I think if it works out right, this game will make a new generation of gamer realize what an MMORPG can be like. I hated MMO's before I played WOW. I tried to get into Everquest and just could not get the idea through my head. Then a simple version called WOW came along and made me love the MMO genre. I found friends who gamed like I did. I joined guilds with people I had done leveling dungeons with. I raided with people I had leveled with. I helped others with class quests and others helped me with my class quests. Then an expansion came along. I realized all my hard work levleing my crafting was out the door as none of the mats or the skills were any good anymore. THe gear I had fought so hard to learn a raid with were useless. At first I thought oh well maybe next expansion some of those hours spent will be worth it and they will tie it all together. Another expansion came along and threw away all I had done on the last two "Episodes". Then to make matters worse they tore apart my raiding guild when they decided it was too hard to put together so many people for a raid and less raiders was a good idea. WOW also started to be a job get this daily done to get that rep for the recipe and the rep for that trinket and the daily for your food. I got to the point where I tried many other MMO's and a lot of the same ideas were going on there as well. This game is sounding so good I pledged to it. I have high hopes for even just the beginning so even thinking about later is a stretch. However that is what I would wonder about. We have read and watched and absorbed so much on the first part of the game have any of the Dev's ideas on how to proceed after success happens and it will happen with this game. This game makes you think and strategize and do more than follow the path and get reward swarm mobs rinse repeat. There is no way it can fail after people experience what we have seen in videos. So not to jinx it but what are the visions of the future will we all be the same tanks in the same shoulder pads running the same dungeons over and over to get that one last piece of gear? Will be able to look and feel different than the tank standing next to me in the village square? Will I be able to spec differently and play differently with the same winning result? Or will I be killing my team because I keep trying to use an axe and shield while the meta is sword and shield? I am just curious if anyone else has thought of these things?
Question:
If you can, identify the specfic features that...
Made you dislike EQ...
Made you like WoW...
I would be interested in your thought process as to why you liked one over the other.
Hey @Lockjr, Tanix is just an Evil Genius that wants to pick your brain a bit. But this game wont be anything like WoW is/was, it wont have damage meters, specs or item level requirements(like how wow does at least). It wont be about any of that either. Not even sure if there will be a meta, well i guess their is always a meta but still.
I think everyone would like to look and feel differenct too, we'll just have to wait and see what VR ends up coming out with. Correct me if im wrong here, but i think we are just in {PreAlpha5}. Patients will go along way here as everything is currently subject to change.
Well I have to be honest I definitely do not want another wow situation. I know that won't happen here which is why I did pledge. I like that they are making pantheon group centric where as in WOW that was what I think the original goal for the dev team was there as well. In Vanilla a lot of the cooler items were found when doing group quests or when quests took you into dungeons where you were forced to find a group doing the same content. I love that part. What I lacked in everquest was the ability to figure out how the dynamic of finding friends and groupmates was. The funny part is all I had to do was was ask but as it iwas one of my first MMO tries I was unfamiliar. From what I see with the influence and the questlines and the dungeons Pantheon is right where I like it. Group quests are great times and introduce us to each other. I would rather have fun and fail than succeed and run a WOW dungeon today. I liked how in the beginning though you would get the chest from here and the helm from there. Those make traveling around fun so you look for things. Exploring is great when you find that one cave nobody has seen yet. I also love to find vistas where great screen shots come from. Once we had flying in WOW the hard to find screenshots were over you just flew up to it. I love learning the new content with people who are seeing the places for the first time. I ran UBRS and Scholo more than I ever think you should have to, but it was great because it was always with people who had not been there before. So I guess I liked being a guide as well in WOW. We had a global channel that a lot of us made and joined on our server so we could all skip the main channel and get the raids organized no matter what guild you were in. So I guess I liked the ability to communicate without having to be on a Teamspeak or vent server. We had our guild convo on TS and could chat to friends from other guilds in global at the same time or tell them to get on vent with us. I loved the feeling of being in an immense world without feeling like it was overwhelming. I can't wait for the launchday of Pantheon when everyone is learning the new start zones and start chatting each other up and grouping to do content. I want to find the first dungeon we can do at the lowest possible level and get the largest group of noobs together and run it for fun. BTW nice meeting you everyone I said it before I know it's early and I trust the Dev's because so far what I see is amazing. But I just hope were not alll running around in the same endgame gear at the same time. I hope we have to travel to far away lands to get great raids and items from those to be epic but not so epic that you have to wear them to be viable in raids. If I like the look of one item and the stats are just not quite right but close enough or actually work with my play style I want to wear it. I hate those guys who say you must suck because you don't have x gear on. I was a main tank in Molten Core and for the longest time used my blue set for the bonuses and because I just never got the drops. But I think I made the point my blues were fine for the longest time because of my play style. I just hope group centric will some day mean gear centric. I hope we never see meters ever again in MMO's. Sorry for the book I write novels because I never really can be clear on my concepts.
