[HN Gopher] EverQuest's long, strange 20-year trip still has no ...
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EverQuest's long, strange 20-year trip still has no end in sight
(2019)
Author : Tomte
Score : 38 points
Date : 2022-06-25 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| ThalesX wrote:
| I remember those days, so many MMORPG on the market. Everquest,
| Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Dungeons and Dragons,
| Anarchy Online, and so many others.
|
| I remember being involved in the community for an ultimately
| vaporware MMO. Realms of Torment / Age of Mourning.
|
| Then WoW came and the rest is history.
|
| I think we need a new WoW, and I think it's going to have to come
| from FAANG level company. A fully dynamic cloud backed world
| running AI agents, GPT-3+ storylines, Unreal 5 graphics.
|
| I swear it doesn't even seem that hard nowadays for those kind of
| resources.
|
| I had hopes that Amazon's MMO would show a glimpse of that. It
| didn't yet.
| lampshades wrote:
| I, like you, followed MMO to MMO throughout the 2000s and the
| road ended at WoW.
|
| I don't think we'll see the next big MMO until the Metaverse
| and VR become mainstream. I've given up all hope of anything
| ever competing with WoW. It was such a phenomenal game that
| nothing else has ever even come close. We need the next
| iteration of immersion technology before something can compete.
|
| I still miss that game so much.
| Jonnston wrote:
| FFXIV is actually bigger than WoW these days.
| dimgl wrote:
| > doubt
| ThalesX wrote:
| WoW was colossal. It shaped an entire generation I was part
| of; the socialization, camaraderie, ventrillo and teamspeak
| chats, friends all over the world. I can't really imagine
| myself without it.
|
| I remember one New Year's Eve in Goldshire. It still is
| honestly one of my favorite NYE. Getting drunk on voice chat,
| throwing fireworks, having engineers build all sorts of weird
| contraptions, some steamy chat with probably a balding dude
| playing a Night Elf chick.
|
| I still play every expansion. I make a new character and
| level it to max. But it takes ages and I usually solo and
| when I hit max I mostly stop. It's a little guilty pleasure.
|
| I like to believe this is what kids today get with Fortnite
| and whatchamadoodle.
| treis wrote:
| >I think we need a new WoW, and I think it's going to have to
| come from FAANG level company. A fully dynamic cloud backed
| world running AI agents, GPT-3+ storylines, Unreal 5 graphic
|
| I'm mildly worried about the societal implications of something
| like that. EverQuest was pretty addictive as it was. Hard to
| fathom what something even more immersive with essentially
| infinite content would be like.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| There's an anime about that (Sword Art Online) ;)
| numen9311 wrote:
| >I think we need a new WoW, and I think it's going to have to
| come from FAANG level company. A fully dynamic cloud backed
| world running AI agents, GPT-3+ storylines, Unreal 5 graphics.
|
| If you think this is all video gaming industry is your going to
| have a bad time, none of these would contribute to making a
| half decent game, let alone an mmo.
| ThalesX wrote:
| I'm not sure why you'd go with this take. I'm not saying
| throw some AI, some GPT+ prompts and Unreal 5, deploy it to
| EC2 and call it a day. There's main storylines, side quests,
| great campaigns and assets that can be done by humans, you'd
| of course need to make it a game. Is this a reason why the
| weird hermit NPC living in the forest shouldn't have a richer
| life than sitting in his hut all day?
|
| All I'm is saying is that I'd like a new age MMORPG using
| these new technologies that can help create dynamic rich
| worlds, populate them with reasonably realistic NPC and have
| nicely polished clients, especially with the $bajillions that
| get thrown around tech nowadays.
| zarriak wrote:
| I'm surprised how this fails to mention Elitist Jerks and how
| much of an impact (for better or worse) they have had on wow and
| Blizzard in general
| q-big wrote:
| Relevant:
|
| >
| https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/3n4fjv/why_did_elitist...
