EverQuest in Unreal engine (fan project)

[anvi]

Looks really nice at times. I wish he had a team to fill it with gameplay.

 

[gurugeorge]

Looks really nice at times. I wish he had a team to fill it with gameplay.

Remarkable project.

But

 

[anvi]

I think he is just doing it for the experience of developing in Unreal. Just a shame there's no gameplay. If one skilled guy can create all that, a small team could create something really good. Again. If only the gaming business wasn't dysfunctional.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Building something like this is a good way for modders / uncontracted developers to make themselves known, it wouldn't be the first time that someone gets hired based on an amateur project.

 

[anvi]

I don't know if this is the same person. Either way it really amazed me, he remade most of Antonica in Unreal 5.2 and is using procedural tools etc.

 

[Beans00]

Everquest was only successful because it was the 2nd major mmo, after ultima online. I'm aware of meridian and the realm but I think those were nothing games, correct me if I'm wrong.

Once better options came out, everquest died out. It was a corpse by like 2004.

anvi In permanent cope about this lol.

 

[anvi]

More like you are misinformed about it. If rarity was so important then UO would be far bigger. EQ did amazingly well, it peaked at 555,000 people paying a monthly subscription... That means they bought the box and then paid $14 or whatever each month to play it. They also likely bought multiple expansion packs which at the time were all physical boxes. The budget of the game was only $3m and they made an absolute fortune from it. Do the math yourself and see. They were gaming gods for that.

It probably had people checking it out because of the novelty, but this was a time when gaming was at its best. You could play Quake or Tribes online or Unreal Tournament... Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999). Delta Force (1998). Asheron’s Call (1999), Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (1999), Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Counterstrike was taking over, etc. All of those games you could play on the internet and it was amazing... EQ got popular despite all of those other games, and none of them required a subscription. A lot of people hated the idea of a subscription. Partly because they felt tied into paying, but a lot of people didn't like giving their personal details to a company back then. EQ was hugely popular, despite all of that.

None of this I really give 2 shits about though. I love the game only because of the gameplay. If it was a single player game with an AI party, I would have loved it just the same. Playing with real people was a blast though. But aspects of the gameplay blows my mind. Sorry you missed out. Most people did... You could try P99 and see. It's not as good but you might understand...

 

[Beans00]

Sorry you missed out. Most people did... You could try P99 and see. It's not as good but you might understand...

I'm only sorry I missed out on DAOC and Eve online.

 

[anvi]

You should feel bad about all three, and UO. (You can still play most of them)

 

[Beans00]

You should feel bad about all three, and UO. (You can still play most of them)

I tried UO briefly years after its prime and it seemed like dogshit. I'm sure the pvp was fun before they did the retarded world split update(I'm sure I would have enjoyed it since it was full loot), but that game was basically only successful because it was the first major mmo.

 

[gurugeorge]

More like you are misinformed about it. If rarity was so important then UO would be far bigger. EQ did amazingly well, it peaked at 555,000 people paying a monthly subscription... That means they bought the box and then paid $14 or whatever each month to play it. They also likely bought multiple expansion packs which at the time were all physical boxes. The budget of the game was only $3m and they made an absolute fortune from it. Do the math yourself and see. They were gaming gods for that.

It probably had people checking it out because of the novelty, but this was a time when gaming was at its best. You could play Quake or Tribes online or Unreal Tournament... Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (1999). Delta Force (1998). Asheron’s Call (1999), Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (1999), Starcraft, Diablo 1/2, Counterstrike was taking over, etc. All of those games you could play on the internet and it was amazing... EQ got popular despite all of those other games, and none of them required a subscription. A lot of people hated the idea of a subscription. Partly because they felt tied into paying, but a lot of people didn't like giving their personal details to a company back then. EQ was hugely popular, despite all of that.

None of this I really give 2 shits about though. I love the game only because of the gameplay. If it was a single player game with an AI party, I would have loved it just the same. Playing with real people was a blast though. But aspects of the gameplay blows my mind. Sorry you missed out. Most people did... You could try P99 and see. It's not as good but you might understand...

I think EQ was the MMO that "crossed over" into normie land a bit, and only WoW did that job better. I remember at the time, the buzz about EQ among nerdy types working in office jobs.

There were three gaming "phenomena" that crossed over hugely in this way: the original Doom (qua shareware), EQ and then WoW.

 

[Beans00]

There were three gaming "phenomena" that crossed over hugely in this way: the original Doom (qua shareware), EQ and then WoW.

