Ahh Everquest corpse runs. Through bloody Kithicor at night, firebeetle eye in hand, to the top of the aviac treehouse in SK, L Guk, and on to City of Mist for my epic quest and Sebilis for that awesome fungi tunic. That game made dying so much fun, up until soulbinding gear became a thing. Then it was just a minor annoyance. My character was a half elf ranger named Temken, the first of a long line of characters with names stemming from obscure book or movie references. Everyone had a Drizzt or an Aragorn or a Legolas. My name was unique. EQ made travelling long distances fun. I quested for my SSoM, chased down the ghoul messenger. I was actually 5th in line to my target so wiped out a camp of ogres that netted me a turtleshell helm as an upgrade. Later my guild took me to get a ykesha. Of course these two blades had the same graphic so people would see me and immediately shout "TWINK!" Though completely untrue, it was good for a chuckle.
In my time playing EQ I went from solo questing, to being guilded with 400+ players casually, on to raiding through PoP. The ranger class never truly found its niche in my time playing, many hybrids shared a similar fate but rangers often had it the worst it seemed. Which made it all the better when occasionally I would surprise people by for instance getting solo exp off a Tunare kill (yes I killed my own god, what of it?) up against a full raid that had no room to spare. So I got to call loot by default teehee.
My time in EQ came to a bitter end when, in the midst of a stagnant raiding guild halfway through the Discord expansion, the lead CS rep chimed in on a DPS balance discussion. My class having taken some lumps, this rep simply replied with something akin to "Why don't you all reroll rogues?" As most MMO players know, with their main character comes a certain attachment, so being told to start over in order to progress further was that last straw and so I bid the game adieu.
Leaving EQ left a bit of a gap in my playtime that I was spending a ton of rental money trying to fill. Vanguard was down the pipe soon so I filled that hole with Guild Wars in the meantime. Decent game but not nearly the social experience Everquest was. I pushed through 2 expansions but after upgradeable hero henchmen, the groupable player pool kinda dried up, and LO! There was Vanguard Saga of Heroes! This was it, Brad McQuaid, back to basics, with better graphics. But this was a modded UE2 engine, which if you've ever tried to make a large map on UE2, you would know that is not what this engine was built for. And I have, so I knew this but still played nonetheless.
So, Vanguard, beautiful game but not optimized. It had the "heroic opportunities" combo system that Brad wanted for EQ but never incorporated, so stronger skills were tied into weaker skills. WoW would also use a similar system. I leveled as one would level, the maps were annotated with their level, the further you get from a city the more dangerous it got, except this game had housing! This game was very rigidly structured. No dual-spec system. If you played a DPS class that's it. If you played a tank class, you were a tank. So even with this structure, the not-optimized game engine, the game still had its charm. I leveled a ranger to raid level wherein my guild came in direct competition with an old EQ guild, Brotherhood of the Spider (first to wake the sleeper don'tcha know). I raided, I conquered. The devs would create new challenges by changing raid mechanics since Vanguard wasn't funded well enough to actually make new content reliably. This eventually forced my guild to leave the game. We killed that dragon one last time and all posed for a screenshot, bent over, pants unequipped, back to the player taking the shot, in front of said dead dragon. There was an odd clothing bug at the time where some characters, namely the large ones, appeared to have no pants when armor was unequipped so it looked as bad as we wanted it. We posted the screenshot to the official forums and we migrated to WoW, where the guild promptly fell apart. I was not a fan at first, preferring more realistic graphics to the cartoony look of WoW's races but I stuck around, having no place to go.
I joined WoW in the midst of the WotLK expansion. I level grinded as one does. This had become old hat up to this point except there was no groupfinder or instance queue so a lot of it was soloing, lest I sit in Orgrimmar spamming tradechat for hours on end. From the second I started raiding in WoW I was not really a fan. I liked it for the lore but building the right spec, and rotation, something that periodically changes with every second patch or so, became akin to my old M:TG days of rebuilding decks when a new set was released, just unnecessary tedium. I liked raiding but maxing out my spec down to the nanosecond, not fun. This is why I always went for more casual raiding guilds, the kind that had fun together but didn't care about arbitrary things like world firsts or guild rank. Over the course of my time in WoW I've been in 3 different raiding guilds and left them all for about the same reason - not the right mix of casual and core. They were too bent on downing content no matter what and would sacrifice members to that end.
As mentioned, I liked the lore in WoW. I liked that it had roots in another gaming genre entirely and would draw on those roots for new release content. This all but fell to the wayside with Pandaria. Sure there was that one pandaran that showed up in Warcraft 3, whatever. It still wasn't a big enough piece of the game to build an expansion around and the transition from Cataclysm to Pandaria simply did not feel organic, more like it was new content for content's sake, so get back on the treadmill. I have only stuck around to see how it ends. I had leveled my rogue to raid with a guild I have now left, and being lv 90 and ready to raid, I want to see why I bothered to level the character at all. After that, it will be time to move to greener pastures.
