Lore: The Path of the Beastlord
When 85% of the news articles on EverQuest2.com are about other games, it’s easy to miss bonafide EQ2 items. That said, a new article has been posted outlining some of the Lore related to the Beastlord class coming in the Age of Discovery expansion.
The beastlord class is coming in winter 2011 with the EverQuest II expansion: Age of Discovery!
In North America, Winter is defined as the time period from 21 or 22 December and 20 or 21 March. With the last Beta invites scheduled to go out on November 16th, we were assuming that the Age of Discovery would launch on either November 22nd or November 29th. Should we revise that estimate?
You can read “The Path of the Beastlord” at EverQuest2.com.
Tags: beastlord
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Comments (40)
Anaogi
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Unless they can’t even get THAT right. Given the track record, it’s anyone’s guess what is going on in there.
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Necromancer
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Considering the track record of the EQ2 development team, two weeks after beta sounds right because they never allow ample time for testing, and seem intent on releasing every patch, every GU and every expansion completely broken with thousands of different bugs.
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Landacet
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Even if they had a month to test out it will still have many bugs unless the devs are actually saying that some of the stuff in game now “is working as intended” a simple example are the code items that drop in EoW
095_scout_bracers 15768 (yay code roleplay)
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Dharvane
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Correction to your post, Feldon. You said…
The beastlord class is coming in winter 2011 with the EverQuest II expansion: Age of Discovery!
I think what you MEANT to say was…
The beastlord class is coming in winter 2011 with the EverQuest II DLC Patch: Age of Discovery!
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Striinger
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Damned if they do, Damned if they don’t.
Arguing about whether something is an expac is just pedantic and myopic. Whining about the expansion after receiving free expansions (GU’s) just paints large parts of the community as thankless spoiled brats throwing a tantrum over the dolly their mom won’t buy them.
As for buggy code, I have no idea where the break point is. Sev 1 &2 bugs (reproducible game or platform crashers) have to get fixed first. DoV highlighted how scaling out things like PQ’s change how things work.
This isn’t a console game where everyone has the same hardware and OS. Some people have massively powerful machines running the latest Win 7 updates, but others try to run things on their 5 year old laptop with XP SP 2 and a mess of spyware and virus ridden pirated software. Add to that people demanding better graphics, sound, multithreading and a code base that’s a decade old.
So, do they test using their standard lab and people who know how/what to test so they can release code sooner and start fixing what pops up in the varied upscale world, or do they hold back until the small tester group can find no more, then roll out and start fixing?
They make a LOT of mistakes (realization was too knee jerk), but be less of an idiot!
Maybe instead of closed betas they should try the 2-3 day open beta tests to get more people testing at one time?
Just remember…it’s a game that you pay to play. It’s a not an asset you bought: not property, gems or currency. One day the switch on these things gets flipped off, so maybe some should start therapy now so they can cope.
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Kassandra
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winter is pretty ambiguous, especially saying winter 2011. Snow is usually on the ground by middle to end of november, especially further north. Most people view winter as november-april sort of deal (or october to june some times in Canada).
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Steve
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Are they going to say “coming in really late Fall 2011”?
No, remember though, their marketing team consists of the mail boy writing copy on one of his smoke breaks.
Do they still allow smoke breaks in the People’s Republic…er…California?
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Maesyn
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True, it’s not an asset. But I’m sure you’d agree that it is a service. Just like the one you pay for TV, internet, phone, etc. Just because it’s a game doesn’t somehow make it ok for a company to f*ck around and waste our money. People hate cable companies because they are notorious for shitty customer service, shitty service, overcharging, etc. Only thing that keeps most of them in business is little to no competition. And people don’t have a problem when the masses complain about them. But just because SoE is a game company they get a pass?
Fact of the matter is, if you want to act like you’re a AAA game developer, f*cking produce like one. As a professional software developer I understand how complex these systems are. They aren’t easy to develop or maintain. But considering the fact that other companies developing PC-based games don’t screw up as often is evidence they can and should be doing MUCH better.
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flosch
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Meteorological winter is often defined to start on the 1st of December for the northern hemisphere. That sounds about right. 3 weeks of planned testing, add one or two weeks of panic, headless-chickenesk patching and postponing, and you’ll end up in winter.
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Roxox
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Hey Striinger,
This is an internet forum. Take your sensible, well-reasoned response to a complex problem somewhere else.
