding the LMB, as well, thereby only needing the mouse to move around. What they failed to realize is that this is probably the WORST setup you can have - having to keep constant pressure on one, or worse both, mouse buttons while still moving the mouse around to navigate leads to aches in the wrist and hand I cannot even begin to fathom. And the rest of the interface does NOT get better from there. It takes up huge amounts of your view, it's cumbersome, it's totally ANTI-intuitive, and basically just sucks all around. I cannot begin to understand how ANYONE, let alone legions of seemingly intelligent people (I've met plenty of EQer's in my day, and they were all quite bright - even those I attended class with at Clark), can sit there for days at a time, non-stop, playing this game with such a horrible UI - both graphical and otherwise. It just boggles my mind.

Is there ANYONE here who has played EverQuest, or who still does? How in God's name did / do you do it? And would you mind taking the time to share with me, so that I just may walk away from this WITHOUT having wasted my (limited) money on a piece of electrical feces?

[Pren]

I was all about to jump in here and applaud you, until I read your post. EQ has a lot of problems, but you're being whiny.

EQ's GUI is about the best of any game. It is ENTIRELY user customizable. I mean, completely. There are people who have skinned their windows with porn. Using XML (or by downloading one of the THOUSANDS of user made UIs on google) you can create your perfect UI. Many people convert their buff list to a 8 font size list of the buff names and stick it in a corner instead of the bulky icons.

The game has built in autorun. Tap the numlock and you're good to go. Because you don't actually rely on skill or movement in gameplay, needing 00b3r fps controls is unneccessary. Frankly, I never even switched to wasd movement because it prevents you from typing while strafing.

Also, first person view is about the worst to play in. Truly skilled players use 3rd person to keep tabs on everything (I've been complimented by other eq players in real life, "The way you handle the camera makes me want to vomit.")


The areas of complaint are:

Sony only wants to make money from eq. It doesn't care about anything else. Expansions are not finished -9 months after being released.- The game is currently balanced worse than Diablo 1.10. Gameplay is boring. The things that made it interesting in the beginning (hugely scary world to slowly explore) are gone, replaced with "you can buy loot for 50pp in the bazaar that is better than anything that existed in the first 2 1/2 years."

Anybody who has played longer than 6 months plays for 2 reasons: Itamz, or to keep in touch with the friends they made. That's the only reason. Or they're super casual players and for some reason still have fun playing their lvl28 ranger.

This summer I flew to seattle to meet 9 folks I've known in EQ and attend one of them's wedding. Not many games have the same result.

EQ is like smoking, people either do it socially and habitually, or because they're dumbasses and want to look cool (get phat lewt.)


Oh yeah, EQ's updated #$%&tastic graphic engine which was implimented when the moon was released ruined the game. Runs like #$%& on the best computers.


edit: Computer problems and RL have kept me out of game since july or august sometime. I am a member of one of my server's uberguilds but only give a damn about the friends I've made.

[Pren]

I never touched on why the game is truly horrible. There's no risk at all anymore. The concept of Risk vs. Reward is purely Time vs Reward.

The lunar expansion, Luclin, was the worst thing of all time. It was about when the original big names dropped out and formed Sigil. It brought new character models, which while higher polycount, look out of place and are animated horribly. The new engine raped the game and made it impossible to play on computers that rocked it a couple of years ago. It also doubled to tripled the numbers required for raids. While you could have successful raids with 30-40 people, it became necessary to use 60-100. And you suddenly needed keys. Lots of keys. Keys that took 100 man hours each on top of weeks of raiding to equip your guild with good enough gear to kill the big badass to finish the key (who he himself needed a couple of keys to get to, and dozens of hours of farming to make weapons that could hit him.) These keys let you get to that expansion's end game zone.

This zone was known as Vex Thal, the City of Shadows. Why? Because every other mob cast an unresistable AE blind. Only, in EQ, while blinded, your entire screen goes black - as if the game crashed. You can hear sound, but you can't see anything. Not text, not your ping, not anything.

