Complete Heal

Fan Faire 2010 has now officially come to an end. There are a number of sites that have been covering the event this year such as EQ2 Wire, so my plan is just to recap some of the conversations that I had with various developers and point out some things that I found interesting. I apologize for the wall of text and any typos that follow as I don’t have much time to proof this post before it’s time to get some sleep for the night. I’ll clean up the post and get a good number of pictures on the site once I get back in town on Tuesday.

Overall

In my opinion, this year was a bit subdued vs. prior years. The main game hall seemed to be toned down and most of the focus was on new releases including DC Universe Online, The Agency and the Clone Wars. I didn’t see any official game stations running EQ, EQ2 or Vanguard. Sure there were tournaments and game room machines in the back of the main hall but it just seemed to be a bit light on the bling factor this year – at least as far as the AAA MMO titles were concerned. I think attendance might have been down a bit this year too. On the subject of new games, I will say that DCUO looks amazing. I think that game has a great future. I also really enjoyed talking with the SOE guys this year from Smedley on down. You can tell they are passionate about making games and they enjoy getting feedback from their customers. It’s a really unique dialogue that goes on between developer and gamer at these events and it’s one that doesn’t happen in many other forms of entertainment. WIth that said, the following is a recap of my thoughts on the weekend.

EQ

The new EQ Live server will be a time locked progression server. The developer I talked to about this said that they know players want it out earlier but the team is focused on releasing the new expansion – House of Thule in October. They don’t want to take the focus away from the expansion and the new content that follows so the current thought is to wait a few months after the expansion releases before the new server is released. The current projection for the launch of the new EQ progression server is the second week of January.

The new EQ expansion will include another 5 levels as well as player housing. My understanding is the player housing will be connected to the guild lobby but it will be a separate zone with stand alone houses.

The EQ population is relatively stable and depending on which numbers you look at the game still has about as many subscribers as EQ2. The games go back and forth as far as which has the larger population. Speaking of population, the devs have considered a free to play approach (something like all servers are free to play up to level 50) but nothing like that will be coming soon. They aren’t really in favor of going the route of EQ2 Extended where the F2P model is on separate servers. They are also very aware of the overall EQ Live community feelings about paying for power vs. earning what you have and will tread lightly on this front. One last thought, one developer I talked to referenced Nike’s “Beat Adidas” campaign in regard to the EQ Live vs. EQ2 mix. In other words, when Nike came out their sole goal was to one up their rival. It sounds like internally, the EQ guys are still mixing it up and trying to compete with the newer and sexier EQ2. I really liked hearing that – a little rivalry can be good for everyone.

Vanguard

When SOE said Vanguard wasn’t on the official list of Fan Faire games – they weren’t kidding. I couldn’t find a single developer in Las Vegas this year for Vanguard. They didn’t make the bus trip. They also had a kiosk running the game last year but this year? Nope. There was a live quest on the schedule but I took my wife out to lunch instead. There was still a Vanguard banner hanging in the main hall but that was about it.

I did learn a few things about the game – even though the developers were absent. First, there are no plans to shutter the game. I spoke to John Smedley, President of SOE, directly about the game. Let me say that he was open and honest and we had a great dialogue. He was a pleasure to talk to and regardless of what people say about the guy he is a gamer at heart and cares about the games we all play – including Vanguard. I asked him if the game was in maintenance mode and he said it’s a step above maintenance mode. The truth is that the remaining developers are shared with other games (EQ2, EQ Next etc…) and they allocate time for them to work on Vanguard as the schedule permits. I basically understood it to mean that Vanguard doesn’t have any more full time developers. That was a bit of a disappointment but Smed stated that he thinks the game will stick around for a few more years. He’s also open to ideas on how to make the game more popular.

He acknowledged the chicken and egg problem with spending money on the game and I thanked him for all the effort and money they put in the game since they acquired it from Sigil. It’s truly come a long way. We also talked about doing some kind of free to play server for Vanguard but he wasn’t sure how the “core gamer” that’s left in Vanguard would respond to such a thing. Russell Shanks, EVP / COO of SOE was sitting next to him when we spoke and they both were interested in giving Vanguard a spark of life.

