The Legends Of EverQuest - or - Third Time's The Charm?

Has everyone seen Daybreak's Big Announcement? I feel I pretty much have to post something about it, even though I haven't really got much to say. Still, when has that ever stopped me?

 I guess we should run over what it is first. 

"EverQuest Legends™ (EQL) is a newly reimagined version of classic EverQuest from its original release in 1999. Featuring all the fun magic and nostalgia of the original game, EQL is also packed with tons of new features and quality of life enhancements."

As you would know if you clicked through the link. I'm not really adding much here, am I? That's because there's not much to add. The press release goes on to explain everything in some detail. I can't really do any better than to reproduce the full text. And then maybe I'll nitpick it after. That's kind of what I do here, after all.

 

Let's start with that name: EverQuest Legends. I wonder if anyone involved in the naming process even remembers their history? Once upon a time, in the deep, dark past, there was a server by the name of EverQuest Legends. It was the elite server, where you paid a higher subscription for full-time GM services and some other perks. 

It's extremely difficult to find detailed information on the decades-defunct Legends server today, a task very much not helped by the current frenzy of discussion on the new project that stole shares its name, but with the help of Calishat's invaluable TimeCake app and some creative googling of my own, I eventually managed to track down an interview about it with John "Smed" Smedley from GameSpot in 2002.

Then there was the much better-remembered and hugely easier to research Legends of Norrath, the virtual TCG spin-off that ran for just shy of a decade before closing down for good in 2017. With a legacy of two failed projects using the name, I'm not sure I'd have wanted to lumber the latest with the same burden but then, hey, it's not like the target market is going to be people who played EverQuest back in the day, right?

No, the target market is very clearly the people who used to play on The Hero's Journey emulator, until Daybreak took the operators to court and put them out of business. Plus, of course, the presumably orders of magnitude larger number of potential customers who might very well have played on THJ if they hadn't been too chicken to give their bank details to the people behind what was, at the most favorable interpretation, a gray-market operation. As the MassivelyOP news report suggests, the new Legends service certainly explains why that lawsuit had to happen.

In essence, EverQuest Legends is what a lot of people have been saying they wanted for almost as long as the game has existed: a solo version. Perhaps the most surprising thing about it is that it's taken so long although, with the current fad for ersatz mmorpgs like Erenshor, games that simulate the entire milieu, other players included, maybe the time has finally come.

Thinking of Erenshor does make me wonder why EverQuest Legends needs to be an MMORPG at all. If grouping is entirely optional and group size is limited to four, it seems like it would work equally well as  a co-op game. It wouldn't even have to be online.

That might make it harder to collect a subscription, though. And EverQuest Legends is going to be a subscription game.  I guess if the idea is to re-create the original experience to some degree, a monthly sub would be part of it. 

The first thing I thought, when I saw a sub was required, was whether it would be included in the All Access deal. That's since been clarified and the answer is no. 

It's a completely separate game, running on different servers, operated by a different company, a third-party developer by the name of Game Jawn. (Really, really bad name, by the way. It may fly in Philly but for everyone else it just makes you think "Game Yawn" Not quite the image you'd want to put into the mind of a potential customer.)  

Game Jawn (Seriously? It hurts just to type it out...) is the brainchild of several people who used to code and run EQ emulators. Poachers turned gamekeepers, I guess. Or maybe turned gatekeepers, now they have the official seal of approval. I imagine starting new emulators with hefty rules modifications is going to be a little bit riskier now.

These guys were in the emulator business in the first place because they used to play EQ and didn't like the way it was going, I guess. Now, it appears, they see merit in the progressive relaxation of restrictions that's led to the much easier version of the game that's on the live servers today. Only they're going even further, setting things up so the game can be fully experienced the way lot of people always wished it could - alone.

For once, there's not going to be a long wait to see how it all turns out. Nor will there be a prolonged purgatory of Early Access. EverQuest Legends is set to launch in July and you can send in your application for closed beta right now. 

I just did. I wasn't going to, at least not yet, because I wanted to know if there was an NDA first. I hate being in testing programs I can't talk about here on the blog. But then I clicked the button to get the link for this post and it was literally two or three more clicks to sign up, so what the hell...

That brings up the Really Big Question, namely do I even want to play EverQuest Legends in the first place? Not would I like to blog about it or would I like to check it out but would I want to play it? As in every day, for weeks or months...

Hmm. If this was ten or fifteen years ago then sure, I would. I would have loved a fully soloable version of EverQuest back then. The timing would have been perfect. Now, though? Unlike Stargrace, I'm not so sure.

For one thing, this is going to be Classic EverQuest, albeit with some massive tweaks. It's pre-Kunark, even if you will be able to play an Iksar (Or a Kerran or a Froglok.) right from the start. The thing is, I can already solo that era, on a regular server. 

Anyone can. You just need a mercenary. It's easy and it's fun. I've done it several times. I'm not sure I want to do it again with the twist being no mercenary but a souped-up, multi-classed character and a difficulty slider instead. I mean, sure, yes, I'd want to play around with that for a while but would I want to bed down and take it seriously? 

I kind of doubt it. I suspect that's more likely to appeal to all the hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of people who haven't actually played EQ since it got easy. And even if I did want to play it for more than a minute, would I want to pay for it? 

Maybe the promo trailer will help me decide...
 

Yeah, that's not doing it for me. I'm not sure I want to play that game. It doesn't look great, compared to the other options, does it?

