In the wake of EQ2Follow

Good day and hello from the Final Fantasy XI forums!

Those who have been following E3 2009 may have noticed that Square-Enix recently announced Final Fantasy XIV Online, the second MMO in their blockbuster franchise. It has been made clear that this is a completely new game and there will be no transfers for existing FFXI characters, and as you can imagine the playerbase is abuzz with speculation and anticipation of what's to come.

Having a mind to reference history, I thought I'd come over here and ask any of you fine folks that were playing at the introduction of EQ2 some questions about that experience.

What was it like when EQ2 hit? Was everyone on EQ excited, or were there many holdouts who didn't want to invest yet more hundreds of hours to start from the beginning again?

What actually happened to the population after the introduction of EQ2? Did the servers become empty and have to be compressed? Did things carry on mostly as they had been? Was it more difficult to find groups?

Was there a great deal of recidivism - people who switched to EQ2, decided it wasn't for them, and came back? I understand that for some time the original Everquest had the greater population.

To your knowledge, were there any new features / systems implemented in EQ2 that worked so well they were added/altered in EQ via content updates?

Any other comments about what to expect from our virtual world in the times to come?

Thanks for your time, take it easy and have fun out there!
KK

EverQuest II (or here or here)is set on the fictional world of Norrath five hundred years after the The Planes of Power storyline of the original EverQuest game. It was released 11/2004.

With all due respect, this isn't going to give you any insight (which is what I assume you seek).



This isn't going to give you any idea or answer to your questions because it wasn't EQ2's release that caused any of this to happen. Was a small, indie title by some company no one had ever heard of before that released 15 days later that devastated EverQuest.



When EQ2 came out, I had maybe 4 people in my circle of friends (and perhaps 10 people in the entire guild) who went to play it during offhours. After they got enough of all the server crashes, rollbacks, and the stupid subclass system, they came back.....just in time for the release of the aforementioned game from the unknown studio. THAT game was like someone hit EQ with a chainsaw connected to an industrial vacuum cleaner, population wise.



Not a single one. The two games are so different (in focus, playerbase & target audience) that there aren't too many features or systems that would be parallel. Plus, EQ1's codebase is notoriously ancient (often called 'spaghetti code') and difficult to modify so there aren't too many truly new systems that can be bolted/jury rigged onto it. Mercs are an example of one, but the merc AI is as stupid as the mob AI (never thought I'd ever see the feature implemented in a way that made Guild Wars' henchmen look like geniuses).



Fragmentation and cannibalization is what you can expect. More people spread over more titles and new titles not attracting new people to the genre but just poaching some from the existing titles. My views of FFXI come courtesy of some corpmates in EVE who switched (since I haven't played the game since shortly after launch - the "server assignment" system turned me off, not to even get into the class dependency issues back then. The graphics didn't appeal to me either) but from what they say, FFXI's playerbase is FFXI's playerbase. Can't really expect too many of them to bolt, given how much "work" goes into developing a character (something, incidentally, that used to be EQ's hallmark and means of subscriber retention). But I don't think comparing EQ's "successor" to FFXI's is a valid comparison. It's like comparing today's "Global Economic Crisis" to the Great Depression. It's a fool's errand (and that's not an insult, it's a figure of speech. Turn of phrase, if you will). The environments are totally different. EQ didn't have a behemoth to deal with (it WAS the behemoth at that time), for one thing.

It would be better to watch what happens in the genre as a whole, since that's where the greatest effect is going to be apparent. DCUO, APB, The Agency, Champions, Star Trek Online, Telara, and the continued growth of RMT games is going to give you better answers than "How was EQ when EQ2 came out" while ignoring WoW, which decimated both of them. In fact, if I remember right, EQ2's release was almost a failure due to WoW's open beta coinciding with it.

Read the entire post?



And as far as the OPers questions, I'd agree for the most part with Rems post. I knew of no one personally other than myself that left EQ1 for EQ2 when it launched. I knew a bunch of people in EQ2 that had played EQ1, but had left long before EQ2 came out (mid-PoP era at the latest and many prior to that).

I've known more people that have left for EQ2 in the past few years, but still nothing in comparison to other games. And as previously said, most people that were playing EQ1 simply tried out EQ2 and either didn't like it, or didn't like it enough to leave EQ1, and either kept playing both, or simply came back to only playing EQ1, or switched to a completely different game.

Yther Ore.

Edited, Jun 4th 2009 10:00pm by Yther

My sarcasm detector detector detects that there are some broken sarcasm detectors detected.

I remember a good amount of people playing both but I don't think it was a massive move of people to EQ2. WoW on the other hand took about half the people (mostly kids) from EQ and most never came back.

I never got out of the newbie field in EQ2, tried hard to like it but didn't and went on to Wow. Am not a kid, have spent about 3 or more years in Wow and I am back to EQ. Which I guess you could look at two ways. One, look at all I missed and now need to catch up or you can look at it from the standpoint that the 'break' was good for my perspective and now I am home again and very happy and many things new to me to explore.

Didn't know there was to be a new independent online of FF. That is interesting.