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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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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 spent some time with the demo version of Diablo III…err that is Titan Quest over this past weekend. Since I haven’t finished the game, and haven’t even explored the multiplayer aspects or the map making tools available in the full game, I don’t want to give a definitive review but I thought I’d throw my first impressions out there for anyone that’s interested.
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It’s been a week since E3 and I’ve been going over my notes to finally put together my review of the games, besides Hero’s Journey, that I had a chance to look at.

This was my first experience at E3 and while it was a lot of fun it was also very tiring, I think my feet started proceedings to disown me on Thursday, and loud. I understand that they had some strict noise policies in place and this year they were enforcing them but still, when you’ve got 100’s of games playing at even normal volume the din can be overwhelming. I heard that the NCSoft booth got fined for one of their bands being to loud and I can believe it, lets just say that watching someone playing Aion on a system 10 feet from the stage is NOT where you want to be when the drummers started up.

The demise of the booth babe was also overly exaggerated, they were still out in force and there were still lines of gamers lined up to get their picture taken with them…kind of sad really. There were also quite a few women gamers/developers there too which just goes to show it’s not strictly a “boy’s game” anymore – a good thing if you ask me.

And now on with the reviews…

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I’ve been playing D&D for more years than I care to admit and I still think that the Baldur’s Gate series are some of the best PC games ever made so I really wanted to like Dungeons & Dragons Online. Sadly it was not to be. Turbine came so close but the things they missed on they missed by a mile.

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