So I won't confirm or deny whether I have played an MMO based on a long-standing single-player franchise, but if I have it could be inferred that I might purchase this game on its official release date sometime in the future.
*breathes* Sorry bout the wall of text.
In my time playing EQ I went from solo questing, to being guilded with 400+ players casually, on to raiding through PoP. The ranger class never truly found its niche in my time playing, many hybrids shared a similar fate but rangers often had it the worst it seemed. Which made it all the better when occasionally I would surprise people by for instance getting solo exp off a Tunare kill (yes I killed my own god, what of it?) up against a full raid that had no room to spare. So I got to call loot by default teehee.
My time in EQ came to a bitter end when, in the midst of a stagnant raiding guild halfway through the Discord expansion, the lead CS rep chimed in on a DPS balance discussion. My class having taken some lumps, this rep simply replied with something akin to "Why don't you all reroll rogues?" As most MMO players know, with their main character comes a certain attachment, so being told to start over in order to progress further was that last straw and so I bid the game adieu.
Leaving EQ left a bit of a gap in my playtime that I was spending a ton of rental money trying to fill. Vanguard was down the pipe soon so I filled that hole with Guild Wars in the meantime. Decent game but not nearly the social experience Everquest was. I pushed through 2 expansions but after upgradeable hero henchmen, the groupable player pool kinda dried up, and LO! There was Vanguard Saga of Heroes! This was it, Brad McQuaid, back to basics, with better graphics. But this was a modded UE2 engine, which if you've ever tried to make a large map on UE2, you would know that is not what this engine was built for. And I have, so I knew this but still played nonetheless.
So, Vanguard, beautiful game but not optimized. It had the "heroic opportunities" combo system that Brad wanted for EQ but never incorporated, so stronger skills were tied into weaker skills. WoW would also use a similar system. I leveled as one would level, the maps were annotated with their level, the further you get from a city the more dangerous it got, except this game had housing! This game was very rigidly structured. No dual-spec system. If you played a DPS class that's it. If you played a tank class, you were a tank. So even with this structure, the not-optimized game engine, the game still had its charm. I leveled a ranger to raid level wherein my guild came in direct competition with an old EQ guild, Brotherhood of the Spider (first to wake the sleeper don'tcha know). I raided, I conquered. The devs would create new challenges by changing raid mechanics since Vanguard wasn't funded well enough to actually make new content reliably. This eventually forced my guild to leave the game. We killed that dragon one last time and all posed for a screenshot, bent over, pants unequipped, back to the player taking the shot, in front of said dead dragon. There was an odd clothing bug at the time where some characters, namely the large ones, appeared to have no pants when armor was unequipped so it looked as bad as we wanted it. We posted the screenshot to the official forums and we migrated to WoW, where the guild promptly fell apart. I was not a fan at first, preferring more realistic graphics to the cartoony look of WoW's races but I stuck around, having no place to go.
I joined WoW in the midst of the WotLK expansion. I level grinded as one does. This had become old hat up to this point except there was no groupfinder or instance queue so a lot of it was soloing, lest I sit in Orgrimmar spamming tradechat for hours on end. From the second I started raiding in WoW I was not really a fan. I liked it for the lore but building the right spec, and rotation, something that periodically changes with every second patch or so, became akin to my old M:TG days of rebuilding decks when a new set was released, just unnecessary tedium. I liked raiding but maxing out my spec down to the nanosecond, not fun. This is why I always went for more casual raiding guilds, the kind that had fun together but didn't care about arbitrary things like world firsts or guild rank. Over the course of my time in WoW I've been in 3 different raiding guilds and left them all for about the same reason - not the right mix of casual and core. They were too bent on downing content no matter what and would sacrifice members to that end.
As mentioned, I liked the lore in WoW. I liked that it had roots in another gaming genre entirely and would draw on those roots for new release content. This all but fell to the wayside with Pandaria. Sure there was that one pandaran that showed up in Warcraft 3, whatever. It still wasn't a big enough piece of the game to build an expansion around and the transition from Cataclysm to Pandaria simply did not feel organic, more like it was new content for content's sake, so get back on the treadmill. I have only stuck around to see how it ends. I had leveled my rogue to raid with a guild I have now left, and being lv 90 and ready to raid, I want to see why I bothered to level the character at all. After that, it will be time to move to greener pastures.
So I won't confirm or deny whether I have played an MMO based on a long-standing single-player franchise, but if I have it could be inferred that I might purchase this game on its official release date sometime in the future.
*breathes* Sorry bout the wall of text.