They then stuck 10-40 mobs in each room, and you sloughed through them to collect the phat lewt. After a few months, they removed the blind.

For the next expansion, they removed keys. They replaced them with flags. Kill a notable god or demigod and you get a flag granting access to the next planar area. Only, every person in your guild needed every flag in the expansion to reach the final end zone, which was not complete until 9-10 months after the expansion was released. To prevent people from getting to it, they made the final encounter before it impossible with less than 200 people. They slowly, over a period of 3 months, weakened the encounter, before finally making it winnable with real numbers.

Also, the difficulty of gaining flags prevented 90% of the population from getting access to more than about 5 zones. Again, later they opened up many more zones and allowed people to 'piggyback' into flagged zones if enough people in their raid had flags, and allowed them to gain flags out of order. Originally, if you forgot to hail someone for a 'pre-flag' before killing certain npcs, you could not get credit for it.

The new expansion is supposedly OK. It is basically timetrial adventures with 4-6 people in a group, or 18-30 people in a raid. Which considering that guilds now sport rosters of 200+ people to function in the previous expansion...

But, the gear is excellent for the non-uberguild players. You just need to spend a few hundred hours of winning adventures for each item you want to upgrade.

[WarLocke]

Wow, Pren, that makes me glad I dropped EQ along time ago. I still like the idea of MMORPGs, of playing 'alongside' others and accomplishing feats you can't do alone, but it seems none of the More-Pigs ( ;) ) on the market have gotten it right yet.

I picked up EQ shortly after release, and after several false starts on the normal server (starting with Veeshan, where Fires of Heaven were currently 'running the server') I settle in on Test with my lil' halfling cleric. I was lucky enough to find a great semi-regular group (cleric + paladin + enchanter + druid = some arse-kicking) who all had alot of experience (the enc and pal claimed to have been part of an uberguild, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was true) and were great people in general. We had tons of fun hunting places that would have been overrun on the normal servers (crushbone, that castle zone off of leser fay I can never remember the name of, highhold keep, upper/lower guk) and made off with some mad lewtz. I quit shortly before Kunark was released, my cleric at level 29 with about half a set of the (then new) cleric class armor ('butter plate').

Man, I remember taking on that undead froglok assassin (or whichever mob had the black silk sash for the pal); that was one helluva fight. B)

[mommie]

Hiya
I play EQ on the Tholuxe Paells server, look me up (Naoa or Kharessa) Nebcat also playes o nthat server (apolline). As for the ui you can change that to one you like , here is a few sites. Pm me with you srever/char name and will be gald to help you.

EQ interface

EQ Stratics
just make sure you get the latest ones so they will work with the expansions that you have.

PS. do you ever check the forum on your site?

[Taem]

Roland, I completely agree - the interface is crap! The movement is terrible, and even thou you can customize your "interface", it doesn’t help the game play. What I absolutely despise about that game is the chat, err talk. I'm completely used to the Diablo style context where you type your message and hit enter and whola - there it is on the screen for all to see. EQ has a World Shout, 'Proximity' based Talk, Secret or 'Whisper Talk, and you must choose which you want, but that’s not the bad part. The worst part is the actions are text based and in a tiny font and when there are like 10 people in your general area doing 20 things a second and all talking and people making world shouts all at the same time... all you end up seeing is scrolling text and not comprehending anything. Did someone ask you an important question? Should you stop fighting that rat to see what just happened by scrolling the text? I tell you its terrible! The WORST, hands-down, I have EVER seen! I hated it for the entire two weeks I drudged through playing it, hoping it would get better - it didn't!

And of course Pren has an EXCELLENT point about WHY the game itself is crap by rewarding hours of play. To those that do like this game, I applaud your tenacity, however it was definitely not for me.

[Baylan]

Hey Roland, long time no chat!

I must say that while your issues with Win2k are quite sad, I must agree that the rest of your rant here is a bit of a whine :-p. With that however, I also have to state that EverQuest has one of the steepest learning curves in any game I've seen.