Another developer told me they might end up moving the Vanguard servers to the East coast. Not sure really what the point of that would be but it would be closer to me so that can’t be all bad. This same developer said VG was considering the F2P model but the recent staff reductions hit VG pretty hard and he didn’t feel like the resources were still there to invest that much time in the game. That was also a bummer. I was pitching an idea of a free to play Vanguard server to let people who bought the game come back and see how much progress had been made since release and maybe they would transfer over to the Telon server or subscribe to keep the game alive. At this point, why not do it? What’s the alternative?

EQ2 Extended

As you all know, EQ2 is coming out with a F2P service called EQ2 Extended. It’s currently in Alpha and beta begins on August 17th. The Senior Producer of EQ2, Dave Georgeson, talked about the philosophy behind this “experiment” and spent a lot of time listening to players and getting their feedback. It’s clear that he is trying to breathe new life into EQ2 and I think that’s a good thing.

EQ2 Extended is basically an attempt to get more users into the EQ2 universe and really to raise brand awareness for Everquest in general. It’s not designed to replace EQ2 Live. According to Dave, EQ2 is their most important product in their stable of games. EQ2 Extended is going to run on separate servers and will release with only one PVE server. They would like to add a PVP server under the service but it won’t come out right out of the gate. Characters transfers off EQ2 Extended won’t be allowed because of “duplication exploits” and “EQ2 Live players don’t want to play with characters who bought their way to power.” Seemed reasonable to me.

Many people lamented losing the 14 day free trial and were concerned that this would dry up the number of players coming into EQ2 Live. The devs stated that very few players convert to a paid subscription after going through the free trial so their take on it was that it wasn’t very effective at getting new players anyway. They are hoping EQ2 Extended will be more productive and cited all the good press they have gotten recently – even being in the Wall Street Journal.

The devs are prepared to offer special incentives on the EQ2 Live servers should the population start dropping such as mounts, armor sets etc… with multiple month subscriptions and they want both services to succeed. You will be able to copy your character from the Live servers to EQ2 Extended for a $35 fee. Players from both PVE and PVP servers will be able to copy characters over into the new servers.

Dave also confirmed that no new items with stats will be coming to the marketplace on EQ2 live. That was good to hear. He said the EQ2 population has been stable since the release of the SF expansion and any perceived drop in population is more a result of people transferring over to AB and Nagafen (the higher population servers.) If EQ2 Extended takes off, there will be more money for advertising an investing back in both models of the game.

EQ2

GU57 is coming soon and is all about bringing new players to the game. It features new spell effects, greater performance out of Shader 3.0 and much improved ability to render Flora without framerate hits. They eventually will be using the EQ2 Extended streaming launcher for both versions of the game and from what I hear that thing is very slick. GU58 is due in October and will feature the Guk Spire Dungeon, new items on SF bosses and a redo of Greater Faydark.

The new EQ2 expansion was announced and as expected we are going back to Velious. The official title of the new expansion is EQ2: Destiny of Velious. I think it’s interesting the expansion, due out in February, is referred to as “part 1″ of the Velious story. Will the rest of it be in future game updates or in the 2011 expansion? No decisions have been made as far as I know on that subject. The expansion will not have a level cap but there will be more AA available. The biggest news was that we will get flying mounts in all zones. The first flying mount will be questable. I bet one day we will be able to buy them with station cash – just saying

Server merge discussions are ongoing. The new expansion zones are level 86+.

EQ Next

A new Everquest game is coming and right now it’s PC only. It’s going to have the name “Everquest” in the title although right now it’s referred to as “Everquest Next.” We had two surprise panels that were not on the official schedule about this game. A few notes follow. First, there is a very senior team on this game right now – including the director Clint Worley. The game is going to use a modified version of the Free Realms Engine but the concept art and in game screenshots that they showed us didn’t look very Free Realms like to me. They are going to have PVP in this game from the beginning or as Smed said “pvp done right.”