EQ was the 2nd biggest(behind ff11) mmo before WoW(outside of lineage in korea), but it wasn't close to being on wow's level. You're coping hard, which I respect if you loved the game. EQ was not large in popular consciousness though.

Eq peaked at 500k subs and was a corpse after 3-4 years. Wow peaked at like 11 million, and is still played heavily today.

 

[Beans00]

anvi

That's the MMO adult table, throw in FF14 aswell for modern MMOs. I'm sure ESO also broke 1 million.

Eq was at the kids table, with rift, city of heroes,swg, whatever the fuck dofus is.

 

[anvi]

EQ started in 1999 when hardly anyone had a PC, let alone the internet. And it controversially required a 3D graphics card which only real gamers had. The fact it was that big back then was shocking to everyone. The people who made it had no idea it would be that big, and planned the game for a much smaller audience. It was so popular it caused major infrastructure problems in California, caused a US Army satellite to be interrupted.

WoW was made by people who loved EQ, and wanted to remake a Blizz version of it. It is the same game only much easier, dumbed down, and made to work on Mom's netbook which everyone had in 2004. That was also when the internet boomed. So yeah of course it's going to be bigger. Blizz was well known and rich.

Your constant sperging of these charts is stupid. Going on the numbers that shitty Second Life is the best thing ever, and we both know it wasn't. Also WoW is the best thing ever, yet as I said it is just EQ remade for kids, by people who played and loved EQ years before. Or how about that thing Aion? You want to pretend that EQ was only popular because it was one of the first, but all those shitty Korean games like Aion in your chart came a decade later when the business was saturated, and look how big that got. At least use consistent logic to your dumbass agenda. But all of this is retarded anyway. Who cares about the numbers? I wouldn't care if EQ had 2 players or 2 billion. I don't care about any of these games or their numbers, I only care about how fun it was to dungeon crawl as a Necro or something good. The quality of the dungeons, etc, and the quality of the combat. It's all on another level. And all your angles on these games you want to drag me into, have nothing to do with any of that.

 

[Beans00]

EQ started in 1999 when hardly anyone had a PC, let alone the internet.

Maybe in syria, where you're from lol.


Also second life isn't really an MMO or even a game, it's just an interactive chatroom for lonely winemoms.

 

[anvi]

No in 1999 PCs were not in every home. It was small business owners and students and professional people. The demographic was completely different to how it was just 5 years later. I didn't know at first because all I played was Quake and Tribes with other kids. So I jumped into EQ assuming it was just another game and I wanted to get the most frags. Took me a while to adjust... And I was surprised that the game was full of 30 year olds. The first guy I spoke to was a small business owner who had 2 PCs in the office and would play games on the second PC while he fielded calls and stuff. There were lots of late 20s stay at home moms with babies who liked playing and chatting. There were a lot of people like that at the start. But it was talked about in all the magazines so a lot of people of all types were joining when I joined.

It changed a lot in just the first year alone. By about 2000 is was full of players, far too many for the size of the game and the servers were not coping. And it was only about a year in that drama really started with bickering and fighting over things and rivalries and trolls and people getting people killed on purpose etc. It all got interesting once the masses joined. It was far too popular. There were double the number of players in each area so the popularity harmed the experience. A year in they added an expansion which really helped. But it pissed me off in some ways so I rage quit. I only played 1 year 1999-2000. Then I went back at some points but mostly on other private servers. I played it again when it was peaking at 550,000 players, but that was like 6 years later and the game had grown into something different by then and I hated it. It was all about 'raiding'. So I quit again and never went back, only ever played private servers that changed the game a lot.

You would understand if you played it. It has amazing aspects, and bad parts.

 

[anvi]

Also you gotta get your calculator out to understand those numbers. For a start, you can't judge if a game was profitable or a success or not if you don't know the budget. A game could have 500,000 sales and still be a financial flop if the budget was huge. Or a game could have 10,000 sales and it be hugely profitable. It all depends on what went into it.

Also subscriber numbers is very different to sales. They are sales as well, but the monthly subscription is a lot more.

500,000 players buy the box at $30 = $15 million.
500,000 players pay $12 in a month = $6 million. In a single month.