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Galaji
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All the comments I’ve seen on release date so far seem to be forgetting an important factor, SWTOR.
They release on Dec 20th and I’m sure they will dominate the mmo scene for at least the first (“free”) month.
If I was a betting man, I’d place money on SOE staging the release somewhere around 1-2 months after SWTOR releases. This will avoid competing for media coverage and consumer dollars, and also allow them to lure back players after the honeymoon in SWTOR is near its end.
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Daffodil
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Don’t know howcome the winter there doesn’t start on the 21st December like the rest of the northern hemisphere but I’m pleased to see that the beastlord appears to have a real, living pet. The prelude quest had me a bit perturbed with the ghost pet, which was more akin to a shaman.
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spawn
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Well if you live in Canada you tend to define winter as mid to late October to sometime in late march early april lol
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Striinger
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@Galaji
Or like with Rift they’ll compete head to head to (without the media blitz stuff).
I’m still scratching my head as to why Sony threw two extra admin layers in for SOE to function…marketing and all of the deployment management. Maybe they outsourced it to Bangalore?
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Neihn
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Sony will not be pushing this back into early 2012. I don’t care whats coming out around the same time. The released TSO the same month as WoWs xpac back in 2008 so its not unheard of.
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Feldon
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I think if the Itemization and Content of the last 8 months hadn’t been so buggy, people wouldn’t be taking all these potshots at SOE over the lightweight AoD. There wasn’t this much fury at Fan Faire about it. We don’t know what the price will be, but $40 would be absurd. Instead of an expansion, I would have just sold the features a la carte:
I would also give DYOD for free to all players for 30 days starting December 1st. Having the features a la carte would give the side benefit of SOE knowing exactly what features they should spend their time on.
Oh please. NONE of the problems with Velious have had ANYTHING to do with DirectX, graphics, hardware, etc.
It’s been buggy quests, buggy zones, buggy progression, out-of-whack difficulty, unkillable raid mobs, and Itemization.
That was done as a PR stunt by Rift. It had little to do with actual testing and didn’t improve the game at all.
Yes. $14.95 per month or $150 a year. Most game developers expect to get paid $50 once every 2 years. Look at the bigger games these days that have full online capability, chatroom, item trading, and content updates every few months. Yet they don’t expect $14.95 a month.
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camelotcrusade
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I pretty much agree with Striinger. I love reading this site, but I always find more doomsaying than anything else in the comments.
Interesting idea about a la carte, Feldon. I like that you have maximum freedom of choice, but I don’t like that players would become extremely varied in terms of what they have access to.
I can selfishly say that since I would buy the full pack then I would just end up annoyed when friends don’t buy the pieces I want to share with them. And I can already hear the rants of the person who spent 20 dollars or more a la cart, decides he wants the rest later on, and proclaims he won’t spend another penny since it would end up costing him more than full price. Plus the inevitable forum whining about the Devs spending time on features someone didn’t personally buy.
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Anaogi
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That was done as a PR stunt by Rift. It had little to do with actual testing and didn’t improve the game at all.
Um, you are familiar with ‘stress testing’, right?
Beyond that, yeah. Absolutely none of the major, glaring problems have anything to do with end-user hardware. (Though to be perfectly honest, some of the difficulty problems do arise from, shall we say, faulty chair-keyboard interfaces. But not nearly enough to justify what’s happened.)
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Feldon
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Oh I’m not saying Rift didn’t launch polished and virtually bug-free. There’s no question it did.
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Anaogi
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I was talking about DoV’s issues. Rift is Rift. If only there were still a forum for that… /sad
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Harvy of Unrest
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That sounds a lot like forced F2P monetization concepts on top of legacy subscribers or turning legacy subscribers into F2P Gold Members without the option to downgrade to free if we wanted to.
Which… of course I think that’s been the plan this whole time since the inception of the F2P servers 🙂
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Feldon
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Harvy,
There are plenty of people who think $40 a year for expansions is a ripoff and that $15/month should give us all the content.
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Landacet
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Feldon,
That is very true. I enjoy my account and always have I just wished they would think, test, and produce rather then produce, launch and Fix.
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Murfalad
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I’ll buy the expansion without a doubt, but if there was one thing I’d like to see done in EQ2 it would be the itemisation properly, still sore about the state of the lower levels here.
