A new player survey pops up when you log into EverQuest these days, asking what sort of content players would like to see from the venerable MMORPG. Can an eleven year old game still innovate? These poll questions hint that SOE has not given up on the game that put them on the map:
Poll Question: What new feature would you be most interested in seeing in EverQuest?
UI Revamp — Work with the community to come up with a new default skin for the EverQuest UI, with a possibility for other changes like re-sizable hot bars and backpacks (not increased slots, however).
Increased inventory space — Revamp the inventory management system to allow backpacks larger than 10 slots.
Player housing — Personal player houses with items that can be placed inside, a ranking system, access rights, etc.
Improved guild system — Advanced guild rank management, guild halls that allow decoration and item placement (similar to player housing).
Revamped bazaar/broker system — Offline trading, trading outside of The Bazaar zone, etc.
New player character models — Optional new player character models (any new visible armor would only be visible on the new models).
More mercenary types — New AI types like DPS, crowd control, etc.
Player generated content system — Allow players to place NPCs and traps, set mission types, and turn loose their custom zone for other players to experience and gain points in a scaling reward system.
I’ve highlighted the ones I think are especially cool. Player-generated missions? YES, PLEASE!
Kaozz of EC Tunnel has compiled a list of a lot of Octember All Hallow’s Eve events for all the major MMOs — including Maple Story, big props for including even the MMOs that are way more popular than WoW — so there’s your to-do list for fall fun.
Well, maybe, but if you read between the lines, it’s almost certain that EverQuest Next will be a PS3/PSP release. A browser-based EQ would compete with Free Realms, and they’ve learned the lesson about competing with themselves….
Dalayan Diary’s Ramon writes about using the Shards of Dalaya web-based item marketplace to buy some new swords for his happy haffer. Web-based marketplace? Yes, please! Talk about bringing some pretty meaty gameplay to the web.
Scopique has an epiphany and realizes that most recent high-profile MMO releases are essentially identical. I commented on his post and will repeat it here — DON’T support MMO clones. If you want WoW’s gameplay, PLAY WOW. If you want something different, PLAY A GAME THAT DOES SOMETHING DIFFERENT.
Is fighting other players too scary? That’s okay, Darkfall is adding boars, wolves, bears, lynxes and annoying little birds that follow you around adding into fights and just wasting your time to make quest grinding even more tedious. Oops, sorry. LotRO flashback.
Budding stalkerazzi have a friend in Luna Online — now you can choose from a list of matches randomly chosen by the game based on your player profile and go to a special, two-person instance for the purposes of LURV. And you can have some hot coffee afterward!
Awwww, over-protective mommy ship takes cute baby alt-ship out for the first time! Yes, I’ve joined the ranks of EVE pilots with two accounts; the lure of EVE’s Power of 2 promotion and the savings in time by having a second account for salvaging, hauling, and extra drones was just too much to ignore.
If you think THAT picture is just too twee, check THIS one out.
So there you have it. Another alt is born.
—
Hey, Aion’s out? Already? Wow, how’s it doing? Gold sellers everywhere? Let’s get some economics going. You are spending real money, that you earned, that could go for food or rent or gas on … nothing. NCsoft can always make more gold. They make it by the infinities every day. A resource that has an infinite supply that costs the producer absolutely nothing to produce has NO WORTH. So when you buy gold, you might as well be handing out dollar bills on the street. Anyway, Rer of (Insert Awesome Aion Name) says it a little better. Not only are you pissing away wealth on nothing, you’re ruining the game for everyone else.
Way to go, uber dude.
Stropp has some good ideas to combat gold spam. Simple economics, though, suggest the only real way to combat gold spam is to make NCsoft’s cost to produce more gold non-zero. To, like, make them adhere to the gold standard… So to speak. What if NCsoft had to give a dollar to charity for every thousand gold kinah they added to Aion?
Are you a MMO connoisseur who only plays the BEST, TRIPLE-A titles, like WoW and, um, WoW? Because the other SUB-AAA titles aren’t as good, so you’d be wasting your time on games like Maple Story, Wizard101, Chronicles of Spellborn, et al? Beau Turkey politely asks that you re-think what AAA means with regard to MMOs. Just because it’s a major studio sitting around in executive money chairs doesn’t mean they are the only ones who can make a fun, quality, game.
Gordon of We Fly Spitfires asks how it came to be that raiding is the end-game for MMOs? Why not something else — ANYTHING else? Well, Gordon, it all began with a little game called EverQuest. The EQ devs set their level cap so impossibly high that they never expected many people to ever reach it in the year and a half that they expected the game to run. They had a couple of dragons in the game as impossible challenges. But lots of people DID hit 50, and they found that if they got a hundred of their closest friends together and keep rushing at the dragons that they could eventually kill these beasts. So why is there raiding? Because MMO players INVENTED it. Since then, MMO devs have just been giving players what they ASKED for.
