Yeah, getting killed by a griffen was frustrating, but it was also exciting being there knowing you had to keep checking for griffens. There were a few areas in EQ like that where a high level mob wandered around and victimized people. It added a little spice to the game.
Do you remember in the Desert of Ro that named Dark Elf that was in the camp of gypsies? He was like a super-villain. He stayed there until someone wandered close enough to aggro him, and then he was launched like a pinball, running around and attacking players. Better yet, he sometimes would camp in a different spot for awhile – might have been a bug. Players would stumble upon him in an unexpected spot. It was with great satisfaction that I returned many levels later and killed him about a dozen times.
Yea, Divin, I think that was the dark elf guy in South Ro. Forrtunatly I never had a problem with him. My classes were either evil, or they were neutral and I worshiped and evil god which made me OK with him. I could walk right up to him and he never would aggro me.
There was an element of unpredictability in EQ that added spice. Divin, griffens, sand giants, minding your business at Unrest and having someone accidentally train about 20 undead on you – those things were at times frustrating, but they were the X factor in situations you could otherwise control with ease if you were judicious. I think MMOs need a bit more in the way of random encounters.
To be fair, I don’t think Kadath or Qenan’s posts were remotely pro-“Vision”. Kadath pointed out that the game was better without it, and Qenan’s bottom line is that it was no good for the non-catassers.
I rarely see anyone defend everything about the original vision: most people recognize that it was thoroughly sadistic. Of course, there are always a few people who enjoyed parts of it, and an even smaller number of full-blown masochists who worship the ground McQuaid walks on. We’ll see if there are enough of them for his next game to be successful. Personally, I won’t go anywhere near it unless he gives me a free copy and starts sending me $15 a month.
Yes some of these random elements are fun, but the death penalty was not. If EQ had the WoW death penalty, sure random griphhon or Divin ganks would not be to bad and add nice spice to life in the MMO. However, dying with serious XP loss (hours) and a corpse run trounced any form of enjoyment out of the game.
Mark, you’re forgetting just how much that unpredictability sucked. Random uncontrollable unpredictable unavoidable death, which is what you get when you have a level 40 aggressive griffon wandering a level 15 zone, isn’t fair to the players but it was a cornerstone of the Vision. Same deal with trains in unrest. That wasn’t fun at all, there was no plus side to getting 30 mobs on your ass either insta-killing you or forcing you to zone. The only real benefit of all this shit, plus the strong interdependency and forced grouping, was the coherent community it generated.
Silverpine has the Son of Arugal wandering around, and he will likely fuck up any solo player questing in the zone, given his level and elite status (I think he cons as ?? when you first enter the zone based on level).
I’ve always had to be careful to make sure he’s not around, and with the death penalty being “run back to corpse”, the tension is about worth the penalty (meaning, you’re not constantly on edge looking out for him because you’re not risking 30 minutes of work if he catches you off guard).
