I’m currently giving EQ2 another try. I quit in early 2005 and much has changed since then.
A few observations:
1. The game still runs like a turd. My computer isn’t top of the line anymore (P4 3.0 GHz, GF 6800 Ultra, 1 GB RAM) but it’s still pretty damn decent – far better than what most gamers are playing on. The performance is insufferable. I spent about an hour trying to find the best compromise between visual quality and performance. The problem is that there is no good compromise. The game either runs dog slow or it looks like shit. I don’t even want to imagine what it must be like on lower-end computers.
2. Memory Leaks, long loading times, severe stuttering as soon as more than 4 PCs/NPCs are on screen - little, if anything has improved in overall non-graphics-related performance.
3. Stability doesn’t seem to have improved all that much, in fact, for me it has gotten worse. I experienced 3 crashes in 6 hours, which required a hard reset becaus the game crashed the video card driver right along with itself.
4. The new Newbie Island sucks. It’s like the old one, just with fewer and less interesting quests. It feels incomplete and empty. I liked the old Newbie Island, it was one of the most polished parts of EQ2 at release. The new one just isn’t as fun, even though it’s a bit better from a lore point of view.
5. The new class structure is a huge improvement. Classes feel more different from each other and you aren’t stuck in some generic archetype class for 20 levels anymore.
6. The combat update a few months ago has definately made combat more fun. Combat feels more interactive and the skills seem more useful and coherent now. I’ll have to see how combat evolves through the levels but so far my level 11 n00b Brigand is fun to play and I use most skills frequently. I still wish they’d have done away with the power pool in order to make melee and magic feel a bit more different from each other. The same applies to the particle effects. Everything you do makes things look like a fucking Christmas tree, no matter if it’s a powerful spell or just some melee attack.
7. Quest progression is way off now. You level much faster and quests turn green and gray as you run simple fed-ex quests in your city. You aren’t really required to enter the newbie yards anymore, which used to be an important part of the newbie experience. It’s probably not a bad idea to get new players and alts out into the world zones (where the real game begins) as quickly as possible but the low level content now feels incoherent and rushed. A lot of good content goes to waste. I guess it’s for the overall good of the game but it makes the newbie levels much less interesting.
8. The new death system is an improvement. Not because it’s particularly good but because the old one was too convoluted. Death is rather trivial now but at least it’s straight-forward.
9. The UI has improved some but it’s still ugly as sin and doesn’t feel as responsive and snappy as WoW’s. At least it’s still as configurable as it used to be – something that I greatly appreciate, especially after having to keep up with WoW’s inflexible out-of-the-box UI. I always hated being forced to rely on 3rd party mods in WoW. SOE should try to improve the look and feel of EQ2’s UI, at least to a point where it doesn’t look like an mid-1990s shareware abomination.
10. The new map-system is useful and makes locating quest NPCs much less frustrating. I used to be very anti-map in MMORPGs but once you got used to it it’s hard to go back. I think all those Vanguard fanboy armchair designers who scream bloody murder every time someone even mentions the word automap should go and try to play EQ2 without it. It’s not fun.
11. Quest NPCs now have icon hovering above their heads, WoW style. This used to be another thing I didn’t like, but thinking about it, I like randomly hailing every NPC in a zone even less.
12. The visuals are still a mess. It’s bad enough that the game runs like shit even on settings that look extremely average. What’s even worse is the LOD algorithm. It’s too intrusive. A good LOD algorithm tries to make the adjustments as gradual and unobtrusive as possible. EQ2’s LOD algorithm is especially bad with animations: they look horrible even from a medium distance and sometimes it completely breaks down and other players appear to be frozen in their current posture.
13. SOGA models… they don’t look as nice as I thought they would but I guess they’re still better than the original models.
14. It’s too early to make a final judgement but itemization seems to have improved. There is definately more item diversity at lower levels now, even though that’s not much of an achivement considering that there wasn’t any diversity at all initially.
15. There’s a mail system now. And it actually seems to work rather well. The mailboxes look like outhouses, though.
16. The quest journal has improved tremendously. It now holds 75 quests and you can sort by zone and category. It’s actually useful now.
