Feldon We’ve just finished watching a live Webcast of Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson and Salim “Silius” talking about the upcoming Destiny of Velious expansion, including player-submitted questions. What follows is a rough transcript. We recommend listening to the recording to get a complete picture of what was said.
- Unlike past Betas, the Destiny of Velious beta has already been fully itemized, so players are seeing the items they’ll get in-game when the expansion goes live.
- Ancillary products like Fortune League (an EQ2 Facebook fantasy football type game) and EQ2 Mobile were created by third party developers. SmokeJumper gave design input but they did not tie up the EQ2 team.
- Focus has been on having everything up in Beta so that it can go through many iterations of testing and improvement.
- Kael Drakkel is possibly the largest zone in the game. It’s just a huge zone designed to fit the scale of Giants.
- Silius’ favorite zones? Tower of Frozen Shadow and Velkator’s. If he had to pick one, the 7th floor of Tower of Frozen Shadow. It’s something we’ve never really done before. Velkator’s is visually stunning.
Question: How will the gear in Destiny of Velious compare to the gear in Sentinel’s Fate?
Answer: Obviously Destiny of Velious items will be better. We have been looking at the itemization and player power and procs. We want players to be able to choose which items they put procs on. Standard item growth is more straightforward and it’s obvious which items are better. Items are essentially a shell that the player builds on.
- No current plans to introduce Shard of Growth or Valor in Velious pt 1.
SmokeJumper raised this himself:
Question: “Is Velious as big as the original Velious in EQ1?”
Answer: “To try to do it all at once would have been a mammoth undertaking. We’ve decided to split it up into at least 2 parts. It’s going to depend upon what we discover as we do the next stuff over the coming year whether it stays as 2 parts. We’re not going to just cram everything from Velious EQ1 into Velious EQ2. We have some different ideas too.
- Cobalt Scar and the Dragon Hatchlings are in Western Wastes which is not part of Velious part 1.
- We’re trying to do some different things in raids this time around. Sentinel’s Fates were very well done and we’re trying to continue that same idea. Some new mechanics. Rely more on other classes and archetypes on debuffing mobs. A lot of outside-the-box thinking.
- Raids will have a full progression with easy and hard mode raids.
- There is a full post-release plan for raids. Every game update after Destiny of Velious will add a raid zone with both easy and hard modes. “We have a bunch of stuff in various Game Updates to keep content fresh.”
- Destiny of Velious starts at level 85. Iceclad starts at 85-90. Eastern Wastes is level 90.
- Travel to Destiny of Velious is by the giant turtle Lodizal. Later on, there will be event to unlock other means to get to Velious.
Question: Will there be 3 factions that you have to choose between?
Answer: We recognize that this was one of the key parts of Velious. Your choice had consequences. Within the EQ2 world, we didn’t think we would be able to pull that off very successfully. However Faction is very important still. You still want to help the Denizens of Iceclad, the Coldain, and the Rygorr. Raising faction unlocks certain rewards, adornments, etc. There are definitely things to do with factions, but it’s not set up with the warring factions like in EQ1.
- After Destiny of Velious launches, we will have 8 days of events during Launch week.
- The first day you login, you get a potion with 50 charges that lets you play as an Othmir. It’s not a full playable race, but we have added a ton of animations so you can ride on mounts, do emotes, etc.
- Rehashed the announcement about Multiple House Ownership and Prestige Housing.
- Flying Mounts work almost everywhere except indoor and in cities. All the old world content. Kingdom of Sky is a great example.
- One of the features we are most looking forward to the playerbase experiencing is Public Quests. Public Quests are events that spontaneously go off and anyone in the area can join in, the more the merrier. Other games have had Public Quests but the drawbacks to them is once the zone is less populated, the quest is less useful. Our Public Quests scale up and down based on population.
- Through Public Quests, we were able to recreate the Coldain Ring Quest. We have the Ringwar allowing you to get the 10th ring.
Ok campers, it’s 3:30am and time for me to go to bed. 😉 Just think, only 3 more of these.
I just don’t understand the purpose in starting the new expansion content at level 85 (even lower than the 86 advertised at Fan Faire). It would have been great to have had another zone for 80-90 when TSF came out so that they wouldn’t have had to ruin that expansion’s exp curve by cramming ten levels into two zones (down from Kunark’s four). That ship has already sailed. Even if they want to try to sell Velious boxes to people who quit back when the cap was 80, those players are still going to have to use TSF content to get to 85. At that point, you might as well let players finish the TSF content before starting Velious so that you don’t waste half of the expansion by having it start five levels below the current playerbase.
They started The Shadow Odyssey’s outdoor zone, Moors of Ykesha, at level 76 when the level cap was still level 80. It worked out well.
Worked well? I still never completed the TSO quests on any of my 80s, and I had 7 toons over 80 when I left.
Think you’ll need all that content to get 50 AAs if you are level 90 and have done everything.
I loved the Moors content. Was good for AA 🙂
It works fine for me too, on the list of things EQ2 lacks its new lowbie content. Personally I don’t want an entire expansion to be like GU57 or WoW’s Cataclysm where the bulk of the new content is for low levels/new players, still that ones out now so we all get to see how that formulae for an expansion plays out.
And I guess its what people enjoy, I loved the Moors of Ykesha, so much so that I stay there rather then go to SF (and the quest line is damn epic for TSO), at least for the Sundered frontier. That’s something EQ2 does do right, we can adventure where ever we want, whether its staying in Kunark 70 to 80, or mentoring down to go through Kingdoms of the sky or the Loping plains.
“Think you’ll need all that content to get 50 AAs if you are level 90 and have done everything.”
If that’s the primary demographic for the new content – which I agree seems likely – then it should start at 90, not 85.
Why does the level of the content matter?
You think you’ll get better legendary quest rewards if the quest is level 90 vs. level 85? And from what I hear, we don’t need the solo quest mobs to hit any harder than they already do.
Hmm, re-reading my comment I meant to say on the list of things EQ2 lacks it isn’t low end content – oh well 🙂
If they’d done the Thundering Steppes revamp, it would have really filled out the 20-35 content. The problem is, Mastercrafted loot and itemization revamps have really eliminated any reason to spend time in level 10-80 content. I know it’s a reality of every MMO, but they could have kept this content relevant if they wanted to. Streamlining everything discourages playing the entire game and encourages grinding to level cap.