|
Stanley Pain posted:I'd be happy with Vanguard 2 with a FFA PVP server ruleset. I wish they would bring Vanguard 1 back from the dead and put some development behind it. It was actually kind of cool after a couple of years away from McQuaid. It was crippled by the disastrous launch that caused players to bail which led to not having enough development staff to accomplish what they wanted. I also want a unicorn and a magic carpet IRL, so take that for what you will.
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2015 22:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:24 |
|
|
Kazak_Hstan posted:Yeah that was one aspect of EQ I've never recaptured. The pace of play was such that text based chat was great. More contemporary hottton mashing makes chatting while actually, playing difficult, and I don't really like voice chat. Enjoyable is probably not the right word. Tolerable is probably what you are looking for. For what it's worth, the forced player interdependence is really how they forged those social bonds to form in old school EQ1. Unless you were a Necromancer (or sometimes druid or wizard or bard depending on circumstances) there was very little you could do by yourself. There also was no auto grouping tool and very limited lfg tools, so you couldn't just have the game shuffle you into a party based on your class; you had to communicate with another person to get a group. Even in groups getting experience was often slow and dangerous to the point that you potentially risked leaving a group with less experience than you went into it with. While sticking to that style would result in a strong social experience in a new game for those that play it, it's also going to turn off a very large chunk of the population right of the bat. EverQuest 1 happened what is approaching 20 years ago. Forcing people into groups to do any sort of exp content is completely midevil by today's standards and brings up a lot of hard questions in the long run (See: the game isn't as popular as anticipated and/or everyone else is max level, who is John Q StupidNewbie going to level with if he can't get a group?). I just don't see that style of game working in the modern context. I think there is room for a game that is harder than the MMO status quo whilst not being torturous to the casual player, but there would have to be a pretty aces balance in the game content between leveling content meant for solo players, duo players, and groups. I know I've banged on this drum before, but Vanguard circa when they shut it down would be kind of a good reference point for that. There content was balanced to where do players could level through to max solo level, but there were plenty of quests meant for duo/trios mixed in with it to at least getting you talking to other people. From there they need to add a tool to allow you to see nearby people who are on the same small group quests as you (or people you've grouped with in the recent past) and allow you to streamline getting people together to do stuff on the fly. That being said: I don't trust Brad McQuaid to get that and fully expect whatever he puts out to have some good ideas but have significant issues that need to be fixed by whoever takes the reigns after him. Edit: vvvv I never claimed Vanguard's balance was prefect. 
DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Oct 6, 2015 |
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2015 21:43
|
|
|
Kazak_Hstan posted:Nah, I'm pretty sure I have a better idea of what I found enjoyable in 2002 than you do. In an expansion that was comparatively speaking fairly flush with fun and interesting things to do, Vex Thal keys was objectively the worst part of the game at the time. Especially when you had competition in zone for drops. If sitting around staring at a patch of sand for multiple hours was your idea of high times just because of guild chat than literally anything else you could do in the game would of been significantly more enjoyable. I think the only reason I got through it was because I could play Final Fantasy on my TV while I waited for the ground spawns. The worst part was that Vex Thal was kind of poo poo anyway. The Gray/Ssra temple and The Deep were way cooler from a thematic standpoint. To get things back on topic of McQuaid: in my mind I compare him to John Romero. They both floated on their developer star power to get their own studio and capital to make a game. They then get caught up in their own hubris and ego confident that they can do no wrong. Both studios big game goes way over budget and have very little to show for it and by the time it does come out its a janky, buggy mess. The difference being that after Romero's flop was very humbling for him, and he spent his time post Daikatana doing mobile games and generally keeping his head down. McQuaid on the other hand keeps doubling down and insisting he is God's gift to MMOs, and while there was some good things to be said about Vanguard (diplomacy, good class design especially with healers, a world that resembles a place that actual people could live in) the game was largely a broken unplayable mess at launch and only got good after he had left the company. I'm not holding out for Pantheon unless he can prove that he's able to do the QA and balance passes necessary to ensure people would actually want to play it.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 8, 2015 15:04
