Eight Steps On The Path To Sedition

 The pre-expansion event, Paths of Sedition, has started, over in EverQuest II. It turns out it was enough of a draw to bring me back to Norrath for the first time in quite a few weeks. 

EQII has had a rough go from me in the current expansion cycle. I got halfway through the storyline back when Rage of Cthurath came out at the end of 2025. I dropped it in the New Year for Baldur's Gate 3, then came back to finish it. After that I decided it had been too slow and grindy for me to want to take another character through it right away so I dropped it again.

Later in the year I was just starting to work on a plan for leveling another character to the cap, without it making me want to throw the monitor out the window, when my PC decided it hated playing games and began crashing after every session. With ChatGPT's assistance, I eventually got that fixed but by then I'd rediscovered GeForce Now and fallen in love with playing my games on someone else's machines. 

EQII, to no-one's surprise, I'm sure, isn't on GeForce Now so that put it at the back of the pack to begin with but worse than that, the second time I played again there was another crash on exit. That put me off. In any case, a bunch of newer, fancier, cooler games were jostling poor old EQII out of the way, so it wasn't likely it would have gotten much of a look in anyway, even if I hadn't been worried playing it would screw up my machine.

I do like to try and keep up with what's going on in Norrath, though, even if it isn't my main gaming home any more. And there have been a few pre-expansion "Preludes" worth playing. Not as many as there probably should have been but some. 

Creating Illustrations for Loading Screens - A Lost Art

I saw the write-up at EQ2 Traders and that got me interested but the tipping point was the mention of no fewer than eight new quests for adventurers. (There are also eight tradeskill quests but I was willing to bet at least half of those would just be standing at a crafting station, banging out hats and boots for some annoying NPC that could easily have done it themselves). 

I didn't think it would require a great time commitment. Naomi Denmother described both questlines as "short". From experience, I can only speak to the adventure option. I guess is short, if you consider it as something that's going to be with us for a couple of months. On the other hand, it took me about an hour and a half, which isn't as short as all that for a story quest. 

I guess what matters is whether it's fun, not how long it takes. And yes, I'd say it's fun. It kept me engaged and interested throughout, at least. And it had two genuine "Whoa!" moments, which is two more than most quests can manage.

I won't precis the storyline in any detail. Anyone reading this who plays EQII is going to do it anyway, if they haven't already, and they won't thank me for spoilers. Everyone else really isn't going to care.

This is one of the big differences between MMORPGs and almost every other kind of RPGish, narrative-driven game I write about. I find it very easy to write, entertainingly I hope, about the kind of storylines that crop up in Wuthering Waves or Neverness To Everness or Nivalis Nights because they tend to be novelistic or cinematic. Granted I might not always make a great job of it but as a journalistic exercise, a retelling of the story of a quest in one of those games ought to be at least as interesting to a general audience as if it were a movie or a TV show.

Who indeed? And more importantly, who cares?

That is very much not the case with MMORPGs. No-one who doesn't already know the politics of Norrath is likely to give a damn whether some troll shaman is claiming to be the new Grozmok or that Neriak has ambitions on Freeport.  And even all of that politics is more accessible than the usual litany of unpronounceable gods and demons and their world-threatening yet somehow still incredibly petty squabbles.

It's not just the subject matter that makes MMORPG quests hard to retell, either. The way they're written too often makes them seem stiff and awkward when taken out of context. It's not that they're badly written, necessarily. Mostly they're solid enough but many, probably most, follow conventions proper only to the games in which they appear. 

When you play those games regularly, you get so used to the way the quests are written, you hardly notice it but they all have a kind of local dialect or accent that's impossible to mistake. WOW, EQII, SW:tOR, ESO, LotRO, GW2, New World, FFXIV... the writing in all of them follows predictable patterns that seem to supercede individual authorship. 

In most, it also leans strongly towards literary tropes and speech patterns usually found mainly in either fantasy or historical, rather than contemporary, fiction. I think about the only MMORPG I can remember that wasn't written this way was The Secret World. It may well have been one of the reasons it was praised so highly for its writing at the time.

Must have the same scriptwriter as Theresa May

Of course, the writing in every game has a tone and a style of its own but for some reason it seems to be much more pronounced in MMORPGs. Or perhaps that's not it at all or at least not all of it. It occurs to me, looking at the list in the previous paragraph, that all of the games except TSW have some kind of fantasy or science-fantasy setting that doesn't much resemble the world in which we live - or any likely extrapolation of it. 

The Secret World, though, is set in this world, our world, with fantastical elements layered over the top. NTE and Nivalis Nights are both closer in conception to TSW than they are to any of the others except, perhaps, SW:tOR. Even Wuthering Waves, which is arguably more fantasy-oriented, is peopled with regular folk doing ordinary jobs in a quasi-contemporary setting. Perhaps it's the familiarity of the characters and the lives they lead that make retelling their stories seem likely to be more accessible to someone who doesn't play the games.

All of which could have been the biggest sidebar in this blog's history. To return to the original topic, there are eight quests in the pre-expansion event for adventurers and I had a good time with all of them. There's a fair amount of running around but for an All Access subscriber, fast map travel makes much of that trivial. 

