Sony Online Entertainment Fan Faire 2007

So, let's start with Pirates of the Burning Sea. Produced by Flying Labs and published by Sony Online Entertainment, this game is about the Caribbean. You can play one of four different factions, one of which obviously are the pirates. The other factions are the Brittish, Spanish and French. Within these three factions you have three class options, traders, officers and privateer.

There are three big parts of this game, one of them is ship to ship combat, one is avatar combat, and one is crafting/trading. In ship to ship combat you control your own ship and attempt to sink or take over the enemy ships. Like this, it is possible to board the enemy ship and fight over control. During the boarding you are fighting as your avatar, with the help of your shipmates (the NPCs which represent the rest of your crew). It is also possible to go into harbours with your avatar and meet other players, get quests and do some land exploration. The crafting and trading portion of the game is basically what gets some of the more interresting ships, weapons and such into the economy. Rather than producing things yourself however, you basically get facilities and hire people to craft things for you. After that you can market these and make money off of them.

There are various styles of combat you can learn for your avatar. Each uses a specific kind of weapon, and has their own attributes. Unlike most MMO games, Pirates of the Burning Sea does not feature auto-attack but requires you to use your skills to fight. As in real life, a practiced swordsman won't be hit as long as he maintains his balance. In this game, balance is used to determine whether or not you hit your opponent (or whether or not your opponent hits you). Using your skills it is possible to reduce this balance to gain momentum, and strike your opponent.

While in your ship there are various things to take care about, one is the wind direction, which is constantly displayed in the ring surrounding the ship. The ring will also show the speed your ship will go for each direction. Next to that there are range indicators for your cannons on the basic display, so you know what you can shoot with them. The side of the ships usually have better armor than the back and front of the ship, as such catching an enemy from behind can be very advantageous in this game.

In this game you have to earn your deformations. Things like peg-legs and eye patches are earned through quests. This would mean that your leg would get cut off during a quest, and as such you have to walk on a peg-leg instead. There is, however, a basic eye patch you can get during character creation. During the panel a question arose about whether hooks would be available as well. The answer was that they arn't currently in game, but they'd be working on it, as they wanted to have a fighting style for hooks as well. This may come out after launch though.

Next up is The Agency. A promising looking MMO for both the PC and the PS3. Read up on the preview if you have not done so yet. During this session they basically went through the movies with us, and told us some more about the game. There will be some highly scripted points during the missions they call agency moments. For some of them you'll have to do some things, and others will be more like in-game movies. Transitions between areas will be pretty much the same, either you have to work to get there, or you'll be driven there automagically.

Part of the game is the "living loot", the operatives that you attract as you get better. They do various tasks, some of them are like Q from the James Bond movies and make gadgets and stuff you can use in missions. Others gather intel on the areas you head out to, and finally there are some that head to the "other" areas. There will also be cases where you rescue an operative from the battlefield.

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One of the other featured games was Free Realms. This game is a free family game. There are a lot of things you can do in this game, raise pets, help in a diner, and fight among things. throughout the game everything will show some kind of humor, and is focused on fun. This all to bring The entire family together in one game.

During the address they announced a new game: Legends of Norrath. This will be a card game within the EverQuest realm. Based on the lore common to EverQuest one and two, this card game will be both stand-alone and integrated within both aforementioned games.

I got to play this game at the faire, and while the Magic: The Gathering base is still there slightly, the gameplay is very different. The art is very good, and all related to the games.

The best part is that you do not have to buy anything. The cards are lootable in the games, and you get one deck completely free. You can buy booster packs and decks if you so desire though.

The other way around is true as well: there are loot cards in the card game that grand you items in the games.

Another game that is on the working table is Gods and Heroes. This game is based in Rome, where you play a hero. It looks very unique, and features squad based combat, various amazing abilities, and lots more.

EverQuest is still running strong, as its 15th expansion is coming up. Set in the Faydwer, this expansion goes deep into the secrets behind it.

The EverQuest 2 expansion covered this year is Rise of Kunark. This expansion features another level expansion, as well as a new race. The Sarnak will get their own area in the Timorous Deep. It will feature content for levels 1 through 20 as well as 65 through 80.

Another feature of this expansion is persistent instances. This means that whenever you get locked out of an instance, you can return to it during the lockout time.

They announced that there will be a number of raids, which will have a progression of difficulty. They are also going to make a number of raid specific effects for raid dropped armor.

Also they announced there will not be any heritage quests in this expansion at launch. But the epic weapons that have been announced will be about as tough. Also some of them will have ties to the originals. These quests will be vague in nature in an attempt to get the community to work together in solving them.

One of the other things they are boasting in this expansion are soft zones. This basically means that within the larger zones they can designate smaller zones that have a complete unique feel to them.

At this year's Fan Faire they had a wedding of two people of the Aggro Fish guild in EverQuest 2. The wedding was downright awesome, and truely unique. They were wed before nearly 1600 gamers in the Rio hotel.

Want to know more about how and what happened at Fan Faire? Read my blog.