|
|
|
Byolante posted:http://www.afterlifeguild.org/Thott/kunark.php I mean, let's be honest, eq1 didn't get 'good' relatively speaking until Velious. Kunark tried too hard to have some amount of content across all levels (so iksar theoretically could level 1-60 without having to hassle with other cities factions until they were good and ready) and was left kind of content thin across all the levels. The fact that Brad can play this expansion up as a plus for him was because there really wasn't poo poo to do in vanilla and it could be argued that he set the framework for the next couple of expansions. Velious really hammered down on it being level 40+ content and had a swathe of cool things to do for anyone at the mid to high levels. Velious was the point in the game that I had the most fun back in the day. The non raid dungeons were really cool and unique (I'm thinking Vektor's lab, sirens grotto, dragon necropolis, the non raid portions of Kael and Skyshrine) and had one of the coolest raid encounters in EQ1 full stop with the Coldain ring war.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 12, 2015 17:59
|
|
|
Byolante posted:Generally 1 or 2 zones being heavily overpopulated is a massive redflag of either content starvation or the treadmill causing people to focus on a single facet to the detriment of the game due to poorly thought out reward structures. In modern mmo terms yes. In "Back In The Good/Bad Old Days" terms there was a feedback loop with regard to where you go to level. Because it took significant time and effort to get anywhere meaningful you tended to stay in one zone and level through it. Certain zones like Lake of ill Omen and Highpass Hold got the reputation of being the places where groups lived, which brought in people and thus the groups bringing the reputation to life. That was actually part of the big draw of wizards and druids at the time in game. Wizard damage was bursty and could get you killed often, but there was a big draw in being able to relocate a group from a densely crowded zone like a LOIO or a Dreadlands to somewhere relatively empty like Sol Eye, permafrost, Cazic-Thule, and then get them back at to the popular zone at the end of the night. I made so much goddamn money in pre-luclin eq1 just teleporting people around it wasn't funny.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2015 20:24
|
|
|
The blood mage and disciple can come along too because those were legitimately fun healer classes.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 9, 2015 05:39
|
|
|
First Question:quote:Visionary Realms has obviously come a long way since 2014, when former employees made accusations about money mismanagement and work on the game slowed down. A lot of our readers have some serious trust issues with Pantheon given that and given the problems that preceded with Vanguard. What makes the current incarnation of Visionary Realms different? Why should they trust in Pantheon and its leadership? *Proceeds to not even acknowledge the flaming shitshow that was the development of Vanguard*
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2015 15:52
|
|
|
xZAOx posted:VG was indeed a shitshow, but it's like....apples and oranges. There's only one guy who is the same between the two, and we're going from a "you have an infinite budget" situation to "make this as cheaply as you can". The one guy who is the same between the two projects is arguably one of the driving reasons that Vanguard failed. As a leadership figure in the company McQuaid may not be doing the hard coding or asset creation directly, but he can be held directly responsible for the creative direction and people acting on his behalf in the project. The middle managers he brought in on Vanguard were at best Yes-Men and at worst Do-Nothings that would kowtow to his every idea no matter how idiotic. The golden-boys that McQuaid brought with him from EQ1 were largely fired because they were bucking against The Vision of his dream game, leaving the game to be finished by amateurs fresh out of college. Despite all of that, McQuaid was also largely absentee during the hardest parts of development because he was in the middle of a raging opiate addiction that was so bad he would sometimes steal prescription meds out of employee desks. This deserves to be posted in any thread even tangentially related to McQuaid and is attributed to Vincent Napoli (now currently employed by SCEA) after Vanguard crashed and burned: quote:You know, as much as I hate having to carefully craft (AKA, lie through my teeth) an answer to "What was Vanguard's biggest failing?" in job interviews, I realized after reading that rather disappointing article how proud I am of it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2015 21:12
|
|
|
