What could make me download and install EverQuest on my new PC, given I
haven't bothered until now?
Answer:
A 300% XP Bonus and a free Level 115 Character Boost.
I wasn't going to post today due to laziness but then I saw this news story at MassivelyOP and I thought I ought to share. EverQuest just turned 27 and in the tradition of MMORPGs that means it's the one giving out presents.
They're good ones, too:
All players will receive the following for free:
Anniversary Kickoff Event
300% XP
300% Rare NPC spawn chance
245% loot
190% coin
200% alternate currency
175% Item evolution experience for all players!
(The kickoff ends March 22 at 11:00 p.m. PT)
A Maestro's Baton Ornament for all your characters. (One per character; available until April 20, 2026, at 11:00 p.m. PT.) *
After
the anniversary kickoff event, all players will receive 150% experience
gains for all players! (Starting March 23 at 12:00 a.m. and ending on
April 1, 2026, at 1:00 a.m. PT.)
The celebrations come in two parts, it seems. There's a week with everything turned up to eleven, then a second week when everything calms the heck back down. Even then, 150% isn't chopped liver. (I'm assuming everyone hates liver...)
Of all of those bonuses, as an old school EQ Player it's the massive xp bonus that gets my attention. What we wouldn't have done for a bonus like that, back in the day, amirite?
Of course, these days I very much doubt even a bonus as generous as that is going to be able to compete with the xp you can get just from standing around in the Guild Lobby, sending your agents out on Overseer missions every day. And since I haven't even bothered to do that for a few years now, it seems exceedingly unlikely I'll be going out hunting, no matter how big the bonus.
So why did I even bother patching up? Well, there's not much suspense to be wrung out of it, is there, seeing how I slammed the reason right up at the top there in the biggest point size available. It's the free Level 115 boost.
115's not the cap. It's ten levels shy. The cap, as of this 27th Anniversary, is 125. Tunare forfend they'd ever give out a boost to max level. If they did that, Luclin might explode!
Unlike the perks listed above, the boost is only for subscribers but that's fine. My highest character on the account I pay for is just 87. (Hmm. That means I must have done a couple of levels on him after I boosted him. I bet that was on Overseer...)
I have two Level 85s on that account, as well, both of them boosted. No-one on the account has ever really been played. All the characters I care about are on a different account, one for which I canceled the subscription long ago. Old story. Not going into all that again.
The F2P account doesn't need the boost, anyway. My Magician there already dinged 115, back when that was the cap, through a combination of going out and killing things and staying at home doing Overseer missions. She can't benefit from the boost and anyway, as I said earlier, if I really cared about leveling her up, I'd have been keeping up with those missions. There's no faster or easier way to level solo.
So, realistically, there was absolutely no point in bothering to re-install the game at all, was there? It's just... free stuff...
What would really be fun, now I come to think about it, would be to take one of my low-level characters and blitz through some zones with a merc and that 300% bonus, possibly topped up with an xp potion, if the bonuses stack and if I have any left. It'd be pointless, sure, but it would be fun and I haven't done it for a while.
I just might do that. And if you'll take my advice, if you have an old EverQuest account lying around gathering dust, now might be the time to brush it off and take it for a spin. After all, it's not going to cost you anything but time.
It seems very old-fashioned now, but when EverQuest launched back in
1999, good vs evil was a real thing. Among a number of really quite significant
choices you had to make at character selection was whether you were going to be
a goodie or a baddie. Yes, Virginia, back then that sort of thing actually
mattered!
If you chose to be Evil with a capital E you'd pick an Officially Evil race,
Troll being the most reviled until the first expansion,
Ruins of Kunark, when they had to cede that honor to the Iksar. Ogres
came next followed by Dark Elves, who were more your suave, sinister evil
masterminds. Or you could pick a good or neutral race and be Necromancer or a
Shadowknight, which would mean your career would overwrite your racial
heritage, a popular choice for anyone who wanted to be a Bad Gnome.
Most races had a city of their own and there were a lot of races. For maybe
the first decade, most MMORPGs came with multiple races, alignments, classes
and starting cities. Extensive choice was was one of the defining principles
of the genre. If you picked an evil class that had to share space with
goody-goodies, you'd get your own secret hideouts within the walls, often
underground or in the sewers.
And you'd better have done your homework before you started. Character
creation in the early days didn't mean tweaking sliders until you had
something you could bear to look at. It meant getting a character you'd be
able to play for more than a few sessions before you were forced to re-roll
and start over.
It was entirely possible to gimp your character, that being the awkward term
in common use back then. If you picked the wrong race/class combo you might
not even know anything was wrong until you started to look for groups and
found no-one willing to take you on.
The more immediate problem, though, came when you walked past some
innocuous-looking guard standing next to a tower along the roadside out in the
middle of nowhere, only to find yourself back at your spawn point, when it
turned out you were the evil monster he was guarding that tower from.
In EQ, all of that was fixable over time. You might start out evil (Or good.)
but you didn't have to stay that way. Every race had Faction and Faction was a
Stat and one of the often-forgotten aspects of EverQuest's gameplay is that it
includes a whole raft of stats that go up with use. Everyone talks about
leveling up in that game but no-one talks about raising skills, even though EQ
is as much skills-based as it relies on levels.
Another, mostly uncelebrated, fact about EverQuest is that at the start it was
much more of a sandbox than a theme-park. There was no central storyline and
questing, even though it was right there in the name, mostly seemed like an
afterthought. There was a great deal of setting your own goals and working
towards them and one goal a lot of players who'd picked Team Evil at the start
liked to set for themselves was Getting Everyone To Like Me.
I did a bit of that. Not as much as some but enough for it to be the main
thing I did for a few weeks on certain characters. My Ogre Shadowknight killed
scores of corrupt guards until his faction was good enough to let him hand in
their helmets for extra credit, then scores more until eventually he could
stroll into the bank in North Freeport and get service like a regular
citizen.
I did it partly to see if I could, partly because killing guards was great xp,
and mostly because otherwise banking was a fucking nightmare. I'd have had to
go all the way back to Oggok in the swamps, three or four zones away,
or else to the dark elf city of Neriak, a trek to get there only to end
up wandering the maze-like corridors for far too long before I figured out
where I was going wrong.