I guess we'll have to wait and see. And I, personally, might have to wait a bit longer, because summer really isn't a great time for gaming in my book. Not unless we get a really bad summer, anyway. I'd rather be outside than sitting indoors in front of a screen. January always seems like the best time to launch a game to me but that's an outlying opinion, based on the evidence.

If I was in the market for an old school, diku-MUD-inspired MMORPG around about then, it most likely wouldn't be a re-tread of an old one, anyway. It'd be more likely to be something like, oh, I don't know, Monsters & Memories, scheduled to go into Early Access in June.

Except, of course, they had problems of their own even before they learned about EQLegends, which must have come as a very unpleasant surprise. The two games would look to be tapping into the same pool of players but Legends clearly has the advantage of huge press coverage and a massive backwash of ex-EverQuest players, most of whom have probably never heard of M&M.

Then again, there's that group thing... Maybe that'll work in M&M's favor...

Remember how everyone always says the reason they keep playing their MMORPG of choice is the community? It's their guild, their friends, the people they've met along the way. That's been the received wisdom for decades. Monsters & Memories, like Pantheon and all the other retro-mmorpgs have been riding that horse into the ground for years. Where does this leave them?

If it really is all about the friends you make, why is everyone apparently so excited about being able to to play the game without any? Or, as several news sites, GameSpot among them, chose to phrase it "No Time Or Friends For An MMO? EverQuest Legends Has A Solution".

If nothing else, it's going to be an interesting test case. Is the gameplay of a classic MMORPG sufficient in itself to sustain long-term interest even without the social bonds that come from forced grouping? And if it is, will people want to pay a monthly fee for that, when so many very similar options exist without one?

Because, without the need for other people, what, really, is the difference between an MMORPG and any open world rpg or survival game?

Well, in EverQuest Legend's case it's immediate access to a pipeline of two and a half decades of proven, tested content, not to mention a semi-installed base running into millions and instant access to gaming news channels merely on mention of your name. More than twenty years after EQ could last claim to have been a big dog, all Daybreak needs to do is bark and the journos come running: PCGamer, Kotaku, IGN, GameSpot, Rock Paper Shotgun... all of them covered it yesterday, along with many more.

I hope it all pays off for Daybreak. I suspect it will. As Wilhelm pointed out the other day, the front-runner in their financials these days is Palia. It would be nice to see EverQuest back at the top. 

Even if it is on someone else's servers.

Stoned Again

We're enjoying some very pleasant Spring weather here just now, which was why Mrs. Bhagpuss and I came to be driving out on a sunny March morning last week to take a look at the standing stones at Stanton Drew. There's no shortage of ancient stoneworks within a short drive of where we live and we've visited quite a few but this one was new to us both.

It's unfamiliar to a lot of people, apparently, despite being possibly the third largest stone circle in Britain, after the far better-known Stonehenge and Avebury. Julian Cope, ex-lead singer of the Teardrop Explodes and self-styled Modern Antiquarian, called it "undervalued" and it's certainly under-visited, especially when compared to its two big rivals.

We only thought to visit it because we'd recently been to the village to look at a nursing home for my 93 year-old mother. She's gone somewhere else but the home she didn't move into is right next to the stones so we thought we'd go back for a closer look.

And you can have as close a look as you'd like. Climb all over the things if you want. No-one's gojng to stop you. 

The three competing pre-historic attractions stand orders of magnitude apart in terms of access, with Stonehenge on one side of a massive barrier, literally and financially, with the other two a long way outside.

Stonehenge is fully enclosed and zealously guarded, thanks to decades of varying use and abuse, everything from would-be druids holding solstice ceremonies to the Convoy staging pitched battles with the police. 

As a child, I visited the henge on a school trip. I seem to remember it was already sufficiently commercialized even then to feature a gift shop but we were allowed to touch the stones and there was no fence around them, or at least not in my memory. 

Now you have to book in advance and pay almost £30 just to get inside the main fence as far as the next security cordon, where ropes keep you at a distance from the stones themselves. It's £3 to park your car, too.

If you want to walk among the stones, inside the circle, you'll need to buy the full "Experience". That'll cost you £70! And even then you still don't get to touch anything.

Avebury is a lot more relaxed and it's free, too, although if you use the car park it'll set you back £7. Plenty of free parking in the village, though, or there was when we last went, which admittedly was over a decade ago. You can wander up to the stones and lay on hands, too, which to my way of thinking is pretty much the whole point.

Visiting Stanton Drew costs £1 and that's only if you're honest. There's a box on the gate and you're trusted to drop a coin into it as you go through. If you don't, no-one's going to know because there's no-one there. 

Even with a nominal entrance fee it's still cheaper than Avebury because there's a free car park. The pound goes to the local farmer who owns the land on which the stones are sited. It's a working farm and there are sometimes livestock in the fields, which is why no dogs are allowed. (Avebury is dog-friendly.)

 The size of the car park gives you some indication of the number of visitors the circle at Stanton Drew sees. I'd guess you could get eight cars in it, if everyone parked very carefully. The morning we went, there was just one other vehicle there but a few more people wandered in on foot. It's the kind of place that attracts neo-hippies and ancient history buffs alike but the history buffs tend to come in cars.

Because we had Beryl with us, we had to take it in turns to go to the stones. It's a surprisingly long walk, not least because the stones are bigger than you think, so they look closer than they are.

When I went in, there were a few other people strolling about, moving from monolith to monolith, taking pictures. One guy was lying on one of the stones, his feet higher than his head, taking a photograph of another. 

