Well the only small thing I could say was on the harvesting resources, you can get unlucky and arrive just after someone has slowly farmed one particular resource over and over again leaving you with 1001 bushes due to the random way they spawn in some zones
They are changing this mechanic in the new expansion (probably that area only) to spawn in a completely fixed manner like in WoW which says it all really.

While I want to avoid the whole dumbing down of questing (something that puts me off the PVE game in WAR, its just so easy to quest that after completing 100 of them I could only remember what 1 or 2 of them were actually about) I do think the map remembering the location of the person to hand the quest in would be welcome.

And I definitely agree with the idea of quests being offered to encourage the new player to learn how to play the game.

The comment about the browser needed is spot on, I feel like I’ve failed when I reach for it, yet its the only way if the alternative is to hop around for 1 hour in a zone infested with high level enemies for a low level reward. Really not sure what the answer is there, redesign the quest?

I think the game needs a lot of simplification on one hand, but in other areas like combat it could do with more depth being added.

They are moving in the right direction removing a few redundant stats for a starter with the new expansion, but when I see a weapon with a toolbox 1/2 a page deep something is wrong, less text is definitely more. The new Mythical weapons are prime hum dingers for that, I know they are meant to be epic, but epic should be explainable in a couple of lines, here’s an example

Eye of the Siren (Mythical), 43 lines of text not including blank lines. I love complexity, but this is one item of equipment amongst many.

If they want to make me listen through a long dialogue then real speech or a reward to do so (interactive please too – its so refreshing to play a MMO where there is a choice of responses, one unique thing I love about EQ2) would be better.

Over all I’m starting to wonder if you are right that SOE are prepared to change the game, Brenlo did say at the 2009 fanfaire that they want to produce “the best starting MMO experience ever” with their new starting zone so it appears that they are at least saying that they will. And in recent dev discussions on the user interface on the forums the developer has mentioned about streamlining things…

But in the background I worry that SOE were burned by their experience with changing SWG in a large way, NGE went down as a legend in bad MMO decisions, are they still haunted by that?

Looking at Blizzard they have, and still are changing WoW in breathtakingly massive ways. The cataclysm expansion idea I think is a good one, although I think the content will be pitched too easy if its the same sort of questing etc as the WotLK expansion that drove me off.

(And lastly, it took a long time, but I’m seeing what you mean about some of the player character looks, playing a Froglok which looks very good stopped me from seeing how wrong some of the races textures and shapes were, still wouldn’t want Aion like, too false for me ).

Saying that, I agree that EQ2 is too complex. I like difficult games but EQ is complex in a bad way, with complexity for the sake of it. They could really do with streamlining the game and re-releasing it

I still get lost in that city though — as you say, it’s a frakkin’ maze and the various city services are so scattered it’s not only hard to find them, but then to remember where they are when I come back, and I also don’t like having to run all over the place in order to do it.

This has actually been a common complaint about all the cities since EQ2 came out, though. Certain subsections of Qeynos might have a broker, but not a bank, or a section has both, but they’re on extreme opposite ends of the zone, etc.

This is why all my evil toons share a single house in the same racial village in Freeport — I don’t have to know where the crap is in the larger city and I only need to know the layout of the 1 small zone I’m in that has everything I need. I’m told that South Freeport actually has “everything” now, but even with that I don’t care to move.

Oddly… the city of Gorowyn is actually quite excellent with the hub system — all the crafting, broker, bank, etc is right in front of all the housing. But with that said, it’s the most confusing of all the cities they’ve created so far. They’ve alleviated a little of it by adding a teleporter at the lower entrance to the city that takes you right to the housing area, but still…. I hate that place.

Neriak’s the best city, IMO — logically laid out, everything’s well “hubbed” and there are teleporters to make travel to distant parts of the city faster. Now if only it weren’t so graphically intensive that it kills my computer to go in there. . . . I would gladly move all my toons from Freeport to Neriak, but the lag. . . the lag. . . .

FWIW, the Darklight Woods and Gorowyn newbie experiences are (again, IMO) way better than the original or the Fae ones. I hope you’ll take the time to review them also.

And then I look forward to how you “cuss out” Gorowyn for being so crappy in its overall design

If/when you get into your upper 40’s/lower 50’s go give Lesser Faydark a whirl — it’s a much brighter zone than Gfay. I love the look and atmosphere in there. It’s seems like it’s a maze at 1st also, but once you run through it a time or 3, you realize it’s actually a pretty good quest hub model. Too bad there are so few actual quests in there

I totally agree that when you finish a quest that you have to go turn in that the “come back here” thing should show on the map no matter how far you are. With my alt-itis I sometimes will go years between playing various toons, and finishing a quest on a long uplayed alt and then having to go “Crap! Who gave this to me and where is s/he?” isn’t very fun (and I’m a launch day vet of the game, so one would think I’d be pretty familiar with it).

