Feldon And now the Producer’s Letter promised for today.
NOTE: We can assure you, there is NOTHING in this Producer’s Letter that has not already been publicly known and widely discussed.
From the EQ2 Forums:
Hello again, Norrathians!
It gives me great pleasure to raise the curtain on a new chapter in our game’s history.
Today, we stop requiring any sort of payment. There are no upfront download costs and memberships are no longer required. Everything is voluntary now. If we’re doing a good job of entertaining you, then you can help support the game you love with purchases or memberships, spending as much or as little as you choose to spend as you play.
We have a fired-up dev team. We believe that EQII is the best MMORPG in existence and we intend to keep making it better so that everyone else has to admit it. What we’re doing today keeps us on that path.
This is your world, and we’re committed to making it more and more your world as we keep growing.
Today, every one of you can walk into “Freeport Reborn”. Lucan D’Lere has returned to kick his city into gear and reassert his dominance across the map. And to show how much his desire for power has affected the city, Freeport has been given a huge aesthetic facelift, combining North, South, East, and West Freeport into a single city without zones, and retexturing and improving the impressiveness of the city.
Although we’ve preserved much of the original content and quests in Freeport, we have also added a large amount of completely new content also. The approach on these new quests is unique for this game. For the first time, we’ve focused on race- and archetype-specific quest lines throughout the city so that each time you run an alt through the game, you can experience new content in Freeport. Also, the quest lines added to Freeport dynamically scale in level so that regardless of what level you come into the city, chances are that some of the new quests there will work for your character. With a greater focus on stories and better NPC personas, the city is coming alive like it never has before.
So go be evil. Enjoy Freeport. Revel in the moment of glory that is the beginning of greatness! We bring you to the city via the Golden Path naturally at level 20 (from Butcherblock), but you can go there at any age and a good chunk of the content will scale to your level.
And that’s just the beginning of what we’re bringing you today!
Today is also the day we launch the standalone, level-agnostic expansion pack, the “Age of Discovery”. This expansion is designed to be available to you at any time during your adventure as an EverQuest II player. It’s a box of entirely new gameplay that opens up wide vistas for players that have experienced much of the original game and want to enhance their adventures beyond the standard game features.
The “Age of Discovery” is aptly named. We focused on customization, collectability, and allowing players to unlock countless hours of new gameplay.
Let’s start with Beastlords. This new player class feels fresh the moment you begin to tame new Warders. The world of Norrath is full of creatures, and Beastlords can tame a huge chunk of them, in 16 different families of Warders, with their own unique abilities and specialization trees (yes, your Warders have their own “AA trees”). Add to that a more active gameplay style where your Warder looks for weaknesses so that you can take advantage of them, and a new charge-up mechanic as your successful use of advantages gives you power to trigger powerful Primal effects. What you end up with is a hugely varied, insanely tweakable, fun-to-play character class that you use to explore throughout all of Norrath.
This alone gets a lot of folks excited, but there’s an incredible amount in this expansion even beyond Beastlords.
We are also bringing Mercenaries to the game. Each mercenary in the world is unique, with abilities and AI traits that are theirs and theirs alone. (A Dark Elf healer may have entirely different skills than a Halfling healer, for example.) You pick the merc you like, hire them on, and the two of you journey out into the world together (as long as you keep paying gold to the merc, that is). You can customize their appearance, change their name, give them tactical commands, and there are even rare-spawn mercs out there in Norrath that you may stumble upon one day…and they are impressively powerful.
Mercenaries have a huge impact on the solo and small-group play experiences. Content that was impossible to achieve without 6-12 players (heroic dungeons and X2 raids) is now entirely possible to explore with only 3-6 players instead. This opens up the world of Norrath to the new player and veteran alike, as even just a few friends can get a group together. Essentially, your potential gaming space in Norrath expands enormously in size once you have a Mercenary at your disposal.
Not done yet. There’s still more. A lot more.
The third of our main features in AoD is Dungeon Maker! Almost every one of us has played a paper RPG in the past. Probably most of us have been a gamemaster in one game or another. Haven’t you always wanted to be able to create content within an MMO for your friends and guildmates? And do it without having to learn some insane scripting language so that it’s actually *fun* to build a dungeon?
