Feldon
More of a quick summary of this panel… Lots of clips of Othmir. Videos of enemies and friendlies. Showed bump maps and texture maps of Othmir. With the rewrite of mounts, they no longer have to make 42 animations of each mount. Now a mount can be done in 3-5 weeks. First saw this on the prowler. Part of this was to prevent tails going through mounts and fix problems with capes. For example when Tom added Othmir on a t-Rex as a demo he didn’t have to make animation of how the othmir moves on the mount. It...
EQ2
Live blog from Fan Faire with q&a on EverQuest II.
Sorry for blurry pics. Here’s what I got. I also recorded the first part on video, but didn’t get the Q&A. 🙁
EverQuest 2: Destiny of Velious PART ONE This is part 1 of Velious.
The #1 reaction SOE has been receiving from players re: station cash, rmt, and free to play has been a resounding Not in My Back Yard. We commented about this on Wednesday. And this may need to change if we want to have eq2x to eq2 transfers. If there is one thing I know about EQ2. If enough players ask for it, and it will make SOE money, they will add it. So who knows they might put Beastlord class on stationcash. 🙂
No doubt the best part of Fan Faire is talking to the developers. So far I’ve gotten to ask Rothgar both serious and geeky questions about the new UI, server upgrades, guild halls, and of course free-to-play. I’ve made no secret of my concerns about the logistics of free to play seemingly cutting off the flow of new players to the live subscription side of EQ2.
Here’s a canonical summary of the SOE Community Address. At under 50 minutes, this has to have been the shortest Community Address in the history of SOE Fan Faire events. We were advised to expect a ‘light’ event, but nothing could prepare us for nearly 20 minutes of banal, juvenile humor and heavy promotion for all things Jace Hall Productions. If you saw EverCracked, you get the idea.
Had a minute to talk to SmokeJumper 1 on 1. All has not been revealed. More incentives coming for subscription servers. Marketing will promote both games. More in tomorrow’s panel.
Dethdlr
E3 took place this year from June 15-17. SmokeJumper was interviewed and said that the current subscription model would not change. When asked after the announcement of EQ2 Extended about that interview, he had this to say: Yes, at that time, we were discussing the concept. No, we were not ready to commit to it, nor did we have any details of what we might be doing. On July 27th, EQ2 Extended was announced. I counted up how many work days passed between the interview and the announcment. Guess how many work days went by?
Fan Faire Rumor: The end of all those eq2 dev chat questions about /sit and /laydown may finally be coming. 🙂
From EQ2Players: If you’re attending Fan Faire and interested in participating in the EQII Platinum-Pass Battlegrounds tournament or the Zraxth’s Unseen Arcanum tournament, you might want to compete with your own character.
With the migration of Nagafen server last week and today’s moving day for Antonia Bayle complete, we should now see whether the new servers finally vanquish the lag monster. Rothgar is seeking player feedback on the server upgrade and, if the move proves successful, we will hopefully see the migration of all servers to new hardware. With this morning’s maintenance, Antonia Bayle received some new hardware which should greatly reduce, if not eliminate, the lag you’ve been experiencing. We will be monitoring the new hardware and phasing out the old hardware over time. Please share your experiences with us.
I still talk about the 1-50 (or 1-89) game in EQ2. I would be naive not to realize that once most folks reach 90, does it really matter how they got there? To a growing population — not really. However people quit EQ2 all the time. Whether over an unpopular policy, or the draws of real life, a slow trickle of players are always leaving MMOs and they must be replenished. You need new players. All the great players of eq2 had the luxury of leveling up at a pleasant pace, playing fun content from at *least* 35-70 with...
It seems inevitable that most conversations over the coming Fan Faire weekend will now somehow be tinged by Free-to-Play’s arrival in the EQ2 universe. I predict that Free-to-Play will be the elephant in the room that everyone is talking about. Even in SOE’s other active and in-development games. Even in other MMOs by other developers. Enthusiastic players who take the future profitability of EQ2 seriously have barely had a word to say about the basic concept of Free-to-Play, but have instead focused their concerns on it’s implementation, and how SOE’s choices may very well lead to a fracturing of...
Today marks the official rename of our site to EQ2Wire.com. No more feldoncentral.com, and while we were at it, we ditched the www’s too. It’s just plain EQ2Wire.com. This should make our site easier to remember, and result in a substantial cost savings on your next tattoo. We’ve also refreshed the logo to make sure we aren’t using any SOE art. Did you know? EQ2Wire will have T-shirts at Fan Faire!! We’ll post more info later today.
Starseeker
Starseeker is another new contributor to EQ2Wire and wanted to share a viewpoint on the aftermath of EQ2’s F2P announcement. This is my commentary on Free to Play. I have to get it off my chest. EverQuest 2 is an old game, 6 years, that is a long time for an MMO. I have been playing this game since launch. I remember the days when you would have spirit shards, and experience debt that would take away XP instead of just give you a % penalty. I remember when your guild could lose levels, and when there was heroic...
Druidess
Our own Druidess gives her perspective on the long-term effects of StationCash and what Free-to-Play means for the future of EverQuest II. Since SoE decided not to sugar coat the news on F2P, I figured I’d return the favor and save the sugar for cookies I plan on baking later.
EQ2Wire has never had the privilege (and responsibility) of covering a game whose Senior Producer posts almost as frequently as a player. And yet that is where we find ourselves today. Traditionally, EQ2Wire has sought to highlight and quote every post by the current EQ2 Senior Producer. Posts were so rare from Brenlo and Bruce Ferguson that this made sense. However it is impossible to get a clear picture of the storm facing SmokeJumper, the entire EQ2 team, and indeed Sony Online Entertainment, without reading each and every post by both SmokeJumper, and his lead man — Greg “Rothgar”...
So far we’ve had over 550 responses to our EQ2Wire EverQuest II Extended (F2P) Survey and we’d like to share the results with you! We asked for your initial impressions of the new F2P service, whether you would move either a primary or secondary characters to the service, what effect you think it will have on the game, and finally whether you would recommend such a service to new players. We now know that the 14 day Free Trial will be going away, and the Recruit-a-Friend service will be receiving some type of revamp or nerf going forward. New...
With Game Update 57, various in-game Merchants will start carrying StationCash items. If you think this is worthy of further comment, well read on… If not, well, the word of the day is “slippery slope”.
Between the avalanche of news about Free-to-Play, the new UI, and Guardian tweaks (coming approximately one month after GU57), it’s been easy to overlook the new Spell Animations which went to Test along with GU57. In short, all particle systems and related animations associated with casting spells and combat arts have been revamped. This means every animation such as roots or chains coming out of the ground, explosions, streaks of light, glowing colors, and pyrotechnics for all of the spells and combat arts of all 24 classes have changed.
There has been a lot of anger towards the new Free-to-Play service. Not the least of which has been from players currently on existing servers that continue to struggle with lag. Thus far, we’ve heard that Free-to-Play will be launching with one server initially from an existing stock of decommissioned servers, with other servers to follow, possibly old EQ2 servers as they are upgraded to new hardware. In mid August, the Antonia Bayle and Nagafen worlds will find themselves within the comfy confines of a brand new server.
TenTonHammer has landed another exclusive interview with Dave Georgeson on EQ2’s new Free-to-Play service. You can read it here.