Picking At Scars And Other Questionable Activities

I've written a lot of long posts this week so I'm going to try and keep this one really short. Place your bets now...

Should be easy enough. It's just a recap of where I am with the games I'm playing and that's mostly been EverQuest II these last few days. 

I finished the Tradeskill Signature Questline from Scars of Destruction on Tuesday. It was short and simple and I'd be lying if I told you I really followed what it was supposed to be about. 

There was a bit with the Open Hand, the new, cultish organization introduced with the expansion, about whose background and motivation I still have no more idea than when I started. Nothing I saw or heard in the crafting quests made any of it any clearer.

Then there was some business with Raffik, the ratonga introduced long ago in an excellent crafting storyline devised by the much-missed Domino. Raffik was an orphaned child when we first met him, then he became a pirate and now he seems to be the captain of a merchant ship, working with the Far Seas Trading Company. It was good to see him again but I thought he seemed a bit less exuberant and more downbeat than usual, which didn't feel great, especially when his ship sank.

The last part of the questline involves yet another snarky gnome who thinks everyone else is an idiot, which is par for the course with gnomes in Norrath. They either behave like hyperactive, sugared-up toddlers or that one sarcastic teacher everyone loathed in school. If you haven't played EQII, just replace "Gnome" with "Asura" and you'll know exactly what I mean.

I didn't have a clock on it but I doubt the whole thing took me more than three hours, not counting the extra faction work in Port Woe, most of which I did as an adventurer. It certainly helped that my Weaponsmith, who was doing the quests, is also a max level Berserker. 

There are long sections when the narrative assumes you're going to be sneaking about or using the W.H.A.T. device that lets you astrally-project as a giant, non-aggro hand that can gather for you but mostly I didn't bother with any of that. I just plowed through the mobs and killed everything that got in my way. It was a lot faster.

The main reason I wanted to get the crafting timeline done first is that you get full flight privileges for the expansion at the end of it. That makes a truly enormous difference when you do the Adventure timeline, for which you don't get flight until all the hard work is over. It makes so much difference, in fact, it's hard to imagine there's anyone who doesn't max a craft skill on their main adventuring character just for the head start on flying, even if they actively hate crafting.

Once I had that out of the way, I went back to the Adventure Sig, on which I spent a couple of hours each day for the rest of the week. It's been fun, mostly because the fights are really easy. Either I've set myself up better this time around or the instances have been tuned almost exactly to my preferences for a change.

It's so lenient now that mobs in the instances, including bosses, are easier than stuff in the open world, which is a bit weird. The way it works in EQII these days, and has for a few years now, is that almost everything outdoors is an actual, solo mob but all the mobs in solo instances are heroic. You get a huge buff when you zone in so you can handle them. 

In the past that's been a slog at times but in Scars the "heroics" actually die much faster than the genuine solo mobs outside. It seems like a back-assward way to do things but I'll take it, especially now I can just fly over everything I don't want to waste time on outdoors.

Drops in the instances are good this time around, too. Lots of upgrades, some cosmetics and yesterday I even saw an Adept spell book! Those are like hen's teeth nowadays. It wasn't for my class, of course, but you can't have everything.

After what must be ten or twelve hours altogether by now, I'm still in the first of the two overland zones doing the Adventure questline. I've done three "dungeons", I think, and I'm about to start the fourth. I'm guessing that will probably move me on to the second zone, Western Wastes, which of course I have already explored as a crafter. 

Western Wastes quite attractive, for a Velious zone, particularly the mob density, which is generously sparse. I'm looking forward to adventuring there.

I'm also looking forward to the story beginning to make some kind of sense because it certainly doesn't yet. All I know is that Lucan d'Lere, the undead Overlord of Freeport, is in Western Wastes, possibly looking for a Dragon's Soul. Why, and more importantly why I should care, is not explained, other than by some very vague scaremongering along the lines of "Well it would be bad for everyone if he got his hands on one, even Freeport". 

My Ratonga Berserker is not convinced. He thinks it might be quite a good thing if Lucan got even more powerful - and why wouldn't he? He's met Lucan several times and Lucan has generally played straight with him. As for the Open Hand, the ones whispering all the bile about Lucan into his ear, who the hell are they, anyway, and why should he trust them?

I know no-one plays EQII for the plot but generally the expansion plotlines are at least coherent and convincing within their own terms of reference. This one, so far at least, is anything but. Paradoxically, that actually makes me more interested to get to the end of it, to find out if there's some twist coming or if it all comes together in the end. At the moment I'd bet against it but it does give me some motivation to push on and find out.

Other than EQII, I've not played much. I did buy Animal Crossing Pocket Camp Complete Edition as I said I probably would. It was £8.99, slightly less than I expected, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I knew I was too late to transfer my old character across but I made a Nintendo account anyway, just in case. No joy there but maybe it'll come in handy for something later. 

I can't say I'm sorry to be starting over. I wasn't very emotionally attached to my one and only character (Can you even have more than one per account? I don't think you can.) so I was quite happy to begin again without all the impedimenta of the past.

What did surprise me was how good it felt to see the good old campsite again. I'd be lying if I said I'd missed it but it felt nice to be back, all the same. 

The game runs beautifully on my new phone. The image is super-sharp, gameplay is very smooth and the phone barely seems to notice the game is running. I played the online version on my Kindle Fire and it was fine there but this looks and feels noticeably better. The experience feels so comfortable, in fact, that it's encouraging me to consider the possibility of playing more games that way. 

I might install Wuthering Waves. It should run well enough. It allows crossplay, so I could swap between phone and PC on the same character, which would work very well for all the talking that makes up more than fifty per cent of the gameplay, although I can't imagine doing the fighting or the fancy gliding and jumping and climbing with mobile controls. I mean, I'm sure some people can but I can't imagine it being anything I'd enjoy or even manage.

I also might consider Once Human on the phone, when the game eventually come to mobile. Not because I think it would be good that way - I very much doubt it will - but because I'm having huge problems updating it on Steam. 

I tried several times this week and it failed over and over again, something that's happened more than once before. I uninstalled and re-installed it and it still failed so now I've uninstalled it, possibly for good. It's a great game in everything but the patching, which has always been a problem. Maybe it'll update more fluently on mobile.

Other than that, I haven't really played anything. There's a Stars Reach testing session tomorrow evening that I hope to find time to attend. I caused a bit of a stir on a Massively OP comment thread about the game recently, when I mentioned I'd been invited to the test on three different email accounts. 

That got the attention of both Raph Koster and Carneros. I didn't realize it was going to be a big deal - I assumed it must be happening all the time but maybe other people just stick to a single email address and don't get themselves into these awkward situations.

The Kickstarter-proper should be up in a week or so, anyway, and at that point I imagine the current testing phase will become somewhat moot as we wait to learn the outcome of the campaign and what happens after. If nothing else, it's going to be interesting to see the level of attention the whole thing draws. Here's hoping it all turns out well.

And that, I think, is about it for today. Was that a short post or not? It was quick to write, which is what matters. 1,500 words in just over an hour. Wish I could knock these things out that fast every day...