Before the second expansion, Scars of Velious, which added the icebound
city of Thurgadin, filled with dwarves so cut-off from civilization
they'd lost most of their prejudices and would trade with anyone, Evil
characters were very restricted in things like where they could bank or shop
or find services of any kind. Even traveling on the roads through what looked
like open countryside could be fatal. The same thing applied to Good
characters in reverse, of course, but somehow it never seemed to inconvenience
them nearly as much.
The difficulty was compounded by race, meaning evil humans or gnomes would get
a pass in places where Ogres and especially Trolls would be killed on sight.
Dark Elves flitted somewhere in the middle, their options often hugely
improved by the class choices available to them. There was a very good reason
why so many DEs decided to become Enchanters, a class with a whole line of
spells designed to let them impersonate other races or fool people into
treating them nicely.
Thurgadin was all very well but it was even more inconvenient to get to than
the racial starting cities. It wasn't until the third expansion,
Shadows of Luclin, opened travel gates that took us to the moon, where
no-one knew or cared what your alignment was, that it became practical to stay
all evil, all the time.
From then on, alignment and faction gradually lost their power and influence.
Well, I say "gradually"... It was more of a landslide.
The fourth expansion, Planes of Power, didn't just add a completely
neutral city, it filled that city with every conceivable service and facility,
making it by far the most appealing place to set your bind spot, particularly
since the expansion also came with the game's first instant, on-demand travel
service. Granted, you still had to get to a physical object in the game-world,
a "Book", and click on it, but there were Books outside every starting
city and in plenty of other places, too, so that wasn't much of a problem.
That was, to most intents and purposes, the end of Good and Evil as a limiting
factor in the game. There was and still is a residual effect - try rolling up
a High Elf and strolling into Oggok and see how far it gets you - but for
almost all practical purposes, it makes no difference any more. We're all
murder hobos together and every newly discovered continent or plane or
dimension can't tell us apart.
Planes of Power came out in 2002, a couple of years before
EverQuest II appeared. You might have thought the experience the dev
team had garnered by then might have led them to the understanding that, while
some players quite enjoyed the challenge of a faction grind, most preferred to
be able to play the game without having to prep first.
Not a bit of it. EQII launched with a hard-coded Good/Evil split that
made even Classic EQ look like Hello Kitty Online. Everyone had to be
either GOOD or EVIL. The big difference from the elder game was that your
alignment was no longer tied to your race. You could be a good troll or an
evil high elf. Unlike before, though, you couldn't be a neutral anything.
That was because in EQII your alignment was decided not by anything so crass
as what you looked like. What mattered was where you lived. When you reached
the end of the introduction on the Isle of Refuge, you had to choose to
take ship either to Freeport or Qeynos. Going to Freeport meant
you were evil. If you went to Qeynos you were good.
And don't think it wasn't going to matter much in the long run, either. Years
after EverQuest had made it seamless for all races and alignments to work
together, EQII decided it would be great if it wasn't only the characters who
couldn't mix. How about if the players couldn't, either?
You could be in the same guild together but to form the guild everyone had to
be of the same alignment and the guild hall would be in that alignment's city
so good luck to anyone from the other side who joined later, trying to use the
facilities. There was no mailing items to the opposition and quest credit and
guild status had some sort of blocks on them, too, as I recall. Shared guild
missions were supposed to be a big content driver but apparently no-one in the
dev team had thought about that.
That was on a PvE server, of course. On a PvP server you couldn't even group
together, let alone share a guild. In fact, screw grouping - you couldn't even
talk to the other side. The two cities spoke different languages. But
hey, PvP, right? Suck it up!
You didn't have to do that. In both PvP and PvE there was a long and
complicated process you could undertake to switch sides. If you were really
bloody-minded abut it, you could pause in the middle and become de facto
neutral, but that only meant everyone hated you.
Was it popular? Maybe for PvP. On the PvE side of the divide, hell, no, it was
not! Everyone hated it, surprise, surprise. Faction restrictions were
some of the earliest to be revised and eventually removed. Even before the
whole game was revamped by Scott Hartsman a year or so after launch,
most of the alignment restrictions for PvE players had already melted away.
A residue remains, all the same. The two cities still nominally retain their
alignments although these days there are plenty of other starting cities to
pick if you want to be free of the worst of it. Those tend to lean towards one
side or the other, even so.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of those bad, old days are the two mighty starting
zones, Antonica and Commonlands, the former stretching out from
the gates of Qeynos to the Thundering Steppes, the latter from Freeport
to Nektulos Forest. Together with the cluster of very low-level zones
attached to each city, these vast stretches of land kept most adventurers both
busy and apart for the first twenty levels or so.
Back in 2004, I found the whole thing confusing and counter-intuitive. By
inclination, I prefer to play neutral or good-leaning characters but Qeynos
lagged so badly at launch I couldn't stand to be there. As I remember it,
which may not be strictly accurate, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I started off trying to
play in Qeynos but had to re-roll because it was just untenable. Freeport
had its problems but at least it was a lot easier to move around.
That we'd also both preferred Freeport to Qeynos in EQ was probably a factor.
In EQ, Freeport was more like a neutral city than an evil one. Trolls and
Ogres weren't tolerated but Dark Elves and evil classes could move safely
through the parts of the city not controlled by the religious factions. Qeynos
was a lot less sanguine about that sort of thing and felt a lot more
restrictive.
That was how we ended up playing multiple characters on both side of the
ideological divide, especially once the lag got sorted out and I'd upgraded my
PC. It meant I got to know both Antonica and Commonlands pretty well.
Maybe next time I'll even get around to talking about one of them.
I was scanning down the list of posts this morning, looking as I sometimes do
for any kind of pattern in the viewing figures, when I noticed a draft I didn't
recognize. When I opened it up to see what was inside there was nothing but two
YouTube links. Obviously I clicked on them to see what they were.
Songs. Nothing but a couple of songs. Obviously ones I'd considered including
in a music post. Only I never do it that way. For a long time now, all I've been doing is
tagging possible post fodder as "Favorites" in Firefox then, when
the time comes, looking through what I've got to pick out a few I haven't used
already. It's messy, chaotic and highly inefficient. Suits me perfectly.
