Well saturday I made the trip down to Indy to check out GenCon.

I went down supposedly to hang with some friends who would be there, but as they are major dice chuckers, and myself am a keyboard hacker, I really went there to check on EQ2 and OOW. :D


Things I found out.

1) The EQ2 babe booth is freaking HAWT :grin:

OOW
1) Only 1 zone in OOW do you need to be flagged for. The others are open to anyone.

2) there are Taskmasters to allow non raiding people to achieve goals (at what level I am not sure)

3) Lots more Instanced Dungeons Ala LDON. With Scaling encounters based on number of people

4) Raids are limited like GoD to 54. And will be that way from now on, they felt the 72 people raids in PoP were a mistake.

5) I got a free sign up for beta, so whenever the NDA is lifted I can actually tell you some stuff hehe. :elfgrin:


EQ2

I actually saw a live demo of this and played it for a bit, it seemed really good. But those comps could probly have started the space shuttle so I am not sure how it would run on mine.

1) The Eq2 babe booth girl was Hawt..did I already say this? :grin:


2) All three Priest class, will get Rez , Druid, Shamans, Clerics, will all start out as Priest, then further refine their place in the world at lvl 10 and then again at 20. Meaning they split into the different branches you see on the website.

3) No more spawn Racing. All major encounters are Instanced. The group or raid leader gets a temp flag, that allows all in the group or raid to access the encounter at that time.

4) Teams of 6 people to group max., with the total raid force maxed at 36 people. and ONLY those 36 can enter the dungeon or lair, say bye bye to zerg 70+ raids.

5) any race can be any class, for example I saw a Ogre Mage while I was at the booth.

6) The charater creation is really awesome, they let us make a charater, and I watched someone making a Ratman Rogue. The customization is just awesome.

Gotta head to work, Feel free to add anything if you were there.

72 person raids were a mistake. I like what they're planning for EQ2.

Oh, and pics of the hot babe??

Oh, and pics of the hot babe??Well if there was only ONE for all the EQers, she had better have been more than just "hawt".

Funny.... I never see "hawt" guys in their booth pics. They all have dunlap disease. :/ I'm thinking about a discrimination suit!! Maybe a class action with all 5 of us females who play EQ.

/giggle

EQ2 stuff sounds awesome. I'm torn between WoW + CoH and EQ2 + CoH with a little GuildWars thrown in for PVP fun. Gurk. Not enough time in the day or money hehe. On a sidenote... *pouts* I so wanted to go to GenCon this year but car troubles and my graphics card burning out cancelled those plans. What sucks is that I live just 30 miles from Indy and had no way of going there and getting back each day. Maybe next year I'll volunteer to work there.

forgot one really important thing


EQ2 Concentration.

In order to do "buffs" in eq 2, you have what is know as concentration. Where you "Concentrate" to keep the buffs up.

wich is 5 bubbles or bars. This goes with you HP and Mana bar, kind of like stamina.

Each spell or buff cost a certain amount of CON to cast. For example, If you cast POT9 wich takes up 3 con bubs, then you only have 2 con bubs to use for either a 2 con bub spell or 2 , 1 con bubble spell.

You can not have 2 , 3 bubble spells up at once. If you have to cast another 3 bubble spell the first one will shut off. SO kind of like were all bards.

Insta spells like healing and nukes however do not require concentration, just maintaining buffs and such.

I can understand the rationale for limiting raid sizes when designing and tuning raid encounters. However, the preceding expansions (e.g. PoP) did require the larger raids. So, guilds grew and adapted to that larger size requirement. And we need to keep those numbers to do the Elemental Planes and time raids. It just seems wrong to then have to tell guildmates that we're doing a LDON or OOW raid and you can't come because we've already filled the raid. :(

It just seems wrong to then have to tell guildmates that we're doing a LDON or OOW raid and you can't come because we've already filled the raid.

Why's that? I thought ubers loved competition like that. Racing to gather first and be ready for the raid first? I thought it'd be a dream come true for them. Now they not only get to compete against everyone else... they get to compete against themselves.

Regnon, you said there were more instanced dungeons which scale according to the number of people who enter. What is the minimum number of people to start the event? <Crossing fingers>

One of my friends went to GenCon and asked Chekov (from Star Trek) to say "Nuclear Wessels".

Why's that? I thought ubers loved competition like that. Racing to gather first and be ready for the raid first?

