What with all these Next Fest demos, I haven't been playing all that many MMORPGs lately. About all I've managed has been a couple of logins to Noah's Heart just to keep my guild from kicking me for inactivity and a couple more short sessions in Dawnlands to do pretty much nothing of note.
And yes, I know Dawnlands isn't an MMORPG. It just feels like one when I'm playing it, just like Valheim did. All the survival games do, when your normal MMORPG playstyle is mostly to solo in mostly empty areas of low-oppulation games, like mine is.
Oh, alright, it's not a winnable argument. Technically, it's defintiely a quest. It goes in your Quest Journal and the NPC you have to talk to to get your reward isn't one of the Collection guys so, yes, it's a quest.
Mechanically, though, it might as well be a collect. Here's what you have to do....
... normally, at this point I'd just link to the Wiki or EQ2 Traders or some other website with a full walkthrough except, in what I can only consider an ominous and worrying non-development, five days after the event went live, no-one's done one.
To be less panicky, EQ2 Traders does have a full and comprehensive write-up of this year's Nights of the Dead although naturally it only concerns itself with the elements that directly involve crafting and decorating. The new quest gets a mention and there's a picture of the rweard but it's just bundled into a two-line section headed "New From Gravedigging", which covers changes to a pre-existing part of the event.
Of much greater concern as a straw in the wind for the future of the game is the full entry for the Halloween event at EQ2i (AKA the wiki.) This is where I'd normally go to read a full, in-depth rundown of everything that's been added this year. If you try that today, closing in on a week after the event began, this is what you'll find:
It probably hasn't escaped your notice that it's not 2022 any more. No-one has bothered to update the entry for this year at all, let alone to add a write-up of the new quest. I don't believe that's ever happened before and it cannot be a good sign.
"Mystic's Crystal Orb"" would eventually drop for me if I got out my shovel and started digging up graves, as you do this time of year.
All you have to so is keep on digging. Inbetween the presents with your name on them, the ghosts who want to fight, the ghosts who want to dance, the angry rats and vicious undead, both of whom need a damn good clout with a shovel, you'll eventually find two (Or maybe it was three?) more drops that update the quest.
I'm not sure now whether all of them were drops off creatures that had to be killed or whether one of them came out of a present. If I'd known at the time I was going to be doing a guide I'd have made some notes. In the end, it doesn't matter anyway. You'll just have to keep digging and dealing appropriately with whatever pops up until finally you have everything, at which point the quest will tell you to go speak to Horace Tobin in Antonica.
I used my map to insta-travel to the Antonica docks. No sign of Horace there. I had a tracking scroll already running so I started tracking him by name and set off to fly what I thought was the most likely route - along the road past both Qeynos gates then out to Windstalker Village, which was where I thought he was most likely to be hanging out.
Tracking got me nothing. I stopped at Windstalker and walked around. Nothing showed on my map or on track. I googled Horace by name. Again, nothing.
I flapped my wings and carried on, making a full circuit of all the salient points - the McQuibble Farm, where the Scarecrow King spawns, all the various named keeps and towers, the Thundering Steppes zoneline (A popular neutral spot all factions back in the day), Archers Wood, the Claymore...
After fifteen or twenty minutes of that I got fed up and logged out. I was annoyed. It seemed like a lot of unecessary effort for a fluff holiday quest. If the blasted halfling (I was betting he'd be a halfling with a name like Horace Tobin.) couldn't put himself somewhere I could find him then he didn't deserve to get his stupid stuff back.
I left it a couple of days in the hope someone would post his whereabouts online. Then last night I checked and found this. Apparently the little bugger had been spawning under the world, making him impossible to find.
As someone in the thread points out, there is a way to get NPCs in that state to communicate but you do have to know they're there in the first place. Even after reading the thread, I still didn't know where in Antonica Horace was. Luckily for me, someone else hadn't done their due diligence and searched the forums before posting. There was a second thread made by someone who couldn't find the guy and in reply someone had finally revealed the location - Windstalker Village!
Right where I started. I knew that was where he'd be!
Off I went again, this time forewarned that a) he might be under the world and b) he was inside one of the buildings. When I got there this time I could easily see the big, red book on the map that indicates a quest hand-in. It was somewhat obscured by other map icons, though. It's possible I might have overlooked it the first time.
I checked track and Horace wasn't showing up. I went inside the building and stood next to him. Still no sign of him on track. That's probably why I missed him the first time. He may have been under the world but since I didn't go into the building I can't be sure.
What I do know, which I'd forgotten, is that not all quest NPCs show up on track. Why, I have no idea. It's worth remembering you can't just expect tracking to do everything for you, though. Sometimes you actually have to use your eyes.
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| Heavily enhanced image so you can see Horace's "outfit" in all its |
I had a brief chat with Horace, who turned out not to be a halfling after all. It was dark in there but as far as I could tell he was a human, wearing a ridiculous floppy wizard hat, pantaloons with voluminous lace turn-ups and lime-green cosy slippers. He gave me some ridiculous spiel about a seance and some angry ghosts. I assume they were incensed by his dress sense. Who wouldn't be?
He also gave me his Mysterial Spirit Board, basically an off-brand Ouija board with a planchette that actually moves. I put it on a table in one of my many dens and it looks pretty spiffy.
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| Amateurs! |
I checked that one with the wiki and as I suspected, even though it theoretically scales to level, anyone much over seventy, the original level cap when it was introduced, is a shoe-in to solo it. I flew over to the McQuibble Farm, waited a few minutes for the Professor to show (Someone else just having done the quest.) then one-shotted the King when he popped.
From that I got a nice floaty, glowing skull pet and the satisfaction of having finally completed a quest I probably started more than a decade ago. No need to rush these things. With the very nice Phantasm Witchcraft Cloak I got from one of my gravedigging presents, I thought it all went rather well.
All I really need to do now is buy the latest Nights of the Dead crafting book and I'm done for another year. Although I might wake Mitsu up and do a few Halloween-themed quests with her. It's often more satisfying to do holiday content on characters on servers where I don't have everything already stashed in the bank.
While I'm there, I might do some of the expansion prequels with her too and maybe the Panda quests. I was enjoying levelling her up a few months back and I forget now why I stopped. I imagine something else came along.
It usually does.
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EQ II has great Halloween quests. May need to stick my head in for those, it's been a while. The last time I was playing I had almost hit that transition point where the style of the game switches to the modern one.
ReplyDeleteIt does look so much better after that.
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