There's been a lot of focus lately on Desert of Flames, our first major expansion to the game due out this fall. While we're extremely excited about this first expansion, I wanted to take some time to talk about a few things that will also be coming up for EverQuest II.
Quests, Quests, Quests, and more Quests
One of the big things we've been quietly working on in the background is a universal examination of all the quests in EQ2.
As you've seen in update #10, collection quests got their own tab in the Quest Journal, which means they no longer count against the cap of 50 active quests that you can have at once, letting you work on every collection in the game at once if you choose.
Among other things, we're making sure that the level and difficulty (and therefore, experience and item rewards) are appropriate for the challenge provided. As a part of this, we've also been adding new information to each quest that everyone should find really useful.
Soon, your journal will be able to tell you when a quest is Heroic and thus worthy of taking a group or Epic requiring a raid, as well as which zone the different steps take place in (to allow for more types of journal sorting), and lastly when a quest is complete and ready to be taken back to the giver for the reward.
The idea is to make sure that the objectives of the quests themselves are the fun challenge, and to remove some of the "Quest Bookkeeping" that people currently need to do.
Combat and Items: Diversity, Challenge, and Rewards
Class diversity, class roles, and the challenge that the world presents have been major topics that we come back to a lot when talking with people about their experiences in EverQuest II. As many of you know, we're nearly in testing with some pretty large combat and abilities improvements aimed at addressing many of common concerns about what people experience in the game:
- In some cases, classes aren't diverse enough. People get pigeonholed into one of four core roles with not enough useful flavor between the subclasses.
- In other cases, a profession's secondary contribution is better than another profession's primary contribution.
- In other cases yet, even inside of an archetype, there are distinct differences between people's ability to contribute at the level they're supposed to.
- Some combinations of abilities are a bit too effective, causing some of the end-game to get into the realm of trivial and, therefore, boring. This is one of the most frequent causes of burnout at the high end of EQ2. People figure out "the trick" and there just "isn't any challenge left." While issues like this won't impact the majority of people, it should come as a relief to those on the high end.
An update on our progress will be showing up on Test Server for public evaluation some time in the next couple weeks, and we'll be paying very close attention to the feedback of those who've played with it.
One thing that everyone should be aware of: In our discussions with people on this topic, we're definitely aware that there has been a certain amount of apprehension to what we've been doing. Anything that's an unknown that touches a topic like "combat" or "spells" gets people nervous. While there will definitely be some changes, please be assured that we're not looking to drastically alter the fundamentals that make EQ2 fun.
We want to make it very clear that we're paying attention to people's concerns. In everything that we're doing with this revamp, we are proceeding very cautiously, which is why you haven't seen anything rushed out to the live servers, or even rushed out to public test, for that matter.
All of our work in this area can be turned on and off with a switch, as we've been doing on Test Server over the few past updates. When we're in the middle of working on areas that really need to be finished all at once before a part if it makes sense, we just turn it off.
In addition, everyone will be getting the ability to respec all of their traits, traditions, and the like once this update does go live.
What's up with PvP?
With the inclusion of Arena Champions in Desert of Flames, there's been a lot of talk lately about what our plans are for PvP in EverQuest II.
Lots of people remember that before we launched, we had always referred to PvP as "something that won't be in EQ2 for launch," but it's always been something that we wanted to include, just not unless we were able to take the time and do it "right."
That begs the question, "what does 'right' mean for PvP in EQ2?"
We have a lot of spells and abilities in EQ2, and they were all designed to be used in Player vs. NPC interactions.
For starters, 'right' means that we need to make sure that every profession has a role to play in PvP, while at the same time ensuring that no profession has the ability to completely shut down others players' usefulness (and, by extension, fun) in PvP.
There's no question that EQ2 is predominantly a PvE game and that there are people who do not ever wish to take part in PvP, and those people then naturally become concerned that their PvE abilities might be nerfed because of PvP concerns.
Given that, 'right' also means that we needed to make sure that we had a system in place that would let us change any individual ability's PvP effect without changing its PvE effect, which is definitely how we plan to balance PvP abilities.
Further, putting PvP into a PvE game also complicates the issue of what people's expectations are for their roles are in PvP. A person who is a support class in PvE will likely also be primarily support in PvP. Our goal in this is to make PvP fit into the world of EQ2 in a smart way, which means PvE roles will carry across into PvP. We're not aiming for a world where everyone can compete one-on-one or completely redefine classes based solely on which type of combat they're participating in.
With that in mind, our plan for PvP looks something like this:
Step 1: Dueling. We've made it available on Test Server with the current state of the PvE abilities for those who wish to give it a shot.
Step 2: Balance larger scale PvP fights. Do casters dominate? Do melee dominate? Is there something fun and useful for everyone? What do we do with power regen on casters vs. the autoattack power of melee? We've been testing these kinds of fights internally for quite awhile now, and we need to make sure that we have the ability scaling and effectiveness (using the system I described above) in a place we think is solid. This is the step we're on right now.
Step 3: Release Dueling to the live servers once the first round of PvP settings have been fleshed out.
Step 4: Beta for Desert of Flames and Arena Champions, in which we'll be getting a wealth of valuable information on our progress so far, since Arena Champions exercises different kinds of group PvP combat.
Step 5: Launch of Desert of Flames and Arena Champions.
Step 6: This is when we'll begin discussing our longer term plans for servers based on a PvP ruleset, and will be able to get into more details.
For now, know that it's something that we know people are interested in, and we're looking forward to being able to bring it to you in a way that doesn't adversely impact your PvE abilities.
Help us Test, earn Bonus XP!
If you want to help us test the latest things we're working on before the general public sees them, you're always welcome to check out EQ2's Test Server by looking in the TestServer directory under your EQ2 install and reading the instructions in the TestServerHelp.txt file.
We've made a couple changes to Test Server lately that we're hoping bring more eyes on the things we're looking to release.
Test Server now has an optional 50% experience bonus that people can use to help grow new characters faster, as well as its own full time liaison and guides to help make sure that even more bugs find their way to us.
As always, characters that you make on Test Server don't count toward your Live character maximum of 6 slots (or 10, for Station Access members).
What's this about The Splitpaw Saga? 
Amidst all the other talk of things going on in the world of EverQuest II, there are rumors of a long-lost tribe of gnolls resurfacing, allegedly somewhere in the Thundering Steppes. Rumor has it that they bear a striking resemblance to the Splitpaw tribe of old, only much more bold and vicious.
Lots of people liked the idea of having something new to do when we released The Bloodline Chronicles earlier this year, but not everyone was in the right level range to enjoy it at the time. This time, with The Splitpaw Saga, we're trying something a little different.
The dungeons (and rewards) will scale in level, for players level 20-50, making sure that there's something there for nearly everyone, and that as many people as possible can play through the story. We're looking forward to seeing what people think of this new development. Play it through and let us know! The anticipated launch date is June 28th.
And finally, we really enjoyed spending some time with members of our community live and in person at our 1st Fan Faire since the launch of EQ2 last week in Vegas! To everyone who came out, we thank you very much for making our inaugural Fan Faire an even bigger success than any of us could have dared hope. Be sure to check out the wrap up reports, thoughts on the 1st look of Desert of Flames and of course what would an event be without photos!
Good hunting,
- Scott
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Scott Hartsman
Senior Producer, EverQuest II
Sony Online Entertainment
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