There’s only two good MMOs anyone has ever played: the one they quit to play their current one, and the one they are soooo dumping this game for when it comes out.
I agree with your thesis but I’d say the two good MMORPGS are the first one you ever played, and the totally awesome revolutionary one coming out “real soon now.”
WoW is just a timesink until people discover that EQ2 became fun.
Why wasn’t it fun when it was released?
Did they know it wasn’t fun when it was released?
If so, why did they release it? What about all those people who purchased and subscribed to the game when it was un-fun? Was it fair to them?
Of course not, because they’re fucking SOE. SOE, who purposely robbed us of our Star Wars MMO. SOE is the fucking devil.
Making an un-fun MMO fun doesn’t count, after release. You can tweak and improve it, sure, but if your core design at release sucks (SWG, EQ2), forget it. You’re done.
Are you getting some kind of d3d.dll error? I was too. The launcher says you need the latest version of Direct X which I thought (Direct X 9c ??)I had, however if you click the link on the launcher it will take you to the MS Direct X web installer that checks your files and installs some things. Then the game worked no problems.
What piqued my interest about Vanguard were the exploration and virtual world aspects , but at this point I can’t really say much as I have only tried the beta for a few hours total (got into the closed beta last week) and am still aquainting myself with the game systems interace, etc.
What strikes you right away is that the game needs a lot of work. I noticed a few bugs pretty much right away and reported them. Performance is pretty abysmal albeit on an aging system, until I turned the graphics down to high performance where it became playable. On this setting the graphics are okay but a little bland. I love the big open terrain though. Pushing the graphics down to highest performance results in even better performance but the ugliness is too much to take with blurry textures reminiscent of games in the late 90s.
This game definately needs more work and tons of optimizations. If Sony is responsible for pushing this out now they must not really give two shits and probably are only interested in using Vanguard as a cash grab and to add value to their All Access Pass (therebye keeping their EQ and EQ II subs on board). Kind of feel sorry for the 100 + crew that were developing the game.
There will not be any miracle build before launch what you see is what you get.
I preordered this months ago, and even though I am not playing any MMO right now, will probably cancel, unless in the coming weeks of ‘open beta’ the gameplay shows promise.
There are at least two “versions” of 9c, the original and I think an august update. Stupid eh?
[quote=Balasarius]Why wasn’t it fun when it was released?
Did they know it wasn’t fun when it was released?
If so, why did they release it? What about all those people who purchased and subscribed to the game when it was un-fun? Was it fair to them?
I enjoyed EQ2 at launch. Really, the only two bullet items I had a big concern with was getting your shard and how similar the first 20 levels were for classes in the same archetype. Both of which were fixed.
[quote]
Of course not, because they’re fucking SOE. SOE, who purposely robbed us of our Star Wars MMO. SOE is the fucking devil.
From conversations I’ve had with people, it really seems as though LucasArts is the one to blame for this, not SOE. SOE’s taken the hit for it a bit unfairly, I think. LucasArts (whom is the publisher) had the Starter Kit ready for release on 11/15, and the NGE was going out that day, damn the results. LucasArts were the ones perfectly willing to sacrifice their existing customers for the dream of getting new ones.
One of the reasons I think this is over the last few years, SOE has gotten a LOT better at communicating to their customers. But, I notice this decent communication is in all areas but one: SWG. I think that’s due to LucasArts mucking up the comminication stream.
Making an un-fun MMO fun doesn’t count, after release. You can tweak and improve it, sure, but if your core design at release sucks (SWG, EQ2), forget it. You’re done.
I can’t say as I really notice a big difference in my fun-factor for EQ2 @ launch and after the updates. I wouldn’t say that EQ2’s design sucked at lunch, but rather there were a few key areas that didn’t end up working out as well as they thought it would. Kudos for them realizing this and making adjustments.
There was a December update also.
I think they tried to go the ‘Vanguard’ hardcore route when they first released EQ2 and although the ideas seemed good, turned out to be very bad in practice, especially when trying to cater to the casual player:
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xp loss on death. EQ2 originally had scaling xp loss based on level when you died, but you could go back to your ‘shard’ where you died and pray to regain some of the xp (similar to a corpse run). This has long been gone and the death penalty is not .5% xp loss and 10% item damage, which can be repaired at a mender.
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travel. Travel between the higher level outdoor zones required very difficult quests to be completed before you could access them. This has been eliminated. There are some small dungeons/instances which still require access quests, but they are very very few.
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crafting. When the game was first released, all crafters (except provisioners) required items to make their products that came from other crafters. For example, a carpenter making a chest might require metal braces that could only be made an armorer. This has long since been eliminated and all crafters can work independently.
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harvesting. When the game was released, all harvest nodes had exactly 1 resource per harvest with three harvests per node before it disappeared. Between this and the old crafting system, it was PAINFUL to try to get anywhere. Now each harvest provides 1, 3, 5, or 10 (plus a ‘rare’) resources per harvest.