Who else is on this team? I was told by another developer that some of the Vanguard guys have been moved to this project. I didn’t get specifics but he also said that Sillius continues to spend a good bit of time on EQ2. He’s probably working on the new expansion. There was a lot of talk about immersion and with the Free Realms engine there will be no zoning in overland zones. It will be like WOW where you can basically walk anywhere above ground without zoning. There will be instanced dungeons and solo, group and raid content.

Things will look familiar if you are a veteran of Norrath. They mentioned that they are considering “corpse run servers” or “hard core servers” to appeal to the old school core gamer. That comment got a loud round of applause. There will be fewer classes than EQ2 and classes will have more defined roles – think Enchanters and Bards from EQ Live. The team has a lot of old school EQ developers on it and they are leaning on that experience a bit more than EQ2 when it comes to vision and direction for the new game.

The new game is very colorful and vibrant. Characters have big shoulder pads – almost WOW style. The engine is very scaleable so it will run on most laptops and yet still look amazing on high end gaming rigs. The game world is up and running now internally – they can move around the world etc… It’s still going to be a while before it comes out though – probably at least a year maybe two or more.

EQ2 PVP / Battlegrounds

They are focusing on improving class balance, increasing the efficiency of the matchmaking service, dealing with AFK issues, and making daily quests funnel players into specific battlegrounds – perhaps generating greater rewards such as AA or tokens etc… They want to reward players proportionately vs. time spent so longer matches / instances should yield greater rewards in the future.

They are also considering allowing character transfers to and from the PVP servers in the near future. They are thinking about 1 vs. 1 PVP matches and ranking ladders. They also addressed giving mentored players on PVP servers the ability to fight back if attacked – this may happen one day but no guarantees. There was talk of a “Battlegrounds Hub” where players who go from their home server to the battleground server could remain on that server to form groups with people etc… This would cut down on the performance hit that battlegrounds are having on the Live game as people zone back and forth between servers. Finally, they talked about how well the new hardware has gone on the Nagafen server. That’s it for me tonight – need some sleep.

In less than 24 hours, I’ll be on my way to Las Vegas for the 2010 Sony Fan Faire. It’s hard to believe that I’ve been playing SOE games for over 10 years and that this year marks my 5th consecutive Fan Faire. I’m looking forward to spending a few days in Vegas and to getting the latest info on EQ Live, EQ2 and Vanguard. There are so many interesting things to talk about and questions to be answered this year. I’ll try to post some updates each night like I did last year and will have lots of pictures to post over the coming days.

I’ll also get to play in live tournaments, get some hands on time with the Agency and DC Universe Online and check out all the sights and sounds of Sin City. This year I’m arriving later than I would like due to my work schedule so I won’t get into Vegas until late tomorrow. Between panels and events, I’m also going to take some time out this year to get out of the host hotel and see some Cirque du Soleil shows, get some great food and just enjoy being in Vegas. Viva Las Vegas!

I gave it my best shot. I kept telling myself that I didn’t need to go to Fan Faire this year and that there were plenty of reasons why it made more sense to stay home. For weeks, I was able to resist the urge to hit the submit registration button. I’ve been to the last four events and my level of commitment to SOE games and really online gaming in general seems to have waned a bit over the years. After all, I’ve been spending a whole lot of time in virtual worlds since the release of Ultima Online many years ago and as many gamers have experienced the passage of time brings raising a family and getting pulled in all sorts of directions – most of the time away from gaming due to work or other RL responsibilities.

In the end, I pulled the trigger. Why? Just because I can. After all, who doesn’t need a break from the day to day routine of being a “responsible” grown up? What else am I going to do with that cash – fix the sink or paint the house? Seriously, you only live once and I’m going to pack it up and go to Vegas. There is something unique about these events and I’m excited about going once again. The Blueberry Muffin Man shown above would be proud.

