Tag: EQ

A Return to the Trenches

Random Thoughts

Long ago, before the dawn of Everquest, in Quakeworld, in a land of two forts, a soldier stood. Logan5. His rockets fired true, his grenades landed squarely, his shotgun shells littered the ground, and his enemies laid dying at his feet. First of the proud Disciples of Syrinx, later of nobody’s heroes, and finally fading away to nothing…

Three nights ago, he returned.

I bought a video card a while back, and in the box was a coupon for a free copy of Half-Life 2. The coupon shuffled in with the other papers on the computer desk, and was almost lost. The release delays of HL2 seemed endless, but finally the game is here… and… Wow.

When I first played the original Half-Life, I’d been gaming for years. I’d battled my way through Doom 1 and 2, Quake 1 and 2, and dozens of other first person shooters. They all had one thing in common… sucky AI. In every game, you could exploit the AI flaws to trivialize the game. All the monsters reacted in certain ways, and you could predict their movement to the point of boredom. That’s why on-line play, the Quakeworld servers, were such a wonderful draw. It was on those servers that I found what would be the longest running game of my life (yes, it even beats EQ, which lasted 5 years)… Team Fortress for Quake.

Playing through the early versions, I saw John, Robin and Ian’s vision of the game develop. And when it solidified, it was awesome. The maps they made, and the ones players made, lead to a level of clan and tournament play that simple deathmatch just never got me excited enough for. I’d come home from work and play TF for hours, hopping server to server, hanging out with teammates and rivals. And in a game that ultimately lacked ‘tangible’ goals, any animosity was fleeting, friends were friends, enemies were friends, and for 30 minutes at a time, from map to map, the adreneline flowed.

When Team Fortress Software was purchased by Valve, I knew I needed to keep an eye on them. And when I met Robin and some of the Valve guys at E3 and they showed me Half-Life and the Team Fortress Classic mod for it, I was hooked. I bought the game when it came out, and something odd happened… I played the single player game, and I sucked… or rather, the AI didn’t. Soldiers flanked, drew fire, fled and laid traps. The tried and true methods of getting monsters stuck on corners or behind halfwalls didn’t work any more. Even Deathmatch for HL was fun and not like the rocketfest that Quake DM was.

TFC came out, and I played it for a while. But as much as I loved HL and TFC, I stopped playing after a while… EQ had come into my life, and that was it.

Now, EQ is done. I don’t think I will, ever again, play a game that requires that level of investment, or requires you to play a certain way to avoid that investment (when only some classes can solo, you have to play them to avoid getting stuck looking for a group). I play City of Heroes, and I love it… its very low key, I can solo as any character, groups are fun and easy to find, and while it does take some planning and game knowledge to pick powers and place slots, there is no gear hunting to keep up with the Joneses and the ever expanding difficulty of the game. I also play Eve Online, which is another low key game… I train my skills while I’m offline, and I hop on now and then to fly missions or kill pirates. I’m looking into World of Warcraft… still not totally sold on it, but my time in beta did show me that it could be played solo or duo without much difficulty, and that my game could remain fun even if I didn’t “raid” the “high end”, it holds promise for the low key gamer.

When I redeemed my coupon online for Half-Life 2, it came with a bundle… HL, TFC, Day of Defeat, Counter Strike, Counter Strike: Source (CS using the new HL2 game engine), and more. So after I loaded up HL2 and was blown away by the graphics and how well they ran on my years old PC (Doom3 runs like shit, and this game looks better than Doom3), I loaded up TFC and hopped on a server… It took about 15 minutes before my fingers were finding the right keys again, before I stopped kicking my own ass in sacrifice and started putting some of my foes in the dirt, but then it all came flooding back… The reason I loved TF, and it wasn’t just the classes and team fighting, it was that a game was 30 minutes or so… you jump on a server, dive in, play, then when the map recycles you can leave and no one says anything bad about you… the map was done.

Logan5 is back, sort of… turns out while I’ve been gone from the FPS world, someone has been using the name, so I’ll use something else… I’ll think up something while I play the original Half-Life through again.

EverQuest… What`s next?

Random Thoughts

I was going to originally post this in the EverQuest category, but that was really for my ideas for fixing EQ… seeing as I no longer play EQ, its a dead category but will remain as is… and this, this is just comedy.

Over on the message boards for Monkly-Business, someone asked, “Now that Omens of War is out, what do you think the next expansion will be?”

Seeing as the next expansion will come after World of Warcraft’s release, and there are a number of games on the horizon, as well as free content patches for City of Heroes, the following was my reply:

EverQuest: The Twenty Other Zones of Faydwer That You Just Never Happened to Notice During the Last Five Years of Playing.

