Looking Beyond Velious

A thread was created on the EQ2 Forums a couple of weeks ago entitled “Why is there no hype about Velious?” which elicited responses from Amnerys and Rothgar indicating that we’re still 3 months away and not everything is nailed down. This thread raged on.

However the real discussion about the EverQuest II expansion Destiny of Velious and future of Norrath beyond its release has been happening in the elephantine Server Merges Announced by Email thread, which has become sort of an omnibus discussion between SmokeJumper, Rothgar, and the players.

The latest branch of the discussion started with a zinger by a player JAEnox:

The way to save EQ2 is to return it to the way EQ2 was supposed to be in the first place!

SmokeJumper took the bait:

Okay. I’ll bite. What would that be? What was EQII supposed to be “in the first place”? MMOs are constantly-changing vehicles. Change is something that happens in all games of this genre. We’re certainly not going to lock it into a single state and never adapt or move forward.

So what would you have us do? I’d love to hear constructive suggestions. Leave the marketplace out of it for the moment since that is a completely optional element that you can gleefully ignore if you so choose. What would you like to see change in the game? Or how has it deviated from “the way it was supposed to be”?

Malificant of Unrest put this forward:

For me the game has gotten to where it is too easy. People are spoon fed things. No more challenge.

to which SmokeJumper said:

We tend to agree with you that the challenge that most folks associate with any type of game has been missing for a while. We’re reintroducing some of the old beloved challenges in the Velious expansions and we’re going to keep tweaking the game to make it a more involved, game-like experience in the future.

Itemization got a massive overhaul in the Velious expansion. If you all like what you see there, then we’ll be doing a sweep elsewhere and taking the lessons we learn in that expansion to make everything else better as well. We have high hopes for doing some really cool things in the future (yes, including Freeport and Qeynos).

We also tend to agree that the guild hall amenities, while being very cool and convenient, did not do good things for the game long-term. Of course, there’s no way that we’re going to yank all that stuff away from players, so we’re looking into ways to counteract some of the bad things that happened as people isolated themselves into guildhalls (mostly by making very attractive socialization points outside of guild halls that won’t become amenities). More on that (much) later from now.

While I don’t personally demonize Guild Halls as others do — cities were largely abandoned even before Guild Halls were introduced — I can see the value in adding more socialization options. Empty zones send a bad signal. About why we’ve had radio silence so far on Velious, SmokeJumper commented:

We may have made a mistake reserving so much stuff for Velious. That makes it look like we’re not adding anything to the current game and focusing all our efforts on the marketplace. But that’s not actually true. You’ll see when Velious comes out that we’re adding tons of stuff that you can quest and play to get.

Additionally, even the marketplace stuff is getting reused and added to existing loot tables. We recently did that with mounts and armor in the Unseen Arcanum stuff, and we intend to do more and more of that as we move along.

And yes, we’d like grouping to be more advantageous so its attractive to players. We’re working on designing those adjustments and we’ll have more to say on that front after Velious launches.

We need to start talking about Velious. Marketing is getting their act into gear now, and I’ve been holding off announcing anything so that I don’t steal their thunder. (They need to keep stuff in hiding so they can get exclusives for press opportunities and such, and the more I talk about, the less opportunities they get.) But you should start hearing a lot more soon.

Ok, so what about Velious? On the subject of challenge, a player Mentin had this to say:

It would be interesting if some mmorpg vendor would take the risk at releasing a challenge variant of their game. Put in corpse runs, key farming/flagging, make (some) travel meaningful, make content hard enough that it is really challenging. Maybe force grouping for more content.

It’s worth pointing out that Rift: Planes of Telara has a form of corpse runs but without the chance of dying. A hybrid approach. SmokeJumper responded with:

I secretly loved (and miss) corpse runs. That level of difficulty is probably beyond what we’re talking about in the near future though.

I don’t particularly like forcing huge travel times from place to place though. Even though boat rides are cool the first, second third times, crossing the OOT over and over just gets…well…old.

But yes, challenging content is where we’re going.

