I’ve been feeling a little low as so many of my friends are brimming with excitement over World of Warcraft’s Cataclysm expansion that is coming out in the next few hours. I’m not particularly jealous of the game itself, but that “Night Before Christmas” feeling is something I haven’t really felt about a game or expansion release in a while. Am I getting old and jaded beyond repair, I wonder?
But then I look at Optimus Prime dressed as Father Christmas, and everything is better again.
This was the cover of issue 41 of the UK Transformers comic.
‘Tis the season for giving! Winter is here and there are only a few short months until the freezing tundra of Velious is open for exploration. Starting in December and ending in February, active EQII Live subscribers and EQ2X Gold and Platinum members (with accounts in good standing) who purchase the upcoming EverQuest ® II Destiny of Veliousâ„¢ expansion will receive a set of in-game items as complimentary subscription rewards each month.
Each of the three sets is comprised of two amazing items, one of which is the new Ice Wolf Mount (pictured) and the new tightly-concealed Vampire Race, which has yet to be displayed to the public! The December and January mystery items will be revealed at the time the rewards are distributed.
Keep checking EQ2Players for updates about the upcoming EverQuest ® II Destiny of Velious™ expansion launch scheduled for February 8, 2011. Enjoy the rewards!
Vampires? Seriously?
Even Dracula is incredulous.
Yes, it’s a new playable race. More details will come out mid-next week. At that point, I’ll be unleashed to answer more questions. – Smokejumper
I’m not surprised it was tightly concealed. It needed to be protected from the scorn which is rightfully going to be heaped upon it. Being harmed by sunlight is a vulnerability shared by both vampires and bad ideas. SOE likes to keep its very worst ideas secret until they’re far too far advanced for player feedback to have any effect.
There are a wide range of races that players have been asking for. Gnolls. Aviaks. Those awesome panda-folk from the Stonebrunt Mountains. Vampires are for cheap browser games where you recruit more victims for the Offer Wall to suck the money out of.
*Sigh* Yes, I know vampires are the in thing at the moment, but you’re not going to be able to out-vampire CCP’s upcoming World of Darkness MMO. To try to jump on the Twilight/ True Blood bandwagon is just toe-curlingly embarrassing. What’s next? Getting Justin Bieber to do the new EQ2 theme song? Anyway, wherever you try to make the game dark and gloomy, you will find a chirpy little halfling or ratonga bouncing up and down singing about cheese pie.
Please, EQ2, you need to start respecting yourself. You keep trying to become more like WoW, even though the President of SOE revealed today that very few EQ2 players play WoW. If we liked WoW-like games we’d be playing WoW, which does WoW-like better than you ever will, having had something of a head start.
Be yourself. You need to lose the inferiority complex and keep doing all the things that make you special, and are why so many people love you.
I had REALLY hoped that the new Velious race would be the Coldfang Gnolls, who were rather nice chaps back in Everquest. Or even the Othmir, who were mostly friendly Ottermen. Yes, they’d be a bit silly, but at least they’d be Everquesty and from Velious!
I’ll no doubt have more to say about this once more details have been revealed. I can only hope these Vampires don’t form a matching set with the Sparkle Ponies.
Ahoy!! It has been a while since I last sailed the Burning Sea, but I popped in today to see how things are coming along. I could certainly use some Caribbean sun after the snowy week we’ve had in the UK.
Of all the Arkenors in all the worlds, POTBS Arkenor is the best dressed.
Yesterday, Pirates of the Burning Sea became Free To Play. The set up is similar to other games which have travelled the same path from being subscription only to a hybrid model. Let us take a look:
Free Account
Premium Account
Captain’s Club
Cost
FREE
FREE after one month of Captain’s Club membership Former subscribers free
$14.99 / month
Character Slots per nation
2 – Can purchase more
6
6
Dockyard Slots per character
2 – Can purchase more
5
5
Ship Storage slots per character
0 – Can purchase more
100
100
Economy slots per account
2 – Can purchase more
10
10
Item discount at the Treasure Aisle
No discount
No discount
20% discount
Ship Insurance
No ship insurance unless purchased at the Treasure Aisle
Automatic ship insurance
Automatic ship insurance
Society Creation
Requires purchase of a Society Charter from the Treasure Aisle
Requires purchase of a Society Charter from the Treasure Aisle
Societies can be created without a charter (requires doubloons).