Featuring zones like: Middle Faydark, Dagnor’s Other Cauldron, The Hidden Lair of Meldrath, The land of LXnmoptgWWjyr, The Brownie City, Randomly Generated Dungeon Zone with Poor Pathing and Randomly Placed Mobs 27, and at least three new Estates none of which will be restful!

With this expansion they will introduce new items contain the new NO LOOT tag – you can view the stats and take screenshots and have the items load to Lucy, but you can’t pick it up and equip it! These items are intended for all the people who like to make Magelo profiles for their non-existant characters by picking items that they’ve never seen for themselves and try to pass themselves off as uber!

Also in this expansion, we will be introducing female giants! Ever wonder where all the giants come from seeing as they are all male? Well, rather than fix class balance, we’ve decided to make a whole set of Lore including new zones, spells for mobs that you’ll never get, and new models (since we STILL aren’t going to do new player models no matter how much you beg) all about the story of the where the female giants have been for the past 6 years! All because we know you care!

And lets not forget that we will be introducing a new class! Following both the arcane and physical arts this player can nuke as well as a wizard, heal like a cleric, tank like a warrior, and dps like a rogue.. from ANY ANGLE! This new class, called the Tankmage is bound to turn grouping and raiding on its ear! Class balance? WE GIVE UP!!

The World of EverQuest before the Planes of Power

Random Thoughts

This was originally posted in a thread on the Monkly-Business message board, so forgive the places where it refers to another post:

Before the books, because the world was “larger” and travel time existed, people would go to a zone, and stay there or near there for a while.

I went to Unrest at level 23. Thankfully I had killed enough goblins in my younger days to earn the respect of the dwarves of Kaladim. I fought in Unrest on most days I logged in. Sometimes I would travel out to the Ocean of Tears and play on the islands, but most it was Unrest. There were up to 60 people in that zone in prime time, mostly the same people. We got to know each other, grouped in the various rooms of the house, met on early Sunday mornings to “break” the house. When the Ghost was on the lawn, it was a good day in Unrest. I finally left Unrest for good at level 34.

Like with my fishing trip story above, many of the people I met in Unrest, I still talk to. I show up at a public PoP raid and I’ll get a tell, “Hey man, been back to Unrest lately?”. A couple of us are even going to meet up in the next couple of days and go kill the Fabled version of the Ghost for old times sake.

Unrest isn’t a special place though… I have friends from my days in the Oasis as well… and the people I met in Frontier Mountains… and the Dreadlands. The reason we grouped so often was because travel time was non-trivial. People stuck around an area longer.

And most importantly though, there are people who were levelling up at the same time I was that I never met, because they chose a different path… they chose different zones to hang around in. Some of the oldest uber guilds on most servers were born out of Lower Guk and SolB and the times people spent together day after day, and the stories they share…

I feel for the people who only started EQ after PoP… they may enjoy the game, they may love it, but in the game we have now, its just not possible to have the same find of experience that people had before PoP. Travel is bordering trivial… its so easy to get to so many places, any zone not within 2 or 3 of a PoK book is empty… People don’t hang around a zone anymore… zip zip, they are off to the other side of the world… the guys you group with today are gone tomorrow… You can follow them, but its just not the same.

LDoN is bringing a little of that back… not the travel, but with people wanting to adventure in the same places over and over, you can meet the same folks again and again… there is a warrior I met doing Tak dungeons… 4 or 5 times he happened to be LFG when I was making a Tak group… since then we’ve done 30 or so adventures together, I’ve taken him with me to BoT groups and other places… and there are others as well… the spirit of the old dungeons is there… but it is a ghost.. a shadow of its former self.

This is what I want in Vanguard… I want a world thats big, where travel is non-trivial, where you stay in the places you know, and every now and then adventure off to the places you don’t… The world of EQ was different a long time ago. And every game that has come out since has in one way or another tried to “improve” on it by making things less non-trivial, easier. As much as people complain about the grind in EQ, people come back because most other games are so non-grinding that there is no real sense of accomplishment. In EQ, going through 59 was a trial by fire… it took forever… when you got 60, everyone in the zone cheered! Other games don’t have that, and that’s why EQ stays so popular.

Nothing worthwhile is ever easy.

Anyway… enough of a ramble from me… I’m sure the people who don’t get it, won’t read it anyway…

Trade Skills: The Good and the Bad

Random Thoughts

So today I decided to try out the trade skills of Dark Age of Camelot. I’ve been familiar with the old UO style, and the EQ style, and never bothered AC (are there trade skills in AC? I never cared to stay long enough to find out). What follows is, as always, my opinion.

We’ll begin with how to do them, and I’ll stick with tailoring since its what I chose to do. I talk to the Tailoring Master and say I want to be a tailor. He says, “Great!”, and I get a skill point. I buy a tailoring kit and some supplies: wool thread, leather, cloth. Deciding ahead of time that skilling up on your own just costs money you never get back, I take the option of doing consignments.

