Feldon In February, former EQ2 Senior Producer Alan “Brenlo” Crosby created a thread “What is the Golden Path?” It included this provocative passage:
The golden path is the first step in a larger revamp of our new player experience. We took a look at the starting areas, other than Qeynos and Freeport as we plan to move away from those, and reworked content so that it had a better flow. We wanted the quests in Darklight, Timorous and Greater Fay, to give you a better progression path.
When asked in the EQ2 ZAM Dev Chat to clarify this position, Brenlo responded further:
We plan to only allow new characters to start in the newer player areas. Timorous, Greater Fay, Darklight and soon Halas. The new player experience in Qeynos and Freeport are just not up to snuff anymore and do not provide as solid an experience when you enter the game for the first time.
Any hopes that this change would be canceled with the introduction of new EQ2 Senior Producer Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, were dashed with his indication that he would “not be changing anything that was short-term” (short-term plans). So it seems this change was destined to go in one way or the other. Here are today’s Test Update notes which will not apply to Live Servers until Game Update 56 in mid- to late-May:
Test Update April / 27 / 2010
GENERALQeynos and Freeport have been disabled as starting cities.
Player Reaction
Player reaction to this change has been swift and varied. You can read player reaction in these threads —What is the Golden Path? | EQ2 Dev Chat March 18th.
msgnomer:
I’m quite disappointed that you say you are moving away from Qeynos and Freeport. These are the biggest best cities in the game. Now, if you meant you were moving away from them as starting hubs and plan to revitalize them in some other way…well, then just ask, I have plenty of ideas for that! I hope Qeynos and Freeport aren’t going to be abandoned.
Liral:
Qeynos & Freeport are a huge part of EQ2 history and have far more fun options for people to explore and level up in that surrounds them than the others do.
VikingGamer:
While I readily agree that the newer starting areas are much better, it is still good to have choices, options and replayablity in varied starting zones. One thing they have that the other cities don’t is that sense of getting off the boat for the first time and after a little bit of exploring, coming to realize that WOW, I am in a BIG city.
Terron:
I don’t want one path. I want many different paths so that I can play many alts and get a different experience each time. Qeynos and Freeport do that well with their racial advisors. SF does it badly with very little choice of what quests to do. I have 5 toons at level 80. I don’t want to do the same set of quests with all of them.
Raknid:
Removing the isles is a REALLY poor idea. Simply add a screen to the character select process after you select your class that says “For the best new player experience start in <List of Cities>.” Then when they hit next to get to the starting location they can choose for themselves. Heck, you already have certain races defaulted to certain cities, Wood Elves to Kelethin for example, so the addition of the screen with the defaults selected to whatever city SOE thinks is best would surely be enough.
I mean if a person sees the window and is defaulted to a city other than where SOE wants them to start and STILL selects Qeynos or Freeport then chances are pretty good they have made a conscious decision to go against advice. DO NOT get rid of the heritage by removing the starting isles. DO NOT remove existing content. DO NOT treat people like they need to have the game laid out on rails for them. People who have played this game for years and new people alike are adult enough to decide on their own where they want to start. Give them suggestions. DO NOT force them.
Nayawk:
This game is what it is because of the vast expanse of quest/zones and the huge choice is the selling point as far as I’m concerned. Removing choice is bad, adding choice is good.
I’m willing to buy that new players might need a helping hand/intro into the game and that this Golden Path idea could help but all you need is a big message flashy on the starter location screen at character selection say “we recommend these 3 starter areas for new players or fast leveling”.
Sigrdrifa:
I think they should leave in the starting islands, but guide new players towards the golden path starting areas just by telling them that will be where they will find their best experience.
Jrral:
The Isles have the best introduction to basic game mechanics. In the other areas you’re assumed to know how combat works, what those shinies on the ground are and what to do with them, what harvest nodes are. On the Isles you get quests that take you to trainers who explain all of that. The new areas are great, but the Isles IMO have the best introduction for a completely new player. I’d hate to see that completely go away.
Maltheas:
How does removing the choice of starting in Qeynos or Freeport improve the game in any way? If these areas of the game are lacking, improve them. Don’t just cast them aside. Frankly, if it came down to a choice, I would rather the time spent on making a new starting area like New Halas from scratch had been spent on getting Qeynos and Freeport up to whatever standard they require to not be left to rot. And by improve, I don’t mean making them dull and linear like some of the new starting areas.
Arbreth:
I have posted more than once that the Starting isles for Freeport and Qeynos need to be REVAMPED … to make them more interesting and relevant, they should not be removed. Taking away the choice for Freeport or Qeynos to be a starter city is counterproductive to any attempt to revitalize those cities.
Ashlian:
Please also consider that for people with older computers (yes, we do get them, especially NEW players, strangely, because games like WoW require far less in the way of a computer than EQ2 and refugees from some of the games like that have played for a while on older machines) zones like Neriak and Gorowyn have always been filled with lag. I have guildmates who will not step foot in Neriak to this day because it means rebooting their computers after zoning a few times in and out and the same for guildies who won’t touch Timorous Deep because they hate the overland lag.