That’s what this feature is all about.
You start with a handful of small maps and a decent list of monster spawners and effect objects, but most of the really cool stuff you can use to build a dungeon is “out there” in the world of Norrath. As you explore and defeat the challenges of Norrath, you’ll also find things for Dungeon Maker.
And not just things to use when creating a dungeon, but also things to play when entering a dungeon! The creatures of Norrath (around 50 of them so far) can be possessed when entering a player-created dungeon, each player becoming an Adventurer character with its own abilities and techniques. You decide which Adventurer to play out of the ones you’ve collected every time you enter a dungeon.
Adventurers get XP for playing, of course, but both Builders and Adventurers get rewards when Adventurers finish the dungeon and the cool item and rewards you get can be used for any of your characters. Builders get a small reward the first time each player completes their dungeon, so the more popular your dungeon is, the better the rewards!
Building a dungeon is done with a new, improved housing interface, a cool new Toolbox window, and simple click-and-place mechanics. You can set wander and patrol behaviors, you can customize a ton of text that the monsters say (and even their names) and you can also use easy-to-place and use Effect Objects to change your monster powers and abilities.
It’s an incredibly flexible system and players access it via a Dungeon Maker interface (look for it in the EQII menu!), similar in nature to the existing Housing Leaderboards. It’s incredibly simple to check things out, have fun, rate the dungeon, and get rewards.
This community is fantastically creative. The EverQuest II housing community already makes some stunningly beautiful and inventive creations, so it’s going to be incredibly exciting to see what the community creates when they can make something that’s not only beautiful, but also has compelling gameplay! And did I mention that you can build a dungeon together cooperatively? As far as I know, we’re the first game to *ever* allow that functionality.
I know, I know. This is a long post. But seriously, that’s how much stuff we have for you. It’s a good thing that this is long. Really.
EQII has one of the best and strongest crafting communities of any MMO, and they get a bright new feature this time with Tradeskill Apprentices. Contract your Apprentice from one of several races (you pick), and install your Apprentice in your home. He or she will get to work right away doing research to find new recipes for you that can make some majorly powerful stuff. During that research, your Apprentice will occasionally stumble upon quests that you can do to help him speed his research along. If you do those quests regularly, you can get rare drops and also decrease the amount of time your Apprentice needs. The Apprentice is, of course, appearance and name customizable, and we’ll be releasing new Tradeskill Apprentices in the future, making each of them unique and interesting in their own right as they arrive.
This leads us to Reforging. Reforging is one of those features that is easy to explain, but adds more to the game than its deceptively simple description. Basically, you can change blue stats on a Legendary (or better) weapon and you can also find “decorations” out in the world (such as loot drops or NPC merchants, to start with) and add cool particle effects to your weapons. Simple, eh? But you’ll be surprised how many times you’ll sit at a Reforger contemplating your changes and deciding how you want your gear to look. If you like customization of items, this is good stuff.
And lastly, we’re adding +20 to the AA cap for everyone that activates “Age of Discovery”.
One of the press folks that toured these features in-game with us (from MMORPG) put it best when he said “The Age of Discovery introduces more gameplay as an expansion than many full games launch with originally.” These are good features, folks, and there’s a lot of replayability here.
But, as the late-night commercials say, “Wait! There’s still more!”
Here’s a list of stuff that we’ve kept quiet until now. Why? Because surprises are cool. Surprise!
- www.everquest2.com : Hugely overhauled with a better look and feel.
- Social networking : We already let you upload videos to YouTube from within the game, but now you can post to Facebook or Twitter from within the game also, and you can also turn on Achievements so that your Facebook page or Twitter feed gets updated with EQII achievements. NOTE: We only broadcast a tiny fraction of the game’s achievements. We have no intent for this to be spam. And this can be toggled on/off per character! (But if you’re proud of EQII, we’d love for you to show your colors. The more people hear about us, the more likely it is that your game will thrive!)
- The new Launchpad : Quicker, smarter, cooler-looking than before. And now Flash-less!
