AllakhazamFollow

i agree with your assessment of the quest system in EQ when it launched 100 percent.

infact, if it wasnt for alla, castersrelm, and everlore, i dont think many people would have bothered questing in EQ at all. if anything, they own the fanbase and the subsequent websites a HUGE debt of gratitude. if it wasnt for the information gleened on this site, im sure alot of people would have canned EQ a long long time before they eventually did anyway.

that amounts to, im sure, millions of dollars in revenue SOE earned from EQ that might not have otherwise.

EQmaps was another great site. again, from players who found the "run around untill you bump into something" vision tm a bit annoying. and between the two, the maps and quest info, a whole new dimension, and thus interest, flourished around the game that wouldnt have been there otherwise.

Vanguard is another matter. clearly it is a game the developers WANTED to make when they made EQ. something they never got out of their system and just had to revisit, even though online gaming was evolving from the no-life geek relm of sitting in front of your computer because you couldnt get a date without paying for it from a pro, into something alot more mainstream.

LOTR better? i dont know. quests are quests, and pretty much all the same in every game. it is certainly more time friendly. but it looks......awfull....unless your the type that prefers saturday cartoons over the latest and greatest special effects movie.

that said, the game play is the same. whack-a-mole for levels and loot.

the only real differance besides the graphics is Vanguard is a group game, LOTR, from what i have seen so far, is more like WoW, very solo friendly.

better? i dont think so. just shooting for differant types of players. vanguard has more bugs, but its not hard to have less bugs when you work with graphics that dont take up alot of band width, ie, require ALOT less coding to deliver.

as more games poped up, and many of the glaring inadiquicies of EQ were fixed with each one of them, and new mechanics were experimented with, web sites became less and less necessary, and chat became more and more prevelant.

there are more vanguard web sites poping up than LOTR sites. if thats not an indicator of what the people think, i dont know what else to tell you.

persoanlly, i dont think either of them will be the next block buster. certainly neither one will over throw WoW as they begine to develop the top end game more and more.

vanguard COULD have been, but for the most part, i really feel people are done with the 5 and 6 hour gaming bingeing. they crtainly have the graphics and the foundation, ie the immersive world. they just dont cater to the right playstyle.

LOTR does, but they dont have a very immersive world, unless you squint your eyes, and pretend to see something thats just not there, and they certainly dont have the graphics people want and never will without a complete rewrite of the game.

the next blockbuster is going to be a vanguard/eq/eq2 world with vanguard graphics and WoW mechanics and playstyle.

its not either of these. its not warhammer either. COULD be Gods and Heros, mabe. or sigil COULD pull their head out of their **** and make vanguard more casual friendly, ie, opening up the dungons and their quests to solo and small groups. but dont count on it. thats the problem with softwear developers. they create the perfect game for THEM. Blizzard just had fewer geeks than most working for them.

It amuses me how much Shadow believes he is an authority on everything he writes (poorly) about.

It's obvious that you only played beta and apparently on a shitty computer. Seriously, are you just really insecure about Vanguard that you need to keep pretending that you know jack about anything else?

I took some character shots and a few scenery shots. I shot the face/gear shots in character select because it was just easier that way:

Human Male
Human Male Body
Hobbit Female
Hobbit Female Body
Dwarf Male
Elf Female

Elf attacking Barghest
Dwarf killing Boar
Skeleton rising to attack me!
Bug minding it's own business


The Great Barrow (Exterior)
The Barrow Downs
Landscape shot of Bree

Me in the world's ugliest hat

God damn, that hat kicked *** Anyway, I've already seen the character screenshots of Vanguard. It's the same basic stuff aside from my screenshots being of more mundane locations since I was too lazy to walk far with my camera.

Captain of the Main Train?

Trust me, I've made that joke already.

Still, it's better than "Man Hunter".

I thought LOTRO was very pretty, but for some reason, it never grabbed me. I've been in the beta since... sometime last fall, can't remember now, and I have absolutely no desire to play it.

After hearing some positive views on VG, I'm so tempted to go get it (along with more ram, haha)

I liked LOTRO. I didn't love it. I don't miss it. It was like the nice guy that just never fully caught my attention.

But I agree, the more healthy games out there, the better. Competition really does make devs improve their games.

Lol, that's a good comparison.

It's nice, has a good job, looks good enough...but there's just no spark.

What can I say...I've been smitten by the bad boy Vanguard.

You have to admit though -- That's one ugly hat.

My first online gaming experience was actually with the original Diablo and later Diablo II(I feel like I just admitted to paying a prostitute to pop my cherry. Cue smart @ss Eldy comment in 4, 3, 2... )

Staying with the analogy, EQ came into my life around 2001, and treated me much like an older woman would a college kid. She'd been around the block a few times already and I'd barely gotten it out of my pants once or twice. I spent the next 4 years as a "casual" EQ player, she wasn't in my life everyday, but I'd make a booty call every chance I could.

When WoW came out, I cheated on EQ. WoW was a hell of a lay(had some great features, like being very casual friendly), but she was just ugly.(Elves were purple and had foot long ears, there were guns in the game...ugh.) I stuck around 6 months or so, but then I moved on and never looked back.

After WoW, I had brief flings with Guild Wars and DAoC, but it wasn't anything serious. GW was like a trashy trailer-park blonde. She was fun for little while, but you damn sure weren't taking her home to mom. By the time I picked up DAoC, she was a former homecoming queen working as a truck stop waitress. Her best years were far behind her.

Middle of 2006, in a moment of weakness, I made one last booty call to EQ. She was still there, and had even had a little cosmetic surgery since I'd last seen her(I left sometime after OoW, and came back just before TSS). She was still a hell of a good time, but she was never going to be "The One". There were just too many differences between us. She was too clingy, and just took too much attention(time). And she was just way too high maintence a girl for me(expantions every 6 months, need to have 2 accounts and 2box to accomplish anything).

Then I finally met Her. She was beautiful, fun to be with, everything I was looking for. We met briefly at a party(stress test) and I was instantly hooked. I was finally able to get a date with her(closed beta invite). Things moved pretty quickly between us(preorder & open beta) and the next thing I knew we were a couple. I even went out and got her a diamond($199 lifetime membership). I hope I didn't rush into things, but so far I'm totally in love with LOTRO.

Edited, May 2nd 2007 12:16pm by Zakthan

My name is Twizzle, and EQ popped my MMO cherry. Then I joined Aude Sapere, and my sanity slowly eroded until I got unjustly banned after discovering a dupe bug in the latest expansion of the time (Dragons of Norrath?). After that, I took a step back, took a few months off, and restarted with AS, only to quickly lose interest in the game and switch to WoW.

I've been off and on with MMOs much like I'm off and on with smoking; some weeks, I'll play 20 hours, other weeks, I'll barely touch the game. I guess it's just a nice way to waste time until real life hits (i.e. I graduate and get a job).

LOTRO didn't actually "click" for me until around release time, after I had been playing beta for months. Until then it was just some random MMO I had to play for work that was sort of like WOW, but not quite as fun.

And then I hit a level where I had to start min-maxing traits, and I fell in love.

Speaking of games that lost their pizzazz, I just got an e-mail from NIC saying that they were re-activating all City of Heroes accounts for free play through the weekend.

And here I just finally got around to uninstalling CoH a week or so ago. No way I'm going through that download again just to run around for a couple days.