Tag: EQ2

What’s the neatest item you’ve seen so far?

We love shiny games and we love new games, but what’s almost as good is when a new pretty makes its way into our current games. Has there been a particular update in your MMO of choice that brought forth a new item that you simply HAD to have? Whether it was a new piece of gear, a quest item, or some other interesting tidbit, games are constantly trying to push forth new things onto their players.

With GU53 came a new live event once again involving the spires of Norrath. They are in various stages of completion (once again) and our friendly token merchants are back – newer and more improved. There are three repeatable quests available, and each quest will reward a number of tokens.

Pictured above is one of the best items I have ever seen in EQ2 to date, of course that is coming from a player who will easily shell out 50p-150p on house items and not blink an eye.

The house item is called ‘magic mouth’ and it acts as a bulletin board where you can write a message on it. When this board is placed in your house and another player walks past it, the message that you’ve added will be used in a /shout in your house zone.

WOW.

I can think of so much potential for these things. You could propose to your loved one while they spy around your house. You could hold a scavenger hunt using messages from these boards, you could (which is what I’ll use them as) describe what the player is viewing as they stand in front of it.

I have wanted an item like that for quite some time, though I don’t need it to shout I do like the idea of people who are visiting my museum to be able to actually read what it is they’re looking at. This has been a long time project of mine, and it’s still on the go (of course). So today I’ve been working on the live event, stocking up these tokens to spend. The magic mouth is quite expensive, and I’m not sure how many I’ll need. There are a LOT of other items on the merchants including all of the ‘no graphic’ gear that we saw when the void creatures were roaming Norrath and had a merchant for that.

Yesterday I spent most of the evening working on achievements. I did some exploring, worked on some old raids, and generally relaxed. There was a WoE raid going on that I do need to complete some time (I need the earring for this weeks raids) but it was a night off from raids and I didn’t want to spend it mucking about WoE.

I also headed back to the shard of love with guild mates, no wings (again) but it was a fast run and I finished off the Love’s Champion achievement and gained that new title. I have heard a lot of people complain about the fact that the zone only rewards appearance and ‘fluff’ items, but I enjoy this aspect, there are so many achievements and collection quests within the zone that it makes it worth while for me. I don’t think it will be something I want to do over and over again, but it does provide a nice distraction.

Happy Friday to everyone, I hope it’s amazing.

I’ll see you in Norrath!

How did you spend your time after the patch?

Yesterday was a whirlwind of activity and I had no idea where to start. I decided the Shard of Love was something I had to rush out and see, so access was acquired for that first. My little templar didn’t fair so well with the berserker duo she was with at the time, but later on in the evening I completed access on the warden and went back with a shadowknight and assassin. The story behind the zone was amazing, and I had a lot of fun getting a handful of housing items. Well, more like two handfuls. The wings didn’t drop, but a lot of other really nice things including a chair with a ‘sit’ option that made me crack up laughing because no matter how many times you select it, you will get the message “you don’t really feel like sitting down” that flashes across the screen. Dang, so close!

I didn’t get a chance to try out the chronomagic feature, but I did have a lot of fun looking at the new achievements. A little confusion in channels about alternate advancement (formerly achievements, now aa) and the new achievement system. I’m sure it will catch on in time, especially for those of us who remember EQ Live.

As you can see above, my mystic does not have a lot of achievements. She was never really a quest character, and there’s a lot I haven’t done on her. Hopefully I can change that, and I’m excited about having something to work on. The appearance gear from completing them is pretty neat. I thought I remembered there being more then 488 on test, but I may have been mistaken. I’m sure more will be added with time.

Last night was a raid night, and we were off to Tomb of the Mad Crusader, where my mystic managed to grab herself T4 bracers as well as boots. That brings her to four set pieces, which I’m happy about. After we’d cleared Tombs we headed off to the new x4 raid zone in Everforst, Miragul’s Planar Shard (I believe that’s the name, I may be off this morning). The zone looks almost exactly like Crucible, x4. The gear was not especially exciting, but we did get discovery on a bit or two. Always nice.

Today servers are down with the patch to fix the patch (as usual) and hopefully when they come back up I’ll be working on the Shard of Love access for the mystic, as well as a few other things. Claymore is fairly high on the list of items I want to obtain, which requires a lot of questing. As long as it’s not RoK questing I seem to be doing fairly well.

