Feldon So we’ve been thinking about last night’s Producer’s Letter which lays out a little bit of the future of EQ2. Our thoughts:
Think about every quest, NPC, and clicky item in Freeport’s 10 subzones (North Freeport, South Freeport, East Freeport, West Freeport, Beggar’s Court, Stonestair Byway, Temple Street, Longshadow Alley, Big Bend, Scale Yard). Now imagine having to relocate them to a new zone/map/artwork, test them all, and make sure they all still work.
Now revamp any flavor or quest text which is long since obsolete such as NPCs wondering when Kunark, Velious, Odus, etc. are going to be discovered. Now revamp the instances linking off Freeport to be new style level 1-30 content with quest hubs, etc.
That sounds like almost as much work as an expansion.
A careful reading of the Producer’s Letter would suggest that we will receive most or all of the rest of Velious through Game Updates, rather than buying another expansion in November, or next February. Morghus asked if we will see the continuation/completion of Velious:
Sounds interesting, does that imply that we will be getting the “rest” of Velious, in regards to new raids/cities/overland quest areas and dungeons dealing with the dragon half of the continent in the future?
SmokeJumper replied with an affirmative “Yes“.
When asked just how different the new Freeport will be, or if it will be a radical departure:
So far, it’s a “realistic” upgrade of Freeport, building on the bones of the old. That’s all I can say for now.
A post by Cocytus downplayed the ‘evilness’ of Freeport:
I really don’t think Freeport needs to Symbolize evil. We already have Neriak. Freeport is fine with its current tone. Streamlining and/or making it up-to-date in the game world is fine, but I don’t really see any reason to change the tone to supervillain evil or something. I like that it’s like a mediocre thief town type thing.
To which SmokeJumper said:
Lucan has bigger dreams than that.
Crabshack of Nagafen asked:
I’m just going to throw this out there. After doing raids tonight and listening to other peoples reactions to this cryptic post.
If you didn’t mean to infer that the avatars were returning, you need to tell us now.
The level of excitement that the gods were returning was pretty huge. Because that meant avatars were coming back. This was by far the biggest thing talked about tonight. Removing avatars took a lot of the competition out of raiding, especially on the contested side of things. Yes they should have the best gear, and they should be hard to kill. But seriously, if they aren’t returning and you only meant that diety spells were getting revamped you need to clarify now otherwise you’re going to have a lot of very angry and extremely disapointed raiders on your hands.
which received this clarification from SmokeJumper:
Avatars have never been mentioned in respect to the slate for 2011.
That’s as clear as we’re going to get right now. We said we’d elaborate on stuff later, and it’ll come. We’ll release more near-future stuff later this week. Other details will be released…later.
Consider this like the first press leak for a new summer movie. It’s something we’re excited about and think will be great, but we need to save our biggest surprises for later, just showing you enough now to get you interested.
Please absolutely speculate. Heck, the ideas you guys generate might suddenly end up on the slate. Just realize that there’s no way we can do everything, but that our focus is on making a better, more entertaining whole game and we’ll try to make the right decisions to that effect.
The slate that’s coming is great, and when we’re done with the Velious saga, you will have played through something special. Plus the game’s feature richness will increase, all while we’re still listening to your comments and making adjustments on the way.
We’re actually pretty fired up for this year. We think we have the right stuff for you.
And finally Gaige, who was predictably unimpressed:
He didn’t say anything other than we’re going to be getting GUs which we normally get and eventually Freeport will be revamped.
Yay?
elicited this response from SmokeJumper:
I don’t think there’s anything I can write here that will soothe the skeptic in you.
I guess we’ll just have to show you.
The GU 60 notes we post later this week should set the pace a bit.
My take on the super villain quote above; I’ve been saying for a long time (since I’m a RPer on AB) just because you play a evil sided character doesn’t mean you’re Lex Luthor or Skeletor. This isn’t city of villains, it’s everquest. The only super villain types we would have here are the likes of Roehn Theer or Mayong Mistmoore. The rest of ya are just citizens of evil empires. Not all citizens have to be dastardly evil conspiring villains of crime organizations. Some are just rogues or folk who know no better place to live.