Most of the quests take place in "new" instances, all of which are rather well-judged. These days, EQII players expect to see repurposed assets from earlier in the game whenever temporary content like this appears but in this case the choice of what to re-use has clearly been made with some thought.

Neck tattoos are in this year. Also, even a dwarf isn't short enough to walk under a pony.

It's always been a puzzlement, why the best-looking zones in the original game, back in 2004, were the catacombs and sewers under the two big cities. It was very noticeable at the time that once you pulled up a grating in the street to descend below Qeynos or Freeport, the fidelity of the graphics went up a notch. The textures always seemed to be more detailed and there'd clearly been a lot of work put into the decoration.

I vaguely remember reading that it was because those were the zones the art team worked on first. Whether it technical issues took over or just the time it took to make the zones look that good wasn't available any more, once they moved above ground, nothing looked quite as fine. With that in mind, I'm always happy to have a reason to revisit the tunnels and caverns beneath the cities and that's what happens here.

The other holdover from the original game that gets to put in a repeat performance in Paths of Sedition is the crafting instance. Back in 2004, if you wanted to craft at all, you had to open a hatch and go down some stairs into an underground workshop. One of the early improvements made to the game, in a desperate hope of keeping people from leaving to go to World of Warcraft, was to put crafting stations above ground so players could at least see what was going on around them as they ground out hundreds of worthless items for skill increases.

A few years later almost no-one was using the underground crafting rooms any more and there was a plan to remove them altogether. Predictably, it caused an outcry. No-one in any MMORPG ever wants to see anything taken away. Whether anyone's actually using it is beside the point. 

Put a bit of carpet down and it'll be lovely.

The tradeskill instances were saved and even now, if you go into one, there's a fair chance you'll find a die-hard veteran down there, hammering away on their own, enjoying the solitude. As far as I know, though, until this event there never was a trapdoor to one of those cellars round the back of the Block and Tackle, one of the overground crafting halls that stands next the docks in South Freeport. There is now.

About the only part of the quest I wasn't all that happy with was the bit where you have to go to a zone of your own level to kill spiders. And that would have been fine if the choice of zones you're given at the level cap didn't all happen to be in Ballads of Zimarra. And if the drop rate had been better. 

Still, it was only a mild irritation in an otherwise enjoyable hour and a half. And there's more to do, of course. Having completed the questline, I'm now free to work on the achievement and then the collection as well as to farm the event currency to spend in the event shop.

Yeah. I probably won't be doing much of any of that. The questline itself gets you a nice familiar that's an upgrade to the free one from the last expansion (And which will, no doubt, itself be replaced by the free familiar from the next expansion in December.) You also get some house items that I'll only use to get them out of my bags.

Hoods and Robes! Bah! I had Hats and Boots in the sweepstake.

The vendor who takes the currency has a huge stock of house items, some of them rather nice, but I already have two enormous homes in Norrath, both bursting at the borders with cruft trophies. Not to mention all the other, less-decorated houses my dozen or so characters own. There's barely a one of them that doesn't own at least a couple of places. There's only so much decorating even I can cope with.

There's also a ground mount. Does anyone use ground mounts any more? And some quite attractive appearance armor. Probably some other stuff. If you want it, you can have it. It won't be hard to raise the funds. I'll leave it, thanks.

I'll probably do the tradeskill questline with someone, just to see it, although I believe it's pretty much identical, as far as story beats and rewards go. Unusually, you can't do both lines on the same character but who in EQII has only one character? Everyone has a stable of alts and half of them would be doing all the quests on all of them anyway. Doesn't stop people moaning about it on the forums though.

While Mordita was running around Freeport, she noticed Nights of the Dead has also started. EQII Traders has an article up about that, too. I may or may not get around to doing at least the new stuff and if I do I may or may not get around to writing a post about it. 

The good news is that my PC didn't give me any problems playing today. If that carries on then I will certainly be visiting Norrath more often. 

Let's hope so. There's an expansion coming! 

EverQuest And EverQuest II - To The Letter

For a while, I've been in the habit of putting a post together every time whoever happens to be holding down the Producer's chair at Darkpaw puts out a letter. That used to be Holly Longdale until she jumped ship to bring her deep knowledge of how best to milk an aging cash cow to Blizzard. Since then it's been Jenn Chan.

Jenn Chan is great. As a customer and a player, I've been very happy with her tenure. She's the epitome of a safe pair of hands. Just looking at her smiling face makes me feel the future of Norrath is secure. As a blogger, though, she doesn't give me much to work with.

It's been so long now since I last played EverQuest seriously, I can barely make sense of most of what she has to say in the letter for the elder game. There's something about making Hero's Journey quests more group-friendly. I don't know what Hero's Journey quests are. There's something else about improvements to the Resource Hunter system. I don't know what that is, either.

After that, there's a couple of paragraphs about bug fixes, class "tuning" and UI upgrades, all of which I can understand in theory but none of which have any meaning for me in practice. Then we get some notes about festivals, most of which I've never heard of (Fall Fun? Festival of Shadows?) and a brief mention of some changes to Account to Account transfers.