As I said, if you want to climb up the stones and sit on top eating an ice cream, there's nothing and no-one to stop you. You'd have to bring your own ice-cream, though. There's no gift shop.

The whole place is extremely chill. Laid back. Relaxed. On a gorgeously warm, sunny Spring morning it's hard to think of anywhere more so. I'd have liked to have had a thermos of coffee and a good book with me. I'd have lain down on one of the flat stones and basked.

With Beryl not being allowed past the gate, we couldn't do anything like that, sadly, so we went to the pub instead. And in the pub garden are three more standing stones, a thousand years older than the circle, so it's said, although how they're dated I don't know.

Those stones are known as The Cove and I didn't take any pictures of them. They're big, though, I can tell you that.

We had a coffee in the pub garden while Beryl frolicked in the grass. Didn't take any pictures of that, either. Sorry.

And then we came home. It was a fine morning's edutainment, although really, for me, the main pleasure of visiting pre-historic sites goes to the senses rather than the intellect. I like to touch them and imagine a connection to the deep past. 

I used to hug trees when I was a teenager. Too much prog rock, I expect. Lucky I grew out of that. Bloody hippies!

When you play games in which stone circles frequently feature, though, it is interesting to see such places up close. If nothing else, it gives some context.

I'm surprised the Druids of Norrath haven't installed any gift shops. Then again, now I come to think of it, I think there might  be the occasional vendor hanging out at one or two. I guess the barbed-wire fences are only a matter of time.

Steam Spring Sale - Bargains And Skips

The first I knew about the Steam Spring Sale this year was when I saw a post about it yesterday from Kay Talks Games. I didn't even remember there was any such thing as a Spring sale on Steam. If you'd asked me, I'd have said there was one in the Winter and another in Summer and that was it. Shows what I know.

There is a Spring sale, though. It started yesterday, even if it's not quite Spring yet, the way a lot of people count it. But let's not get into that one, right?  

Valve's version of Spring only lasts a week, from now until March 26. I understand from bits and pieces I've picked up over the years that prices in the sale used to change as it went along, just like they do in a physical sale, with the real bargains coming right at the start or close to the end. 

From what I heard, that just led to everyone keeping their credit cards in their wallets in the hope of picking up a real bargain in the last day or two, so as far as I can tell they put a stop to it and the discounts stay the same all the way through. On that assumption, there didn't seem any point in waiting, so I jumped right in.

It seems to me like there are a few obvious ways to approach a Steam sale. You either go straight to your Wishlist and see what's been marked down or you hit that handy Deep Discount button on the front page. I guess you could also take a look at the high profile Recommends banner that runs right across the top, too. I did all of those, starting with my Wishlist. 

Wishlists are weird, aren't they? Kind of a misleading title. Developers want to see their games wishlisted because it boosts the profile and players often just want to keep an eye on games they have no intention of buying. It's more of a notepad or a promotional device than a shopping list, sometimes.

I have thirty-three games on mine, down from thirty-five as of last night. They split into three loose categories, grouped by how likely I am to buy them. There are the the ones that aren't out yet that I'm keeping an eye on, the ones I definitely want but only at the right price and then there's the rest. Those I probably will never buy at any price but they're on there just on the off-chance they might go to 90% off at some point and I won't be able to resist.

I guess I could cull that last group. I do sometimes drop a few things I'm sure I wouldn't play even if I got them for free. Mostly, though, it costs me nothing to leave them on there so that's what I do.

Here's an example to make it clearer. I've had Smalland on the Wishlist for more than three years now. It's been discounted many times and it's currently 70% off in the Spring Sale. I still haven't bought it. So why is that?

Two reasons, the first to do with the game itself, the second with the price. 

Smalland is a survival/crafting/exploration game, where the USP is that you're tiny. It looks like it would be fun and it has good reviews but I don't have either the time or the inclination to play a survival game right now. If I did it would probably be Enshrouded. 

At full price, Smalland costs £29.99. With a 70%  discount it's still £8.99. Seventy per cent may be a massive markdown but £8.99 is still more than I want to pay for a game I'm only mildly curious about. The thing you have to remember about bargains is it's not how much you save that matters - it's how much you spend.

So, I didn't buy Smallands or half a dozen more games on my Wishlist even though they were 50% off or more. It doesn't mean I don't want them. It just means I don't want them right now or at those prices. Maybe one day, though, so they stay.

There were a couple I might have gone for, had there been more money off:  Wildermyth and Dispatch. I would play either of those but I'm not so keen I'd take them at 35% off, let alone 20%. Get to half price and then we'll talk.

I did want to buy something, though. I have some credit left from the Steam cards I got for Christmas. Quite a bit, in fact. I like to keep something in the pot for impulse purchases but not fifty quid. 

Luckily for me, there were two stand-out candidates. Games I've wanted to play since I heard about them. Games I can be reasonably sure won't just sit in my library for years, unplayed. One was half-price but the other was only 35% off. Was that enough?

Yes. Yes it was. Apparently I wanted to play Kathy Rain 2: Soothsayer that much. That's a good sign, isn't it?

It's significant that both the games I bought from my Wishlist last night are sequels. (The other is Chicken Police: Into The Hive.) That makes them a low-risk option; known quantities. I remember the originals very clearly. I had a great time playing both of them. The reviews suggest both sequels are more of the same, possibly better. 

Also, and perhaps more important, they're both point-and-click adventures and I haven't played one of those for a while. I really like having one of those on the go. I generally find them more satisfying than visual novels, although it depends on how they're put together. The genres can feel pretty similar, sometimes.