With EQ the 555,000 people wasn't long. But you can see from 2001 to 2006 it is at over 400,000 people paying $12 or whatever every month. That would be $4.8 million each month. Times 6 years, that's $28.8 million. That's not including box sales and expansion pack sales. Again, the budget was $3m. That's why for 20 years since, everyone tried to make an MMO. Sure they all suck, but that's not EQ's fault.

 

[Beans00]

Also you gotta get your calculator out to understand those numbers. For a start, you can't judge if a game was profitable or a success or not if you don't know the budget. A game could have 500,000 sales and still be a financial flop if the budget was huge. Or a game could have 10,000 sales and it be hugely profitable. It all depends on what went into it.

Also subscriber numbers is very different to sales. They are sales as well, but the monthly subscription is a lot more.

500,000 players buy the box at $30 = $15 million.
500,000 players pay $12 in a month = $6 million. In a single month.

With EQ the 555,000 people wasn't long. But you can see from 2001 to 2006 it is at over 400,000 people paying $12 or whatever every month. That would be $4.8 million each month. Times 6 years, that's $28.8 million. That's not including box sales and expansion pack sales. Again, the budget was $3m. That's why for 20 years since, everyone tried to make an MMO. Sure they all suck, but that's not EQ's fault.

I'm not saying EQ was a flop. I'm saying it wasn't as successful(culturally) as you're making it out to be.


EQ was the king of MMO's for a good 3-4 years, which isn't insignificant, and you're right. WoW is heavily inspired by EQ. That being said I think several EQ fans are either overlooking, or don't care about EQs flaws which lead to it completely falling off a cliff.

 

[anvi]

Around 2000 I would have said it was culturally big. It felt like a household name because it was talked about in a lot of magazines and there was even a TV ad. But post WoW it seemed completely forgotten. Which sucks because WoW was worse in most ways and all MMOs since then are WoW inspired. EQ's methods were forgotten, even when they were better.

You are right the fans can be blind to the problems. There were lots of things that bothered me about it, more than most people, that's why I quit after a year. But it's complicated because some of the brutal parts were necessary even though people say they didn't like it. And some of the time consuming things are necessary for gameplay reasons. But the game in general took too long to do stuff and was completely unfriendly to solo players and beginners. The problem is WoW did a lot of logical sounding things to fix the main problems, but most of them ended up worse than the EQ way. I'm only concerned with that, gameplay mechanics and things that will be forgotten because WoW became the blueprint for everyone. Hardly anyone looks back to EQ and when I sometimes see a new youtube documentary talking about EQ, they get important things wrong. If you care about games and gameplay, these things are the building blocks of that. Also most of it was one guy who was pushing for these things, against everyone else who didn't really understand. And now that guy is dead.

 

[anvi]

The guy (Brad McQuaid) was strange to be working in the games industry. He didn't really play games, hardly touched them at all. The exception were MUDs and some early RPGs. He also liked MTG card game. But that was pretty much it, he was into dirt biking and music and other things. He completely shaped EQ based on his vision, but his vision was a non-gamer, and it was weird. In some ways this was bad for the player, but it had major advantages too. He didn't see it like a game. He saw it like a world where people should be dying and having trouble all over. He thought that fostered community building etc. People complain about the regen time but the game has Bards who play a mandolin and regenerate mana. And some other classes are similar. So the players were supposed to build a group of 6 using one of those classes. Brad was brutal, he basically thought people should gitgud or gtfo because that's how the MUD he loved was like.

Also the group size is 6 and it was designed to be a challenge for 6 real people with amazing synergy between their abilities. But this means that when people tried to kill a creature 1 on 1, they often died. I later learned you can't have a game with enemies designed for 6 people and 1 person, it just doesn't work. It's either too hard for the solo player or too easy for the group. The only solution is constant scaling or something lame like that. Or you have weak enemies for newbies and strong enemies later on, but this leads to a boring game deisgned for kids. Pandering to the player. Nothing is a challenge, everything is safe. Etc. It's terrible. It is extreme decline one way, and Brad was the extreme other way. I always felt like both ways are terrible and the proper way should be in the middle. But I've been thinking about these things for 20 years and I decided that the best way is a lot nearer to what Brad had in mind than anything else. So I feel like I should preach the advantages of his methods if I can. He's not around to do it and hardly anyone even understood it even at the time. I think MUDs are a goldmine of ideas for gaming and yet hardly anyone even played one. As time goes by and there are fewer of that boomer generation involved in making games, it's gonna lead to more decline. I never played a MUD but I love the idea. It is not limited by budget and art assets and shit. They can make an entire detailed world full of content. It's a completely different mindset to the rest of gaming. We should use that.

