EQ2, faillings, continued
Everquest 2 is my special pal, the one who gets the most criticsm because of its pedigree. The original Everquest was and remains a fantastic RPG filled with the awe of exploration and the dangers of learning what's "out there". So by calling the new game "Everquest 2", the developers specifically leave themselves open to that comparison... and more imporantly, set up their own quality "bar" to reach. And they haven't reached it.
The original Everquest offered up a world of creatures for us to look at, talk to, and fight with/against. Those creatures were all individuals, unless they were near each other or within "earshot", at which point you might face a piling-on of the creature you targetted and all his buddies who were nearby. But the design was the point: it's believable. You can see a skeleton standing there, and you can see two more that are no more than twenty feet away. It is reasonable, based on what you see in the environment, to assume that, if you run up and hit the first skeleton, the other two will come up and help out their kin. That's called "learning from the environment". The game didn't tell you that information -- you, the player, were able to walk around the world and learn from what you saw and make tactical decisions based on experience. Now, you might be able to use a bow or a spell or something to lure away just that first skeleton, but if your shot fails, you very well may face the whole trio, and you know you can't handle that... hence the danger, the excitement, of: learning from the environment; thinking about the situation; and being able to choose for yourself a course of action that incorporates many different possibilities (take a shot and hope to draw away the one target; hit the one target up-close and run backwards, hoping to draw him off; hit the one target, hit him enough to knock him down, and then run, hoping to escape the other two; etc.). The environment gives you that option. The creatures are separated believably in the wild, and they move around -- leaving it to the player to take that bear while he's with three others, or wait and track him and take him when he's "out of earshot and vision" of the others. Could a group of players do something together? Sure. They just have different math -- they could take all three bears at once, and get the benefits from not having to consider all those other options that a solo player does (wait, draw, etc). The gaming environment, the world, creates the situations but it is left to the players to interpret how to respond and in what numbers. And the responses, the choices, are myriad, and often involve the capacity for the player to do things that the developers might not have thought of -- climbing up on a treelimb and shooting at the skeleton from that perch, where he can't respond to you, etc.
Now we get Everquest 2, the most over-scripted, linear, force-feed info at you and make most of your choices for you game out there. It isn't simplistic, as in World of Warcraft; but it's just as egregious, since it does everything for you AND does it in a ridiculously complicated way.
Take the creatures from the examples above. In Everquest 1, creatures had their "social auras", the area around them that represents their ability to shout and make noise to get the attention of others. Overlap those auras, and you've got a mob forming.
In Everquest 2, it's all handed to you. Creatures aren't individuals at all, they're all "mobs" -- even if it's just one creature. There's no "social aura" really, because when you click on a creature, it's automatically identified for you as individual or group and so forth. The game mechanism TELLS you everything, so you don't have to THINK about anything, you don't learn anything from exploring and paying attention to creatures patterns, etc. There aren't any patterns to learn. Worse, that one creature you see on this side of a hill? When you click on him, it will light up and identify him as part of a group -- meaning, you can't see the others, and this individual can't logically shout or reach the others because they're out of sight and out of earshot, BUT the game mechanic has artificially linked this individual to all those others. So when you hit him, REGARDLESS of your action, you will be FORCED to take all those linked to him. There is careful thinking, no evaluating the environment, none of the learning capacity in Everquest 1 that made it realistic. Here, you hit that one creature, and his buddies who are over the hill and out of sight and out of earshot will come running... not because it makes sense within the gameworld and the environment, but because the developers decided to make it so and put in a game mechanic that artificially requires that to happen. Is that immersive, does it contribute to a believable environment, does it offer a realistic and flexible environment where players learn and players make the decisions about how to approach the content offered? Nope. EQ2 does the exact opposite. It force-feeds the "mob design" on you, creating such idiocy as described above; it channels you, requiring you to only go to "this set of places only", and once you've levelled to a certain point, now you're able to go to the next "set of places" -- and these sets of places are very limited in number and over-designed so that you do the same things repetitiously. EQ2 weaves a host of game mechanics that removes from the player that most important of things, the ability to explore and learn by paying attention; and the ability of the player to come up with solutions to problems that the developers might not have come up with. In EQ2, you will NEVER do that, because the mob-design system prevents it -- you can only take this mob with a certain set number of possible actions, period, end of story, don't dare think for yourselves like you could in the first EQ or almost all of the other games out there.