The interface was recently (last year or so) upgraded from its 1999 self to be made almost completely customizable. As someone said earlier, people have been known to skin some... more disgusting images into their interface. Another aspect that might be effecting you is the mode in which your viewing, the default setup is actually quite terrible (sounds something like Windows to me, eh?) because it gives you a very limited view and is quite bulky as it takes up a good portion of screen for superfluous things.

As for your groaning about the controls/chat window/chat system - yes, it is difficult to learn, but almost every kind of text that is visible to you can be taken away, its color can be changed. In the aspect of the controls and camera angles: they allow you superb control over your avatar and your camera angles that it is quite shocking. You can zoom in right behind the head of your character, or you can rotate and zoom out enough so that your avatar is but a speck of color upon the snow backdrop of some of the zones. If you want to start over and get some help from someone who really knows about the game log onto the Prexus server, create a new character, and type "/who all Legion" and look for names with a <Legion of Light> after them. Specifically Kafalia or Mekaros. It is my former EQ guild, and they are some of the kindest and most friendly people I've met. Just type in "/tell Playername Hello, I was in need of some help explaining... yada yada... Hsaru sent me," and you should be set. Hsaru was the game of my character before I had to cancel my account. And yes, I shamelessly stole my name from Diablo 2 :-p.

In either case, I've got to agree that the higher end game of EQ gets a 'lil bit boring because of the fact that it can honestly take years to level up to the highest levels and then when you throw on the fact that you need to spend forever and a lifetime getting quality gear, I can respect how boring it can get. The truth is though, if you find a group of friends who don't mind pushing the limits of their characters and don't mind it getting a little dangerous, you can have a blast and meet some really interesting people... It is where I spend a good portion of my life back in the day, and I'd still be there if my computer would run the game :-).

In either case, I hope you find that your $30 wasn't a complete waste and at the very least meet a few people who are worth keeping in contact with, I know I did in my time with EQ.

Baylan

[Zarathustra]

<OT>
Wow, there's someone I've not seen in ages. Hi Mommie. Say hi to Neb for me too. ;)
</OT>

[Occhidiangela]

Nice to see you de-lurk. :)

Hail, and hope all is well.

[Guest]

I enjoy playing DAOC sometimes but it to is flawed. I think its superior to EQ because the end game involves a sort of moderated pvp, rather than simply achieving more and more lvls. It still has some interesting pvm, but the pvm is not the sole goal.

However the pvp(realm vrs realm) has become a bit absurd now, it manages to be boring and repetaive, while still being twitchier than a fps.



I did play Planetside for a cxouple of months and I think it had the best game play, of any mmog on the market. I had a blast for the first moth or so, but eventually you have had enough of doing what is essentally the exact same fight over and over.

Eventually someone will make a game with the play and fun lvl of planetSide with the imersivness(if you havent played DAOC lately if does have a lot of pvm quality now) of DAOC and it will good - I think.

[Mithrandir]

DAoC has good PvM? :blink:

Last time I checked, you sat in the same spot for hours on end killing the same mobs over and over and over again. The SI dungeons were a decent idea, but the highest level ones (Galla, TG, Sidi) are 8+ hour long "adventures" killing boring mobs in annoying situations for less than a 10% shot at a piece of loot that you want.

Not to say PvM is better in any other MMOG.

But then again, PvM isn't why we play DAoC, eh? :)

[mommie]

/wave Hi Occhi and Zara

you can IM me any time, Ill check to see if they are in my profile.

[Guest]

Actually the game has a huge amount of good pvm,but.... You can lvl faster chain pulling certain spots than you can by roaming around killing what you meet.

If the exp code was greatly changed so camp bonus was worth much much more and chain pulling was worth less the fun factor would increase hugely. i think that is one of the strong suits of games like Diablo2.

[Occhidiangela]

How much different, User Interface excluded, can WoW be from the other MMORPG's?

Don't know, won't know since I have no desire to MMORPG any time soon and will be happy to wait for WoW to take the risk.

Or is the interface the real showstopper for you?

A couple of friends of mine play Earth and Beyond, a space based MMOG, and they both seem to like it. They are still playing it six plus months into their initial entry.

