Hey, Ray! Won't You Please Stay?

Just as I didn't plan on doing two consecutive music posts last week, I wasn't intending to post twice in a row about new content in EverQuest II but that was before I checked my email right after publishing yesterday's post on the Myth and Monoliths update and found I'd been invited to this year's Oceansfull Festival. 

It started yesterday and runs for another couple of weeks, finishing on August 24, 2022 at 11:59 p.m. PDT. As I type this my Bruiser is sitting on the edge of one of the platforms in the new dungeon, recovering from having been killed by the second boss. 

Yes, the second. He has indeed managed to kill the first, which puts him well ahead of his dismal performance in Fabled Kurns. It took him a long time, although nothing like as long as it took him to spawn and find the second boss, something that requires an insane amount of swimming up and down pipes, lighting braziers and using waterspouts and whirlpools to teleport around the zone.

 

There's a ferociously detailed walkthrough up on the wiki already. It gives some idea of the nit-picking complexity of the whole affair but you can't get the full, vertiginous effect just by reading two-dimensional text. For that you need to be corkscrewing up a column of water, trying to fend off guards and sharks while watching for the almost invisible exits.

I would say "Thank Prexus someone took the trouble to write such a comprehensive walkthrough" but it's actually not as much help as you might think. For a start, the map references don't really play all that well with the three-dimensional space and as it turns out there's no need to do most of it in the specific order listed. I didn't and all the portals still opened and the named spawned anyway.

In the end I just used tracking to find the guardians, once I'd killed the first and knew what they were called, then swam about almost randomly until I found the portals. Not efficient but it was quicker than trying to follow the bloody locs.

The first boss was annoying. The second boss is very annoying. She's actually the final boss by the walkthrough's reckoning, which might explain the extra level of difficulty. I guess I won't know for sure until I've found the two that come inbetween. 

 

At least they are doable. I know it's my inexperience with the mechanics that's the problem, not a straightforward gear lockout. I'd rather the walkthrough went into detail about how to kill the bosses instead of noting every last twist and turn of the path leading up to the fight. Trying to mouseover the tiny buff icons on the boss in the middle of a fight to see what immunities she has, while scrolling back the through the chat box to see what warnings she emoted isn't my idea of entertainment. I'd rather read the Cliff Notes version from someone who's done it already.

The drops from the first boss were good enough to make it worth the effort, though. 315 Resolve we're up to now on this solo, holiday stuff. That's an upgrade to most of what any of my characters are wearing. 

Aesthetically, the entire zone is gorgeous, although we have seen it before. It's from an earlier expansion, abeit slightly tweaked. The best thing about the whole instance has to be the manta ray at the beginning, the one you have to stand on and ride to the platform. If Daybreak don't make that into a mount and add it to the cash shop they must not like money.

There's also an interesting crafting opportunity you have to find for yourself. It is mentioned in the preamble to the walkthrough but not, as far as I can see, inside the game itself. I thought it was odd that there were fishing nodes inside a dungeon, even one in the Plane of Water, so I got out my rod and after a few casts I somehow managed to fish up a fishing rod, or rather the recipe to make one.

The Oceansfull Fishing Rod lets you breathe underwater, which is something my Bruiser currently needs to buy Totems of the Otter to do, so it's going to be well worth having. Three of the items he needs to make it can only be found in the instance itself. So far he hasn't seen any of them. I hope they don't drop off the bosses...

There's some other new stuff in this year's festival, including nine new items in the clam shells that spawn all around the coast of every major landmass at this time of year. I always enjoy prying those open. There's also a collection from previous years the Bruiser hasn't finished, as I discovered when he was doing the short, fun access quest to the new dungeon.

Given the way yesterday's session debrief got completely out of hand, I'm going to leave it at that. If you play EQII you'll certainly want to go check Oceansfull out for yourself and if you don't you've probably already heard more than you ever wanted to know about it.

I'm off to open some clams. Finger crossed I get something good, not just twenty different kinds of coral.

On The Road Again With EverQuest II

What is happening over at Darkpaw? Yesterday we got full 2022 roadmaps for both EverQuest titles. This morning, before I had time to drink my coffee, there was this.

