Nothing

Angela made me two cool scrubbies from her weird japanese scrubby book. One is just a blue circle but the other one is an elephant :-) Its so damn cute I haven't used it to clean anything yet.

I've been kind of depressed the last week or so. It's been six months since I was laid off. I've had one job interview in that time and it was last week. I've written a bunch of stories and done scripts for comicsbooks but it's all seeming like a big waste of time right now. When I stop to think about it for too long I start to feel like I'm going to cry.

Angela made my day yesterday when she came home and told me it was my half birthday. She took me out to dinner and I felt like a normal person for a little while.

The warhammer graphic novel is Exterminatus. I didn't like it that much either. The characters are flat and uninteresting. I am *really* enjoying Vampire Wars though. It's written well enough that the writing gets out of the way of the story. The characters are decently interesting and the setting is great. Thats really the problem with most of the warhammer stuff. The setting is awesome but the characters just feel forced and card board.

My guardian, Eunika, in EQ2 is level 75. I've been tanking stuff for my guild since I have the highest plate tank. Here's a picture of her. She's wearing level 12 master crafted armor in her appearance slots because it looks really cool.

The guys I'm playing with are a mix or newbies and players that have been away for a long time. It's been a lot of fun going through content that I haven't played in a while.

Game Update 52 is in the works and there are a lot of new features but the one I'm most excited about are shadows that are calculated and rendered by the graphics card. Previously all shadows in EQ2 were rendered by the CPU and it was an *immense* performace hit to enable them. I downloaded the test client last night to try it out and with shadows on full on test I get 25 frames a second more than I do on live with shadows enabled.

For some reason, a lot of people have been talking about what EverQuest 3 might look like if SOE were to announce it soon, say at fan faire. The topic of EQ3 comes up every so often but it seems to me that its getting more talk this time than it usually does. I've been thinking about it and here are a few things I would like to see.

No classes. This is a *huge* change but I really want to see a system thats skill based with progressive specialization as your skills get higher. An example, you start the game as "adventurer" there are trainers in the newbie area that correspond to the general divisions of melee, magic, crafting and support. You do quests for each one and the teach you an ability in return. As you use the ability you gain skill in it and are able to unlock choices at certain thresholds of skill. You might have 2 slots and six abilites to chose from though so your choice at one threshold determines what you will be able to chose from at the next threshold.

At the lower level scharacters should be fairly generalized but as they are played more and more they will progressively specialize. There would, of course, have to be ways to get your choices undone so you can try different combinations and permutations.

I would also like to see crafted gear be customizable by the crafter. So not everyone makes the same broadsword +1, then iron broadsword +1, etc. If the crafters can use different raw materials to determine the types of stats on a given piece of gear then every weird combination of abilities will be able to get gear with the stats they need to be effective. This is a big one for me because I play an Inquisitor in EQ2 and Dennika is very much pigeon holed into playing a specific role by the gear she is able to wear and what is available in the game.

I very much want EQ3 to not be a min/max stats and gear game like EQ2 is.

I want the creatures and enemies in the game to have and use spells and combat arts. The mobs should use tactics that are appropriate for the type of abilities they have. Casters should try to stay at range. Mobs should be social. They should run away, call out to their friends, ring alarms, use roots, stuns, mez's, dots, heals, etc. Mobs should use strategies consistently so players can figure out the strategy a mob is using and create a counter strategy. They should be a challenge, but the rewards need to be inline with the challenge. RoK is still an exercise in frustration for most soloists and the rewards, both in terms of xp and gear, are a joke. A mob that can one shot me damn well better give me more than .001% of a level's worth of xp.

I would also like to see a more or less seamless world like Vanguard has. I'm not talking about a world like WoW that is essentially a series of well constructed maps connected together by a few specifically designed points. I'm talking about a single world map with large geographic areas that bleed into each other like on the earth. Not large themed maps like eq2. A seamless world where you can ride your horse from the ocean, through a swamp, to a grassland, to a forest, to a forest in the foothills, to a pass through a mountain range, to a high dry desert, etc.

There should also be a good fast travel system like the bells, boats, griffons, spires and druid rings in eq2 and / or the rifts in vanguard.

I have more thoughts but I'll write them down later on.

Abe