Sony’s “Come back to EQ” free trial and Vanguard

Duration of free trial: 14 days
Patch download time: 28 minutes
Time spent in game: 14 minutes

EverQuest… My first MMORPG… It had a well rounded lore and a game-world that seemed practical within its own dimensions. WoW makes me wonder what EverQuest would have been like if the team had more experience of single-player gaming under their belt.

But EQ was always work, and things were based on “risk vs reward” rather than “effort made + risk vs reward”. That is part of what EQ so addictive to *some* people, because you truly had to invest to achieve progress… The user interface was awful, clunky, hard to use and very limited. You really felt like a new character starting out, there were no maps, no anything. Most importantly, the programming team appear not to really have understood gaming. And as people got into the game, they just didn’t play it at all the way the devs had expected.

I couldn’t bring myself to re-learn the EQ interface; I did try a few things very briefly, but I’d forgotten just how unintuitive and unhelpful their interface is (yes, it’s better than the pre-1.19 WWII UI, but so is a rock). If your interface is going to be complex (which EQ’s neccessarily has to be), don’t reinvent from scratch, copy the operating system. The monitor principle applies: There is a big black (or beige) border around your monitor and thus your game viewport, yet you aren’t continually drawn out of your immersion because of it.

If the game’s UI is significantly different from your native UI experience, then your mind will always have to think about operating it, and that breaks immersion. You are going to have be far more to likely to notice that you aren’t sliding a bag of eel eyes across the table to a troll with no ears, but that you are using a mouse to click a half dozen times to indicate to a piece of software that you wish to increase your gold balance by the value of 24 odd little roundish things.

From the start I’ve felt that the EQ programming team, and perhaps Brad, didn’t understand computer gaming. Some of the team sure did, but there are hallmark mistakes in EQ that show the team was building a fantasy world without stopping to realize the worst thing you can do to a fantasy is let other people into it.

Quick example: Death penalty. If you die, you have to go retrieve all your gear from your dead body. Now a gamer immediately thinks “Well, I don’t want to die where the mob is standing then”, but a non-gamer programmer doesn’t think that straight off. That’s why EQ has a command to let you drag your corpse around rather than a well thought out death penalty system.

I may be being harsh on the EQ team, though, since Brad McQuaid clearly hasn’t learned his lesson. The current poll over on the Vanguard site is this:

Would you prefer the Vanguard death penalty to use…
Experience Loss — you can also lose a level
Experience Debt — you can also lose a level
Experience Loss — you can not lose a level
Experience Debt — you can not lose a level

Dude. Don’t fraking punish me for dying. You don’t need to do anything other than make me run back from some place. Losing 3-5 minutes of my night is entirely punishment enough. Anyone who says it isn’t … I think the local pool hall was asking if they could have their cue back.

And I have to wonder if Mr “MYour world now” really understands the significance of what he’s saying here “They will make their mark on a world we initially create but they ultimately shape and form”. Vanguard seems to be “EQ3: Revenge of the McQuaid”, driven by Brad’s anger at having had EQ corrupted away from his original Vision. Of the few McQuaid diatribes I bothered reading about Vanguard, it just struck me that Brad is recasting the vision. (I went to find some links for that, and found that Woody over at GU Comics came away with the same impression after a private viewing; it seems to be a fairly feeling thing amongst commentators)

Brad isn’t going to like it when Microsoft say “Death penalty must go”. When people start quitting because “wow doesn’t punish me for dying!”, Microsoft are going to remove the death penalty. Brad, I would strongly discourage you from saying things like “over my dead body”

I don’t mean it to sound so personal – I bet Brad makes a great desktop GM, but he seems to be blind to the fact that taking the factors that make for a great night of beer and pizza round at a friends house will translate, in-tact, to 6 of you trying to arrange to be on your computer for a fixed period of time on a computer-gaming-at-home sort of schedule.

- In the table-top experience it’s often something you do once a week, it’s usually something of a social event. Computer gaming is something you can do every night. As an online game vendor, you tend to hope your players *will* play every night. So the one thing you can’t depend on is that people who play together will be able to stay together.

- Table-top play experience usually has a setup time. You have to get to drive to your friend’s house, you have to set up the table from last week, discuss the rules, recap where you’re at.. You could be 30-90 minutes just getting ready to play. But it’s all social activity and spending 30 minutes physically relocating yourself for gameplay is very different than spending 30 minutes watching your character stand on a boat.

- If your DM decides that you’re going to need to spend 30 minutes getting your characters to the start of their adventure, a group of people around a table spending 30 minutes roleplay travelling is very different than a group of people in disparate situations having to stay fixed infront of a computer for 15-30 minutes. (“I gotta go pee”, “Hold it for just 5 more minutes? If you miss getting off the boat we’re gonna be stuck waiting for another 30 minutes” “Can’t I put you on auto-follow” “Don’t do that, you’ll end up lost in the sea and we’ll have to wait 60 minutes!”)

- There is no other group in a tabletop experience. If you decide to go kill perverts in the Foggy Forest of Fornication, the only obstacle to your entertainment for the evening is whatever your DM puts in your way. Either way, you get to play. Finding that your 45 minutes of setup travelling to Unrest was to no effect because Unrest is crowded by people who aren’t roleplaying just somehow grates on the nerves. And Brad has no truck with instancing. I can’t entirely blame him for that.

- If one of you doesn’t turn up for a game one night, the DM can magically cover for you, or you could even choose to play different or something else for the one night.
“Play something else” isn’t what gamers want to hear 4 nights out of 5 in a single week.

I guess the Caravan concept I saw Brad mention covers the last one – you can choose to camp with a caravan and then when you log back in, you’ll log in with the caravan, so you can associate with the travels of a group. I can see that being “fun” for guilds — “OMG you moved the caravan! I told you I had a date in that Foggy Forest tonight!”

- If you are playing 3+ nights a week, you’re probably going to start doing stuff without your friends. Friend-groups are strongest during the early days of play. But unless it’s a freak group of blood-brothers the chances are they’re going to want to spend time away from each other. Perhaps you logged in an hour early. Perhaps you had some class specific thing you went off to do while your friends did something to their advantage, or maybe you just all fell out last night but you want to play some game tonight, just not with your mates. It bites to fire up your entertainment and find the answer to “what are we doing” is “waiting for 30 minutes”.

Sure, that’s 30 minutes of quality role play time. But wait a moment, I don’t recall ordering this MUSH.

Early in WWII Online there were trenches along the sides of roads. And the 3D/positional sound in the game has always been one of its better features.

Lots of people playing WWII Online for the first time would absolutely bubble with awe at the experience of lying in a ditch with this awesomely immersive battlefield sound around you. Some of them would probably even play more than twice.

I still remember my first WWII-ditch experience, it was truly mindblowing. Tracers, bullets, dirt kicking up, being able to tell exactly where I was being fired at. It was an experience. I’ve also had my head infront of the barrel of a [real] gun just as someone was lining it up to fire, once. That was an experience.

A lot of people miss the ditches in WWII Online but not because they long for the days when you could expect to spend most of your night trapped in a ditch waiting for enemy tanks to either look for you or go away but because they were an enrichment of play. I don’t think we could persuade them to let us replace our berms, trees, grasslines, and speed-bushes with ditches here and there.

I suspect Vanguard is going to be a lot of fun to play. I think a lot of early EQers will come out of the woodwork and love it. It’ll be very addictive for people who like their lore to be relevant. I suspect I’m probably going to enjoy it. But I also suspect that it will once again cycle through a seemingly rich and flowing stream of content followed by a desert of grinding/repetition through levels/regions of little content followed by an expansion and repeat.