- (And it didn’t *quite* make it in time for launch, but look for a stronger, faster, better version of EQ2Players to arrive in a week or so!)
So check out the update notes for details, and enjoy! There has never been a better time to play EverQuest II.
On a personal note, I’m tremendously excited to be working with this game at this time. The team is passionate and SOE is making smart business decisions to support all of its games here. Every company goes through peaks and valleys during its lifetime, but there’s a strong feeling of a new renaissance happening here at SOE that’s electrifying. Work just isn’t a chore when you like what you’re doing and where you’re going.
Every single one of you got a new Welcome Pack of goodies today, so check your /claim windows. And have fun! That’s what it’s all about!
— Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson.
meh – just another part of the launch day hype, nothing wrong with it really, not everyone keeps up with everything that’s going on, and the letter is a nice summary – personally, though, i’d be more interested in an actual launch
Did he really think the suprises were cool..
I really love Smokejumper’s enthusiasm for EQ2. That’s just me. But I think it’s great and that’s what is needed to make the game move forward.
lol i read all that and the first thing i see at the bottom that stands out any way is “meh”
So all that stuff in the Webcast was just smoke and mirrors?
I get he is fired up, I get he likes his job. I am not getting AoD!
still feels light to me, when you going to put stuff in it Smokejumper?
so much for the “will usher in a new era for this game” letter
How its moving forword if people dont know about it. They can put out 15 new updates xpacs etc. whats the point if theres no people to play it. Content is grate game play is awsome advertising team just sucks i been playing 7+ years never saw any thing anywhere about Everquest or Everquest2.
well WoW got Chuck Norris so SOE decided to get Bruce Lee!
Oh wait he is dead isnt he?
@ Minibang – good point – There has always been a big problem with EQ2, which is by far the best MMO without question, IMO – yet WoW has totally dwarfed them in the market. The reason? Crap management at SOE. Development has been right on target, but marketing has been totally non-existent, and player feedback has been barely acknowledged. Not sure where things stand now, but I remember going to buy the RoK expansion at Gamestop a few years ago (there was some special thing you got with the boxed expansion I think), and the clerk said, “Everquest 2? Never heard of that.”
…“The Age of Discovery introduces more gameplay as an expansion than many full games launch with originally.” … Do they consume some sort of drugs on their Press-Tours ?
SO? was that update notes or a super big secret Producer’s Letter SJ was claiming we would hear today. A very sad day.
Sounds like he’s trying a little too hard to make this “expansion” seem like it’s worth the money…..
I am amazed at how so much can be written, and actually add nothing to current game play. I believe this expansion is the beginning of the end, you needed to amaze us with content before SWTOR releases, and I just think this failed to do so…
Sorry guys, just my opinion.
They must be really selective in who they take on their press tours… must be folks that only play terrible facebook games to think that AoD is launching with “more gameplay” than full games launch with.
And so much for any surprises. The only thing that was remotely close was the social integration, and that has been known for long enough (and honestly, who cares).
@Minibang – so you never read IGN, Massively, TenTonHammer, Zam, etc etc. Or been on facebook with an EQ2 ad or been on anyone’s social networking page who “liked” EQ2’s facebook page? Or been on any major gaming news site who talked about free to play conversion and highlighted eq2 versus another game? Just sayin’.
Personally, monster missions and mercs bought me back to eq1. Then the free to play server (freeport) bought me back over to eq2. I saw the performance improvements from 2005 and i ended up gold.
Soon I will be equipped with an i7 and a gtx 560ti from my pentium d and geforce 6800, i can do “monster missions” and have mercs in eq2 with voice chat and free velious content inbound in very high quality (so i can finally see particle effects). Among other things, like a beastlord.
All in all, I may be alone, but, I am hype about it.
You either love or hate smokejumper, depending on the day for me..Today I love him,
As I’ve seen in other places, this team could have waited to produce AOD until Feb and combined these features with velious content and charged the same thing and everyone would have been happy. They chose to do it differently and some are outraged. In the end it is the exact same result. I prefer to enjoy the features up front instead of waiting and getting it any way later.