I very nearly bought a third point-and-click adventure: Old Skies. I really want to play it but it was only 20% off and since I already had two similar games in my basket it seemed like it could wait a little longer. It's moving up the list fast, though. I might crack before the sale ends and get it anyway.

When I said earlier that I started with my Wishlist I was misremembering. I had a quick look at the Deep Discounts first. It makes sense to start there. Two or three super-discounted titles might have been all I needed and all together they might have come to less than a single game at half-price. There's only time to play so many games, after all. Why spend more than you have to?

In the event, there was only one game on deep discount I could imagine playing immediately: Pathfinder Kingmaker. It's another Baldur's Gate style isometric RPG. I've looked at it a few times and left it alone but at £2.66 (85% off.) it seemed like its time had come.

So I bought it. And only now, as I write this, do I realize my mistake. Yes, it was a bargain but not so much of a bargain as the bundle that includes the game plus all the DLC for £3.38. 

So I've just submitted my first-ever request for a refund from Steam. If it's approved, I'll buy the bundle. Maybe I won't like the game enough to want to play the DLC but if it's only going to cost me less than a pound I might as well be optimistic about it.

There just remains the question of when I'm going to play any of these games. Even though I make a pretty good job of only buying things I'm likely to get to sooner rather than later, it can still take a while. In the screenshot at the top of the post you can see two other games I'm kind of playing right now: Penny Larceny and Road 96. I'd had for a while before I got to them. 

I've played two and half hours of Penny Larceny so far. I'm enjoying it but it's a bit preachy, which puts me off a little. I was expecting a knockabout caper with supervillains but it seems to be more of a social satire. So far, most of the characters don't even seem to have any real superpowers, just a lot of angst and drama. The narrative tone can get quite judgmental at times, too, even when it's clearly trying to be just the opposite. Not sure they have the balance quite right.

As for Road 96, I'm really not having a lot of luck with that one. My played time is just 16 minutes because that's how long it took me to get to the part where you have to kick a ball and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I googled it and still didn't get an answer, or not one that worked, so either I'm bugged or I can't follow simple directions. Could be either.

And that's the state of play re my Steam Sale so far. A few more days still to go. I might yet buy something else. 

I should probably resist the temptation. I clearly have more than enough to be going on with.

Winds Of Valen - First Impressions

I've only recently started paying attention to the recommendations that appear on my Steam home page or whatever the heck we're calling it. Landing page? Login screen? The first thing I see when I open Steam, anyway. You know what I mean.

It used to be filled with games I had absolutely no interest in whatsoever and I trained myself to ignore them but lately I've noticed a lot more turning up there that seem to have some vague relevance to the kind of thing I might usually play. I've gradually slipped into at least glancing at them, taking a closer look at any that stand out. I guess that's how they get you.

Yesterday, a title I hadn't heard of popped up - Winds of Valen. It looked pretty so I passed the mouse pointer across the image to see what sort of game it was. 

It's a F2P MMORPG. That is kind of in my wheelhouse. Not that I have a wheelhouse. Or would know what to do with one if I had. Keep my wheels in it, I suppose...

Here's the store description:

Winds of Valen is a free fantasy sandbox MMORPG. Experience old-school progression where every level, skill, and drop is earned through effort. Train your combat, mining, and smithing skills, and hunt for rare and unique items in a seamless open world filled with danger and discovery.

Well, that sounds alright, doesn't it? I wonder how much of it is true? (Spoiler: most of it, if you squint hard enough and don't set your expectations too high.) The footprint was fairly small, just over a gigabyte (The specs say 2gb required.) so I stuffed it into my Steam Library and left it there for the morning. 

Today I played for half an hour after breakfast and an hour and a half this afternoon. 

And it was fun. For a given value of fun, that is. Whether you think it would be fun too depends on your feelings about The Grind.

As many of the Steam reviews (More than six hundred of them, currently aggregating to Mostly Positive.) point out, often as though it's an attraction not a drawback, there's not much to do in the game other than kill mobs, raise skills and pick up loot. Grinding is the gameplay. The developers seem to agree:

"Winds of Valen is built for players who enjoy the open-ended, sandbox design of old-school MMOs." 

Yeah. That's what we called grinding, back in the day.

The other thing many of the reviews agree on is how similar Winds of Valen is to one particular, very specific old-school MMO. It's the one that literally has "old-school" in its name: Old School Runescape. 

I can neither confirm nor deny the accuracy of that impression. I've never played OSRS. I have played Runescape, though, albeit years back and not for long, and it didn't remind me all that much of what little I remember about it, but I think that might have more to do with what WoV looks like than anything. I sure don't remember Runescape looking this charming.

So, where did this thing thing pop up from, anyway? According to the description on Steam, WoV launched in November 2025. According to itch.io, where the game is also available, it came out slightly before that, at the end of October. Itch says the developer is HeadCoach. Steam says it's Fiery Dog Games. 

Not sure it really matters. What does is that, since then, it's been updated regularly. And that tells an interesting story in itself.

If Winds of Valen was a modern, forward-looking, cutting-edge MMORPG it wouldn't have launched at all. It'd have gone into Early Access and stayed there for a year or three. That would have given the devs a pass for any glitches, bugs or shortfalls in content. Or at least they'd have claimed it did.