Thanks All I just hope we have good discussions like this about the game well past launch. Sorry grammar and I do not get along.
Wall of text crits for 1000% of damage. Edit that and throw some paragraphs in there, I don't care if they make sense just do my eyes a favor.
With regards to your first post/topic. EQ was really good with lateral progression. The first two expansions never triviliazed old content in EQ. To me this is something I just haven't seen done in any MMO since and I'd love for it to become a thing again. Well into Velious we were still raiding content from the base game. I truly hope VR goes this route when launching expansions. The thing that will need to be addressed is that most expansions are meant to add content at the top of the level range because everyone is maxed level. If you drastically slow down leveling then you have the chance of people still leveling when the first expansion comes out, meaning lateral content would be seen as worthwhile.
I think WoW had some good features too. Don't let some people here get you down because you have a different opinion on what fun or good is.
@Lockjr
In terms of the tanks wearing the same stuff...I highly doubt it. Unless they have small looting tables in raids. Since stat distributions will be different for each race, that would mean that different loot of the same pieces of gear will be better for certain races to fill in the stats they need. Now if all classes get the same stats regardless of race, then yeah...you will have the same gear. I don't think they are doing that though, so you should see different pieces of BIS gear for different races. They will go even further and probably have different pieces of gear being optimal for certain fights...and even thoughs pieces can be different in terms of stats with the same effect. So they can get really detailed will multiple layers of decisions for gear for certain class/race combos.
((Made you dislike EQ...
Made you like WoW...))
Almost no game is so good that it has no bad features. Almost no game is so bad that it has no good features.
The thing I liked most about WoW was that it had separate racial starting areas and different backstories and lore related to the races. Even the races I didn't like I started and ran to mid-level just to experience this. There were more things I did not like about WoW than things I did like but that was not the question.
The thing I liked least about EQ was the enormous number of slash commands to memorize and the relative lack of menus. I am not talking about in 1999 when that was simply the best way things could be done - I am talking about later when games like EQ2 had advanced to a more menu-driven interface while EQ retained its more ...primitive .... system. It may make me a lazy modern gamer that wants everything simple and easy with no need to think or work for rewards (there Tanix I saved *you* the effort of saying it) but I prefer to devote my mental efforts to playing the game not memorizing slash commands.
dorotea said:((Made you dislike EQ...
Made you like WoW...))
Almost no game is so good that it has no bad features. Almost no game is so bad that it has no good features.
The thing I liked most about WoW was that it had separate racial starting areas and different backstories and lore related to the races. Even the races I didn't like I started and ran to mid-level just to experience this. There were more things I did not like about WoW than things I did like but that was not the question.
The thing I liked least about EQ was the enormous number of slash commands to memorize and the relative lack of menus. I am not talking about in 1999 when that was simply the best way things could be done - I am talking about later when games like EQ2 had advanced to a more menu-driven interface while EQ retained its more ...primitive .... system. It may make me a lazy modern gamer that wants everything simple and easy with no need to think or work for rewards (there Tanix I saved *you* the effort of saying it) but I prefer to devote my mental efforts to playing the game not memorizing slash commands.
Its funny you mention starting areas and race. The one thing I really loved about EQ was not that every race had a "story" but more that every race had a culture. They didn't lay out the history of your chosen race for you but if you went out of your way you could find all the detail and depth they put into each race. EQ's commands were... and are... very archaic. I don't think the user should ever be fighting the user interface or struggling to find the command or setting they want. That's bad game design to me.
dorotea said:I agree - the racial cultures and distinctions in EQ were a good thing. Race should mean more than just appearance or even racial bonuses or handicaps - even non-roleplayers should be shown what being a member of that race *means* in terms of history and challenges.
Yeah. I wasn't on an RP server and we still made jokes about each others races, cultures, etc. in guild. These are things I've never seen in a MMO since. Even on a non RP server there was a little bit of RP because you identified with your race. You had a different experience of the game, saw different things, because you lived out the prejudice that your chosen race endured. It shaped your view of the game. I think moreso as an evil race than a good race, but still. I know many Paladins who after completing their epic quest had a different outlook on Freeport.
