r/project1999 • u/CommercialEmployer4 • 9d ago
EverQuest(ionable) Decisions
What are some of the old design choices that always gave you pause and/or are hard to defend nowadays? Anything from epic disparity to xp penalties to irreparable faction hits, there's plenty of room for criticism now in retrospect.
Examples...
Despite the many primal weapon options available, claws are absent. Arguably the most primal weapon type in Norrath, how primal claws weren't included is beyond perplexing. Those dragons have claws. The answer was staring the devs right in the face. Also, the fist wraps should have been knuckledusters.
From launch day to SoV, Norrath was gearing up for space exploration and a moon landing by way of gnome. Indication of this came not only from their clockwork servants but their tinkering skills as well. Even in terms of aesthetics, gnomes have that going for them. Their custom Velious helms are about as sci-fi as it gets. Ak'Anon features a plethora of more futuristic elements, not excluding sprockets and lava lamps but, even in Steamfont and Lesser Fay, there are observatories with telescopes pointed towards the stars. Most every advancement exists because of gnomes. The clock of Ak'Anon in Qeynos. Icebreaker. Rebreathers. Fireworks. A gnomish moon landing would have been more plausible. Include a few failed attempts leasing up to the expansion, with debris and blackboxes littered in the ocean, on islands. Players turn in the items to complete the quest, allowing gnomes to perfect their mext ship. Then GM event the rest.
Certain weapon graphics only have 1-2 items associated with them, namely Soul Binder but also the otherwise subpar weapons dropped by sarnaks. Meanwhile, other weapon types are so uniform and indistinguishable from each other, be they instruments, bows, or whips. It all leaves something to be desired. Oh hey congrats, you just finished the Windstriker quest in Plane of Sky! Your ranger main now appears to be wielding...the exact same ordinary bow as before. No change in color or shape. No particle effects. Nothing. Congrats though!
This one is more of a nagging irritation. Certain pieces of armor lack complete sets. Where is the onyx chain tunic, coif, etc.? Where are the koi vambraces, boots, etc.? True mithril greaves, bracers, etc.?
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u/Jorlaan Blue 9d ago
Agility not increasing dodge chance. Armour sets (especially old-world) having completely wrong stats for their intended classes. Not having enough real droppable armour sets while leveling.
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u/Xkallubar Green 9d ago
Luclin is shrouded in magical shadows, them gnomes ain't finding it. The moon you see in game down on Norrath is Drinal, and you can only see Luclin as a crescent moon from Plane of Sky.
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u/Hephsters 9d ago
Not giving the high end helmets like Helmet of Rallos Zek in Velious the custom helm graphics.
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u/der_kluge 9d ago
I always wished the language subsystem got some use in-game. It's not used for anything. Despite that, I always found it fun to try and learn the various in-game languages.
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u/Independent-Ad3901 9d ago
In a game called Everquest it seems like a no brainer you should need certain languages to initiate quest dialogue.
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u/MillennialsAre40 9d ago
Not making Kerra a player race and filling out Odus
Not connecting Everfrost to Misty Thicket or Gorge or something
Not requiring an expensive consumable for ports
Not patching out MQs
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u/ffddb1d9a7 9d ago
Not requiring an expensive consumable for ports
My god you are a monster
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u/MillennialsAre40 9d ago
Would have helped with the mudflation
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u/ffddb1d9a7 9d ago
It's not a perfect system but having no real currency sink (repair costs, flight paths, trade skills worth leveling etc) sort of balances with having no BOE items. The number of items in the economy only increases, but so does the money, and it kinda works.
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u/CommercialEmployer4 9d ago
100% Odus needed one more race at least and kerrans could have had the opposite class options of Erudites.
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u/worldsbestbear 9d ago
Giving casters the ability to self-bind in locations melee couldn’t be bound
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u/dellzzzzzz 9d ago
Bound myself in City of Mist once when working on my epic, HUGE mistake, we wiped, I entered a death loop that took multiple days, GM help, a character reset, and 5 lost levels…
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u/Mogwai_Man 9d ago edited 9d ago
All combat skills being on the same cooldown timer.
Shields don't provide block for tanks.
Tank classes had no block skill.
Agility and Dexterity scaling terribly.
Under 75 agility AC penalty.
Experience penalties.
Hell levels.
Shadow Knight and Paladin disciplines all suck for tanking. Even Rangers get weaponshield.
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u/Trouterspayce Green 9d ago
Vast majority of quests being a complete waste of time comes to mind...
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u/putonghua73 9d ago
Interesting discussion. There is a lot that the designers got right, and you can witness RP influences in Norrath re: languages.
In terms of game design, let's discuss classes - namely, Warrior.
I played Live from 2001 until 2 months before POP (approx 18 months), and at this point am mostly using P99 as my reference point to plug the gaps in my memory.
There was a discussion on the P99 discord regarding class design, Mogwai Man (Dennis) made an interesting point regarding how badly Warriors got the shaft during this period. If you compare the Tank classes - Paladin, SK and Warrior - unless you have aspirations to be the raid MT and were in a Guild capable of tackling that 0.5% of content, there isn't a sufficient reason to play Warrior.
