EQII Rage of Cthurath - Welcome To Our Nightmare

Today's post should have been a couple of Next Fest demo reviews. I've already played two of them. I was out of the house a lot longer than I expected today, though, and now I don't think I have time.

Which is handy because I also wanted to say something about the new EverQuest II expansion, pre-orders for which went up either yesterday or today. I saw the PR push when I logged in this morning and it's impressive. 

I think I mentioned this a while back but Daybreak have really upped their game, when it comes to marketing. Here's the "landing page" on the official website. Slick, isn't it? And modern. You could easily be fooled into thinking it was for a game less than twenty years old.

It's also surprisingly informative. Not only does it tell you everything you need to know if you're thinking of buying the expansion, it has a good amount of detail about what to expect when you start playing.

The "New Lands To Discover" section contains individual entries for five different zones: Yon Gorroth, Oggothl Sprawl, The Unknown, Gerion, Hold of D'Lere and Zon Zobboz. 

Pardon me a moment while I put my teeth back in. 

I find it hard to believe we're getting five non-instanced overland zones so I imagine at least two of those will be "dungeons", even if they are open to the lowering, purple skies of The Void. There are two screenshots for each zone and they make the hellscape look nowhere near as grim and repulsive as I feared. That was my biggest worry going into the expansion - that it would mean a year of dour, ugly heavy metal album cover art, all clashing colors and nowhere to rest your eyes. 

In fact, the art team seem to have done a magnificent job (As usual.) of making everything look better than it has any right to be. Some of it looks almost pretty. This, for example:

There is an awful lot of purple and red but it could have been a lot worse. There's a video, too, and that looks... actually, it looks really good. 

You know how these promo videos for aging MMOs can sometimes seem a little embarrassing? Not this one. Even the animations don't look too archaic. 

Granted, they seem to have chosen some of the least cluttered, most open areas to showcase, giving the whole thing a feel of open space and minimalism that most likely won't be how it feels in the game itself. But that's the Marketing Department's job, isn't it? To make things look, if not better than they really are, then at least as good as they can be.

As well as all the visuals, there's a lot of text. I read all of it and found it quite intriguing. At one point I couldn't help wondering if there wasn't some satirical point being made although I couldn't quite pin down what it might be. Having the main villain of the piece be called The Consumer surely has to mean something, doesn't it?

There's also a nice list of features included in the expansion, several of which seem pretty significant and/or useful. Last time around we got a keyring for Petamorph wands, something I thought was exciting enough to write a whole post about. In Rage of Cthurath we're getting another Keyring, this one for Illusions and I'm even more excited about that.

I use the Petamorph keyring all the time but only on one or two characters because it collates the specific items that change the appearance of combat pets and only a small number of classes can use  those. Everyone can use illusion items, though. All my characters have some in their bags and more in their bank vaults.

Having them on a Keyring is going to free up a significant amount of bag space but better yet it will also mean I use the damn things. I like illusions and EQII has some very good ones but I can never be bothered to ferret around in my bags looking for the items and then clicking them just to make a cosmetic change. If they're all on a handy keyring I can access with one click of the UI, then I'm far more likely to enjoy them in the way they were intended.

A much more significant innovation for most people, albeit not for me, is likely to be the new option to be in two guilds at once. That could be a potentially game-changing move for some. I would have loved it, back in the days when I was active in multiple guilds and had to choose which characters would sign up to which of them.

I remember what a big deal it was when Guild Wars 2 launched with the option to join up to five guilds at once. I did make good use of that over the time I was there. For a while I was in four active guilds, doing different activities with all of them. 

It's surprising how few games have followed suit. DBG is calling this feature "Guild Coalitions" and as yet there are no details on exactly how it's going to work but even that they're playing around with the concept is a huge step in a good direction for the game.

The third new feature, also very much unexplained in any real detail at this stage, is something called "Untold Heroic Dungeons". It looks as if it will be EQII's version of WoW's Mythic/Mythic + system (Not that I understand how that works, either.) although there are other ways it could go. It's highly unlikely (By which I mean all but impossible.) that it'll be of any practical concern to me but I await further news of how it works with interest.

And that won't be long coming. Along with pre-orders comes beta access, full details of which, including rewards for participating and hitting certain benchmarks as you test things like the Signature Questline or the dungeons and Public Quests, are included in the forum post.

Tempting though the rewards, which include familiars, mounts and illusions, may be, I will not be setting foot in the beta, even though I certainly will be placing my pre-order very soon. The phrase "too much of a good thing" comes to mind although in what sense a buggy, unfinished version of something you're going to be seeing for real in less than eight weeks counts as a "good thing" is a question always worth asking.

As well as all of the above, the expansion obviously includes all the usual content - major questlines for both adventurers and crafters, new spells and abilities, more levels and so on. In some expansions that's about all you get and honestly it's probably all you really need. This time, though, it looks like there'll be one or two rather tasty extras. 

The release date is "December 2025". There's a caveat of "before December 31" in the small print but experience suggests the final date will be considerably closer to the start of the month than that. As for the price, the Standard Edition, which is the one I always buy, is £25. Okay, actually £25.12 for some weird currency conversion reason. The dollar price is $34.99. There are the usual Expensive, Very Expensive and Insanely Expensive editions (Not the official titles, unfortunately.). If you're interested in what you'd get, you can see all of the details here. 

And now I'm going to try and get another demo or two done. With luck there'll be something about that here tomorrow. I'm not promising though.