I kind of wish we didn't chase McQuaid out of the forums the first time around, if only because I was wanting to see if we could get some sort of Vanguard post-mortem from him. I want to see if he learned from the mistakes of that game or if he doubles down on The Vision Cannot Fail, It Can Only Be Failed. That alone would give me enough pause to give a new game from him a hopeful shot. Everquest 1 Kunark/Velious had a lot of terrible design decisions in hindsight but man it had some charm for how bare-bones it was compared to modern MMOs and I still hold a lot of nostalgia for it today. Vanguard may have been a flaming shitshow that was on life support 3 months after release, but gently caress did it have some interesting, unique classes. Not sure how much of that was part of McQuaid's original design docs, but I give him (or at least the people under him) credit for that one aspect. If he can bring in some form of the Vanguard Blood Mage / Disciple / bard style class design into this new project I would at least give it a passing shot. I think there is space for a EQ1 informed slower-paced-and-comparatively-difficult-but-with-modern-conveniences type of MMO. Vanguard was almost there after post-release patches fixed a lot of the terrible poo poo that the game launched with, but by that point no amount of hype or good word of mouth could bring people back. The question in my mind's eye is if I trust McQuaid to make that game.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 2, 2016 17:35
|
|
|
hayden. posted:I think Vanguard would have been a smash hit if not for technical problems at launch that were also never really fully fixed. I think design and vision wise it was spot on. I remember going to Best Buy the day it came out to buy a copy (to avoid long download time I think) and even the random sales guy at Best Buy was like "I wouldn't buy that, it's buggy and slow and your computer won't run it". I told him I was playing the beta just fine. I mean, EQ Next seemed almost novel and quaint when they first announced it (didn't they announce something like 170 potential classes on top of things like procedural generated NPC interactions and NPC migrations?) until they stopped talking about it altogether and they forced landmark on everyone to make the players do design work for their world. The speed at which EQN went from "potentially interesting concept and mechanics" to "absolute and total vaporware" was shocking. I don't know, maybe it's just MMO fatigue speaking for me, but it just seems that most MMOs out now are either old as gently caress, relatively recent but not as good as it once was (Guild Wars 2), an also-ran of WoW or other old as gently caress MMO (FF14, champions online, wildstar), Free to play microtransaction trash (Wildstar again, Neverwinter, Star trek online), or Korean grind MMOs made by perverts with questionable ideas about how armor and breasts work (Aion, Blade and Soul). Vanguard was a dumpster fire at launch, but it was a dumpster fire that had some good ideas. I feel like I say this every post in this thread, but the class design was so good. Diplomacy was surprisingly cool and had tangible benefits to the game world. The crafting wasn't there like it needed to be, but they tried to make a system that was more interactive than what was available at the time. Once they got the metaphorical fires put out it was too late to save it. I feel like if they had a FF14 style re-release of the game to how it was before they canned it it actually could of had a decent following. That would of course require convincing one of the money men to put the funds into that, which wasn't going to happen considering that  was bleeding money like a stuck pig at the time anyway and was probably trying to consolidate IPs for their sell/spin off into Daybreak Games.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 4, 2016 16:39
|
|
|
xZAOx posted:It's being worked on: http://vgoemulator.net/ The last big push introduced looting mobs! Never mind that combat isn't really working and you need to gm command kill to loot. It's not really playable at the moment and at the rate progress is coming along its going to be quite a while until it is.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 5, 2016 01:43
|
|
|
Ramulack posted:I'm kind of interested to see this tonight. I have never tried Vanguard - is it safe to say that this game has more resemblance so far to EQ1 than Vanguard? Nobody really knows because almost nobody has seen it in motion. Even today after seeing it in motion you have to keep in mind that the game probably isn't even 10% feature complete. A lot can change between now and when it's available to the public.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2016 15:03
|
|
|
Ramulack posted:Pantheon has officially outlived EQ Next. Not yet, while technically EQ Next is officially dead, that game was in production hell way longer than Pantheon. Edit: In terms of total time in development, mind.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 11, 2016 20:18