Premium Mission access
Missions are available for purchase at the Treasure Aisle
Missions are available for purchase at the Treasure Aisle
Automatic access to premium mission content including the Besieged Tortuga epic missions
Experience gain bonus
No Bonus
No Bonus
10% bonus
Loot chance bonus
No Bonus
No Bonus
10% bonus
Faction bonus
No Bonus
No Bonus
10% bonus
As an ex-subscriber I fall in to the Premium account category. Honestly though, after playing for a couple of hours it does not feel any different to when I was a subscriber. I pretty much have access to everything except for some top-end missions, but I still have plenty to do. It is just about the most generous “Premium” account that I have seen so far, so much so that my concern would be that many subscribers might decide they would be better off dropping down to Premium themselves. Having said that, many subscribers are getting their subscriptions from a Station Access sub which covers all SOE games, rather than subbing to PotBS directly.
In a manner similar to EVE’s PLEX, POTBS allows you to buy “Burning Sea Notes”, which can be sold to other players for in-game currency. Each Burning Sea Note is convertible into 300 Burning Sea Points, and it’s $5 for two, or $20 for 9. You can also buy them with Station Cash, which is good for me as I have quite a lot of Station Cash laying about that I got for free from promotions in other SOE games. 100 Station Cash are equivalent to one US dollar.
The store, the “Treasure Aisle”, contains the usual cosmetic gear that we expect these days, along with a selection of consumables. Some of these are easily crafted in game, but some, such as the Bonus Experience or Loot books are only obtainable from the Treasure Aisle. You can survive without such things, unless you’re in a terrible hurry.
Much more interesting to me are the new Commissioned Officers. This is a consumable that will summon an ally to your side, in either ship or ground combat. I think these are only obtainable from the shop, unfortunately, though I guess a free player can still acquire the necessary points by buying Burning Sea Notes with doubloons.
You can also buy ships, and *shudder* permanent outfitting items. I’m not so happy about that, as it could impact the rather excellent crafting economy system PotBS has. Hopefully the price the shop is charging for them with be such that most people will still prefer to buy in-game. I used to do quite good business selling outfitting (equipment for your ship), which is normally lost when a vessel sinks, so the permanent ones might really cause some problems there.
Update: I’ve been told that the outfitting items that can be bought from the Treasure Aisle are not of as high a quality as the best that crafters can make, which goes some way to allay my concerns. It also appears (after I received a Novice Ship Bundle from an early quest) that when the Ship Bundle description talked about Permanent ship fittings, it meant that you could not remove them after fitting them to your ship (just like ordinary ship fittings), rather than that they would not be lost when your ship sinks. If that’s the case then they should probably make that description a little more obvious before anyone else misinterprets it and gets upset when they lose them.
At any rate, if they work how I now think they do, I’m no longer concerned about them messing up the economy.
PotBS Treasure Aisle's Ship Bundle Description
While I’m not fond of point shops, something had to be done if Pirates of the Burning Sea was going to keep its head above water. I am truly hoping that the move to F2P brings Pirates of the Burning Sea the success it deserves.
If you never played PotBS, especially if you enjoy sailing games like Sid Meier’s Pirates, you should give this new incarnation a try. That’s a personal recommendation! With no subscription required, it’s going to be easy to drop in whenever we feel like a bit of nautical adventure, not to mention that I now have another MMO I can afford to cover! The Yuletide events have just begun, so you never know who you might meet!
It's just a man in a Father Christmas costume. Or is it???
Pirates of the Burning Sea has always made incredibly good use of sound and music. You can while away the time quite easily by wandering about listening to the various musicians that are scattered around the world. The Christmas mission I just did, “A Penny to Bury the Wren”, quite literally brought a tear to my eye through its use of music and the way it really hit all the right Dickensian Christmas notes. It was a great little experience (and educational), and did not require me to kill anyone, which is actually quite unusual for Christmas events in MMO.
As well as the new Everquest 2 Festival of Heroes adventures that I pictured yesterday, “Shattered Remains” also made a comeback, with a sparkly new tapestry reward. This was the main feature in the Festival of Heroes first appearance last year. It was designed to showcase locations from each of the expansions that had come out in EQ2’s first 5 years, and as such it is slightly moving to us old-timers. I was a little surprised it hadn’t been updated this year with a visit to Sentinel’s Fate, but in any case, it’s quite a fun little romp and I recommend trying to catch it before it leaves again on the 30th of November.
Maltheas, needless to say, was rather less impressed.
The mysterious Thumore d’Armer is lying fast asleep upon the floor of Ironforge’s Arms, and any who near him begin to also feel sleepy. Wisely, people keep their distance, but somebody is going to have to try to reach the mind of the dreamer. As Maltheas has always been a mighty hero in his own dreams, he is clearly the best suited to the job!
