One of the things that made the first Everquest great was the how huge the world felt. This was due to a number of factors, including the relative lack of fast travel, the lack of theme-park progression and the general vastness of most of the zones. I think the main reason however was the (again, relatively) huge choice of starting cities. There was one for almost every race, meaning that entire groups, and sometimes even guilds formed composed of the same race. This, along with the unique looks and society of each city caused one to grow a personal connection with your race. Nowadays most MMO companies have a habit of lumping large numbers of races together into few cities. In my opinion this approach lead to a loss of identity with your race, and ultimately shrinkage of the world as there would be far less zones to explore. This was saddening to me, one of the things I most love to do in MMO's is explore. On the EQNext website there was a poll recently about starting zones, this is odd to me as during the official reveal back in August it was announced that players would be starting at the nearest "rallying call" and they would be doing away with starting cities entirely. I personally voted in favor of many starting cities, because I miss the sense of racial identity that was so prevalent in EQ1. The poll makes me wonder if SOE may be exploring alternate routes to the one they announced at SOELive in August, which for me, is a good thing. What do you think of the concept of starting cities? Would you like to start in your races' own city or are you intrigued by the idea of being dropped straight into a rallying call?
I think the devs are really striving to promote the idea of player-built worlds. I'm sure they expect players to create their own cities. And who knows, maybe some day new characters will start out in these player-built cities. That would be awesome!
I agree and I personally think it's a great idea I think it's a great idea to make the player closer to his/her character!
I wonder how well they can implement that in a MMO. Are they going to give everybody their own personal sandbox instance like runescape?
I'm really not sure how I feel about starting cities. My main problem is that there is usually a quest line and it ends at a certain point. You usually get to the point where quests become universal for every race. At that point you lose your sense of identity. That's something that I really think MMOs need to work on. I know it would be difficult to continue throughout the whole game, but I think it would be worth it.
In theory I like the idea but then it comes down to how it turns out in practice which is iffy. I can see it improving with time though.