It also means that mostly, when I post another episode in my extremely
unpopular "What I've been Listening To Lately" series, there aren't all that many songs in there that I have been
listening to lately.
I mean, it's not like there aren't any. There's always a sprinkling. I
listened to White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter a dozen times before I posted it. But then, I would, wouldn't I?
Also, as an aside, I just brought it up on YouTube to play in the background
as I wrote this and it took me three search terms to find it.
Lana+white didn't work and neither did Lana+feather, although
the first finds other songs in her extensive catalog - White Mustang,
White Dress- and the other gets you that duet with Billie Eilish she
did on Billie's Birds of a Feather.
I had to go all the way to Lana del Rey+hawk before her current single
came up. Does that sound right to anyone? I mean, the damn video has 4.2m
views. You'd think the algorithm would be smarter about it. If I was Lana's
publicist, I'd be pissed.
Anyhoo, I was only looking at the view-count out of curiosity. I stopped
worrying about how many people read anything here years ago. Most counts are
contradictory anyway. I don't trust any of them.
Except, lately, I've noticed the figures down the right-hand side of the list
of posts does seem to make a kind of sense. Tells a story, even. That's the
one labeled "View Count" on mouseover and it does actually seem to mean
something, for once.
I can see the page views trickling in there as soon as I publish. Usually a few
people catch the post immediately and then the tally rises slowly over the
next day or so until it hits about a third to a half of the number of people
Feedly tells me follow the blog.
From that, I can see fairly clearly which kinds of posts get more attention.
Music posts are right at the bottom of the list. Maybe a fifth of my
supposedly loyal audience takes a glance at those. TV and media posts, it
depends on the subject matter. Gaming posts get pretty consistent views,
with the popular games getting the most, as you'd imagine.
The biggest winners seem to be topical posts, especially ones with titles that
make it clear what they're about, although people do seem to find those even
if the titles I give them skew a little sideways. For example, the most-viewed
posts this year so far were on the
Steam Winter Sale,
Discord asking for proof of age
and
layoffs at Playable Worlds, in that order.
It's all notional, of course. Even if I was certain what the numbers meant and
even if I trusted them, I still wouldn't tailor my posts to make them go up.
Although I do like to see numbers go up...
I only mention it as an introduction to how this came to be a music post in
the first place. Oh yes! That's what it is! Did I fool you? Have you gotten
all the way to here without realizing you'd been suckered?
Yeah, that won't work. Readers can smell a music post a mile away, no matter
how I try to hide it. So, for the handful of you still here, let's get to it!
First up, those two mysterious tunes I saved in a draft post several weeks
back.
Bad Bad Milk - Oh! Gunquit
Where that one came from I have no idea. Fourteen years old so I guess it
turned up in the sidebar suggestions when I was looking at something else. The
self-described "'rumble-bop trash blitz freak-a-billy'" five-piece was
formed in 2011 and they’re still going. There's a whole sub-culture of this
kind of thing. It never penetrates the mainstream but it's always there. Been
around since I was at college, at least, so that's half a century. Must be a
fun lifestyle.
Go Away - Junky58%
The answer to the eternal question "What if the Ramones had been Japanese? And girls?" Ok, that's two questions...
Yes, I know exactly what you're thinking. It's "How great would it be if they covered the Carpenters' "Top of the World", isn't it? Thought so. Well, ponder no longer!
Ok. That's those two squared away, plus a bonus cover. Now what have I got
marked for real? Oh, I know! How about the UK's entry for this year's
Eurovision Song Contest?
Eins, Zwei, Drei - LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER
Remember post-modernism? Big in the 'nineties? Looked a lot like the future,
then. That's the trouble with the future, though. Hang around too long and you
have to live in it.
On that note, we'll have to wait until May to find out how it does but you can
place your bets now. Here's
a compilation of all 35 entries
boiled down to just over seventeen minutes of power ballads, flag-waving, and
forced wackiness. Should be a fun four hours...
Time - Star Moles
Speaking of time...
Got a lovely roll to it, don't it? Sounds like something
Johnny Walker might have played on his afternoon show in the
'seventies, back when I was still at school. Is that a good thing?
Genuine Connection - Swell
Because sometimes you just wanna rock.
if you wanna party come over to my house- Fcuckers
No but it's true. I put it in and wrote eight paragraphs off the back of it
and then when I was done I thought "I'd better just check...". Probably should
have done that first. Anyway, not wasting all those words so it's a second go
for sadie! I think that might be the first time that's happened.
Also, wow, was it really a whole month ago I
did one of these? To the day, no less. And two Friday the Thirteenths in a
row, too. Spooky!
Until about a year ago, if you'd asked me (Which, why would you?), I'd have
said pop songs were three minutes long. They're not, though, are they? They
never have been.
I was thinking about it yesterday, when Mrs Bhagpuss was getting ready to take
Beryl to work. (Beryl has a job, by the way. It's only an hour every other
week but she gets paid. I won't go into details. Confidentiality and all
that.)
Anyway, as she was getting ready, she had The Weakest Link on (Mrs
Bhagpuss, that is, not Beryl. Beryl doesn't really watch TV although it's HD,
which apparently dogs can see and recognize, which they couldn't with any
earlier definition.). It was a celebrity edition and
Pink Pantheress was on, which was bizarre to say the least of it. She
did really well, too. Last to be eliminated before the final head-to-head.
Anyway, Mrs Bhagpuss had no idea who Pink Pantheress was, which tells you
something about market separation. I'd have said she was kind of a big deal
now but everyone's a big deal these days and still no-one's heard of them.
(Tell Chappel Roan that and see what it gets you... then again, Mrs
Bhagpuss knows exactly who Chapell Roan is so maybe we're on a different scale
of fame there...)
Getting back to the point, one of the things Pink Pantheress was famous for
fifteen minutes for was saying
no song needs to be longer than two minutes thirty. When I was making all those songs with Suno last year, a lot of of them were well under three minutes long. I worried about it a bit until I
started to notice so were many of the songs I grew up listening to on the
radio.
See Emily Play? 2.47.
Happy Jack? 2.07.
I Get Around? Two minutes dead, when they did it for Ed Sullivan; a few seconds
longer on record. Sure, songs - even some singles - got a lot longer in the
proggy seventies but mostly they held that line.