More insult comes, when in their latest "re-tiering" (aka redoing the power/difficulty levels in the world of those mobs), they put "solo" targets (targets that are specifically labelled as being able to be done by solo players) in the midst of "heroic" targets (targets that are specifically labelled as being not able to be done by solo players), thereby being able to claim that they have solo content (yup, it's right there) while ruining that content and making it undoable. But more egregious than that is the fact that the language you have to speak just to describe the game demonstrates how horrible the "mob" system is. Solo targets versus non-solo targets? We shouldn't even be talking that sort of language in an RPG (MMO or not). The environment should make sense, the creatures should have things they do and therefore paths they follow as they move around, and each target should be itself. Have a place you want to make undoable to an individual player by himself? Make a nice campfire, put fifteen individuals around it -- you won't be able to pull without getting everyone's attention, and it would make sense to use other players in a group to take the campfire area. But then again -- look at what we just did. We looked at a situation, and we, the players, came to conclusions based on the environment. How does EQ2 do it? You click on any of the creatures, and it tells you "group mob only" (aka "heroic"). End of thought. End of trying to think of ways to handle the problem. The game mechanic just defined and limited your world for you.
And that's terrible game design. It runs counter to what made games like AC1, EQ1, Dark Ages of Camelot, and even World of Warcraft fun and believable in terms of the environment: the PLAYER runs around the world, learns from the environment, and comes up with the solutions by thinking about the situations. In EQ2, the developers have already limited your options by the mob design, and then craft the environment to to accentuate the mob design, and they tell you that they have divided the world into "solo" and "heroic" (aka, non-soloable) targets for you and make the game rigidly along those lines.
They can keep it. And while I would have liked to continue playing EQ1, I'm making my choices about what subscriptions to keep open -- and it no longer makes sense to pay Sony for the Station Access, so I can play all the games I like, when those games are now only one: EQ1. So end of the Station Access account.
What am I playing? Asheron's Call 1 and Dark Ages of Camelot. Either of these games is so superior to EQ2 in terms of a consistent, believable, non-force-fed gameworld as to be incomparable. What might I play? I keep hearing too many interesting things about Saga of Ryzom, I might give that a shot. But I can tell you flatly, EQ2 will not be in the playing mix -- it's over in the gather-dust area of my shelves, with WoW. Not unless they scrap the moronic, force-fed, artificially-limiting "mob design" they're using ... and I don't see that happening. They're not interested in making an immersive, believable, consistent world -- they're design philosophy is very limited and limiting and linear.
The original Everquest offered up a world of creatures for us to look at, talk to, and fight with/against. Those creatures were all individuals, unless they were near each other or within "earshot", at which point you might face a piling-on of the creature you targetted and all his buddies who were nearby. But the design was the point: it's believable. You can see a skeleton standing there, and you can see two more that are no more than twenty feet away. It is reasonable, based on what you see in the environment, to assume that, if you run up and hit the first skeleton, the other two will come up and help out their kin. That's called "learning from the environment". The game didn't tell you that information -- you, the player, were able to walk around the world and learn from what you saw and make tactical decisions based on experience. Now, you might be able to use a bow or a spell or something to lure away just that first skeleton, but if your shot fails, you very well may face the whole trio, and you know you can't handle that... hence the danger, the excitement, of: learning from the environment; thinking about the situation; and being able to choose for yourself a course of action that incorporates many different possibilities (take a shot and hope to draw away the one target; hit the one target up-close and run backwards, hoping to draw him off; hit the one target, hit him enough to knock him down, and then run, hoping to escape the other two; etc.). The environment gives you that option. The creatures are separated believably in the wild, and they move around -- leaving it to the player to take that bear while he's with three others, or wait and track him and take him when he's "out of earshot and vision" of the others. Could a group of players do something together? Sure. They just have different math -- they could take all three bears at once, and get the benefits from not having to consider all those other options that a solo player does (wait, draw, etc). The gaming environment, the world, creates the situations but it is left to the players to interpret how to respond and in what numbers. And the responses, the choices, are myriad, and often involve the capacity for the player to do things that the developers might not have thought of -- climbing up on a treelimb and shooting at the skeleton from that perch, where he can't respond to you, etc.
Now we get Everquest 2, the most over-scripted, linear, force-feed info at you and make most of your choices for you game out there. It isn't simplistic, as in World of Warcraft; but it's just as egregious, since it does everything for you AND does it in a ridiculously complicated way.
Take the creatures from the examples above. In Everquest 1, creatures had their "social auras", the area around them that represents their ability to shout and make noise to get the attention of others. Overlap those auras, and you've got a mob forming.