As for the deities, it would make sense to bring them back now since we killed Theer (well most of us have by now). I think Theer was what frightened them off anyway right? The God Slayer!
Re. Freeport’s disputed villainy: Speak for yourself. I would love to help a revitalized Lucan spread some darkness and dismay over Norrath! Hee hee.
My take on Lucan D’Lere being evil is that he’s clearly someone who has sacrificed a lot to get power, we can get inspiration from despots around the world to see how they hold onto power.
But is he the meglomaniac? His apparent immortality for someone who should be mortal to me is an unstable combination, sitting in his stronghold for years on end almost ended with disaster with the void story so it makes sense he would spread his influence again.
Its also something missing from the story though, the people, again with current world events some real despots are getting some grief from organised and disorganised groups. Could even the knights of Marr be restarted to challenge his rule? Might they even be based out of Qeynos or close by?
There is so much story telling that could be done here, I’m excited 🙂
As for the rest, graphics upgrades are desperately needed, both in speed and upping the quality. To me they need to get some big projects in motion, something that fundementally changes the engine even if the payoff isnt going to be seen for 12 months.
Lastly, no mention of server upgrades, the Smedley publicy stated how they have great plans for new games etc last year and now it seems that changes were forced on them from above. The question is whether the resources freed up will be returned back to games such as EQ1, EQ2, or plowed into the endless quest of success with Free Realms, or trying to push the numbers up with DCUO.
I know Smokejumper and the producers of existing games are motivated to make theirs better, still not sure where the senior management including Smedley stand on it.
Seeing that the dev team numbers have not been massively cut though I think there is some significant sign of resources going to EQ2 at least, I want more 😉
My first reaction was somewhat along the lines of what Gaige said, though recent GU’s (and even boxed expansions) have been relatively thin. If we’re actually getting one or more entire new zones in GU’s, that is a big change and would explain the whole “oh, I’ve got to get permission to do this before I can announce it” routine SJ has been doing about this letter. But yes, actions will speak louder than press releases.
My bigger question is how they intend to pay for all of this. Velious contains two overland zones, nine heroic instances, and what, four raids, and that was what they just charged us $40 for as the output of an entire year’s dev work. I don’t see how you put out even half that much material and still have a similar amount left for an expansion early-mid next year, but neither a dramatic scale-up of efforts nor forgoing the annual expansion fee seems consistent with what SOE has been doing of late (e.g. doing everything they can to try and increase revenue, having layoffs on the team).
The logical guess would be a free to play shift, but they already fired that bullet, and they did it in a way that makes it very hard to successfully get more money out of EQ2Live players.
I may be one of the few, but I am excited about Smokejumpers statements. Velious is already one of my favorite exp packs and I can’t wait till the other half of the map opens up. Having this much end game content with more on the way can only be good for the game.
I’d have more confidence if they could get the mechanics right. DoV was a disaster with stat merges and itemization, class balance is all over the place.
No matter how great the content is these issues continue to overshadow their efforts.
I knew if I typed my post in 18 point font he’d reply. 🙂
They are missing out on a ton of continued subs by not bringing back the avatars imo.
The avatars were killed by one or two guilds per server, if that. Hardly a “ton” of continued subs.
Speaking from a pvp servers point a view avatars were the best thing to happen to raiding and the server in general. I’m sure on blue servers where once a guild gets a strangle hold on the timers it’s pretty one sided. But on Nagafen it’s an entirely different story.
Even though Onyx held the majority of the avatar kills on nagafen, the number of guilds trying to get the kills, monitoring their spawn times, and contesting rival guilds pulling them was crazy.
Not having contested content at least on a pvp server sucks to put it nicely.
Smokeblower really didn’t say anything concrete. Pretty much all of what he did was blow smoke, say very vague things that didn’t actually SAY anything and mention we’re getting GU’s and a revamped Freeport soon.
Not impressed so far.