Saavedra's Fan Faire Recap

So, I'm MOSTLY recovered from the SOE Fan Faire as I write this. I say mostly, because my voice has only partially recovered, and my feet still "kinda" hurt from standing around at the booth so much.

I had such a good time this year! At least I think I did! To be honest, I didn't have alot of time for recreation, as I was almost exclusively chained to our kiosk demoing The Agency! I don't know how many times we ran through the gameplay that we were demoing, but I do know that I lost my voice over it.

Besides all of the demoing, the panels, and the SOE related events I really didn't get to do all that much in terms of extraneous activity. I have friends who live out there, but never got a chance to call them, I think I spent all of my free time talking to guildies or potential Agency players.

As I put it to Dan, our producer that was there, we only really took naps the entire time we were there. We are talking 3 to 4 hours of sleep a night. In fact, I never left the building even once during the event, and didn't see daylight for 3 days. The only time I saw the outside was when I arrived and when I left.

Anyways, this was a great Fan Faire for me. I thought our game was well recieved, the crossroads area was trafficked much more than in past years. I was enjoying all of the affection that EQ2 was getting, despite my not being on the team anymore. Overall it was a good time.

One really cool thing for me, that I'm not sure most of you can relate to is the fact that this new Odus expansion will be the first EQ2 expansion where I don't know about everything that is going into it before I get to play it. For the first time I'll be able to experience it purely as a player instead of a developer, so I really look forward to that. I'm also looking forward to some of the cool features that are coming and probably anticipate it as much as the next EverQuest 2 fan!

This time around, I quite enjoyed The Agency panels, despite the rocky start we had with the first one. I got to field quite a bit of questions about Pvp and it made me so happy to see all of the interest in it. We got to show some footage and images that no one has seen before, so that was pretty cool as well. I thought it was pretty fun watching people with their cameras snapping shots like fiends as we showed some of it.

I saw some really fantastic costumes this time around as well. There must have been double the number of entries this year! I was so impressed by the fact that some people chose to make costumes of things that were not particularly their avatars, so that was so cool. Big props to the girl dressed as a Siren, not only because she wore the costume well (and I mean very well!) she did such a great authentic job with it.

Anyways, I had a great time and look forward to doing it again, God willing. I always feel so blessed to meet the people who keep me employed and always feel so grateful for their enthusiasm. It makes coming back to work such an exciting thing.

The Agency In Game Footage @ E3

Massively.com, one of my favorite websites has footage of the in game demo for The Agency, which can be found here: http://www.massively.com/2009/06/03/e3-2009-the-agency-in-game-footage/

Or, you can just look at the embeded video instead!

All Is Quiet

Things are very quiet here at SOE today.

Normally I do not post from here, but things are relatively calm compared to what it has been like the past several months and I felt like writing about it.

I'm very happy with how the launch went. Despite the problems with actual in store box distribution we still managed to get the game into the hands of the players via our digital download, and I'm glad that option is there. I am starting to buy games this way more and more, as I tend to not really look at the box art anymore these days and most of my cds and dvds are just on the shelf collecting dust, never to be installed again.

We made a big effort to try and launch a very large expansion with as few problems as possible. Of course some things slip through the cracks in a game as big as this, but overall I'm very happy with the quality level of the expansion. I'm proud to be a part of it.

I've spent the past couple days just running around in game and enjoying the fruits of our labors playing my beloved Saavedra. To this day I've played the same character from launch, and I rarely get hassled by players in game, which goes to show that either they don't care, or don't know that I'm a dev.

I managed to get all of my ports for the druid rings and now I feel like I'm super powered just because I can give rides to people. It's the little things that make all the difference. Back in Everquest I played a shaman and I was always jealous of the druid's ability to port people around.