When You Stare Into The Void...

Oh, look! I'm going to post something about EverQuest II again! Anyone would think I was trying to make some kind of point...

Nah, it's actually much simpler than that. I'm not really playing anything else so if I'm going to post about gaming, EQII is pretty much all I've got. And I barely even have that, since about all I'm doing most days is setting and collecting my Overseer missions, about which I am more than willing to complain yet again.

Seriously! What is this thing? I've been at it for what has to be most of the year and I'm still waaaay off the cap, which I think is currently 70, although as always it's hard to be sure. If there's one thing the game needs more than an enhanced presence on social media, it's some up-to-date, accurate, informative guides on the many, many abstruse and obfuscated systems that have been added over the years and only sporadically maintained or documented.

I have just now, as I started to do a little due diligence for this post, managed to find this wiki page, which has never turned up on any of the numerous searches I've done, this year or before. It's very helpful. In fact, it includes a lot of highly pertinent detail that I wasn't aware anyone had made available anywhere, like the exact amount of Overseer XP you get from each, individual mission.

Not that that's particularly useful in any practical sense. It mostly confirms what I already believed, that you get more XP the higher the quality of the mission and that within each quality band, longer missions give more xp than shorter ones. I could have proved that for myself by taking note of the change in XP after I hand them in, of course, but that seemed like too much effort so I'm happy someone else has done it for me.

There's not an awful lot I can do with the information now I have it, of course. All I can do is set the ten best missions available to me every day and those are exactly the ones I always thought they would be. I can - and do - stagger my picks through the day to let the better ones come off cooldown but that just tends to push my schedule off-center and lead to fewer choices the next day, so I'm not convinced it's always worth the trouble.

I'm still plugging away, as much out of stubborness as anything. At the rate it's going I'm not convinced I'll be at the cap by the time the expansion arrives, although I'll be close. I'm currently very close to the end of Overseer level 63. There's an Achievement at 65, for which you get nothing but the badge. The next tier - Tier 8 - doesn't exist yet but when it does, presumably when the expansion comes, it'll start at 71. 

That's another six levels, not counting 70 itself because the deciles always go at hyper-speed. I dinged 60 around the start of September and it's going faster now I have nearly all the missions for the tier, so I guess another two months 'til the expansion arrives might just about see it finished. I bloody hope so, anyway!

Speaking of the expansion, we know what it's called now. Jenn Chan issued a Producer's Letter yesterday. As usual, it goes hard on reviewing the past few months but only very lightly on what's coming next.

The name of EQII's twenty-second expansion is Rage of Cthurath. I'll let you have a moment to think about that one. And to go get a drink of water if you've been foolish enough to try and say it out loud.

The theme and setting of the expansion looks like it's Lovecraftian horror, which clearly explains the throat-mangling title, although when I saw it for the first time my immediate thought was "Mmmm! Churros!". 

Here's the pitch:

"Our journey begins through entering a reality outside of our own, a boundless realm of entropy and madness, where mortal lives are often treated with excessive cruelty. This is the Void, an ineffable conglomeration of paradoxical existence eked out on the edge of nothingness." 

Doesn't that sound inviting? It carries on it that vein for a while but I won't quote the whole thing. It's all there if you follow the link.

I have to say it doesn't inspire much excitement in me. The reverse, if anything. It always seems to me that these extra-planar jaunts take the game away from its well-established foundation in high fantasy. That said, the Void is an extremely well-established part of EQ lore, going all the way back to the elder game's initial phase, where Shadowed Men were a much-feared presence across the Commonlands and beyond. 

EQII's previous flirtations with the Void include some things I've really enjoyed, too. The Shadow Odyssey featured a number of Void-related instances, at least one of which occupied many happy hours as I farmed the final boss for what was, at that time, a very decent chunk of change. 

One of the best dungeons in the whole game, The Obelisk of Lost Souls, in the game since launch, is closely related to the Void and Rivervale has been over-run with invaders from that mysterious plane of existence since EQII began (Better them than halflings!) so I guess it may be about time we went to see where the pesky creatures come from.

There's not a whole lot more information available in the Letter, other than the names of what sound like a couple of open-world zones, Yon Gorroth and the Unknown. Exactly how many zones, instances or other explorable areas might be included has yet to be revealed but we do know the game is going to be getting yet another difficulty tier with the addition of Untold Heroics.

Commenters in the thread following the Producer's Letter on the Forums wasted no time in comparing UHs to World of Warcraft's Mythic Dungeons, promptly deciding that meant they wanted nothing to do with them. Since I already have nothing to do with the existing Heroics I and II, it's all a bit of a non-issue for me, just so long as we'll be getting the regular Solo versions of whatever dungeons the expansion brings.

There will also be a new batch of Public Quests. I really like PQs although it is quite true, as one disgruntled commenter points out, that in three months no-one will be doing them. That does tend to be the way it goes but honestly you could say that about most content in EQII and a good deal of content in just about every MMORPG, at least the ones that rely on vertical progression to keep people motivated. If we ruled out every new addition to the game on the grounds no-one would be using it in three months, we'd have barely any new content at all.

Finally, as everyone already must have known, the level cap will go up by five to 135. Happens every second expansion. If nothing else, that will make revisiting some of the only slightly out-of-date content from recent expansions and GUs a lot more fun, for me at least, although the merciless Resolve escalator means there's not a lot of point, other than to see stuff I haven't seen yet.

Pre-orders open up in a week, on 14 October, which is also when the Beta for the expansion begins. Pre-ordering always gets you a beta invite, which I never use because it's enough effort going through the whole thing once or maybe two or three times when there's a cap increase and I have alts to level. I certainly don't want to be doing it when everything's buggy and I'm playing a character I'll never see again.

Anyway, that's what we know so far. Oh, and the Arch-Villain of the piece is called The Consumer, which I imagine is supposed to make me think of some towering, all-devouring monster with teeth the size of cavalry sabers, but which actually gives me a mental image of someone in a housecoat, sitting on a sofa with the TV blaring as they hunch over a laptop, ordering lampshades and throw-pillows from Amazon. 

About the only other thing I have to say about Rage of Cthurath at this stage is that I'm not entirely looking forward to staring at purple and orange fungus for the next year. Other than that, bring it on!