Luckily, Wilhelm dropped me an email with the link. Otherwise there's every chance you'd be reading a post in which I speculated wildly about something that had already been announced. 

When I read the EQII roadmap yesterday, the line that jumped out at me was this:

Lore and Legend Server - Every piece of content in the game is appropriate for your character.

That sounded intriguing. It was also one of the earliest items on the schedule, due to arrive in February. I was planning on making it the focus of my post today as I went through the details of Darkpaw's plans for the EQII year. At first glance, I'd picked it out as one of the few genuinely new things EQII players had to look forward to in 2022, although now I read through the whole list again I realize there's a whole lot more going on than I originally thought.

For reference, here's the whole thing:

What's that? It's a bit small? Well, you weren't going to read it all anyway, were you? I mean, if you were that interested, you'd have clicked through the link. Never mind, it's all good. Don't bother digging through the desk drawer for that magnifying glass you put away "somewhere safe". I'm going to go through all the interesting bits. 

And, as I said, there are more of those than I thought there were. It's true there's a lot of "That thing we always do" and "This thing you'd expect" but there are quite a number of oddities. Not only that; in the context of the history of EQII, there are some lines worth reading between as well.

Take the seemingly bland "Improvements to the Test Server - Recipe books from old expansions added to the bookworm and level boosts setup to scale correctly to max level" coming this very month. That's been a long-standing bone of contention with the dedicated but tiny community that plays mostly or exclusively on the Test Server.

I won't rehash the extremely convoluted and controversial history of the EverQuest and EQII Test Servers yet again - that's a whole post of its own - but suffice to say they do not operate in the same way as similar servers for other mmorpgs. They are de facto permanent servers with separate rule sets, where a small but very committed group of players treat as their "main" server. 

In recent years, EQII's Test server has been sorely neglected. This is a meaningful change and one which I would bet is happening due to the arrival of Niami Denmother on the dev team. Denmom plays on Test and fully understands the importance of the community there. I take this change as a Very Good Sign for the custodianship of the game.

Another aspect of note, easy to miss on a casual read, is the repeated use of the phrase "new dungeon" throughout the year. There's a "new throwback dungeon" with the Chronoportal event in March, "new raid dungeons, new heroic dungeons" in April's GU19 and "A new dungeon" for Tinkerfest, now relocated to mid-Spring from its usual Summer slot.

There's a "red-hot new dungeon" coming with Scorched Sky in June and another, presumably soaking wet, with Oceansfull in August. I know the dungeons in the GU will be proper "dungeons" in the sense EQII players use the term but are we really going to get actual "dungeons" for four of the annual festivals as well? 

 

If they really are adding full dungeons to four holidays then that would be absolutely unprecedented. I suspect they may mean new "instances", lighter, less combat-focused, more casual-oriented knockabouts, with no "Bosses" as such. That would be a much more usual addition to the holiday festivities but even then it would be a major advance on what we've seen most years. Very welcome, too. 

April sees a new Overseer season. That's probably the thing I'm most excited about although I'm well aware many EQII players still distrust and dislike the Overseer system and won't be at all happy to see more development time being spent on it. 

I love Overseer. I find it entertaining in itself but mostly I find it incredibly rewarding. I've had so many great upgrades from it and made so much money. It's not quite in the game-changing league of Mercenaries but it's getting up there. Of course, it does play directly into the mmorpg-as-single-player-game trope that many EQII players absolutely loathe but you can't please everyone.

The moving of Tinkerfest to May is curious. It's one of the larger, more popular holidays and it's always been in the middle of the year. I wonder if it's felt to be clashing with the other big summer event, Ethereals? 

Except... wait a moment... where is the Ethereal event on this list? Nowhere, that's where! A close reading suggests it may have been replaced by Tinkerfest, Scorched Sky and Oceansfull, all of which now share "Jubilation Medals, coins that can be earned and exchanged during the three summertime events for desirable items!" That would explain the addition of actual dungeons to each of those three, allowing the whole thing to become a full replacement for the old Ethereal event, which did indeed stretch across the whole summer and feature a currency that could be spent on major upgrades.