17. The German localization is still horribly broken – in many regards things are even worse now than they were one year ago. EQ2’s localization woes warrant a posting of their own. It’s quite a story. Deception, lies, broken promises and incompetence. It’s all there. Good stuff.
All in all, EQ2 is still a mixed bag. Considering its age, the game still feels very unpolished. The newbie content even more so than it did at release. There is improvement though, maybe even enough a an improvement to make me keep playing. I’m looking forward to see what has changed at level 20+.
Circle jerks are an integral part of the weblogging scene. The first step of a circle jerk is called “reblog”, which means one weblogger commenting on something another weblogger wrote. When a third or even more webloggers join the fray then you have a circle jerk.
The term “circle jerk” usually implies that the participants agree with each other, thus stroking each others’ eCocks. Sometimes though the circle-jerking webloggers don’t agree with each other. In that case, the circle jerk could be classified as a “circle assrape”. While that doesn’t sound particularly pleasant, even circle assrapes include the occasional reacharound, so the term “circle jerk” still applies.
I’m new to this weblog thing and I’ve only recently started monitoring what’s going on in the MMORPG weblogging scene. I don’t really know how frequent circle jerks occur in this particular sub-culture but there’s a nice one going on right now: Cesspit commenting on Plaguelands commenting on AggroMe’s comment on some Penny Arcade diatribe.
What do you call a weblogger commenting on a circle jerk? I am not quite sure myself but a good analogy would probably be a guy stroking his ePenis while watching the circle jerk in progress. Yep, that’s me.
I’ve been skimming through the games list over at mmorpg.com and was rather astonished by the sheer number of MMORPGs currently in developement. What was even more astonishing was the fact that I’ve never heard of most of them. I recognized a few names, mostly of games that were announced many years ago and are still in developement, like Hero’s Journey. I think most of these games are financial disasters in the making, half-assed projects initiated during the heyday of EverQuest. With the recent success of WoW, we’ll probably see another wave of MMORPGs – hopefully better ones than the most of the garbage from the post-EQ era.
A few titles on that list stuck out. These are the games that I believe to have the potential to turn out well:
Age of Conan is Funcom’s next MMORPG. It’s hard to dislike Funcom. They are the developers of The Longest Journey, arguably the best graphic adventure game ever made. Their first MMORPG, Anarchy Online, was highly innovative at the time it was released. Features like instancing have since then become a staple of the MMORPG genre. Sadly, AO suffered from a catastrophic launch. I was a beta tester for AO and the sudden release came as a complete surprise to all testers. Virtually nothing worked. The servers were unstable, the client CTD’d every few minutes and even fundamental game mechanics, like the random mission generator, were completely borked. Yet, aside from some innovative game mechanics, AO had much going for it. I loved the SciFi game setting, the graphics, the lore and the world design. After a number of expansion and much patching, AO turned out to be one of the better MMORPGs out there.
Age of Conan seems to take a rather unusaly approach to MMO gameplay. Your character will first go through a story-driven single-player game before entering the shared online-world. Gameplay will be centered around epic large-scale battles. Real-time combat, castle sieges, the ability to command NPCs into battle… sounds quite intriguing to me. Plus, the screenshots that have been released so far look absolutely gorgeous. The quality of the artwork is nothing short of incredible.
I have high hopes for Age of Conan, mainly because I have trust in Funcom’s ability to innovate and I am confident that they’ve learned from past mistakes.
Initially co-developed by Games Worshop and some n00b game developer, the project was cancelled in June 2004. Mythic Entertainment, the creators of Dark Age of Camelot, acquired the license in 2005. The game is currently in an early developement stage.
The reason why I am looking forward to Warhammer Online is that Mythic has a proven track record and their trademark “Realm vs Realm” (RvR) concept for PvP is, in my opinion, the best PvP implementation to be found in MMORPGs so far. DAoC is a great game, I played it for almost two years. Mythic have also demonstrated that they can work on a budget. DAoC was developed on a shoe-string budget of less than $ 3 million and became a major success. While the release version initially suffered from a lack of content, the foundation was solid and Mythic greatly expanded upon it. The way Mythic handles community relations is exemplary.
