EQ2s Sentinel’s Fate expansion launched on our anniversary. Naturally, being complete geeks we played on launch night! (Of course, it WAS a Wednesday, and we did our anniversary dinner on the following Saturday instead). Loredena (my guardian) and Sisca and Acsis (his monk and fury, respectively) are our usual trio, and they had been 80 for several months. I had started leveling up my original launch-day character (Daena, a conjurer), now moved to a second account, to 2-box but she was still only 76 on the 17th. Luckily it turned out that there were three different starting quest lines on Spire Island — one, from Felice Adae, was for 80 crafters, which all of us were, a gnome gave out a questline at 75, and then the city reps gave theirs out at 78. By the time we had done the gnome and crafting lines, as well as many of the quests stemming from that, Daena had turned 78. On Thursday night she dinged 80, and on Sunday night Sisca’s ranger Casis (slated to replace Sisca in the foursome) also turned 80. Of course, in the meantime our trio has hit 82

In ten years of playing MMOs, until TSO we had never had max-level characters. Clearly, while we won’t be the fastest levelers around, we’re going to max out again within a few months, which will leave a very long time at max this time around. Still, we have plenty of AAs to acquire and a ton of content left to explore (not to mention a stable of alts) so I’m not overly concerned.

First impressions: I loved that there is an extensive series of crafting quests. The first two to complete the initial lines (before the 4 daily crafting quests) made 2.5 levels each, which is awesome! The zones are huge, and a bit laggy due to the number of people, but that’s already improving. They are also really stunning — much brighter colors then EQ2 tended to use early on, and some fantastic artwork. The quests tend to involve an awful lot of running back and forth, which gets tedious, but also ensures you learn your way around. The coin is good, and the quest rewards were definite upgrades for Daena and Casis, whose gear was lagging, but not really for the others, who are in a mix of tier 1 shard armor (TSO) and Kunark quested. I love doing collections (ooh, shiny!) and there are a lot of them in this expansion — but there are also a ton of spawn points for the shinies it seems, so so far no difficulty in doing them. As a crafter, I appreciate that I can do my harvesting without much difficulty as well. I’m also looking forward to spending some time in the Hole once we’ve gotten a bit further along in our questing, and I like that so far everything has been manageable by our small group rather than requiring an optimized one (we never did do the missions in TSO for instance, getting all of our shards from the solo quest).

Having read all of the uproar over Champions and their lifetime subscription plan, but only if you order now and not after you actually get a chance to play the game, I was glad to see that they had relented somewhat and actually opened up the beta to pretty much anyone before the deadline for making a decision. I was also curious since a lot of the bloggers seemed to be disappointed with what they had seen of it. I wondered if this was a fault of the game or just a case of the hardcore MMO fans looking for something, anything, to be the second coming and dethrone WoW.

So, first my overview of the game play experience. I know that much of this has been posted elsewhere but I think it’s important to put down what I saw while playing so you can see why I’ve formed the opinions that I have.

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Lately I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed in EQ2. There are so many different things I want to do that I find myself paralyzed by choice.

This weekend I decided that what I needed was a change of scenery and since both Champions Online and Fallen Earth had open “betas” I figured I’d give them look. I plan on writing a more detailed post on each of them later but here’s my one line review.

Champions: City of Heroes 2.0 or maybe CoX evolved and that’s not a bad thing.

Fallen Earth: The love child of Fallout 3 and Eve with a crafting system that I find very compelling.

More later – the iPhone is ok for short posts but not so much for longer writing.

So, over at Clockwork Gamer, Kendrick posted on EQ2’s Research Assistants with a fishing comparison.  A lively discussion ensued, but since it is pretty apparent that we have fundamentally opposing views on this, and since neither of us will convert the other, rather than continuing to spam his comment section I’m taking it to my  own blog.

First, let me lay some groundwork.  Kendrick is the guild leader of a large raiding guild – a casual raiding guild, but still a raiding guild.  I’m the guild leader of a tiny friends-and-family casual guild.   While I led a few raids in EQ, I’ve yet to be on one in EQ2 in 5 years of playing, and I’m unlikely ever to be on one.  While I would enjoy doing the 12-man city raids, I have no interest in doing what it would take to turn my tiny guild into one large enough to do the 24-man raids, and I’m also not going to jump ship to a larger guild just to raid.  Besides – week nights the only night I stay up past 10:30 is the night I have a team game of Civ 4 with friends, and Saturday nights Sisca and I play D&D with those same friends.  I like my sleep too much to become a raider!  (For the record, I’m over 40 and I’ve been playing MMOs since EQ launched in ‘99)

As noted elsewhere on this blog, Sisca and I only recently reached 80, with his monk and druid, and my guardian.  Next highest in the guild is a 72 necromancer, followed by my 67 conjurer, and then a 62 berserker and a 60 wizard (who has been playing for about a month ).  Even ignoring time zones and varying work/D&D schedules, with those levels and classes we’re barely capable of grouping up for instances in, say, Tenebrous Tangle – we can’t yet do Kunark instances let alone TSO ones as a guild. 

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I know a lot of this has been posted elsewhere by now but due to traveling and having to upgrade my main computer to Windows 7 when I got home – the beta build is expiring so I have to upgrade to the RC – I never managed to get this stuff posted. Still, I want to get it out there and I hope I can help clear up some of the confusion that I’ve seen here and there over the last couple of days.

The first session we attended on Saturday was the premier of EverCracked, the Jace Hall documentary about the creation of EQ. I can strongly recommend that you grab a copy of this when it comes available it as hilarious as well as an interesting look at the people behind the game.