WoV sure as heck plays like an Early Access game, not least because there's not a whole lot of content there yet, but if you can remember that far back, that's how many MMORPGs used to be at launch. They'd come out half-finished, if that, and then patch patch patch until they had something approximating a full game. Players expected it and if the game was any good they hung around for it.

WoV is like that. The update history on Steam shows a stream of patches, small and large. Eighteen since last November. That's old school, alright. 

As for the payment model, F2P, might not seem to fit the old school bill (Although the free to play model is older than you might imagine.) but if this was a regular 2026 F2P title, it'd have plenty of Supporter Packs you'd be able to buy to "show support". As far as I can see you can't give Fiery Dog or HeadCoach, whichever it is, any money, even if you wanted to. How they're funding this thing beats me because there's no in-game cash shop I could see, either.

So, that's the background. How about the game?

Well, there's not a lot there yet but what there is looks very promising. As you can see from the screenshots, it's very pretty. If anything the visuals are better in game.

Performance-wise, I'd say it was bug-free because I certainly didn't run into any problems when I was playing, except that I hit a pretty big one when I logged out. After each session my PC crashed and had to be hard-rebooted. Makes me a bit nervous to try again, although I might give it a go on the laptop to see if it'll run there.

When you hit Play for the first time, it's straight into Character Creation. There's absolutely no story, no narrative, no introductory movie or cut scene to sit through. There aren't even any passages of sub-Tolkeinian prose to set the scene. There's nothing at all. It's so refreshing!

Character creation itself is fairly basic but the models are cute and I had no problems getting someone I felt comfortable playing. The surprise comes when you have to pick a server. There are half a dozen, each in a different region. How a game like this manages servers in the USA, Europe and Australia beats me. When I was making my choice, there were people on all of them, mostly single figures. The game has a thirty-day average concurrency of just under a hundred with an all-time peak three times that, according to the Steam Charts.

I spawned in on the outskirts of a village with a huge castle behind me, the implication being, I guess, that that's where I'd come from. Nothing in the game said so, of course. Nothing in the game says anything, including the NPCs, mostly because there are none.

There are no questgivers because there are no quests. There are shops but they're automated. No-one's waiting behind the counter to serve you. You have a sword and a pickaxe and that's your lot. It's the sandiest of sandboxes. Who needs NPCs? Just get on with it!

So I did. I went out of the village to see what was there and what was there was goblins. And skeletons. And chickens. And cows. You can kill all of those. I did, except for the cows. I didn't kill any cows. It seemed... unnecessary.

I sliced them all up with my sword. It's not like I had a choice. There's only one weapon type I could find and that was the sword. There's a  whole sword shop. All it sells are swords. There's crafting and the only weapon you can craft is a sword. If you don't like swords you're in the wrong game.

There are shields, too. They have their own shop and crafting recipes. Ditto armor. Ditto potions, theoretically, although I couldn't find the crafting station for those.  There's jewelry, too, and a jewelry store but I didn't see any crafting option for rings or amulets. Probably waiting for a patch.

If you don't want to craft your gear you can rely on the mobs you kill to provide. Everything always drops something, even if its only coin. You can wait for the item you need to drop, which is how I got a shield, a helmet and a ring, or you can save up your coins and buy what you want in town. 

It's surprisingly satisfying. And very old-school, except in the really old days, everything in the shops would have been inferior quality, where here it's pretty good. The motivating factor to get you crafting or looting rather than going to the store is the price. I'd still be saving for a shield if one hadn't dropped.

One distinctly new-school innovation I liked was the information panel that pops up when you target a mob. It doesn't just tell you all the stats, it tells you what the mob drops and the percentage chance of it happening. Until you actually get the drop, there's a question mark to maintain the suspense about what it might be but the likelihood of getting something is clear right from the start.

Even better, the chance of a special item dropping increases the longer you fail to get one. I was killing skeleton miners to see what the drop was going to be and my chances went from 7% to 12% before I got lucky. 

The rare drop off a Skeleton Miner turned out to be a pair of boots with a bonus to mining. The common drop is either tin or copper ore. Drops are rational and realistic, which I'd have to say is very definitely not in keeping with the old school vibe, but much appreciated by me all the same.It used to bug the heck out of me when a wolf would drop a rusty sword in EverQuest.

The combat itself is about as basic as you could possibly imagine. No player input is required at all beyond targeting the mob and starting the fight. From then on, the two just exchange blows until one of them falls over. If it's the mob, you loot it and move on to the next. If it's you, you respawn in town at full health . There's no death penalty as far as I could tell.

There's not much in the way of healing, either. You can use potions but I didn't bother. It seemed pointless when I was so close to the spawn spot. Mobs either use potions to heal up after a fight or employ some similar mechanism. They heal themselves up in stages, anyway,with a visual effect to show they've done it. If you can run back fast enough, you can catch them still at low health and carry on the fight you just lost, only at an advantage. I did that a few times.

Despite the sparse nature of the gameplay, there are some more sophisticated systems in place already. There's a bank. You can add gems to jewelry to give bonuses. There's fishing. It's not like there's nothing to do.

The main attraction, though, is grinding. Kill mobs to make skills go up. Kill mobs to make your level go up. Kill mobs to get better gear. If that's the kind of simplicity you've been missing you're going to have a fine old time.

I did. I was surprised how much fun I had. That old gameplay loop, with its skinner box structure and all the dopamine hits, it still works. Especially when there's a really satisfying ding every time something significant happens. 

I enjoyed my two hours with Winds of Valen a lot. If I could be sure it wasn't going to break my PC every time I log out, I'd be playing some more right after I post this. That does put me off a bit, though. 