Account to Account transfers is a bit of a sore point with me. I would long ago have given SOE, and then Daybreak/Darkpaw, my money, if they'd been willing to let me transfer characters between the accounts Mrs Bhagpuss and I set up back in 2000. It would have been worth hundreds of dollars to us to get all of our characters on the right accounts, back in the days when we were both playing EQ.

Sadly, the Account to Account option exists solely and only for accounts registered to the same person. Both accounts have to  have the exact same name associated with them. There has never been any option to move characters between accounts owned by different people. 

It sounds very reasonable until you factor in the monthly subscription for those accounts. I always paid for both our accounts on my credit card, from the day they were created and ever afterwards. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that that the defining proof of ownership ought to be whose name is on the card that's being charged, especially when there's only ever been one source of payment, but that's not how they see it.

Not that I care any more. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played either game in a decade and a half and never will again. I have all the login details to all the accounts (I think there are at least eight of them...) and I can play any of the characters on any account whenever I like, which in most cases will be never. Even if they did change the rules, I wouldn't bother now.

 

Checking the official site, though, it appears that Account transfers are currently unavailable. I don't know how long that's been the case but I do know that for EverQuest II the process is automated whereas for EQ, you had to submit a petition to Customer Service for the transfer to be performed manually. I'm guessing EQ is going to get the same automatic option EQII enjoys.

With that little piece of technical tomfoolery out of the way, we're down to the only part anyone's really interested, namely the upcoming expansion. It's called Favors of Fortune and it involves some gods falling out about something. It would. It's an EverQuest expansion.

It also involves the return of someone or something called Scorn. I have never heard of Scorn but his/her/their/its return is emphasized in heavy, bold type: Scorn has returned. Like that. Whatever impact that's meant to have is lost on me but the effects of Scorn's return do sound intriguing:

"Across the lesser planes, chance itself twists unnaturally. Simple gambles collapse into disaster. Once‑reliable odds warp into impossibility. Victories slip away as though guided by an unseen hand. The very fabric of luck feels poisoned, bent toward failure by a force both deliberate and unseen."

I wouldn't mind an expansion that turned all the expected results into a crap shoot but I bet most people would hate it. So I don't suppose it's that. Not that I'm ever likely to find out from personal experience. Chance would have to twist a very long way out of true for me to find myself back playing EQ at all, let alone in current content.

There's a very much higher chance of me playing the upcoming expansion for EQII, though. I'd put it no lower than 90%. I've played every EQII expansion on release since 2014's Altar of Malice and I have no particular intention to stop. 

The ten per cent wiggle room I'm giving myself comes from two things: firstly the ever-increasing number of games I'm trying to play (There might be a post about that soon.) and secondly the tendency of my PC to crash when I log out of EQII. It's doing it much less than it used to but it still happens and it puts me off playing because otherwise the machine is working perfectly and I don't want to screw that up.

 

It's harder to wring anything worth talking about out of Jenn Chan's Producer's Letter for EQII  than the one for EverQuest. It starts with a whole lot of detail about all the things they've added to or fixed in the game so far this year: exciting things like "cleaner spellbooks after changing factions or possessing pets, more transparent messaging when Cleric and Guardian abilities are stifled by debuffs".

Don't believe me? Go read it for yourself. It's chock-full of minutiae like that,. The sort of detail that makes perfect sense in a set of patch notes but isn't exactly what you'd imagine would make the cut for a Producer's Letter. 

I'll spare you the excruciating specifics but I will just mention the list of upcoming holiday events. Again, we all know these are coming. They're long-established annual holidays, after all. Not to mention there's an in-game calendar that has them all listed. 

Browsing the list, though, I did notice there was no mention of the event formerly known as Days of Summer, later rebranded as  Panda Panda Panda. That would normally have started in mid-September. I might not be playing at the moment but I still get the PR emails and I hadn't heard anything about so I did a bit of googling.

Gemini, once again, seems to be operating in an alternate timeline. I asked specifically if Panda Panda Panda was going to be happening in 2026 and the AI told me "Yes, new "Panda, Panda, Panda!" content and tasks are scheduled to run in EverQuest II in September 2026". Once again, the links it gave as sources for this confident assertion not only didn't support the claim, they didn't have anything to do with pandas at all!

I had to go to the official forums for the correct answer, which is that "We are doing alternate things in place of the panda content. The Splendid Celebration Crate content has taken its place." Angeliana said that. She is not an AI. She knows what she's talking about.

I'm quite pleased they've pensioned the event off. It was a great addition to the game back in 2017, when it first appeared but it's been a while since it made much sense. What with the big summer update in August and the Expansion in December, not to mention Overseer, there are plenty of ways to get much better gear than the pandas hand out these days. 

 

And so to the only thing anyone really cares about: this year's expansion. It's called Descent to Val’Zyroth, which may be nowhere near as good a name as Favors of Fortune but does make up for in accuracy what it loses in style. Well, it might. That's assuming Val'Zyroth is somewhere in the Underfoot, which is where we're going.

