I was reading a post by Wolfshead over on Wolfshead Online Tuesday night I found very interesting. He took a look at the new player experience in EverQuest 2 of a player entering Queen’s Colony and analyzed it from a developer’s perspective. According to him, SOE did so much wrong. I got a chuckle out of a few things. Too many harvest nodes? I thought Queen’s Colony was a great demonstration that unlike in World of Warcraft, players could harvest everything! Complaining about having crafting appear so early in the game when most people say that the thing EQ2 does best compared to almost all the other games is crafting? Really? I thought that the purpose of the newbie experience was to put your best foot forward.
But the thing that really made me question what Wolfshead wrote was the complaint about SOE putting in too much NPC dialog. I found the text in Queen’s Colony very helpful when I started out. I think SOE does a good job with the quest dialog. Personally, I read all the dialog I can as long as I don’t have people grouped with me bugging me to hurry up and stop “wasting my time” reading the quest text. I actually like to know why I’m going out and killing ten rats instead of just running off and doing it. I’m not into mindless killing. I’m funny that way.
But how do I get the point across about the quest text in EQ2? I guess I could list out examples like some school term paper or master’s thesis, but that would get boring. Instead, I’m going to do something that I hope is a bit more entertaining. I’m going to write stories based on the quest text I encounter in the game. In fact, all dialog in the stories will come from the quest text. EQ2 has a logging function that allows me to easily capture the quest dialog. I’ve done it once before and liked writing the story. So I’m going to start posting these stories starting next Thursday. And the first stories will be centered on crafting. Think nothing ever happens to crafters? Then be sure to pay the blog a visit next Thursday.