Later, as I made more and more songs artificially, they got longer and longer.
And they still sounded great to me. Short? Long? Doesn't matter, does it?
Songs are the length they need to be. Well, the good ones.
Oh, yeah. That all started because Arms Wide starts and ends in media
res for a running time of 2.10 and it's perfect that way. Also, I freakin'
love autotune! Why do people hate on it?
So, what else do we got? Let me check my laptop a mo... Oh, wow... there's
some really good stuff on there... I should have started with a couple of
these.
Never mind! It'll be a bonus for the hardcore. Anyone still here?
Thisworldly - R. Missing
Best one from R. in a while. She knocks them out and they're all
quality but this is a dreamer. That stately pace. That ethereal tone. Very,
very 'eighties, in the best way.
Bad Moons - American Football
Remember what I was saying up there about songs being the length they need
to be? Case in point.
Is it just me or does it sound like the Smiths? Did
Morrissey invent emo? God, I hope not...
Okay, three more then this can be
Thirteen Songs for Friday 13th Pt. 2 and it'll seem like I planned it!
American Girls - Harry Styles
Hah! Who had Eurovision and Harry Styles on their Bhagpuss Bingo Card today?
No-one?
Classic title, good tune, clever video. What more do you want?
The Way It Goes - Aimée Fatale
Remind me - what year is it again? She's playing in the next city over from me
in April but if I didn't make the effort for Sunday (1994) I don't
suppose I will for Aimée, either. God, I'm so old now! (Not to mention
lazy.)
And finally. A banger to finish.
HEELS BROKE = DIED - MGNA CRRRTA
Oh yeah, that one was NSFW just a little. Maybe could have mentioned that.
Only the words, though, and who listens to those?
Remember when I said that if I ran out of things to write about, I might start an irregular series on The Zones of EverQuest II? It's time to make good on that threat promise! The question is... where to begin?
First of all, how many zones are there in the game now? Yeah, like that's an easy question to answer. I suppose I could go round the game and count them. Maybe we could meet back here in a few months?
Or I could look at the wiki. They have lists by various definitions there - level, tier, update and more - and none of them is either complete or up-to-date. The wiki, once transcendent, is fading slowly away.
Still, it's a start. I count 68 outdoor zones on the "By Level" list, which doesn't include the last two expansions so let's say about 75ish. That's way, way more than I'm ever going to cover even if I run this series for the life of the blog. But it isn't even all the outdoor zones, not really.
That count collates the Freeport and Qeynos starting zones into two bundles for a start. And it doesn't include any of the open dungeons, which I'd say count as "zones" rather than "instances", even if they aren't always outdoors. Although some of them are outdoors anyway.
Those are listed separately on the wiki as "Shared Dungeons" and there are 34 of them, a count that stops at the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion, which came out a decade ago. I know shared dungeons have been out of fashion for a while but I'm pretty sure we've seen a couple of new ones since then.
Just sticking to open and shared zones and avoiding any mention of solo, duo, single-group or raid instances then, and the count is already over a hundred. Except that for most of the life of the game the bulk of content has been instanced.
I'm not about to start counting all of those but maybe one of our friendly AIs could do it for me. That's exactly the kind of thing they're meant to be good at, isn't it?
I asked Google "How many zones are there in EQII in 2026?" and the AI Overview, which I assume is powered by Gemini, replied instantly
"Based
on information leading up to early 2026, EverQuest II has hundreds of
zones, with some estimates in previous years exceeding 900, including
overland areas, dungeons, and instances."
Previous years? Just how previous? And even at that Gemini wasn't convinced, covering its imaginary backside with the caveat
"For the most precise number, players typically rely on community-maintained wikis like eq2.fandom.com to track specific zone counts across the numerous expansions."
Well, shoot! That takes me right back to where I started, doesn't it? If I wanted to check the wiki I could have done it myself. I did do it myself! And these things are going to take all our jobs? Something, something, keep a dog, something, something, bark yourself...
How about Co-Pilot, then? Certain bloggers I follow claim Microsoft's AI is better than the rest. Let's give it a chance to prove it. Same question:
"Short answer: EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, and by 2026 the total sits at roughly 867 zones, based on the most complete public listings available. This number comes from the major zone index used by the EQ2 community and continues to grow with each expansion and event update."
Okay, that's a lot more specific. I'll let that fatuous "roughly" slide. It's just trying to pass for human, I guess. A lot of people would give a highly specific number like that and then claim it was approximate. You literally cannot have "roughly" 867 of anything unless you can also count that thing in fractions of a unit, which certainly doesn't apply to zones of Norrath, either before or after the Shattering.
And now here's a twist. I'd finished the post, added the pictures and was about to do the final edit when I noticed Blogger was idling and not updating. The Preview Panel was working normally, showing the complete post with pictures but there were no screenshots in the edit.
If Blogger fails to update to its cloud servers, it always gives an error message and there hadn't been one so I figured something was glitched locally. I closed the Preview and the Edit and guess what? When I reloaded I'd lost the second half of the post. Everything above the last screenshot was here. Everything below was gone.
Usually I keep a copy of the text outside of Blogger but nothing like this has happened for several years so I'd gotten slack. My bad. Still, it was a pretty short post. I could remember most of it. Just needed to bash the second half out again.
Only I'd also closed the AI result tabs and apparently Co-Pilot, unlike Gemini, doesn't automatically keep a record of the ongoing conversation, not if you aren't logged in, anyway. I just ran the query in Firefox anonymously and it was as gone as the rest of the post.
Never mind. Easy enough to ask the same question again. I have the exact wording there in the text that didn't vanish. Just need to run it past Co-Pilot again and... get a different answer.
"Short answer: There’s no authoritative public source that states the total number of EverQuest II zones as of 2026. The game has hundreds of zones accumulated over two decades, but no official 2026 count exists. The closest reliable figure comes from large fan-maintained databases."
Hmm. Look at that. The whole very specific, not rough at all, "867" is gone, replaced by the much more wooly "hundreds of zones". And there's a plain statement that "no official count exists".
So where did the 867 come from? Co-Pilot is only to keen to explain:
🧭 What We Can Say with Evidence
📌 1. The largest maintained zone list shows 867 zones
The Fanbyte/ZAM EverQuest II database lists 867 zone entries in its public index. This is the most complete zone list available, though it is not guaranteed to be exhaustive or fully up to date for 2026.
