Kalok said:Parascol said:OK you seem pretty hostile and I'm going to disengage. I never said you wanted it one way or another. I actually asked you, because you aren't being clear, you're just arguing. I literally had no idea what your stance or opinion is, because you're just being contrarian and not adding any input other than telling someone they're wrong without any explanation as to why you feel that way. You're only putting others down. Obviously this one little example is not representive of the entire game and difficulty is subjective based on context.
Actually, I have never once been hostile. Nice try at projection though. Stating faacts isn't hoostility.
He tired to disengage and you are pushing still, why? Lets all be friends here. We all want a good game and VR seems to be doing a good job =-)
As echoed above. Even if you go into a game with 0 knowledge of anything. You dont read any forums. You dont look for help on drops and quests. The pure fact that you have played several different mmos for the past several years is going to GREATLY eliminate much of the difficulty of the game.
Regardless of what anyone says. EQ was difficult because much of it was unknown. That's why you see 17 guilds clearing Ntov on progression servers, even with the increased difficulty of the raid mobs... because all the strats are available everyone knows where to farm gear etc...
No MMO will ever be difficult during the leveling process and you can only create so much difficulty at the raid level.
Porygon said:As echoed above. Even if you go into a game with 0 knowledge of anything. You dont read any forums. You dont look for help on drops and quests. The pure fact that you have played several different mmos for the past several years is going to GREATLY eliminate much of the difficulty of the game.
Regardless of what anyone says. EQ was difficult because much of it was unknown. That's why you see 17 guilds clearing Ntov on progression servers, even with the increased difficulty of the raid mobs... because all the strats are available everyone knows where to farm gear etc...
No MMO will ever be difficult during the leveling process and you can only create so much difficulty at the raid level.
I think making raids and dungeons to hard can also remove the fun of things. There is a balance that needs to be found. The devs can just make it super hard and only make it so content can only be done by the top 10% of guilds. Thats not the game I want.
I'm a little confused by the direction this conversation has gone while I have been away from the forums this morning.
Are we discussing the overall challenge level of the game, and are we talking about that at all levels or at a certain level range?
Are we discussing meaningful travel and the "boat" concept specifically?
Are we discussing the use of invisibility and/or stealth to cross dangerous areas in order to achieve some objective? (like buying spells?)
My post this morning was to provide a counterpoint to what I saw as the statement that "EQ's challenge was overstated" - by pointing out a different situation, from launch EQ, that *was* very challenging to the player, regardless of how much they knew or didn't know going into it.
Like all games, EQ made some design decisions that now, 20 years later, we might want to do differently. I absolutely loved the trip across the Ocean of Tears in EQ, every time I did it. Why? Because it felt real. It made the world feel large and dangerous. Sure, I hated when I would glitch on zoning and fall through the boat, and I hated when the boat would get stuck somehow and wouldn't show up for an hour, but overall? I remember traveling in EQ a whole lot more fondly than I remember traveling in many other games. Why? Because traveling in EQ meant taking on risk. You could fall off the boat and end up stranded in the ocean. You could run into Sergeant Slate when he was having a bad day, or that griffon might decide you looked like lunch. You could be just a little bit too far from the wall in Kithicor and end up getting HT'd by a very red skeleton. You could run into a train in Highpass. You could get AoE'd (from behind) by Gorenaire crossing the Dreadlands.
Does that mean I would make people wait 45 minutes for a boat to cross from Kingsreach to Whitethaw in Pantheon? No, of course not. But it does probably mean that I would give them an ocean to actually cross, maybe with a boat leaving every 10 minutes, or with a zone-in and then having to hop boats from island to island or whatever. Does it mean I would have a zone like Kithicor where at night, everyone had to run along the zone wall to get across it? No - but I would absolutely have nasty things laying in wait for any traveler foolish enough to leave the road. Does it mean that I would allow people to cross from one side of the world to the other in 15 minutes in order to met up with their friends? Absolutely not - unless they had already made the trip and found each outpost along the way to unlock an option to join a caravan to get there.
"Challenge" is too broad of a term. Depending on the frame of reference, it can mean solving puzzles, like figuring out where your spell trainer is. It can mean tough encounters like I described above. It can mean taking risks like running across Kithicor at night. It can mean requiring more of a time investment, and not providing instant gratification, like having to take the boat to cross the ocean. All of these are valid measures of challenge but none of them tell the story on their own. It's the combination of the different factors that matters in the end.
So, which aspect of challenge do we really care about here, in this thread? What is it that people are really arguing against?
For me, I want to see memorable experiences. Fights that matter. Choices that matter. Travel that matters. I don't want things handed to me. I don't wany any aspect of the experience streamlined to the point where I take it for granted or worse, where it makes Terminus feel less like a world and more like a game.