Speaking of the Muffin Man, what happens when a GM with a lollipop shows up on the Luclin / Stromm server? He draws a crowd of course! In the last month or so that I’ve been back in EQ, I’ve seen a fairly large number of GM run events from horse races in the arena to passing out experience potions and offering up special character titles. In my case, this Blueberry guy was announcing his retirement from the GM program and passed out 10 – 30 minute double exp potions before he called it a night. He also gave my Enchanter a sweet last name. I enjoyed talking to this guy and hope to see him in game again one day.

When I met the GM, I was in Iksar form and there were very few other players around. He called me a “Chicksar” magnet and then dropped “The Lounge Lizard” surname on me. I think it’s pretty fitting in either Iksar form or in my default gnome skin. Anyways, my EQ time last week was spent grinding AA points in COD, BOT, Plane of Fire and Tower of Sol Ro. I’m up to 161 AA points currently and am enjoying the nightly grouping. Since I have a few veteran rewards, I can use the daily “lesson of the devoted” which grants double experience for 30 minutes every 20 hours or so. You can basically play EQ for an hour or two at a time and get a lot done – whether it’s regular exp or AA exp. It’s been fun checking out these zones in Planes of Power that I haven’t seen in years. I’m still looking forward to beginning our official raid progression in a few weeks and getting the chance to beat the Plane of Time – something I never finished during my original stint with Everquest. In the meantime, I better get going as Kibartik apparently has an axe to grind.

The outside lights just shut off on the Paris hotel and casino outside my window so that must mean it’s time for me to get some sleep.  My writeups on the panels from today are contained in the posts below but I wanted to get a few pictures out before I called it a night.  These pictures are mostly Vanguard centric – capturing the majority of group Pantheon bosses, the raid dungeon Halls of Shattered Souls, current Stirhaad, Vanguard costumes, Vanguard players and a few other miscellaneous things.    Hope you enjoy.

Today was a good day for Vanguard.  I got to spend a good bit of time with Silius talking about a variety of topics this morning and the panels were more organized and informative.  I checked out epic weapons, Pantheon, Stirhaad, the FanFaire wyrm flying mount, Halls of the Shattered Souls, a new overland raid mob with some very interesting tactics and much more.   I started off my discussions with Silius suggesting the team speak more about what they have accomplished and where they are going rather than repeating that they have a lack of resources.  I felt like the mood was a somber one at the end of the first day of panels and a more upbeat tone was needed to get people fired up about their game once again.  I think people realize they have a lack of resources but if you keep saying that over and over again people get demoralized and some start going all doom and gloom on you.

I said something like, people just want more direct communication on issues that they feel are important.  I suggested more developer chats but he said previous ones got overly negative and non-productive.  You see, we have some responsibility when we get an avenue to talk to these guys to provide constructive criticism when needed but to keep it professional.  We don’t do ourselves any favors by getting pissed off and going crazy on the forums or dropping virtual f bombs on these guys.  He said he would consider more developer chats and a more frequently updated producers letter.

I talked about things like stuck in stairs bug or rain in vista and although both won’t get fixed anytime in the near future, it would be better for him to just address these things directly with the players so we can just deal with the answer and move on rather than continue to pound away at issues that just aren’t going to be resolved.  Silius said that new players who often post on the forums are quickly squashed by six players posting in their “VG is great” threads about how much the game sucks and that they shouldn’t waste their time.  When we are so negative it spreads like a cancer and pretty soon everyone feels bad about the game and new players decide to go elsewhere.

We talked about Pantheon, the group version and he confirmed that the pegasus mounts are rewarded by the group content vs. the upcoming raid content.  Speaking of the raid content, the raid zone called Halls of Shattered Souls will have a total of six bosses.  These bosses are bad dudes.  A group of ancients were locked inside this place and utterly destroyed by these six mobs.  There will be no trash in this area and it will be sharded.  The encounters are going to be epic in scale.   There are Ulvari impaled on spears hanging from the wall and that will tie in to Nexus one day.  Whatever did these things to the Ulvari is not something to be trifled with.  The zone was not populated but the place looks like something very bad went down in there.