Maybe we should all get together and ask for something else?
If you’ve been stuck on Chaos MUD’s Wolfe Island for the last decade, the zone’s creator has come forth with a walkthrough, so you can finally move on with your life, maybe take a crack at the Telescope Room in Myst :) Seriously, I love reading the stories from the old MUD communities that more than anything else, set the stage for our MMO hobby.
Krystalle at Massively has been playing around in the Eskil Steenberg’s Love MMO’s paid alpha. You’ll remember Love as the game based on procedurally generated content — a world generated by algorithms as opposed to the more usual method of having artists and level developers plan them out. This makes it possible for a single developer to to make an entire world (and is how big-world MMOs like Dawn and Dark&Light intended to make worlds too large to ever be explored). Full featured MMO or glorified tech demo? Check out the videos, or play the game and decide for yourself.
Pete of Dragonchasers has been waxing rhapsodicabout Bioware’s forthcoming Dragon Age for awhile, and why not? Looks like a great game, but I personally find it boring to play video games by myself these days. Just having people around makes it more special. Doesn’t mean I won’t play it, though.
Pro tip: Use phrases like “waxing rhapsodic” to confuse your non-English-as-a-first-language friends. It’s fun!
Syp never understood the appeal of sandbox MMOs like EVE Online and Star Wars: Galaxies before, but since he’s been playing Fallen Earth, he’s become a convert. So, I assume we’ll be seeing you in highsec pretty soon? :)
Ramon of Dalayan Diary LIKES grouping in Shards of Dalaya, but dislikes HAVING to group in order to see all the best stuff. Yup. It’s nice to have the choice — but given a choice, people always choose the easiest path. The only way to have a game with a really quality group experience is to make that the best and most obvious choice, alas.
“It would like them much; but an ye wot how dragons are esteemed, ye would not hold them blamable. They fear to come.” — “Well, then, suppose I go to them instead, and—” — “Ah, wit ye well they would not abide your coming. I will go.” And she did. She was a handy person to have along on a raid. — Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
I work not half a mile from the house where Samuel Clemens wrote that book, and the book is my “bus book” I read on the way to and from work, and when I saw the lines about dragons and raids, well….
Anyway, lots of people are still waiting in queues in Aion. I think enough has been said about that, and I don’t ding NCsoft for going easy on the servers to start off. (Rer has some ideas on what to tell friends who might be reluctant to try Aion because of queues and other things). Nothing worse than making a million servers and then closing half of them in a couple of months after people go back to WoW. Because you KNOW they will. In the MMO space, WoW is like this huge dark star in the middle of the system. You can travel to another planet for a visit, but unless you nail your feet to the ground, that dark WoW star’s gonna pull you back.
Seems only natural to want to work there. After all, if they already have your soul, might as well make them pay for the privilege. That’s what Ixobelle thought, fresh back from Japan, as he drove to Blizzard headquarters in Irvine, California, with $500 worth of full color, 27 page booklets outlining his painstakingly designed raid dungeon, the Castle of Baron von Lupus. If that doesn’t sound like a natural fit for the new Worgen PC race, what does? Not knowing any Blizzard employees well enough to get through the front gate, he set up a table and sign across the street, hoping for a response. Did it pay off? You’ll have to read the post to find out.
Brad McQuaid writes about Vanguard’s Size Problem. As in, the world is so big, vast, tremendous, huge, etc that unless you stick close to the cities, you will only rarely see another person. Though with all the methods of travel available, 90% of Telon is just there to keep the quest hubs separated. Brad says this vast expanse was a pushback against EverQuest’s omnipresent crowding that had people bumping into one another at every turn. But overcrowding is better than the alternative….
Brad says people will group if there’s enough people in the area with which to do the thing. Thallian insists the reason people don’t group (in WoW) is because it’s not FUN enough. He goes on to give a lot of suggestions about how to make dungeons and other encounters more fun, most of which were done eons ago in EverQuest.
SOE’s working on a new EverQuest, EverQuest Next. They could do far worse than to go back to basics and try to capture what made EQ special for its time. EQ has changed so much now that it’s a different game, but back then…. and as someone who last year started over from scratch, I can avow that EQ still has that same magic, if you’re doing it with a group of friends. EQ nostalgia must be going around, because Rao has got it as bad as I do. I don’t see either of us jumping back into the game, though.
Entries (RSS)