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Artoisx
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Not in our game : Lore: path of panda
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Isest
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Landset said “that is very true. I enjoy my account and always have I just wished they would think, test, and produce rather then produce, launch and Fix.”
I love my eq2, I always have. The problem with the entire xpac of velious, has been. Launch now, patch day after day. There have been patches to patches. All because they they don’t test, and as far as I can see there is no quality control in place. They expect the folks on test, to do the testing for them. And we are all having to pay the price. Yes I come down hard on soe, I used to be a COBOL programmer, and I would be fired from that job if I were to test the way soe does.
We have a great game, and it could be so much better. We have broken itemization, broken raid mobs, pathing issues, and other things that are still bugged, and now we get a dungeon finder that is buggy as well.
Add to this a declining player base, and don’t tell me it is not happening. Anybody can see that over the past few years we have had a fall off. WE are keft with what I call the hard core base of eq2 lovers, kind of like the eq guys who refused to leave eq and come to eq2.
I just would like for once to see soe, get back on track, and start doing things right. Is it the dev’s, or is it the producer, or does it go all the way to smedly. I don’t know but it is obvouis to me, that something needs to change.
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Isest
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@feldon you said
“There are plenty of people who think $40 a year for expansions is a ripoff and that $15/month should give us all the content.”
I don’t mind paying 40 bucks x2 for me and the wife’s account for a real xpac. My problem with this xpac is that it feals like were moving back to the days of the old adventure packs. I am sure you remember those, the bloodline chronicals and all. I am worried that we are headed back that way, kind of the rmt route, 10 bucks for this 20 for that.
Will I buy the xpac, yes. You either buy it or you miss stuff. That is why they call it optional. You buy to unlock the class, since there is no content.
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melpheos
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Do you smell bugs ? I smell bugs…
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Landacet
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“Will I buy the xpac, yes. You either buy it or you miss stuff. That is why they call it optional. You buy to unlock the class, since there is no content.”
Whether its affordable or not, optional or not(not optional to end game raiders who need more aa’s) our issues are with having to put up with
the rush order expansion, this isnt fast food. Because even in the food industry they do a lot of weeks of testing.
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Anaogi
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Not in our game : Lore: path of panda
-cough- Hua’Mein -cough-
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Necromancer
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I will not be buying Age of Discovery because I refuse to pay $39.99 for a glorified Game Update.
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Isest
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I did not know we had a price for it yet, please like where you got that info at Necromancer, becasue I dont see it on the soe site, now the actually eq1 is 39.99.
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immasukr
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Hello, I wanted to let everyone know I’m looking forward to buying this. I’m also looking forward to buying most of the appearance gear with station cash. I’m looking forward to all the nights I wont be able to play the game right do to bugs. I look forward to everything that did work and was fun to be taken out or changed in one way or another. I look forward to people no matter what saying it’s wrong to wonder why the changed what I liked. And most of all I look forward to this time next year where everything that took months or weeks to get will be completely changed and will only take less than 30 minutes to get. See ya online.
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Necromancer
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Name one EQ2 expansion that at launch was not $39.99 or more.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
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Isest
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I will point at the 3 adventure packs. Bloodline Chronicles, and i cant remember the other 2 that were like 9.99 a piece and were listed as optional.
This one is listed as optional as well.
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Necromancer
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Adventure Pack is not an expansion. Age of Discovery is listed as an expansion, not an Adventure Pack.
Try again.
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Landacet
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“The Official price for Age of Discovery will be 19.99” posted on ranger forums for dreamy rangers…
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Sharann
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What annoys me most is the lack of communication from the Devs, more than the bugs themselves.
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Landacet
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we get it he was wrogn Necro, this forum is to inform and comment on, its not to go against expac or optional or cats raining from heaven. We can all agree on 1 simple fact, the price will determine the players reaction.
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matthewayne
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Yahh. I agree with the previous comments. This is the first so-called “expansion” I’m going to pass on. Seems like AoD is just another way for them to get money out of us. These “features” should’ve been free and released as updates. Seriously?! who will care about the other-half of DoV in 2013?? Sorry SoE.. gonna be too late by then for me. With all the great games releasing soon and all the idiotic bugs/let-downs coming from the dev team over the past year.. I’m not even sure i’ll continue to play EQ2. Fail. Fail. Fail. You killed EQ2 for me. Thanks!
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