For some reason, Co-Pilot thinks ZAM is the resource most EQII players use. I'm certain that's not true. The ZAM EQII zone database , linked in Co-Pilot's reply, ceased updating with the Age of Discovery expansion, which came out in 2011. No regular EQII player is going there for anything after that.
That "867" number is the count that appears on the first page of ZAM's thirty-five page list of zones, where it warns you you're "Viewing 1 to 25 of 867 entries. You may want to add some filters.". A quick flip through the pages shows quite a few of those "zones" aren't adventure areas at all. The list includes Housing and the Dungeon Maker for a start.
Co-Pilot is happy to build on that shaky foundation all the same:
📘 Best Estimate
If we combine:
867 zones listed in the major database (pre‑2026)
Dozens of new 2024–2026 zones from expansions and updates (e.g., Rage of Cthurath and 2026 map additions)
…it’s reasonable to estimate that EQII has well over 900 zones by 2026, though no source confirms an exact number.
Yes, I guess it is reasonable to assume that, especially given there have been fourteen expansions since ZAM last added any new zones to their database. Not to mention at least twice as many biannual Game Updates.
It is interesting that both Gemini and Co-Pilot come up with the same estimate of something over 900 zones, although neither really makes a convincing case for it. Still, it's probably about right. And even if it's not, I sure as heck don't plan on counting them, so I suppose it'll have to do.
This wasn't intended to be another post about how flaky AIs can be, even after all the supposed improvements and Great Leaps Forward, but it's always useful to remind ourselves just how unreliable they still are. I do sometimes get sucked into believing the AI summary at the top of the results although never for anything that isn't totally trivial. Convenience trumps caution, occasionally.
Then again, as this seems to demonstrate, even the trivial is well beyond the AIs. In fact, the more trivial the topic, the worse the information. The problem with the question I posed isn't so much that the AI's can't answer it; it's that it can't be answered. And since AIs don't like to admit when they don't know something...
Someone must know, of course. It's not ineffable. I imagine Darkpaw know how many zones there are. Maybe some players do, too. I bet there's someone out there who still keeps a ring-binder file with every map printed out. And speaking of maps, I guess someone at EQ2Map might have a pretty good idea.
Whoever does know, they're keeping it to themselves but it doesn't matter much anyway. It's not like I was going to write a post about every last one. I'm not going to live long enough to do that, even I was crazed enough to try.
What I'll most likely do is cherry-pick my favorites and the ones I have something to say about. If I get through a couple of dozen I'll be surprised. In fact, since I'm only likely to post at all if I have absolutely nothing better to write about, I guess the fewer I get through, the better.
Not to mention so far I've managed two posts about the feature without ever saying a word about any of the actual zones! I wonder how long I could keep that going?
I'll try to close that worrisome possibility down by saying here and now that the first post in the as-yet unnamed feature will either be Antonica or The Commonlands. I did think of starting with the old neighborhoods and city-based starting areas or the two major cities, Qeynos and Freeport, themselves but if I went with that idea, I might never get out of the cities at all.
In fact, now I think about it, when I first thought of this project, if I'm going to glorify it with the name, I was in Antonica. So that's where I'm going to begin.
I let slip a while ago that I'd finally gotten around to watching the first
season of Arcane, the animated series commissioned by
Riot Games and supposedly based on, or at least inspired by, League of Legends. Everyone else, of course, watched the show years ago. The first season came
out in late 2021 and the second and final season, which I have just finished
watching, premiered three years later. Talk about being late to the
party...
Why did I wait so long? It's not like I wasn't aware of it or how good it was
reported to be. The show has stellar reviews. It won a shed-load of
prestigious awards. I remember a bunch of bloggers raving about it when
it was new and my close friend, who has very good taste in TV and movies,
tried to get to me watch it ages ago.
It was the League of Legends connection that put me off. I've never played the
game and never wanted to, which makes for an educative data point
alongside Cyberpunk 2077, a game I've also never played but have
frequently considered buying. There's an animated series based on that one,
too, Edgerunners, and I didn't have any interest in that either, at
least not until I found out Rosa Walton of Lets Eat Grandma had
done the theme song.
Apparently, the presence of a gaming IP, even one I approve of, can actively
deter me from watching a TV show. For corroborative evidence I offer
Fallout, another highly-regarded show I have yet to see. This is
clearly a personal foible and one I need to address. It's self-evidently
preventing me from enjoying some of the very best work in the field.
Having watched Edgerunners I
judged it
"very, very good". I'm going to have to come up with something a
lot more complimentary for Arcane.
Arcane is possibly the best animated series I've ever seen. If there's a
better one, I can't immediately think what might be. I'm sure most people
reading this will already have watched it so I'm not going to go into a whole
lot of hyperbolic detail about why it's so good. Everyone already knows and if
they don't I strongly suggest they stop wasting time like I did and go find
out what they've been missing. It's a lot.
The animation is almost literally breathtaking. It did make me draw in breath
in surprise or awe a few times. I've spent a lifetime watching animated movies
and television shows and I've never seen anything as rich and deep. The level
of detail is astonishing but more astonishing still is the extent to which
that detail informs the narrative. It's one thing to dress a set, another to
reveal a world.
The writing is novelistic. Characters have inner and outer lives that extend
beneath, above and beyond the text. There are no ciphers or stereotypes. Even
the minor characters have substance.
The plot is labyrinthine, yet always navigable. The story works on multiple
levels, from coming of age to family saga to epic myth, and somehow manages to
keep all of them balanced throughout.
Well, almost. The end shows signs of the elision from five seasons to two as
Riot decided they'd accrued enough prestige from patronizing the arts and
decided to cut their losses as costs spiraled. The fact that the show bears,
by all accounts I've read, almost no resemblance to the video game and
consequently had little to no impact on that game's profile or profitability,
presumably factored strongly in the decision to fold.
Even so, the truncated ending is barely noticeable. The finale leans hard into
the cosmic and it works. It might not be immediately comprehensible but it
carries.
Who knows what would have happened across five seasons? Would the quality have
held up? Maybe it's better it ended when and as it did.
