A Bear of a Pet!

The exact details of the Dire Bear mount/pet in The Shadow Odyssey have been revealed.

• Available as a summoned pet from 1-19, after that, becomes a mount.
• Becomes a mount at level 20 – 20% run speed.
• Increase in run speed at level 40 – 30% run speed and armored appearance.
• Increase in run speed at level 60 – 45% run speed and increased armor appearance.
• Increase in run speed at level 80 – 52% run speed and increased armor appearance.

Scaling Mounts: Called to the Carpet!

With this mechanic in place, it seems even more obvious to me that the carpet in the D.I.R.T.Y. quests in Sinking Sands should have followed the same regime. Right now, a level 10 character can do those quests and get a 35% carpet in 45 minutes of easy solo questing. That seems overpowered to me. This scaling system would have been PERFECT for the carpet. Make it a 20% carpet at level 20. Then scale up over time.

The Pre-Order Mess: Redux

Here we go again with the lobes of SoE’s brain not communicating. You would think that since EQ2 is hardly available in retail stores and it costs SoE a fortune to have a retail presence anyway, and since likely half of the $40 retail price ends up being gobbled up by the publisher, manufacturer, and retail costs, they’d just give up on the retail box like they did last year* and make the DirectDownload desirable. Nope!

The Dire Bear is a Retail Box Pre-Order item only. But wait it gets better…

The Void Beast-in-a-cage house item is a DirectDownload Pre-Order item only.

You guessed it! SoE wants $80 from every player for The Shadow Odyssey. Since they’re already going RMT, and they’re already putting major game-changing stuff into LoN which is basically RMT, like Unicorn mounts (the single-most desired mount for girls), new housing, special mounts, special equipment, etc. why not just let us pay $5 more for the DirectDownload AND get the Bear.

Are you sure it’s a Bear?

Of course while they’re at it, it would be great if they made the Dire Bear look like, you know, a BEAR! It looks like a Sabertoothed Wolf. It is very obvious that they took the existing Warg model and tweaked it, rather than giving us an original mount. This is one of those situations where trying to stick with existing lore is LESS appealing than going for the attractive, extremely popular ice bears from The Golden Compass.

If a pretty unicorn is the fantasty of many girls, an armored ice bear is an equally powerful fantasy for the boys. There aren’t ANY mounts in EQ2 that I am particularly excited about. Maybe that’s why I specced 66% runspeed.

*The Rise of Kunark box contained a poster of a Dark Elf (rather than Kunark) and a poster of Legends of Norrath. The packaging was very cut-rate with paper envelopes for the discs, which for all intents and purposes were EoF DVDs relabeled as Rise of Kunark. Most players saw download times in excess of 2 hours, and analysis of the DVDs revealed no Kunark files whatsoever. The boxed version was just a bad idea all the way around. And this is not to mention the mass confusion this created with pre-orders of the Burynai pet (which was only available in certain situations which were so vague that SoE ended up giving the Burynai pet to everyone anyway).