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From my notes:

Odus is continuing the void storyline, and bringing it to a close.  It will tell us what happened to change the Erudites to how they are now, and give more lore/backstory about both the Kerra and the Ratonga (apparently there have been a LOT of requests for more Ratonga lore), as well as Al’Kabor and Al’Rod — backstory for Paineel too.   Hinted that the Rime are somehow involved?   There will be a ‘new’ villian — hinted at both the Rime and Sathir, so not sure.   They said that Odus is part of an overarching storyline that has yet to be told, and that what happened in the past will be reflected upon the future. 

They plan to bring back forum quests around the lore, and interweave those with in-game lore events.   They indicated that Kerafym is not gone.   Also, that dragon from Icy Keep will be back, all grown up, before the expansion — a two group raid, that they indicated was not intended to be particularly difficult, and is not tied directly to Halas.

The Erollisi storyline begun in February continues, they reminded us of the Innoruk quest line stating that ‘The daughter of hate, crowned in treachery, sealed the fate of Valor’s twin’ and thus the opening of the Shard of Hate leads to the opening of the Shard of Love.

Other odds and ends:  Kaitheel was surprised at how upset people were at Gardy Giftgiver having been beaten up, and we can expect a quest line around him this forthcoming Frostfell.  There are no new deities being added with Sentinal’s Fate, but that does not preclude more arriving before or after.  Minor deities may also return to the world, though not necessarily able to be worshiped (also, they aren’t extending the deity quest lines another tier).   Currently the LoN dev team is entirely separate from those of EQ and EQ2, and the lore does not tie well; they would like better integration.  Considering adding some small quest lines such that one is challenged to a card game in a tavern, which will trigger a LoN scenario.

A couple things I noticed — the dev team (influenced by Brenlo) are definitely making changes to encourage the less-hardcore amongst their audience. Someone complained about the research assistants, and specifically complained that it reduced what he could sells Masters at. Brenlo’s response? ‘As a 76 ranger with 30pp to my name, I don’t consider that a bad thing’. I’ll point out as well that when the research assistants were mentioned at the opening night kickoff, there were a cluster of young men who loudly booed; the rest of the crowd cheered. It appears that even amongst those hardcore enough to pay for Fan Faire, that it was in general a popular move.

During the session in which the change to all raids going forward was discussed, such that at each pull of a boss mob one can, through lore, set the difficulty level, a top-tier raider complained that this reduced his guild’s sense of accomplishment. This elicited a handful of responses: From the devs, they pointed out that since it IS handled through lore, the entire encounter changes based on the difficulty level, such that one might not even face the final boss on ‘easy mode’, and Rothgar pointed out the likelihood of achievements that indicate the mode/boss killed. Brenlo’s response was a bit more pointed — this is one of the few times I’ve heard a producer of any MMO state outright that it is a business decision. It is not cost-effective to produce raid zones that only 5% of the population ever sees (Brenlo’s stated percentage), and this change is in part to greatly increase the number of guilds that can work their way through the zones, and both see them and experience the lore.

We only managed to take in a couple of sessions today but, between them and the announcements from the keynote tonight there’s going to be a lot of new stuff coming for SoE games. I’m just going to go through my note book and give you the stuff that I remembered to write down along with some impressions.
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I attended two EQ2 sessions at Fan Faire so far today.  The first was on quest mechanics, the second on more-general game mechanics.   What was interesting in the first was watching the process of rewriting a quest — in this case, that really annoying open-the-gate quest in Thundering Steppes is being rewritten!  No longer must you know Halasian, nor come only during the day, to earn the right to come and go as you please.  Further, the story line makes more sense, AND does not require you to lower your faction with the centaurs!   Instead you’ll collect guard tower reports, find a box of coins (look under the sofa!) and kill a highwayman causing problems, all to make the road safer.     For how the quests themselves are built, I’m afraid you had to be there, or talk to someone better at conveying it then me.   suffice it to say that while flexible, the tool IS still by its nature limiting in what can be done.   There was one point of interest though — there is a desire within the dev team to add other ways of advancing/completing quests that is not so dependent upon kill-10-rat mechanics.  This will require rework of the tool, as well as some gameplay mechanics, but they seem to be keen to do something there.

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Yesterday in my Twitter feed (@sisca if you want to follow me) and I saw this from @spouseaggro:

Silly Far-Stretched Comparison of the Week: “..Free Realms looks and feels like an overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW..”

To be clear this was a quote from some blogger and not the opinion of the fine folks over at Spouse Aggro

That got me thinking and then this morning I was reading through the comments over on Broken Toys post about the game and it kind of congealed.

For all of you out there that are trying to compare this to WoW – or whatever your favorite flavor of the month is – I just have one thing to say…

LEARN 2 PLAY!

You know like you did when you were a kid.

No, really. Put your achiever, must get to max level and get the uber gear mindset back on the shelf and just go out and learn how to play again.

I’ve got 2 young nieces, 7 & 9, their parents don’t really like them watching TV and they tend to regulate how much time and what they can do on the computer. They don’t seem to mind that much though because they have more dolls and horses and such than you can shake a stick at. They even have a small tent setup in an otherwise unusable area of their house that is filled with these dolls and such that they call their cloud castle. They spend hours playing together, making up stories or acting out stories from their books. They also spend time competing, racing each other, playing soccer etc.

I can see them playing Free Realms now and jumping from job to job, game to game, achiever to explorer to socializer.

If you really think that this is just a “overly cutesy, yet still grindy, version of WoW” then this game is not for you! This game is only for the truly hardcore PLAYer’s that really understand how to go into a world and make it their own and to do so for nothing more than the FUN of it.