That must have been your server, mine Katta always had a lot of people in it; not many took the time to do the portal tasks but a fair number of us did. It was actually a fairly fun expansions as a whole. Beyond doing the Hand quest I avoided the zone of the Buried Sea like the plague, only returning to help friends with their tasks. I am hoping that the next expansion will be something to do with us curing Tsaph and he amassing his forces (and his daughter's) forces to take out Seru. Using a Latin translation Arx Foris means "Fort Abroad"; while Arx Mentis means "Fortress of the Mind".
I am afraid that SoE atm has a huge problem, they post large amount of Money into new games, which only lasts a 2-3 years. I seriously doubt they make large amount of money on a lot of games, which fails rathar badly. And I think Casidia might be in on something about making their Cash on alfa/beta access on new games. And the EQ next thing, well I saw some stuff from there, and I am not impressed.
I cannot really get a good idea of what EQ:N will be based on what we have seen so far. I even played Landmark for a bit (not my cup of tea really). But that doesn't give any idea of the lore, quests, combat, game play etc. So I really don't know what to make of it yet. Hopefully, we will see a lot more information on that at FF later this summer.
Aw, it's unfortunate that LDoN could be considered a small expansion. If you scan your EverQuest directory for the four-letter S3D files that start with guk, mir, mmc, ruj, and tak, you will find no fewer than 48. Guk has 8 and the rest of the themes have 10 apiece. Each of these 48 zones was populated by hand to meet standards for population density, type, and variation. This is one of the maps that population designers created for internal use to demonstrate that we'd hit each requirement. Now normally, we wouldn't share detailed spawn point data, but I believe the benefits of a little behind-the-scenes game design discussion outweigh keeping the wander routes in MirI, an over 10 year old zone, a secret. To give the dungeons some variety of NPC placement, even within the same map, most NPCs had a 95% chance to spawn (any of the purple dots) while others were a 30% chance (the red dots). As you can see, possible spawn locations for the boss for assassinate missions and the hostages for rescue missions were placed at the furthest points possible from the Start. Possible spawn locations for rares were at least a third of the way through the dungeon. Objects and traps were scattered uniformly throughout the map but an equal number were in each zone. The 'flavor' dots, peach-colored, are text emitters. We haven't done that much since, but they were standard in each LDoN zone. As you may know from playing LDoN, and as you can see in the map above, rooms repeated. The Library shape showed up twice in MirI, the Study is present three times, the Round room twice, and so on. (Though, each zone had its unique points of interest, such as the Prison and Barracks/Teleport above.) So, there's a reason for the repetition. We used a tool that would take a set of room pieces as input and generate a randomly stitched-together dungeon as output. One could be tempted to imagine that this reuse of room geometry and randomly generated layouts would mean making many different LDoN zones was a trivial task. That was the intent. Unfortunately, one would be wrong. Even if the resulting geometry was flawless, (it wasn't... room openings didn't mate precisely, necessitating a lot of geometry touch up), the zones still need object placement, audio emitter placement, particle placement, lighting, and everything population-related that design does - pathing, NPC files, NPC placement, texts, and later beta testing. And of course... a sweet map like the one pictured above so we know where to find the rares when we're playing. So, that's LDoN in a nutshell: the smallest 48-zone expansion in EverQuest!
I love love LOVE it when you and the other developers share the inner workings of Everquest. Thank you for that.
And that's a perfect illustration of how different things can look from the dev and player perspective. It's quantity (dev side) vs variety (player side). 10 zones within the same theme that look almost the same really count as 1 zone from the player perspective. For all we knew at the time, LDoN was a 5-zone expansion that offered very little content. And for you it was the largest expansion to date. Fast forward to CotF. And here we go again. LDoN 2.0. After seeing the player reception, do you agree that if you made 10 zones and 20 HA's instead of 4 zones and 50 (or how ever many there's going to be) HA's - this expansion would be considered a success instead of what it seems to be considered by most players?
But unfortunate it does not feel like that. And well, doing the adventures is mind numbing, when you done 1, you done them all. There no feeling about the zones, and they boring. And unfortunate the HA in CoTF feels much the same.
I don't care what spin you want to put on it in regards to how many files it took for the expansion. All I care about is how many zones and how much unique content is involved in the expansion. Having 1 zone try an equal 10 zones by playing with the same repetitive geometry is worthless. So feel free to get back to me when you can actually understand that viewpoint instead of showing how much work you had to do to put out such weak content.
Thanks for the read, Prathun. I understand quit a bit of work went into balancing them. Unfortunately the layout of the LDoN maps is still very boring because it is all in a single plane. This is something that has been plaguing Everquest since the PoP/GoD era. Sure, there are height differences, and *some* overlap here and there but none of them come even close to designs like GuK or Sol A or Velks lab or even the Qeynos Aquaducts. I can't even imagine what kind of evil geometrical Genius managed to create the Qeynos Aquaducts. I am getting a headache looking at the map alone (a superb dungeon though). This picture sais it all, though it refers to FPS map design over the years. Same can be said for MMO dungeons though:
I disagree. Ldon was a great xpac. It brought a ton of people together in pick up groups. I still remember groups being rushed to finish before time was up. It was great fun. ~Carel
That was my experience as well. I met a lot of superior players in my PuG's. Many of them would become future guild mates doing high end raiding. LDoN allowed me to completely upgrade my character. Sure you look back with disdain on those items NOW. But at the time LDoN items and sets were a huge upgrade plus experience plus great PuG-ing. Thanks to the dev for the detailed info on LDoN's creation
I would actually like to see a mixture of RoF and SoF or SoD. I really liked RoF, but even then some of the content was lacking. It had the major partisan/merc quest lines but after you finished those the zones were basically finished. What I think needs to be reintroduced is something along the lines that was done in SoF/SoD with absolutely massively long quests or quest lines for something specific. A port clicky, aug, something that isnt a necessity, but might be worth getting for some. Make these even span a few zones. This keeps longevity in the game, instead of get 6 people together, spend 6-12 hours in a zone doing the mercs/partisan and never going back like in most of cotf/rof. I want a reason to travel and work in these zones minus some collection pieces and missions/raids.
It was great for pugs yes, but the zones themselves are not interesting at all. You can make 200 zones but if they all use the same geometry, textures, mobs and mission objectives (everyone wanted the kill # missions anyway) it get repeatative very quickly.
TBS was quite a nice expansion that gave us probably one of the more memorable raid zones of the modern EQ .. the only thing from a raiders perspective that could make it better would be maybe 3 or 4 entry level raids, but at the time, with no level cap increase, most guilds aside from the top ones we're still doing FC/AG or were stuck on Aprosis until SoF DPS increases came out. Enjoyable expansion though, imo.. rogues were always in demand to get the location updates for one of the Zhisza tasks >,<
Tool are great you can get more done but dont let the peeps above you force sameness using these tools your just get the same ness of the tool. make some events going down hill. some going up a mountion. make a big open swamp and the rooms are huts or dug out caves. add viratity to the walls, floor, think out side the tool box buy using it for an expand their varaible world.