Welcome pack of goodies in /claim, eh?
ANything we didn’t know about?
Reading this did help me realize that there is a lot more to AoD than I had originally thought, the 20 AA is crap, mainly will go to fluff BS. Beastlords I really couldn’t care less about, but the other stuff I actually feel that this doesn’t add any content, but as a whole makes all the content more useable by someone like myself who tends to play more solo than group. I’m still “meh” on the price and think it was a bit lavish, but I still look forward to playing the game and trying out all the new features, yes, even the Beastlords.
yeah whoever made the comment about soe not listening to feedback im right there with u they dont listen and they seem greedy
TAKA
Oh i read it all but avrege person who just starts to play mmos dose not know about eq2. And 30 second comertial wont kill soe twice aday. there is soema dvertisemnt dont get me wrong but is mostly to people who play soe games or just hard core gamers who are on top of all the new stuff.
Eh… i don’t know what they were smoking when they toured AoD and it was said “The Age of Discovery introduces more gameplay as an expansion than many full games launch with originally.”, but that must have been good stuff. Can i have some ?
Enough with all the Hype get the game unlocked and let Players play the game to see if the hype is all that or just smoke up Players rears. No pune intented there!! Also hate some of the new stuff already like Station Launch liked what I had and too small and not as detailed. Also hate some of what you did to play in game like with casters. When you make them toglle off Auto-Attack and make them ranged is stupid and makes playing caster even harder not that we need it to be we are squishie enough as is. To take away Auto-Attack everytime we cast a spell or buff is the DUMBIEST THING I HAVE EVER SEEN. You need to rethink some of those great ideas you had and give the Players what they want not what you think will be good for game. Like doing away with Live gamer another STUPID move on your part!!
They will likely spend more on marketing now that the game is free, but mass market ad dollars to direct someone, say from TV, to go to a website, to download an insane client on a PC that many won’t support it, is not going to generate positive ROI. Any ad dollars they have in budget discussions for 2012 will likely go into online gaming sites touting free-to-play which will likely have a decent ROI.
LOl soe needs to advertise, i never seen an add for eq2, until reciently you not seen much even at the other sites. Only folks who have known about the game are ones who been told by friends to come. Now we have to xpac devoid of anything real for some of us, and they want us to brag to our friends. Word of mouth works both ways
Smoke and mirrors is a pretty apt description. Servers still locked.. no surprise there! 🙂 Sundown & time to go shoot some beers and drink some pool methinks! Mebbe the Smoke will be vindicated 2moz if this alledged Xpak release is smooth/bug free.. but right now when I hold AOD up to the mirror it still says DOA.
I have two expired gold accounts, each with >4 L90 toons. Can I active those accounts as FTP? If so, do I have to pick 2 to play? what happends to the adept spell and gold cap etc?
Smokejumper can be enthusiastic all he wants – it still won’t matter when the EQ2 population continues to plummet (I’m hearing record lows currently) and Age of Discovery becomes the least most selling expansion in EQ2 history.
So true Necromancer.. I honestly do think despite all previous issues/bugz we have survived over the past 7 years that top lvl management at SOE would have gotten a clue by now that they are missing the mark with EQ2. Not many peeps will stay with a game when it’s rules, mechanics, playability, and flavor of the month Class changes 2 or 3 times a year. At this point High confidence me own gaming dollars goes elsewhere come Feb.
@Necro where are you hearing the record lows from love to know your “inside” source
I got a raid tonight hurry up already.
I’ve been playing this game (and having tons of fun) for too many years I think. Entering beta, all I could think was, “There’s more to this expansion than they are saying. There has to be.” So I got in there, saw this mess, and now all I can think is that SOE is trying to get us all ready to dump the albatross this game has become for better sailing elsewhere. Are they intensionally killing EQ2 so that we’ll all be more likely to invest in EQNext? That’s how it feels.
A hand full of half baked game tools and a class that’s just a copy and paste of an existing class with the added ability to catch your own pet Warcraft style? Straws and grasping at them…
is the game up? i ran eq2 like normal, after a few minutes, instead of the old box type launcher where it showed download status then when finished, a play button popped up… now i have this little thing that looks like a wrist watch and thats it… nothing that says play, downloading, status, etc….
just has a buddy list, chat and an email icon…
what do i need to do?
