Early Adopter Blues: EQ2

Ah, technology. How we love you. How we hate you.

I was so looking forward to SOEmote. I had such plans! Such dreams! The rousing speeches I would make to my guild, holding them enraptured as they hung on my every word, mesmerised by the subtle yet intensely meaningful wrinkling of my aquiline ratongan snout, inclined majestically against the lowering Freeport sky. The videos I would record and send out into the world, expounding ratongan philosophy and wisdom in my noble, if slightly squeaky tones.

For SOEmote I bought a webcam. A webcam with a built-in microphone, no less. With much swearing the webcam was made to work. With much more swearing the microphone, too. With swearing of truly heroic proportions both were made to work with SOEmote.

And what did it get me?

That's what.

Boiling The Frog: EQ2

I was cogging in EQ2 last night when someone in the Test channel started banging on about Ethereal Weapons. After a while my curiosity rose up and pushed me onto the forums where I found The Dear Leader's Evil Henchman's Sock Puppet's August Update Plan post.

Interesting stuff all round. Apparently we're getting a "year-end" expansion. Wonder if that's why they trademarked "Reign of Fear"? More excitingly, SOEmote is finally going to drop in just five days time, giving me a couple of weeks to play with it before GW2. And the Ethereal Weapons are apparently raid-quality ultra-rare random drops off anything. If I get one by chance, yay! but I don't plan on making much of an effort.

Which leaves this bombshell:

" Step Right Up!

We are adding a feature where you can play instanced mini-games to win random loot in game!  You purchase a ticket that gives you access to a mini-game instance.  Should you beat the simple, fun game, you receive a random reward from a chest, or opt for tokens you can spend on items available on a merchant.  We will be selling the tickets for Station Cash in the marketplace. "

Great timing after my recent Runescape discoveries.

I heard one dropped in Fallen Gate!

Beating me to the punch as usual, TAGN has a good post about it. I visited the forums several times, expecting hysteria and the proclamation of the End of Days. EQ2 players can usually be relied on to go bananas over anything more game-changing than the correction of a typo and this looked like a significant lurch towards the kind of cash-shoppery the forums really hate. But, silence. Same thing at EQ2Flames.


Maybe no-one's really noticed yet. Maybe it will blow up into a firestorm when it actually happens, or when we find out what the rewards are. MaybePay-to-Win has to be proven before anyone really cares nowadays. Maybe all the people who really get riled up about this sort of thing have already left. Whatever, no-one's lighting the torches, boiling the tar and plucking the goose as far as I can see. 


Me? I really don't care. I used to get annoyed by this stuff but I can't summon up the righteous ire anymore. I've played plenty of F2P games with lockboxes and never felt the need to buy one. Lockboxes drop randomly in Guild Wars 2 and the keys sell in the cash shop (correct me if I'm wrong but that is what those things I kept destroying in beta were, right?). City of Steam has dungeon chests that need keys and though the keys do drop in game, if you find yourself with a chest but out of keys you can click up the Store and pay real money for one on the spot. 


It's the way of the world and I don't mean to miss out on MMOs I might enjoy for the sake of a mild and ever-diminishing distaste for the moral equivalent of lottery scratch-cards. These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others.

So Emo. No, Wait! SOEmote : EQ2

Hands up who saw this one coming. Anyone? Anyone? Thought not. Sometimes an idea starts so far out in left field you have to turn your head to the right to see it coming.

Go on, turn your head. Your froglok head.

Would you like to see your character yawn when you yawn? I think I can say with complete honesty it's never crossed my mind. Must have been itching away at someone, though because yesterday Dave "Smokejumper" Georgeson gave us the benefit of a long close-up of his ever-smiling face as he enthused his way through a promo for SoE's Big New Idea. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch this.

To sum up if you didn't care to click through, EQ2 is getting both real-time facial tracking and voice fonts. Your character will be able to look more like you and sound less.

Trying to digest that news gobbet, I must have looked pretty much like Froggie the Imaginatively-Named Froglok. Let it settle a while, though and things begin to clarify. This tech was developed for something else and adapted but it's a good fit for EQ2.

Added value is what it's all about. EQ2 is becoming a portmanteau MMO. So much to do there these days the undertow is hard to fight. I keep getting sucked back in and something like this isn't fluff on the upholstery any more, it's the stuffing in the seats that's making it such a comfortable ride. (Yes, I do mix my metaphors with a blender).

"I'm not sure officer. He sounded like a froglok"

In his lengthy PCGamer interview Smokejumper says "All games should have this" and he would, wouldn't he? He's never knowingly under-enthused. But SoE have the very worst history of innovation. They spit out ideas like the old woman at the back of the bus spitting sunflower husks into a paper cup and they pay about as much attention to them afterwards, too. The question's not "should we have it?" but "will you remember we've got it after you've given it to us?"

He says "Once you get used to other people’s faces moving realistically and intuitively, characters in other games start to feel really plastic and mannequin-like". If I was charged with boosting EQ2 I'd be chary of putting the plastic dollface image back into anyone's mental field of view but that aside, he may have a point. If, that is, you habitually stare at the faces of other people's characters when you play.

Does anyone do that? Well, yes. Roleplayers do. Or at least they sit in groups facing each other, talking in /say and emoting til their fingers bleed. This I know not from EQ2 but from Rift, where in both Sanctum and Meridian I would frequently push through knots of them deep in the kind of conversation I remember from all yesterday's parties.

I don't envy them the emotional commitment and I won't be joining them but I can see how strongly something like this could play to that crowd. No, while I'm looking forward a lot to playing around with the facial imaging, it's the voice fonts that really interest me.

I ams so a troll pirates! Can't you hear my deeps troll voice?

Georgeson says of the integration of voice chat within EQ2: "Once players revealed their real voices to each other, it suddenly started feeling awkward to pretend to be a big gruff troll or a high elf princess… and roleplay took a serious nosedive". I don't know how badly it impacted roleplay but it's the main reason I've never used voice chat. I play in a really small room and the thought of filling it with a babel of Dutch, Texan and Aussie voices creeps me out more than somewhat. Imagining being surrounded by a gabbling menagerie of Kerrans, Iksars and Ratongas, on the other hand, has the opposite effect.

If you have the kind of awkward memory I do, you may recall that we were told years ago in the original PR release for EQ2's voice chat that it would include "voice masks". In typical SOE fashion, once mentioned this idea was left by the side of the road somewhere to wither up and die. There are third-party apps around already that will do what we were promised but at last we can just change a couple of settings in-game and squeak properly.

How much use am I going to make of this? Who knows? It's not in-game yet and I'll reserve judgment until I see it working. Smokejumper talks a good game and I am broadly happy with the direction he's taken EQ2 since he took control (I still think of him as being in charge of EQ2 with Windstalker as his sock-puppet) but the game he talks is sometimes better than the game we get to play.

It has possibilities, though. Enough that I'm going to buy a webcam tomorrow. An idea for an all-ratonga podcast just popped into my head...