CamBamUniverse said:
beastro said:
Grape_Bullion said:
BF 1942 was the only true Battlefield masterpiece.
It's one of those "You had to be there" games and so much of the problem with the latter games simply comes down to map size, especially those that screw you over if you're not riding a vehicle since they always prevent truly vehicle vs vehicle maps.
FFVII rightly deserves all the praise it gets, it just hasn't aged well, at all. It might be hard to imagine nowadays, but the graphics did drop jaws, even the sprites.
UO and EQ are still the best MMOs ever, even if they had massive flaws. Yet again: You had to be there.
I have a question for you. It isn't meant to spark an argument, just friendly debate.
Do you think the fact that "you had to be there" makes those games good? I mean, I feel as though things just get outdated. Mario 64's controls got outdated, and have been vastly improved by more recent Mario games, and yet people still recall 64 as the second coming of Christ. I still respect Mario 64, because heck, I played it on the N64 and enjoyed the hell out of it for being one of the first of it's kind, but the only reason I'd play it today would be nostalgia. I don't think it's awful, but certainly outdated and I really wouldn't ask anyone to play it.
So are you trying to say that you respect these games or are you trying to say that they're still good and people should like them?
Oh, only in the moment. I can see why someone can hate FFVII now, just as someone their age 10 years from now will hate their favourite game.
The guys I listed that you quoted were all terribly faulted and as much as I want games like that to come back (mostly old MMOs), I'd never want them to come back completely cloned. Too much about them were annoying for no reason and those who played them accepted it because there was nothing better or they were totally new to the genre.
The only thing I want back is some of the core mechanics of the games (again, MMOs here), that have been sacrificed for broad appeal and make the game less intriguing.
EQ still holds a strong appeal for me, I play it now free to play and have played emulated servers that tried to be as true to the old game as possible. My only issue is with JRPGs now.
I will never play one again because my view of them has drastically changed.
Especially FFVII as I got older as the graphics aged and the more annoying bits stuck out that cover what was once good in the game (and the few things that still make it good). I used to really be into JRPGs as a kid and from the start I admitted that they weren't challenging, at all, I looked on them more as an interactive movie or TV series and the main ones that got my attention. FFs IV, VI (they'll always be II and III to me), VII and IX had stories I liked.
Funny enough, FFII was my first taste of fantasy in any medium with knights and kingdoms and all and I actually found the steampunk in III to be a little jarring at first (Back when I never realized that FF sequels weren't really sequels and thought that one was directly linked to the other with the Magi War that caused magic to fade in III being the events that took place in II).
My major turn against them came when I realized that their gameplay was so wooden, structured and gave you a false sense of risk vs reward compared to shooters and others that actually took skill even when you had a guide for the game as is what I later discovered with PC RPGs. You didn't have to be good at them at all, just spend enough time playing them once you got the mechanics down pat.
More than that was FFII, III and IX. They didn't have great stories. FFII was fairly standard fair and was only interesting because fantasy was new to me, III because of the odd quirks about it like Kefka and IX because of it's own quirks like King Cid being a frog and the things like the minigame where you play him, the other characters and the style and setting of the game, plus I thought the idea of mesa like landmasses surrounded by dangerous mist turning the mist into the open ocean and leaving everything below it shrouded in mystery like the deep sea REALLY interesting (The game became less interesting to me when that plot went away and I didn't like how it was basically thrown away).
VII I once liked for the same reasons, but as I got older, I paid attention to the story more and came to really appreciate and how screwed up Cloud was because of what was done to him when I didn't really notice it when I was younger.
Also, I never got the whole thing fad over Sephiroth. To me he was a Boba Fett long before I knew of that trope. He might have been a bad ass, but we rarely got to see him outside of Cloud's flash backs while the rest was just Jenova. I'm not sure if it's actually the story of the game, but my take was that he died soon after the the events at Clouds hometown and what was later looked on him was just Jenova after it melded with him and took his memories, just like how Cloud, messed up from Jenova cells, created a false life after he bumped into Tifa again after arriving in Migard after all those years.
With that said, I can apply the same thought to not only the gameplay, but the story of Xenogears, my favourite Square game and JRPG as a whole. Same gameplay like other JRPGs and the story was very derivative for the most part. It was before I realized many Japanese games developers just borrow religious, mostly Biblical material, to make up for lazy writing and FF games have their fair share of it as well, not no where near as bad as Xenogear/sage.
Xenogears, however, had enough of a strange, unique story that I forgive of those faults and really enjoy it's mixture of religion and science fiction as well as serious subject matter that was mostly alien to console RPGs at the time. FFT is the same too. Funny given both and the fact that I'm a run of the mill Christian. The Gnosticism of the first and the Christ-is-really-evil of the second I found fine, I didn't get the trouble XG had being brought to North America).
So yeah, if you have me games like that now, I wouldn't like them at all and I feel thankful that my interest in consoles died when it came to PS2s launch and being tired of buying a consoles if they were going to be replaced every so often while my interest in computer games took off at the same time when my brother moved back home and introduced me to Everquest.
On to the others: I never played UO, I know it's mechanics and design are terrible, there was almost no real PvE aspect that was much fun and the game revolved around getting ahead by being the most ruthless Player Killer, exploiter and confidence man.