In any case, at the moment, there's not really enough there to hold the attention for more than a few sessions. But all the building blocks are in place. If the developers keep adding systems and content the way they have been up to now, this could turn out to be a very enjoyable MMORPG indeed. 

As first impressions go, I'd have to say Winds of Valen makes a good one. And for free, why wouldn't you give it a go?

A Heroic Effort

Hey! That 300% bonus xp thing in EverQuest? And the Heroic Level 115? How's all that working out for you, then?

Yeah, not so good, as it goes. 

So, I thought about it and I decided what I'd do first was take a lowish character and have some fun moloing them up a few levels. Moloing is soloing with a mercenary, in case you didn't know, and it's very quick and easy up to maybe 70 or so, even without a big bonus.

I took a look at the characters on my regular account and the likeliest prospect seemed to be Cassis, a mid-40s druid I sometimes get out to take screenshots for posts. It'd obviously be handy if she had more teleport spells to more places plus I like her, so it wouldn't seem like time wasted, probably.

I logged her in and... she wouldn't log in. I'd left her in North Ro and now the launcher was hanging halfway through Zone Loading. 

After a few minutes the game shut itself down. I tried again. Same thing.

Well, I've seen this before. Corrupted zone file, most likely. I opened the game folder and deleted everything with Nro at the start. Tried again. Same story. Did it a few times, finding more files to delete every time. Still nothing.

Might be Cassis that was corrupted? That's happened before, too. Very annoying because it needs a GM to fix it. Before I got to petitioning I thought I'd run a couple of checks myself.

I logged in someone else to see if they could get to North Ro. Of course, everyone was either in the Guild Lobby, Plane of Knowledge or the Bazaar, so I had to run them to the Freeport portal in PoK and then through the Commonlands into the tunnel. 

Halfway down the tunnel I hit the zoneline with the desert and guess what? Now I have two characters I can't log in!

Next step: google it. I found a few threads on similar issues. They're not that uncommon. Most of the suggestions I'd already tried but one possibility was an issue with ports to the server I was trying to access. Apparently some people had had zones become inaccessible for characters on one server but had no issues with the same zone on another.

I have a lot of characters on different servers so I thought I'd test it. Now I have characters I can't log in on two servers. 

Whatever the problem is, it seems to be specific to the North Ro zone. Best advice is to wait until the next patch, when the servers will all be taken offline, and see if that magically fixes things.

That was it for Cassis for now, anyway. I thought about shifting the plan to someone else but then I remembered the free 115 Heroic. Might as well grab that and maybe do something with it.

When I posted about the Anniversary, I hadn't seen the other Daybreak press release about the Heroic Characters in the store. That tells you all the things you get for your 4,500DBC and it's quite a lot:

 50,000 Platinum  

200 Bayle Marks  

Entrusted Midnight Steed's Saddle  

Two 40-Slot Bags  

Spells  

Thousands of auto-granted Alternate Advancement abilities (AAs)  

Full set of Equipment, including Weapons, Armor, Power Source, Charm, and Augments  

Food, Drink, and Ammo 

I'm not sure 50k in platinum will get you much in the Bazaar these days but two forty slot bags is a hell of a deal. I don't think any of my characters have any that big. A full set of all gear at 115 is very appealing, too, always assuming it's any good.

I had a good think about who I'd like to bump up to 115 from the existing roster and the answer was no-one. It has to be on the account I'm paying for and there's no-one on there that I want to play. That meant making a new character and with the same logic as before, it looked like that was going to be either a Druid or a Wizard. They're the ones that get the ports.

I've never had any luck with Wizards. Can't play them. Druids, though... I know druids. I should. I have several.  

At 115 a druid has a lot of travel options. Not only the ports to all the druid rings but at some point druids got their own version of the Wizard's Translocate line, which means they can point at someone else and teleport them to another zone without having to go themselves.

That could be handy. It'd be a lot quicker to log in two accounts and have my druid on one send my Magician on the other to wherever she wanted to go than it would for the Magician to make her own way there. So much of a session in EQ can be taken up with just getting from one place to another it's enough to put you off even starting, sometimes.

So, I made a wood elf druid and called her Floradelle. Then I selected the upgrade option to make her 115 and logged her in to Greater Faydark, as I'd selected on the drop-down and she appeared in Gloomingdeep, the tutorial zone.

Well, eventually. Some time since I was last there they added an introductory slide show. You can see it, too. I took screenshots. They're all in this post. 

What I did wrong, I don't know. Probably didn't press the mouse button hard enough or something. I logged out and went back to Character Select and did it again and this time it worked. Kinda.

Floradelle was 115 alright. She had all her spells. About a hundred and thirty pages of them. She had a mercenary standing next to her. She was in Plane of Knowledge, too, so that was all good. 

Problem was, she was still in her starting gear, wielding a wooden club that looked like she'd torn the leg off a table, back in the kobold mines. 

Where was all her high-level gear? In a bag, maybe? Nope. I opened inventory and apart from an eight-slot backpack with some basic food and a note for her guildmaster there was nothing. No 40-slot bags, either.

I tried Claim in case that was how it worked, It wasn't. I tabbed out and did some googling to see if maybe freeloaders don't get the full kit. They do. So I did what everyone always does when something's not working in EQ; I logged out and logged back in again. 

And that worked. Floradelle came back fully dressed in new armor and carrying two huge bags. In them, for some reason, were her weapons. I got her to put the table-leg away and swap it for something more appropriate but by then I'd had enough. 

