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.

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.