For those who want to get an idea of how this server is, I am going to leave it open just for today
(BETA)... Quite a bit has changed since our last night open, such as the intro for one, and the hub zone that comes in after the intro.
This server is intended to be a lot of what players are used to in an EQemulator server, soloable, but not ridiculously easy and everything is handed to you. It's a controlled progression, with tons of customization. When I say customization you'll just have to see that for yourself, there's a lot of things going on here that I haven't seen anywhere else.
CUTSCENES:
We have a story line that has to do with prison for example, you are in your cell, and once the guard comes by on a timed basis he says its time for lunch. When you are ready to go to lunch you will be flagged to do so, whereas another player could be in the same spot at the same point in time an wont be able to hail that same guard to go to lunch. The lunch scene consists of an instance, in which there is a huge table with a bunch of inmates consisting from people you haven't seen before, from characters from old EQ. If you have read up on the server lore at all we have about 4 writers working on this, one of which has a Bachelors almost a Master's in creative writing, this server revolves around time travel.
State of the Server:
We're working on finishing up our main plotline - Which will be the soloable (for the most part) of the server. You will have mercenaries in each theme. There will be about 10 for the release, completely built from the ground up consisting of lore that ties to some existing EQ lore and revolves around our own story as well.
Now alot of people think, ewwwww story/lore... /puke. Well I've played EQ for probably just as long as a lot of you and I can say reading paragraphs from an NPC gets irritating... Well this is a natural and free flow scenario where you glide through the content (for the most part) you still have your challenges, and many will tell you yes you will die many a time, but it's not UN-doable.
TASKS/Quests/Camp raid targets
On that relative subject there WILL be tasks/quests, instance-based missions kinda like monster missions as well that will stem off of those themes once we have the big guys done. WE WANT to bring back that wow factor in the occurrence of mobs spawning and the rarity of the things that they drop, such as spells that are attainable for classes only via those raid targets.
Chaosslayer once drilled me with one of the points I had on the front page of the post... "WHAT IS THIS UNIQUE SPELLSYSTEM!?!?!" Well it's merely a new line of abilities for each class going up until level 110, for now, as we will release "Expansions" on top of that level base. I don't want to develop beyond it until we get an idea of how players react to the content and where its headed, but we have plenty of plans for zone ideas etc. There are abilities that classes don't typically have, and abilities that are added there in attempts to rebalance and make every class a valid and fun class to play soloably... We feel that as this server goes live, it will balance out a lot more...
Considering the amount of content at this time and the amount of dedicated testers considering their free time, not everything is able to be drilled down so posting them on the forums when this becomes live will be sentimental to the server's health in the bug area.
Some unique features that I will point out that haven't been announced prior are some of the things on the Black Market guy in the hub zone... This is a concept that we will be expanding on of course as many ideas go through our heads...
NAME EFFECT
Potion of Vitality I
10% Increase DMG
Potion of Vitality II
20% Increase DMG
Potion of Vitality III
30% Increase DMG
Gift of Life
INCREASE HP BY 1k TEMP
Gift of Thoguht
INCREASE MANA BY 1k TEMP
Gravity Inversion Trinket
Gravity Inversion (lev,movement,vision)
Death in a Can
Feign Death in a can
Stone Essence
War Defensive Discipline in a can (W/Cooldown of 1hr)
Stone of Calling (G)
Group Call of Heroes
Stone of Calling (S)
Call of Heroes
LEVEL CAPACITY: For now is 110, spells and abilities will be released as we release more of these.
All in all, I'd say we are getting closer and closer to having the themes completed which the rest of the content will come by much quicker considering the amount of time/thought/effort put in to each of the segments. Originally we thought wed be done sooner, but we decided to squeeze more of the plotline in between what we currently have already so it is taking us a little bit longer than projected before. But we are still making quite a bit of progress. I will make a post when it's live of course and will be making a credits list to those that have contributed to this project. The overall goal is to have a unique experience with the game we all fell in love with a long time ago and can't seem to get away from it... As a player I always thought, hrmmm, what if it was this way? So that's what we do here, is if players have an idea for a timeline they wanted to express in the midst of the lore here, we say, "have at it." And then we analyze it together.
I'll have posted a full structure of our outline and brief summaries when we release.
Thanks to everyone who has supported us, thanks to Trevius for help with various things, thanks to Secrets, and thanks to the rest of the EQemulator developers who have dumped a huge amount of their time into the project to allow such things to happen.