The Underfoot is Brell's realm below the surface of Norrath so this is another spelunking expansion, the first since 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I have mixed feelings about underground expansions. One of my favorite EQ expansions at the time was Depths of Darkhollow. I had some good times down there. I also quite liked Terrors of Thalumbra. 

They do get quite claustrophobic, though. And this one is full of Dark Elves. I am not a big dark elf fan.

In DTV, which really is not a very memorable acronym, we're set to  

plunge through the treacherous tunnels of Subtunaria into the glowing, magic-soaked reaches of the Underfoot. Infiltrate the resplendent Teir'Dal city of Neriondalon, battle alongside unique subterranean allies like the resilient Tontu molemen, and breach Brell Serilis’ legendary planar workshops before dark magics swallow the realm.

The infamous ruler of Neriak, Queen Cristanos, has spotted the absence of Lucan from Freeport and fancies her chances. Having played EQII pretty consistently since launch, that does actually mean something to me and I'm mildly invested in putting a stop to her territorial ambitions. Most of my characters come from Freeport after all. The last thing any of them want is to end up living in a Tier'Dal police state. Stick with with the police state you're used to, that's my advice.

There is, as usual, a pre-expansion event. This one's called Paths of Sedition and it begins on October 6. Generally, pre-expansion events aren't all that exciting but there have been a couple of notable exceptions. The Letter doesn't give much away about how this one's likely to go.

And that's about it. I'm not convinced the whole Producer's Letter tradition shouldn't go the way of Panda Panda Panda. It seems like most of what's in both of these letters either didn't need to be repeated yet again after the numerous previous times we'd been told about it or could have simply been handled by a regular News item on the websites.

Still, it's always nice to hear from Jenn Chan. And if she enjoys writing letters, who are we to stop her?

EverQuest II : Rage Of Cthurath - Very First Impressions

After I finished yesterday's post, I felt sure the next thing I'd write would be a follow-up in which I recounted my difficulties - or lack thereof - in setting up my account to play Ashes of Creation (Early Access.) on Steam. With luck, I thought, I might even manage enough time in the game itself to put together some kind of First Impressions piece.

That plan lasted exactly as long as it took me to publish the post and then try to log into EverQuest II for a bit of house-building, only to find those servers also down, not for maintenance this time but for an update. I thought it was a bit odd. EQII almost always patches on Tuesdays. There was a link to the patch notes, so I clicked through to see what was going on. 

Which was when I realized there was something I'd forgotten. Something quite important.

Yesterday, December 10th, was the scheduled release date for this year's EQII expansion, Rage of Cthurath.  

That tells you a great deal about how some things have changed. Time was, when the imminent release of a new expansion for an MMORPG I was playing would have been enough to drive almost everything else from my mind. I would have been looking forward to it for weeks. 

On the day it was going to go live, I'd have been sitting at my desk, staring at the screen, waiting for the servers to open. I'd have been checking the forums, listening to people chatter excitedly about what was coming.

If the servers were due to come up when I'd be asleep, I might well have set my alarm clock to wake me up early so I could get online as soon as possible. I might even have taken a day or two off work so as to not to miss all the excitement.

That was then. Now, even though I've already paid for it, I couldn't even remember the day the expansion was slated to arrive. And it wasn't a momentary lapse of memory. The exact date just hadn't made that much of an impact. If you'd asked me, last week, when the new EQII expansion was coming, I'd have said "Sometime in December. I think it might be the 11th?"

Well, it wasn't the 11th. It was the 10th. And, at least once I'd been reminded, I did feel interested enough to want to take a look right away. The servers came up mid-evening my time. I was able to get in a couple of hours which, as anyone who's seen me moaning about it here lately will know, is quite a long session for me, these days. 

Today, I've already put in another three hours or so. If I didn't have this nagging voice in my head telling me I really ought to get on with writing a post about it, I'd be playing now. As soon as I finish, I'll be happt to get back to playing again.

Which certainly suggests I must be having a good time. And I am. I'm enjoying that oddly comforting, reassuring sense of commitment that comes with finding yourself wrapped up in a new expansion for a game you know well. You're aware there's plenty ahead of you. You're not going to run out of things to do for quite a while. 

You also have a pretty good idea what it is that you're going to be doing. Basically the same as you did the last time and the time before that. Only with different scenery.

That pretty much sums up an EQII expansion, twenty years after they began: same content, different scenery. (Really very lovely scenery, too. The screenshots never do it justice.) 

There's a very annoying cliche marketing departments, particularly those attached to publishing houses, love to use. There are variations but it always follows the form of "If you liked X, you'll love Y". The theory seems to be that what people want next is whatever they had last, only more so. It's as if the sheer repetitiveness of the experience intensifies it rather than watering it down.

And you know what? It's mostly true. It certainly works for books, anyway. As a bookseller, one of the first and most important questions you have to learn how to answer is "Have you got anything similar?". Readers read books a lot faster than writers can write them. A series that took the author a few years to write might take a new fan a few months to finish. Or even a few weeks. 

When they find there aren't any more and there won't be for at least another year, always assuming the author is still interested enough to keep the series going (Hi, George! Hi, Patrick!), they start casting around for something that's as close to what they just read as possible. Anything to keep the jag going. 