Leave options in the game for people who have trouble with the “let’s build a zone as big as we can get it so people don’t have to zone but then experience forty times the latency and lag” credo.
Bridgeplay:
The problem with Freeport and Qeynos is that with the “Streaming Client,” it’s a crummy gameplaying experience for people starting there. Too many zonelines to cross, and a delay each time you cross one. The “Streaming Client” works much better for newbie starting areas that are contained in one zone. Once you start crossing zonelines, the “Streaming Client” becomes a much worse option than just downloading the full game.
Sutava made an interesting and important point. With the removal of Qeynos and Freeport as starting zones, there is now no difference or unique quest lines amongst the 19 races. The Qeynos and Freeport quest timelines after leaving the Outpost or Colony were unique in that they offered different content for each race. “The racial questlines provide some much-needed racial lore to new players, and it means creating characters of different races allows you to do a different series of quests. And then it takes you on a path very similar to those found in the other cities.”
Why Change?
At first glance, this change seems understandable. The Qeynos and Freeport starting islands date back from the beginning of the game (although they have undergone some revamps, including the removal of the captivating and popular ‘boat ride, slay the dragon’ sequence) and award relatively poor quality gear and only progress players to level 10.
Upon reaching level 10, players must elect to take a boat to the suburbs of their home cities and continue to quest content from level 11-20 in multiple zones. There is no question that it is not a smooth experience, however there is a certain player nostalgia for the Starting Islands, and for a player who could eventually start 12 characters on a Station account, six starting cities is better than four.
EQ2Wire has been dutifully suggesting, in every venue available to us, that instead of outright removing these islands, adding an NPC or adding options to an existing NPC, to instantly port the player to one of the other 4 starting zones. However it seems this feedback has been ignored.
One of those threads has its last post as a month ago (after a separate thread was started to address the topic, it was locked and we were told to discuss it in the general dev chat thread), the other one was locked by Kiara. It’s obvious they don’t want to hear our feedback about this, and they don’t care about letting customers have a choice.
It’s not just this specific decision that irritates me, it’s the idea that it represents–taking away choices despite what the player base wants. If this is the new direction of EQ2 I’ll probably move to another MMO sometime soon. =/
I sometimes wonder why they even bother having official forums tbh.
Hmm, in the long year I play EQ2 now I created several alts. Till lvl20 there are lots of zones and areas to explore, gain XP and get some AA. Then you are lvl 20 and there is a sudden stop to the zones to choose from and every alt took the same path as it was the most effective one to walk 😉 Do I need to say it’s boring ?! Why don’t the devs get it, a new starting zone to lvl20 is not needed, the content “after” needs to be looked at. Revamp Zek and TS to be viable questing areas. Maybe some people will try EQ2 with Halas coming, but they will only play catch-up with the people already playing and may never reach the endgame with reasonable amount of AA and gear.
Really, how is a new player going to get 200+ AA to be competative at the lvl 80+ content where everybody is at now, right, they dont !
The original plan for Game Update 55 (the update which coincided with the release of Sentinel’s Fate) was to revamp Thundering Steppes into a rock solid level 20-35 leveling area. A decision was made to instead revamp Butcherblock Mountains to serve this purpose.
Personally I felt that Butcherblock Mountains were already pretty smooth from 20-35. If they’d revamped Thundering Steppes even by just moving around griffon towers, adding a couple of quest hubs, and leaving the rest, we would have had two halfway decent zones. Right now, we have just one good leveling zone. After 6 characters that’s going to be pretty boring indeed!
Nektulos Forest isn’t bad. There are some quest hubs. It’s Thundering Steppes that is most in need of revamp at this point, and it seems this is no longer on the front or even back burner.
This is ridiculously dumb: removing game content needlessly. Yes, Q/FP as starting cities is not as good as Darklight Wood or Kelethin or Timorous Deep. But hey, instead of letting people choose, just remove that content? That’s like removing Antonica and The Common Lands because “Butcherblock is better”. Srsly dumb.
This change ticks me off really bad. Qeynos is my favorite city, and now i gotta teach people how to betray or switch cities when i bring them to the game to play with me… Here is a suggestion sony. Why not improve the starting areas rather then nix them. It is possible ya know… But alas lazyness tends to get in the way i guess…
Here are some ideas I thought of and wrote down off the top of my head in just 30 mins that would solve the problem instead of cutting off the problem from the mainstream of new players.
— Isle of Refuge
-Recombine the isle, let players from both sides see, meet, and play with each other. Even on PVP, but don’t allow PVP except for one SMALL area and only once the person is level 10. (Even when it was one name, it was never combined zoned for good and evil, except the content.
-Make it a fight between Freeport and Qeynos with reps for all the other cities within their aligned areas.
-Get the presence of the far seas trading company at the spawn location for each of the two alignments.
-Instance the zone at every 20 players, and have a portal between them(Like Gfay and DLW) if people wish to be in a more player populated version.
Freeport and Qeynos
-Zoneless cities.