Warhammer Online will mark the return of RvR gameplay, something that I’ve been craving for ever since WoW’s PvP gameplay turned out to be a disappointing exercise in pointlessness.
First of all, the name sucks. It doesn’t sound very nice, it describes a concept from Lockean philosophy and Freudian psychoanalysis and it’s frigging Latin. Not the kind of name I’d chose for a computer game. It conveys connotations of intellectual snobbery. Change it. Now.
I included Tabula Rasa in this little list of mine because I don’t believe that the creator of Ultima can develope a crappy game. In recent interviews, Richard Garriot has hinted at game design concepts that could truly break the mold of current MMORPG gameplay, though next to no hard facts are known so far.
Having a financially healthy publisher like NCSoft with a proven track record of successful MMOG releases makes me confident that Tabula Rasa will turn out to be a worthy addition to the genre.
Vanguard will most like be the next MMORPG I will waste my time on. Developed by Sigil Games Online, a company founded by EQ-developers Brad McQuaid and Jeff Buttler and funded by Microsoft, Vanguard is supposed to be a “spiritual successor to EverQuest”.
Most post-EQ MMORPGs have tried to ”improve” on the EQ-formula by reducing or getting rid of gameplay elements the developers percieved as “not fun”. The result are games with fast leveling, a great degree of soloability, a shift from dungeon crawling to questing, the virtual elimination of down times and travel times as well as a sharp reduction of the penalty upon death. Many people feel though that those elements are important to challenge, immersion and the community aspects of the game. I tend to agree, at least to a certain degree.
EverQuest was a bit too heavy on the time-sink side but the counter-movement went clearly over the top. Virtually eliminating penalties upon death takes away the sense of danger, reduces the respect for the game enviroment and thus has a negative impact on immersion. Making travel too easy and fast makes the world appear smaller and less immersive. Fast leveling and the ability to solo to max level prevents players from forming meaningful in-game social networks.
While I certainly don’t want the return of 30 minute boat rides, 8-hour catass raids, 10 minute downtimes and week-long item-camping sessions, the current direction into which most new MMORPGs are headed doesn’t work for me either. I hope Sigil will manage to find a viable balance between these two extremes. I think it’s great that there is at least one game that goes against the current trend of immitating WoW’s successful formula.
There are still a couple of open questions and areas of concern. I think some fo the ideas and game mechanics Sigil have announced are questionable, if not batshit insane. I’m still not convinved that having no instancing at all is such a great idea. I understand the reasons for not having instacing but I think the benefits of instancing far outweigh the problems. Vanguard’s crafting system looks like it will be ridiculously complex and highly interdependent – something which, in my opinion, doesn’t really work out well. I’m also concerned about Vanguard having to many character classes that might be too similar to each other. There are a number of other potential issues. Basically, when reading previews and developer postings I’m constantly torn between “yay!” and “wtf?”.
That’s it. Of all the MMORPGs currently in developement there are only four that I find to be promising. Kind of sad, isn’t it?
Hello and welcome to my weblog.
I’m not entirely sure why I bothered creating this weblog. I don’t even like weblogs. Most of them contain little more than intellectual excrement and this particular weblog probably won’t be the exception. I see this weblog mainly as a means to brush up my command of the English language and my writing abilities in general. I have little opportunity to put my English to active use and foreign language skills tend to deteriorate rapidly unless one actively cultivates them.
The reason why I decided to make MMORPGs the focus of this weblog is that I don’t really have all that much to say about real-life issues. For years now I’ve been spending an exoribtant amount of time playing these games and discussing them in web forums. It makes sense to write about something I know and enjoy.
I’ve been a fairly hardcore MMORPG gamer ever since I discovered Meridian 59 in 1998. You can read up on my nerd credentials here. I hope I can muster the time and dedication to keep this weblog updated. Time will tell.
