What is this Golden Path?

Brenlo,
You got me excited with your golden path idea but HORRIFIED with your remarks about Freeport and Qeynos! These cities were and should be the 2 centres of the game! Please dont destroy that! Improve the starter island, get the brilliant boatride back, add back all the old quests in the cities and add more, join city zones into bigger zones, open up the castles etc! IMPROVE these cities but PLEASE do not leave these beautiful cities by the wayside because of the fact that it would be a lot of work to bring them up to the standards of the newer starter cities.
Thanks for reading this rant but you really scare me with your ofhand remark!
Kind regards,
Ikke.

Sounds interesting to me, I am delighted to hear of this change because I remember when I was starting out I got up to lvl 40 or so and my quest journal was full and I had no idea where to go or how it related to what I had been doing so it will be interesting to see how this unfolds.
My 2c worth of advice for this change:
1.) While in storytelling mode have lots of cut-scenes & spoken storytelling with the ability to skip it if desired.
2.) Have the ability to turn it off/on if you wish.
3.) Do not "move away from" Qeynos & Freeport. They are great citys with a lot of good content. A little revamp work might be in order but in general they are great citys.
Thanks,
-Avi

Avianna@Butcherblock wrote:

Pleeeeease don't add more cutscenes. A few are okay, but I'd much rather see quest dialogue. Make my character part of the story - I'm not paying every month to watch a movie. I loved the Will of the Tyrant quests - the Antonia storyline was particularly good, especially the interrogation.
Avianna@Butcherblock wrote:

Agreed - I still think of the good and evil sides as "Qeynos" and "Freeport", with the other cities as kind of extras out there. I loved the old citizenship and class progression quests, and would love to see those come back, along with all the other "boring" quests that got removed a while back - they really helped bring life to the villages with all those NPCs that needed help (plus they help with quest count ).
Animul wrote:

Can I have your stuff?
You haven't liked the game for a couple years now, you think every change they've made is bad, and yet you're still paying SOE your money every month?
And, really, what's with the "this sucks" post? Explain WHY it sucks and how they can fix it, and maybe they'll listen.

Bridgeplay wrote:

What incomplete content are you talking about?

Lera@Antonia Bayle wrote:

Sure thing your share is in the mail.
Laters

I can understand how some players may want a "path" - good for them. Please understand that some players DO NOT want a path, and FP and Q allow that - I have started characters in each of the current starter areas and by choice would not start anywhere else but FP or Q now. Might be ok if you plan on taking one character along the progression to lvl 90, but doing multiples - ughhh - exactly the same quests, same order each time.

The golden path thing sounds great and since its optional I don't see any drawbacks from it at all.
The storybook though sounds even better, getting new players to care about the world, instead of just going through it collecting virtual loot I think is the best way to get new players to stay with EQ2 for the longterm.
But as others have said Qeynos and Freeport seem to be in Limbo with these plans, personally I've only experienced Qeynos and Kelethin as starter zones (due to only playing Frogloks ), and of the two I much prefered Qeynos since it had amazing scenes (the city is beautifully designed) and full of characters (especially Castleview hamlet). Kelethin in comparison was a little too "twee" with all the children etc, and lacked the characters Castleview hamlet had to interact with.
It would be a dream to see these zones glued together so that we had no more zoning, I'm not sure what the future to them should be whether as starter zones or questing zones, but I'm sure they should be central to EQ2 throughout the levels. And I would miss places like Castleview Hamlet, Castle ruins, and Oakmist forest, very well designed areas I think to start off in.
I would like to see more racial based starter quests, using zones already in the game, for Frogloks Kugup could be the place you visit later on as a Froglok with Tunaria somewhere High elves visit etc, maybe even have these areas provide levelling content that you can do at any level as some sort of rite of passage for your race.

I love the idea of moving away from FP and Qeynos. The game has moved so far away from the original duality of good vs evil and matured into a multi-faceted world. I can't see eliminating them but I sure can see blending them in to the rest of the world. IMHO the decision as to where to start a character should be based on building their persona, not which zone is easiest to navigate or which one gives the best loot. I would like to see much more "homeland" based abilities and gear that would fit into the storyline of the characters we create. Anything that gets away from pressure to build your toon based on "optimal" specs posted in forum stickies would be welcome.

Thanks for the heads up that you are planning to abandon the starting zones we pre Sentinal's Fate newbies just spent the last three months getting used to.
Really, really nice to discover I invested 3 months in dead end, soon to be abandoned starter zones.
So new players who choose the human race are automatically sent to a starter zone that the game designers are "moving away from"?
Does this mean that in order to experience the new and improved version of the starter "experience" one has to choose a race that will place them in one of the newer starter zones that the devs actually intend to invest development time into?
Where is the up front warning to new players choosing to create human characters that they will be relegated to an obsolete, no longer going to be improved starter zone and will be precluded from participating in the Golden Path.
As you can probably guess, I am more than a little perturbed to discover only now that the zone I started in and call home is being "moved away from" by the development team.
Perhaps you are not truly intending to abandon Qeynos and Freeport and just made a poor choice of words in conveying your intent.
One can only hope.
p.s. feeling more than a little like a victim of fraud here