Gamers are much the same and MMORPG expansions ignore it at their peril. The "different" ones are rarely the successful ones. 

EQII expansions are even more attuned to the expectations of the audience than most, I suspect. I won't say they're formulaic or predictable but only because that sounds unnecessarily pejorative. They do all follow a pattern, all the same.

I wouldn't describe them as crowd-pleasing or fan service, either. Not really. Somehow, a section of the playerbase always seems to find itself baffled or upset about something. Many EQII expansions end up being surprisingly controversial, usually for relatively minor changes to systems or mechanics.

I think what EQII expansions have become in recent years could best be described as "a known quantity".  They aren't by any means all the same in detail. They all add new features and make changes to gameplay, some of which can be disruptive. It's also not unusual for the whole tone and feel of the game to shift perceptibly for the duration of a particular expansion cycle.

And yet, no matter how radical the new elements might be, the underlying structure is always almost identical. Compare the lists of content, year on year, and about all you need to change are the zone names.

There are always two or three open world zones across which you travel as the storyline unfolds. Each zone has a number of instances that have to be unlocked at specific points in the Signature questline. The questline always has you on foot at the stat, with flying being enabled at the end of each stage but only for the zone you just finished.

Everything always begins in a village or a camp on the edge of the first zone, to which you arrive by ship or portal from the Old World. Even though you clearly know nothing at all about the place you've just reached, everyone there immediately starts treating you like an old friend or a trusted servant, someone who can be relied on to take any job, no matter how  tedious or dangerous, and get it done with minimal guidance or instruction. No footling errand is too trivial; no affair of state too grand. Despite no-one knowing whop the hell you are, everyone just assumes you're trustworthy, capable and willing.

And, of course, you are. Before you leave the village for the first time, though, be sure to strip down to your underwear right there in the middle of the town square and swap every item you have for whatever you find in that box on the floor. Better yet, have a chat with the fellow standing next to it first. Let him tell you how to dress yourself. Better listen carefully, too. Miss even one step and you're going to find everything a lot harder going than you expected.

From then on, it's a long and convoluted tale of gods and monsters as you save the universe or the world or some specific subset thereof yet again, either by hitting things and setting them on fire, picking them up and making things out of them or quite possibly both. 

Along the way, you'll change everything you're wearing at least twice more, collect a whole bunch of random, useless items off the floor and hand them off to some obsessive, who will happily trade them for something different that you probably don't want either. You'll get a new pet and a new bodyguard and a new ride and you'll spend time and money you can scarcely afford on all of them to make sure they can keep up with you because you might think you're doing all this alone but in EQII "solo" means there really has to be at least four of you working together at all times.

That's what I was expecting and so far that seems to be what I've got. And I'm very happy with it, so far.

There is one big change from my perspective, something that really has freshened the whole thing up for me: I'm finally playing as a Necromancer. 

It's been my plan for several expansions but until now the disparity between my regularly-played Berserker and all my other sometimes-played characters has always left an insurmountable gap in preparedness, so even if I've started with someone else, I've always ended up back with him in the end.

This time, I spent much of this year setting up for it. Not the gear, which all gets replaced in the opening seconds, but the skills. In the past it's been little things like not having the obscure languages or taking three times as long to gather anything that's made playing anyone but the 'Zerker feel like a chore. My Necro is still lacking in a few specialist areas but mostly she's on par and for the first time I can enjoy playing her without the niggling details dragging the experience down.

So far, she feels much more powerful than the Berserker. Her Time-to-Kill is much better and she has far more versatility. Of course, to be sure the difference really is in the innate superior soloing ability of her  class, rather than Rage of Cthulath itself being a significantly easier expansion than the last few, I'd have to play it to the end of the Signature questline and then do it all again with the Berserker. I probably will, in time.

For now, though, I can say that from the first pull, every regular mob has been dying in two casts or three casts. And it only takes that long because they're all DoTs and I keep stacking them when I probably don't need to. 

The pet can solo them with no help from me and almost as fast. I have the new mercenary but he hasn't had to heal anyone on a regular mob yet. It makes exploring very enjoyable, even without being able to fly. Anything that gets in the way is dead before it even gets to us. 

Even more satisfying is the way the Necro has been able to handle the open-world solo bosses in the opening zone. As usual, they're all about seven levels above the starting level for the zone and flagged as tough for solo mobs. 

A few expansions back these kinds of mobs were always easy but then something changed and they became almost impossible. In one expansion, my Berserker still couldn't kill the named solo mobs in the first zone even after he'd finished the whole Signature quest. Things improved with the last expansion, in which they were kind of in-between those extremes. He still couldn't do them when he was working their zones but he could a little later, when he came back for another try. 

This time the Necro killed three of named mobs in the second session before she'd barely got going on the questline. It wasn't a total walkover. They all took some concentration. Her Mercenary died in one fight but it was near the end and the outcome was never in doubt.

I never felt she was in any great danger, even when she had to do all her own healing. Given that last night I watched someone in plate armor having a much harder time with one of the same targets, it seems fair to put it down to the superior DPS and survivability of the Necromancer rather than a major nerf to the mobs.