What it had until Trammul (sp?) was total freedom to do what you wanted, it encouraged PvP and didn't have any hard wired mechanics to prevent that (When I first played WoW my heart sunk when I realized they'd cut out cross faction communication: One of the key pillars of good PvP is good smacktalk, but I realize it's a drain on Costumer Service).
Everquest wasn't my first real PC game, but it was the one that really drew me into PC gaming and the internet on top of that. EQ is very rough around the edges and the game it is now is not the game it was 1999-2004.
Much of that love came from it being the first really MMO me for (and many others) and it existed in the days before things like datamining where spoiler sites could only work off submissions from the player base on items and secrets.
Compared to WoW gameplay, especially raiding, EQ was total crap.
Only a handful of classes could solo while some were in between in utility and some classes had experience penalties that would apply to the whole group, so when it came to picking a group, you picked a good tank, a healer (Which in EQ speak meant a cleric and only a cleric), an enchanter or really good bard for crowd control, and the last three slots for whoever you wanted, and if they were friends, you'd accept the penalized classes.
All raiding until Luclin/Planes of Power revolved around tank and spank and the only enjoyment from the PvE aspect came from the fact that no instances existed, so you had to do your time to earn raid loot which made you really value it and the fact that camping items turned the game into a funny interactive chatroom that fostered comradery more than modern games do.
The main aspect that made EQ PvE so neat was the sense of exploration and discovery... and danger.
I don't think that will ever be recreated because so much of it came from not only lack of data mining, but also the near lack of knowledge of MMOs as a whole. EQ wasn't the first one out there, but it was the first that really large numbers (UO got peoples heads turned and made them realize that there was something special and big about the genre. UO got it noticed, EQ made it popular, WoW made it big).
It was mostly the EQ community pooling resources in guild, on message boards and contributing to sites like Everlore, EQ Caster and Allakhazam (They were rarely looked on as spoilers sites and bad, but a place where people joined up to discover and share the game with). Entering a new zone and exploring it was very exciting and the death mechanics of the game made it that. If you died you left a corpse go back to res to regain exp and loot your gear.
If you died deep in somewhere and your pick up group disbanded, you better have friends or you were screwed. This was the worst for melee classes because they were nothing without gear, most of all their weapons. When it came to raiding, places like Plane of Fear could leave whole guilds naked needed their bodies and sometimes if often came to them begging others guilds to help them break the entrance just so they could recover their corpses. Raids, and most of all bad raids like what I just mentioned, took an ungodly amount of hours so it made it feel important to never screw up and personally, it made you really value your character and identify with it.
I played on a PvP server (Rallos > all) so that added another aspect into the game and my server was special since it's set up encouraged guild politics to happen (Vallon and Tallon split the server in different ways, Sullon Zek was based on good/neutral/evil so they all had hard wired mechanics to prevent free for all PvP which is what Rallos had).
In all four servers, it was the community that made PvP fun. Everquests PvP mechanics were terrible and and afterthought. It was a PvE game that later was given PvP servers after enough interest showed up and they always were the lowest populated servers.
Some classes were made for PvP for Wizards, Necromancers and Druids, while others were struggled to get by outside of group PvP. The worst were Warriors who were made to tank mobs, they had a bunch of armour and hit points, but crap melee DPS and their Bow damage was worse. Most casters could root and Druids, Necros and Shadowknights could slow peoples movement down, and when a Warrior went up against them, they were nearly powerless to fight back unless the warrior was good and the other person terrible at their class. On my server item loot was in so it made it dangerous to wear gear and be low on health. Because Wizards produced the most damage the quickest, naked Wizards running around attacking anyone with gear were very common because they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Later they added a skill to them Manaburn, that turned all their mana in one huge nuke. Once a Wizard got more mana than most people had hit points, they'd run around Manaburning geared people down, then gating and hiding (that same expansion introduced zones with no PvP in them) until the skill refreshed in an hour or so.
It was hugely imbalanced. Varant tried their best, but EQ wasn't made for PvP, later when Sony took over, they didn't care at all and it all went to hell.
Nonetheless, the player competition, freedom to attack people and open communication to allow smacktalk made the games PvP very enjoyable. WoW may have balanced PvP, but it's artificial. Battlegrounds made PvP souless, into fighting really intelligent AI.
My guilds celebration of WoW Open beta was a raid on Astranaar where we took it over, killed everyone and everything and laughed whenever someone flew into the die only to die wonder WTF was going on and where the windrider NPC was to fly off and escape (it was dead) in the town until finally after hours of battle the Alliance finally gathered numbers and drove us out of the town and then out of that zone.
We loved it, it was good old fashioned Everquest PvP and zone contesting.... then they made the windrider NPC too hard to kill... then they made the town vendors unkillable, then they made the guards too hard to kill and thus died zone contesting. Six months most of my guild quit and then I did.
Taking over zones, fighting in Hillsbrad, that was the kind of faction vs faction fighting we wanted, not zones that were basically two sports teams going at each other over zones that didn't matter, only the rewards you could get from fight in them. No loot was needed for open world PvP, we just wanted it to have meaning, but more and more of the population began to avoid it and just sit in battlegrounds line ups.
Beyond things like the heart being torn out of most modern MMOs and good JRPG story lines, both are "You had to be there". Everything else about them is done better these days.
Sadly with regard to early MMOs, their is one "You had to be there" that will never, ever come again, at least with a kid you could raised him from playing NES upwards as he grows up to understand the appeal of old, not so good games, but no company wants to make MMOs like they were made and technology ruins the adventure of them.
