Smed, you failed…
Two names guys; The Elder Scrolls and Civilization. What do they have in common?
You guessed it, they are both not managed by John Smedley (Currently President of SOE).
When you have an IP and a Game Brand which has its own demographics of a specific target audience and filling a specific Niche in the genre… you should take care of it and evolve it WITHIN what makes it the unique experience it was.
Sid Meier released Civilization in 1990 then released 4 sequels. Civilization was a Turn Based Strategy game and still is. It was released back when the Real Time Strategy games didn’t exist or weren’t very popular. After the release of Dune 2 and then Command and Conquer series then Warcraft.. did Sid Meier switch to that hype and mutated his Civilization game to try to grab as much money of THAT different market? No, Civlization remained a Turn Based Strategy game. That’s why it’s still a success and that’s why the fans are happy.
The same applys exactly for The Elder Scrolls and look at Skyrim now, the hype meter is unbelievable.
Compare these two games to EverQuest. Thanks to the clueless bald guy called Smed… (I hate him I cannot be political about it.. sorry) the idiot completely changed the whole identity and vision of what made EverQuest the game we all loved. He wanted to compete with WoW by releasing a mutation of a game HE called EverQuest 2.
Smed, learn from Sid and his Civilization IP. Learn how not to compete in a market that doens’t belong to your game’s demographics. Learn how to respect the fans of that specific IP and stick to its root. Just because StarCraft was a BIG hit doesn’t make turning Civilization 3 into an RTS game a good idea. Got that? Got that? Got that?
No, you didn’t get it. Because I KNOW for a fact you will fuck things up with EverQuest Next. It’s your expertise.. it’s why you exist; to ruin games and you’re good at it.
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7 Comments
LF SOW
I couldn’t agree more. The Original EverQuest was an immersive, outstanding game with many dedicated fans.
If “Everquest Next” wants to be successful, the creators needs to understand what made Everquest (pre-Luclin) amazing.
Smed’s comments about “evolutionary vs. revolutionary” are so vague it’s ridiculous. This game is gonna blow for sure.
bob
I haven’t payed for a MMORPG in at least 1.5 years, been doing weight lifting instead. Why? Cause they’re all wow-clone quest-grinding pieces of shit, and Pre-CU SWG was the best MMORPG out there.
I now have 8 free2play MMORPG icons on my desktop. They’re not even worth playing FOR FREE! It will be a cold day in hell when any of these companies gets a dime out of me for a wow-clone.
MMO Tomb
LF SoW your name is one example of why EverQuest provided a unique world experience. The mechanics of EverQuest revolved around an epic scale adventure where random strangers traveling can help you with many different skills and spells like Spirit of Wolf where your running speed is improved which makes traveling much faster.
The whole concept of “time” was essential to the genre. When Traveling takes time it gives you a community interaction to reduce this travel time from the community whether by teleporting others or casting spells on them. Same is true for down time; down time was essential that not only it provided people to communicate but also it made other role concept viable like the Bard’s mana songs.
Razak
I don’t get it. So they predicted that WoW would be uber successful and they released EQ2 to compete? That just doesn’t even make sense. EQ2 released before WoW, and in fact Blizzard was so worried about the behemoth that is EverQuest that they actually pushed up the launch of WoW in order for EQ2 to not get more than a month or two foothold on it.
Now that being said, surely EQ2 has changed greatly since it launched in response to WoW and not for the better. I can’t particularly comment on EQ1 vs. 2, most people who played 1 didn’t seem to like 2 but I hated 1 and I liked 2 so go figure.
I definitely agree with your base premise though, you shouldn’t change your genre just because some other game is more popular. Not really sure EQ did that, after all WoW was nothing more than a cheap knock off of EQ.
MMO Tomb
Hello Razak, you are right EQ2 was released before WoW. But if you lived the competition before the release of these two games and followed the “500 quests”, “1,000 quests” then “1,500 quests” announcements of these two under development games; it was a cold war of how many quests one can dish out. There was big discussions in the MMORPG community back then about the Down Time which EverQuest suffered from. EQ2 development team was focusing on “out-featuring” WoW which was the most obvious competitor instead of focusing on what made EverQuest a unique experience.
If SWTOR announce to include Dynamic Events to the game or remove the “Holy Trinity”; isn’t this an obvious attempt to compete against GW2. Regardless whether SWTOR is going to be released before GW2?
On 2005 Smed announced, again, to compete against WoW by turning Star Wars Galaxy into a Quest Driven Mish Mash and the infamous NGE was born and we all know what happened to that. The press release was funny but now it’s hilarious (in a sad way) to read.
Razak
SWG was a failure all the way around… any change to that was just a struggle to make it work. I don’t think that anyone was delirious enough by 2005 in SOE to think that SWG could ever compete with WoW. They were mostly trying to just be relevant enough to make money. Granted they were delirious in other ways, not really sure what they were thinking with their changes but still…
I still think you are off. Yes, SOE was aware of WoW and was trying to compete with it, no doubt about that. SOE was trying to compete wtih everyone. Heck I remember when EQ2 was announced, their feature set was talked about at the time to have been taken from AC2 (which oddly enough was a really strong influence on WoW). Whether they were trying to compete with WoW or any other game is not the point. At the time, no one thought that WoW was even going to win. Fans, critics, and I am sure SOE included all thought that WoW was just the next Horizons, or Anarchy Online… all hype, no meat. I am not entirely sure why SOE would have made sweeping changes in their design period years before WoW was even successful just to be like WoW. You are giving WoW far more credit than it is due. Nobody saw what happened coming.
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