I was certainly satisfied. And satiated. It was a hard watch in the sense that
each episode drained me. I could not have watched two in a row without losing
something. I'm bitterly aware of how much I missed but the thought of
re-watching is overwhelming. In a year or two maybe.
One thing Arcane did make me want to do was re-watch Edgerunners. I know it
won't be an experience on the same level but now I'm wondering how much I
might have missed there, too. One watch is never enough for anything, let
alone something good.
I haven't gone back to Edgerunners just yet though. What I'm watching, now I
have a space in my schedule, is more Angel, the
Buffy the Vampire Slayer spin-off from 1999, doubling up from one
episode a night to two.
I've had the box set on DVD for years and never even opened it. Once again, my
main reason, other than sheer inertia, was that I thought I knew what it would
be like. I always know. I'm often wrong.
I thought it would be dark, brooding and serious. Angel, as a character in
Buffy, never seemed to have much going for him other than moody good looks and
some bad-boy attitude, especially when his come-and-go soul went. Even though
I knew the first four seasons of his own show also featured
Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia and even though it's
pretty hard to imagine Cordy ever being even remotely serious, that was still
the impression I'd somehow acquired.
As, once again, I'm sure most people who come to this blog already know, I was
wrong. Or I was for as much of the first season as I've seen so far, fifteen
episodes. Maybe it gets darker later. Usually I like to wait until I've seen
at least a whole season to comment but in this case I have an ulterior motive.
Before I get to it, let me just say Angel, the show, does not match my
expectations at all. Like Buffy (The show, not so much the character.) it's as
much a comedy as a thriller. It does hit some dark notes but so far it's
orders of magnitude away from the relentlessly grim later seasons of Buffy,
the grim, dour, depressing period, after Willow drags Buffy back from
heaven. The very seasons that would have been running in tandem with Angel at
the time. Who'd have thought Angel would have been the light relief?
Maybe it won't last. Maybe things will turn bleak in the coming seasons. I
hope not. I'm enjoying the monster-of-the-week plots and all the mugging and
slapstick (Wesley.) and snappy come-backs (Cordelia.). As for
David Boreanaz and his perpetually confused look, it's a big
improvement over his Heathcliff impression back in the Sunnydale era.
And just as Arcane made me want to re-watch Edgerunners, Angel makes me want
to re-watch Buffy. I have the box set of that, too, which is just as well
because, unlike Angel, which I'm watching on Amazon Prime Video for
free, Buffy isn't streaming on any of my platforms just now.
The advantage of seeing Angel on Prime instead of DVD is convenience. The
disadvantage is adverts. Prime, as we know, despite charging a subscription,
wants you to pay extra to avoid ads. And here we come to my ulterior motive in
talking early about Angel.
Those ads! What the heck are Amazon playing at?
I don't mean by trying to make us watch them. I get that they're making money
coming and going by charging companies to place ads and then charging viewers
not to see them but for that ploy to work, wouldn't you think there'd need to
be some pattern to it?
There is none! I watched one episode of Angel last week that had an advert
before the show had even started, then another less than two minutes later,
between the credits and the show itself . Then there were more ads every ten
or fifteen minutes until the end. It was incredibly disruptive and annoying.
Obviously I didn't watch any of the ads - I tabbed out and turned
the sound off - but just the constant interruption to the narrative was
infuriating.
Prior to that, which was an exception, some episodes just opened with a
trailer for another Prime show, something that barely counts as advertising at
all in my eyes, then maybe popped in one more short ad much later in the
program. That was very easy to ignore. Other episodes had the same cadence but
with much longer ad breaks, which was more annoying but manageable.
The last three episodes I've watched, however, have had no adverts at all.
None. Not even the opening trailer. It's spooky.
Am I'm being lulled into a false sense of security? Has one of my ad blockers,
none of which should affect Prime at all, upgraded itself and taken control?
Has Amazon not managed to sell any advertising space in these particular
episodes?
It's disconcerting. I find myself waiting for the ads to start. I'm not saying
I want them to but the suspense when they don't is getting to be
altogether too much. At least when Mrs Bhagpuss and I watch
the Great Pottery Showdown live on Channel 4, the ads (Which are
universally terrible, by the way.) come at the same time in every episode.
That's bad enough but it's far worse knowing they could pop up at any time. Or
not at all.
I'd love to know if there's a commercial imperative behind the apparent
randomness or whether something's just broken. Clearly, Amazon has the
capacity both to target ads at specific viewers and also to place them in
shows those people are likely to watch. Maybe no-one wants their ads turning
up in random episodes of twenty-five year-old shows. Maybe Amazon thinks none
of the ads would interest me. Who knows?
I don't but I'd love to. Anyone else getting this kind of sporadic,
unpredictable advertising? Or have any theories what my be driving it?
Now I'm done with Baldur's Gate 3, it's time to get back to where I
was before I interrupted myself. So, where was that, exactly?
I bought BG3 on New Year's Day. It was the last in a line of
Steam purchases I handily laid out in
a post
on the same day, saving me the trouble of listing them here. Except that's
kind of what I'm going to do anyway.
There's a nice, neat, round dozen titles in the screenshot I used, which for
convenience and out of laziness I'll repeat below. Of those twelve games, six
haven't even been installed yet, much less played. The untouched half-dozen
are:
Dustborn
Spire Horizon Online
Cat Detective Albert Wilde
Brok the Investigator
Penny Larceny: Gig Economy Supervillain
Sovereign Syndicate
I looked at most of them last night, wondering which I ought to play next. My
immediate preference was Sovereign Syndicate, (Currently available in a
double deal with Esoteric Ebb if you haven't got either.) which I
remember from a previous Next Fest as being quite entertaining, but when
I saw it was a 10gb download I balked.
Why was that? I have plenty of drive space. 10gb on Steam generally takes a
few minutes at most. I could have made a coffee and come back to an installed
game. And yet it seemed like it would be too much trouble.
I flipped through the rest. Dustborn is 25gb so that was a
non-starter Albert Wilde is 13gb. Ditto. I didn't want another
MMORPG so Spire Horizon Online was out. (We'll ignore
Ashes of Creation for the same and other obvious reasons.)
Brok was only 2gb and Penny Larceny just 500mb. It was a toss-up
between those two until I noticed three of the games were already installed.
