Feldon It has been an interesting week, to say the least. Expansion launch weeks always are. It’s also been a rather bumpy ride for the servers and developers resolving issues that made it through Beta.
We’re trying to get back into the habit at EQ2Wire of skimming the forums and finding the gems of info which may be of interest to our readers. Here’s the standouts for this week:
- What is the Golden Path?
- Adornment and Tinkering Recipes Not Dropping
- Guard Level bump to 95
- TSO Tradeskill Instance recipe books
- Will of aTyrant questlines remain
- nVidia 3D Vision
- Shaders 3.0
- What is the Golden Path? From Brenlo:
The golden path is the first step in a larger revamp of our new player experience. We have hundreds of zones and for non veteran players, it can be intimidating trying to figure out where to go next. So phase one is the “Golden Path” of content. A better progression of quests through various hubs starting in the three new player areas above. If you go to any of the zones listed in the update notes and start questing at one of the hubs, you are now on the “Golden Path!”
Phase two, which is following in the upcoming months, will introduce the Storyteller window which will link quest lines together in an interface, providing the visual representation of the golden path. The Storyteller System will move players along through content that we feel will give them a fun and exciting experience.
- Level 80-90 Adornment Recipes and Tinkering Blueprints are not dropping. To be fixed next week.
- We are currently tracking the unnecessary and surprising level bump of every single guard in every part of Qeynos and Freeport to level 95 with the update. Previously, only a select few guards in 1 stronghold area (North Qeynos and West Freeport) have been at the maximum level. This change makes it impossible to complete quests like the Stein of Moggok, To Speak as a Dragon, and The Reaching Blade of the Assassin at the appropriate levels. EQ2 Forums topic
- Recipe books to make TSO Void Shard Armor are now available on the Far Seas Supply Division merchant for FSSD tokens. The loot from Tradeskill Group Instances now includes Battlegrounds armor and Marks of Manaar armor and jewelry recipe books. Also the drop rate for Tradeskill Group Instances have been improved. EQ2 Forums topic
- The Will of a Tyrant questlines have had a stay of execution and will remain until March 1st.
- EverQuest II now supports nVidia 3D Vision. Read more about it.
- Shaders 3.0 will be returning to Test soon, with the possibility of appearing in Game Update 56, but we are not going to make any assumptions at this point. Check out this quote from Imago-Quem:
Shader 3.0 was meant for a graphical update, not a performance boost. 3.0 shaders don’t automatically give you a performance boost. They allow you to pack more graphical effects into one shader and optimize for “new” effects like deferred lighting, shadow maps, depth of field, etc.. These effects have not been implemented in EQ2 yet, except shadow maps, but EQ2 now has the framework to support these effects. (Shadow maps were created within the shader 1.0 framework and have not been optimized for shader 3 rendering). The zone and character layouts of EQ2 were designed for the shader 1.0 framework, so running them in shader 3 will be just as slow unless we re-designed every area and optimized them for the shader 3 framework.
EQ2 performance is a hot topic within the team right now, so we will “likely” be attacking it soon, specifically for rendering.
big fat lol @ the first golden path quest bugged (no npc in steamfont).