Why EQ1 was better then WoW - Fear.

[HTeam]

EQ punished players with time out of their life if they did poorly. Or if their connection dropped. Or if EQ's connection dropped (which is did frequently). Hey, you just lost 6 hours worth of XP and have a corpse run to *somewhere* because they couldn't keep up their line.

Have a fight, use up your mana bar and get ready to meditate for 10 minutes. Enjoy. Oh, and originally you'd have to look at your spellbook that entire time, unable to see the world around you.

Everything was based upon punishing the player for attempting anything remotely adventurous. Go out on a limb and if you're successful you receive nearly no benefit of playing it ultra safe, camping near the zone line and fighting stuff several levels below you. Adventure this does not make.

If you want real fear, play Eve Online. EQ offered nothing but fear of poor game design.

[Souca]

If you want real fear, play Eve Online.

"I'm sure there is no one on the other side of this gate, I should be safe."


- Souca -

[jinkobi]

EQ punished players with time out of their life if they did poorly. Or if their connection dropped. Or if EQ's connection dropped (which is did frequently). Hey, you just lost 6 hours worth of XP and have a corpse run to *somewhere* because they couldn't keep up their line.

Have a fight, use up your mana bar and get ready to meditate for 10 minutes. Enjoy. Oh, and originally you'd have to look at your spellbook that entire time, unable to see the world around you.

Everything was based upon punishing the player for attempting anything remotely adventurous. Go out on a limb and if you're successful you receive nearly no benefit of playing it ultra safe, camping near the zone line and fighting stuff several levels below you. Adventure this does not make.

If you want real fear, play Eve Online. EQ offered nothing but fear of poor game design.

Played Eve for like umm 20 minutes? Couldn't stand it and not my cup of tea what so ever. EQ1 came out at a really busy time in my life and I wasn't even playing games back then. So I missed out on EQ despite one of the developers of the game being a former immortal on a MUD I use to run with a friend at UT Austin. He was a master programmer and pretty much re-coded all of the classes for the MUD which were the roots he used for EQ. Later on he told my best friend that they looked at our code so much that our names were engrained in their heads because we used our names as variables, lol.

The original MUD is still around amazingly- http://www.renegadeoutpost.com/

Sorry to go off on such a self indulgent rant- but some enjoy to hear about the history and evolution of games.

Fear factor MMORPG's are all about gone and it's doubtful they could ever return. Sure many times in those games I got frustrated and pissed. Definitely more pissed than I have ever got in WOW. But when I achieved something really hard - it was much more awesome. Anyone can do something easy.

[Multibocks]

EQ punished players with time out of their life if they did poorly. Or if their connection dropped. Or if EQ's connection dropped (which is did frequently). Hey, you just lost 6 hours worth of XP and have a corpse run to *somewhere* because they couldn't keep up their line.

Have a fight, use up your mana bar and get ready to meditate for 10 minutes. Enjoy. Oh, and originally you'd have to look at your spellbook that entire time, unable to see the world around you.

Everything was based upon punishing the player for attempting anything remotely adventurous. Go out on a limb and if you're successful you receive nearly no benefit of playing it ultra safe, camping near the zone line and fighting stuff several levels below you. Adventure this does not make.

If you want real fear, play Eve Online. EQ offered nothing but fear of poor game design.

Agreed. At first I liked it, but when WoW came along and I saw an alternative... there was no looking back. You tried something new and you were severely punished for not succeeding. It made for a very timid player base.

[Ishar]

I do miss the immersion...and the feeling that new zones were freaking scary. Even as a6 boxer (or perhaps partly becasue i was a 6 boxer) I had to be cautious about exploring new zones (because whiping was so painful). Plus other people all over...really felt you were a part of something. Instances and questing kinda kill that. when was the last time (other than pvp server) when you really interacted with other players that weren't part of your group or raid outside of a city, bg, or whatever? I mean in eq i got to know people just casue we camped similar zones at similar level ranges... you'd run itno people 20 levels later that remembered you from Guk. and the camps that never ended...eg frenzy in guk, camped 24/7. so you ended up getting to know the other people camping him, cause primarily it was some of the same folks. I remember i'd get in the group, then 8 hours later im leading the group, and the people that invited me are back online.

as mentioned, another thing I really hate about wow is the gear resets. The great pleasure of eq for a boxer was old content. You could sometimes get decent gear by doing content 3-4 expansions behind.

Also, i hate the dancing. It just kills immersion for me. I mean, it is challenging....but what the hell? alright, step right, step back, forward, spin, spin, left, right, forward.... wait...what? lol. (eg avoiding fire/goop/spikes/whatever ) It looks soo much worse with a boxer too, cause your dps are more or less synchronized.

a complete lack of pulling as mentioned above. played a monk in eq. I sitll pay for the monks sub, i have no idea why. Every time i go to cancel i get all nostalgic and log in and talk to folks.

But, really, the thing it comes down to (for me) is that things are just plain difficult for no good reason in EQ. And im talking things like, interface crap. Its just awkward. WOW is very smooth and polished by comparison. Especially in the realm of boxing. At least by comparison, its not without its issues.

I dunno. Its a love hate thing. Hate eq's prep time. Like the difficulty and lack of gear resets. Having godlike raider friends that would come help you out...so fun. Before I quit the last time I was messing round in plane of air... (or is it plane of sky? The plane with all the weird quests). Strangely, its sitll somewhat challenging, years after it was released. (Partly cause of mobs that death touch...) I also, strangely, miss AA. I don't like hard caps. and AA is like a really shittily implemented soft cap (for 90% of the player base, anyway. I would get 50% through an expansions aa only to have them release another expansions worth, lol.) I mean, there were critical AA for some classes, (worst for tanks, who needed like 500 or so to really be viable by the time i quit...) but 500 aa is a very thin slice of the total aa available. Plus, it was cumulative...meh

I'm babbling and I'm gonna stop. every time I thought the post was gonna end I remembered something else about EQ that I loved or hated, lol.

[Tonuss]

I was a part of two raids to the Plane of Fear. The first one lasted eight hours: 90 minutes prep time, 30 minutes to break in, 30 minutes killing around a dozen trash mobs and wiping on a bad pull... and five-and-a-half hours recovering from the wipe. Not a single boss kill, not a single kill of anything significant. The most mind-numbing experience of my life.

The second raid lasted five-and-a-half hours total, featured two wipes*, but we cleared the whole zone including Cazic-Thule. Yeah, half of the raid was level 65, but it sure was a lot of fun getting my revenge.

Also- splitting mobs is one of those things that developed by accident in EQ and become such a fun thing to do. I can still remember playing my shadow knight and working together with a monk to split giants in Kael. It was another of those areas where if you did well, people recognized your skill and it felt pretty fucking good. Especially since a lack of skill meant that you trained the rest of the raid (muahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa).





*The second wipe occurred when the puller accidentally aggroed Cazic-Thule after we had cleared about 2/3 of the zone. As in other EQ Planes, when you aggroed the end-boss he would chain aggro any and all remaining mobs in the entire zone. I can still, seven years later, remember the literal WAVE OF MOBS coming to obliterate us. Possibly the funniest thing I ever experienced in an MMORPG because it just seemed so damned ludicrous.