| The "newbie" area for Neriak and the Arysai is called Darklight Wood, and is parked about where you'd expect it to be from EQLive, nestled against Nektulos Woods. Darklight Wood is a showpiece for what the EQ2 team has learned about starting area design. Hartsman spoke of breadcrumbing players from quest hub to quest hub throughout the starter levels and always keeping one interesting thing you want to investigate in sight. He glowed when pointing out a particularly huge and impressive tree in Darklight Wood, While art direction and design was planned out in San Diego, art assets were actually created in the SOGA studios in Taiwan. From what I saw, quality was by no means lacking. I commented that the new areas brought the ornamentation of Faydwer's treetop city woodwork to mind. "Thank you," Scott said with a smile, "that's definitely what we were going for. |