Posted on the official EQ2 dev blog, Everquest II will now have player-written books in game.
This is such a super fun and interesting idea, and is a great move by SOE. First of all – books and collecting them are extremely popular in the game. Second, they have a thriving community of roleplayers in Everquest 2 who will absolutely love the ability to create stories about their characters and hand them to others.
It’s interesting how what sets Everquest II apart from WoW and other competitor games is their ability for users to really put their mark on the game. From winning the lotteries or clicking on landmarks in the world and having your name shown to all, to creating furniture and designing intricate houses, EQ2 feels like a very personalized experience while you play. This is just another addition to the game that gives it the fun flavor that it has. User generated content in MMOs can be so powerful, I can’t wait until every game has some sort of UGC built in.
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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Excellent! Makes me want to pick it up again…along with every other MMO I've abandoned by the wayside
Wow… Man. Sometimes I really wish I could justify myself putting time into EQ2. After 4 years and no desire to slow my pace, I still feel very much invested in WoW… My recent, erm, positive interactions with SOE as of late and stuff like the above are really starting to twist my arm.
It's surprising there aren't more games with this. I used to write books in Ultima Online and leave them on corpses for people to take.
This makes me very happy to see. Anything (well, nearly) that lets players have a bit more freedom in creating something and putting their mark on the world is a step in the right direction – and EQ2 has been fairly decent about that (as stated in the post).
Nice blog, spotted this thanks to one of our writers Sres.
I think the user written books are a nice idea, not sure if I'll find the time to write one myself but it could be fun to do a character journal.
By the way, I'm going to put a link in our blogroll to you, hope that's ok.
I have to think that's a Speedman feature (excuse me, Autenil) since he did something very similar on UO.