My take on Luclin:
I think that after giving people 2 expansions, each of which added a new continent, the game creators decided to do something new (the lore about chunk of Odus blown up to the moon have allready existed since time of classic, they just finally decided to put it into the use), plsu players have been begging Brad to make Kerras playable for a longest time.
IMHO, adding the moon as playable area wasn't the best idea, but as I said, they devs wanted something new, and not just another discovered continent. What I would have done is to create a Shadow World (like in DnD lore), which exists in parallel dimension with Norath, but differs a lot. And instead of 1 side light and 1 side dark setting, it would permanent state of twilight, with some areas darker than the others. But we have what we have.
-Overall the moon itself wasn't so bad, but they really should have omitted the obvious sci-fi elements from it: the boglings and the netherians were just screaming sci-fi aliens out loud. The rest f new models were actually pretty nice.
-Overall low-mid end content was decent, but the Paludal ZEM was insane corporate greed idea to get people to buy the expansion. They also added a lot of mid areas that were poorly thought out and were empty 99% of the time - Tenebrous, Grimlign Forest etc.
-The high end was great on some parts - like Ssra, and horrible on other - liek VT. While VT itself is a beautiful zone and I absolutely love Akhevan npc models, the raid quality was essentially tank and spank for all the bosses there who had zillions of hps, and even to get to them you had to go through hundreds of trash mobs with thousands of hps each who kept spawning adds on death. All that was sugar coated with the uber loot, but raiding VT wasn't really the joy like you got out of raiding Ssra, which featured some of the first scripted encounters in EQ history.
-The new graphics is a controversial issue. I welcomed the new engine improvements, and mostly I was pretty happy with improved models for most of the races (specialy the elves and ogres). At the same time some races ended up being worse - like all the shorties in the new graphics are complete look alike, I can barely tell them apart. They should have put more work into those.
-New gear effects - like spell focuses - were great addition to the game - they finally gave casters a reason to get something else out of the gear other than mana.
-I like the idea of mounts overall, it was a great cash sink for the economy.
Overall, the sci-fi elements mentioned above, and poor work on the VT (+the insane key grind) are the 2 significant downside feature of the expansion for me, but otherwise it was acceptable.
|