What did I mean by that? Damned good question. I don't design MMO's for a living - just keep that in mind when you ask me such a question. But I do recall that for months the pre-release hype for EQ2 was talking about some radically innovative stuff. Go back and look at the old hype - my fingers hurt too much for me to type it here. But I was expecting some really cool stuff.
Okay, the graphics are great. My footsteps "echo" when I run through tunnels. Cool! But like the old TV ads "WHERE'S THE BEEF?!" - I want to know where the "content" is? If we got a "next generation" look (and echoing footsteps) - where the heck is the "next generation" of "stuff to do" - what I'm calling content? Where is the creativity and innovation????
Well, there are wisps of it. See, I think they had a whole team or more working on this sort of stuff - and - I dunno - maybe it never worked out - maybe they rushed to beat WoW to marktet - I dunno. I know people who workin in the gaming biz - I don't see them a lot any more - I'll ask them and see if they know. Where do I see these teeny wisps of creativity? There is a cave, kinda hard to find - but do Pecket's Patrol in Antonica - and u'll get a huge hint (it's near where it ends) - and you find a cave full of gnolls creating rotstuff scarecrows - just like the ones out in the farmer's field. That's great! I just found that today - and I love it! Wish I'd seen it earlier. There are other examples like this, but way way way too few.
And there's almost none in the department of spells, abilities and tactics. Okay we get fun fluff spells. Whee. Actually that's decent, I'm happy about it - but not blown away. The thing we do most in the game - fighting - is the most backwater, derivative, stole- borrowed heavily from other old games (daoc and ff) part of EQ2 !!!!! Gah! Those of us who see this and recognize it for what it means - we are shocked, depressed, let down - whatever - we hate it. Okay? Sure, we like other parts of it too, most of us. But this - and the on-line selling - and only 4 characters period - and a lot of these harsh and profit-sucking moves SoE has made - frankly has already made a lot of us go over to WoW.
Go over to WoW. Read the guide on getting a Hunter from 1 to 20. Seriously - go to Alla's WoW site and read it. Learn what they did w/ their version of the beastlord, the Hunter - how he has to go catch his pets, train them and keep them happy - and board them if he wants to get another ---- and he can learn a skill from a new pet - then teach it to an old pet he had in a stall! That's some seriously creative stuff - it's new and innovative. EQ2 has nothing to compare to that in the area of spells, combat, fighting, tactics etc. I'm not trying to say WoW is such a great game overall - I've never played it - I want to try it now - but hell, it might suck out loud. But they at least got something doen that eq2 didn't. They at least in that one area advanced the envelope.
Now - tradeskillin - a lot of you might say "evil, aren't you forgetting tradeskillin - that's pretty rad. And... I dunno - i hate tradeskillin - personally I want it to be done as fast as possible. I'm not a big fan of this sitting there making stuff crap - and if I'd designed the game, I'd have given the non-artisan the option to give the collected junk to an NPC craftsman to make the darn thing for you - heheh sorry to all who love crafting! (evil now ducks for cover knowing bombs are coming). I jsut find the whole EQ2 tradeskill thing a ... it's not for me. And again, back to what most players spend most of their time doing - there was no major content innovation there - in fact - it went retrograde - they consolodated, simplified - and made it narrow, controlled and lacking in variation or options. And it's making me sick, cuz I wanna be playing EQ2 for the cool stuff, for the parts they got right - and yet the parts they screwed up weigh me down like 10 ton anchors. Oh well. I guess I'm crazy to think that. Or just -->
I don't mean to wear you people down. Sorry if I ruin your experience or sour your fun. But SoE really needs to give us a better game that this. Or maybe I am asking for too much. Yeah, maybe we need advanced AI to get the "next generation" I want. But I don't think so. Yeah, these games are ... they boil down to grinding for exp and gear. But something creative could have been done to make this process more interesting/rewarding/better whatever. That's how I feel.