Anyway… loved the write-up, and am looking forward to more in the future for however long you keep it up!

As one of those who reacted skeptically to the objectivity of your previous forays, my impression here is that you kind of expected to have a hard time and were more distanced from the frustrations as a result when writing? Which in itself is revealing about the EQ2 newbie experience — if you were so frustrated with it that it affected your objectivity (I know you don’t agree, I’m just noting what I perceived when I read the previous posts), then the newbie experience is kind of sucky, 15 minutes or no 15 minutes. Learning a new game is always somewhat frustrating, but it shouldn’t make steam come out of the new player’s ears.

Either way, it’s a much more dispassionate (and yet compassionate, I like my contradictions) look at a game that is huge fun once you “get it” but that is damn near impossible to “get” without vast amounts of perseverance, luck, and/or external help.

Oh hey, regarding Kelethin being dark and dreary. (I think it’s partly the overly large wood textures and EQ2’s love of brown, but anyway.) Try turning on atmospheric bloom if you haven’t yet and your comp can handle it. It turned that place from a “Oh yeah, we’re in the trees” location to a much more fay-like place, especially at sunrise and sunset. Definitely worth a try — some places don’t look so great with the bloom, but Faydwer generally seems to benefit from it.

The only real issue I can find with your article is this:
“Another thing I would like to mention that at night it is very hard to see NPCs — especially those blue orcs that seem to blend in to their surroundings”
It seemed to me to be the strangest of statements, stating that orcs that hide and blend with their surroundings is bad for the game! They wouldn’t be very good baddies if they were florescent orange and glowed in the dark now would they!

Gotrik.

Ambience, variety and the illusion of nature can always be added after the fact with artwork. The spokes of the city could vary in length and possibly in height to alleviate the geometrical feel.

Let’s also not forget that SOE’s actual city being built in the trees is for all intents and purposes implausible. No engineer could actually build a city in the trees like that to start with — so no matter what you do it will end up feeling unnatural.

1.) City Design has become an art form in contemporary MMOs. The cities shall look great, unique, and all should be very functional, too.

For example, placing bank and auction house rather far away of each other makes the city undesirable for auctioning/trading. I speak of Darnassus, compared to Ironforge and Stormwind. No wonder the elven capital is almost empty, but this can also be attributed to the fact that Teldrassil is/was a backwater area.

Undercity is also confusing the heck out of me, I totally agree, Hirvox.

I like your “New Kelethin”. You might want to break up the symmetry a bit, but adding more paths from one sector to another is definitely an improvement to a maze.

There must be a trade-off between functionality and looks. As Anakh pointed out already, many players use their guild hall for selling/trading and all that. It is the same in Guild Wars. Instead of going to the merchant and storage there, people pick a guild hall that has merchant and storage located in convenient places and then decide on the looks of the guild hall. There are a few highly unpopular guild halls because they place the most important NPCs /storage & merchant) far away from each other.

2.) Browser-features in MMOs.
They are not only related to questing, having a Wiki to explain the game, mechanics and all that has almost become the standard, which is a good thing.

But there is indeed a drawback, quests are often designed with little care, and as nobody reads the quest text, the -> follow arrows have become standard, too.

IMO we have to get rid of the majority of mundane quest tasks, bring/kill 10 foozles are not quests, they are boring work orders that do not require a quest text.

I am worried about the quest arrows and quest zone markers (think of WoW’s questhelper, MobMap and LOTRO’s quest tracker system) that are just too good to forget about them. I would be totally lost without them!

Still, it degrades us almost to questfarm bots. Follow the green arrow, it is your best friend! Here is your play zone, kill the mobs and then follow the arrow back to your quest giver, HERO! *snickers*

Guild Wars has “Missions” that are, as all of GW, instanced. They offer a set challenge to the player, sometimes hidden bonus extras, and play a bit like a dungeon instance in WoW that you can fail if you die too often. The GW dungeons of “Eye of the North” are closer to WoW, you can die infinitely without losing and getting kicked out of the scenario/instance/mission.

Their latest idea was to allow more open and larger instances in AoC/Aion style for GW2. They would take the QUEST-NPCs of GW that basically teleport the party in their own instance inside the instance to do this specific quest or mission. This is somewhat similar to Blizzard’s phasing, I think people who played in Icecrown know what I mean.

3.) I did not even see the huge elevator in Aion’s Sanctum. I somehow have orientation problems in 3D MMOs, regardless how well they are set up.

Interestingly, I *never* had any issues with finding my way in Ultima Online’s isometric 3D view. With my usual praise for Ultima Online I end my comment. Farewell.