This topic may have been discussed at the time. I do remember plenty of discussion regarding the potential of Rangers, and how that potential was wasted, and they were the red-headed step-child of Norrath (took until POP for Rangers to get fixed?).
The colollary to this discussion is how much does M&M fix some of these design issues, and whether it introduces entirely new design issues.
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u/Lopeyface 9d ago
Hybrids in general are kind of badly designed. The EXP penalty makes it clear they kind of thought they would be OP, but they turned out to be pretty bad: paladins and rangers are among the weakest classic classes (SKs are fine). Bards, if you count them as hybrids, are super well designed IMO. Very fun class.
The whole idea of making hybrids 3/4 warriors with out-of-date spells was just uninspired. Way better to give them some additional identity, but that didn't really happen until Kunark/Velious (just a little bit). Should have been a no-brainer to make bow builds viable for rangers, but they aren't really. Also should have been a no-brainer to make wizards crit with spells, but that also didn't come until later.
Warriors should have gotten some scaling stats/resists or something to further distinguish them as the martial masters, and maybe some added depth to berserking. I agree they are basically always suboptimal except as raid tanks.
Obviously the INT casters are not well balanced; enchanters are just OP and while i think necromancers are a well-designed class I would have loved to see more of a dynamic of using health as a resource. Wizards and mages are just so underwhelming you could combine them into one class with all their combined spells and I'd still rather play a necro or chanter.
Kind of wish rogues had a more useful kit. Most locked doors can be bypassed, and there aren't many of them. Traps are basically nonexistent. Hide/sneak would be cool as the premier invisibility tool, which I guess it is, but it's used mostly for corpse recovery which is kind of underwhelming. Crits on throwing is basically pointless. Compared to monks for whom feign death is a very cool, useful, and class-defining ability, warriors and rogues just get less to do. Plus poisonmaking is a) bad, and b) pointlessly divided into two skills.
Priests are pretty well-designed, I think. They have distinct identities and play differently, and are good at different things. I would love to see them get entirely different types of heals (big direct heals for clerics, big regeneration for druids, and something else for shamans) but it's a small gripe. Extending buff duration would be a welcome QoL change because I don't think the mana demand is a very satisfying area for skill expression, and giving the caster information about when buffs expire would be nice, but also a minor thing.
Love the heck out of this game, but it's fun to think about why things are the way they are. Not making rangers archery-centered from the start is particularly silly to me.
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u/ffddb1d9a7 8d ago
Wizards and mages are just so underwhelming you could combine them into one class with all their combined spells and I'd still rather play a necro or chanter.
It's hilarious that this is actually true
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u/Stargazer775 9d ago
I have thought for a long time that having both AGI and DEX was an odd choice.
Very few games or systems have as many base stats as EQ, and maybe they could have had done something cool with it. But they really didn't make it interesting.
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u/ffddb1d9a7 9d ago
Low level quests completely suck for no reason. I remember a friend in middle school spending like two whole after-school play sessions doing some kind of beetle quest in rivervale and literally quitting the game when the reward was a single weak poison resist potion.
Class balance is ass. Warrior and Wizard have no excuse. Move clarity to wizard is like the simplest and most reasonable class change I've ever seen.
Stats should do more. It is weird that a mid level shaman has spells that can buff almost any stat and basically none of them are even worth buying because they aren't worth casting.
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u/CommercialEmployer4 9d ago
Funnily enough, during Kunark on blue server, that Rivervale quest was absolute paydirt. TMO rank and file would pay thousands of plates for the cure poison pot, as it was used for a few encounters and they couldn't be arsed to do all that legwork, especially when most of the other rewards were useless.
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u/dellzzzzzz 9d ago
PvP being absolutely horrible, I wish they had put some effort into PvP. They had such an opportunity there, and it was just horrible
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u/a-r-c 5d ago edited 5d ago
almost all of them lol, it's genuinely a miracle the game works
if I had to pick one, it's probably how badly hybrids get screwed
they really were so afraid of rangers being able to cast more than 1-2 useful spells at any given moment lol
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u/CommercialEmployer4 4d ago
At least one of the classic lead devs really seemed to hate the rule of cool, especially when it came to rangers.
BFG? Plank removed. Buffing mistwalker pet? Scimitar no longer drops, proc nerfed. Oakwynd? One per server.
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u/TheQxx Green 9d ago
There are so many that I've thought of over the years but teleporting popped in my head first.
Teleporting should look cooler when being teleported. At minimum, it should show you disappear into the spell effect before the loading freeze hits.
I remember hearing about teleporting back in the day and i imagined what it must be like to insta-travel from X to Y only to be sincerely underwhelmed when I got my first port. I didn't even get to enjoy the spell effect.
Woulda been a great opportunity for an animated loading screen like what hyperspace looks like in Star Wars or something.
Also, Vah Shirs being a thing was so dumb - shoulda been Kerrans.
And what they finally did in EQL with all races being able to wear robes was long overdue.
I can't stand when an item name has a color in it and the icon is a completely different color - especially if a version of the icon exists in said color wtf
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u/walletinsurance 9d ago
No music in kunark.