Lornick
05-30-2007, 09:21 PM
<p>I love EQ2. Been playing since release and I've really enjoyed how the game has progressed and developed. There is one thing that really irritates me though and has since I first logged on. Outside of a few select examples there are very few differences in the quests and activities between good and evil characters. The first 20 levels are fine in this regard since the initial quests are all given in specifically good and evil areas. But after the 20+ level range it seems to me that 90%+ of the content is geared toward good players.</p><p>When I'm playing on my bruiser, I get really sick of rescuing cats from trees and stuff =p In a lot of cases it's more of the dialogue then anything else that bothers me. Quest rewards are motivation enough to do them, but I'd like the NPC's to know that I'm doing their little chore strictly for the money and that I'd punch him in the nuts if someone gave me a copper piece. Another issue is evil characters having to side with good factions to complete quest lines. That was one nice thing about DoF. Good and evil characters could choose different factions to work toward. But from KoS onwards questlines didn't differentiate much for good and evil (except for Claymore). Why does my bruiser have to side with the sissy fat owl hooluks? How come I can't help the aviaks or vultaks conquer Barren Sky instead? Sure I can understand why I could never go into an alliance with the ravasect since communication just isn't possible and our goals (assuming ravasect have any) are too different, but both vultaks and aviaks are capable of speach and I'm capable of understanding them. I've heard them say things like "I won't slip like the last one!" too many times to count. I'd rather have a conversation like the following... "Hey Mr. Bird. You want control of Barren Sky. I like money and roasted owl meat. Let's make a deal!" =p</p><p>There are a handful of quests that are more evil aligned too. Like I always felt weird doing the tears grifter quests on my good characters. Like why am I putting a scorpion in this dudes bed again? Or maybe there's a better way to get information out of someone instead of beating them half to death? While those things are fun, they aren't exactly following the good principles of Qeynos. The Bone-Clasped Girdle HQ is another good example of an evil quest. I really didn't like kissing up to that squid-head minion of Cazic Thule. But the vast majority of quests are more good aligned so this isn't too much of an issue for Qeynos.</p><p>This is sort of off topic, but I would like to see more specific objectives with instanced zones too. Unrest is a great zone and there are a lot of objectives you need to accomplish to finish the zone, but it still doesn't give you much of a feel for "Why am I here in the first place?". But it is still lightyears ahead of other zones. Like Blackscale Sepulcher. There is like one quest related to the zone. To bring this back more on topic, what I would like to see done in the future is to have more zone objectives and I would like it if some of those objectives were good or evil based. Like Qeynos folks might enter an instance to rescue a kidnapped diplomat and Freeport folk might enter the same instance to kidnap the kidnapped diplomat for a session of tortured questioning (or kill him/her on the spot). If the group is a mix of good and evil then they could choose to ignore their cities objectives and just clear the zone for loot. But if you accomplished the mission it could be like an uber writ and give the equivalent status of like 2 to 5 level appropriate writs depending on how long the instance is.</p><p>I understand that developer time is a precious thing and a lot of ideas are great on paper but just not feasible to do in the limited development time of an expansion. But I think fixing up the dialogue to be more in line with what a good or evil character might say would go a long way. Mosts the quests actual objectives could stay unchanged. Just make the conversations to receive the quests different. Same with instances and objectives. The zone geography and monsters would all stay the same, just add in quest npc's near the entrance for good and evil. I think that alone would go a long way.</p>