 

If so, I like the sound of it. Ethereals always seemed a bit of a "give the hardcore something to grind" kind of deal. I never bothered with it much. This looks a lot better - on paper...

As well as the Lore and Legend server, which I mentioned at the top of the post and still haven't gotten around to discussing, there's another Time Locked Expansion server coming in May. That does seem curious. EQII players have so far proved less interested in regular restarts than their EverQuest cousins and to have two new servers open within a few months of each other (Especially while Kaladim, the existing TLE server, is still progressing and remains fairly well-populated.) seems over-optimistic.

The more I think about it, the less likely it seems that Darkpaw expect these two servers to appeal to the same players. The L&L server looks very much as though it's aimed at the more family-oriented, casual player, a demographic that was once very well-represented in the game but which in recent years has seen short shrift.

The brief precis of how the L&L server is going to work does seem to support that interpretation: 

"We've heard over the years that sometimes when you or your friends take a break it's difficult to catch up and play with your friends. We've also heard that sometimes you want to experience older content without it being trivial, want to put together a casual raid with friends and not have to worry about leaving behind lower-level friends, or you just want to craft or decorate without worrying that you might be too "squishy" for where your quest for recipes takes you."

That really does target the group I'm describing: people who want to hang out with friends and not be too "challenged" by cutting-edge content. I'm pretty sure the most of the people I was guilded with a decade ago would have absolutely loved the concept.

The thing is, none of those people have logged in for years and I don't imagine any of them ever will again. There absolutely is an audience for this kind of gameplay but over the last seven to ten years both SOE and Daybreak seemed increasingly uninterested in serving it. 

 

It looks like that's going to change and about bloody time, too. If ever there was a game set up to serve a casual, creative, family and friends audience, who just want to kick back and have fun, EQII is that game. I just fear it might be too late. 

Still, if you don't try, you'll never know. With a ruleset and systems that put every player on an identical footing from the start, this has the potential to be a strong solution to the perennial problem of how to get new players up to speed in an old game. There is no "speed" to get up to:

"Kael Drakkel is an opportunity to get involved in EverQuest II and experience the lore and the stories without worrying too much about whether you have the right gear...On Kael Drakkel you will start at level 90 with a full set of level 90 gear. As you adventure through the lands, you will be auto-mentored down to levels appropriate for the zone that you are in, making content you normally would have been out-leveled relevant once again. Special loot drops along the way will allow you to upgrade your base gear as you progress."

To quote the name of one of the game's best-loved quests, the proof will be in the pudding. Leaving aside the question of whether it's a good idea in the first place, I'm very curious to see how all of this will work on a technical level. Mentoring in EQII is slick and effective but the current iteration, even after much tweaking over the years, leaves any character whose actual level is more than a few levels higher as overpowered as any superhero.

Of course, if the goal is to make everything feel super-comfortable and unchallenging, maybe that won't be a problem. It certainly wouldn't be a problem for me. And conversely, maybe they have worked out some way to make all content feel just challenging enough but not too challenging. That would be the ideal. 

I suspect the limitation of Kael Drakkel to just the first seven expansions has much to do with keeping the whole thing within a limited range of existing systems, which might be more amenable to harmonization than the variety of expansion-era specific mechanics that have become the norm in later years. It's also pretty much the same level range that was used for the largely-abandoned "Agnostic" dungeon mechanic, which is almost certainly not a co-incidence.

 

We'll just have to wait and see. And we won't have to wait long. Kael Drakkel opens its doors in exactly a month, on February 22nd. I had absolutely no plans to restart on yet another EQII server this year and this one could not possibly come at a more inconvenient time for me, seeing as how Guild Wars 2's End of Dragons expansion is also set to launch next month, quite possibly on the exact same day.

Oh, well. Maybe I'll be done with Chimeraland by then. That should free up some time.

Looking at the roadmap, everything does all seem to be happening in the first half of the year. Game Update 120 is listed for August. It will presumably be significant but there are no details on what might be in it. From September onwards there's nothing other than the usual pre-expansion and holiday events. Well, other than"Swag Store". I have no clue what that is.

I think that's most of the highlights. There are a couple of much-needed structural alterations, like the 64-bit client and the addition of commas to damage numbers. I can't tell you what a pain it is to try and parse those billions and trillions after a fight. 

