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Fan Faire Day 2 in Review

Sisca — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:01:28 +0000

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.

Next up was the Mechanics panel:

There will be a major changes coming for ore/gems as well as tinkerers and transmuters, I believe this will be in GU53 but it may be after that. First of all they are changing which spells use what. The spells/combat arts will come from the gem nodes with the softmetal being used for Fighter/Scout and the gem being used for Priest Mage. The ore will now be used only for armor and weapon crafting and it’s not clear but I’m assuming that the loams will just be used for potions and tinkering. The other major change is that they’re moving the gem nodes onto their own spawn table so that they’re no longer sharing a spawn with the ore nodes – so if you harvest a gem another gem will spawn.
After the change you’ll be able to be both a tinkerer and a transmuter on the same character. This is being done because Domino would like to move the majority of the adornment stuff to the transmuter and off of the various other tradeskillers. This will allow you to do adornments and tinkering no matter what your tradeskill class.
The expansion will also see more tradeskill quests added, including more Far Seas quests. Domino also mentioned that she’s working on making the Odus tradeskill faction be more quest oriented than grindy as the Kunark faction was.
No new spells will be added with the expansion you’ll just get upgrades to existing lines.
Some spell effects, for example haste, are already approaching 100% so spells with those effects may get an additional effect added instead of just increasing the amount of haste.
There won’t be a new AA tree but the Archetype and Class trees will be extended downward.
The Class tree will be reorganized to look more like the Shadows tree from TSO to make it easier to extended and follow.
Any new AA abilities will be innate and will trigger off of combos instead of requiring more room on your hotbar to use.
Combining effects such as ranged crit and melee crit into just a crit effect. Along with this they are adjusting the crit multiplierers for the core job of the class. This will allow you to use a wider variety of weapons and armor as it will only have +Crit on it and your multiplier will make it appropriate for your class. In other words a piece of armor with +Crit on it will provide a bonus to both ranged and melee crit but a Ranger would get a bigger bonus to ranged while the Berserker will get the bonus to melee. This is especially helpful with jewelry.
They would like to consolidate buffs where it makes sense, especially self only buffs. It doesn’t make sense for you to have to cast 3 different buffs on yourself when you could just cast one and be done with it. Standing around a buffing is NOT what they consider a fun part of the game.
New items (and possibly retrofitted to older items as time permits) will have a rated value. This value will decrease as your level increases beyond the level of the item. This probably won’t play much of a factor until post level 50. This will encourage you to upgrade to newer gear as you level and it will also allow you to clearly see that a new piece of gear is better than your existing.

Class Balancing:
My notes are not as strong on this section for several reasons, mainly I was busy trying to follow what was going on and also, most of this stuff really only applies to raiders so I didn’t fully understand some of it as that’s not my interest.

Priest Balancing:

Balance heals vs amount of health players have. Some of the heals are extremely weak for well geared players.
Make sure every priest has the tools to do the job of main healer so that raids don’t feel they HAVE to have a plate healer.
Evaluate the stun heals so that priests feel involved. These are useful spells that heal a large number of HP but stun the priest for a time basically taking them out of the fight. This isn’t fun so they want to come up with a different trade off that will keep the priest involved in the fight while still making them think about when to use the spell so they’re not just hitting it as fast as it refreshes.
Improve heal over time for the druids. As it is on a raid the druid HoT sits behind the shamans ward and the clerics reactive heal so that by the time it actually triggers there is little for it to do. As such druids aren’t sought after for raid healers. What they’re looking at is saving the heal if the tick comes and the player isn’t damaged. Then on the next tick if the player is damaged they will get 2 ticks worth of healing. If the spell wears off without using all of its healing they’re looking at having that healing jump to another member of the group.

Rogue/Summoner:

They want the rogue and summoner to work together for debuffing. The rogues will debuff melee while the summoners will debuff spells.
They’re also looking at improving the scout pet for summoners so that they can actually stand in close to AoE mobs and survive long enough to be useful.
Dumbfire pets ill be come a damage/debuff based attack spell and no longer a pet. I’m sure if you ask nicely you could get them to at least keep the pet spell effect for it but I don’t know

Bard/Chanter:

Adjust key buffs to make group buffs raid wide so raids don’t feel the need to have multiple bards and enchanters just to keep each group buffed. This is part of trying to make all classes wanted on a raid, they need to free up spots for those other classes and not have 8 of 24 spots taken up by 2 archetypes.
Also looking to allow limited casting of unique buffs (those you can only cast on 1 person at a time) being castable on 1 person per group on a raid.
With these changes they’re also looking to balance support vs DPS. Again, this is trying to make all of the classes useful on a raid.