[Guest]

Blizzard has said they are concerned about game play and action. EQ always placed those secndary to concept and character development. In both EQ and DAOC it often feels like you are playing old pen and paper D&D, while watching a movie of your game.


There is no reason a mmog cant simply be fun to play while still maintaining a large interactive world. I suspect Blizz may be the first company to achieve this.

[Occhidiangela]

I think I see where you are coming from. I hope you are right. :) Then again, since I might get addicted to such a game, maybe I should hope you are wrong! :o

[Drasca]

Playing Earth and Beyond, as a Terran Trader and other things... Maxing out the character. It has the same traps as other MMoRPGs in that there's only uber-items and friends at high level. However, everything is on a smaller scale.. Though getting people together can be epic. I played on Orion server. Andromeda and Orion are the largest, the other two -- Pegasus and something else are smaller and less worth playing due to smaller guilds I think. I've witnessed a lot of changes in Earth&Beyond, people going in and out. Friends leaving. The actual "leveling up" is extremely redundant, but the back-stories are humourous and worthwhile for its own fictional sake-- but not timewise for quest rewards of experience, items or credits.

E&B can be fun, but its combat system is lacking really (all about equipment on the warrior classes) You really will see how social class (character class making for social class) warfare plays out in the economics, ranting, combat, unfairness and all. All the "uber" stuff has to be killed for... usually by large groups of warrior classes who have the "best equipment" (until it is replaced by the equipment they're fighting to get). The game is good until you turn high level, and some people are just rush-rush-rush. The 5 day free trial (truly free, no credit card or any monetary proof required), gets you just high enough level to start enjoying without hitting the experience gain wall of repetitiveness.

[Bolty]

There is no reason a mmog cant simply be fun to play while still&nbsp; maintaining a large interactive world. I suspect Blizz may be the first company to achieve this.

I have to admit that EA may also have this formula with Ultima X: Odyssey. Remember that they used an FPS game engine (Unreal Warfare), and it's an action game at heart. Not that I'm endorsing UXO over WoW - I've only gotten a chance to play one of them - but I'm saying that there could be options coming up soon.

-Bolty

[Thecla]

:P

[Mithrandir]

Actually the game has a huge amount of good pvm,but.... You can lvl faster chain pulling certain spots than you can by roaming around killing what you meet.

If the exp code was greatly changed so camp bonus was worth much much more and chain pulling was worth less the fun factor would increase hugely. i think that is one of the strong suits of games like Diablo2.

I agree, the camp bonus code needs a big overall to fit its intention.

But on the other hand, some people like to just sit down, listen to music, talk to friends, and zone out for a couple hours and the current form of PvE tends to support that more. The big issue I have is the time invested - 40+ soloing is absolutely a waste of time unless you're a BD or Necro and so you just spend 5hrs/day for 2-3 weeks in FP groups. Granted, you don't want to make leveling instantaneous I would think, but as I said before, I play this game for RvR and not PvE.

In both EQ and DAOC it often feels like you are playing old pen and paper D&D, while watching a movie of your game.

This confuses me. DAoC is perhaps the most active game I have ever played at high-level RvR.

There is no reason a mmog cant simply be fun to play while still maintaining a large interactive world. I suspect Blizz may be the first company to achieve this.

I will still be a long time before any MMOG achieves true levels of interactivity. The fact is that you're working within the bounds of an engine - many highly desired things are either extremely difficult to code or just downright impossible. It is also improbable to expect every single feature you would ever want to be anticipated and accounted for at the start of the project and have the appropriate measures taken. Obviously some engines are moldable than others, but the problem still stands.

Don't get me wrong, I hope WoW is the greatest game of the century. I hope it has a gigantic bug-free living breathing interactive world at release while maintaining fun. But, the way Blizz dances around the subject of PvP makes me more than a little wary. I don't play MMOGs to whack on monsters controlled by a complex set of case structures :) I want to fight against living, breathing people on the other side of the monitor - nothing else will satisfy me.