Feldon Do you long for the old days when epic monsters dropped wooden chests (if they dropped a chest at all), travel took time (and money), overland zones were packed with roving bands of heroic gnolls, and raid mobs took weeks to figure out? It seems appropriate that for the 15th anniversary of the original EverQuest, EQ2Talk takes a turn for the nostalgic with an extensive reminiscence about past expansions and what challenge means in MMOs.
For its 74th episode of EQ2Talk, the lovely Aliscious takes a much-needed break and in her place, Dellmon‘s guildmate Osgz steps in to co-host. They ask the big questions, including whether EQ2 of the Desert of Flames days could be successful today in the face of player impatience and distractions…
EQ2 Talk #74 – The Ozman Cometh
EQ2 Talk is back finally with a new episode after an extended holiday hiatus. While Ali is on break, Dellmon is joined by Osgz from the Unrest server. They reminisce about their days in Everquest Live and talk about some of their personal highs and lows in Everquest II. Find out who knows more about dead “legendary” dragons in a grudge match of Are You Smarter Than a Dellmon.
Always knew Osgz was meant to be famous! Way to go Eyen.
I do not long for the days of dead overland zones with pointless amounts of heroic encounters that didn’t drop any worthy loot.
“raid mobs took weeks to figure out?”
Lol took weeks? More like a couple of hours or at most a few days…unless you’re a special individual of course.
Nexona was figured out in a couple of hours? Mmmkay.
I was talking about the original game, not RoK.
RoK was actually when the game started to take its current shape especially solo overlands.
True. People forget that raid mobs were not particularly scripted in the early days.
While those early raid encounters might not have the scripted elements that modern encounters do – they did have their own challenges
– access quests required to enter
– bane-weapons
– lack of instancing
– 10 pulls before you were donning your secondary and not as powerful gear
– resistance or outright mitigation to types of damage and attacks
– travel to because of the lack of rally flags
So perhaps those early encounters were less involved, but there were other aspects that made them challenging in a different way
Those weren’t challenges. Those were tedious obstacles placed down as a way to artificially extend the lifespan of game content.
Instancing did exist except they’re weren’t persistent. Back then if you were kicked out of the zone via server shutdown, disconnection or w/e then that was it for the week.
Travel isn’t an issue because most of it was just bell clicking. Take the docks to TS/NF then hop over to Lavastorm, Everfrost, or Feerrott. Not to mention two major end game raid instances were located right off of Commonlands and Antonica. EQ2 didn’t have immense traveling, unless you count the amount of loadtimes via bells as traveling.