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wymranar

I <3 SKs *kissy face*
Joined
Jun 16, 2019
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Hey fellows,

I’m just now getting into exploring CoV and seemed to notice something that I absolutely hate. Doesn’t it seem like everything in the new expansion is complete cookie cutter? Let’s look at the “features”


Claws of Veeshan is EverQuest's 27th Expansion!

Major highlights include:

Beautiful new Zones to explore (Every zone is a revamp)

New Spells, AA's, Gear, and Armor (from what I can tell there are no new aas/gear or armor. The only thing you might call new is that a few bags have stats on them. Everything else gets an obligatory 15% bump and that’s it)

Dragons Hoard - A dragon's hoard for those that have collected so many items, it is nigh impossible to contain. This is an additional space to hold all those items you may need once more but do not need now. (Don’t even get me started on this)


Now, let’s look at an expac from a few years ago.


The Burning Lands
Beautiful new Zones to explore (3 or 4 legitimately new zones, PLUS GMM!)
New Spells, AA's, Gear, and Armor (ok, spells and aas were lacking, but we got a huge new feature in evolving gear and type 18/19 augs!)
New Luck Stat (another new feature!)
New Faction Window (yet another new feature
!)
Return to the Planes Lore



Ok, so what’s going on? It seems like this trend started to accelerate in ToV, but it’s been getting progressively worse. I understand we are in a pandemic, but I imagine this kind of work is doable while working from home. Even if we factor in some drop off in content, this latest expac still seems severely lacking.

Looking at the financials recently, a see a pretty positive outlook for the future. So, what’s going on? Do you all think that we will see something exciting for Anniversary with new owners?
 
I for one really hate the old zone new twist idea. We pay for expansions that really just get tweaked to fit our new levels yet we pay the same as say a game like wow that is priced for complete new content. shadowlands for wow is 39.99 cov for eq is 34.99 by comparison eq puts out a new expansion every year while wow adds new content to same expansions and rolls out new expacs every 2 years.

by there math we pay almost double every 2 years and get nothing more than washed out zones with max level mobs. i understand that the game is going into its 20's and new content is rougher to come by but that should reflect in the price as well. old content revamped should not cost us the same as fresh content with major changes....... the juice just isn't worth the squeeze!
 
They dedicate a lot of their resources to TLP servers also. In a perfect world the infrastructure is there already and they just flip switches for expansions, etc. But from what I'm recalling in my bias memory is that every rollout comes with needing to dedicate teams to the updates and fixing broke stuff.

That said, there's no excuse for the small squeeze on development for new content. They just underwent an acquisition, but I would be surprised if they didn't restructure their project teams at some point to keep their financial viability moving forward into the future. I'm just not sure if that's exclusively in new expansion content or if a portion of that is in-game purchases expanding. Some games can survive exclusively on that model, there's no reason EQ should miss out on that if they can spare the resources.
 
What’s the number 1 money maker for DBG? It’s TLP right? People are mainly paying and playing EQ for nostalgia reasons. Revisiting previous expansions is a way for them to expand the game and keep that nostalgic feel that people keep coming back for.

I didn’t spend a lot of time in Kunark so I don’t get that repetitiveness from EOK/ROS. Even ToV/CoV seem newish compared to the original Velious. I for one really hope they revisit Luclin in the future. I just finished the Shaman epics 1-2.0 and it was very Luclin heavy. It got me excited and reminded me why that was my favorite expansion.
 
old content revamped
This is kind of not true. Everything is redone. The zones are different, the mobs, quests, the lore. It’s not like they copy and pasted Velious and hit +60 an n the mob levels. Plus didn’t they stagger the end game raid roll outs? Isn’t that new content still coming for CoV throughout the year?

While the setting may be the same, the content is completely different.
 
@SomeTester absolutely not completely different imo. All I’m saying is, I understand the limitations. But, there is a massive drop off in new content from TBL to ToV and even greater to CoV. If this trend continues I don’t have a good feeling about things
 
It seems to me if you take away the enrichments (ice, trees, door placement, nooks etc) then all the new zones are copies of the base zones. In other words if you just look at the border lines on the map they will match old zones they are based on. I seem to path thru "new" areas that I recognize as original zones.
 
It seems to me if you take away the enrichments (ice, trees, door placement, nooks etc) then all the new zones are copies of the base zones. In other words if you just look at the border lines on the map they will match old zones they are based on. I seem to path thru "new" areas that I recognize as original zones.
To me it would be strange if you didnt recognize the zone. In game i dont know how long its been, but i doubt that erosion would have changed everything in, for instance, overthere.
 
wym, I feel yah - I was under the impression of literal copy and paste of old stuff and slap some new paint on it.

it turns out that they actually re-create the zones, its not just textures and whatnot - they actually do all same amount of work in creating these "new zones" as if they were creating fresh never-before-seen zones... just with reference points to where/what should be located in it. I had always assumed it was some copy paste stuff to reduce/reuse/recycle - but it turns out they do it because of player nostalgia.

nostalgia is cool and all - but new stuff is definitely deeply desired

EQ's lore is some of the best in any fantasy universe - there's a ton that we could explore that would scratch the "familiarity" of known stuff, plus give us new stories and things to explore.

if we went more cookie nostalgia - I wouldn't mind luclin and i deeeeeeeeply would love an entire expansion dedicated to OG PoMischief and Bristlebane <3
 
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I also dislike the "remake" zones. I would have much preferred all-new zones made in the velious theme with zone connections to the original velious continent. Same for kunark. Don't remake VP, skyfire, overthere. Do new zones like gorowyn and kor'sha and connect them to the original RoK era zones.
 
I dont mind the revamps all too much. I would love to see Epic 1.0, 1.5's and 2.0 go evolving so they can be useful at current levels but group, raid and crafted are still better with ratios. or another massive quest line to empower them. It might also be time for a level squish however I fear that may break eq for real.
 
I don't understand why they copy the old zone layouts. A dev in one of the threads complaining about this said it is harder to copy an old zone than to make a new one. With so many people complaining about copy/paste it seems like madness to do extra work to provide something less than what people seem to want. I can't recall people complaining about new content so why copy old if it is harder?
 
If they’re legitimately re-making from the ground up old zones versus making new zones, then screw DPG. No one asked me if I wanted to play the same zone three times in 15+ years. Spoiler, my answer would be “no.”

and all the quests absolutely ARE cookie cutter... kill x of y mob, do this annoying quest for partisans that’s some combo of running around, picking up stuff from the ground, and killing a couple of mobs (also, you can tell that different devs do the quest arcs in different zones because some zones are super annoying and others are easy and less annoying).

and don’t even get me started about itemization. Shit is SOOOO cookie cutter that Ngreth literally had to change the copy/paste lore groupings from last expansion’s augs. For the record, it’s late feb. The expansion went live three months ago. Beta was active another month or two before that. Unacceptable.
 
Hmm...well it takes entire teams to design content. I might be wrong...but I don't think they've got those kinds of resources anymore...just thinking out loud.
 
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