EQ wasn't a difficult game. It was a tedious game with inconveniences. Leveling was fairly easy and generally more EXP was always made than lost. It became difficult when proper planning, simple planning or over estimating the abilities/levels/gear of ones group, was not in play. Because the tedium would then set in, travel, corpse runs, returning to a camp/finding a new camp if too much time elapsed. Raids were straightforward, we all knew the proper tactics to use on each raid encounter. On progression servers like Agnarr, it was easy to plan for raids, run DKP, and always keep the best gear on your main.
Starting fresh on P99, I knew where to go for big money. I knew what items to get, where to find them, how to best camp them, what class to start as, what class to finish as.
As stated above, the unknown inflated the level of difficulty greatly. In today's world with fast access to information, this will never be the case again. After a month, there will be detailed or relatively outlined ways of obtaining gear and fast exp. Those who want a more difficult experience will ignore this, others who are part of a long running guild will be granted this information regardless of what they want.
The overplayed difficulty comments, I feel will largely let down newer players. There is only so much difficulty they can add to this game. Tedium can be added to increase difficulty, but it's artificial. Although all of us expect and do want some tedium involved. It brings a sense of balance into the often chaotic and fast gameplay associated with newer MMOs.
I still remember a lot of stuff from when i was learning EQ1. I never knew how the elevators in Kelethin worked until someone showed me that was a challenge for me. The challenge was figuring out how everything worked in this vast open world without anyone holding your hand and telling you what does what. Have we learned from our mistakes? You bet, we now have firm strategies from previous MMO's that we can utilize. The boat example is a wonderful one because it wasnt difficult, but you needed to figure out how it worked. When i first hopped onto that boat i didnt know where i was going to end up. And those 14k-56k modems were murder. I remember getting dropped in OOT because i timed out and had to log back in and i freaked out, but guess who got thier swim skill up real fast?
Does anyone remember sitting in login chat for days at a time because servers were always down?
When it comes to an actual challenge of something it all depends on certain factors. What you have done previously to prepare yourself for this experience. Resources available to you while you perform said function. And lessons learned from previous experiences performing this function.
The game might be quite difficult for someone that has never played a chat based MMO like EQ1. There won't be any websites telling us exactly how to level from 1-50 until someone actually tests things out. There won't be maps or spawn locations on launch. There will be a sharp learning and experience curve for all of us. This will be a guessing game for most of us. Yes, those that get to test in pre-alpha/alpha/beta will be able to shed some light on how things work, but even then there will be some things that will be discovered that even the most /played character in testing will have no clue about.
I guess what i mean is - even a simple task such as going to buy spells (milk run) or travel across an ocean on a boat can be a challenge if you have no context or previous experience or resources to pull from.
Much of the difficulty with launch Everquest was because the genre was relatively new, at least when it came to 3D representations, and it was different age where the internet was not nearly as helpful in finding information about it (if there even was any). I've played on several Classic EQ servers, and knowing what I know now, the game isn't really that hard. Time consuming maybe, but once you know where to go, what to do, what to kill, how to level, and in the case of the OP, where to buy stuff, it's just not as hard as it first seemed. Pantheon will have a generally similar experience for the first month or two, but by then, we will undoubtedly have resources to use to find out exactly what we need, which just wasn't the case for EQ.
But, I still agree that Everquest does have a higher level of difficulty when compared to other MMO's, especially if you're not experienced with the content, and it may be off putting to some. I would like to see Pantheon follow a similar model - I don't want the game to be easy. I want to be challenged. I want hard choices. I want to be punished for mistakes. These things make the learning experience that much more thrilling. People who follow the genre now may have forgotten (if they even know what it is) what it's like to experience adversity. If I want to play an "easy MMO", I have dozens, if not the entire genre of current MMO's, to play instead. Pantheon needs to neglect holding your hand through every step of the game. That's what the pitch was, and that's what I bought in to. I'm not expecting it to be "throw my keyboard against the wall" hard, but I am expecting it to bring back the feeling it promised by being a classic MMO.
kreed99 said:I still remember a lot of stuff from when i was learning EQ1. I never knew how the elevators in Kelethin worked until someone showed me that was a challenge for me. The challenge was figuring out how everything worked in this vast open world without anyone holding your hand and telling you what does what. Have we learned from our mistakes? You bet, we now have firm strategies from previous MMO's that we can utilize. The boat example is a wonderful one because it wasnt difficult, but you needed to figure out how it worked. When i first hopped onto that boat i didnt know where i was going to end up. And those 14k-56k modems were murder. I remember getting dropped in OOT because i timed out and had to log back in and i freaked out, but guess who got thier swim skill up real fast?
Does anyone remember sitting in login chat for days at a time because servers were always down?