Graymane-Dunedain wrote:

Well I feel for you. The whole EQ2 system isn't very good about warning people that Freeport and Qeynos are just black holes of worthlessness. (Yes, I know that old school EQ2 players would argue with me in terms of nostalgia and lore.)
Though I do know that evil human characters can start in Timorous Deep. With that in mind, I guess that I also expected that you could make a human in Kelethin. I don't know about Kelethin because I've never tried that combination.
If people don't come to the message boards or don't talk to others who play the game, then newer players will get stuck having a really crummy starting experience. To me, that's what Brenlo is agreeing with. I mean, you couldn't pay me to actually level a character up to 20th through Freeport or Qeynos. So unless SOE does a complete revamp of those cities (in terms of actual game play and joining them into a mass zone for the purposes of their new streaming client), those starter cities should just be cast aside as dead husks. From what I was able to read from the situation, that's the direction that SOE is moving in.

You may have gotten used to fp and q, but honestly, the zones need a full revamp at the least. The only advantagous thing is the tier3 guildhalls. I've been playing since launch and the original newbie cities suck compared to NKG. Perhaps the only good thing about them is they are less convoluted than the new city zones... the newbie areas aren't even a comparison though, the old world newbie areas suck. Badly.
They should gut them entirely, slap the entire city and surrounding zones into a single zone.

I don't know about other people, but I like the decent gear for lowbie toons and the smooth path the questline in TD has. My toons are usually based in Qeynos, which means they are put on the starter island (oh the memories!) where I quickly remove them, head into QH, use that carpet to SS, down to BBM and fly to TD. I would think about starting in Kelethin but it's WAY too hard to get a lvl 1 from the Nursery to the city to use the carpet. Besides, other than the poor gear, the Nursery also has a decent questline.
As long as I can continue to LIVE in Qeynos, the idea of wasting devs time on revamping all the newbie zones there when they should be working on new content tells me that this is, in the long run, something that is needed. However, I think the racial quests in the starting cities, ie: Willow Wood, Temple St. etc. should remain and the various lowbie zones OTHER than the starting islands should remain as they are fun zones to play in especially with auto mentoring.

Can anyone help me to locate one of these "golden path" hubs? I am not new to the game, and have a high level toon, but i recently convinced my wife to play, and she has made it all the way thru the TD line (prior to expansion) and last night she took the grif to BB, and sure there are tons of quests for her to do there, but I was trying to help her find one of these hubs and i had zero luck!
One of the things she complained about to me is she got kinda of lost along the way and it seems to me like she has yet to learn some fundamentals that are very important to grouping and succeeding in this game.
anyways, please let me know if you have any insight as to where the hubs are located, thanks!!!!!

Those are the hubs: TD, Gfay, Butcherblock. I believe they are the areas where you can pick up a quest story line, if you went thru TD, she followed the line from the TD hub to the BB hub, and is now working thru that.

Goolug wrote:

They're just normal quest hubs; you won't see a golden aura and as far as gameplay goes there's nothing extraordinary about them. The progression is just especially smooth in these zones.
http://eq2.zam.com/wiki/The_Golden_Path

I do hope that what he meant was a moving away from the Islands and not the cities themselves. I have long stated that the Islands needed a complete overhaul to make them more interesting and relevant. Qeynos and Freeport do not actually have a newbie timeline within them, this is something that needs to be corrected more than just abandoning them.

Arbreth wrote:

I suspect that "moving away" from the starter isle just means they're not going to get any attention and people willl be encouraged to start characters in the more modern starting cities.
Qeynos and Freeport *do* have newbie timelines; they're in the suburbs (villages) rather than the cities themselves.
Qeynos Villages Quest Series
Freeport Villages Quest Series

An interesting new layer of content could be to map out distinct "golden paths" from character creation to an arbitrary higher level hmmm... say 80). These seprerate paths could be keyed to combinations of race/class/gender to provide variety and their rewards could be some sort of minor buff/ward/resistance/item/skill/wield_ability etc etc. Look at it as being able to collect unique passport stamps in the world of Norrath.

The idea sounds excellent, but NOT at the expense of abandoning Qeynos and Freeport. These two cities are some of the most beautiful, well-layed out, realistic looking cities I've ever seen in an MMO. Gorrowyn, Neriak and Kelethin are drab, poorly designed, annoying to traverse and just down right butt ugly.
Please do NOT abandon Qeynos and Freeport.

Arbreth wrote:

They most certainly do. The timeline starts with the individual racial advisers, progresses through the starting zone's adjacent adventure zone (e.g., to the Peat Bog for Nettleville residents), then goes to (in Qeynos at least) The Caves, after which the Qeynos newbie should be over level 10 and is sent out to Antonica for the solo quest series there, which leads into Thundering Steppes.
It's perfectly fine and the racial questlines provide some much-needed racial lore to new players, and it means creating characters of different races allows you to do a different series of quests. And then it takes you on a path very similar to those found in the other cities.

Powers &8^]