After I finished yesterday's post, I felt sure the next thing I'd write would
be a follow-up in which I recounted my difficulties - or lack thereof - in
setting up my account to play Ashes of Creation (Early Access.) on
Steam. With luck, I thought, I might even manage enough time in the
game itself to put together some kind of First Impressions piece.
That plan lasted exactly as long as it took me to publish the post and then try to log into EverQuest II for a bit of house-building, only to find those servers also down, not for maintenance this time but for an update. I thought it was a bit odd. EQII almost always patches on Tuesdays. There was a link to the patch notes, so I clicked through to see what was going on.
Which was when I realized there was something I'd forgotten. Something quite important.
Yesterday, December 10th, was the scheduled release date for this year's EQII expansion, Rage of Cthurath.
That tells you a great deal about how some things have changed. Time was, when the imminent release of a new expansion for an MMORPG I was playing would have been enough to drive almost everything else from my mind. I would have been looking forward to it for weeks.
On the day it was going to go live, I'd have been sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, waiting for the servers to open. I'd have been checking the forums, listening to people chatter excitedly about what was coming.
If the servers were due to come up when I'd be asleep, I might well have set my alarm clock to wake me up early so I could get online as soon as possible. I might even have taken a day or two off work so as to not to miss all the excitement.
That was then. Now, even though I've already paid for it, I couldn't even remember the day the expansion was slated to arrive. And it wasn't a momentary lapse of memory. The exact date just hadn't made that much of an impact. If you'd asked me, last week, when the new EQII expansion was coming, I'd have said "Sometime in December. I think it might be the 11th?"
Well, it wasn't the 11th. It was the 10th. And, at least once I'd been reminded, I did feel interested enough to want to take a look right away. The servers came up mid-evening my time. I was able to get in a couple of hours which, as anyone who's seen me moaning about it here lately will know, is quite a long session for me, these days.
Today, I've already put in another three hours or so. If I didn't have this nagging voice in my head telling me I really ought to get on with writing a post about it, I'd be playing now. As soon as I finish, I'll be happt to get back to playing again.
Which certainly suggests I must be having a good time. And I am. I'm enjoying that oddly comforting, reassuring sense of commitment that comes with finding yourself wrapped up in a new expansion for a game you know well. You're aware there's plenty ahead of you. You're not going to run out of things to do for quite a while.
You also have a pretty good idea what it is that you're going to be doing. Basically the same as you did the last time and the time before that. Only with different scenery.
That pretty much sums up an EQII expansion, twenty years after they began: same content, different scenery. (Really very lovely scenery, too. The screenshots never do it justice.)
There's a very annoying cliche marketing departments, particularly those attached to publishing houses, love to use. There are variations but it always follows the form of "If you liked X, you'll love Y". The theory seems to be that what people want next is whatever they had last, only more so. It's as if the sheer repetitiveness of the experience intensifies it rather than watering it down.
And you know what? It's mostly true. It certainly works for books, anyway. As a bookseller, one of the first and most important questions you have to learn how to answer is "Have you got anything similar?". Readers read books a lot faster than writers can write them. A series that took the author a few years to write might take a new fan a few months to finish. Or even a few weeks.
When they find there aren't any more and there won't be for at least another year, always assuming the author is still interested enough to keep the series going (Hi, George! Hi, Patrick!), they start casting around for something that's as close to what they just read as possible. Anything to keep the jag going.
Gamers are much the same and MMORPG expansions ignore it at their peril. The "different" ones are rarely the successful ones.
EQII expansions are even more attuned to the expectations of the audience than most, I suspect. I won't say they're formulaic or predictable but only because that sounds unnecessarily pejorative. They do all follow a pattern, all the same.
I wouldn't describe them as crowd-pleasing or fan service, either. Not really. Somehow, a section of the playerbase always seems to find itself baffled or upset about something. Many EQII expansions end up being surprisingly controversial, usually for relatively minor changes to systems or mechanics.
I think what EQII expansions have become in recent years could best be described as "a known quantity". They aren't by any means all the same in detail. They all add new features and make changes to gameplay, some of which can be disruptive. It's also not unusual for the whole tone and feel of the game to shift perceptibly for the duration of a particular expansion cycle.
