Sometime in the next week, Sony’s Everquest2 will release their third expansion on the second anniversary of EQ2. While the first two expansions added to the base of the game by improving characters and level limits, Echo’s of Faedwer (EoF) isn’t going in that direction. Instead of boosting levels up for the third time, Sony instead is focusing on the complete Everquest experience. New Places to Explore
Those of us with the memories of the first version of Kelethin will have equal experiences in this, the second one. For those who are not familiar with it, Kelethin is a sprawling tree city set above the greater Faedark. A series of walkways sit above the forest floor inviting uncontrolled plummets to the unwary. While the Fae have the ability to slowly float to the ground or glide amongst the trees, most of us ground pounders do not and will have to watch our steps lest we have a really bad drop.
There are five complete regions for players to explore, ranging from level one to level 70 – Kelethin being the safe area for most lower level players and castle Mist Moore being the most dangerous. Other Regions to explore include the lesser and greater Faedark, Butcher Block Mountains, Steam Front Mountains and the Loping Plains. There are 6 dungeons for players to crawl through, my favourite being Klak’Anon, the former city of the gnomes, now taken over by the clockworks created to protect it. There’s at least one instance for players to take advantage of, The Estate of Unrest, and at least one raid zone for higher level players to enjoy themselves in.
There’s a new deity system in place where you can quest to serve the god of your choice. Deity benefits are purchasable with favour received by completing quests for the gods as well as sacrificing various loot on their alters of your chosen deity. The avatars of the gods will cast small buffs on followers of the gods that are near and are fully attackable, but woe to the person who kills their own god’s avatar.
The favours granted by the gods themselves are interesting – ranging from massive damage dealing abilities to bonuses (almost like buffs) on almost everything from statistics to crafting. There’s a couple of down sides to the avatar system. One is that favour, once spent, takes quite a while to accumulate again. Another negative to the avatar system is the fact that the favours you do receive are very short in duration with a very long, long reset time, in the neighbourhood of 1 minute to 10 minutes with an hour recycle time – Ouch!
New Alternate Abilities
The AA’s have been increased by 50 points – however there’s a catch. Once an AA point is spent on the Kingdom of Sky (KoS) side, it’s only available to the KoS side, permanently. If you choose to respec your points at a later date, the points that you’ve put into the KoS AA’s will always be forever stuck in that tree, and vice versa for the EoF AA’s. Basically this means you don’t have much leeway to play around with the AA’s as your character develops. For those of us who are already max level it doesn’t mean that much, most level 70 players already have 50 AA’s from KoS and are just burning through the new AA’s to be on a level playing field with everyone else. Those of us who are just getting along will have to be careful of where we put the new AA’s. Once spent – the points are forever locked into the original tree.
While there’s some interesting end of tree abilities for most classes (like the Templar getting a 25% bonus to trigger any item effects, and a bonus to smite damage) most of the EoF AA’s are uninspiring attempt to shore up lack-luster spells and abilities every class has. While most of us didn’t use these spells and abilities before due to their poor efficiency and lack of usefulness, the “added” bonuses that Eof gives to these abilities just means that you’ll have a new “improved” lack-luster spell or ability. Something else to put points into to reach that end super ability.
The Rest of the Story...
Lastly – there’s a few things that don’t fit into any one category of things – the guild level is being raised to level 60 – and here I was just thinking if I never had to see another basilisk...
There’s also some armour sets being introduced. Those familiar with World of Warcraft and Diablo will already be familiar with armour sets and their like. Basically if you collect all the pieces of the armour set and you’ll get a set bonus. One thing to keep in mind, however, is you are not required to be a high level in order to collect the sets – acccording to one developer you can start benefiting from sets as low as level 20. I haven’t had much of a chance to view the sets, but from the brief look that I had received of them they did indeed look like worthy conquests.
As with other expansions keep on the look out for collectable items – there’s a great number of them to be found in this one, including a new familiarity collection sets, comprising of many components of the other sets. I haven’t seen the rewards of any of these sets but they’ll probably be in line with the expansion rewards.
Game play – Sound, Visuals and User Interface
There’s no leaps and bounds for the sound and visual part of EoF . There are the normal sounds that can be associated with any zone and the all too familiar chink of weapons coming out and being put back into their sheaths. Visually I didn’t see much improvement. That’s not to say that EoF isn’t visually stunning. Familiar or not with the lore of Everquest, many will find the vast forests and cliffs of the region, dotted with camps and other interested features, to be worth a look. Boat travel is back, so you might as well enjoy looking around as you travel from zone to zone. Thankfully it isn’t as long as the original concept of boating it around the world in the first version.
The user interface hasn’t seen much in the way of changes this time around, though there is the ability to remove those annoying spinners from the hot bars. No more changing from hot bar seven to hot bar eight in the heat of crafting or with a misclick. Note, however, if you remove the spinners you’ll have to resize your hot bars to make up for the extra space. I also noticed one additional improvement for PvP – there’s a flashing sword and shield located just underneath your concentration area. This is an indication of whether or not you’re vulnerable to attack by another player. It will hopefully take the guessing out of “am I attackable now?”
The Big Picture
So what is this expansion like over all? Well, it is easies to break it down into pros and cons.
Pros:
Cons:
Got started in the gaming industry with the beta for Asheron’s call. From there I’ve pretty much done a huge amount of beta’s for the industry. I’ve beta’d games, worked in customer service for games – been a game cop (kinda like a higher level gm…), written articals for games, about games, hint’s and tips for games.
It’s probably pretty safe to say that I have either beta’d or played every MMRPG game that has come out onto the market since 1999 – And I’ve played muds, moo’s and mush’s as well. My likes about the game industry. Oh so much creativity! So little time. Dev’s doing what they say they will. Hmm, What else do I like about games. Well, I do like to explore… Some dislikes. Well, I really, really hate buggy games. Especailly buggy games that are actually really interesting. There’s nothing worse then having this super-hyped game that’s groundbreaking in many new ways – only to have it unplayable due to stupid little bugs that should have been cleared up waaaay before release.
