Complete Heal

The second day of FanFaire is winding down and I thought I’d put up a quick recap. After getting a late start this morning, I made the Everquest 10th anniversary celebration panel. This event had about 10-12 EQ developers and was hosted by Jace Hall. It was interesting to hear from the devs, as they were introducing themselves, about how many of them have rotated around over their SOE careers working on different games such as EQ2 and Freerealms only to come back to EQ development. I guess it’s pretty common for game companies with multiple products to rotate developers but it just kinda struck me as noteworthy. Speaking of noteworthy, did you know that the 1999 release of Everquest actually brought down the internet in San Diego? SOE had to call their network team in to get San Diego rolling again – neat story. The EQ devs talked about wanting to grow the game with more subscriptions and echoed their desire to keep releasing expansions into the forseeable future. After talking for a while and answering some canned questions from the moderator they opened the floor up for questions.

They took a good bit of heat for deciding on a 51/50 server vs. a progression server. They said they might actually release two new servers – one with each rule set in the coming months so stay tuned. On the question as to how has their demographic changed over the years they said their players are 10 years older now. They are no longer college kids with 60+ hours a week to play so they take that into consideration when designing new content. The game has gradually moved away from it’s hard core heritage and they strive to strike a balance between the hard core and casual player. They acknowledged that many players like the nostalgia and they are trying to work some of that into their new expansion. We might be able to fight Vox and Naggy and others at higher level once again. They took another question on what was their biggest mistakes. Gates of Discord was cited as well as Planes of Power, especially in regards to the backflagging fiasco. Another question dealt with graphics and keeping up with more modern games. While no major graphics overhaul is planned, their newer zones are pretty competitive and they are going to continue to optimize their engine to consume less memory etc… They are concerned about scalability as a good portion of their player base is apparently on pretty old hardware.

Up next was the Vanguard live quest – which I skipped to go eat lunch, followed by time spent hanging out in the main hall. At 4 pm the Vanguard panels started and they were hosted by Silius, Tiraslee, Raijinn and Jansan (sp). The format and vibe in the Vanguard panels was identical to last year. The room was very small, there was no organized presentation (they actually had a computer and projector but never used it) and the first topic on the agenda wasn’t even discussed – lore and mythology. I was hoping they would put Pantheon up on the projector and talk about lore or preview Nexus or something. Instead, it just turned into a question and answer session on a wide variety of topics. I heard “not enough resources” no less than 20 times. I asked specifically about the relationship between their dev team size and the number of paid subscribers noting that they lost a few devs over the past 12 months yet the subs seem to be stable. Silius couldn’t talk about the numbers of course and he seemed a bit frustrated with the lack of resources.

Other Vanguard news is that Nexus is on the shelf. They are going to work on the players choice update, AAs, Shattered Souls, Panthor Zhi (sp) and Stiirhaad (sp). The later two areas are single group dungeon crawls. Silius also said that Vanguard is “very, very cumbersome when it comes to new art assets.” The recent ranger nerf was due to possible exploits with bugged mobs. Rather than fix the mob AI, which would take more developer time they opted for the 10 minute range nerf instead. That change is permanent. Another great quote was “Galleons are just a big fishing boat.” Apparently, there had been some talk about more boat functionality such as storage, recall points or even content only reachable by guilds who own that large ship. None of that stuff is on the horizon. They talked about dyeing armor and Silius said that Jeff and Brad (oriignal Sigil brain trust) were against it to avoid “high level circus clowns” running around everywhere. While they may do something one day, it’s not a high priority. On the subject of Diplomacy, Silius said “diplomacy is the red headed step child of Vanguard.” My overall Vanguard thought is that the devs are doing the best they can but it’s hard to fly to Vegas, arrive in a panel with no prepared presentation and hear how lean the team really is. The night topped off with Smedley ignoring the game in his keynote address for the second year in a row. Talk about pouring salt in the wounds. I was hoping for a more upbeat deal – maybe tomorrow.

I’m not going to talk much about the community address since it’s all over other news sites and many of you probably watched it live. I will say that EQ2 is going to add a lot of new content between now and the February 2010 expansion. Specifically, they are adding a system where you can mentor down and clear old content for exp and AA points. An achievement system is coming which features in game rewards, titles and other neat stuff. That system may not be implemented on the PVP servers. GU53 will have a new four group raid zone and it will have each encounter with a difficulty slider. In other words, if you fight 10 bosses in the zone, you can dial them in from easy to nightmare mode with difficulty and loot adjusted accordingly. The scripts will be different on each level of difficulty. Expect this for all future raids.

After the community address, the opened the new EQ 51/50 server called Mayong. The grand opening is only for players who are here in Vegas. Next week, the server will open for the general population. The bad news for the general population is that we killed a number of bosses tonight and got the titles and first time rewards that others won’t have the opportunity to compete for. I logged on and rolled up a new character, got him guilded in the Fanfaire guild and proceeded to kill Vox, Naggy and VS and more. Screenshots of the EQ server opening are shown below.

The first 51/50 players (Mayong server) FanFaire 2009

Naggy’s Lair – FanFaire guild

Dragon down

The first Mayong server raid force

Another celebrity sighting

More dead dragons

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 27th, 2009 at 4:08 am and is filed under Fanfaire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.