More specifically, I played some of the new expansion, instead of prepping for it, which is just about all I've done since Scars of Destruction dropped back before Christmas. It was all very spur-of-the-moment. I logged in mainly to collect my monthly 550DBC stipend and on a whim I ported into Port Woe, the intentionally unattractive starting area in Sodden Archipelago, the expansion's equally unattractive opening zone.
Place names in the real world often reflect either their physical situation or the attitude of the people who named them. That convention holds true here. Unlike those really annoying games, where everywhere seems to have been named by upsetting a Scrabble board, Port Woe is unironically miserable and its hinterland undeniably waterlogged. Things do improve somewhat as you move further inland but at no point, at least no point that I've reached yet, does any of it start to look attractive.
This, it has to be said, is a risky strategy for a game to adopt. I was skeptical when the EverQuest Show attempted to spin the approach as both worthwhile and successful, claiming "... the direction of creating more realistic unique landscapes like swamps, highlands, and rocky outcrops is a much more demanding task, to do it well. And the artists do."
Yes, well, maybe. A more detached observer, however, might conclude that as a twenty year-old game whose graphics have not aged as well as they might have done, leaning into the things the tools are good at, like the vibrant colors and lush foliage seen in several recent expansions, might be a safer option than trying to make stagnant water and bare rock look appealing.
It's not all about looks, though, is it? It's about story and gameplay and progression. Isn't that why we come here?
Up to a point. I do like to have nice things to look at while I'm playing, all the same. So it is indeed a compliment to the devs that I found time zipping past this morning even while I struggled badly to find anything worth taking a picture of for the blog post I knew I'd be writing later.
If I'm going to be strictly accurate, it wasn't really the story that jollied me along, either. I think there is one but I'd be hard put to tell you what it was. Granted, I did the introduction a couple of months ago and now I'm back to do the follow-up I've forgotten the finer details but I have a feeling that, even at the time, I was never clear on why I was in Port Woe or what the Big Crisis was supposed to be.
Let's see if I can precis the story so far without looking anything up. Hmm....
Some bunch I never heard of before, by the name of The Open Hand, got in touch with me to go someplace I'd also never heard of before, to intervene in some sort of burgeoning problem that was going to be bad because... I have no idea why.
When I got there the locals didn't like me or trust me. A bunch of adventurers had apparently turned up and started running around, riling up the indigenous bad guys, firstly a bunch of Teenage Mutant Turtle lookalikes and more importantly the inevitable tribe of militaristic orcs that shows up wherever you go in Norrath, with whom the Port Woeians were barely holding their own through a policy of kow-towing and forelock-tugging and basically keeping their heads down.
Naturally, I got the job of ingratiating myself with the locals, trying to convince them I and my new best friends, who I barely knew, weren't going to cause a huge heap of trouble then vanish, leaving them to deal with it on their own. As always, getting on their right side took the form of doing menial tasks for anyone too busy or lazy to do them for themselves which, again as always, turned out to be everyone.
Along the way I was able to throw in a few noble acts, like finding unsupervised children, who should surely not have been allowed to go wandering about in the alligator-infested swamps in the first place, and rescuing a bunch of fishermen, who'd managed to get themselves captured by orcs. Isn't that always the way?
All of this eventually got the locals to think of me "kindly", at which point a different bunch of villagers, noticing how gullible I was, suddenly thought of a whole new set of chores for me to do. One of those was to go to some haunted village where all the Kerrans who used to live here died in some unspecified purge or pogrom or natural disaster (Or maybe it was specified but I forgot, which seems more likely.) to steal a baker's dozen of their totems, something that apparently was going to put the willies up either the orcs or the turtles or both.
That village turned out to be the first instanced "dungeon" in the storyline, although I don't think we call them dungeons any more. Very few of them are underground, anyway. This one wasn't.
I'll quit with the story-so-far at this point because, as must be clear, I have no clue what it is. The last time I remember there being an actual narrative, as opposed to a string of chores with some flavor text, was probably the first time I zoned in back in December. I'm trusting that at some point an actual plot will develop, probably with guest appearances from a few Norrathian celebrities and a climax featuring a demi-god or two. That is the go-to format for EQII expansions, after all.