Fighter:

Adjust taunt and hate gain.
Consolidate block & deflection.
Brawlers gain a clear advantage to the avoidance proxy buffs since they are the masters of avoidance.
Improve the desireability of defensive stance.
Balance defense and damage.

Sentinals Fate:

There is a plan for the Mythical even though you’ll be outleveling it. They’re going to be adjusting effects so that you’ll want to use it even though there will be better weapons available. My take was that they’ll be adjusting it so that you’ll want to hang on to it for certain encounters.
This will wrap up the Void story line and introduce a new villain
It will also explain the change in the Erudites more fully.
They will be adding to the Ratonga lore as well.
The Hole will be coming back as a contested dungeon, the players seemed to really like this idea.
There will also be a return of contested raid mobs, again the raiders really seemed to like this change.

Fan Faire Day 1 in Review

Sisca — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 06:59:52 +0000

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.

The first session we made it to was a what’s in store for Legends of Norrath session. The big news was they’re coming out with a new expansion that will be the final part of the trilogy that started with the Ethernauts expansion. The goal of this trilogy was to provide some of the back story for what was going on in EQ2 with TSO so if you’re interested in the lore it might be worth it for you to play through the scenarios to get the story. They also mentioned that there would be 2 new loot cards, 1 each for EQ and EQ2. The EQ2 loot card will be a new frost themed mount that seemed to be on par stat wise with the mounts you can get from Lava. Looks wise it reminded me of the invite-a-friend horse but with a frost/ice skin. For EQ the loot card is a dragon illusion and they mean a real dragon – you know giant lizard with wings type of thing. I didn’t catch the stats but come on you can fly around as a dragon!

Next up was a session on how quests are built in EQ2. See Lore’s post below for most of the details. I will say that, having worked with Hero Engine – the engine being used in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic – their design tool looked extremely flexible but it’s that flexibility that can allow the bugs to creep in. This is especially true the more complex the quest gets. They showed the dialog tree for the tradeskill tutorial and it looked like a plate of spaghetti with all of the interconnections between the nodes.

Next up was the EQ2 game mechanics session. Again Lore talks about that below but I’ll rehash my notes. First up they announced Achievements. As part of the achievement system they’re revamping the journal window to be side by side to allow a better display of information. They’re also revamping the Persona window so that they can show he info from achievements. Achievements will be things like kill 10,000 rats – much like the slayer quests of today which will be retroactively added to your achievements. There will also be exploration and tradeskill based achievements as well as potentially Class specific achievements such as heal 100 people. Achievements can also be “meta”. The example given was a test one called “Love the Humans but hate the Goblins” which you got if you completed both the “Hug 100 Humans” and the “Kill 100 Goblins” achievements. None of these will give you anything game changing. They’ll mostly be titles if anything though I do think they might consider adding a house item for some things. They did say that there are no plans for giving a buff like rewards such as you get from the Lore & Legend series. These are supposed to be about bragging rights and not something that you feel you need to do to make your character better. Oh, and I’ve heard several people mention that EQ2 isn’t WoW or that they stole this from WoW etc. Remember WoW took this from XBox Live and they did it for a reason, players love it. The good news is if it’s not your cup of tea there’s nothing that say you have to participate other than by accidently completing an achievement. Oh, and the best news is that these are per account not per character since the idea is to show the achievements of the player. This means that if you get the kill 10,000 orcs achievement you only have to do it once. So, yes, it’s possible you’ll see a level 1 running around with a title that indicates he’s slain every raid boss in Kunark but so what, the player behind that level 1 earned that title.

The second big announcement was the Auto-Mentoring system that Lore described below. The interesting part was the idea of putting together a group of people and all auto-mentoring down to say 30 and doing one of the lower level raids. Since level 80′s mentored down to 30 are going to be way over powered that group could do 2x raid encounters and possibly even 4x. This will allow you to complete those encounters at the appropriate level.