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:iirc it's mostly pre-packaged assets, so that's about as tight as those graphics get. Yeah, that stream wasn't a "Hey look how tightened up our game is!" stream, it was a "This can ostensibly be called a game that can be played, albeit with janky programmer/open source art" stream. From the brief bits I looked at on the stream, they were basically recreating Orc Hill in EQ1's Greater Faydark.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 15, 2016 13:19
|
|
|
My hope is that if they go HARDCORE and do heavily emphasize grouping and whatnot that they give an incentive for higher level players to mentor down and help lower levels. It would suck if 3 months after release it's super difficult to do anything group related because everyone outleveled you and don't want to do scrub poo poo anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2016 22:00
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:Just to add: GW2 just reversed a bunch of "hardcore" stuff from their recent expansion. It's another example of people saying they want hardcore, but don't actually want hardcore in practice. Difference in this case being the base game was very non-hardcore and all the a lot of the major shifts toward the hardcore direction showed up in the expansion, which alienated a portion of the established community that didn't really want that. If there's a portion of people out there that want their game to punish them harshly, it basically needs to be that way from the word go, not something that gets added in afterwards.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2016 12:54
|
|
|
Alexander DeLarge posted:One looks less garbage than the other and it's the one with a fraction of the funding behind it. At least Pantheon is creating their own assets. Pantheon is creating the best assets money can buy (out of the unity stock asset store). I gotta at least give McQuaid credit though for not tripping and falling down the microtransaction laden shithole that Shroud of the Avatar did (or, not yet at least). Both McQuaid and Garriot's original pitch is some pretty hardcore nostalgia mining for a time when MMO games had a fraction of the userbase that now exists, but McQuaid seems to be contenting himself developing the game first as opposed to Garriot courting whales and selling $300 pre-release houses.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2016 20:24
|
|
|
Ramulack posted:Everquest I part II Yeah, they are nostalgia mining old Everquest players pretty hardcore. Not saying I'd trust McQuaid right now to make a spiritual successor to Everquest that I can play reasonably now that I'm no longer a teenager with nearly unlimited free time, but I am feeling a (ever so slight) bit more positive on him compared to when he first announced the development and was using those crazy fundy developers on the cheap. One of the first gameplay streams they did was an area I described as basically 'Greater Faydark's Orc Hill Version 2.0'. Combat from what they showed seems a lot slower and more deliberate. Maybe it's me being naive, but I keep thinking I would like to see a game when the main combat isn't about skill rotations and mashing out resource cheap generic special attacks or otherwise, but rather about utilizing a small handful of unique strategic abilities versus a limited power pool, kind of like D&D 4th edition encounter powers extrapolated out to MMO form. Start with the EQ1/Guild wars style 'equip a certain amount of active skills at any given time' on the EQ1 mana bars, but make the out of combat regen significantly quicker to limit downtime.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2016 19:04
|
|
|
Rasmussen posted:Didn't he try that already with eq2 and vanguard? He wasn't really on the EQ2 development team for any significant length of time and while Vanguard was a bad game, it had some really cool class mechanics and contains some lessons worth learning. I guess the question is, do we trust him to actually learn from his mistakes in the past? Pantheon is looking like a smaller team than Vanguard that he's working more directly with. If McQuaid can keep himself out of his co-worker's medicine cabinets and hone in on what worked and cut what didn't from his previous games, then I'll at least give it a chance. If he half asses it and spends most of the development cycle nodding off on opiates and gets stuck in a toxic cycle of THE VISION (tm) then I'll give it a pass.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2016 13:20
|
|
|