Just so I don’t get yelled at, I’m going to put this one below the fold. It is indeed spoilerific. Or wrong.
While one world burns in dragon-wrought Cataclysm, meanwhile, Everquest 2’s Norrath is celebrating it’s 6th anniversary with the Festival of Heroes.
But all is not well in the city of Qeynos! Slippery Toughshield, the leader of the Heroes’ Festival Band, and holder of the coveted “Most Amusing Name in Qeynos” award, is missing one of his members! Elsewhere, a fair damsel is missing some of her decorative lanterns! A strange man is taking up floor-space in Ironforge’s Arms, curiously causing all nearby to fall into the same slumber! And when all that’s sorted out, somebody still needs to hand out flyers for the band’s performance!
Will the Heroes’ Festival be ruined by these Cataclysmic events? I say thee nay! The Heroes’ Festival needs a hero of its own! Fortunately, Norrath has its very own saviour of holidays! No peril is too small for Maltheas of Rodcet Nife!
Everybody else was off being devoured by dragons.
Hoorays! The Festival is saved for another year!!
The Heroes Festival will be running until the 30th of November! Don’t let Maltheas hog all the glory; come lend Qeynos and Freeport a hand!
Star Trek Online did not always treat me kindly when first we met. That did not stop me from devoting a quite ridiculous number of posts to play-by-play coverage of my beta experience. My final thoughts as the game launched were not particularly complementary, and you can see them here.
My greatest annoyance though was how, when I cancelled my subscription, it was re-activated and they carried on charging me for a couple of months. I am not a rich man, and I can’t afford to be having my credit card details misused. Just reading that old post is doing bad things to my temper. In case you’re wondering, no, I never got the money back.
Once you have their money, you never give it back.
– The 1st Rule of Acquisition
They say that time heals all wounds. As usual, “they” are spouting platitudinal nonsense, and have obviously never been shot by a disruptor rifle on full power. You do not recover from being disintegrated. Be that as it may, my annoyance had faded somewhat, and I had been hearing some positive things about how Star Trek Online has changed post-launch. Perhaps it was time to take another look.
So it was that, a couple of days ago, Arkturos Reh stepped forth to defend the Federation once again! I have a Captain-ranked Scientist from my original free month of play, but I had largely forgotten how to play him well, while the live version of Arkturos Reh was still only a Lieutenant. You may remember Beta-Arkturos as the main protagonist in my Beta liveblog, after Beta-Arkenor got trapped forever in the Wrong Tutorial.
The all-new Reh is more alien than ever, and every bit as annoyingly tiny.
Jiro Sugihara, and Arkturos Reh. Together, they fight crime.
Arkturos Reh hails from a high-gravity world. I’ve gone for as insectoid a look as I could manage, and he has inadvertently ended up looking like he’ll be played by Samuel L Jackson in the movie of his life. (I think it’s the eyes.) He probably weighs more than the Ambassador there, and is certainly stronger, but then again, Ambassador Jiro Sugihara is a non-combatant. He is, in fact, my liaison for the Federation Diplomatic Corp!
One of my major complaints with STO at launch was that it was that it was far more focused on violence as a solution than any of the series were:
Combat was always going to be a big part of any Star Trek MMO. I can live with (and enjoy!) having more fights in an hour of gameplay than would normally happen in a season of TNG. I did expect to be able to limit casualties, through diplomacy, trickery, or disabling ships. On the ground I expected to be able to set phasers to stun, and be able to leave my enemies unconscious but alive, ready to be beamed to the brig. Instead, I leave corpses and burning hulks in my wake.
Some people, especially on the forums, say that it is WAR!!! That we can’t act like Federation officers in the TV shows because we’re at war and the rules all change:
Firstly, us being at war was brought in after the fact as an excuse for the game being all about killing.
Secondly, the rules don’t change in war. Not for the Federation. We’re still supposed to abhor violence except when strictly necessary, and supposed to try to limit casualties on BOTH sides. In STO you have a mission where your job is to kill the witnesses to deeds Starfleet don’t want reported. Picard would resign his commission if he was ordered to do something so obviously against everything the Federation stands for. “The first duty of every Starfleet Officer is to the truth.â€.
The Diplomatic Corp is Cryptic’s first stab at rectifying this imbalance. While it is entirely optional, members of the corps can get special First Contact and Diplomatic missions. I’ll have to get back to you on how great those are, because Arkturos hasn’t quite gathered up enough Diplomatic xp to join yet. You get Diplomatic xp from most missions that don’t involve killing, most notably those old “Aid the planet” missions I complained about in Beta, where you basically just fly up to a planet, they ask for some stuff, and you give it to them.
