Ryan

@HokieKC

I actually think porting it could make sense, but I doubt updating the graphics would. If you were to upgrade the graphics, you may as well start from scratch.

I've really wondered why they don't put it up on the Sony PS3 store for free, and create a $5 or $10 subscription for it after a month free. I'm willing to bet it would have been profitable, but maybe I underestimate the difficulty of porting it.

Maybe it still would have been profitable, but they just want to bank all their energy on the F2P move with EQ and EQ2... and then focus on EQ Next.

@SnarlingWolf

They weren't major games or even MMOs, but they were a lot of fun.

I used to play Cosmic Rift when I was in college... it was a great space ship pvp shoot, almost like an arcade game with simple controls, just with different 'classes' of ships to spice up the strategy, varying in speed, weapon power, shields, etc.

To be honest, I didn't even realize SOE still offered it. It wasn't a bad way to kill 30 minutes, despite its simplicity. It could actually get kind of addictive if there were a lot of people playing.

Hrm. I hate to say it, but it looks kind of bland. Maybe I biased because I loved the old Skyshrine in EQ1.

Some random thoughts:

1. I live near Salem. It doesn't look like that. And it didn't look like that... that wouldn't be an issue, if not for thought #2:

2. Why couldn't they have called it some other town name? Or made one up? If it's not going to look anything like Salem, you may as well name it something completely different and do your own thing.

3. Why does the 'civilization increaser' have to be churches? Not only do churches have almost nothing to do with civilization (indeed, Rome's decline and the church's rise were pretty much happening at the exact same time -- and it took Europe the Enlightenment to surpass what Rome accomplished in terms of building a civilization, a secular movement if ever there was one).

Yeah, this is a minor complaint, but using churches as a marker of civilization just seems like such a boring and lazy concept. Why not something far more interesting, like needing government buildings, universities, markets, theaters or who knows what else to 'increase civilization'?

Leave the churches for a magic system or paladin training, etc.

4. Their spokesperson looks so much like the actor who plays Neville Longbottom in Harry Potter -- and, yes, that's a compliment!

@AlienFanatic

I disagree. There's still plenty of great RPGs coming out every year. It's just that most of them aren't MMOs.

The thing about games like WoW wasn't that they didn't attract people who love the genre and appreciate the immersiveness of it all; it's that they attracted *everyone.* The people who were there first and foremost for the immersion were far outnumbered by people who just wanted to kill things and get phat lewt. That was very different than the MMOs before it, like EQ, where most people were as interested in exploring Norrath and figuring out things (ie quests that were cryptic and not handed to you on a silver platter by the NPC who gave it and the map that pointed out where everything was) than killing ten rats and getting raid gear.... especially in its first few years, before the expansions started getting more and more bland as each new one came out (pre-PoP is always my marker in that regard).

MMOs are businesses first and foremost and I don't blame game companies for realizing that. A game designed like the original EQ, even a newer version of it, won't attract the 5-10 million that WoW or TOR could.

If leveling is a grind (figuratively and literally), getting around is a bitch and death has real consequences, it's going to be a niche game and it's tough to get the funding together to be a niche game and still have a beautiful world. Niche games today usually end up being really cheap looking, buggy and lacking in depth. To be honest, I'm shocked the few games that have ever managed to do it got as far as they did, and there's a reason why they still only exist from the early days of the genre.

Still, it would be nice if game companies could meet that happy medium and appeal more to people who appreciate elements like immersion and sandboxes. I think TOR actually made some improvements on that front, with their quest system with actual dialog and choices to make. I just wish they went that extra mile and made the choices you make have *real* consequences.

Is it really gone? I've been creating an entire mission/quest in a mediocre game like STO, using the Vault, and features like the Vault are exceptionally popular in games that have them (so much so that I don't understand why almost all games that can don't create one).

My guess for why player-written books don't exist in most (if not all) modern MMOs is because they're a) not at the top of most players' lists, b) probably not well used in older MMOs and c) even less read than written in those games.

I don't think they're bad ideas and, even if most players won't read them, they can still serve a greater purpose by just having them there, if anything to keep record of the history of the genre. (It's so hard finding the history of these games, both from the developers' perspectives and the players, and given all the hours put in by developers and players alike, that history *should* be kept).

