Do It Again!

I've left it a bit late for a post today so let's hope this is going to be as short as I think it should be. Doesn't always follow that when I have nothing much to say, I don't take long saying it.

The post is about EverQuest Online Adventures again because apparently that's what I play now - a decades-old, discontinued game for a console three generations out of date, reanimated as a grey-market PC emulation. I mean, it's not like anyone's made any new games since 2003, so it makes sense, right?

But that's where the mouse-pointer finds its way now, whenever I feel like playing a video game. I played yesterday and I played today. Couple of hours each time. These days that's a lot for me. 

And did I get much done? 

Hah! Has anyone played this game? Wouldn't be asking that if you had, I bet.

No, I did not get much done, thank-you. Not by any reasonable estimation. And yet it felt like I did. 

Sound familiar? It will if you ever played EverQuest or one of its contemporaries, back in the days before MMORPG players began to value their time. An awful lot of doing nothing and then feeling smug about it. Or furious. One or the other, depending how many times you died.

Let me see if I can remember just what I did achieve in those two, two-hour sessions...

About as bright as it gets in Steamfont, believe it or not.

I started off by going to see if I could solo the Level 5 Gnome Magician Class Quest. The one the guy who gave it to me said I'd need a group for. 

Actually, what he said is that I'd need the help of some other apprentices because if EQOA is anything it's a role-playing game. More self-consciously so than EQ, I'd say. Everyone seems to be very much in character there. The NPCs, that is. Not the players.  

The quest asks you to go kill some Mindwhippers. To the best of my knowledge, the Norrath I'm familiar with doesn't have any of those so I had no clue what they might be, let alone where. The quest guy seemed to assume I'd know, being a local. 

He did give me some extremely vague directions but nothing I could use. I'd already done a lot of running around. I won't dignify it by calling it "exploring". I hadn't seen any mindwhippers so I thought I'd at least try and save myself a little trouble by looking the quest up online. 

From a few sources I found out that Mindwhippers are wasps. Why they're called something so dramatic I have no clue. Are they wasp enchanters? It's possible, I suppose. I also got a rough travel plan on how to get to them, which boiled down to "Go out of the West gate, turn West and keep heading West". 

So of course I went out of the East gate.

That wasted about a quarter of an hour. Once I'd figured out the problem, I went back in and then out the other gate and glory be I found the damn things! Took me another ten minutes but there they were. Most of them conned red but one was yellow so I thought I'd give it a go.

• First pull, it killed the pet. I ran away and lived. 
• Second pull, I tried to root the wasp, it came after me, I ran away and lived. The pet didn't.
• Third pull, I got killed by a roaming red con wasp before I even finished casting. 
• Fourth pull, I sent the pet in and nuked. I got the wasp quite low before I got aggro. The wasp came at me, but I thought I still might be able to take it so I stood my ground and kept nuking. I was wrong.

At that point I decided the guy had been right all along and I'd need some help. Or else some levels. 

Anyone know if he was always called Q`Anon?

I was also fed up to the back teeth of it being dark all the frigging time so I thought I'd go exploring and see if it got any lighter anywhere else. I was Level 5 and I didn't seem to lose any xp on death or gain any xp debt and there's no corpse recovery in EQOA so it seemed like a good time for a roam.

Using Right Button as a kind of radar I headed South, threading my way through the increasing number of aggressive red mobs - Large Spiders, Fire Ants, some sort of bear, a few wolves, a Decaying Skeleton and eventually something very unexpected - a Dragoon. 

Dragoon in Norrath is a rank peculiar to Dark Elves. These Dragoons turned out to be guards outside the DE home city of Neriak. 

At that point I hadn't begun to come to terms with the extremely different topography of this new Norrath. Since then I've studied the map in the Prima Guide and I have a slightly better understanding of the layout but at the time I came across the Dragoons I was very confused.

I stopped and took alook at the map (Out of game, of course. There is no in-game map.) and saw that Klick`Anon is in the far North-East, directly above Neriak, which is directly above Freeport. That last pairing is the same as in the Norrath I'm used to but in that one the gnomish city is on a different continent altogether.