My overall first impressions, then, are very positive. The first zone is gorgeous. Any worries about the dark nature of the storyline delivering an ugly hellscape can at least be put off until I get to the next one. Gameplay is exactly as expected, which suits me perfectly. The story is also highly familiar and very much what I signed up for. And the class swap is shaping up just as I hoped it might.

All in all, a very good start. We'll see how it goes on. 

EQII Rage of Cthurath - Welcome To Our Nightmare

Today's post should have been a couple of Next Fest demo reviews. I've already played two of them. I was out of the house a lot longer than I expected today, though, and now I don't think I have time.

Which is handy because I also wanted to say something about the new EverQuest II expansion, pre-orders for which went up either yesterday or today. I saw the PR push when I logged in this morning and it's impressive. 

I think I mentioned this a while back but Daybreak have really upped their game, when it comes to marketing. Here's the "landing page" on the official website. Slick, isn't it? And modern. You could easily be fooled into thinking it was for a game less than twenty years old.

It's also surprisingly informative. Not only does it tell you everything you need to know if you're thinking of buying the expansion, it has a good amount of detail about what to expect when you start playing.

The "New Lands To Discover" section contains individual entries for five different zones: Yon Gorroth, Oggothl Sprawl, The Unknown, Gerion, Hold of D'Lere and Zon Zobboz. 

Pardon me a moment while I put my teeth back in. 

I find it hard to believe we're getting five non-instanced overland zones so I imagine at least two of those will be "dungeons", even if they are open to the lowering, purple skies of The Void. There are two screenshots for each zone and they make the hellscape look nowhere near as grim and repulsive as I feared. That was my biggest worry going into the expansion - that it would mean a year of dour, ugly heavy metal album cover art, all clashing colors and nowhere to rest your eyes. 

In fact, the art team seem to have done a magnificent job (As usual.) of making everything look better than it has any right to be. Some of it looks almost pretty. This, for example:

There is an awful lot of purple and red but it could have been a lot worse. There's a video, too, and that looks... actually, it looks really good. 

You know how these promo videos for aging MMOs can sometimes seem a little embarrassing? Not this one. Even the animations don't look too archaic. 

Granted, they seem to have chosen some of the least cluttered, most open areas to showcase, giving the whole thing a feel of open space and minimalism that most likely won't be how it feels in the game itself. But that's the Marketing Department's job, isn't it? To make things look, if not better than they really are, then at least as good as they can be.

As well as all the visuals, there's a lot of text. I read all of it and found it quite intriguing. At one point I couldn't help wondering if there wasn't some satirical point being made although I couldn't quite pin down what it might be. Having the main villain of the piece be called The Consumer surely has to mean something, doesn't it?

There's also a nice list of features included in the expansion, several of which seem pretty significant and/or useful. Last time around we got a keyring for Petamorph wands, something I thought was exciting enough to write a whole post about. In Rage of Cthurath we're getting another Keyring, this one for Illusions and I'm even more excited about that.

I use the Petamorph keyring all the time but only on one or two characters because it collates the specific items that change the appearance of combat pets and only a small number of classes can use  those. Everyone can use illusion items, though. All my characters have some in their bags and more in their bank vaults.

Having them on a Keyring is going to free up a significant amount of bag space but better yet it will also mean I use the damn things. I like illusions and EQII has some very good ones but I can never be bothered to ferret around in my bags looking for the items and then clicking them just to make a cosmetic change. If they're all on a handy keyring I can access with one click of the UI, then I'm far more likely to enjoy them in the way they were intended.

A much more significant innovation for most people, albeit not for me, is likely to be the new option to be in two guilds at once. That could be a potentially game-changing move for some. I would have loved it, back in the days when I was active in multiple guilds and had to choose which characters would sign up to which of them.

I remember what a big deal it was when Guild Wars 2 launched with the option to join up to five guilds at once. I did make good use of that over the time I was there. For a while I was in four active guilds, doing different activities with all of them. 

It's surprising how few games have followed suit. DBG is calling this feature "Guild Coalitions" and as yet there are no details on exactly how it's going to work but even that they're playing around with the concept is a huge step in a good direction for the game.

The third new feature, also very much unexplained in any real detail at this stage, is something called "Untold Heroic Dungeons". It looks as if it will be EQII's version of WoW's Mythic/Mythic + system (Not that I understand how that works, either.) although there are other ways it could go. It's highly unlikely (By which I mean all but impossible.) that it'll be of any practical concern to me but I await further news of how it works with interest.

And that won't be long coming. Along with pre-orders comes beta access, full details of which, including rewards for participating and hitting certain benchmarks as you test things like the Signature Questline or the dungeons and Public Quests, are included in the forum post.

Tempting though the rewards, which include familiars, mounts and illusions, may be, I will not be setting foot in the beta, even though I certainly will be placing my pre-order very soon. The phrase "too much of a good thing" comes to mind although in what sense a buggy, unfinished version of something you're going to be seeing for real in less than eight weeks counts as a "good thing" is a question always worth asking.

As well as all of the above, the expansion obviously includes all the usual content - major questlines for both adventurers and crafters, new spells and abilities, more levels and so on. In some expansions that's about all you get and honestly it's probably all you really need. This time, though, it looks like there'll be one or two rather tasty extras. 

