2007 has been an amazingly full year, considering some of the major games we were hoping to play (Gods & Heroes, Age of Conan) were canceled or delayed.
In January, I was still living in San Diego, still hoping that Sigil or SOE would finally read one of my resumes… on the 8th, the company in Carlsbad where I worked downsized their IT department from two people to one, and I was on the street. I found nearly immediately that spammers have taken over the job search websites as well as everything else on the Internet, and learned some hard lessons about telling real opportunities from spam opportunities (which aren’t opportunities at all, of course). Gaming suffered, since I had to spend all my time preparing cover letters, arranging interviews and so on. I was very much getting into the Star Trek Online community, and looking forward to Lord of the Rings Online, which I had pre-ordered.
February: SOE released the Estate of Unrest, which was a wild success; it’s still not hard to get groups for this zone. Simply an amazing place. They also announced that their next expansion would be the Rise of Kunark. Vanguard had come out, but compared to Lord of the Rings Online, it was a distant second. I’d gotten into the LotRO Stress Test, and was very impressed.
March: SOE raised the price of their Station Pass from $25 to $30/month, which has led directly to me dropping two of the three Station Pass accounts I’d been paying for. If PotBS isn’t compelling, I’ll drop the last one as well. It was widely believed they did this to subsidize the loss they took when they took Vanguard on. My feeling was, if you played three or more of their MMOs, fine, that would save you money. I only played two, EQ1 and EQ2, and I was leaving EQ1. I spent most of March moving to my new job in Connecticut.
April: Still pretty chilly in New England in April! Lord of the Rings Online came out, and I dropped every other game I was playing (EQ1, EQ2, FF12, everything) to throw myself into this wonderful game. I found a list of upcoming 2007 SF/Fantasy movies and did a snarky preview of them all and pretty much called them all, though “Sunshine” was supposedly a better movie than it sounded. I didn’t see it.
May: A chilly April became an absolutely glorious May in Connecticut. SOE released a new starter city, Neriak; the best newbie zone to date, Darklight Woods; and a new race, the evil Fae, Arasai. So much new stuff was happening in EQ2 that I was eager to finish up Lord of the Rings Online. A billing error canceled my LotRO account on me, so I returned to EQ2, found my guild had deguilded all my alts and demoted me while I’d been on LotRO, so I jumped ship to Eternal Chaos.
June: Raiding was fun again with Eternal Chaos, but I soon found I had joined the guild on a high point. I got into Neopets, specifically the Shapeshifter game. SOE announced that they would be publishing “Pirates of the Burning Sea”. and that it would become part of the Station Pass, which improved chances I would try it out. At the end of the month, my father passed away after a long fight with cancer. I’m glad I moved back to New England so I could be with him fairly often during his final months; I wish I’d come back sooner.
July: I realized that MMOs were wasting my life, so I resolved to spend less time playing them and more time doing other things, more productive things. Or at least, to make MMOs less repetitive and more challenging. I was still a little sore that LotRO had taken a beautiful newbie experience and turned it into a very standard grind down the line. Trying to find a better MMO experience, I tried the EvE 14 day free trial.
August: Perpetual confirms that SOE would not be publishing Gods & Heroes, no big surprise. Early reviews of G&H called it a subpar game, and with Vanguard draining the lifeblood from SOE, I can’t imagine they were too eager to take on another subpar MMO. My experiences playing DAoC, EvE and on the EQ2 PvP server Nagafen convinced me that PvP makes gaming more fun, even if you don’t do PvP. I saw Blue Oyster Cult for the first time in about ten years. Man, they got old.
September: The TV Fall Season starts off with a whimper. I started watching bunches of shows but ended up only watching Heroes. I should have taken my sister’s advice and gotten into Dancing With the Stars. SOE brought us Live Update 38, which brought the god Bristlebane back to Norrath, along with the “Appearance Tab”, the ability to have one set of armor for show, and another for stats, and more rumors of Kunark. RoK beta started, but I wasn’t in it. Curses!
October: Bildo tossed me a beta invite for Mythos! Take that, SOE! Syncaine ran a couple of articles complaining about how ugly EQ2 was. So I just had to respond to that. I have never considered EQ2 ugly, because it isn’t. Guitar Hero 3 came out, I caught the third Legendary Spirit on Pokemond Diamond, and fell into a Portal. At the end of the month, I had the joy of being a guest on “Shut Up, We’re Talking #12“.
November: Shady dealings at Perpetual had people wondering about the fate of Star Trek Online, a game which does not currently sound like the game people want to play. Rock Band came out, but everything else was swept away by the launching of EQ2’s third expansion, “Rise of Kunark”. My EQ2 guild pretty much died. I got into Dungeon Runners a little, but mostly I spent my gaming time working on leveling. I had some issues with how RoK was designed, which ended with his departure from SOE. Well, maybe these events weren’t *directly* related, but who knows?
December: Finally reached the level cap with a character! Once I stopped trying to get groups and stopped trying to solo, moved my cleric to her own account and swallowed the two-boxing Kool-ade, things went better. SOE buyout rumors turned out to be just rumors after all, but opened the door to speculation about what their price and future would be if they *were* to be let go by Sony. I bought a Sony Reader to bring back my joy of reading (with failing eyesight), and it has worked wonderfully (until I thought I had lost it; then I missed it terribly). I moved to the second half of my leveling curve and had a lot more fun with it.
2008 promises to be an even busier time for MMOs, with Pirates of the Burning Sea, Warhammer, Age of Conan and Chronicles of Spellborn all due to be released, plus an unannounced (yet) fourth expansion to EQ2 (my bet: Luclin).
See you on the battlefields 🙂
4 thoughts on “2007 in Review”
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i would say the next expansion for EQ2 is velious
Well, if they follow EQ1’s expansion history, Paineel and The Hole will come next. I think, though, that after having two expansions heavy in EQ1 nostalgia, that for the next expansion, they will go to Luclin, which is a very different place now than in the time of EQ1. They have never really clearly explained what happened to blow up the formerly-hidden moon. They could build an expansion around that and a new 3D landscape set on the shards of the broken moon.
I dearly hope it is not Luclin. Luclin was the very low point of EQ1 for me and actually resulted in me quitting that game for the first time. I didn’t return until PoP was released and everyone was leaving Luclin behind. To this day, more than a year after I logged out of EQ1 for the last time, I refer to that expansion as “Shit Outta Luclin” and I still get a giddy feeling and start laughing as I look to the EQ2 sky and see Luclin burning in ruin.
Well, I just think it would make a good *setting*. I actually liked Luclin. I left EQ1 a few months into Velious and came back with Luclin and joined a raiding guild, and had a lot of fun with them. Of course we mostly raided Kunark and Velious at that time, and was working our way through Ssra. Ya know, come to think of it, I really liked Luclin a lot. Vax Thal could get tedious after awhile. Prophecy of Ro was the expansion that killed EQ for me.