Everquest / old games in general rant

[Borgholio]

So Sony sold EQ to a company called Daybreak awhile back and they've been running the game since then. Same old routine, a new expansion every year or so, new features, updates, etc... I recently fired up my old account and after half a day re-learning to play and re-setting all my hotkeys, I was off and running. Many of the changes to the game in the past few years have been for the better, making it easier to play solo if desired, and easier to find groups as well if you don't want to solo. Lots of new zones and new stuff. Trouble is though, EQ is still a very old game and it's not as packed as it once was. I re-visited several of my old haunts from the beginning and they were empty. Totally, empty. Entire cities with not a single PC in them, zones that used to be the most killer zones to grind XP were totally deserted.

So even though the game is still running and is reasonably healthy given it's age...it's still somewhat depressing seeing my favorite zones completely abandoned and forgotten.

In that same thread, I remember how it felt when Quake 1 was on it's way out. Started with hundreds of servers on Gamespy, down to a few dozen, down to one or two that were empty half the time, then none. Then Gamespy died entirely a short time later.

I can relive my childhood by playing these old games that still work just fine today (even better now that my computer is a beast compared to what I had in the beginning), but it still all feels bittersweet. I hate getting older.

[Elheru Aran]

Isn't EQ free to play now? I've thought about getting into it a time or two...

[Borgholio]

Yeah it's free for bronze (basic) membership. One time 5 dollar charge for permanent upgrade to silver, or monthly payment for full access. If you sign up, go to the Povar server and look up Batmonkey.

[Elheru Aran]

It goes on the list. Sad thing is that once I'm up to that point it'll probably have closed down by then... but one can always hope.

Frankly I'm not very familiar with the history of the MMORPG community. Never got into it until very recently (year and a half or couple years or so now). I know there are a number of old games still floating around, there was a Cracked article on one not too long ago. Apparently you can log on and just walk through buttloads of ghost towns and empty spaces where the only things remaining are NPC's for missions that have been finished years ago.

[Borgholio]

Apparently you can log on and just walk through buttloads of ghost towns and empty spaces where the only things remaining are NPC's for missions that have been finished years ago.

Yeah. Ultima Online is right up there with EQ like that. It's rather haunting and depressing. I mean I remember the days when you had to compete for the best camping spots and there was dead wildlife everywhere. Now...it's all empty.

[Elheru Aran]

It'll be strange when that happens to STO (though given how Cryptic/PWE have handled it I wouldn't be surprised if they just arbitrarily close down the servers one day). Right now there are still always a lot of ships flitting about sector space, people on the various space stations and all that.

I wish there were more games out there that weren't just a sheer bloody grind after a certain point, though. I mean, it's easy to swoosh through your first say 20-30 levels, right? And then everything after that just seems to take forever unless you shell out. I get it, the level system makes sense to some degree, and you do have to stretch it out a bit in order to have something for players to do as you build up your stock of aftergame material for them to play after they've maxed out.... but still.

[Borgholio]

Yeah the grind is the killer. I mean that's the main reason I went through one MMO after another. Started with EQ, went to EQ 2, went to WoW, then DDO, then EVE. Each time it was just due to the grinding. Everytime I went back I left again once the grinding started. EVE has been the least grinding MMO I've played so far, but I'm feeling it now there as well. That's probably why it's a good thing to revisit my old games once in awhile and stick around until it stops being fun then moving on again.

[Elheru Aran]

I'm almost over MMO's in general apart from STO. Been feeling an itch to find a copy of Emperor: Battle for Dune on Ebay or Amazon one of these days... pull up one of the old-school RTS'es that will kick your ass in the second half so hard that your grandkids are still rubbing their behinds.

[Borgholio]

I've never been a big RTS fan...but I find myself itching to go back and play Warcraft 3 again.

[Elheru Aran]

I've never been a big RTS fan...but I find myself itching to go back and play Warcraft 3 again.

I liked Warcraft 2 a lot. Age of Empires was also decent, if occasionally silly; there were cheat-codes for your catapults to throw cows or give you a nuclear missile...

Shit, I have the Starcraft treasury kit with the Brood Wars expansion. I should fire that up one of these days.

[Borgholio]

I tried to get back into Starcraft 1 but found the UI to be too dated for me to enjoy it like I once did.