Heh Aly, just love to get your insults in, don't you? But, you are assuming too much here. Never claimed to be an uber, not once. Don't have that mindset either.

I think the old saying about ass-u-me is applicable here. :p

total raid force maxed at 36 people. and ONLY those 36 can enter the dungeon or lair, say bye bye to zerg 70+ raids.

Are you sure about this 36 number? Last time I checked, it was 24. Although, 36 is a much better figure than 24; allows to get the 24 classes in much easier. It's getting close to the 54 figure that is prevalent in EQ now... Looks to me like the EQ and EQ2 will start to hit the same clientele... Dunno if SoE would care to comment on that ;-)

Callahad

I dunno, during my EQ heyday (re: Velious) our guild could easily field 30 unique members, and ours was the smaller guild of the alliance. The larger guild could get up to 50 without breaking a sweat. While those raids did give my vid card a work out, and I agree that 70-80 member raids weren't the funnest thing in the world, I think 36 sounds a little too small. I mean, I know a lot of "family guilds" that have an active roster of over 200 different characters (not players) and can field 50 members by themselves if needed. Cutting each adventure down to a limit of 36 players will severely limit the guild dynamic.

Plus, if the instancing is based just on the items that are described here, there's going to be a huge amount of mudflation in the game. "Boss" mobs spawned whenever a player is ready - talk about item depreciation.

As for the concentration thing, sounds very DAOC to me.

I was told the current max on raids is 6 people in group x 6 groups= 36

Also not to sure about the force required to instance a dungeon.

Yeah was gonna say, that concentration thing is right out of DAOC. Grand tradition of the internet, and all that... but I hated it in DAOC, so just another reason for me to avoid eq2 8)

Dont forget that items all wear out Storm, I'm sure they'll adjust the treadmill to keep mudflation from getting out of hand, at least for a year or two.

I can understand the rationale for limiting raid sizes when designing and tuning raid encounters. However, the preceding expansions (e.g. PoP) did require the larger raids. So, guilds grew and adapted to that larger size requirement. And we need to keep those numbers to do the Elemental Planes and time raids. It just seems wrong to then have to tell guildmates that we're doing a LDON or OOW raid and you can't come because we've already filled the raid. :(

Well, they tried to stuff the genie back in the bottle. That never works it just pisses off the genie.

Item wear is very slow(and only happens on death) and simply a money sink *shrugs*
And concentration saves you from having to re-cast buffs, sucks for trying to buff random people, but most buffs in EQ2 are group based anyways.

Stay on topic

Conc buffing was nice in daoc, no stupid timers to refresh every 30 minutes or however many minutes.

stay on topic please

plaintext.

stay on topic

you know whats funny about the space shuttle..

today's hand held calculators have more processor power. They have to search Ebay for replacement parts. Thats no joke =D

Stay on topic

lets try to get back on the subject please.

That's the one thing that conerns me about EQ2 - the power you need in a computer to be able to run it smoothly. The game looks/sounds great, but if it doesn't run well without a beefed up, top of the line machine, what's the point?

I believe longterm viable graphics was the idea behind this, as it is stated even a top of the line can't run everything max yet decently. It all depends on how well their engine scales tho before you begin to bitch. Some games are able to scale lowest of low to top high end very well, giving both players a respectable experience taking hardware into account. If the game can't run 1600x1200 at 4x AA and 16x AF on a 'midrange' pc today (9800pro. 2ghz processor) then you won't see me crying. If it doesn't at least run good at 1024x768 with 2x / 4x on this hardware then i'll bitch.

I'd have to say tho, anything will be better then EQ's current piece of garbage labeled game engine. DX9 compliant my rear.

It should run at least "ok" on any machine recommend specs or above. The character creator isn't 100% accurate to how it will run ingame, but it does give you a rough idea of how well it will run on your computer. With a good machine you can hit 60 FPS+ in it.

Thread on it (http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=tech_support&message.id=23763)

Looked at the link. Looks like it won't run on a mid-range PC. We are talking about 20 FPS on 1024 by 768, and that is for Character Selection only. I shudder to think what it will be like with a more complex scene, many toons and NPCs, etc.

Callahad

the set up I am running.

Anthlon 2400
GForce FX 5200
512 Ram

Should do ok, but I am looking to move to 1 Gig of ram before it goes live.

Which expansions will be required for OOW? With the task system going in I was just wondering if the people who have chosen not to buy some of the latest expansions will be required to have them in order to finish some of the tasks, or even to use the OOW expansion.