Another Year, Another Beer

I could have written at least three lengthy posts based on what I did yesterday and today in Valheim. The game continues to generate stories (or, if you prefer, anecdotes) at an astonishing rate. It also kicks up any number of discussion points concerning the mechanics, the gameplay and the design.

My problem with posting about Valheim remains the same, however: I'd rather play it than write about it. And I love writing about it.

Also, all Valheim and no other games make Inventory Full a dull blog. And I am still playing other games, when I can force myself to stop building and exploring. 

To be strictly accurate, I'm down to two other games most days: Guild Wars 2 and EverQuest. In the first I manage to get two sets of dailies done every day, pretty much, which takes between fifteen minutes and three-quarters of an hour depending what the randomiser spits out. 

Not infrequently I'll end up staying longer to do a world boss or defend a keep. World vs World continues to be vibrant even though there's absolutely no reason it should be and many why it shouldn't. 

GW2 in general seems to be as busy as ever although I have no idea how well the new stuff that we're all supposed to be working on is going (recruiting allies for the next big dragon fight, I think it is, although I'm really not up with the plot). I only ever see the zones that have dailies in them but those are always very well-populated.

 

My participation in EQ is limited to farming the Overseer quests for crafting mats to sell in the Bazaar. I was doing it every day without fail but since Valheim took over every waking moment that's slipped to as often as I remember. I'm still managing better than every other day, though.

The game I imagined I'd be concentrating on in the opening months of 2121, EverQuest II (the one I bought a new expansion for just before Christmas) has almost fallen off the playlist altogether. It's frustrating in a way because I did for once have some plans there. That'll teach me.

I do keep track of what's going on and I'm making an effort not to miss anything new. I logged in last month to do the new Errollisi Day quest and today I forced myself away from Valheim for long enough to run my berserker through the new Brewday quest, "Yours, Stein and Ours".

Brewday, as I've mentioned more than once, is not my favorite Norrathian celebration. It's based on a holiday we don't really celebrate where I come from, St. Patrick's Day, and it has the increasingly uncomfortable theme of heavy drinking.

I'm no longer as puzzled as I once was by the quasi-religious fervor with which some players and developers regard the simple act of getting drunk but it still unsettles me a little. I always felt it was cool to drink, uncool to talk about how much. To be strictly fair, it's by no means an attitude unique to gaming. I've encountered it often enough elsewhere. Wherever it turns up, I always find a little awkward.

Brewday is all about drinking too much. It's also the official feast day of Brell, the Duke of Below, god of all who dwell in the Underfoot but especially god of Dwarves. Everyone knows dwarves like a drink so it makes sense.

 

Over the years I've done all of the Brewday quests and activities many times over. Some of them are fun. Some are very annoying. I've never liked the way most mmorpgs attempt to represent drunkenness by futzing about with the graphics. The sensation of having the room spin around you was always one of the worst side-effects of drinking too much in real life so why anyone would want to replicate it in a game beats me.

Thankfully the new quest involves nothing like that. It's another by-the-numbers instance that follows the well-trodden path of many similar holiday quests before it. Which, as I said about the new Erollisi Day quest, is absolutely fine with me. I don't come to EQ2 for cutting-edge innovation or out-of-the-box thinking. I come for what I know.

What I said earlier about people treating drinking as a religion was metaphorical but for this quest it's nothing more than the simple truth. The questgiver, Acolyte Kosma, is a priest of Brell and she's lost some special steins that were destined for the Brewday festivities. Actually, they've been stolen. By Brownies.

I get the feeling someone at Daybreak (and before them at Sony Online Entertainment) thinks brownies are the same as leprechauns. Or maybe they're just the nearest Norrath gets. Leprechauns would, naturally, be just the thing for a holiday based on St. Patrick's Day (although I don't imagine St. Patrick himself would have been any too pleased with the association). Since we don't have any, Brownies will have to do.

 

Acolyte Kosma, who I was delighted to see is a ratonga, ratonga also being children of Brell (although my own ratonga berserker is a follower of Rallos Zek, God of War) is skulking in a tent at the Highland Outpost in Butcherblock. She's scared to tell her boss, Steinsister Daglara, that she's lost the steins. Naturally, my ratonga volunteered to help. Ratonga solidarity - it's a thing.