When it comes to an actual challenge of something it all depends on certain factors. What you have done previously to prepare yourself for this experience. Resources available to you while you perform said function. And lessons learned from previous experiences performing this function.
The game might be quite difficult for someone that has never played a chat based MMO like EQ1. There won't be any websites telling us exactly how to level from 1-50 until someone actually tests things out. There won't be maps or spawn locations on launch. There will be a sharp learning and experience curve for all of us. This will be a guessing game for most of us. Yes, those that get to test in pre-alpha/alpha/beta will be able to shed some light on how things work, but even then there will be some things that will be discovered that even the most /played character in testing will have no clue about.
I guess what i mean is - even a simple task such as going to buy spells (milk run) or travel across an ocean on a boat can be a challenge if you have no context or previous experience or resources to pull from.
Hmm, I don't know. They intend to stay in beta for about a year if I remember correctly, which means by launch there will probably be a wealth of info on the internet. Sites like magelo most assuredly will spring up. But yes, I generally agree that there will be knowledge gaps initially.
Nanfoodle said:I think making raids and dungeons to hard can also remove the fun of things. There is a balance that needs to be found. The devs can just make it super hard and only make it so content can only be done by the top 10% of guilds. Thats not the game I want.
In my certainly unpopular opinion, there should be situations where if you're not skilled, geared or reactive enough, you should simply not be able to do certain things. I'm not expecting anyone to agree with this at all, but the sense of the unknown is a big part of making a convincing and appealing world. Making it easy enough to allow everyone to just jump into it and get it done, while fair and certainly reasonable/understandable, has limitations and will obviously affect how certain players feel, in just the same way not being able to do the content will affect others. It's a double-edged sword, really. Too easy, you lose the hardcore crowd. Too hard, you lose the casual crowd. Everyone is here for different reasons, and VR will definitely want to appeal to as many old school fans as possible, but I would rather be locked out of content that I have to practice to get to rather than be allowed in everything and have the entirety of the content experienced long before the game grows old.
Nanfoodle said:Porygon said:As echoed above. Even if you go into a game with 0 knowledge of anything. You dont read any forums. You dont look for help on drops and quests. The pure fact that you have played several different mmos for the past several years is going to GREATLY eliminate much of the difficulty of the game.
Regardless of what anyone says. EQ was difficult because much of it was unknown. That's why you see 17 guilds clearing Ntov on progression servers, even with the increased difficulty of the raid mobs... because all the strats are available everyone knows where to farm gear etc...
No MMO will ever be difficult during the leveling process and you can only create so much difficulty at the raid level.
I think making raids and dungeons to hard can also remove the fun of things. There is a balance that needs to be found. The devs can just make it super hard and only make it so content can only be done by the top 10% of guilds. Thats not the game I want.
I agree. But that's why I think having multiple tiers of raid offered (similar to mythic raiding in wow) makes alot of sense.
Despite how much I hate what wow has become. Their raid scene (minus LFR) is nearly perfectly balanced for casuals and hardcores alike.
Madae said:In my certainly unpopular opinion, there should be situations where if you're not skilled, geared or reactive enough, you should simply not be able to do certain things. I'm not expecting anyone to agree with this at all, but the sense of the unknown is a big part of making a convincing and appealing world.
I think most people would tend to agree. Noone WANTS handouts. But people do think they are entitled to try. Which is where most of the complaints come, when someone is prevented from trying.
I think one of the worst parts about wow (but also one of the best) when a patch releases new content, the bosses are fully fleshed out and usually do not require much nerfs. Because of this extensive PTR testing most of the strats are available from day 1 for even the most casual of player. I would love to see pantheon take a similar approach to testing, but restrict it to certain guilds and enforce some sort of NDA. I dont think the world first race in pantheon will ever get to the point that it is in WoW where sponsors are involved so this shouldn't be an issue. But allowing people to truly discover a boss for the first time will be a great feature for everyone.
Moved to Off-Topic as it is about another game's emulator, not General Pantheon. Please directly relate the post to our game if you want it to remain in General Pantheon.
Emulators are not a good source to compare as they are run by 3rd parties, typically fans of the original game, so the experience in-game is provided by fans and not the developers, even if they are trying to emulate an earlier point in the game's history, it still isn't authentic.
I would much prefer you guys give feedback like this once you have tried our game and base it on your experience in our game, rather than another game as I think you will find we have learned from a lot of other games mistakes and either corrected them or tweaked them to better suit our game and our community.
I will leave this thread open as long as it remains on topic and respectful.