What about everyone else, how did you spend your time in game once the servers were up? Get to explore anything exciting? I haven’t checked out any new house items yet or even peeked to see where that extra room is in my 5-room homes, but I did find it in my 1-room homes. I had to remove a wall so I could find it in fact, lol.

Hope everyone has a fantastic Thursday, no matter where you find yourself. I’ll see you in Norrath!

The Waiting Game – How do you Play?

It’s game update time! The day we have anticipated for MONTHS now, eagerly, on the edge of our chairs while we drool over lists of updates and changes. Excited? Yes, yes I am. So how do you spend the time waiting to get in game for those who may be around this time of day on a regular basis. Do you wander off and play another game for the duration? Do you get those chores done that simply are not going to take care of themselves? Or perhaps you spam your friends on twitter with random facts, until you risk getting banned.

Whatever you do the waiting is the most difficult part. I want to see the changes! I want to explore achievements, the new shard of love zone, the new heirloom tag, house items, and so many other goodies coming in this update.

Before the servers went down this morning I was busy completing a handful of level 1-10 quests in The Caves and Oakmyst forest on my templar. See, she was 20 quests away from the “1,000 quests completed” mark, and for some reason I decided I just HAD TO GET IT DONE before the servers went down. I did, it was great. Calreth was there listening to me shout out my progress as the minutes ticked.

I also managed to get my mystic a pair of T4 set gloves last night from Palace of the Ancient One. Not exciting, but it was a huge upgrade from her T2 gloves, so I was happy.

Aside from that, I am just waiting for the remaining 2 1/2 hours until servers (fingers crossed) are back up! I’m spending my time chattering on twitter, blogging, writing the occasional article for work, and of course knitting. It’s dark and raining and cloudy out – in other words an absolutely perfect day.

Happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself – and hopefully I will see you in Norrath soon(tm)!

What Feature would YOU add?

Eventually if you play a number of different games, you’ll come across a point where you think to yourself ‘I wish such and such game had THIS feature!’ It doesn’t matter what the feature is exactly, but you’ll think it and you’ll feel a little dirtier thinking it depending on what “it” is. Now, there are a couple of directions you can go with this thought.

Number one, it’s common for games to “borrow” from one another and add popular features to their game that may have shown up elsewhere ‘first’. This only makes sense, why would you NOT add a popular feature to your game, even if someone else is using it. It’s not the developers who cry ‘we had that first!’ but the players who typically shout ‘oh yeah, well THIS GAME had that feature first! So it must be better.’ In the end it doesn’t really matter.

Second of all, if games only used unique and different features in their games we’d have even more indecision on what to play because no one game could possibly house everything you would like to see.

What feature have you seen in one game but would love to see in another? Would this feature changed whether or not you played either of those games? Feel free to name some that are realistic (ie: you could actually see them being implemented in your game) and some that you know there’s absolutely no way you’d ever see in your MMO of choice.

One of mine would have to be from world of warcraft. I would absolutely love to see EQ2 with a built in calendar much like WoW has (you click on it from the mini map) that tells players what world events are going on, and when they start. You can click on each specific day of the calendar and it will tell you everything you need to know about this event.

I think this would be fantastic for events such as the moonlight grotto that comes once a month, Frostfell, and every other holiday event out there. When a special promotion is going on (ie: doubt exp weekends, SC cards on sale) that could also be mentioned.

Of course it’s not good enough to simply swipe another games idea, you have to improve on it and make it better. So how about allowing guilds to customize their calendars and add events to it, raids. Then players know what is scheduled without having to always log over to their guild web site, and it gives officers and leaders a neat place to write things down and keep track. The general calendar could be something simple and edited by the community team so that developers don’t have to spend hours and hours working on it once it’s released to the game, and things like Antonia Bayle’s server wide roleplay events could eventually get added to these calendars for players to look at while they’re in game.

This feature may not be for everyone, but it’s still something I would one day absolutely love to see (and yes, I’ve left /feedback about this before). Lets hear some other features out there, it doesn’t matter what game you’d like to see it in, I want to hear them all!