Drives A Little Slower: EQII

Isey, from I Has PC, chose to celebrate EverQuest's twentieth anniversary with the closest thing he could find to the original experience, Project 1999. It was, as he said in the title of his post, "Slow Progress...":

"I spent three hours this morning on my 7 Enchanter at Orc hill.... By the end I had barely dinged 9 (I was only one bubble away from 8 when I started)... three hours of gameplay for a full level and a bit."

He also lost his level on a bad pull when he was Level Eight and when it was all over, all he had to look forward to was

"...an incredibly non efficient trip ... to High Keep (from Gfay) – my level 8 pet spell is only sold there. I can’t remember how long of trip it is but if memory serves it’s something like 4 or 5 zones plus a boat trip." 

I can't quite match that but my progress, leveling a Dirge on Kaladim, EverQuest II's new Time Limited Expansion server, has been mightily slow, too. I logged out a few minutes ago, immediately after she dinged Eleven. My /played shows I've played her for just over a dozen hours so far.

Allowing for the extremely short time it took to do ten levels of tradeskills (the crafting tutorial gives insane xp compared to anything an adventurer could hope for) that's about an hour per level. My progress wasn't anything like as smoothly distributed as that. I did four levels in a couple of hours on the first day but the next time I played it took me the best part of three hours to do a single level.

A lot of that could well be down to the way I play. For some reason I seem to be incapable, in any MMO, of sticking with the content meant for my level. Dressed in the most basic imaginable gear (actually, nothing at all in about half the slots) my Dirge has been running face-first into the brick wall of quests and mobs meant for characters three or even five levels above her.

She must have died, at a conservative estimate, thirty times at least so far. I've certainly had to do full repairs from 20% three times, plus a few more before things got that dire. It's been extremely difficult to break the bad habits of Live and I have to admit the absence of any meaningful death penalty has contributed heavily to my lackadaisical, not to say suicidal, attitude.

Despite those frequent deaths I've been having plenty of fun. Progress has been slow by modern standards but very fast in MMORPG historical terms. And therein lies the rub. It seems there's something of a battle raging on the forums between those who feel XP is about right and those who feel cheated that it isn't as slow as it was at launch, something that was (kind of) promised in the FAQ.

Will experience values be tuned for Kaladim?
Experience values will be slower, similar to how it was at original launch. Tradeskill experience will be the same.

Leaving aside the bald claim about tradeskill XP, which seems to me to be quite simply crazy wrong, this opens up a whole barrel of issues, not least what was XP like at launch? Presumably Daybreak has some numerical data to rely on but all the rest of us have are decade-and-a-half old memories. Which is enough for many people to make statements of absolute certainty about how things were and how they ought to be.

General chat this morning was ringing with reminiscences of how wonderfully, magically, immersively awful slow it all was in 2004. All those people claimed to have been there. So was I but I have no genuine certainty over how long it took me to level back then. Mostly what I remember was how attritional it felt, which is not the same thing at all as as being "slow".

In my memory, everywhere and everything required groups, not just dungeons but almost all overland content as well. I remember how excruciatingly rare it was to find spell upgrades as drops, while crafted versions were prohibitively expensive because of the appallingly badly designed tradeskill sytem (the same system a few masochists even now hold up as the paradigm of how crafting should work).

None of that difficulty - literally none of it - has been brought back for this or any other TLE server, thank heaven. I'm sure it's someone's dream - forming a full group to go grind heroic difficulty crabs on a strip of Antonican sand for hour after hour in the hope of getting a single spell book to drop, a book which, inevitably, will be usable by no-one in the group. It's not mine.

Neither, I would hazard a guess, is it commercially viable, even in today's sophisticated nostalgia market. All these things some people remember so fondly were changed because a lot more people stopped playing rather than put up with them. It's possible there could be enough potential customers who a) genuinely preferred the way EQII played in its first six months and b) still have sufficient interest in reprising that pleasure to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege, but I doubt it.

Were the genuine status quo ante ever to be recreated in all its true horror, I suspect the unfortunate experimental server in question would bleed population even faster than the original game did all those years ago. As I said, there's slow and there's awful. If there were ever to be a P2004 server for EQII, I very much doubt it would attract and sustain the kind of population P1999 enjoys. EQII at launch was no Classic EverQuest, that's for sure.

Even so, by and large, I'm in favor of slow, if "slow" means "time to enjoy the scenery". The restrictions that apply on Kaladim are having that effect on me so far. There's no Fast Travel, no Broker Anywhere, no flying mounts, no access to housing other than by going to your front door. Getting anywhere from anywhere takes time and it really does make the world feel much bigger.

I'm enjoying it now but I'm not sure how long that will,last. It's very interesting to be able to compare the situation on Kaladim with what I'm enjoying on Live at the same time. I did over twenty levels on my Shadowknight yesterday, from around Level 60 to the mid-80s. I had 100% vitality (for a while), 140% veteran bonus, 100% server bonus and 100% XP Potion, all at once. It was exhilarating and satisfying and I had a great time.

That "great time" consisted of me burning through as much content in an afternoon as took me about six months the first time round. Of course I didn't really see all that content this time, any more than you "see" Europe as you pass over it in a plane. I just saw a few selected highlights as I flew across zones and Fast Travelled from era to era, cherry-picking a few favorite quests and completing in minutes what would once have taken me hours or possibly weeks.

Even though I'm using the same launcher to get to them both, EQII on Kaladim and EQII on Live might just as well be different MMORPGs altogether. They may both nominally share the same content but that's like saying five sets of tennis and a game of fetch with your dog both use the same ball.

As the release date for WoW Classic draws ever nearer I'm increasingly curious to see how Blizzard's reluctant entry into the nostalgia market plays out. From everything I've seen so far in MMORPGs from EverQuest to Rift, one person's faithful recreation is another's slap in the face. The difference this time is that World of Warcraft is big enough for a slap you can hear around the world.