@Tony
If you think SWTOR is a threat to the EQ1/EQ1 player base you could not be more wrong. As a beta tester for some time I can tell you that SWTOR is the exact opposite of the EQ genre. It is the most extreme-linear, hand-holding, easiest game you will ever play online, ever, bar none. No skill needed or wanted. At all. Basically, the game is dolled up to be WoW on steroids in the Star Wars universe – it’s targeted towards the preteen/teen crowd and not adults. Please don’t even suggest that a single EQ player will enjoy that game – because trust me, they won’t.
No the game is not up the servers are locked .. Eta was 12 hours we are now at 15 hours be nice to know when we will be playing….
Still down AFAIK Robert, after the servers are up and running, using the launcher *should* automatically download the new LP4 and run that.
@Robert
That happened to me as well. It wasn’t until I followed the new patcher links provided in another story here that I got the new one. Please do not make the same mistake I did and just run the new .EXE without reading the FAQ or you will be downloading 14 gigs of data! 8)
@brigh
i clicked the link for the patcher info, all it wants to do is dl the entire 14g thing….there is no other option
Dear god what a let down i honestly thought something new would be there..silly me
Two issues with this letter, first, SJ implied that this letter would have new info about the direction of the game, it doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
My biggest issue is this quote:
“There has never been a better time to play EverQuest II.”
I’ve been playing since launch and can say I’ve never had less fun playing EQ2 than post DoV.
I quit the game after DoV launch because the game was not fun, I played Rift for a while but I couldn’t find a raid guild that worked with my schedule, where my EQ2 guild’s raid times did (not to mention I missed the ppl I had raided with since ’05), so after 6 months I came back. And now I log in once a week to raid, and that’s it.
IMO, there has never been a worse time to be playing this game, the game is simply not fun anymore.
Letter was pr going please buy the xpac, and please give us your money. We promise we will do whats right from now on.
Uhmmmm No, i will not buy your xpac despite that sj is saying it is the greatest thing since swiss cheese.
Their Facebook and Twitter pages must reach a ultra high number before they will unlock your servers. When they have enough new friends/followers they will also unlock their new website! Join the new chapter in our game’s history.
anyway, no matter what patcher link i click, all it wants to do is install hte entire game. even if i have i pointed in the right directory, it asks to install. i do not have a repair/copy option like in the screenshots.
I’m not overly excited about this expansion. But to be honest, I haven’t been overly excited about EQ2 in general lately.
I made the decision to move to SW TOR when it comes out, and I think based on this info, it was the right decision.
I have 12 years in SOE games. I am not going to lie, it breaks my heart that the games I grew to love and played for so many days are not fun for me anymore. But hey, it was a good run…
Well here i am its 710 eastern usa time still no EQII im going to sleep and waking up in 2 hours mabye by then i can play!?!?!?!?! -___->Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
Love everyones threat of Well Im leaving for this game or that game.. Funny thing is most of them always come back.. I fell for the Hype of many games over the years but it always seems to be either Wow or Eq2 I come back too.. The latest was rift.. No new game is going to compete with 7 years of content.. Any new game ive played Im threw the content in a couple months and then Im back here… Will be the same thing with Star wars… Like the next guy Im excited about SW’s release in 2 weeks but Im sure like always it will be the same old cycle that has been happening now for years…
@Kharn
I got a raid tonight hurry up already.
glad someoe raiding our guild folded last night so i need to log in to Look for one
@OreganoNGarlic: There’s no waaaay I’ll be playing EQNext. Check out this link, and read the 7th paragraph.
http://www.everquestnext.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/eq25_2.jpg
To highlight the important part:
“This opens the door to bringing more console gamers into the world of Norrath, along with our loyal PC players. It also pushes us, as developers, to bring the level of user-friendliness, polish and fun required to succeed on a console.”
I really don’t think anything that will be that level of dumbed down will appeal to me. At all.
