Pantheon: i unemployed now have been for year money running out help lol nothing

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > The MMO HMO > Pantheon: i unemployed now have been for year money running out help lol nothing

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Asehujiko posted:

Multiple sets of 22-slot resistance gear carried in 5 slot bags.

A Guy Fawkes mask as mask gear.

Nice Everquest reskin.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2015 15:25

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:30

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

DeathSandwich posted:

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.

Frankly, there still is EQ for that, in its various permutations. There's P1999 for the super hardcore, prog servers for the semi-hardcore, and Live for those who prefer a more fast-paced modern EQ. Every time I think about how a new game could re-create EQ, I just end up thinking..... well, I'll just play the real EQ. Even Live EQ honestly contains a lot of the original EQ, in terms of zones, game mechanics, NPCs mechanics, etc., for good and for worse. Virtually all the nostalgia is there, the only (big) thing missing are the masses of players swarming the zones. Not much to do about that. I still like it and subscribe from time to time.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 23:55

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

i am tim! posted:

Certainly, and I don't wanna come off like I'm flat out against death penalties or an open game world or anything. Sure my current MMO of choice falls under that theme park feel (I think the concept has a great deal of merit), but it's all we're seeing now. We need variety, for pete's sake!

Just don't look to EQ as a model of the idea. It was acceptable in its day because there was little else to compare it to. People say you are losing 10 hours of work because... Well, you did. They didn't call them "Hell levels" for nothing, and that's to say nothing of the social consequences arising from it. "Sorry friends, I know you're counting on my warrior being there, but I DC'd last night and a dragon humped me to death before I could get back on. I'll have to get that back before I can be more than dead weight" was a very real, very unpleasant situation to have found yourself in. A good balance needs to be found so as not to make people quit from frustration, and I feel you DEFINITELY want to avoid a system where a death penalty might keep you from playing with your friends for a significant amount of time.

That's a bit overblown. No death meant losing 10 hours of work. Anyone raiding at level 60 (the fictional dc'ing warrior you describe) would be maxed out xp-wise at level 60, so one death would mean little. Even if you did de-level to 59, you lost no skills, no gear, and all you did was lose a few hitpoints. Get a good group with your guildies and you'd be back at level 60 in an hour.

Looking back, deaths and ressing was never really a huge deal for me back then... you were just super careful, traveled along the walls of zones, took ports, and did dungeons in groups. Still, I think modern EQ is way better; you do lose about 8% xp, but it's easily re-gained, even solo.

Alexander DeLarge posted:

What I really take issue with is this mentality of "people leave these games because it's too easy! Make the grind 150 hours instead of 20 so people know their classes!"
I don't know about you guys but when I play a generic theme park MMO, I can learn my friend's fully leveled classes in under an hour, often I can manage in the time that my friends tell me to play their characters when they go to the bathroom for five minutes. The real issue with these games is that content is completed far sooner than they can pump out more.

It's not about learning the class, it's the fact that progression in RPGs is where the fun is at, not raiding the same mob every week. Did you ever hear of someone burning out after buying the latest WoW expansion and working their way towards max level? No. But everyone ultimately burns out once they're at max level.

I was constantly baffled at how ridiculously fast it was to hit max level in the latest WoW expansion. The most fun part of a new expansion is the buzz when everyone is leveling, gathering new gear, skills and actually grouping up for quests and doing dungeons all the time. It should take months to hit max level, but we'll never see an amount of content great enough to ensure that in an expansion. Maybe in a base game.

Note that I'm not saying original EQ was a super game, it was very flawed, and only really suitable for no-job, no-studies people like myself back then, with no other hobbies or obligations. Looking back I don't know how on earth I spent an average of 7 hours per day playing it over the span of two years.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2016 23:14

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Byolante posted:

It's not the easier game, it's the game that doesn't unduly punish the player for attempting difficult things.

That's a good point. A thing such as the WoW Dungeon Hero achievements, where you had to do special things during a boss encounter, would never be feasable with a harsh death penalty, and I remember those achievements being super fun and could really bring people together in a dedicated group. You can't have a truly difficult dungeon or raid encounter that requires practice, because people would burn out from all the death penalty. In original EQ, all bosses were stupidly simple if you had some brains and leadership (which admittedly few people had, but see how easily people raid in Project1999 now).

# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 10:19

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

I think GW2 took the easy-ness too far, I just went about and hit all my buttons as fast as I could, and with no challenge or reason to what mobs I fought. The nearby-player event mechanic just made quests into one big brawl. I died a few times, but it was so inconsequential and whatever that I didn't care.

WoW Classic's death mechanic was fine really. No loss, but a fair amount of travel to your corpse (varied greatly, some were a bit extreme), plus the danger of having to click respawn amidst mobs if you were deep inside a cave.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2016 19:52

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

DeathSandwich posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2016 14:15

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

DeathSandwich posted:

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.

Modern Live EQ1 is actually not sit-n-camp. People at higher levels do relatively quick (30-45 minutes) missions, where you are dumped in an instance and have to perform certain fixed tasks, such as explore there, kill 10 skeletons, kill boss, pick up those ground items, etc. Sure you can call it repetitive, but I guess it's more varied than a WoW dungeon where it's literally just "kill all bosses". Other people form groups in open zones and do the sit-n-camp, but there are fast respawns, lots of mobs, and frequent named spawns with decent drops that it's not so bad. There are also daily tasks where you go to a zone and kill 5 random mobs and get a reward. Again, not groundbreaking, but not like sitting 8 hours in Lower Guk and ending up with a Moonstone Ring for your effort.

Gameplay also trumps graphics, I don't understand why people are so interested in a re-skinned EQ1. What I'd rather like is a new core engine that makes ancient poo poo like the terrible attack mechanics, movement, environment clipping and jump modern. But again, it just wouldn't be the same so I'd rather play the original EQ1.

# ¿ Sep 30, 2016 23:52

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Yeah I freely admit I've been Chasing the Dragon for many years, but gave up a few years ago when stuff like Rift and Guild Wars 2 ended up being disappointments after just a few days.

I've searched my soul and realized that I'm contented with just grinding my boxes in EQ1 for a few months every year, enjoy it for what it is, then let my cheap Krono subscriptions run out, and return later during the year. I enjoy it.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2016 20:05

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Flunky posted:

Straight-outta-EQ feign splitting starting at ~10:00, right down to feigning and waiting for some of the aggro'd mobs to run back, then pulling the single one that stood around instead of walking back to its spawn point immediately. That poo poo should be left in '99 where it belongs. Hell it should have been fixed even back then, I assume it was "emergent gameplay" they left in as a feature.

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.

# ¿ Jun 7, 2017 14:51

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Reddit Pantheon fan explains why the game looks crappy right now:

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 10:12

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 20:30

Pilsner: Nov 23, 2002

Subjunctive posted:

By default PUBG puts NA players on Asian servers, but that�s a bug. It�s still quite playable.

PUBG also only has one North American server location, in Amazon�s DC data centre. They�re hardly in the local area of all North American gamers. I play with people from all over the continent.

There are problems with MMO shooters, but network latency isn�t really the big one. It wasn�t even when Planetside launched, and latencies were worse then at every part of the network stack.

Isn't CSGO an FPS? I haven't played FPS' online in a decade, but back in the modem/ISDN days, ping (latency) was the number one concern; you were dogshit if you weren't on a good connection to a local server, and hopeless against people on fast, digital connections.

Maybe it's not such a big problem these days, but I can't imagine much fun to be had playing from, say, Europe on an Asian server.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2017 22:31

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