What I will say is that the instance was fun. I really enjoyed it. I went in blind, didn't look anything up, didn't even have the Wiki open. I thought I'd try winging it, see how it went, then back off and do the research when things fell apart. But they never did.
There were five bosses. All of them were tank&spank or at least I tanked and spanked them all. That alone would earn the instance at least a B+ in my book. I wish every boss in every game was T&S or more properly T&S-friendly. I don't mind them having clever mechanics for those that like that sort of thing, so long as I can ignore them. I just want to stand there and hit stuff until it falls over and this morning that's what I did.
Which is not to say the bosses didn't have resources. Two of them did serious knockbacks that sent me flying high into the air and at least two also summoned loads of adds. Happily for me, I had my Featherfall cloak on, so all I had to do was gently float back down to carry on the fight. As for adds - I was playing my Berserker ffs. He thrives on adds!
Even better, not one of the bosses had any of the more irritating passive abilities used by devs in recent times to make the fights more "challenging". The one I really, really hate is the huge mana drain every bloody boss used to be given that meant I often ended up spending ten or fifteen minutes auto-attacking the buggers to death. That was fun.
The other, newer trick is for bosses to become invulnerable to all damage except what comes from Heroic Opportunities. That one gained currency right after the big HO revamp, surprise surprise. It's far less irritating than the mana drain but it's still hokey and trite so I hope we've seen the back of it.
With none of that nonsense in play I was able to explore the dungeon (Sorry, Instance.) at my own pace. Not that there was a lot to look at. Some instances in EQII can be genuinely gorgeous, especially the ones with a lot of tiling and statuary, but this was a long-deserted mountain village, originally populated by relatively primitive cat-people, so there weren't a whole lot of photo opportunities. At least one of the bosses had a model I hadn't seen before. though, so that was nice.
As far as mobs went, there were a lot of undead Kerrans and a lot of rats. Really a lot of rats. At one point I was swarmed by what looked like a dozen or so and that was one encounter. I haven't seen a mob of mobs like that since the deer in Thundering Steps. It was novel.
It was also easy because it seems all that work I did prepping has paid off. In the past, the first instance in an EQII expansion has sometimes been a little rough. They have been tuned a little high at times and anyone going in unprepared tended to have a difficult time of it. Since they added the Tishan's Box at the start and put in a tutorial to make sure you make full use of it, that's improved a lot.
I also had good food and drink, the new mercenary, mount and familiar and I'd had my Jeweller make me Expert level Combat Arts for most of my main attacks, so I was about as well-set as a casual was likely to be. And now I'm better set even than that because three of the five bosses dropped upgrades I could - and did - use.
The other two dropped items a Berserker can't wear but those will be passed on to someone who can. I have someone who can use everything, pretty much. I was happy to see all the boss chests were metal this time around. Last expansion there was a disheartening switch to Treasured quality drops, something I did not appreciate, even though the stats may have been the same. It's the look of the thing, don't you know?
I'm trying to do the Adventure and the Tradeskill questlines at the same time because there are some welcome synergies. The Crafting line is much shorter and faster and you get to fly in the expansion zones as a reward for finishing it. It relies on gaining faction with Port Woe, though, as does the Adventure line, and Adventurers gain that faction much faster.
With a bit of swapping I should be able to make each of them feel easier and therefore more fun. Easier is always more fun for me. I used to wonder about that but I'm pretty convinced now it's true.
There is a sense of satisfaction from overcoming more challenging content, I'll not deny it, but after decades of playing games like this, I'm convinced a fleeting sense of satisfaction rarely compensates for the hours of frustration experienced achieving it.
It's the old banging your head against a wall thing, isn't it? Lovely when it stops but surely better never to started all that unnecessary head-banging in the first place.
And since I've clearly wandered off the point and clambered onto my soapbox, I'll leave it there. It's nice to be back on the old horse, anyway. Let's hope I don't fall off again before I get where I'm going.
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