WHEN THE MOON HITS YOUR EYE ... LIKE A BIG SONY LIE ... THAT'S AMORE

You know it's bad when you get a shoddy product; when the producer of the product not only deceives you about it, but has a long track record of deceiving you; when the product causes you endless frustration as you attempt to use it ... and yet ... **sigh** ... you still love it.

I can't even begin to describe the horror that was the launch of the Everquest expansion, "Shadows of Luclin". Here it is, a couple of weeks after commercial release, and you can still find the chat servers and message boards full of people that can't even play the game. Patches have come in at the rate of about one every other day in what have been vain attempts to resolve serious problems, ranging from inabilities to simply load the game from the CD to graphics cards showing characters that are **actually** naked.

My personal experience with trying to just get Luclin started up was probably better than most. I couldn't get the CD to just load up; apparently no one at SoE partitions their 80gb hard drives and they assumed we'd all have the room to just pop three CD's worth of information into our Everquest folder. I literally had to scour the internet for hints and clues and figured out how to get it loaded; then I spent another day investigating the message boards for clues on how to get the patcher unstalled. Eventually, I could log in and play; however, this still takes several attempts to actually get in, and usually at least once in this process my character gets stuck in the game and I have to wait 10-20 minutes for it to log out.

I have to allow at least one hour to get logged into the game successfully. Even then, at any time, I could crash to desktop and have to start all over. However, I have other things to do anyway, so again, my experience in this probably isn't as frustrating as most others.

How can I even begin to rant about a company that thinks this is acceptable? How can one even fathom an industry that thinks forcing people to seriously upgrade their computer and pay THEM to debug and test their prematurely released product is an acceptable business practice? And yes, Martha, when you change the basic specifications of the game on people that have almost three years of time invested in their hobby, you are indeed FORCING them, or else they have to give up three years of effort.

This is beyond appalling; it is a comedy of faustian flavor. It is patently unbelievable that a company puts a product on a shelf and EXPECTS the buyer to be a debugging/computer programming/internet expert in order to figure out how to play it. There is simply no way to measure the disgust I feel at the business "ethics" of SoE. They have no ethics. They have NO ETHICS.

If they didn't have some of the most inventive and talented creators in the business working for them, they'd be a joke. That's right, I'm changing my front page to reflect a new sense of respect I have for the artists and designers at SoE. Shadows of Luclin (WHEN YOU CAN PLAY THE DAMN THING) is without a doubt the most incredible "game" I've ever had the pleasure to interact with on my computer.

First off, the new characters are absolutely breathtaking. The choices for facial structures, hair, beards and mustaches are fabulous. The emotes are absolutely inspired (whoever did the female Erudites' emote animations deserves an academy award). The scenery, both in the old world and on Luclin, is absolutely stunning. It is disappointing that there are only a few armor models in the game (RyGorr looks like banded looks like chain), but it looks like they really took some time to make what armors they have look very, very good.

The inclusion of "Nexus", or a central teleport mechanism to and from main points on the old world and on Kunark is a welcome change in policy from SoE; this makes getting around much easier without harming the usefulness of wizards and druids in transportation. Even the horrible framerates of the city zones on the moon can't detract from their magnificence. The inclusion of the Bazaar and the arena just off of it will, I'm sure, be very handy in the future once people can actually move around in those areas without feeling like you are neck deep in molasses.

Best of all, things are actually **different** on the moon. Gameplay is different in many areas, and SoE took the most popular "types" of zones and encounters of their previous experience and gave it to the customer in spades on Luclin, including real improvements to questing and variations of their spawning mechanism.

Also, as the new trade skill recipes come out, it appears as if trade skills have actually come into their own with this expansion, giving a true breadth of option to Everquest that it has been sorely lacking. From what I've seen, most of the expansion is playable by casual groups and players; banks and vendors are everywhere, and there are large outdoor areas with much to kill accessible to pick-up groups.

Also .... the horses are cool. I don't care what professional, min-max players have to say about horses; by putting in horses that anyone can buy, you've just given thousands of casual players a goal that they **can** accomplish if they just save enough money. Most of us don't play the min-max game, and we **do** want to see our characters on a horse.

I love the game. I respect the people that actually created it. I loathe the company that is producing it. I guess two out of three isn't bad.

 

 

Might as well discuss this HERE, because nobody ever uses my forums.