In Everquest 2, it's all handed to you. Creatures aren't individuals at all, they're all "mobs" -- even if it's just one creature. There's no "social aura" really, because when you click on a creature, it's automatically identified for you as individual or group and so forth. The game mechanism TELLS you everything, so you don't have to THINK about anything, you don't learn anything from exploring and paying attention to creatures patterns, etc. There aren't any patterns to learn. Worse, that one creature you see on this side of a hill? When you click on him, it will light up and identify him as part of a group -- meaning, you can't see the others, and this individual can't logically shout or reach the others because they're out of sight and out of earshot, BUT the game mechanic has artificially linked this individual to all those others. So when you hit him, REGARDLESS of your action, you will be FORCED to take all those linked to him. There is careful thinking, no evaluating the environment, none of the learning capacity in Everquest 1 that made it realistic. Here, you hit that one creature, and his buddies who are over the hill and out of sight and out of earshot will come running... not because it makes sense within the gameworld and the environment, but because the developers decided to make it so and put in a game mechanic that artificially requires that to happen. Is that immersive, does it contribute to a believable environment, does it offer a realistic and flexible environment where players learn and players make the decisions about how to approach the content offered? Nope. EQ2 does the exact opposite. It force-feeds the "mob design" on you, creating such idiocy as described above; it channels you, requiring you to only go to "this set of places only", and once you've levelled to a certain point, now you're able to go to the next "set of places" -- and these sets of places are very limited in number and over-designed so that you do the same things repetitiously. EQ2 weaves a host of game mechanics that removes from the player that most important of things, the ability to explore and learn by paying attention; and the ability of the player to come up with solutions to problems that the developers might not have come up with. In EQ2, you will NEVER do that, because the mob-design system prevents it -- you can only take this mob with a certain set number of possible actions, period, end of story, don't dare think for yourselves like you could in the first EQ or almost all of the other games out there.
More insult comes, when in their latest "re-tiering" (aka redoing the power/difficulty levels in the world of those mobs), they put "solo" targets (targets that are specifically labelled as being able to be done by solo players) in the midst of "heroic" targets (targets that are specifically labelled as being not able to be done by solo players), thereby being able to claim that they have solo content (yup, it's right there) while ruining that content and making it undoable. But more egregious than that is the fact that the language you have to speak just to describe the game demonstrates how horrible the "mob" system is. Solo targets versus non-solo targets? We shouldn't even be talking that sort of language in an RPG (MMO or not). The environment should make sense, the creatures should have things they do and therefore paths they follow as they move around, and each target should be itself. Have a place you want to make undoable to an individual player by himself? Make a nice campfire, put fifteen individuals around it -- you won't be able to pull without getting everyone's attention, and it would make sense to use other players in a group to take the campfire area. But then again -- look at what we just did. We looked at a situation, and we, the players, came to conclusions based on the environment. How does EQ2 do it? You click on any of the creatures, and it tells you "group mob only" (aka "heroic"). End of thought. End of trying to think of ways to handle the problem. The game mechanic just defined and limited your world for you.
And that's terrible game design. It runs counter to what made games like AC1, EQ1, Dark Ages of Camelot, and even World of Warcraft fun and believable in terms of the environment: the PLAYER runs around the world, learns from the environment, and comes up with the solutions by thinking about the situations. In EQ2, the developers have already limited your options by the mob design, and then craft the environment to to accentuate the mob design, and they tell you that they have divided the world into "solo" and "heroic" (aka, non-soloable) targets for you and make the game rigidly along those lines.
They can keep it. And while I would have liked to continue playing EQ1, I'm making my choices about what subscriptions to keep open -- and it no longer makes sense to pay Sony for the Station Access, so I can play all the games I like, when those games are now only one: EQ1. So end of the Station Access account.
What am I playing? Asheron's Call 1 and Dark Ages of Camelot. Either of these games is so superior to EQ2 in terms of a consistent, believable, non-force-fed gameworld as to be incomparable. What might I play? I keep hearing too many interesting things about Saga of Ryzom, I might give that a shot. But I can tell you flatly, EQ2 will not be in the playing mix -- it's over in the gather-dust area of my shelves, with WoW. Not unless they scrap the moronic, force-fed, artificially-limiting "mob design" they're using ... and I don't see that happening. They're not interested in making an immersive, believable, consistent world -- they're design philosophy is very limited and limiting and linear.
posted by Thurken | 8:31 AM
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