A couple of days ago I was planning to write a few lines about the two new expansion planned for Everquest 2. The first is “The Splitpaw Saga”, an “adventure pack” sold as a digital download for $7.99. Scheduled for release June 28th. The second is “Desert of Flames”, the first actual expansion pack with a price of $29.99 and to be released September 12th. I decided to glide over this news simply because the press release I had under my eyes was completely devoid of informations. Promises about innovative PvP systems, promises about gameplay-changing features but absolutely nothing concrete and worth commenting.
Now there’s a slightly more interesting version with at least a few more details.
The first thing jumping to the eye is that the next adventure packs are going to cost 7.99 instead of 4.95 as previously stated. I guess the experiment of the first one (“The Bloodline Chronicles”) didn’t go so well even if they’ll probably pull the excuse that this one is bigger in scope and everything.
This makes me suspect that they are also trying to further boost the all access pass. For 22$ each month they offer the access to the classic EQ, SWG, Planetside, EQ2 and, if nothing hasn’t changed in the meantime, these adventures packs in the case you are subscribed from at least one month. For sure this is good marketing. If they still have a strong point, after all the screwups of the last month thanks to their awesome and creative president, it is on this offer. Right now I don’t even remotely plan to play one of their games but in the case I’ll return on this choice (won’t happen) I’ll probably consider just this option even if in my case there’s that smart VAT tax that I happen to have to pay only if I play a SOE game.
To notice the fact that they stopped to release the subscription numbers for each game. Now we get the total number of accounts active: around 750k. I guess this choices is probably to sustain the skyrocketing numbers coming from Blizzard, without revealing the gap too much. Meanwhile, the “worldwide leader in massively multiplayer online” brag remains just too funny and definitely out of place.
Aside the price increase and the useless yadda-yadda about more mudflated, irrelevant content, the other two points of interest are the introduction of PvP and some sort of Tomb Raider plug in.
It’s some time that they rave about this innovative form of PvP “never before seen” in a mmorpg. The informations are still lacking about how it is supposed to work but at least we know (as anticipated) that it will happen only in special arenas available in the zones of the new expansion. It’s rather obvious to everyone already playing the game that this game isn’t really built and balanced for the PvP and I don’t think there’s to expect much fun from it. The press release hints the possibility to fight against other players as well other creatures and even some sort of unspecified “shapeshifting”. The idea for sure has potential but only if expanded and developed thoroughly. An arena-type of gameplay requires increasingly hard encounters, ladders, official competitions, appropriate rewards, a bet system and so on. I don’t think SOE will really focus on this, in general they always try to do as much as possible but doing it in a superficial and bland way in order to gather a long list of pointless, unfun features. Maybe we’ll see something more about this approach when Mythic will release “Imperator”, maybe not. I’ll just repeat that this form of instancing, mixed with PvP and a global ladder/event system can be really exceptional and, in particular, perfect in the case the instances are able to matchmaking the players coming from all the servers (so no more empty PvP zones or long queues, and an interesting way to open the “server Vs server” competition). Of course that’s also the target of Guild Wars, with, from a side, a wonderful gameplay that no other game was able to reach till now, but, from the other, another PvP system that doesn’t seem to have a real depth or compelling purpose (so growing rather boring, pretty soon).
The Tomb Raider plug-in is probably the only actual manifestation in the game of those “exciting gameplay-changing features” that they keep repeating. This will come out in two forms. The first is in the adventure pack and is about the possibility to interact with barrels and crates in order to solve puzzles and blow ’em up. The second part is with the retail expansion coming out in September where they’ll add the possibility to climb walls and reach new places. I wrote in my ravings something similar but, again, I can see how they’ll avoid the actual potential. A better and meaningful interaction with the environment (and the new role of the environment right on the gameplay) is something that I can see as the real true potential of the genre. It’s part of that 3D interaction that brings these games to a new level, detached from the limits of the design of the textual games from where these mmorpgs came out. The heart of this type of approach isn’t as simple as it could appear. It mixes a lot of different requirements to be planned correctly. It’s a complete new work on the controls, on the world design and the actual gameplay. It’s a complete change of focus. Not anymore the character within a box represented like a fixed background (think to Squaresoft’s rendered background or the old Lucasarts adventures), but the background becoming the real environment and subject of the gameplay. Now… Can you see SOE going toward this? Obviously not, they just picked from this approach the pointless, superficial feature: the possibility to move a barrel or climb a specific wall tagged for that action.
About the rest of the content I’ve already commented. It doesn’t matter how much stuff they add, it will be completely mudflated to remain a cool feature on the game box but that only a fragment of the subscribers will actually see and have fun with. What is important in the PvE is the role of each piece you add, not how many pieces you have to offer in total. Obviously this requires again a type of approach not completely superficial. So not coming from SOE.
Finally, reading about the “Arabian Nights” theme of the expansion can trigger some fancy, good expectations, but finding “twin metallic dragons” on the same line does not bode something good…