Erei

FE always had odd difficulty spikes. Still do sometimes. Places where mobs respawn super fast, or with ridiculous aggro range (s2 devil's own I'm looking at you). Or better, both. Sometimes looting was just too risky, the area had to be rushed before the respawn+large aggro radius killed you. I had a boss doing 100+crit in early S3 (dieseltown) yesterday. Almost killed me. With armor use maxxed, and pretty much best armor of the level. Some things never changes The random master boss are a stupid design decision. I played S3 yesterday, and there is one master in Quarantine, and another in the pre-fall museum. For quests (there is a 3rd but it is not needed for the quest, and you can CC->loot the item). They are super small places where people don't stay, and the game population is not enough to support group content at random places. Especially considering how low the reward is. The pre fall museum also have a quest to kill a quest object, and if you stay at range, it's 100% safe, but it's a master object, with lots of HP. I assume it's meant to be done in group. That's 3 quests with a master in it, in an unmarked place on the map, for little rewards. How many people did those in a group ? Did anyone ever did ? That kind of things are common in "old school" MMOs. Having random group quests was normal. And bad. Especially on low pop games. Which is why we don't see much of that anymore. Release FE had odd decisions and design. Factions had a greater impact on build, and you used to chose the faction for what they offered and not for RP. Unique skills, mutations, items.... For example, Enforcers had a rifle skill, and so did Vista. When I played, the majority of the server was LB, I assume for the heals, but it could have been another reason, I was too far off "endgame" to know the meta and stuff. They also wanted mutations to be "support" only and not used as main "weapon". So they were trash for the most part, with a few "op" exception. They really, really, didn't want a "caster/mage" type of character. I think they really had a thing against fantasy MMO that dominated the market at the time. Most of their marketing was about how much FE was not fantasy. Stuff like "we don't have paladins" on their ads. Lots of people asked for "mage" type of character, through offensive mutations, and the devs were very vocal about how they didn't want to. If I remember correctly, OP skills where nerfed, and nobody played mutations except for healing. So they had to revamp them to make them less trash. Ironically, Willpower is still a useless stats/noob trap to this day. The game was meant to be slow. Everything took a long time, from leveling to travelling and crafting. No instas, no xp boost. AP quests were pretty much mandatory (no free random AP/dome/race). Which included the player's favourite : faction wheel flipping. Lots of factions mobs where grinded, their ghosts forever haunting the wasteland. This leads to things like builds having a faction attached to it. IE "rifle-crafter.LB". And people suggesting new players to pick the opposite faction of the one they wanted, so they would flip only once. "Do your AP quest" was probably the most typed sentence on help chat. And we used to have a spreadsheet for AP quests. PvP was to be essentials. They did it with the crafting, mostly. Initially, we only had the boxes (the one with a message in chat) and node in pvp, but it was not good enough. Back at release, we didn't really have "rare" materials. Fasteners, plastics, gears, glass... that kind of stuff. So, they made a patch to change that. And the rare/uncommon mats where supposed to be found in PvP area, almost exclusively. So you wouldn't be able to craft the actual useful items without going there. No boss fastener boxes or anything like that either. That was quite a drama back then^^ Icarus was very much against fast travel, and if I remember correctly, wardrobe. The first one because they wanted the world to feel "bigger", and the other so you could see what kind of armor the opponent was wearing. Ironically, ever since we have FT, I feel the world is bigger. I never went back to lower level zone before, because it was so far away and took ages. For all intent and purposes, they stopped to exist for me, making the world smaller as a way of consequences. Now, I can, and I do it at times. G1 did many things wrong, but fast travel and wardrobe certainly isn't.