Regarding SJ’s awaited Letter..meh. I loved his interview on EQ2 Talk the other day, however I loathe the artificiality and overdone saccharine tone presented here. If he gets fired from SOE, he should definitely consider a career as a used car salesman. In Flint.
Its just the forced, over-jovial Charlie and the Chocolate Factory sales pitch that really grates on my better sensibility as a consumer. We know its a glorified update, we know its a cluster of meagerness. Pushing his stance harder and throwing silver sprinkles in the air while he’s doing it isn’t going to turn that turd into something we’ll covet, it just reinforces how sad the whole thing is.
Well i played this game since Beta and will do so in the future. I must be weird . It´s 1.30am here and i sit here and wait for servers coming up. I´m just angry about the way this so called Expansion is hyped by SOE. Seems like it´s pushed to live together with all the other stuff that no one can really see what is AoD and what not. The times SOE talks about “tons of new and cool stuff” is enough for a couple of years…
I think the big announcement is we can market the game for them, via social networking. Does anyone really want me to tweet my achievements to them? I will spare the general public that information, not to worry … and I don’t really post to facebook about my Everquest adventures, since most of my friends don’t play. So that’s not making me jump up and down in excitement.
He specifically addresses our concerns about “passion” from the team and “smart business decisions” from SOE. Ok, you really do believe in your project, and you got some press people to give you an endorsement.
I really want to believe, but it’s pretty difficult right now. I don’t care that the launchpad is cooler looking. I need to drink a lot more koolaide to get where he’s going. I think they changed my game to something very different than it was yesterday, and I hope I like it as much. I liked the subscription model and the inability to buy game-changing items, which I think is now a thing of the past. Everything is voluntary, sure, but everything costs money, too, which is the flip side of that argument. “We aren’t making you spend your money, but you really will need to!” seems to be the new slogan. Meh.
its a netflix repeat just a big f up lmao real big hahahahahahahahahahahahah
For myself, I just want more content. I dont know what I will even do with a 90 beastlord tbh…but want to make one, nothing my main needs.. but my boyfriend has a great suggestion.
Maybe put 12 uber items on npc that cost some rediculous amount of instance shards. Like 700 to 1000… and when u get that amount of shards u can pick an uber item… would make more 90s want to run the zones an do stuff.. I find most people in my guild dont even want to run zones due to no up grades available for there mains. Lately its very hard to get a group. Everything in every zone is basically alt loots. Yet imo if we had an item ( like in sf the shards bought uber items) we would all be happy to run more zones. Example imagine an UBER MOUNT like the one in the x2 dunder zone.. but not easy to get, costing 1000 shards, I would run the zones to get that item! The game needs a KICK, something that interest everyone, right now this xpac imo is for newer players, but holds nothing for raiders, or older players that have, been there done that! So imo give everyone a reason to want to play more! But maybe I am one of the few that feel this way, not to sure tbh. But hope they do more content or something soon tbh.
paying for content would b ok but paying to unlock bags sucks and plat and lvl caps what the crap are they thinking
From somewhere above: “Love everyones threat of Well Im leaving for this game or that game.. Funny thing is most of them always come back.. “
More correctly, “a few eventually come back”.
We’ll soon be down to 9 servers, and a couple of them are low population again. I’ve been through 2 server mergers, so that’s halving twice, then shrinking some afterward.
They don’t merge fully populated servers. Most don’t come back. And they’ve started leaving again.
Well I listened to Smokejumpers interview on EQ2 talk and what he has been saying here and in other places, it is very clear to me that he is moving the game in a more casual direction. If you like it or not is up to you but my guess is that the constant attrition of casual gamers leaving forced a new direction of the game, that also makes the decision of not fixing the broken DoV raids and other changes in the DoV content more logical. For whatever reasons the game left most of its sub base behind it, and they need to get it back. From my personal point of view the game stopped catering to me about 1.5 years ago, I will be back to check it out and see if it is more accessible to a casual gamer now, and I hope so. Other people may find that the game is not for them anymore, and that is sad.
@Robert cut and paste your Paks folder,music folder,and LON folder into the new launcher folder.It’ll go from 14g down to about 2.