The release date is "December 2025". There's a caveat of "before December 31" in the small print but experience suggests the final date will be considerably closer to the start of the month than that. As for the price, the Standard Edition, which is the one I always buy, is £25. Okay, actually £25.12 for some weird currency conversion reason. The dollar price is $34.99. There are the usual Expensive, Very Expensive and Insanely Expensive editions (Not the official titles, unfortunately.). If you're interested in what you'd get, you can see all of the details here. 

And now I'm going to try and get another demo or two done. With luck there'll be something about that here tomorrow. I'm not promising though.

When You Stare Into The Void...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here's the pitch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out Of The Fog They Came

EverQuest II is a very busy game for one that's been plodding along for more than twenty years, largely catering to the same, ever-diminishing group of players. I've mentioned the plethora of holiday events many times. Since all of them tend to get one or two additions every year, the dense crust of content surrounding each gets thicker all the time. But the holidays are just one of the numerous content streams that keep bubbling up, over and over again.

Panda Panda Panda, for example. That's back. It's not exactly a holiday, in that there's no specific event being celebrated. It's just some agarophobic pandas with a warehouse of extremely powerful items they keep trying to give away for information they could very easily google. Assuming Norrath has the internet, of course.

I'm not going to say any more about Panda Panda Panda today because although I read that the event had started, I haven't been to see what the reclusive bears want this time. I'll get a separate post out of that soon enough, I'm sure.

I'm also not going to talk about the new(ish) Fabled dungeon that only arrived in the game a short time ago, with the summer update. It does have a solo mode I could try out but until yesterday I hadn't bothered to find out didn't know where the zone-in was. I do now but it's going to have to wait until I'm both in the mood and have the time for a proper session.

No, today I'm going to reveal a very few facts about this year's expansion prequel event, Heralds of Oblivion. Every year we get one of these, whether we want it or not. Sometimes they can be really good. I can remember a couple that kept me occupied for weeks, putting several characters through them for the experience or the loot. 

 

Mostly though, and especially recently, they've been a bit thin. Usually a very quick quest to introduce us to the next, previously unheard-of, Norrathian secret society and a bunch of repeatable quests so we can ingratiate ourselves with them for no very obvious reason. There seem to be an unlimited number of these groups, most of them self-appointed guardians of something or other, roaming around the world like a bunch of Boy Scouts looking for old ladies to help across the street or planar incursions to repel.

This yeare's bunch are called The Flamebearers and they differ from the usual run of do-gooders by being associated with Lady Najena, who I could have sworn was a Medium-Sized Bad last time I met her. She's organizing this year's bunfight all the same so maybe it's one of those enemy-of-my-enemy things or perhaps she's had a bang on the head. I imagine we'll meet her at some point and she'll monologue all about it.

Angeliana on the forums claims "Heralds of Oblivion is shaping up to be the biggest prelude event to rock Norrath since 2018’s Against the Elements event that preceded Chaos Descending." If I could remember what that one was like I might be able to benchmark against it. I bet I posted something... ah! Here we are...

"I spent more than two hours helping Freeport’s Academy of Arcane Science this morning. The introduction to the event was even more perfunctory than usual and the quest itself took less than ten minutes, half of which was finding the main questgiver... "

Hmm. That doesn't sound like it was much to write home about, does it? But wait...  "None of that mattered a jot when I got stuck into the gameplay. It's exactly what I want from an MMO."

Aha! That's more like it! And I remember something about it now. It was a big, open world affair, where you could fight waves of mobs and close rifts, just as if you were... playing Rift, I guess. I also noted "the rewards are fantastic", suggesting it wasn't just fun but profitable, too.  

It's too soon to say if this year's prequel matches up but the signs are promising. I ran through the first several quests last night and those were more substantial than usual. They took a while and involved some travel and some combat that was easy but not a complete walkover, thanks to mostly taking place in endgame zones, where I had a lot more trouble from random, wandering mobs than the ones I was there to kill. (There are also tradeskill quests for the non-combattants among us. I took those but haven't done them yet.)

 I can immediately see the similarity between 2025 and 2018 - it's another bunch of rifts that spawn waves of mobs you have to dispatch before firing up your doohickey and closing the portal. I did that the required number of times to progress the quests, along with a few other menial tasks, acquiring a bunch of event tokens along the way. Who takes those and what they give you for them I do not yet know.

I also don't know where the next questgivers are, the ones that hand out what I'm guessing are the repeatable quests. The event neatly sends you to whatever the highest-available open world zones for your character level might be, so in my case the NPCs will be somewhere in the two endgame open world zones, Sodden Archipelago and Western Wastes, but I couldn't find them and it was getting late so I decided to wait until someone posts their exact locations on the wiki or, better yet, adds the POIs to EQ2Maps.

I can say that the rifts I've had to close so far are not random. They appear in the same spots and have a fairly short cooldown, of the order of five or ten minutes I'd guess, meaning you can just pick one and stay there as long as you need. Or you can fly around like a dumb-ass like I did, looking for new ones, until you finally realize you just keep coming back to the same two.