I remember back in Warcraft 2 I would play with my dad and piss him off by zerg-rushing him with elven archers. I even remember this one time I was on a map with a huge forest protecting his rear and the only path through was a heavily defended pass in the middle of the map. So I took my peasants and chopped a long (halfway across the map) path through the forest so I could march my troops through and lay waste to his city before his forces facing me at the front could react. He was livid.

[TheFeniX]

It'll be strange when that happens to STO (though given how Cryptic/PWE have handled it I wouldn't be surprised if they just arbitrarily close down the servers one day). Right now there are still always a lot of ships flitting about sector space, people on the various space stations and all that.

STO is one giant server (instanced to high Hell) so you can theoretically play with anyone online at any time. You're never likely to see a dead world unless the game just flat-out died, so yea: Cryptic would be pulling the plug not soon after.

Unlike WoW, where Blizzard makes serious bank off server transfers. I actually liked being on a low-pop realm because I had all the major professions maxed and farming mats was hella easy when there were few people to fight them for. But since CRZ? Ugh, forget about it. It gets pretty old either not being able to do anything against PvE players cross-realmed onto your server farming mats or fighting off waves of them when they can engage on their own terms.

CRZ is all of the negatives about a lot pop realm with all the advantages removed. Now one bored player can lock down an entire server group rather than just his own little hell-hole.

I'm not so burned out that old games have died. I'm burned out that little has come around to replace them. We have no good mech games. MMOs either pound the WoW formula or work F2P hard (or both). I tried getting my friends into Natural Selection, The Hidden, and even Zombie Master (been a few years), but the playerbase was small to begin with. Now it's even smaller and the few people who still play are better than you are by far and tend to be dicks about it. This attitude is not conducive to new player retention. On the flip side: Team Fortress 2 just went.... crazy at the end.

Co-op dungeon crawls are mostly all Diablo clones with no real RPG elements to give them any depth. I would kill for a modern Neverwinter Nights. 2 has pretty bad netcode and dropped games are a major issue and the co-op tends to break the scripting something fierce. But any game in that vein these days is destined to be a boring MMO grind-fest or just gutted into a Diablo-clone.

[Borgholio]

What we really could use is an MMO version of Dungeons and Dragons that is as different from DDO as possible. DDO rewards you the more you grind and has little in the way of exploration or epic-ness.

[Lord Revan]

Quick question does Everquest have it so that once a quest is done it's done and no one (even a person who signed up after the quest was done the first time) cannot do it after that or is it the WoW style where you can do non-repeatble quests once but there's no limit as to how many characters can do the quest?

[Borgholio]

A few quests in EQ may be one-time-only for individual characters, but typically you can repeat them as much as you want. I am not aware of any quests that are once per server except for the infamous Kill the Sleeper quest.

[Alferd Packer]

Yeah. Ultima Online is right up there with EQ like that. It's rather haunting and depressing. I mean I remember the days when you had to compete for the best camping spots and there was dead wildlife everywhere. Now...it's all empty.

Is UO F2P? I'm suddenly curious--I played back in 1998-1999, I think, back when it was complete anarchy. I'd love to see what two decades have done to the game, and what, if anything, is still familiar about it.

[Borgholio]

Looks like it's not F2P yet. But it's still going.

[TheFeniX]

What we really could use is an MMO version of Dungeons and Dragons that is as different from DDO as possible. DDO rewards you the more you grind and has little in the way of exploration or epic-ness.

The problem is them going the MMO route at all. Instead of another persistent world system where you build a small group to play a "single" player game, you're dumped into another WoW clone. It removes what makes DnD DnD. Instead of co-op Skyrim or Fallout, we got a themepark MMO: ESO. Sure you can loot a bit more like in FallScolls games, but that's about it. It's another WoW with Elder Scrolls assets.

Having something like a persistent server, like Ark, where we can setup a base, craft out some stuff for our adventure and move out as a group while completing actual scripted adventures/quests and/or randomly setting out in a direction and screwing around is what I'm looking for.

Honestly considering giving ESO a go now that it's F2P. $30 isn't too steep an investment for co-op shennanigans, but I was already rather annoyed going from a game that not only allows, but rewards, playing through the entire thing in Co-op (SWTOR) to one that makes you break group CONSTANTLY (FFXIV) for the dumbest reasons. I have no idea how ESO plays in this regard. But as much as I liked FFXIV for a time, the main stories (including class questing) is excruciatingly annoying because it's single-player content in a fucking MMO.