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.
First off I think the story idea is great and can't wait to read them.
ReplyDeleteBack about a year ago I was still reading the trash on MMORPG [dot] com from othere members from the site. I started posting with them as I have been a EQ2 fan boy for a long time. I do not know if the person played WOW, but they said thay did. Most of them wanted to talk about how evil SOE was and EQ2 was at the top of the list, Well SWG allways is at the top of that list, but EQ2 is right behind it. Any way this WOW player was trying to make the point that SOE was only out to make money unlike Blizzard meaning WOW. He said that EQ2 had so many game updates and expansions just to keep us in the game, and adding all that content was there way of sucking all our money up. To where WOW didn't add a lot of content and that is why it was not evil.
The bad thing is that many of the SOE haters joined him in this. Pointing out that content was bad and putting very little content into the game was good.
I think that is when I walked away from that site. When you have people that think like that, there is no way for me to even think about having a real debate with them.
It sounds as if you have ran into one of them, That thinks more is bad.
Alik Steel