The whole thing had taken me more than an hour and anyway I had no real idea what to do with a Level 115 Druid, other than use her as a taxi. All I wanted to do, still, was wreck around some low-level zones with a merc and have some fun.

Maybe I'll do it today.  

Been Teen - A Dolly Mixture Story

I was clearing the clutter around my desk yesterday, when I came across a book I'd meant to post about as soon as I'd read it. Since I finished it sometime in December you can imagine how much kipple had accumulated everywhere within arm's reach of where I sit. Not, of course, that I'm saying the book was kipple. Very far from it. It was just buried under several layers of the stuff, which is how I came to forget to write the post.

Well, we're here now. So what was the book? 

I'm glad you asked me that! It was Teenage Daydream by Debsey Wykes. Still is, in fact. (Tenses are slippery little buggers, aren't they?)

Debsey was the bassist and one of the singers and songwriters in my favorite band of all time, Dolly Mixture. Favorite bands is an interesting concept, isn't it? A lot different from best bands, although in this case I'd be willing to make an argument for them being the same thing.

I'm not much of a one for sticking with favorites just because they got to me first. I could make a fair go of listing all the bands and solo acts I'd have said were my "favorite" at various times over the more than half a century I've been listening to music and while I still like most of them, there aren't many I still listen to with any sort of regularity, let alone the same thrill. The new pushes out the old, which is how it should be.

Dolly Mixture, though, are always with me. Is always with me. Damn. Case agreements are slippery, too. I know it should always be a singular for a collective noun, which is what the name of a pop group is, but it never sounds right.

 

They've been with me for a long time, too, the three girls in the band. Debsey, Rachel and Hester. I first saw them when I was at University, although even after reading the book, full of detail about specific gigs and dates as it is, I still can't be sure exactly when that first time might have been. 

I think it was when they were third on the bill at the Cambridge Corn Exchange to the Fall, with the Users sandwiched in-between. There's no doubt that I was at that gig. I remember it about as well as I remember anything from that long ago. The only question is whether that was the first time I saw them play live.

It sure wasn't the last. We went to see them as often as we could. Everyone liked the Dollies. There was also one of those degrees of separation things going on, the kind that happens all the time, when you're young. A college friend of mine knew some people who knew some people who knew the Dollies, so we ended up at a couple of the same parties. 

I particularly remember going to one given by a guy called Lance Chainsaw, who had a fanzine called Chainsaw. (Probably not a co-incidence.). The Dollies were definitely at that one. I think they might even have played a few songs but I went to a lot of parties back then.Very, very few of them was I in a state to remember much about afterwards.

Anyway, old history. (Is there any other kind?) Not going over all that again or not right now. I came here to talk about the book.

For anyone who was in Cambridge as the seventies turned into the eighties, it's a time capsule. Reading the first half felt like stepping back in time. All the places, the bands, the way everyone thought and behaved. It's not always a good feeling, your past turning up like it wants to get back inside you, somehow. But it can be. This was.

As the narrative winds on it starts to fray and lose its cheer. Not the writing, which is fluent and friendly and lovely to read, all the way to the end. No, it's the way all those hopes and dreams begin to dessicate, drying out before they eventually turn to dust and blow away. It's heartbreaking, in a way, even though in another, just the life that was in them while they lasted ought to be enough to sustain anyone forever.

If you want a casebook example of how just being talented is never enough, read this book. More, being talented and having the breaks doesn't guarantee anything much of anything, either. Dolly Mixture had plenty of truly great songs. They had a unique look and sound. They had charisma and elan. They had people with influence pulling for them. 

They played a lot of gigs. Made a lot of demos. Released some singles and EPs. Got played on the radio. Made the covers of the music papers. Important, influential people loved them. Famous people. Stars.

They got chances many bands would kill for and they didn't waste them. They made it all the way to Top of the Pops. On a Number One record, even. It just wasn't theirs.

With all of that, they never convinced a record company to let them make an album. They had to do it themselves, by which time they were all but done. It's quite possibly the best album ever made by anyone but then I may be biased. It's certainly my favorite.  

So, all of that and much more is in the book. If you want the whole story, I suggest you buy it. You can get it in Hardback, as an Audiobook or for your Kindle. In September there'll be a paperback, which suggests it must have sold well enough. 

And so it should have because even if you've never heard of, let alone heard, Dolly Mixture, Teenage Daydream is a great coming-of-age tale. Anyone could read it and have a good time. The subtitle is "We are the girls who play in a band" and if you want to know how that goes, you can't do better. Unless, of course, you happen to have been in a band when you were a girl. In which case, where's your book about how that went?

Two odd things struck me as I was reading it. No, actually, one didn't strike me until later, when I was reading Amy Rigby's Girl To City. I wrote all about that in a post that turned out to be one of my least-viewed ever. Seems not many people care what I think about autobiographies of musicians they never heard of, which doesn't bode well for this post but what the hell...

Dolly Mixture, for reasons Debsey never really seems to understand, did not get on well with some of the other all-female bands of the time, one in particular. There seem to have been ideological issues at the heart of it. The Dollies always looked like they were having fun even when the songs were bleak when you thought about them. The post-punk years weren't generally a great time for that kind of nuance. You weren't just supposed to take yourselves seriously, you had to let everyone know about it.

The same bands turn up in Amy Rigby's story as incredibly helpful and supportive. Which goes to show... something. That people have shapes that fit together or don't, I guess. Anyway, it was weird, reading about two versions of the same people so close together.