The LGBTQIA bunnies are back in June, too. I love those. I wonder which orientation or gender communities will get representation this year? I also wonder how many EQII players have any idea what any of them mean when they see them hopping after someone in game? I know I don't pay as much attention to which flag my familiars are flying as I probably should.

And that about covers it, I think. I'm sure I missed something. It's a lot, isn't it? More than I thought, for sure. Someone seems to have faith in the old game yet. It looks like a lot of work and thought went into all of this. 

Let's hope the players appreciate it.

Room For One More Inside? : GW2

It's the last day of December and I have just over eight hours left to finish my Monthly. All I need are two Fractals.

Yes, I finally got my teeth gritted, my loins girded and stood in the Grand Plaza yelling "LFG Fractals 1!". 10 seconds later I had a group. I introduced myself.

"Hi! I've never done one of these before".

"Neither have I"

"Nor me!"

My first toe dipped in the GW2 Dungeon pool and I find myself splashing around with a full group of Fractal Virgins. Moreover, not only had no-one ever done a Fractal before, not one of us had more than the vaguest idea how they worked. No-one had even watched a YouTube video or read a guide. Perfect!

We muddled through. When we ran into something we didn't understand we talked to each other, offered suggestions and experimented. We worked out what we needed to do as we went along and while we died quite a lot, we got there in the end. No-one got angry or disheartened, no-one ragequit as we wiped yet again. No-one even mentioned that one of us was only level 40 and spent most of the time dead.

It took over two hours but in the end we completed all three fractals put in front of us. I now have one character qualified to run Level 2. Which she duly did a couple of nights later. This time the group was more experienced and if anything chattier and better-natured even than the first. Naturally, things didn't go as well.

The second group struggled through the first two fractals, could not finish the third and had to give up. That fractal was the same one the first group of complete novices got as their opener and they got through it, so experience clearly isn't everything. DPS is, at least for that one, and we didn't have it, especially not after someone bailed. We tried it once more with just the four of us but it was never going to happen. We agreed to call it a day and I returned to Lion's Arch still licensed only up to Level 2.

The fractal dungeons themselves are beautifully designed. Visually and aesthetically, like everything in GW2, they are true works of art. I would love to be able to stroll round them in my own time an appreciate them fully, without swarms of mobs trying to rip my head off. There seems to be some kind of thin, overarching narrative based on Asura Anthropology and each fractal has its own storyline as well. Hard to follow or appreciate either when you never stop fighting, jumping, running, dodging or falling.

I found the gameplay challenging, to use a popular euphemism. In plain English I found it annoying, irritating, fiddly, irksome and downright infuriating. Rarely did I find it fun. A lot of the concepts are great - running down a tunnel with a giant flaming boulder chasing you, smashing the chains binding a 500 foot high giant to a mountain, following mysterious footsteps through a blinding blizzard - great to watch in a movie, not so much fun to replicate through keyboard and mouse.


The best bits were when I could stop and look around - some of the scenery is breathtaking - and the fighting. I like fighting in MMOs. I like playing my character and using my character's abilities and at least I was mostly allowed to do that as I saw fit. We had some very fun fights. I would personally prefer none of the gimmicks and tricks, just the nice scenery with some tough things living in it who resent a bunch of adventurers coming in to take their stuff.

One more run this evening, even if it partially fails, should see my monthly completed. I'm quite glad to have had the spur to go take a look but I can't imagine running these things often, either for fun or profit. Just about anything else I've done in Tyria has been more entertaining. Well, not Orr, obviously. Or some of the Personal Story.

OK, fractals aren't that bad. I did quite enjoy them, in a masochistic kind of way. I certainly appreciate the way that doing them and the Tixx dungeons has bump-started my dormant PUG powers. Not only did my old LFG skills come flooding back but I even found I could still start, recruit and run a PUG. From a social perspective the whole experience was so much better than I'd come to expect from other MMOs of late that it really does put me in mind to do more just for the half-forgotten pleasure of meeting new people and sharing new experiences.

