I'm pretty excited about the new Sentinel's Fate expansion pack that's due in February of next year. Based on the trailer, it looks great. The artists in EQ2 are doing a great job in creating spell effects, armor, and monsters, that rival even some of the newer games on the market. The game's look has improved dramatically in the last few years; it's a far cry from the much maligned sea of gray and brown textures that the game had when it launched.
One thing that bothers me are the increasing number of extra items that you can only get by purchasing a game in a certain format. This isn't a criticism of EverQuest II in particular; Age of Conan and World of Warcarft all have bonuses or collector's editions or special in-game items you can only get through one channel or another.
However, once upon a time the difference were little figurines or fluff in-game items like a pet dragon that couldn't leave your home (and that was controversial enough at the time!) Nowadays we seem to be suffering from perkflation, as the extra perks that come with the retail pack has expanded to include things like the best mounts in the game and 7-day headstarts before anyone else can play.
Now, I do understand that offering retail perks is important to help get the game onto shelves, which helps attract new players. Apparently some people actually leave their homes to shop. But there's a line somewhere there that shouldn't be crossed, and I get the feeling, like so many other things in the recent past (particularly Legends of Norrath loot cards), we're getting precariously close to crossing it. If we haven't already. I don't know. It's only seven days and then the perk is useless, so it's not a huge deal. Except that if I don't buy it I may end up having to solo those seven days because the rest of the server are in the new zones. But still...
Where do you draw the line?
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The trailer looks really good, definitely much better than EQ2 looked at release.
The flood of perks, ingame items and all that people get for preordering or buying collector's editions has really gotten out of hand.
But it is us players to blame: Apparently too many of us paid extra money for some ingame stuff that came with Collector's editions or preorders.
I think we have reached the stage where we get so much fluff that we can hardly store it anymore, and we also get more and more items that offer definite advantages ingame. This is not really good in the long run for the games, but if the game/expansion sells a few more copies because of such offers, we won't get rid of them. I expect more preorder/CE excesses in future.
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