Iryssinia

Channeling the OP's frustration...

EQ1's lore through Planes of Power was great. It was thin in some places, but where it mattered, it was consistent. It fell off with the Deus Ex Machina "reboot" by Druzzil Ro after the Quarm kill at the end of PoP, and then jumped the shark with the "omg aliens frum discord!" of the next two expansions...at which point I quit playing, so I can't tell you how the lore nowadays is.

A lot of EQ2's lore simply doesn't match up to EQ1, and it's too far away to be explained by "well, 500 years is a long time and facts get distorted". On top of all of that, EQ2's release lore has been largely disregarded in favor of nostalgia. Part of it has to do with the lack of communication between EQ1 and EQ2 writers, and part of it has to do with the high turnover rate in the writing areas.

I think for future EQ2 expansions, or even future games, quest writers and lore writers need to look at games like Mass Effect and Oblivion. There should be, at the very least, a good and evil option to finish quests, and with intricate quest lines that both (or more) paths can take you to, with equal or equivalent rewards.

On top of that, there needs to be unified game lore, internally documented, and written out in advance for multiple game eras that the design team can refer back to and make sure their quest dialog and events fall in line with the lore.

It takes a lot of work to do this for what comes down to glorified flavor text, but the roleplayers love having a strong lore background to base their character concepts out of, and even raiders/hardcore sorts like it when the stuff they're doing just makes sense.

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Liunie Nar'Thex, 80 Brigand
Bloodthorn, Antonia Bayle

LFG

Exactly. I'm not a lore person myself, and freely admit I'm one who just clicks through quest dialogue as quickly as possible to get the update or reward.

But wow did they fuck up EQ1 by going from a theme based on knights, dragons, and gods to aliens and space mutants. That complete and utter management failure had to be the biggest disaster and player hemorrhage up to that point in the history of the MMO industry.

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Deson

You mean besides making a level 70 tuned expansion when the level cap stays at 65? And announcing that it's a 55+ expansion when really it's a 65+? Or making trash mobs with more DPS than AoW with procs? What about the over inflated AA costs? The dramatic cuts in raid size?

I think it could have survived that lore-wise if the rest of the expansion weren't such utter crap.GoD and OoW were unmitigated disasters on every level.

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Jemeni

I'd love to see this in a game. I used to play Ryzom and it came close. Guides would call everyone out to a place and tell this story before directing people to defend an outpost from waves of mobs for example.

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Mechasean

Although I have never been a lore junkie, I have to admit the OP has a great point. I remember being in beta and then playing after launch and thought this is kinda interesting and then SOE just seemed to stop doing anything to keep the actual storyline alive.

I had been under the impression that there was supposed to be some climatic event between the two original cities that would draw players into the story arc. Remember the sabotage quests they introduced, it encouraged players to pick a side, even if they didn't really intend to. I also remember what a huge pain betraying was and it affected your play for a brief period.

Hell remember the first world event, The Plague, that was actually a cool little diversion and was never repeated.. like all the world events entailed holiday events or building spires for a new expansion after that.

I would love to see them actually put some effort into the world again but I never see it happening.

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Pink Poodle

I like some of the Desert of Flames lore, some of it is well-written, but maybe it's because I like the general theme of that place overall.

However, one thing that bothers me is the NPC's names like (adjective)(noun)

Like... Ellie Redpaw. Joseph Steelbark. Anna Pinkpoodle.

I also wish there was more Evil versus Good stuff on the PVE servers. Not necessarily PVP, but something else that I can't come up with.

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Narkle

Lore is gay

Illuminator

Lore fathered the industry.

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Don't vote for Obama.

Arkanis

Apparently the Devs think this too.

I always thought that all the EQ2 devs should have been forced to work on EQ1 for 1-2 years before EQ2. EQ1 was dead after PoP but atleast they could get a good grasp of the lore up to Power of the Planes.

IMO Warcraft lore is small compared to the mass of EQ lore and this is why the EQ2 devs dont care. Most of the players they are trying to attract from WoW just want loots and good graphics. Its why i welcome AoC in May, it already has a good ammount of established lore and supposedly the developers arent gonna betray and butcher it.

Shackleton1

A good writer would help. A lot of the dialogue is un-neccessarily long. Make it shorter, snappier and more meaningful. If you read the dialogue in Lord of the Rings, it's beautiful. Each sentence carries real meaning.

I think it would help if perhaps they managed to bring in conversations with more than one npc. So if another npc could chime in too, that would make conversations much more interesting.

Quests they need to stop with the kill 5 tigers for their pelts, and they need to stop with the joke quests too I think, or at least make them much less frequent. Whoever writes the quests clearly isn't taking their job seriously :P