Can't get a smaller download than no download at all.
Of the three, Steins;Gate I already played (For 38 minutes.)
and it bored me rigid so forget that one. If I want to read a book I'll just
read a book and a better book than that, too. That left
Beyond Two Souls and Road 96.
As I said in the post linked above, I have literally no idea what Beyond Two
Souls is. Nor do I have any clue where I heard about it or why I added it to
my Steam library, much less why I installed it. I certainly haven't played it.
I don't need Steam giving me a Time Played of 0 minutes to be sure of
that.
Looking it up, something I didn’t bother to do when I wrote the previous post,
apparently, I remember now that I came across it when I was reading about
Elliot Page (Ellen Page at the time the actor played the lead
role in the game.) although why I would have been reading about him in the
first place remains a mystery. It's an action-adventure a little over a decade
old. Apparently there's
a TV series
in development. I might wait for that.
Road 96, though, I could remember. At least I could remember how I heard about
it and why I downloaded it. Tyler F. M. Edwards wrote about it on his
blog
last November
and I thought it sounded right up my street. Naturally, having taken
possession of the game, I felt no immediate desire to do anything with it,
least of all play it, which is how these things usually go with me.
By dint of already being there, ready to play, and not being a completely
unknown proposition, last night was Road 96's big chance. I logged in,
answered a bunch of the kind of questions they ask you at training seminars,
started to watch a cut scene and then Mrs Bhagpuss came in and said tea was
ready so I logged out again.
Actually, the game wouldn't let me log out. I had to tab out and kill it from
the taskbar, which didn't endear it to me. These days, games that can neither
be paused nor closed down at an instant's notice don't make it far up my
playlist. Still, I won't let that put me off. Road 96 will get another chance.
Just not right now.
Observant readers may have noticed there's one game on the list I haven't
mentioned. That's Slay the Spire. I have actually played that one. For
exactly an hour.
I bought it because a) several bloggers I follow have raved about it and b) it
was super-cheap. Having bought it, I had the bright idea of seeing if it would
run on my laptop. In theory, not many games will.
As I wrote back on January 2, 2025, I bought a refurbished
Lenovo Thinkpad T480 to replace my incredibly ancient laptop. The T480
is about as far from a gaming laptop as you can get. It has integrated
graphics and, according to
Can You Run It?, can't run pretty much anything I own on Steam.
Except it can. Officially, the T480 can't, for example, run the
Esoteric Ebb demo. It doesn't meet the minimum spec. Only, I played the
demo very comfortably for over an hour on the laptop with no problems at all.
It doesn't meet the min spec for Slay the Spire either but it runs the game
perfectly.
The problem with Slay the Spire isn't running it on the laptop, which is the
only way I'm likely to play it, last thing at night before I go to sleep, when
there's nothing I want to watch on the streams and I'm not in the mood to go
looking for new tunes on YouTube, meaning it's already right at the back of
the queue. No, the problem with Slay the Spire is that it's a bit dull.
It is, though, isn't it? I've put in exactly an hour so far and it's just
fights. And they aren't very interesting fights. It's not very pretty to look
at, there's no plot to speak of and the fights are all the same. I'm guessing
it ramps up as you go along but to get far enough to see that happen, it would
have make me want to keep playing and if it hasn't managed to do that in an
hour, chances are it's never going to manage it. I may come back to it some
day but it doesn't seem likely.
So, after all of that, what am I playing? EverQuest II, of course.
When I said right at the top of the post that it was time to get back to where
I was before I got assimilated by BG3, where I was back then was deep in the
latest expansion for EQII, Rage of Cthurath. The last time I
posted about that was on
December 27, right before I started buying new games on Steam with the Steam cards I got
for Christmas.
At the time, I'd just finished the main storyline of the expansion and I was
thinking about getting the final level needed to hit the new cap of 135. The
Signature Questline itself leaves you stranded less than halfway through 134.
Or it did me, anyway.
Since finishing BG3 I've played a couple of sessions of EQII, one of which I
spent almost entirely working on side quests, quests started by dropped items
and repeatable quests. I think I played for about an hour and a half doing
those and I made barely 10% of a level.
Seriously, it was like the bad old days! It felt like grinding xp in Ye Olde
EverQuest a couple of decades ago. I found myself checking the xp bar after
every hand-in to see how far it had moved. 1.2% seemed about the average. And
I had a 100% xp bonus potion running!
The conspiracy theory explanation would be that Darkpaw have
intentionally made getting to the cap as awkward as possible so as to slow
people down and keep the subs rolling in and/or increase sales of xp potions
in the Cash Shop. Except that makes no sense because surely most regular
players will have an annual subscription, if they didn't buy one of the
Lifetime Subs that sold like hot cakes every time they were offered. And
everyone has more free xp potions from Veteran Rewards than they know what to
do with.
I suspect it's more likely the current xp drought is a response to the
complaints that poured in during the period when the signature questlines gave
enough xp to hit the cap before you got halfway through. MMO devs have a long
history of slewing back and forth, reacting and overreacting to customer
complaints so as to be sure no-one is ever satisfied. This is probably just
another example.
It's bloody annoying, whatever the reason. I was really in the mood to play
some EQII but a session of that nonsense put the dampers on my enthusiasm
pretty quickly. I will get Mordita, my Necromancer, to 135 but now I'm
thinking I might wait until the
new Game Update
arrives in the hope it comes with a bunch of new quests that give decent xp.
It's currently in beta so I shouldn't have long to wait.
In the past, that wouldn't have been an option. My Berserker has rarely been
able to handle the increased difficulty level of a post-expansion GU right out
the gate. The Necro, though... she feels a lot more capable. It's why I wanted
to switch to her as expansion lead in the first place.
I haven't even upgraded any of her spells yet and she's strolling through the
solo expansion content. If I take some time out to harvest enough rares for my
Sage to make Expert upgrades for her key spells, I'd hope the new solo content
that's coming ought to be in her range.
And of course, harvesting rares is very relaxing. And satisfying. I can do it
for hours in a kind of zen trance. What with that and decorating her new
house, which is what she spent most of my second come-back session doing, I
ought to be able to keep myself amused for a while.
It does make me wonder what I bought all those Steam games for...
