On Provenance: Thoughts While Waiting For The Pandaria Remix

While Mrs Bhagpuss and I were out walking Beryl through some very muddy fields this morning, I had an idea that something was supposed to be happening today. I thought it might be the launch of the Anashti Sul server in EverQuest II, which made me quite excited. 

I thought, when we got home, I'd get that patched up, make a character, play for an hour or two, then write a blog post about it. I wasn't a hundred per cent sure I'd gotten the day right, though, so the first thing I did was check the launch date. 

I hadn't. It's a month away yet, not due to launch until 13 June.

Well, of course it is. I remember, now, writing about what a long beta it was going to be and how that meant Darkpaw had to be pinning a lot of hopes on the whole thing being a success. Just shows how much I listen to myself when I talk.

Still, I was pretty sure I remembered something was happening today and I was just about convinced it involved a new server starting up in a game I already played. I scratched around in the back of my mind for a while, trying to come up with a clue as to what it might be and then it came to me. Pandaria!

That was why I updated Battlenet and logged into World of Warcraft Retail a couple of weeks ago. I'd been thinking about taking a look at the Pandaria Remix event or, to give it its unwieldy official title, World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria.

And yes, that does indeed begin today. I'd be playing it now, with a view to writing about it this afternoon, except the doors don't actually open until teatime. The official start, which doesn't appear until the very last line of the lengthy official announcement, is 10.00AM PDT, which translates to six in the evening where I am.

That's fine, as far as it goes, although not great for me. I'll probably be eating quiche and watching the Chase about then, after which Beryl is likely to enter Evening Entertainment Mode and require an unhealthy amount of attention due to her innate Princessy tendencies. Even so, I should be able to get an hour or two in before bedtime.

A few bullet points on that:

• I'll be playing on my Endless Free Trial account, which allows me to make a character for the event but only level them to 20. 
• All Remix characters skip the first ten levels, stepping into Pandaland as fresh Level 10s. 
• A key selling point of this particualar dog and panda show is accelerated levelling. 
• The trip from ten to twenty is already over in a short session at regular levelling speed.

It is theoretically possible, then, that I might be able to log in, make a character, play for an hour, see enough to have something substantive to say about the experience and still have enough time left in the evening to put a blog post together. It'd be tight, though.

Which is why I'm writing this now, at midday, instead. Even though I don't really have anything new to say about the whole affair.

Ah, except I do. Last time I talked about it I'd only read the news reports and listened to some chatter. Now I've read the whole of that Blizzard news item I linked earlier and it's very interesting. 

Interesting to me, anyway, because the feature list reads like a Best Of from the last decade or so of EverQuest II. 

I'm not remotely saying these are ideas that originate there or that they haven't been used elsewhere, often, by other games. Plenty of them are generic to many MMORPGs. What I am saying is that I recognize versions of just about all of them from special ruleset servers in EQII that I've played on, as well as from the regular, Live game.

More specifically, a whole chunk of the Remix's remit seems to draw inspiration directly from EQII's Kael Drakkal server. In case you don't remember, that was the one where you started at 90 and all the content in the game was at the same level, which I admit doesn't sound very similar at all. 

This does, though:

EQII: "amazing new armor and weapon appearances made exclusively for the Kael Drakkel server"

WoW: "collect a variety of powerful new items and transmogs"

EQII: "Special loot drops along the way will allow you to upgrade your base gear as you progress."

WoW: "Each time you loot new items, you’ll have the chance for powerful new upgrades"

EQII: "Kael Drakkel armor appearances that will be usable on all characters on all servers"

WoW: "take your transmogs with you when you continue your adventures in World of Warcraft®:The War Within™"

 

All quotes verbatim from the two official announcements and the announcement for the update Kael Drakkal received nine months after launch.

I'm not saying none of this would have happened without Holly Longdale taking over as WoW's Executive Producer but it's getting hard to deny the equivalencies. They might not be immediately obvious to anyone who's only played WoW but as an EQII player, just about the first thing that comes to mind these days, whenever I hear about something new that's coming to WoW, is "That sounds familiar..."

Everyone spotted the debt dragonriding owes to Guild Wars 2 right away because GW2 is a much better-known game than EQII these days. A lot of the other innovations that seem to be changing the whole way WoW operates are coming in much lower under the radar, originating, as it seems they do, in a game most WoW players have probably never even heard of.

Whether this kind of cross-pollination is likely to create a stronger, healthier game remains to be seen. From my perspective as an regular EQII player who occasionally dabbles in WoW, though, it feels like a very positive development. 

I wonder whether the trend will continue in the next expansion. I do hope so. That would be interesting.