That gave me the idea of finding my way into Freeport, where I thought I could at least register with the Coachman so I could get a ride next time. That's something EQ never had but which EverQuest II, which came out a year after EQOA, did - point-to-point, safe travel by NPC mount. I even thought I might bind in Freeport, since they have a Magicians' Guild there, along with something approximating an actual day-night cycle.

Unfortunately, I overshot the entrance to Freeport by what must have been several relative miles, ending up deep in the Desert of Ro. I only figured that out when it was too late, after something killed me and I woke up back in Klick.

Somewhere in the desert,
where if it isn't exactly blazing sunlight,
you can at least see where you're going.

That was the end of my first session.  No material gains maybe but plenty of valuable new knowledge acquired. That's why it felt so satisfying.

Today, I thought I'd finish that trip to Freeport. To spoil a good story, I never got there. I didn't even get as close as the last time. Somehow, whereas the previous day I'd been able to avoid all the dangerous mobs, today I kept getting jumped on in the dark by ants, spiders and things I never saw coming.

After a couple of deaths, I did a bit of googling to see if  there was an easier route. There wasn't, but there was another coach station near a village on the way to the Elf starting city, Fayspire. It looked like it might be an easier trip, so I changed my travel plans and went there instead.

Tried to go there, I should say. All the advice is to "follow the road" but I never saw any road. My screen is so dark I can barely see the trees in the forest let alone whether I'm running on a paved surface or just dirt and pine needles. Another hour of wandering around in the dark, hammering RB and getting killed a couple more times and I'd had enough. 

If you're frustrated by things you can't change, concentrate on something you can. I couldn't get the screen any brighter (I tried...) and I couldn't kill the mobs that were killing me but I could kill weaker ones and level up and with enough of that, maybe I'd be able to survive a few more hits and run away more effectively.

I spent the next half-hour or so grinding light and dark-blue cons back in the starting area until I dinged Level 6. That was astonsihingly enjoyable. I didn't realise how much I'd missed it. 

My new clothes.
(Image auto-leveled so you can see them.)

Once I'd dinged, most of the mobs went green or light blue so I moved outside the walls and went looking for slightly tougher prey. I found enough dark-blues to be going on with but once again I ran foul of some aggressive red con ants and got myself a free port back to bind. 

Which was fine. I was loaded down with insect body parts and bits and pieces of rat and snake. I needed to get shot of it all anyway. I sold it all to one vendor and checked another for new spells. 

Nothing more until Level 8 it seems, so I spent my money on a full set of vendor armor instead. It added a lot to my armor class although I very much doubt that will mean much to an angry red-con. Still, if it helps me run an extra few yards before I fall over, it might be the difference between life and death.

I re-summoned and re-buffed my Water Elementaling for what seemed like the twentieth time and went out to carry on grinding xp, which was when I discovered Level 6 is the point at which xp debt kicks in. Took me half a dozen kills to clear my debt before I started making real xp again. It also made me a lot more cautious, which slowed things down a bit more.

A bubble into Level 6, Mrs Bhagpuss announced it was tea-time so I stopped and after tea I started writing this but once I've finished, there's a very strong possibility I'll log back in and grind some more. If I can get to Level 8 and buy the next pet, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to take those Mindwhippers without outside assistance and probably survive the trip either to Freeport or Fayspire, too.

Someone by the name of Judy Thompson left a comment on today's post at TAGN in regard of World of Warcraft, saying "you can’t go back and do it over". I read that right after I'd been thinking just the opposite. 

EQOA thus far really does feel going back in time. It's not exactly like doing it over but it's the closest I've come since the first time I played on a retro server, many years ago. Maybe closer. 

The trick is that it's the same but also different. A lot of the skills and knowledge are transferable but not so many that it feels straightforward or obvious. There's a lot of learning to be done and also some unlearning. 

I guess what I'm saying is that it's familiar but not over-familiar. How long that feeling will last remains to be seen but it's a good one to have, while it lasts.