I was going pull out a Grab Bag today but I used one of the grabs yesterday and
made a whole post out of it, so now I only have two left. Two grabs do not a
bag make, I fear. Still, I don't have anything else so let's make the best of
it. Maybe something will come to me as I go along.
Kickstarter Doesn't Work For MMORPGs
Oh, yeah? Go tell that to Artix Entertainment.
As you may know, Artix is the developer behind the
AdventureQuest franchise. I've been playing their most recent MMORPG,
AdventureQuest 3D, on and off since open beta back in
2016.
I still play, on occasion. Steam tells me the last time I logged in was just
before the end of January. Yes, this year.
I will almost certainly play some more
AQ3D at some point, most likely when I see they've added something new that
interests me. And they will because Artix Entertainment is quite possibly the most
pro-active of all MMO studios when it comes to adding new content. They drop
new content weekly, without fail, and have been doing so, consistently, for the entirety of their existence, at least as far as I can
tell.
That's the kind of behavior that generates loyalty, something
that's very clear from the response to the company's new
Kickstarter. With 31 days still to run, the project has already racked up over a million
dollars in pledges from more than thirteen thousand backers.
Guess how much they were asking for?
A dollar. One single buck. Talk about over-achievers!
I guess that's one way to ensure your Kickstarter
at least doesn't fail. So, what do they want all that money for, anyway? A new game?
Not exactly. They already have two successful MMORPGs. They don't need
another. What they do need, apparently, is one that will run well and look
good on phones, tablets and Steam.
Wait, though... Didn't I just say I played AQ3D on Steam already? I sure did.
But the Kickstarter isn't for the newer MMORPG. It's for the older one. The
original. The browser-based one you can only play on PC, through the in-house
Artix Game Launcher.
The Kickstarter is to convert the entire game,
AdventureQuest Worlds, into AdventureQuest:Worlds Infinity, remaking virtually everything and ensuring full cross-play and backwards compatibility with existing accounts. So, why go to all that bother
for an old game when you have a new one?
I guess if you still have 8000 people playing every day, despite the game being
ancient and only available through a narrow channel, it might seem worth it.
Especially if you can get those people to pay for the conversion. Actually,
more than just those people by the look of it.
Here's the thing. Artix has established a reputation that allows them to
leverage player trust to an extent matched by few other developers working in
the genre. They say what they're going to do and then they do it. They also
listen to feedback and act on it when it makes sense to do so.
As Project: Gorgon proved, if you just keep doing what you said you'd
do and avoid ripping anybody off, people will give you money and play your game.
And the longer you keep doing it, the longer they'll stick around. It's odd how few
developers seem to get that, isn't it? You wouldn't think it would be that hard to understand.
I've never played AQW and I don't plan on pledging the Kickstarter. I'll be
adding it to my Steam library when it arrives, though, you can bet on that.
And unlike most Kickstarters for MMOs, you can also bet on it really
happening.
It's A Bird! It's A Plane! It's... Supergirl!
Observant users of the Blog Roll off to the right may have noticed a few
non-gaming entries creeping in over the years. One such is
Supergirl Comic Commentary, a blog by Anj.
I'm not a huge Supergirl fan like he is but I grew up with Kara, like I grew
up with the rest of her family. I read her stories but it was mostly Superman and
Superboy that had my attention back when I was in short trousers.
(Don't get me started on grown men in shorts or we'll be here all day. It's an
abomination, that's all I'm saying..)
I always liked her well enough though, especially when she appeared in my
favorite Superhero series of all time, The Legion of Superheroes. Over
the decades she's been indifferently served by too many writers and artists to
remember, as have most DC superheroes.
It's the curse of the
long-running character. For all the endless droning on about
"continuity" and "canon", no-one survives the endless
revamps and new directions entirely unscathed. I've learned to tune out the changes I don't like.
You have to or you'd go insane, as an hour in the bar of any comic convention
will demonstrate all too convincingly.
The Girl of Steel's screen career has been similarly variegated. The
1984 movie
featuring Helen Slater was not well-received or reviewed. Worse, it
lost money.
It was thirty years before Supergirl got her own tv series. It began in
2015 and ran for six seasons with Melissa Benoist in the title role. I watched
every episode and bought most of the seasons on DVD, so I must have liked it.
It wasn't an awful lot like the Supergirl I remember, though.
Nevertheless, it may be the relative success of that show, along with an
influential, high-profile limited-run comic, Tom King's
Woman of Tomorrow, that's led to this year's tent-pole release in the DCMU schedule, the very
simply named Supergirl, starring Milly Alcock. And in an attempt
to drum up interest and media coverage, DC have gender-swapped this
year's Superman Day.
Come on! Don't pretend you never heard of Superman Day! Superman Day is
on April 18 as everyone knows. Look, I wrote about it in 2024.
Only this year it isn't. April 18 is
Supergirl Day
instead. Not sure why they can't have a day each but there you go. Alright, I
do know, really. It's just crass to point out the commerciality.
To be fair, if you scroll down that long, long page of events and special
issues I just linked, you'll see it turns into a promo for Superman after a
while. He's getting his share and I'm sure he won't begrudge his little cousin
taking the lead for one year.
I'm not planing on celebrating the day myself but I might log into DCUO if there any
freebies to be had, which I'm sure there will be. I might also pick up a copy
of Woman of Tomorrow. We have it at work in the excellent and attractive new
DC Compact format, which I highly recommend as a great alternative to
the more expensive and generally too glossy graphic novels.
And I will definitely be watching the movie when it arrives in June. The
trailer looks very encouraging. I doubt I'll get to see it at the
cinema, though. I'll wait for the DVD. I can shelve it next to the TV series.
Finish With A Song
I mean, it worked for Morecambe and Wise...
Sorry Anyway - Rosa Walton
Rosa Walton is, of course, one half of
Lets Eat Grandma. Didn't need to tell you that. Sorry, anyway.
The
duo is on a break just now and Rosa's pal, Jenny Hollingworth, has been
releasing material under the name Jenny on Holiday, some of which has
appeared on this very blog. Big surprise!
They both have solo albums either out or coming soon. Jenny released hers,
Quicksand Heart, in January and Rosa's,
Tell Me It's A Dream, is out on June 5.
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