Everquest Next - News Roundup

I'd also contest that the original EQ + maybe the Kunark expansion never really felt like a grind at all. Levels were a side-effect of having fun with friends.

Things, however, took a turn with the faction requirements and armor farming of the Velious expansion. You began to see the emergence of playing not for fun but to climb some artificial loot and content ladder. It has only continued in this vein ever since.

If EQNext can implement a return to camaraderie-focused gameplay where grouping, exploration, and socialization are once again encouraged while simultaneously doing away with the artificial gating mechanisms that pervade many games today, I think they'd have a hit. But I doubt they'll pull it off.
 
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Classes have tiers, but these are not raised with XP or killing mobs. From what I can deduce of interviews and the class panel, you have to perform "class challenges" to be able to advance a tier. The devs didn't call them class challenges, but that's the closest I came up with to "do various things to get to the next tiers". I even think that these "challenges" are given to you by the class trainer, this is why you can't advance a Paladin class if you are doing evil things. You lose access to your trainer.

and the horizontal progression is collecting more classes and abilities. While the vertical one is raising your class tier, but the way they are talking there are only 4-5 of them.

Also, while you can learn lots of classes. You have to be "in a specific class" when playing and this will define what armor and weapons you can use and the type of class ability slots you have (different for all classes, but there are only 24 combos and over 40 classes, so they are redundancy). The slot types are movement (leap, dash, teleport, etc), offensive (damage dealing stuff like a fireball or mana burns), defensive (spell reflect, shielding, etc), utility (unsummon spell is the example they used).

Aaah. I knew very little about that - thanks for the elaboration!
 
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I'd also contest that the original EQ + maybe the Kunark expansion never really felt like a grind at all. Levels were a side-effect of having fun with friends.

Try playing it again today :)

Pacman felt like a varied game once as well ;)
 
Try playing it again today :)

Pacman felt like a varied game once as well ;)

Can't play it again today as it was played back then. First, there are no groups at that range; the game has been tweaked to be solo-centric for the first half. And, even if there were groups, players who want to "stop and smell the roses" are few and far between because EQ1 is all but dead to new players - the vast majority of people still playing the game are raiders who've been around for years.

And I never said EQ was varied; but there is quite a difference between lacking variety and being a grind. The community in the early days of EQ was second to none and made any sense of grind disappear. Ok, maybe not fully disappear for level 59-60.
 
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Can't play it again today as it was played back then. First, there are no groups at that range; the game has been tweaked to be solo-centric for the first half. And, even if there were groups, players who want to "stop and smell the roses" are few and far between because EQ1 is all but dead to new players - the vast majority of people still playing the game are raiders who've been around for years.

And I never said EQ was varied; but there is quite a difference between lacking variety and being a grind. The community in the early days of EQ was second to none and made any sense of grind disappear. Ok, maybe not fully disappear for level 59-60.

It was an example of how perceptions change.

Sure, you may not have felt EQ was much of a grind - because there was nothing to compare it to, back then.

I didn't feel UO was much of a grind, even though I spent full days doing nothing but chopping wood and making wooden shields. I was having fun.

MY point is that MMOs have changed - and though certainly not all for the better, there's no way you can play EQ today and not have it feel like a grind.
 
There is nothing grindy about either EQ1 or EQ2 right now. I leveled up a toon simply for giggles 3 weeks ago, hit level 95 in 9 hours and rather took my time doing it. If there is a grind, it's when a game first comes out and there are no broker items, no other max toons, and you are basically pioneering the game. If you've never played an mmo during the first week of release, you're never really experienced the best part.



-Carn
 
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There is nothing grindy about either EQ1 or EQ2 right now. I leveled up a toon simply for giggles 3 weeks ago, hit level 95 in 9 hours and rather took my time doing it. If there is a grind, it's when a game first comes out and there are no broker items, no other max toons, and you are basically pioneering the game. If you've never played an mmo during the first week of release, you're never really experienced the best part.-Carn

I've played at least 20 MMOs during the first week of release - and I've experienced all the wonderful server rollbacks and downtime :)

As for EQ - obviously I'm talking about EQ as it was upon release, not how they've modernised the design to match modern expectations.
 
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