I think describing the majority of Everquest as "difficult" in the traditional sense is a misnomer. Everquest's leveling experience was not difficult, but time consuming and honestly quite a grind. There was a general formula you could follow to go from 1 to 50 or whatever the current max level was. From that standpoint, Everquest was only difficult in the sense of figuring out where to powerlevel next, but even that difficulty ended after your first time through the ringer. Am I a fan of this system? Not really. It feels a lot like a tabletop D&D game where you are just doing endless encounters to get to a higher level. I'm really hoping Brad and the team have found some innovative ways to make the process more dynamic and fun so that we are not playing for the end-game like every other MMORPG.
From my personal gaming experience, the true difficulty in Everquest came from the player-centric gameplay that occured at high levels, generally including group raiding dungons, planes, dragons, etc. In those unpredictable situations envolving creatures with levels and stats far beyond what a character could achieve, level and stats were often secondary to the players ability to function in a team, play their class to it's fullest and a certain amount of luck. I clearly remember large groups failing at breaking a plane, while a smaller, more skilled group (and at least one good monk!) made it look effortless.
Nanfoodle said:The things in the OP are the things I am looking for in a MMO again. Where exploring and going to places that can kill you make risk / reward meaningful. I remember many situations like that from my 1999 days when EQ launched. That being said, I am getting worried how often the devs streams need to use dev tools to make the game work. Are they trying to make the fights to hard? Or do the devs just don’t play well? I hope they are finding that balance of risk in combat, balanced with reward and penalty. I’m looking forward to seeing other people try and figure out this game. My guess it will be a while before we see some steady streaming. Because pain for the sake of pain is not a game =-)
To be clear, I actually think having some of this stuff is good, too. Was I annoyed when I discovered I had to hoof it to HHK to get my pet spell? A little, yeah, but it wasn't that big of a deal.
Someone earlier said (rough quoting) "travel was difficult in 1999". I think the key part of that is "in 1999". That was back before any of us really understood MMO mechanics. Certainly that was before anyone knew anything about where they were going because without any maps everything was just sort of "stumble around until you find something".
But 20 years later it will never be like that again. We will know astoundingly more about this game on the day of release than we ever could have imagined back in EQ. It's simply not possible to go back to the same set of circumstances because we do and will "know too much".
This is why it's overstating the difficulty to talk about what it was like 20 years ago. It can NEVER be like that again. It may be fun to reminisce, but you cannot, today, make a game that offers the same struggles to the player as what was had 20 years ago. I am 100% in favor of difficult encounters, and game mechanics which require the players to understand their abilities. Absolutely. But a large reason for what was difficult back then was based simply on ignorance. That characteristic cannot be recreated. That's why people who talk about recreating that should go log on to one of the emulator servers and play for awhile and you'll see the difficulty is overstated. Yes, certain portions of it are still there -- a yellow con mob will still beat me into the ground. But the difficulties based on ignorance are all gone, and they were a huge portion of the struggle. And they're never coming back.
Searril said:I got the "you feel yourself starting to appear" message I think 4 times, but had no difficulty finding an area to duck into and reapply invis. Total time for the entire journey was right around 15 minutes.
So what's my point? I think some people are radically overestimating the "difficulty" and "travel times" of old EQ in an attempt to urge this game to be more boring and tedious than it needs to be. I don't recall anyone saying original EQ was "easy" or the always well-conceived "dumbed-down".
Granted, if I had to have taken a boat from a different continent then the travel time itself may have been longer, but it wouldn't have been anymore difficulty (unless you got disconnected and fell off the boat but we're not using 14k modems anymore here, guys).
Take it for what it's worth. It's just my experience. But my experience says this game doesn't need to be tedious and boring to compete with the game play of old EQ.
I hear these discussions regarding EQ all the time. It's almost been 20 years now since release. Regardless of how long of a break you took from EQ, EQ forced you to learn the game due to the lack of information/knowledge available online. It's impossible to compare what the challenge was then, to today, not only because of the information now available online, but also your history, experience, and wisdom with the game.
The point to EQ is never that any spot had to have 30 minutes to travel to be "difficult," but most every encounter or decision you made in EQ could be deadly because your character's power relative to that of the NPCs. The extra time added to travel, boat rides, etc. just magnified that difficulty because it hightened the risk/reward in deciding whether obtaining those spells were worth it.
And I agree, today, some of that "magic" will be gone due to information being available online, but, the same principles (mainly risk/reward) could still exist as long as content is difficulty/punishing.
Kilsin said:Moved to Off-Topic as it is about another game's emulator, not General Pantheon. Please directly relate the post to our game if you want it to remain in General Pantheon.
Actually, it's not. The fact it was on an emulated server was merely a sidenote to explain the circumstance.
The larger point is about what is or isn't "difficulty", and why, and what are reasonable expectations for the type of difficulty that is appropriate and feasible for Pantheon.
But now that you've shoved it to the wrong forum I expect good conversation to die.