 

[gurugeorge]

There were three gaming "phenomena" that crossed over hugely in this way: the original Doom (qua shareware), EQ and then WoW.

EQ was the 2nd biggest(behind ff11) mmo before WoW(outside of lineage in korea), but it wasn't close to being on wow's level. You're coping hard, which I respect if you loved the game. EQ was not large in popular consciousness though.

Eq peaked at 500k subs and was a corpse after 3-4 years. Wow peaked at like 11 million, and is still played heavily today.

I think you're missing out on context. It's not about raw numbers or how big an MMO was in the abstract, it's about the impact on culture. EQ was WoW before WoW, it wasn't as big in absolute terms, but relatively speaking it had a huge impact. I lived through it, I remember it well. As I say, its catchment was the nerdy end of people who worked in offices, who hadn't necessarily been committed gamers as such, but were tickled pink by the idea of playing together online.

 

[anvi]

They were nice people too. I didn't see any conflict until about a year later when all the riff raff had joined in large numbers. The conflict was good in a way, made the game more interesting. Guilds would cockblock each other by dominating an area. I was never interested in the epeen measuring. I was more interested in where it could go in terms of gameplay. They had already talked about having wars between guilds. If you are a guild leader you could target another guild and type /guildwar or something and it would set your entire guild into PVP mode against that other guild. I don't think it ever became a reality though. Maybe on PVP servers but they came and went sadly.

But I pictured future games with a huge interesting world and people working together as guilds to hold areas against others. The only thing I've seen like this is in WoW they have that kind of thing, but it's more simplistic than I want to see. Darkfall had a lot of good ideas on paper but ended up a jankfest.

 

[Stokowski]

"Other games" (plural) didn't kill EQ. DAoC, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, etc., were small potatoes. WoW killed EQ. Hardly surprising as that was exactly how it was designed: as a non-hardcore EQ. You no longer had to stay up an extra two hours on a work-night to arrange a corpse-run, and so on.

 

[Beans00]

They were nice people too. I didn't see any conflict until about a year later when all the riff raff had joined in large numbers. The conflict was good in a way, made the game more interesting. Guilds would cockblock each other by dominating an area. I was never interested in the epeen measuring. I was more interested in where it could go in terms of gameplay. They had already talked about having wars between guilds. If you are a guild leader you could target another guild and type /guildwar or something and it would set your entire guild into PVP mode against that other guild. I don't think it ever became a reality though. Maybe on PVP servers but they came and went sadly.

But I pictured future games with a huge interesting world and people working together as guilds to hold areas against others. The only thing I've seen like this is in WoW they have that kind of thing, but it's more simplistic than I want to see. Darkfall had a lot of good ideas on paper but ended up a jankfest.

"Other games" (plural) didn't kill EQ. DAoC, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, etc., were small potatoes. WoW killed EQ. Hardly surprising as that was exactly how it was designed: as a non-hardcore EQ. You no longer had to stay up an extra two hours on a work-night to arrange a corpse-run, and so on.

How much did EQ2 impact killing everquest. Unlike EQ1 which was a success for several years, EQ2 failed right out of the gate.

Do you think EQ would have had more longevity if all the resources from EQ2 were put into EQ instead?

 

[anvi]

EQ2 took some players but the game was declining hard anyway because of WoW. I remember some people left when Diablo 2 came out but most of them were back a month or so later. A good bunch tried DAOC as well. But I didn't notice a change until WoW started catching on. It took a huge number of players right away and only grew.

I don't think they could have given it more longevity, they treated it too badly from the start. They were convinced it was too old and with rats nest programming, so they were determined to just give it minimum effort and let it run its course, while trying to make another hit game. But their games sucked, so they never got another hit and they ran EQ into the ground and took all its money. Despite the name it was never really designed to last a long time. They coded a lot of stuff specifically, like there being 50 levels, and when they wanted more it was a big problem. Also the world layout always bothered me, it wasn't designed to grow as a whole, instead they had new continents and islands. It would have been much better if they added to the existing world instead of making new junk with every new expansion. They really destroyed the integrity of the game by trying to grow it. It also wasn't designed well for long term. There were no real money sinks, no gear damage etc, so items were flooding into the world and never leaving making bad inflation. The main issue was that longer players were all in the high level areas and new players were finding an empty game. They did nothing to help new players, it was ridiculous.