The brownies hang out in Lesser Feydark. They were there in EverQuest twenty years ago, when they made many a poor adventurer's life hell, zipping out of the undergrowth at Spirit of Wolf speed, too small to see let alone target. I was surprised to find there's no Fast Travel option for Lesser Fey. You'd think it would have a druid ring if nothing. Fortunately Kelethin is only a few moments away by flying mount. 

When I got there I almost missed the entrance. If I hadn't had copied in the waypoint details from the wiki I hate to think how long it might have taken me to find it. As it was I ran straight past it in the tunnel and had to come back.

Once inside everything was fairly straightforward. I had to find eight of the missing steins, easy enough since the brownies had just left them lying  in the middle of the path. I also had to arrest six brownies, even easier since they all just stood there like dummies and let me cuff them. Well, click on them.

The only slight hitch was finding the explosive to blow up the crystals blocking the pathway. The combusti-ball needed pops out of the crate you open and lies there on the ground. I didn't spot it right away. Only delayed me for a moment.

Finally there was the pot of gold. Two pots, actually. It is leprechauns who have those, isn't it? 

I picked them up and the boss of the brownies (well, the bigwig of this bunch, anyway) appeared. His name is Lugharcan, which is a Leprechaun name if ever I heard one. After some strong remonstrations involving my berserker beating Lugharcan viciously about the head and body with a two-handed sword, the bad brownie surrendered, albeit with very bad grace.

As he pointed out, the gold was his, so we didn't get to keep it. Forget that my berserker is supposed to be "evil" by faction. In Norrath being evil just means you wear your boy scout badge upside-down.

The rewards, when I got back to Acolyte Kosma with the repentant brownies and the stolen steins, were sweet. Good enough, in fact, that I struggled to choose between them. Well, two of them. I wasted no time rejecting the Root Worm Larva Plushie. I have enough wiggling worms in my house already.

The others, though, were highly desirable: a replica of Brell himself, wearing the very hat my berserker wore for years, the mining hat with the candles, or an excellent appearance item, a shield that looks exactly like the lid of a barrel, complete with spigot.

In the end I went for the replica god but I like the shield enough to go do the quest again with someone else. It only takes about a quarter of an hour and Brewday runs until March 19th.

Even taking Valheim into consideration, I think I should be able to fit it in somehow.

Kunark Ascending: First Quarterly Report

I mentioned a while ago that I was just about done with EQ2's most recent expansion, Kunark Ascending, at least as far as completing solo content with my Bereserker goes. Turns out I was somewhat premature in making that assessment.

Power to add, they call it...

KA added several major new features. There were the Epic 2.0 weapon quests, the Wardrobe Tab, gear for Mercenaries and the four Ascension Classes.

Before launch I was probably most excited by the prospect of having a place to throw all the hats, cloaks and fancy robes that had piled up in my bank vaults over the last decade or so. The Wardrobe feature, sad to say, turned out to be more awkward and limited than I'd imagined.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. It works. It's an improvement. From my perspective, though, the problems are threefold: it isn't infinite, it isn't free and each item added is destroyed.

You get a reasonably generous allotment of slots, half a dozen for the basic package, rising to a dozen for the Collector's and eighteen for the Premium edition. These can be expanded by way of the cash shop up to an as-yet unknown amount that's not less than sixty. Nevertheless anything short of everything means making choices and making choices was exactly what I was avoiding by dumping all the armor in the bank in  the first place.

So, apart from a couple of hats, I haven't really added anything much to my wardrobe as yet. It means going through literally hundreds of items and making a decision on every one and I keep putting it off for another day - a day that will probably never come.

Missing some Accolades, aren't we?

I've made a lot more progress on leveling and gearing my Mercenaries. My regular Merc is Zhugrus
Blightstaff, the Orc Inquisitor from last year's Zek revamp. He's a powerful and popular choice. I see copies of him running after people all over the place.

The mercenary gear system is on the simple and straightforward side as EQ2 systems go. Quick, too. There are five ranks, each of which allows your Merc to wear additional gear with stats that make him or her more powerful. The gear comes from quests, drops in PQs and instances and can be crafted.

Like most of EQ2's background upgrading processes, and there are many, it's a mixture of  Fire and Forget and hands-on micro-management.  You have to remember to activate each stage and you don't get any reminders but once you've opened the window and clicked the button you can leave your Merc to get on with it until next time.