For those who don’t know, you can make stuff in DAoC and sell it to a vender at low levels of skill for anywhere from 50% to 95% of the cost of making the item (barring failures), OR you can have the master of your skill task you to make something and deliver it for him in which case you average about 120% of the cost of making the item. Yes, that’s right EQ fans, you make a PROFIT!

So I start asking what he wants me to make, I make it, and I deliver it. I started with 13 silver pieces and today I ended with 12 silver pieces. I know what you are thinking, “Didn’t he say profit?” Yeah, I did. The last task I got asked to make was leather boned gauntlets which require bronze studs. I had to pay 3 silver for 20 bronze bars to make 20 bronze studs so that I could use 1 stud for the gauntlets (yep, you buy things in amounts of 20 from what I have seen so far). So in reality I had 15 silver before I bought the bronze bars, and I haven’t even turned in the gauntlets for my reward yet. Pretty neat, eh?

On top of that, the trade skills are a tree. Tailoring isn’t just tailoring. Tailoring is just the act of making the final product. There are sub-skills like clothworking, leatherworking, and metalworking, and I earn skill in those as well depending on the content of the item I am crafting.

There are two annoying nit picky bits with trade skills though. First, when doing consignments, you have to find the people. You start to cheer and shout out loud when you get a repeat customer because you already found them. Finding people is made easier though because you can ask any guard where to find them and they will literally point the way. Of course, nothing is fool proof and they will point directly to the person, so all I need now is the ability to walk through walls. Second, at least in EQ, you hit combine and you know immediately if you failed or succeeded. In DAoC you get a progress bar. Now you and I both know full well that the game knows before you even start to display the bar that the item was a success or not, making me wait 10 second just to tell me I have to try again is a pain in the ass, especially when you end up having to try 8 or 10 times before you succeed. But then again, not having to physically put items into my sewing kit is nice, so is not having everything automatically eaten on failures.

In the end, DAoC has a more well thought out Trade Skill system. That’s plain as day. However, all EQ would need to do in order to catch up again would be to put in Trade Skill Quests where you are given a no drop note with an order on it, make the item, then return the item and note for money. Oh, that and venders where you can store buy more materials for skilling up, hunting rare supplies is a bitch.

12 January 2000

Random Thoughts

I’m still alive… and still .plan’ing.
Mostly all I do these days is play EverQuest, so that’s really about all I tend to talk about. That’s why I have dedicated 2 pages to it, and am working on a third.
Outside of EQ though, I still do have the random thought, and I’ve jotted a few down. I’ll get to fleshing them out and putting them up here when I get the chance.
Also outside of EQ, I downloaded the Quake source code, and pour over that when I can. Its very interesting actually. John Carmack is a god. He throws out more (and better) code than I’ll probably ever write.
But anyway… off to play more EQ.

3 December 1999

Random Thoughts

Many moons ago, I used to play Ultima Online. And it sucked. Unless you cheated in some way shape or form, or were a college student who could play 18 hours a day, you could barely get anywhere.
Which of course means that I cheated, killed other players, and did all the evil stuff to get better characters since I couldn’t play more than a dozen hours a week. Eventually I got so bored of being able to do anything without repercussions that I cancelled the account and moved on.
Last week I finally broke down and bought EverQuest.
Game should be called EverCrack. I’m still trying to find a way to mainline it.
For one, the game is beautiful. Full 3D graphics that rival some of the best shooters on the market… for now. UT and Q3A will blow it away. Second, you can actually play. You can talk to people, do real quests, form parties, the NPCs are cool in that if you help some people other people will hate you, help some people too much and the others will try to kill you on site. Its just cool, cool, cool.
Even cooler when you don’t cheat. Whereas in UO, if you didn’t “cheat” in some way, you ended up making hats for 3 weeks so you could buy a sword only to have a rat kill you when you step outside of town.
With actual classes and races (UO everyone is a human with just about the same chance in every skill as everyone else), EQ provides a rich world to explore and be a part of. Its just… well… cool.
Anyway… I’m been playing EQ alot, this is why there haven’t been many updates. But this weekend, I promise I’ll find a few hours and do more on the web page. I actually have some stuff to post… and since I’ll probably be putting up something dedicated to EQ, I’ll have a reason to update more often.
In other news… I work with computers, so the next whole month is going to suck ass like nobody’s business. Y2K will be the biggest non-event computerwise that has ever been. All the power will remain on, no nukes will fire, but all the grocery stores will still be out of bread and milk… nothing can be done about that. Oh… and there will be stupid people who fight. I predict a large scale riot that begins in Times Square and engulfs New York City.
Anyhooble… I’m off to play EQ now. More tomorrow.