I asked him about what his definition of  “on the shelf” was in regards to Nexus.  Silius said that it’s basically a year or two away due to resources and the sheer scope of the design document for that place.   As long as Vanguard is still running, we will get Nexus – it’s just going to take a while.  We talked about LiveGamer and he said that it really has no impact to my game play.  He is right.  If anything, we should look at it as SOE’s commitment to the game.  Why would they add it if they were going to shut the game down soon?  While I don’t like it personally, it’s not having an effect on me so it’s no big deal.

I asked about the Smed snub at the prior night community address.  Silius said that it wasn’t a big deal.  He said that if Smed didn’t like Vanguard then they wouldn’t have been at the Fanfaire in the first place.  He pointed to expansions in EQ and EQ2.  The 10 year and 6 year celebrations of EQ and SWG respectively and new game development of Agency and DCUO as things that merited time during that addresss.  His take on it was that they haven’t done anything new that warranted the main stage.  I said what about Pantheon, epics, level cap raise etc…  He didn’t seem to think that stuff warranted a presentation saying basically “don’t read too much into it.”  All that said, I still think they deserved 5 minutes.  I had to watch the guy in the bananna suit four times for God sakes.

Silius echoed that negativity on the forums really works against our goal of growing the game.  I think he is right.  I’ve never really thought of it that way before but to some extent we make our own bed if you know what I mean.  I think we should offer constructive criticism and have open dialogue with the developers.  On the size of the development team, they have artists, coders, CS, Q&A guys and more – in addition to the main guys you hear about all the time.  I was thinking the team might be as small as 3-4 people yesterday but now I’m thinking it’s  bigger considering those other contributors.  Granted, it’s not EQ or EQ2 big but it’s not Matrix either.  Someone else told me today that Matrix was down to 1,200 subscribers when the decision was made to shut it down.  I think we should have much more than that.  If we get down that low, we deserve to be shut down to be honest.

We saw the new wrym mounts in action.  They are pink and are going to have hearts on their hind quarters and on their head.  Hearts!?!?!   LOL.  They joked about rainbows shooting out of their asses.  At least I think that was a joke.  Their speed is the same as the reindeer.  The animations look amazing but the hearts and pink color left me scratching my head.   At least it’s better than a house statue.  It’s like a big giant pink care bear. Rawr!  With Pantheon, we will get God blessings.  These things will be able to be called upon by talking to your God through the black riftstones.  Don’t worry too much about picking the wrong God.  The God blessings will be specific to certain areas of the world.  For example, if you are fighting in Stirhaad you will be able to call on blessings that offer something for your group specific to the mobs in that area of the world.  The Chaos stuff is more offensive and destruction based while the Preservation stuff is more keep myself alive type of stuff.  Those are the two main factions you choose between in Pantheon, apparently.  Finally, the class specific armor sets are the same regardless of faction.

In the next few weeks, we will see increased bank and inventory sizes with banks from all continents accessible from one location.  On Station Voice in Vanguard, it’s probably not going to happen.  There was discussion on guild hall transition; what to do when a guild leader leaves – they are working on making this more seamless.  There is a revamp to the Salamander Caves coming in the future.  The Kamelott story line will be ending.  There is some story about giants that will get finished in next few months – something about seven brothers.  New systems such as AA’s are in the works.  They also talked about immersion and naming mobs after transformers and other pop culture references.  The consensus was that we sit behind keyboards killing fire breathing dragons with swords.  Perhaps technology and transormers isn’t that much of a stretch after all.  We should lighten up and not take ourselves or our game too seriously.  It is just a game after all.

A new overland mob is coming – I think his name was Sparkles?  He’s a little turtle that sends you off to get him some meat.  Once you get the meat, obtained from named drakes in KDQ, you feed him the meat and he gets indigestion.  Guess where this is going?  He grows in size and starts to kick your ass.  During the fight he poops adds, casts “topsy turvy” an ability which flips your screen orientation upside down, has another ability which causes your screen to go black  and at 10% makes your main tank drop his health to 1, wipes out all his armor and drops him from the hate list.  This ability is called “shatter.”  The boss will drop enhancements as loot.

