Seriously though, I hope this is cool
Had my doubts about a lot of things which, to their credit, they have dispelled.
(dunno if you've followed this from the beginning, but try and think of each and every red flag in the game development book; it had them all. As it turns out, it was a matter of necessity/expediency. Each and every time the opportunity arose, they were taken off, one by one. Pretty unexpected and even more so considering it's McQuaid)
Of course it needs be noted that as usually, you have your generalized wordings, your back and forths, your design shifts, etc. Most judge these according to the camp they find themselves in; more solo vs more grouping, more raid loot vs more crafting, etc.
Myself, i stick to the backs and forths, per se. Not the most assuring of signs, implying the course is not set on stone, but again, considering everything that's transpired, can at least say the dude means business. Sorry, would have said, it's the era of microtransactions, lol..
He is serious about making this what he said he'd make it. And it shows.
Also worth noting is that excluding the shitty (but inevitable) pledging "gitfs", the game will have no store, in or out of the client, no RMT, no extra puchasing. Sub only, sub monthly, as it used to be. This is extremely important to me, could name you MMOs that might have interested me, only i never even downloaded them to have a look because F2P
Now if you want my personal opinion (see camps above), my worry is the emphasis on the wrong old school aspects. And the discarding (partially) of the right ones.
- They don't want this to be time-based/consuming, ergo they will be implementing some sort of a daily artificial progress barrier. My understanding is that said barrier will be at a level where someone like me won't ever reach within a single day anyway, but even so.. bespeaks of mentality and giving in to modern trends. And all the shit they bring with them.
- They are adding (or will be eventually) a ton of stuff which is very cool to have, but in proper classic EQ fashion will probably turn out to be unfavored or secondary to most players, as yet again, it will be "group or die". Before you say it, sure.. community, team effort, social skills and you mattering, etc.. O.K. Except this isn't 1999, we know how it goes by now, we know the audience. You take the route of "group if you want to even walk down the street", you take the route of 'loot guild', of 'pixel fever', of "skillz"
before personality, etc.. And on top of that, you take the route of the bad kind of competing. The giefing, the envying, the hating. We had that 19 years ago. Can you imagine implementing all this today? With the current generation of manchildren? Am too old for that. This worries me ^^
- It often feels as if Brad is so stuck in the past, he doesn't even consider/acknowledge what has transpired since. In the positive sense i mean; he sees all the negatives and kudos to him for that, but none of the positives. My impression is (and i have engaged the man multiple times) that it's due to the number 1 issue for most developers: He does NOT play the games we play. He thinks modern MMOs=cancer and he stops there. He hasn't actually played them, because his impression of them is enough for him. It being the issue, you know what i mean? His empirical experience,
as a player, not a dev, is one stuck in the late nineties. This can potentially be problematic.
(for example: Wildstar: Shit, yeah, but hold on. You seen the way they handled the AH/market/economy
before they went F2P? Amazing; smart, efficient, but utterly simplistic, ergo cheap and easily manageable. The one thing worthy of emulating from that game. He ignores it. Just.. not fitting inside his blindfold. Lotro: It managed to have dedicated crafters, talk about 5 and 6 alts just so you can occasionally play your main, and still have competitive raiding (before Rohan all this)
without the typical skillz mentality. Impossible right? It did though. He doesn't even grasp how that was accomplished, ergo no way he'll even consider it. Could name you many others, but that's the gist of it. He hasn't the empirical experience, ergo he hasn't seen how it's not all cancer, how more importantly, some things
should have moved on from back then, and did)
Still, literally the single MMO i have actual hopes for. And the last.. so fingers crossed, lol
edit: and admittedly, the more time goes by, the more i am encouraged by their choices. At least they are ones i can respect, even if i disagree.