And yet, no matter how radical the new elements might be, the underlying structure is always almost identical. Compare the lists of content, year on year, and about all you need to change are the zone names.
There are always two or three open world zones across which you travel as the storyline unfolds. Each zone has a number of instances that have to be unlocked at specific points in the Signature questline. The questline always has you on foot at the stat, with flying being enabled at the end of each stage but only for the zone you just finished.
Everything always begins in a village or a camp on the edge of the first zone, to which you arrive by ship or portal from the Old World. Even though you clearly know nothing at all about the place you've just reached, everyone there immediately starts treating you like an old friend or a trusted servant, someone who can be relied on to take any job, no matter how tedious or dangerous, and get it done with minimal guidance or instruction. No footling errand is too trivial; no affair of state too grand. Despite no-one knowing whop the hell you are, everyone just assumes you're trustworthy, capable and willing.
And, of course, you are. Before you leave the village for the first time, though, be sure to strip down to your underwear right there in the middle of the town square and swap every item you have for whatever you find in that box on the floor. Better yet, have a chat with the fellow standing next to it first. Let him tell you how to dress yourself. Better listen carefully, too. Miss even one step and you're going to find everything a lot harder going than you expected.
From then on, it's a long and convoluted tale of gods and monsters as you save the universe or the world or some specific subset thereof yet again, either by hitting things and setting them on fire, picking them up and making things out of them or quite possibly both.
That's what I was expecting and so far that seems to be what I've got. And I'm very happy with it, so far.
There is one big change from my perspective, something that really has freshened the whole thing up for me: I'm finally playing as a Necromancer.
It's been my plan for several expansions but until now the disparity between my regularly-played Berserker and all my other sometimes-played characters has always left an insurmountable gap in preparedness, so even if I've started with someone else, I've always ended up back with him in the end.
This time, I spent much of this year setting up for it. Not the gear, which all gets replaced in the opening seconds, but the skills. In the past it's been little things like not having the obscure languages or taking three times as long to gather anything that's made playing anyone but the 'Zerker feel like a chore. My Necro is still lacking in a few specialist areas but mostly she's on par and for the first time I can enjoy playing her without the niggling details dragging the experience down.
So far, she feels much more powerful than the Berserker. Her Time-to-Kill is much better and she has far more versatility. Of course, to be sure the difference really is in the innate superior soloing ability of her class, rather than Rage of Cthulath itself being a significantly easier expansion than the last few, I'd have to play it to the end of the Signature questline and then do it all again with the Berserker. I probably will, in time.
For now, though, I can say that from the first pull, every regular mob has been dying in two casts or three casts. And it only takes that long because they're all DoTs and I keep stacking them when I probably don't need to.
The pet can solo them with no help from me and almost as fast. I have the new mercenary but he hasn't had to heal anyone on a regular mob yet. It makes exploring very enjoyable, even without being able to fly. Anything that gets in the way is dead before it even gets to us.
Even more satisfying is the way the Necro has been able to handle the open-world solo bosses in the opening zone. As usual, they're all about seven levels above the starting level for the zone and flagged as tough for solo mobs.
A few expansions back these kinds of mobs were always easy but then something changed and they became almost impossible. In one expansion, my Berserker still couldn't kill the named solo mobs in the first zone even after he'd finished the whole Signature quest. Things improved with the last expansion, in which they were kind of in-between those extremes. He still couldn't do them when he was working their zones but he could a little later, when he came back for another try.
This time the Necro killed three of named mobs in the second session before she'd barely got going on the questline. It wasn't a total walkover. They all took some concentration. Her Mercenary died in one fight but it was near the end and the outcome was never in doubt.
I never felt she was in any great danger, even when she had to do all her own healing. Given that last night I watched someone in plate armor having a much harder time with one of the same targets, it seems fair to put it down to the superior DPS and survivability of the Necromancer rather than a major nerf to the mobs.
My overall first impressions, then, are very positive. The first zone is gorgeous. Any worries about the dark nature of the storyline delivering an ugly hellscape can at least be put off until I get to the next one. Gameplay is exactly as expected, which suits me perfectly. The story is also highly familiar and very much what I signed up for. And the class swap is shaping up just as I hoped it might.
All in all, a very good start. We'll see how it goes on.
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