Pilsner posted:Everytime I think about a EQ reincarnation, I just think how you can still play either Live EQ or Project1999. Both offer a mix of the best of both worlds, whether you want to play old EQ on fast forward, or play the hardcore classic EQ. There's even TAK and other emulators available. Let's be honest with ourselves, Classic EQ / project 99 / TAK has not aged gracefully. It looks like warmed over poo poo even under the best of circumstances. The core gameplay loop of 'sit in a static camp, wait for mobs to pop, get hosed if you can't find a group and/or can't solo, ad nauseum for hours on end' has been kind of outdated by the 20 years of MMO design philosophy to come afterward. There are some aspects of EQ1 that I think are worth preserving in a new game, assuming they pick up and adopt some of the quality of life changes that have generally come around since EQ1s hayday. I can't really sound off on the state of Live EQ because I've not gone back to it since LDoN. Granted, opinions are subjective and all, but one of the things I loved from EQ1 that vanished going into EQ2 was how EQ1 did the spell system. The spellbook vs prepared spells thing was always kind of neat and harkened back to the games D&D Roots and it forced you to make tactical decisions as to what spells you had available at any given time. You still see this sort of thing happen in games like Guild Wars 2, though half of your skill bar in that game is static based on your equipped weapon, which is kind of a neat idea in and of itself. EQ2 by comparison broke away from that in a bad way and by the time you have a max level character even in the early days you had like 4 hotbars filled to the brim and about 2/3rds of your attacks were meaningless filler there for you to hit buttons between the big attacks/cooldowns. Everything became kind of a cluttered mess and it really turned the game off for me, despite the direct nostalgia I had for EQ1. Vanguard always felt more like EQ2 to me than EQ2 ever did, even though Vanguard was a bad game coming from a different direction.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 15, 2016 17:58
|
|
|
Freakazoid_ posted:I want to like forced grouping, but you need something like FF14's party finder and such a large player base that weekday midnight groups are viable. Basically this. You need to be able to account for what people can do if they straight up can't find a group. To make forced grouping work in this day and age you need a robust lfg/party finder tool AND you need to have an incentive for high level players to mentor down for lower levels. Even given all of this, you need to be able to account for the level 8 warrior who is only online at like 3am server time when the population is thin. That or god forbid you get in a Final Fantasy 11 situation where you had like 10 different melee classes but only 2 or 3 were really wanted in groups and/or were so overpopulated it was hard to form up groups around having 4 of them. There needs to be some sort of balance between soloable content, duo/trio content, and full group content so that it's possible to just log in and do stuff no matter your preferred style. Give the full group content the best risk vs reward calculation if you need to, but at least have some sort of critical path that a solo player can take if he absolutely has to.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 16, 2016 13:26
|
|
|
I'm positive by the direction of the AMA, but I'm not willing to submit myself to the pre-release hype yet. Everything McQuaid has touched in his career up until now has been interesting and kind of fun, and utterly broken and miserable in about equal portions. Look at the state of Vanguard at launch; for everything that I praised that game for (class design and mechanics, diplomacy, an attempt to make crafting more engaging, a contiguous world that actually felt like a continent rather than discrete areas stitched together with hard boundaries) there was a whole lot of questionable or downright bad things going on with it (0 solo game at launch, ran like absolute rear end even on state of the art machines, game took gleeful joy in punishing you, any class spec decision you made was permanent and could not be changed). The bad stuff only really started getting fixed after McQuaid was ousted but by that point and by that point it was too late to salvage. I get that he got dicked over by Microsoft during production of Vanguard and SOE turned around and was basically giving him blood money to get it out the door, but at some level there is a personal responsibility with him directly on how the game turned out. Maybe in the day and age of Kickstarter and private backers he'll have the time and the drive to get it done right without having to worry about publisher notes and keeping the purse holders happy (or at least not to the degree that you have to keep publisher penny pinchers happy). At this moment though I'm still in the 'wait and see' category. If I buy into the founders pack it'll be more out of morbid curiosity than gleeful support. I mean, I've spent more money on stupider things in the past.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 19, 2016 15:52
|
|
|
Kazak_Hstan posted:Don't give money to video game companies unless it's an actual purchase of an actual feature complete product.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 15:07
|
|
|
I said come in! posted:Vanguard! Speaking of, how far along is the emulator? Did they ever add experience and actual combat yet or is it still milling about in a mostly empty world issuing admin slay commands and insta leveling yourself to 50?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 15:19
|
|
I really miss this game.
