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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.

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.

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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This week is my birthday and Lore got me the collectors edition of Fallout 3. I still consider the original 2 some of the best games ever and I have high hopes that this one will carry on that tradition.

Last night I was torn between attempting the newest D.I.R.T.Y. quests and playing Fallout…Fallout won and I have to say that so far it’s done a pretty good job of bringing the classic series into the modern world.

The first half an hour or so was basically a combination tutorial/character creation session which was pretty cool but I’m hoping there is a way to bypass parts of that since it’s really only entertaining once. I don’t think it will be a spoiler to say that you actually get to start in The Vault in this one and after the tutorial part and the  initial quests that have you leave the vault I spent the rest of the night in the first town you come to.

This is where I can really see shades of the original games. After 3 hours of running around exploring town, talking to people and picking up a bunch of quests I already have what appear to be conflicting quests and I know that choosing one side is going to have an impact on how the story progresses.

So far my only complaint is the first person perspective and the real time combat. I’m getting used to the first person part – though I still don’t like running around either armed or with my fists up like I’m about to punch everyone – but I think the combat might take me a while. I need to play around with the VATS (paused slow motion Action Point based system) to figure out if I can make it come closer to duplicating the strategic turn based combat of the originals.

I’ve seen a couple of complaints about the lock picking and hacking mini-games but I find them entertaining. I find it interesting that they managed to give them appropriately different feels. The lock picking is a slightly twitchy while the hacking is a more mental exercise though neither is overly difficult. It’s true that as an RPG it should be about the characters skills and not mine but I find it a bit more immersive to participate in these activities and I can see that it would be easy enough to tweak the difficulty of the mini-game to make it easier for more skilled characters – I’m not sure it works this way I can just see how it could be made to.

Last Wednesday SoE surprised everyone with the rollout of GU48 in EQ2. We knew it was coming but everyone figured it would either be later in the week what with Fan Faire taking everyone’s time and energy the previous weekend. This update added a ton of content that Lore and I were looking forward to so Comcast deciding to help us celebrate the release by having our internet connection drop off was NOT appreciated.

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