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content. The game is now overwhelming with content, so much so that your quest log is constantly full and there are several locations appropriate to your level to visit. The one negative to this is that quest xp is so good and levelling is so quick that a casual player may miss certain locations, which will at least give something for an alt to rediscover. The world feels huge now compared to WoW, especially with the additions of Sinking Sands and Faydwer.
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levelling speed. Clearly ripped off from WoW, you get ‘vitality’ when you aren’t playing which doubles the experience you receive until you have it caught up. This applies to both crafting and adventure xp, both on different tracks.
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mobs. In the beginning, mobs post level 20 almost always required a group to tackle. This of course sucked the fun out of the casual player, but I imagine like most companies, they fell into the idea of forced grouping for MMORPGs. Nowadays mobs are broken up into regular, ‘heroic’ (which require usually more than one person to tackle), or epic (which are rare and require a small raid group to tackle).
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AAs. A fairly new idea to better customize your character. Whenever you complete a non-trivial quest, or explore a new area, or kill a ‘named’ NPC, you gain xp towards AAs. You can gain up to 100 of them throughout the game which provide more specialties.
Going back to your question though, if you are the type of person who buys a game, tries it, hates it, and writes it off forever, then you are right, SOE is the devil as it pretty much every MMORPG out there. If you are the kind of player who is willing to check out a game again, though, you might be pleasantly surprised by what you see.
No, I don’t think so.
What I’m talking about is the core-design. The DIKU EQ system, and the skill-based UO system.
At the time, EQ was top dawg, 450k+ subs and climbing. UO was struggling, 200k subs or less and shrinking.
When it was announced that SOE was making SWG, we EQ players all shouted for joy. Surely, SWG would be EQ 1.5 in the Star Wars universe. What could go wrong?
I’ll tell you. SOE, being greedy fucks, realized that a DIKU based SWG would steal all their EQ accounts. So they hired Raph Koster, to make UO 2.0 in the Star Wars universe, so they could preserve their EQ subs and steal subs from UO.
The community had spoken – the level based DIKU system was preferred. SOE didn’t care. They just wanted their money.
LucasArts is to blame for turning a blind eye and letting SOE fuck their fans.
Fuck SOE.
- Everybody that played EQ1 in the first year hates Brad. If you’re going to post a followup saying “I played EQ1 and I don’t hate him!”, let me just stop you right there by saying that you’re lying and shut up.
Amen. It’s the reason I want to try the Vanguard beta, just to laugh and point.
If you’ve read up any of the things they were trying to do with Vanguard, you had to know this would be utter shite. They literally decided EQ was the pinnacle of MMORPG design and took and “made it better”. How can that not be horribly funny.
And dear god…I remember staring at that spell book as a Druid. WORST GAME DESIGN IDEA EVER.
Of all the issues I had with SWG, the skill-based design was the least of them, and once they got rid of it one of the items I realized I liked.
The fact that they stuck the game between Episodes IV and V, put Jedi in the game, had a city sprawl that took over Tat, and pretty much made a Star Wars game that was as un-Star Warsy as possible are larger concerns.
And, yeah, SOE is to blame for most of that.
On the other hand, given how damn hard it it is to pull of a movie-based MMO, where you can’t be one of the main characters, any sort of design would have left me feeling let down.
Preach it brother! Preach it!
I played a necro, then when I got absolutely tired of soloing or attempting to solo everything I ever ran into I rerolled cleric and I couldn’t kill rats without a party after that. But I remember when Brad left and “The Vision” started to waver into things that were much more fun and made sense (at that time anyway.)
If they get rid of the damn death penalty in EQ, I’d probably play it more.
It was amazing how poorly they treated their customers in those days.
I remember folks reading books while their meditation screens were up. You have to admit that a game that encourages reading something else during the game is pretty screwed up.
I didn’t hate Brad, exactly. I thought he was clueless about some things (soloing in particular).
The EQ guys actively hated their customer base. It’s something you’d never get away with now because you aren’t the only game in town. Back then though… it was EQ or go back to UO. And while the UO guys didn’t actively hate me, they did seem to love to see me suffer. :)
And yeah, I had a book for reading while meditating…dear god that was bad.
I never made past the time of the Vision™ in EQ. I just couldn’t take it anymore.
They are all timesinks. It’s just a matter of preference about how you choose to spend your entertainment time. I have yet to play EQ2, though I’m intrigued. I just feel like I have a major time investment in WoW, still enjoy it, and don’t have time to play both WoW and EQ2. I’m also concerned about how well it will run on my PC, but I haven’t even tried it so I have no idea.
All I can say about Brad’s comments are that they are surprising. I’m surprised he’s admitting the game isn’t polished and I’m surprised that someone at SOE hasn’t clamped down on him. His comments can’t help.
Over the past year or so the groupthink has overwhelmingly favored EQ2. Apparently they patched in the fun, the engine runs twice as fast, and they add content fast like rabbit.
I didn’t read books while playing EQ1, I actually had a little TV instead. My screens were setup like [TV][EQ][ShowEQ].
Lionel, you do make EQ2 sound fun. I might have to try it after reading your post of its selling points. Tyler had nice things to say about it too.