A final question was asked in the panel today about 51+ content and the casual player.  Silius said that SOD experience is pretty good but he is tweaking 2 dots to make them more viable for solo players.  He said the old world mobs were too much to manage so the 51-55 progression should be done on the new stuff.  They expect the average player to reach 55 by August.   The panels today were more upbeat, used the projector and showed off lots of cool new stuff.  I had a better feeling about the game at the end of the day.  Let’s hope they can keep up some momentum.  I’ve got tons more pictures and additional thoughts on the weekend but it’s getting late and I need to get some sleep before flying back to the East coast in the morning.  Until next time…

So i went to a panel this morning that gave some insight into the business aspects of MMOs.  I wanted to toss out a few tidbits that you might find interesting from the discussion.  I missed the first 15 minutes or so but once I got in the room, the presenter was talking about buying games from box stores vs. online vendors.  He said that box stores take up to 80% of the profit that the developer would otherwise make while online purchases only take 10% of the profit.  Developers would rather you buy their products online; to save 70% of their profit margins.  That may explain why our games take up smaller amounts of space on the shelves of the box stores each year.

Microtransactions are here to stay.  We will see more and more of this going forward due to simple business principles.  The profit potentinal from mass subscriber numbers and letting people pay for their level of consumption will generally result in more profits than the old subscription model.  Microtransactions are currently a $1 billion a year business and growing.  Did you know that 80 to 90% of new games now have an online component?  That number continues to increase.

We learned a little more about gold farmers and their “fast livery.”  Most of the gold farmers operate out of China (big surprise) but India is popular as well.  The typical setup is started by a guy with some cash who brings in a bunch of young kids to work in his sweatshop.  The kids move in there and sleep on cots with computers under their beds – or within easy reach.  Their room and board is covered by the rich guy and they work 6 days a week or more with 14+ hour days farming for gold.   Their wages are ridiculously low and paying for gold just encourages more sweat shops.  It’s really the bane of the developers and something they continue to fight on a daily basis.

Did you know that the average MMO budget these days is $20 to $30 million with large AAA titles exceeding $60 million?  Finally, if you are interested in working in the gaming industry you can typically get into it in one of three ways.  First, you can get in through customer service or quality assurance.  These guys typically make $20 – $25k a year starting out but the managers usually make in the neighborhood of $50k a year.  You can also get in through the software world or the hardware world.  Did you know that a 2007 survey of game developers found that the average starting salary for a rookie game developer exceeded $75k a year?  Not too bad.

With the recent release of Pantheon of the Ancients, Vanguard epic weapons are coming. They look spectacular. Here’s the scoop. First, epic weapons will all be “enhancements” that fit in a new item slot called a “soul slot.” All new T3+ weapons will have a soul slot in them. This will allow you to keep your epic going as new weapons are released. You will basically attach, or socket your epic in the soul slot of the new weapon and your new weapon will appear like your epic item and have all the epic benefits plus the stats of the new weapon. This system will prevent you from having to put your epic in the bag when a better weapon comes down the pipe. This sounds like a great idea.

Each epic has a story. Each weapon is an old powerful fighter known as an “ancient.” Ancients were an old Telonian race responsible for building the Pantheon under the direction of the Gods. Each of the epic weapons represents one of fifteen ancient warriors – the best soldiers of that storied race. The ancients live in “soul prisions” within your weapon, which is why each weapon has that word in it’s name. The pictures shown below represent the group version of the epic weapons. The stats are not final. A few of them were bugged so I don’t have pictures of all of them. Once Pantheon is cleared, you will get your group epic and then venture to the Hall of Shattered Souls to get the raid version. The raid version will have particle effects and better stats. The raid versions will be called “shattered soul prisions” representing the ancient breaking out and giving you more power. I can’t express how bad ass these things are. Go get them!

Warrior

Sorceror

Shaman

Rogue

Ranger

Psionicist

Paladin

Necromancer (off hand)

Druid

Dreadknight

Disciple

Cleric

Blood Mage (off hander not shown)

Bard