|
Alpha Phoenix posted:There was a stream. But the official stream got DMCA'd audio so you can't listen to it. I'm laughing at the revelation that Brad McQuaid put development time to make a vanity class that only he is allowed to use. quote:War Wizard I'm still tentative on this. It's obvious from the stream highlights that they are really going to be mining some EQ1 nostalgia except with modern sensibilities. I guess now it comes down to how much to I trust them to actually make something playable from it.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 14:39
|
|
|
xZAOx posted:I'm all for ripping on people when they deserve it, but it's really doubtful this was much time. They have their class system in place, so you just whip out a few skills (that probably are already in use on other classes, or just slight mods to existing ones). Not really a big deal, from what Unity3D work I've done. I mean, it really doesn't matter how much time was spent developing the vanity class. An intern could of hammered it out in an afternoon for all I care. The point is that it goes to show that the Brad McQuaid Vision (tm) is in full effect and that development is at least in part being developed from a position of ego and hubris that McQuaid is very much a known item for. Until we know more, I guess we'll see how this manifests in the finished product, generally harder he leans on The Vision the more he hangs on to bad lovely mechanics due to increasingly flimsy justifications.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2016 16:39
|
|
|
xZAOx posted:Ah, gotcha. Yeah, I'm torn on ole Brad. On the one hand, I've really loved and spent a lot of time in the two games he's had a part in. On the other....he's Brad McQuaid. Big into the LOOK AT ME I'M SPECIAL poo poo like his Fiery Avenger and now his War Wizard class. Pretty much everything you listed for the nice things about EQ TLP were not there during his time and he in fact campaigned against them in some cases, like dungeon instancing. I remember reading somewhere that the big inspirations for his games have been pen and paper D&D/Pathfinder homebrew games which seems to make sense if you view it through the lens of him being 'That GM' who loves his self insert ubermensch NPC/GMPC and has to go on to prove how much of hardcore badass/unique snowflake/loved by everyone/all of the above they are. I mean, EQ1 had Firiona Vie as the focal point in the lore for the first handful of games, but she wasn't quite as egregious because the game didn't really go to great lengths to shove her down your face aside from the dumb cleavage shots on the box art and front loading splash. By and large she was a poster girl that you never really interacted with in game outside of one-of-a-kind GM events. The implication in this game by contrast seems to be that their focal point lore character (Aradune Mithra) is going to asserting himself in the game in a more direct manner and making players interact with him. This wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't an obvious self insert of the game's director and also a unique special snowflake war wizard because nobody else in this world has figured out how to wizard and also swing a sword at the same time you guyyyyyss. The amount of raw ego on display is enough to make Richard "Lord British" Garriott blush. If it sounds like I'm talking myself out of being willing to give the game a fair shake on release, it's because I kind of am. It's feeling more and more like McQuaid didn't learn the lesson he was suppose to learn from Vanguard. Who knows, maybe Pantheon will be good in spite of McQuaid if he's got an intelligent dev team under him or people willing to tell him no in areas where it counts. Maybe I'll then convince my cats not to be assholes or get everyone to agree that the left Twix bar is obviously superior to the right one. DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Dec 20, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2016 17:44
|
|
|
Everquest 1 was very much a "Time and place" game. On the surface level it was miserable between the forced grouping, death penalty, high difficulty in getting anything done and whatnot. At the same time though, those things are also what brought people together and created strong server communities for the people that were able to push past level 20 or so. Player reputation mattered because it took so long to level through and enough guilds talked to each other that someone who was a serial Ninja looter / FD trainer / general notorious shithead would get blackballed and have to spend another 100+ hours leveling back to max again on a new character (assuming that your alt didn't get sniffed out and also blackballed). It was a strong social experience, but the only reason people stuck it out was because it was basically the only thing of its kind at that time. Personally, in my case I was a dumb teenager and had disposable time to spend grinding for the Ancient Cyclops or hanging out in Karnor's Castle courtyard in a group for the 8th time that week and making 1/4th of a level total. Nowadays [normal, well functoning] people aren't going to put up with that bullshit since it's basically the video game equivalent of CBT. If they are riding Pantheon real hard in the vanilla/kunark/velious era EQ1 direction then they are setting themselves up for failure, especially if they are planning on having similar leveling curves and nearly non-existent soloing outside of the 2-3 solo classes. Edit: The Something Awful Forums > Discussions > Games > The MMO HMO > Pantheon: basically the video game equivalent of CBT DeathSandwich fucked around with this message at 17:17 on May 9, 2017 |