Bullet points that I gathered from the keynote tonight:

At launch the Station Cash system only had about 5% of the players use it in both EQ and EQ2. Now about 20% of EQ players make use of it and 30% of EQ2 players.
A new Station Cash feature will be the partnership with HP to deliver art prints of the in game artwork to your home. They plan on having the ability to buy prints of many of the current in game paintings in July and in the near future add the ability for you to get a print of your character as well.
Another addition to Station Cash will be the ability to do an automated server transfer for $25. This should go live in 2 weeks.
They should announce 4 Million registered users for FreeRealms next week.
FreeRealms is adding full progression for both Demolition Derby and Race driver professions. This will include quests and equipment. Also adding the ability to customize your car so putting in garages as well.
New soccer mini game is coming as well. It’s no FIFA but it looked like a decent arcade soccer game.
FreeRealms TCG is adding a Card Creator system that will allow you to create a card featuring your avatar. You’ll then be able to get 10 copies of he physical card, each with a claim code, that you can give away to your friends so they can use your card in the digital game as well as the physical game.
SW:G will be adding some user generated content as well. The Star Wars chronicle system will allow you to create player quests that feature the Iconic characters such as Luke and Vader.
Everyone was expecting the EQ2 expansion was going to be Vellious, boy were we off base. Looks like it’s going to be Odus instead. Hopefully they’ve done something to improve lighting in Tox Forrest but other than that I’m looking forward to checking out Stonebrunt again. Wonder if The Hole is still there.

Any questions please feel free to leave a comment and I’ll try and answer them.

Fan Faire – EQ 2 edition

Loredena — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:45:29 +0000

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.

From the game-play mechanics session came announcements of, yes, new mechanics! Planned for LU 53 (which is targetted for September according to Brenlo):

1) auto-mentoring! yes, you will be able to talk to someone in your home city and choose a x0 or x5 level to be mentored down to, automatically, so you can go out and complete those quests at the appropriate level without having to find someone to mentor. So as not to discourage ‘real’ mentoring, you won’t get that 3 times increase in AA experience, but it otherwise will work the same way. And, should you find someone to mentor while you are automentoring, you can end it, and switch to mentoring a player — they are hoping this will get more people out in the lower zones, but appropriately leveled. Furthermore, they plan to add some missions (obtainable at level 80 only, sadly) which will require that you be at a specific level to complete them, thus utilizing the new system.

2) the current achievement system is being renamed to Alternate Advancement, or AA to make way for a brand new achievement system! This will be account based, not character specific, as it is intended to be viewed as the achievements of a given player, not character — they compared it to XBox Live Achievements (and yes, I see the irony . So, you will see achievements for things like kill 1000 goblins (which will retroactively play off the slayer counts) but also for exploration, completing a zone, crafting 100 tables or other similar items. There will be meta achievements (so for instance, finish a zone, followed by finish an expansion) and achievements that are either cumulative across alts (the kill rats quests can be done by any combination of alts) or require something be done by multiple characters (get 3 to 80 for instance). Having achievements be across the account gives the devs more freedom for class-specific achievements they said, as you were likely to have ONE character who could meet it. They also didn’t want people to feel forced to get the achievement on every character. Also, as part of this both the quest journal and the persona window will be revamped.

3) raid scaling — new raids (not existing ones, unfortunately) will be set up to have ‘tiers’ of difficulty, on a per encounter/boss mob level, that will be handled in a lore-appropriate fashion (not a popup select difficulty). So, a smaller, inexperienced/undergeared guild could choose to take the zone, or just a specific encounter on ‘easy mode’ while the top teir well-geared guilds can opt for heroic/uberhard mode. Rewards will scale accordingly, but this should both permit greater utilization of content (they want more people to see the zones and experience the lore) and the ability to work your way up as a guild through the difficulty level of a raid.

There were a lot of hints about forthcoming announcements as well, but nothing specific.

On a completely unrelated note, before the sessions I had an chance to talk to Kaitheel and tell him how much I love the live events. He is very enthusiastic, happy to talk, and young He did share a few tidbits though — Tinkerfest will be 9 days long, to include 2 weekends. Nights of the Dead will likely be extended from last year’s 2 weeks to 2.5 weeks this year. Also, having learned that players hate to have things removed, the Icy Keep will return at Frostfell! even though that dragon is likely to have shown up elsewhere in the meantime….