Fixing the Everquest 2 Newbie experience
I bring this up because I had 2 alts that I leveled up in Darklight Woods and 1 in Antonica, and I ended up taking 3 or 4 times longer to level up my Antonica alt to 20 because of the confusing layout, the huge amount of running that required to complete a quests.
At Fan Faire Brenlo said that he wanted Eq2 to have the best newbie experience for any MMO (or something like that). They are going to release Halas, and redo Thundering Steppes with the next expansion, but that not good enough, I think a bigger revamp is needed.
I would revamp Antonica, The Commonlands, Nek Forest, The entire City of Qeynos, The entire City of Freeport, (yes that a lot, but it needs to be done).
The Cities need to be 1 zone, not 4 Inner city zones, 6 Outer City zones, 3 sewer zones, and 4 dungeons. While all of us old players know our way around, a brand new player to the game is going to be completely overwhelmed, and lost in the new city. City layout is important, something WoW did very well with Stormwind. With out a map or anyone to help me I was able to find everything i needed in the city fairly quickly. Finding your away around the 15+ zones that make up the Freeport and Qeynos on the other hand is much much much harder and ends up confusing and annoying new players.
The 1-20 experience in Everquest 2 for Qeynos and Commanland need work (I think the other cities are fine). The way it feels like it works for the 2 alts I ran through this over the last few weeks.
1-6 Newbie island – this is pretty good intruduction, and i think it is done right.
6 –11/12 Shipped off to your Racial Hood. Depending on your Hood there are any where from 3 to 7 quests. That take you all over the city, where there are more quest that take you to more parts of the city, or parts you allready saw. You end up picking up all the newbiew quest from all the Raical hoods. This is bad design, because it confusing, and frustrating. You want something more compact and linear. The quest in the Racial Hood should only take you around the area of your Racial Hood, and the dungeon connected to your Racial Hood. When you have complete your last mission in the dungeon there should be a quest that has you exploring the important parts of the inner city. Like the leaders of the 5 major guilds want you to deliver a message to the queen or something. And this mission leads you to the last dungeon (The Caves or what ever it is on the Freeport side).
10-20 From the last dungeon you enter Antonica and The Commonlands, which both have problems. These zones are way to large for the level range. You end up spend over 60 or 70% of your time running from one place to another. The Griffon station are no were near the quest camps which doesn’t help the running part. There needs to be a Griffon station next to these camps. Imagine if the only freeway where in rural area, and every else just had roads, that what we have here in these zones. These zone should probably take you from 10-25, with Nek and TS taking you from 25-35. Zek and EL 35-42 Freeroot 40-50, and Lavastrom, and EL 45-55
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Darklight Woods is just awesome. I dont even like Kunark. But the Woods are setup just right.
DLW, GFay and Kunark are all great IMO. I definitely think they should revamp the “normal” city newbie experience from 6 – 20 but I doubt they will as they did that a few years ago plus we’ll be getting Halas soon too.
As a player who’s only really levelled Frogloks I’ve found the Antonica levelling a bit slow too, its not slow in that I cannot get the XP fast enough but it felt like too many of the quests had the time sink of endless running around for that level.
Where what I really wanted to do is go somewhere and get stuck into some action, I’d also agree with the idea of a few more linear story lines to be added in there especially just out of starter areas.
Lastly as I’ve played only Frogloks though I sort of get shoe-horned into Antonica as a levelling area, travel wise I think for a new player the alternative zones to reach are not presented very well (in fact although I’ve not looked for it I’ve not actually gone to Butcherblock mountains yet despite hours of questing and travelling I’ve not stumbled over it
).
I’d not want it Guildwars style where I just click on a island to go to when I’m at the docks since I’d lose the feeling of travelling, but some sort of text when I hover over say a trip to thunderring steps giving me a long description of where to go on further would be cool.
Maybe even the boat routes coming up on the map here could be good, I’m sure a lot of players find an uncompleted journey to somewhere is very enticing in an MMO, as it is right now though for a new player especially travel in EQ2 isn’t logically laid out (the massive city of Queynos harbour only has three destinations!) and the in game map totally fails to give the connection information I think I need.
[...] Ogrebear has another post about the newbie experience, and We Fly Spitfires makes a great point about the difference in EQ2 players versus other games. [...]