|
#
¿
May 9, 2017 17:13
|
|
|
Pilsner posted:Haha, notice how at 10:02, the two backmost mobs warp through the floor, then at 10:23, they warp back up as they return to their spawn points. Like taken straight out of the EQ engine. I wonder if there's any actual EQ1 codebase in this game that McQuaid snuck out of Veriant Interactive / Sony Online Entertainment a decade and a half ago. Here's hoping that AoE spells have no Z limit bounds like Velious Era EQ and hit everything in a vertical column including monsters on other floors. Nothing more
|
|
#
¿
Jun 8, 2017 20:32
|
|
|
I don't have an eye for these sort of things: How many stock unity store assets are still in that stream?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 6, 2017 14:34
|
|
|
xZAOx posted:Right now they have actual funding. From an investor. I'm sure the pledges and such help too, but I doubt the current pledges and monthly packages are doing much. Although I'd still consider Champ and VIP pledges as being whales at this point. EQ1 world design was basically a flash in the pan. It was great and fun when I was a teenager with more time than sense but I don't have the patience for 18 hour semi-rare named spawns with people competing with me. If you told me today to go camp say, the EQ1 Ancient Cyclops I would tell you to gently caress right off, or it would wind up being me binge-watching netflix while an empty desert island happened in my other monitor. I've said it before, but with as many of the odd little engine bugs from EQ1 that are showing up in this game, I half wonder if there isn't significant amounts of copy/paste EQ1 source code in the Pantheon game/mechanics engine. Which  if so.EQ worked in its heyday because it had an amazing, living community. Unless you were one of the 3ish classes that could solo and do it *well* you basically had to group anytime you were trying to level up. That combined with the lengthy downtime basically forced you to be social, not just in your guild but with pubbies too. A lot of the same names would pop up in groups as you leveled and you quickly figured out who knew their poo poo and you developed rapports with them. The problem is that you don't get that sort of tight knit community without setting the difficulty of the game to be wildly solo unfriendly. At a certain point you have to accept that if you're playing a Warrior or Rogue or Cleric (or whatever highly group and/or gear dependent equivalent is in this game) that you're never going to be able to function outside of a group and that's just the way it is. As soon as the game becomes friendly enough to solo to max level there's basically no reason not to and the social aspect starts degrading. Hell take a look at the cross realm dungeon queues in WoW: They were a boon in a lot of ways to low population servers, but at the same time you're just slapped together with 4 other lovely knuckleheads for whom you'll never see again and won't care about 15 seconds after the last boss of the dungeon dies and they may as well be AI controlled bots in all but name for as much as you care about them. Even if this was Brad McQuaid's perfect vision that wonderfully recaptures the nostalgia and wonder of being 14 years old and entering Unrest Estate for the first time I don't think I could pull the trigger on a EQ1-like experience anymore. I'm not interested in multiple-dozen-hour rare spawn camps. I'm not interested in getting phone calls at 3 in the morning because Trakanon spawned and a guild race is on. I'm not interested in getting a group for the evening and due to unfortunate circumstances or player trolling that I end the evening with less player experience than I went into it with. I just don't have the tolerance for the bullshit anymore. I went back to project 1999 a couple of months back and made it to level 16 and the thought of LFG in Oasis of Marr or Unrest or any of the other hot spots just makes me kind of nauseous anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 9, 2017 20:58
|
|
|
megalodong posted:Don't forget the vanguard emulator that's actually progressing quite well. Is combat and looting finally working yet or is it a bunch of people running around admin slaying monsters and doing basically fuckall?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2017 22:07
|
|
|