-2 quests leading away from the city after you arrive from the Isle of Refuge.(You can get and do both) 1 gives The Grand Adventure, leading you into Antonica or Commonlands depending on your alignment. 2 quest is The Prelude to a Grand Adventure, and sends you to any small zone attached to a racial village(Peat Bog, Oakmyst etc) and then leads back into Antonica after 4 levels. (So by 13 or 14 your still on the main stage of Antonica or CL but have the choice of a bit of side adventure to prepare more.)
— Antonica —
-Keep the Gnoll Slayer quests.
-Add in quests to explain the following: Caltorsis, Bloodsabers, Windstalker Villagers(And a few quests to connect them with the bloodsabers), Klicknik Beatles, the Gnoll Caves // Windstalker Rumbler caves ( Deep in the caves there is a door that goes to no-where and should be used to make a new solo instance that has 2-3 quests that draw the player into the Splitpaw Adventure Pack )
-Quest Hubs
–Create Griffion Destinations, but not towers(Like Butcherblock docks doesn’t have a tower just a trainer and a bird), to each!
–Level in the order of this list for hubs, and connect each hub by 1-2 quests.
Level of first quest – Hub Name – (Quest Themes)
LVL13 -Coldwind Lighthouse(Gnoll Slayer starter + Random Quests).
LVL15 -Sayer’s Outfitter’s Lodge.(Cave Gnoll / Windstalker Rumbler, Some Archer’s wood and hints to FireMyst Gully as a good group area.)
LVL17 -Keep of the Ardent Needle(Klicknik Beatles, and ruins of Caltorsis intro, Tomb of Varsoon)
LVL19 -Oracle Tower(More on Ruins of Caltorsis, Intro into Glade of the Coven, and hints to FireMyst Gully as a good group area(Revamp Condemned Catacombs to be late teens, early twenties.)
LVL21 -Windstalker Village(Bloodsabers-Qeynos investigating the 2 hideouts underlake and cave in the cliff near spire-, Connection to Bloodsabers with windstalker village’s mayor, random quests for supplies in bramble woods / beach, investigating stormhold library door, farmlands quests.)
LVL25 -Gnoll Slayerkeep(Gnoll Slayer finish, investigating blackburrow/waterfall tunnel to thunderingstepps/Hidden Vale/Front Entrance to Stormhold.)
That took me 20s mins to think of…
And you know whats funny…is my mind keep going on the un-used content within the zone…
After you finish the quests at Gnoll Slayerkeep your offered a quest series to explore the waters surrounding(There are a ton of interesting points in the waters of Antonica) and as long as your on the quest you gain the ability to get a 30 min buff from a special Mystic totem at the quest starter location.(Prolly Either the docks at Caltorsis or Coldwind Point Lighthouse)…
seems SOE are determined to find new and improved ways to reduce player options.
Admittedly the opening quests are not great after getting out of the Newb isles, but before the introduction of the #guild recall# function every one of my 7 characters were based within Qeynos or Freeport simply for the travel options.
Kelethin still has next to no accessibility to and from anywhere else, and to top it off, is 100 metres above the ground so getting up there requires a long run to one of the acorn lifts, a druid portal, the use of a sinking sands carpet for a good aligned player or a T1 guildhall.
Neriak backs out into darklight wood, which in turn backs out onto the least accessible area of nek forest, has mariners bells to Nek and TS docks, plus a carpet, but kunark boats leave from antonica and Freeport, and as far as i’m aware the only acces to odus if from a wizard spire, of which teh TS one’s a long slog from the docks, and the Nek one’s thankfully near a flightpath, but still involves getting the gryphon quest from the towers.
Gorowyn is in the same situation as Neriak, but backs onto the BBM docks which is actually a solid step in the right direction progression wise. But again, no wizard spire access, and no easy access to kunark.
What EQ2 needs is a transportation revamp not removal of some of the best introductions for new players, city-centric transporation links to get on and off the wizard and druid lines (plus upgrade druid links to be like the wizard perma-portals), while simultaneously providing helpful NPC’s at zone entrances/hubs that give directions and maybe a waypointed quest (like a journeyman’s boots lap) to get them to the hubs. Move gryphon stations to useful areas such as TS docks, the darklight wood entrance in nek, plus windstalker village in antonica, and remove the requirement of the gryph access quest in TS and Nek. Signpposts are always more welcome than a tightly controlled path. Agree with akrith on a number of her idea’s something like an over-riding great quest, to lead folks through the game would be amazing.
EQ2 is getting a transportation revamp. It’s on Test right now and it’s buggy as hell. Basically every Bell and Carpet gives you every possible zone in the game, or close to it.
Whow, some nice comments on eq2 wire 🙂
Keep it up feldon !!
Nother idea would be instead of removing qey/fp at starting cities, why not give them new starting areas. Add some extra land to CL and ant, and make it level -10 content, then streamline it to connect to CL/Ant content. of course thats too much work they would rather just nix everything.
It would take 2-3 months to create or modify new starting areas for Qeynos/Freeport.
Then why dont you fucking do that?! This post was back in 2010 and now were on the second half of 2013 and there still hasnt been any public info on Q/F starter islands. I find this complete and utter bullshit.