|
| on the question "Why did Elitist Jerks die out?":
|
| "A not insignificant number of prominent theorycrafters now
| work at Blizzard, so that killed a number of class threads.
| Some other people quit and weren't replaced.
|
| Later, as the final nail in the coffin, the site was sold to
| Ten Ton Hammer. They unsuccessfully tried to monetize the site
| and caused a mass exodus of forum members, effectively killing
| the community."
| spullara wrote:
| Best MMO right now is Albion Online. But most people don't have
| the stomach for full loot PvP.
| [deleted]
| pyinstallwoes wrote:
| What's good about it?
| jakebasile wrote:
| I miss what it was like to play EQ around the Vellious expansion.
| I loved that game. I've tried playing one of the "classic"
| servers and while it is close to how I remember it I no longer
| found it fun, since I have changed.
|
| I will always cherish the memories from it. Meeting my wife in
| the Paw dungeon. Taking her to the Temple of the Dragons and
| going all the way to the top. Camping the Plane of Hate for her
| epic weapon. Camping the stupid giant in the ocean island for my
| epic weapon. That one zone without oxygen on Luclin. Making tons
| of money teleporting people around the world.
| cletus wrote:
| I played the original Everquest from 1999 until 2004 or so with
| some gaps. it really was amazing at the time. WoW killed it of
| course. There's good reason for that but it's wild to think of
| how hard core EQ was at the time.
|
| For example, if you died, your corpse was where you died. You
| reappeared with literally no gear. If that was deep in a dungeon
| (Sebilis anyone?) then recovering it might be nontrivial. This
| led to corpse-run ("CR") groups. If you failed to get your corpse
| within a week it would disappear taking all your stuff.
|
| You also lost XP when you died.
|
| Another example: wood elves started in Kelethin, which was
| platforms in the trees with no rails. It was a rite of passage to
| fall off those passages and die. If you were fighting under the
| city at times you'd often see newbies falling to their deaths.
|
| Travel originally was originally nontrivial too. One continent
| had a big city on each side (Qeynos and Freeport) and it was
| almost another rite of passage to do the Qeynos to Freeport run
| as a low-level (which could take 30-60 minutes IIRC) because you
| wanted to level somewhere else.
|
| This is a genre I wish there was life in but sadly I think it's
| time has come and gone. A big part of what drove it was that it
| was the era before social networks. You met people in MMOs. Now?
| Everything is so results-oriented. Play a modern MMO and to do a
| dungeon you just queue, join, kill things off the checklist and
| then leave. You may never talk to anyone. People may leave mid-
| dungeon and get replaced without you ever noticing.
|
| It's interesting to see how many small changes players demand
| ultimately kill the genre. Levelling too slow? Eliminate it. Um,
| what? That's half the game. Dungeon queueing. Raid queueing. Solo
| content, which has definite merits also means you rarely have to
| talk to or cooperate with anyone to get a lot of things done.
| xwdv wrote:
| Back in the day I hated EverQuest because it killed Ultima
| Online. It's funny you mention how hardcore EQ was because UO
| was even harder. In the early days you could be killed and your
| entire corpse robbed clean, people could even butcher up your
| body into discrete pieces and feed them to pigs, or carry your
| head around like a trophy or turn it in for a bounty if there
| was one. Also if someone got your house key and they found your
| house they could just bust in and loot it dry. It was so
| dangerous.
|
| But then games like EQ came out and made things easier for
| players, and that put pressure on UO devs to make their game
| easier, and eventually with time UO became a boring safe game
| rather than a true virtual world.
| foxbarrington wrote:
| I still play on an emulated server [0] that keeps things like
| they were in 1999-2001. I keep coming back to this game because
| of how much you have to rely on others to do anything. It makes
| it incredibly social. Still unlike any other game I've played.
|
| [0] https://project1999.com
| voganmother42 wrote:
| It is a wonderful time, I highly recommend p99, especially when
| they do fresh servers!
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