We want you to be able to brag about your game. We’re working with small steps first on Velious to ensure that it’s a quality experience. Then we’ll start making more changes thereafter.

I don’t know if you realize or not, but we have fixed a lot of issues/bugs in the last few GUs (and hotfixes) and we’ve streamlined a lot of stuff also. It’s a huge game, but we’re chipping away at it constantly.

Obviously he’s not talking about making the whole game more difficult, but adding some more challenging content for raid, group, and even solo players. SmokeJumper suggested that EQ2 could be more engaging, more “game-like” which received mixed responses, so he countered with:

By “game-like”, I meant that combat and adventuring could have a bit more knuckle-biting action and risk associated with it, rather than just “slam all 40 buttons as they become available”. Don’t worry. I’m not suggesting we turn it into Sonic the Hedgehog or anything.

further:

We agree that classes need more uniqueness. Our lead designer has provided a far-reaching design which I agree with and am supporting. If I can get approval from the company to make the changes, then we will be posting it for feedback and discussion and then making the changes sometime after Velious. It will *not* be just like the old days. Times have changed and gamers have moved on. But I’m of the opinion that we can make things a lot better than they are now, making grouping interesting and raid compositions more flexible.

Tradeskills: Well, yeah. 456456456456456123456456 gets old. I have a level 90 alchemist that made my eyes bleed. We know it needs to change. The fact of the matter is though, that a lot of the tradeskillers actually *like* a game that doesn’t require much challenge. So we have a design balancing act to do there. But yes, it needs love and we’ll get to it.

Regarding the vague changes: I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again here. I can’t promise details ahead of time. Everytime I’ve promised details in my 20+ years of making games, it has bitten me in the keester in a most painful way. We hold back until we think we have a good quality plan, and then in the case of some of the big issues (like class details mentioned above), we’ll communicate to you folks for feedback. But until we get *much* closer to the changes, we just can’t set expectations. Company directives change, we get better ideas, the industry shifts and we have to react…there are lots of reasons why things need to change and I just simply refuse to add more ammunition to the folks that insist I lie to them all the time. I hope you understand.

So is Destiny of Velious going to have more of the same? Another AA grind, another XP grind, the typical instances, raid zones, etc. that we seem to get every expansion? Not so fast…

More of the same, no matter how good the first few courses were to eat, eventually gets boring and vanilla. We’re having discussions that refuse to allow such phrases as “because we’ve always done it that way” or “the players will hate change” to occur in them.

It’s okay to say “There’s this cool feature in WoW that would be great for our game because of X, Y, and Z.” But it’s *not* okay to say “We should do it because WoW does it.”

Some of the ideas we’ve tossed around are just patently ridiculous, but others are interesting enough that we’re doing more exploration. We’ll be trotting some of that stuff out to you for discussion after Velious launches. Excitement is something we want in this game.

In closing, SmokeJumper had this to say:

You haven’t seen the Velious expansion yet (duh), but there’s a ton of stuff in there that’s unique and not available in the marketplace. Marketplace items come out, usually one per week…but there’s way more items created for Velious than that. We’ve also been adding unique versions of marketplace items into recent dungeons (like Unseen Arcanum) which even has unique mounts in it as loot. This is a trend we intend to continue.

There are good epic storylines and quests in Velious. Is it a clone of Velious from EQ1? No it’s not. But it has many homages to what was there before (think Butcherblock).

We’re working on Velious to make that the best expansion we’ve offered to-date also. We realize there are shortcomings in some of what EQII has to offer and we’re discussing fixes/changes for a lot of that, probably in ways that are unforseen by you currently (but all of which are exciting).

Velious first, and then more later.

New MMOs will continue to come out, but they will never catch up with our content and feature set size. Assuming that we hone the existing gameplay and new offerings that we make to be better and better, there’s no reason that EQII can’t continue to be one of the best MMOs out there and to leave other offerings farther and farther behind.

We are here because you are here. We’ll do our best to entertain you so that you stay here. I wish this stuff was “quick fix”, but that’s not the nature of the beast. But we *are* working on it. You’ll see.