Feldon 
The SOE Webcast has just completed with Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson (Executive Producer), Greg “Rothgar” Spence (Lead Programmer), Akil “Lyndro” Hooper (Lead Designer), and Emily “Domino” Taylor (Associate Producer), along with host Linda “Brasse” Carlson (Director, Global Community Relations).
It was brief, to say the least, mostly because it was immediately followed by a DCUO webcast (whose audience showed up during the EQ2 webcast and trashed everyone including SOE and demanded that the DCUO webcast start immediately).
During the entire webcast, Brasse’s microphone was subject to bursts of static and wind noise making it very difficult to hear. We’ll look forward to the Youtube video so we can clarify some points.
After the jump, some updated bullet point notes from the Webcast…
Updated Notes from the Webcast as of 6:30pm PST (9:30pm EST)
- EverQuest II: Age of Discovery is being released December 6th, 2011
- “There are some things which aren’t locked down yet. There’s really no point in having Beta if we’re not going to act on the feedback we’re getting.” – SmokeJumper
- We can expect substantial patches, tweaks, and feature additions in the days/weeks after the expansion launches.
- “We’re still letting more people into Beta this week for a last minute preview. We have about 2,500-3,000 in right now, and we’re letting another 3,000 in by the end of the week. Everybody that applied gets in by the end of the week.” – Domino
- “People are being honest about things they’d like to see [Dungeon Finder] do. Some of these things we’re looking at trying to add, while others are going on a wishlist to look at later on. We generally agree with people who say that the more customization the better.” – Rothgar
- “[new additions to Dungeon Finder, Tradeskill Apprentices, etc.] are the kind of things we’re trying to squeak in before launch. We heard from you on Dungeon Finder that ‘we get it, and it’s fun, but we can’t really stamp our personality on it’ so that’s why we want to add things like Dialogue and Customizing Monster Names. We’re trying to get that in before launch, but there’s not very much time between now and then. It could be in a patch a few days later.” – SmokeJumper
- Reforging, Tradeskill Apprentices, and Dungeon Finder got the biggest feedback during Beta.
- “The weirdest Beastlord Warder in the world is probably the duck. There is a single duck in the world that can become a Warder, and it’s not even up all the time.” – Lyndro
- “There’s also a cow.” – Domino
- “Warders belong to families, and each family has different attacks. A duck would be a member of the Avian family. The cow is in the same family as other Bovids like deer and goats. (lots of conversation) I believe Avian warders are defensive.” – Lyndro
- “We have 48 warders in 16 different families.” – SmokeJumper
- Character Slots will be sorted out so that people aren’t “losing” slots in the EQ2-EQ2X merge. This is above and beyond the November 12th announcement. Announcement tomorrow.
- New EQ2 Launcher Q: When will we be able to pick a Character to launch the game with on the new Launchpad 4? — SmokeJumper: The Launchpad guys are talking about it now. They’re watching the feedback thread (they’re really paying attention this time) and they’ve already compiled a list of things they want to do with the Launchpad this time.
- 20 more AA points with no new abilities (and not in Heroic tree) — EQ2 Forums Discussion
- Q: Can we buy AoD features like Beastlords, DYOD, etc. a la carte? — No plans.
- “Mercenaries are affected by group buffs. They act just like any other player.” We don’t want Mercenaries to be smarter than players. They’ll make mistakes.
- No daily launch events like the Velious launch. Frostfell starts on December 6th.
- Takeback: There are random world “elite” mercenaries, but we’re not doing the super-rare story-based mercenaries like we talked about at Fan Faire.
That was fast, Feldon — thanks!
20 points! Is that it?
Did anyone else get the impression they weren’t all that excited about this expansion? The podcast seemed to lack some spark of enthusiasm for a rather expensive addition to the game …
I agree Kwill, do they even care anymore?
20 points, no maximum increase for the tabs? So we get to fill in whatever tabs we’d already decided weren’t worth the 10 discretionary points we’ve been working with? I guess there’s still that tradeskill tab wanting to be filled… but 20 points isn’t enough to get the good stuff from it. Hm.
I’m thinking the people complaining that they’d “have to” buy the expansion for the AAs don’t have to worry about that now. I wonder if it will lead to lackluster sales.
I just read Massively’s account of the press tour … my question is, how much are mercs? They sound expensive, like most people couldn’t hire them even if they wanted to. I would like to know the cost for the various mercs.
A level 20 public quest — ok, but why? Twenty comes and goes very quickly, how often do they expect it to be used? A level 40-50 PQ would be much more helpful.
The Beastlords sound exactly like WoW’s Hunter class, which admittedly is fun. They also sound extremely overpowered from the description given.
I am not interested in BYOD, so I have no comment there.
Really you have to look at it all from a different perspective. It isn’t an expansion, it’s just new features. Buy it or not, you don’t need to. Am I disappointed? Yes. I’m not a fan of this method, said it when they polled us before. Too much to say right now, both good and bad. 😐
Kwill — Mercenary picture from MMORPG website:
http://images.mmorpg.com/features/5858/images/EQ2-Mercenary.png
Actually they stated that 20 AA is not the number of AA however 20 new point selection. They did not verify the number of AA, as he corrected what he meant.
It’s 20 more AA points, raising the limit to 320 AAs.
The mercs are expensive for lower level characters, at least — and I assume they will be available on the marketplace soon enough for cash.
Isn’t Beta supposed to address the above so that when things hit live they are finished and not in need of patches and “tweaks” .. or nerfs as we like to call them?
It’s lazy programming practise and an omission that they know that things aren’t finished. Scary times are ahead.
Are you talking about dungeon finder or dungeon maker?
It’s lazy programming practise and an omission that they know that things aren’t finished.
Par for the course for Velious era. I know there’s folks in the trenches who are working their hearts out, but the ‘leadership’ in-shop is abysmal.
I actually miss Brenlo now.
Oh, and as for mercs not being smarter than players…they clearly haven’t seen some of the players I’ve PUG’d with in the past… 😉
“We can expect substantial patches, tweaks, and feature additions in the days/weeks after the expansion launches”
More of the same garbage which has plagued this game since DOV released /sadface, I really wanted to continue to play this game
a few more years, but with this…I am going to take a nice long vacation from Norrath and come back in a year and see where things sit
Good luck to everyone who continues to play this game, I hope things improve but I am definitely not convinced they will
The only I look forward to in the future of EQ2 is F2P so I can unlock my race / class and stop paying this pathetic excuse of a dev team. They are garbage, the game is garbage. I want to love and play EQ2 but that just isn’t possible anymore. More and more players have stopped caring about the game, now it’s clear the devs truly don’t care either. Game over EQ2.
And I’m not saying the game won’t go forward, it will, but it’s time we all moved on to something better, EQ2 has little reason to stay anymore.
Personally, I think all this new stuff is gonna be fun. It just depends on how you look at it. To me, it seems everyone thinks Sony should be totally perfect/no bugs/no worries. I don’t want to be rude, because I agree, but Sony are people with lives and families just like us. Cut ’em some slack.
Super-excited about Frostyfellz! 🙂