All the same, I didn't come to GW2 looking for dungeon-based pick-up-group gameplay. I still think it goes against the grain of the all-tag-on open world we were sold. Fractals may be a big improvement on the first iteration of dungeons but they are still isolated and isolating instances that remove players from the world. No matter how well it may be done that's not a direction in which I want to see the game go.

Let's hope that the promised addition of fractal gear to other parts of the world puts dungeons back in the special interest box and returns focus to the shared world outside.

Dragon Down : GW2

I wasn't planning on doing any dungeons in GW2. The little notes "my" Herald insists on sending me, where he strongly suggests I should consider it, those go straight in the bin, so it was a bit of a surprise last night when I found myself in The Ruined City of Arah.

The Ruined City of Arah (let's just call it Arah, shall we? We'll take the ruining as read) serves both as the highest-level dungeon in the game and the culmination of the Personal Storyline. Ah yes, the Personal Storyline. That'll be that other thing I'm not doing. The last time I touched it on any of my characters was back around level 40. Mrs Bhagpuss, however, has been steadily working her way through hers, delayed only by bugs (courrtesy of ArenaNet) and disconnections (courtesy of our flaky router).

Wait for me!

I'd barely had time to log in and report my first half-dozen bots of the evening when I got the call to come to Cursed Shore. There I joined Mrs Bhagpuss and three others, all from the same guild, waiting to go through the big blue portal to Arah. The group comprised two rangers (us), an Elementalist, a Guardian and I forget the other.

I won't go through the instance in detail. If you don't know it, Zubon gives an excellent account of how it plays out here. Suffice to say that, as a story, it really isn't very good.

As far as gameplay goes, from reading that and several other accounts, I was expecting it to be a lot harder than it turned out to be. Maybe it's been tuned down or maybe our group was better-geared (Mrs Bhagpuss's ranger is head-to-toe in fully upgraded exotics. Mine, um, isn't). Whatever the reason, I thought it was actually easier than several of the earlier Personal Story instances I'd done.

Ultra-rare!  Logan Being Useful

Destiny's Edge, Tyria's ultimate elite fighting force, spent most of the evening lying on the ground waiting for us to do their job for them, thereby following their long-established gameplan. Injury was added to insult when ***spoiler alert*** Zojja got to fire the Big Gun that brings down Zhaitan and all we got to do was stop yet more Risen killing her while she did it. (They did kill her, too, but we revived her and she blew Zhaitan's tail off with a laser cannon. It was quite exciting, actually).

So much for the story. What about the combat? With all that's been said about the supposed difficulty of GW2 dungeons and the chaotic gameplay that arises from having no dedicated Tanks or Healers, was it really that bad? Okay, it was a Story dungeon, which is easy-mode as I understand it, but even allowing for that I have to re-iterate that it was really a lot easier than I was expecting.

Yeah, yeah, now just fall over, already!

Other than a bug which meant we had to do the first third of the instance twice, everything went pretty smoothly. The bosses (I hate that expression but I can't call them "Nameds" - they didn't have names, just "Champion" this and "Champion" that) seemed to have a lot of hit-points but that was about all. Apparently they do have various tricks that you are supposed to avoid, but I didn't notice them. We just piled in and kept hitting them til they fell over. A modicum of running around and moving out of red circles was advisable, but only a modicum. We didn't wipe, didn't have more than the average number of "downs". It felt rather like doing a small-scale Event anywhere in Tyria.

Was it fun? Yes. Was it as much fun as a traditional Trinity-style group? No.

Toto, I've a feeling we're not in High Fantasy any more

There's a very good discussion in the comments following this recent TAGN post which brings out some of the difficulties of the new group model. For some people, removing a more formal structure and replacing it with much greater freedom of action is going to add excitement and interest. For others it just risks pulling out all the bones so the saggy old skin flops around all over the floor.

On balance, I think I'd prefer more structure. The current "everyone is DPS, everyone heals, no-one tanks" is fluid and fun in big crowds but in a 5-person instance it seems odd. I'm certainly not suggesting we need to go back to the Trinity as-was but I don't think this version is a complete replacement. It's an alternative, sure, but someone will do a better iteration than this. They'd better.

One thing it did do, though, was remind me how much fun it is to play in an actual group. Got to do more of that.