Scott Johnson

I liked earning gold that way. It wasn't much, but I liked just saying, oh, this guy's going to go off and I'll take this 300 gold mission. And he'll come back with a bunch of gold that I didn't have before. And then I'll exploit that and have him go every day. And then I'll definitely check it. Like if it's the right motivation, I'm in. But that just never felt like it to me.

yeah uh all right well that's about that for that let's talk about mythics for a little bit more or raids anything about these any changes to mythics i should say this time around for somebody who loves them like you do are you excited about yeah mythic plus dungeons are my jam i really love that um i'm so crazy about mythic pluses that i actually um

Zalatath, by the way, for those who don't know, she's your floating balls in front of her face cinematic lady. She's our big bad to this thing. And the thing that Metzen said in the interview was going to show up throughout the saga, not necessarily just like, oh, she's the raid boss and we're within the It's much more than that.

I'm putting up an image of her right now that she originally appeared as. She looks like she'd be no trouble, you know? Look at this image. I'll put it in Discord. You see that and you just say, oh, yeah, just look at her. It's like an NPC. Big deal. She's not even wearing shoes. Lame, right?

That's right.

I don't remember now.

Oh, that's why I was thinking of Legion. Because she was actually a weapon. Oh, there it is. Yeah, the sentient blade. Yeah, her story is a weird one. But anyway, yeah, I like that. I mean, it will be like all this stuff, proof's in the playing, right? All your mythic friends are going to play it, and then they'll decide whether these new affixes are stupid or not. So watch for it.

Come into a town near you. All right. Okay, I'm really excited to play this. So I'll just play it. Here you go.

Why, it's the town crier. It's the town crier.

All right, what you got there is a multi-generational take on the town crier. We got the OG Nicholas when he was five, then his nephew who is now five, and then Nick, or then me doing the, it's the town crier, and then you got Nick who's now 24 doing his little bit, and then you got Van again doing his thing, and then the two cries are Van and then Nick when he was five again.

All in one glorious bumper file. Anyway, I had fun putting that together. So, uh, yeah, it's nostalgia. It is that it's in its purest form. Uh, let's get to this, uh, here message that we got here. Uh, this is sorry, tabbing around here. Uh, this is a quick message from Bay Lell in our chat room and, uh, discord and all that stuff.

How does it feel, he says, with all the hype coming to The War Within? Do you think that any XEQ devs wonder when it went Blizzard's way or why it went Blizzard's way rather than theirs? So referring, obviously, to EverQuest 2, which launched the same time as WoW. I remember at the time, there were a lot of people, including my very into MMOs brother-in-law, who were convinced that

All the money should be on EverQuest. They were the ones that were going to do it. And that WoW was going to be a also-ran. It wouldn't last very long. You can still play EverQuest 2, EQ2, and it's fine. It's community and everything. But why did it run away as the clear frontrunner and has been since?

I don't have a good answer for this, except to say I think the game began as a more, even in classic days, people want to act like it was more hardcore than it was. But I remember when this game came out and everyone said, when you die, you just float around for a minute as a ghost, and then you get all your stuff back. This is a baby.

I remember people saying stuff like that, even about WoW's initial days, which people act like now. Oh, your hardcore days, man. Those were the days. You don't remember then.

um it was already that right they were already getting accused of care bearing but i think that their instincts were correct make this game as as as available to as many players as possible and that will carry you longer i also think choosing to do a art style that was uh significantly less at least aiming for realism and more stylization did them enormous favors

Because it lasts the test of time. The technology and what we see today is vastly improved, but it's still consistent with what the game was in its early days. So you can keep that consistency throughout the years. They were trying for like the hottest looking mannequin level freaking quote unquote realism at the time with EQ.

And it flopped on its face with that particular aspect because it looks like ass now. It looks terrible now. So never go for the cutting edge. I think that was a hugely smart decision for them and to go stylized and to make the game more playable by more people. I think that's really it. Do you have any thoughts on that, whether I'm insane or not?

Yeah, I agree. What was the game I was playing right before while I was playing a lot of... Oh, geez. What was the one that introduced Realm versus Realm? My brain just went crazy. I can't think of the thing. Anyway, the one that had Merlin in it, it was... I can't remember the name. Anyway, that game I played a ton of and it had this very punishing death problem where you would die.

First of all, they didn't have like questing, proper questing. It was just like grinding. So you'd find a place where a bunch of creatures were and just kill them until you couldn't stand it. And the name almost came to me and then it left again. Shit. Some people at home are yelling at their stuff because they know. But anyway, when you would die, you would lose some percentage.