Aid missions, as well as now granting diplomatic xp, also now give you a random item on completion. Previously they had been a rather expensive business, as the Federation has you buying the supplies out of your own energy credits, but the reward now makes it a more worthwhile proposition.
While, as I said, the Diplomatic Corps missions are technically optional, gaining ranks with them gives you the ability to Transwarp to several useful locations, saving a lot of travel time, so even if I was playing a viciously bloodthirsty character, I think I’d probably still do them! I’ll write more fully on diplomacy when I’ve had a chance to do some of the missions.
The other new feature which has drawn me back to STO are the featured episodes. Basically it’s a series of episodes, which are released on a weekly basis, just as if you were watching a series on TV. My friends have been speaking extremely highly of these, and have been gathering up to do them each week as they are released. We’re currently in a lull, after the end of the second series, but they’ll pick up again in the new year. I’m told they have high production values, and are a lot of fun. I should be sticking my antennae into them soon.
If you complete a featured arc before the next one begins, you get a special reward. The reward for the first featured episode arc was a Breen Tactical Bridge Officer. Alas, I was too late to acquire one through standard means, but my friend Longasc kindly lent me the considerable fortune required to buy one from the auctionhouse. After all, a captain like Arkturos Reh should surround himself with the strangest crew possible! We’re doing it TAS-style!
Breen Bridge Officer Bek during his probationary period.
The big deal which has really enticed me back on to my ship, however, is not yet live. It is the player-generated content tool known as The Foundry. This is due to arrive as part of the big Season 3 update on the 2nd of December.
Will it be frustratingly limited, especially to begin with? Almost certainly, but I’ll do my best to work within those limitations to make some fun episodes of my own. Once we have the tools to make content we can do more than just give feedback about how the official episodes are written. We can do something to fix it.
Tune in next time for the Further Adventures of the USS Gypsy Moth and its tiny Captain, Arkturos Reh, when I’ll be checking out some more of the changes since last I sailed this sea of stars.
Do not let him speak. He will put a spell on us! Ahhh, too late!!!
WARNER BROS. INTERACTIVE ENTERTAINMENT, TURBINE AND CODEMASTERS ONLINE UNVEIL THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINEâ„¢: RISE OF ISENGARDâ„¢
New Digital Expansion to The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢ Launching Fall 2011
Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment unveiled today The Lord of the Rings Onlineâ„¢: Rise of Isengardâ„¢, the latest expansion to the award-winning free-to-play massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (MMORPG) developed by Turbine. Rise of Isengard will expand the online world of Middle-earth where players will join forces to press further eastward into the legendary region of Isengard. Rise of Isengard will be available for purchase in the LOTRO Store in the Fall of 2011 with an increased level cap, the new region of Isengard including the legendary tower of Orthanc, enhancements to monster play and much more!
“2010 has been a year of unprecedented growth for The Lord of the Rings Online with our successful introduction of a free-to-play option for our players,†said Kate Paiz, Executive Producer of The Lord of the Rings Online. “This is going to be another outstanding year for the game as we progress on our journey toward Mordor and it all begins with our upcoming November update. The journey will carry through 2011 ending with our arrival in the epic region of Isengard where players will confront the raging war and shadow that has spread across Middle-earth.â€
NEW FEATURES:
* Experience the Rise of Isengard – The Epic Story continues as the Grey Company makes its way south into Dunland, but troubles arise as their road takes them into lands where Dunlending forces, marshaled by the Wizard Saruman, prepare for war. The Rangers must seek new allies and face dangerous new foes, chief among them the traitor Saruman, whose web of intrigue threatens to endanger your quest, your friends, and your life.
* Increased Level Cap — Players will be able advance their characters up to level 70, gaining access to new traits, virtues, skills and class quests.
* Expanded Monster Play – LOTRO’s monster play system will get a major revamp including opening up the feature to all players, changes to monster player skills and advancement and a brand new region for players to battle for or against the forces of evil.
Autumn 2011 feels like an age away. I’m a little surprised, as I thought the F2P system would encourage the release of smaller chunks of content as often as possible, rather than a large expansion in a year’s time. Perhaps we’ll see other new content appear in the meantime. In any case, after spending so long battling Sharkey’s boys, I shall be looking forward to bearding the lion in his own den!
Hooom…. and then mayhap to Fangorn? But let us not be hasty.