Not nearly as weird as the other thing, though. Dotted here and there throughout Debsey's book are letters from fans. She must have kept all the fan mail. They give a charming and occasionally disturbing insight into what it means to be even a little bit famous. 

And one of them might have been written by me.

You'd think if it was I'd remember writing it. But then, as I said, there's plenty from back then I don't really remember. And I did sometimes write letters to people I didn't know. It was a thing you did.  Well, you had to. It's not like now. We didn't have social media. We had the mail.

When I first read it I thought bloody hell! That's me! It's not just that it reads exactly like something I'd have written. It's the details. The date is right for when I was back home after graduating from Cambridge. The city the letter was sent from is where I was living then.

I was in a band that I always wanted to cover the Dollies' "Side Street Walker" (We never did.). I used to go see The Blue Aeroplanes as often as I once went to see Dolly Mixture and Rodney Allen was often on the bill. (He eventually joined them.) Everything fits.

I don't entirely remember our bass player being in hospital or the drummer going back to Portsmouth, but all sorts of things like that happened all the time to make being in a band as awkward as possible. And come to think of it, I do remember the bass player hurting his hand and us having to cancel a gig because of it... 

The only thing that throws me is the bit about the singer not making rehearsals...  I thought I was the singer. But there was a short time when I wasn't...

Maybe I didn't write it. Only, Debsey has included the first names of all the people who wrote the letters in the book and this one was written by someone with the same name as me. (I've cut it from the picture above because we don't use our real names around here but you can find out what it is if you buy the book! Not that it'll do you much good. I have a very common first name.)

It does seem like an awful lot of co-incidences if it wasn't me. Maybe I have a twin I never knew about. I hope they're not evil.

Anyway, another little mystery to add to the pile. You think you know your own past but you never do, not really. What I do know is that I loved Dolly Mixture then and I love them still and this book brings all of it back, not that most of it ever went very far. 

It won't do that for you because you weren't there but maybe you'll find something that I didn't. Something you wanted or needed or would be glad to have, at least. 

Books can do that. Good Ones. 

This is a good one.

I'm With You - Three Hundred Per Cent!

   

 

  

Question:

What could make me download and install EverQuest on my new PC, given I haven't bothered until now?

Answer:

A 300% XP Bonus and a free Level 115 Character Boost.

I wasn't going to post today due to laziness but then I saw this news story at MassivelyOP and I thought I ought to share. EverQuest just turned 27 and in the tradition of MMORPGs that means it's the one giving out presents. 

They're good ones, too:

All players will receive the following for free:  

• Anniversary Kickoff Event 
  • 300% XP 
  • 300% Rare NPC spawn chance 
  • 245% loot 
  • 190% coin 
  • 200% alternate currency 
  • 175% Item evolution experience for all players! 
    • (The kickoff ends March 22 at 11:00 p.m. PT) 
• A Maestro's Baton Ornament for all your characters. (One per character; available until April 20, 2026, at 11:00 p.m. PT.) * 
• After the anniversary kickoff event, all players will receive 150% experience gains for all players! (Starting March 23 at 12:00 a.m. and ending on April 1, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. PT.) 

The celebrations come in two parts, it seems. There's a week with everything turned up to eleven, then a second week when everything calms the heck back down. Even then, 150% isn't chopped liver. (I'm assuming everyone hates liver...)

Of all of those bonuses, as an old school EQ Player it's the massive xp bonus that gets my attention. What we wouldn't have done for a bonus like that, back in the day, amirite? 

Of course, these days I very much doubt even a bonus as generous as that is going to be able to compete with the xp you can get just from standing around in the Guild Lobby, sending your agents out on Overseer missions every day. And since I haven't even bothered to do that for a few years now, it seems exceedingly unlikely I'll be going out hunting, no matter how big the bonus.

So why did I even bother patching up? Well, there's not much suspense to be wrung out of it, is there, seeing how I slammed the reason right up at the top there in the biggest point size available. It's the free Level 115 boost.

115's not the cap. It's ten levels shy. The cap, as of this 27th Anniversary, is 125 130. (Never trust an AI.) Tunare forfend they'd ever give out a boost to max level. If they did that, Luclin might explode!

Unlike the perks listed above, the boost is only for subscribers but that's fine. My highest character on the account I pay for is just 87. (Hmm. That means I must have done a couple of levels on him after I boosted him. I bet that was on Overseer...)

I have two Level 85s on that account, as well, both of them boosted. No-one on the account has ever really been played. All the characters I care about are on a different account, one for which I canceled the subscription long ago. Old story. Not going into all that again.

The F2P account doesn't need the boost, anyway. My Magician there already dinged 115, back when that was the cap, through a combination of going out and killing things and staying at home doing Overseer missions. She can't benefit from the boost and anyway, as I said earlier, if I really cared about leveling her up, I'd have been keeping up with those missions. There's no faster or easier way to level solo.

So, realistically, there was absolutely no point in bothering to re-install the game at all, was there? It's just... free stuff...

What would really be fun, now I come to think about it, would be to take one of my low-level characters and blitz through some zones with a merc and that 300% bonus, possibly topped up with an xp potion, if the bonuses stack and if I have any left. It'd be pointless, sure, but it would be fun and I haven't done it for a while.

I just might do that. And if you'll take my advice, if you have an old EverQuest account lying around gathering dust, now might be the time to brush it off and take it for a spin. After all, it's not going to cost you anything but time.