Zhugrus finished his training some time ago but of course he's not my only Mercenary. My Berserker keeps four of them on standby and every other character I play has at least one more. I'm currently training up Rafik the pirate rat simply because I really like him and I'm also trying to remember (but mostly forgetting) to train the Mercs most used by my Warlock, Inquisitor and Necromancer.

It's a lot to keep track of although not as much as when I was leveling up three of the Tradeskill Apprentices that were added in Game Update 63 almost exactly five years ago. I'm still training up at least one even now!

Three bags full Lady Najena.

For the time being I've shelved any plans towards finishing the Crafter's Epic 2.0. I never had any intention of attempting the Adventuring ones but the tradeskill quest is definitely within my power to complete. It just takes more organizing than I can be doing with at the moment.

That leaves the Ascended Classes. I almost forgot about those. When I finished the expansion's signature questline it was several weeks before I got around to choosing which of the four to begin. Even after reading up on how it all worked I was still somewhat at sea. In the end I picked one pretty much at random and got going.

Weeks later my Berserker is still only about two-thirds of the way to Level 3. The recent Double Ascension Scrolls week struck me as deeply ironic, personally, although I know it was welcomed by people who play more than an hour or two a day.

What the scrolls effectively do is reset some of your limited capacity to acquire Ascended XP, rather like refreshing vitality or Rested XP. Since I generally run with near-full capacity anyway that makes them about as much use to me as a theremin to a badger. Or possibly less. I don't even bother to visit Najena to pick up my regular ones any more.

All the same, I am working on it. Like AAs in EverQuest or Masteries in GW2, Ascended Classes are an excellent way for characters that have capped out to carry on earning xp. I vastly prefer to see my xp going to something even if it's not anything I'm ever going to use. Much better than to see it simply dissipate.

Don't talk to me about dwarves.The rest of the crew I found face-down on the floor but come dawn next day this rat was still propping up the bar. Ratonga power!

It's looking unlikely that I'll have even one Ascended Class maxed before the next expansion arrives and there are four of them. That makes me happy. I like filling bars.

It's just as well, really, because EQ2 is all about the bars. I'm not talking about Brewday, either, which is back right now, bringing with it a fine new quest that I knocked off in half an hour before I began this post.

I've pointed this out before but every returning Holiday hammers it home - the EQ2 dev team is exemplary when it comes to making the most out of not very much at all. We get a new quest for every holiday, every year. They may be simple but they are always fun and often funny, too. If DBG can do it with a handful of people, why GW2 can't manage it with hundreds...well, there really is no excuse, is there?

Don't look left. That's not for you.

Be that as it may it's progress bars I'm talking about. There's yet another one with the new Deity system. Well, it's more of a circle than a bar but it's the same principle. Fill it up. Spend it. Start again. And like all the others you have to pay attention. If you let the meter hit the top of the dial you're spilling god-juice into the ether until you do something to tap it off.

There are consumable Miracles, similar to the old system (which, I think, is also still in-game) if you want them, but the real attraction here is a permanent boost to your choice of three key stats, Potency, Stamina and Crit Bonus. Everyone, without exception, can always use more of all three so this is another simple, accessible, desirable path to upgrading your character.

That's more stats on one item than some MMOs
give you on a whole character!

EQ2 has a lot of those. It makes it a desperately satisfying game to play, whether casually or obsessively. In addition to all of the above I am also still working on improving my Berserker's gear.

By the time he finished the main KA questline he felt very powerful in all appropriate content but since then he's been able to swap out several items for superior PQ drops. He's also used the Infusion system, lottery though it is, to enhance some even further and he finally got around to crafting Adornments for every available slot.

As it stands he's able to solo much of the Heroic content from 2014's Altar of Malice expansion. I even felt confident enough of his survivablilty to accept a group invite in an AoM contested dungeon the other night, something I haven't done for a long time.

Overall, my strongly positive impression of Kunark Ascending continues to strengthen even further. It's fun, there's a ton of stuff to do and it feels very accessible for a casual player. My server, Skyfire, is still bustling with activity nearly four months after the expansion dropped. PQs are very well attended, there are multiple instances of the new zones and most importantly the tone and tenor of general chat is more cheerful and upbeat than I've heard it for years.

No word yet about either the next expansion or another major interim Game Update. On the evidence before me, though, I expect good things.

There! If that doesn't jinx it I don't know what will!