However, ultimately, it's less important than having a fully-fledged quest system (with plenty of quests to max out a character and beyond), trade skill system, server stability, bug fixes, etc. etc. etc.

I'm willing to bet it would be easier to feature a good section of a website devoted to player stories, pictures, blogs, guilds and timelines. It would also be more easily accessible by players who care about the history of games, and those who would stumble on some of it. Some of it could even automatically be kept, a la player WoW's online character sheets. It would be even better if there were similar pages kept for guilds, keeping track of who they've killed and allowing players from those guilds to put little personal stories about them in it.

That sort of ability to keep history is even more important for older games, that were much less cookie-cutter and everything had to be figured out from scratch, and when gear was so poor that strategy still reigned supreme (sometimes that's still the case, but in more gimmicky ways).

People may think I'm crazy for saying this, but a 100 years from now, there will be 'video game historians' that would be utterly fascinated by this kind of stuff... and they're going to be desperate for information, because of these entire worlds that exist, we haven't been much better at keeping track at what's happened in them than people were before the printing press.

@Vanpry

I like the "must not have" of the holy trinity :p

I kind of liked the original EQ's mix. There was healing, tanking, dps... and debuffing (esp slowing) and crowd control. While you needed three of those, it didn't matter so much what three. (Heck, there were even some groups where you could get by without a healer if you had really great dps and cc, though I wouldn't recommend it.).

CC is the thing that WoW really killed for MMOs. It adds *so much* to MMO's when well utilized, and adds a heckuva lot of intensity, and it was nothing more than a side show in WoW -- a look, isn't that sheep cute! kind of thing. Compare that to my chanter in EQ, who in the early days could turn a group into a killing machine, able to survive encounters with entire trains of enemies with her mezzing, roots, slows, debuffs, stuns and charms. There were groups in which I wouldn't even have a single damage-capable spell up!

I think there's two mixes:

1. Tradeskilling is as viable a 'main' path as exp'ing, and the tradeskill game is fun and meaningful.

2. Character "classes" are loose or even nonexistent and there's many paths to take along the way. That could be an original SWG method of doing it, or even a Guild Wars style with a class and sub class and creating a wide mix of skills that need to be use strategically, while de-emphasizing the importance of levels.

3. Some combination of both.

I think they should have doubled down and ported the sucker onto Sony Playstation's online store. Think of how many new players will be coming to the franchise between the F2P moves and EQ: next. I have to imagine 50-100k people would download a game like that, esp if the download was free.

Anyway, that's my gut feeling. The console market is wide open for MMOs and Sony had a chance with even a title as old as that.

@Miffy

Velious is certainly considered the best expansion by a *lot* of players and old timers, but I don't know very many people who'd agree with you that Luclin and PoP "ruined" the game. In fact, the raiding in PoP was every bit as classic -- IMO -- as it was in Velious, in which players invented what we all currently look at as raids (in ways I don't even think devs predicted). PoP took all of that and made it better, and more epic.

Some people scoff at how easy travel became in PoP, but I don't grudge that -- and I say that as a player who had a main that was a druid and made some fair bank on selling ports pre-PoP, and enjoyed having the role of a player who could snag a group in large part because I could get the group to the place they wanted to fight to begin with.

I always kind of wish the stones in PoK had some sort of small and basic quest involved that made it seem as a reward, but even that is a trivial complaint.

Luclin had its faults, IMO, but it was a gorgeous expansion and there were some classic zones it introduced. Plus, I think a lot of people appreciated the extension of the Shissar story, which was always one of the most interesting aspects of EQ lore IMO. Ditto the Combine and the competing human empires that we got to really learn about in that expansion.

To me, the glory days weren't just through the Velious days, but straight threw to PoP. GoD is when things went wrong -- and, in fact, was a blow to the game that I don't think EQ ever *quite* recovered from, even if that wound has at least scarred -- and it was a very slow descent from there, with expansions that were hit or miss and, sometimes, just far too frequent, similar looking and failing at delivering the same kind of epic feel or lore that the first five all enjoyed.