We're making fun of you because goons are overly cynical about basically everything (and partially because you are way, way too hyped about this given the track record of the man behind the wheel, but that kind of rolls back to the former point). McQuaid was a big part of the design of Kunark and Velious and a bit part of what made it so cool at the time compared to Vanilla, but he was also a big part of what held it back later on, especially when compared to the next generation of MMOs that came after it. His biggest problem has always been his fervent and unwavering dedication to The Vision (tm) and never wanting to compromise on the ideas and mechanics he has for his games, including the objectively terrible things like naked corpse runs after dying when you've already eaten a big hit to your exp and having a usually fairly lengthy run back anyway. IIRC by the end of Velious and towards Luclin, they had the server capacity and technology to implement instanced dungeons and raids to tune down the amount of competition and trolling for the 2-3 big time raid zones in each expansion but Brad pretty much fought it until the bitter end and it wasn't until what, Legacy of Ykesha and Lost Dungeons of Norrath that they actually implemented it? Even in Planes of Power you could see the stitchings in events where you would look at it and say "This looks like it was designed with instancing in mind except it's not there" (see Plane of Justice/Plane of Valor trials specifically, both of those were hilariously broken for a good long time because of all the people trying to zerg rush it and breaking things real bad). Though in his defense I believe Brad was already gone by the time PoP was release, but I wonder how much of The Vision still remained in the post-McQuaid design of that era. IIRC Brad was also opposed to actual raiding group UI during his tenure at EQ and that didn't actually get implemented until after he was gone from SOE. Before then there was no raid UI at all and establishing group comps and such had to be done manually by raid leaders. If you were a healer before this point you only knew the health of your group and the main tank for whom you kept a /target macro for. Some of these things, like the Raid UI, he's (thankfully) turned around on. Some of them, like dungeon instancing, he's most definitely not changed his stance on. Yet still others like the overly cruel death penalty we really still don't know enough about to say, but if I had to guess that's going to be The Vision-ed. One of the things I kind of regret was that I didn't get the chance (before he was ran out of these forums, that is) to ask him what he felt his biggest personal failing was with Vanguard. I've seen the interviews where he likes to shift blame to make it solely about Microsoft and SOE dicking him around, but a good amount of that can be personally laid upon him as well and I wanted to see if he was introspective enough to understand that. Even if the worst of the rumors we've been privvy to about his behavior are true during the development of Vanguard, I would be more willing to give him a chance going forward if he were able to articulate on his own personal failings and how he's learning from them and trying to do better by his fans. All we've gotten from him so far has been, in effect "Toot toot, bitches, all aboard the U.S.S. The Vision, leaving for Fantasy Town!". Between that and the discovery that McQuaid has made a special-snowflake vanity class that only he's allowed to play has impressed upon me that he's still developing games from a place of ego and hubris that doesn't speak well for the final results of the game. That being said, despite being a overall bad game, there were things about Vanguard that I absolutely loved. I thought the class design across the board was pretty novel and good, to where even staple classes like Clerics and Necromancers felt refreshing and interesting while the more unique classes like disciple, dread knight, and Blood Mages were downright amazing. Having separate offensive and defensive targets was a really quaint idea that made it easier to do things like actually contribute damage as a healer while still being able to heal your tank without fussing around with targeting and largely enable the Blood Mage to be able to cast spells that drain health from the target and healed the tank directly at the same time. The diplomacy card game was actually pretty fun once you got into it, and had some pretty worthwhile rewards attached to it. Tooling around the high seas in GOONBOAT owned but I always wish they had done more with it, like being able to go after NPC pirates and boarding actions and such as mini-raid events. With all that being said, despite all my misgivings, I'll probably at least *try* the game when it's in a playable state. At best he makes a moderately playable MMO with a niche audience and at worst it'll be a fun target to sling verbal abuse against, either way much fun will be had by goons at its expense.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2017 15:33
|
|
|
xZAOx posted:EQ on Phinny does that well, I think. Just have to join an active guild.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 13, 2017 17:55
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:24 |
|
|
We basically need to do like Traditional Games did and have a MMO Death Thread like they use to have for games workshop that became the general TG cynicism zone after a while. Edit : I elect the Wildstar thread for it considering its already 90% about other games.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2017 16:49
|
|