They made EQ in the 1990s with a budget of 3 million! (5% of BG3 with inflation) And it's crazily good, and so much depth. Almost every aspect of the game is better than I've seen in any other game and I could talk all day about, the combat, itemization, dungeons, world building, etc.. Just race alone, I'll try to explain..
You make a character with name, class, attributes, race, and religion. There are 16 classes, 16 races, and 14 religions or 15 with agnostic. Now everything in the huge world will react to you based on your race
and religion
and class. Many things will attack you on sight, many will love you, and everything in between:
- Ally
- Warmly
- Kindly
- Amiable
- Indifferent
- Apprehensive
- Dubious
- Threatening
- Aggressive
There are
several hundred factions based on a lot more than race, for example a group of merchants in a city might be part of a trade collective with some far away miners that are different races and different religions, they just happen to be partners. So if you kill one of these merchants and then flee the city, the guards might want you dead, and these far away miners might want you dead. And if you get into a fight with one of those miners and kill him, you may now be enemy to a whole city you haven't even visited yet. But you can improve your relationships by hunting the enemies of whoever you want to befriend. And eventually they will go from trying to kill you, to ignoring you, to maybe offering you quests or help.
Pretty sure they got one guy to design the whole faction system. This guy (even though it isn't credited):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raph_Koster