At max level, I'd recommend the ones in Western Wastes for the simple reason that zone is much less cluttered with foliage, as the name suggests. A lot of it is flat ice floes, which makes spotting the rifts as you fly around much easier. Sodden Archipelago is a jungle and a bunch of ravines, so not ideal for aerial reconnaissance.

The storyline is interesting. Well, it is if you play EQII. Not, I imagine, for anyone else. The rifts are planar but don't appear to come from (Or, presumably, go to...) any planes we already know. The creatures coming out of them are vaguely elemental but of that odd order of elements that includes things like fog and mist. Dragon magic seems to be involved but there's no obvious draconic connection.

 

At one point a treant of some sort turns up and starts throwing threats and accusations about. Everyone denies having any intent to invade the plane of wood or wherever the hell the thing comes from but it pays no attention and keeps on ranting. 

I have to say I was intrigued. It made me wonder what the expansion might involve and where we might be headed, which is clearly the main point of an expansion prequel, so job done there, I'd say. I'll definitely follow the questline to the point when it becomes certain there's nothing more but repeatables for token or faction left. I might be at that point alread or I might not.

After that, I guess it depends how much fun closing the rifts is and how good the rewards are. I'll get back to you when I know more. 

All in all, though, a very solid start to this year's expansion cycle. 

#19 - Ratha - Born 4 July 2004 - 59 Days 21 Hours

Here she is. Ratha, the last of the significant characters we're going to meet on this long, slow, much-delayed journey through EverQuest's first quarter-century. As her close on sixty played days suggests, she got out quite a bit. Also, if this series didn't have an established format for the titles, I'd definitely have called this post Born On The Fourth Of July.

One thing this series has taught me, as if I didn't know it already, is that my memory is shot. Even that suggests it was ever any good to begin with, which it most certainly wasn't. I have always had a bad memory and waiting a couple of decades to write anything down sure isn't making it any better.

It'd be lovely if I could say for sure why I decided to roll up a new character on July the fourth, 2004, which would have been very close to the end of my second stint playing EQ as my main MMORPG. To recap a little, the first run lasted from November 1999 to whenever Dark Age of Camelot went live (9 October 2001) and the second from about six months after that until I got into the EverQuest II beta sometime around the end of August or the start of September 2004.

There was a third substantive phase that began when EQII puttered out about six months after launch, a fourth around the time of the Serpent's Spine expansion in September 2006, (That was the expansion that was intended to re-boot the franchise and nearly succeeded) and a fifth and final hurrah, at least as any kind of group player, when Seeds of Destruction arrived in October 2008, bringing with it the game-changing Mercenary feature. 

Since then, I've been back a good few times, occasionally for quite long runs lasting several months, but always as a solo player. After I created Ratha in June 2004, though, I never again felt the need to start over from scratch with a brand new character, or at least not one that stuck. I may well roll the final five names on this list into a single post because there won't be much to say about any of them.

Ratha, though, has a very substantial history. And if I could remember it, I'd tell you what it was. Here's what I do remember...

Her name, for a start. She's named after the central character in a novel called Ratha's Creature by Clare Bell, the first in a series of novels collectively known as "The Books of the Named". She's a sentient, prehistoric great cat, who learns how to use fire, so you can see why I went there. 

There are five books in the series, published sporadically between 1983 and 2008. I used to review books for a semi-pro comics zine back in the eighties, which is how I got hold of the first and second books in the series. They were review copies. I still have them and they made a big impression on me at the time although not so much that I've re-read either of them since or hunted down the three remaining volumes. 

Looking at them online now, I'm not too surprised to see they're all out of print (Although you can get them all on Kindle.) but more so to find they're quite collectable. I'll have to see if I can complete my set and finish the story.

As usual with just about every name I've ever given a character in any game, no-one sent me any tells saying they recognized the name or commented on it in any way. There seems to be very little common ground between the kind of books I read and the tastes of people who play these kinds of games. Which, of course, makes those books ideal sources for naming characters.

So that's why she's called Ratha. As for why she's a Beastlord, not too long before, we'd been spending a great deal of time grouped with an Eastern European guy around college age, young for our crowd, whose name I forget although I have a feeling it will come back to me [Edit - it didn't.] so I'd had plenty of opportunities to study the Beastlord gameplay as it was then. And boy was it OP!

A lot of EQ players strongly disapproved of Beastlords when they were introduced. The pushback was a factor in why the class didn't carry over into EQII, only being added there years later.

They were widely seen as easy-mode upstarts, created by the devs as some kind of sop to the idea that EQ was too difficult - too difficult to play solo and too difficult to get groups, both of which problems Beastlords seemed designed to fix.

Beastlords could do lots of things other classes could do, making them almost as good all-rounders as Norrath's famous jacks-of-all-trades, Bards. The big difference was you needed a lot of skill to play a Bard but any fool could play a Beastlord. That was their reputation, anyway. And it was half-way true. Having spent a lot of time with a couple of the best bards on the server, I knew what an incredible class it was but also how much chance I had of playing one well - none. The Beastlord, though, looked manageable. 

It also looked far more nuanced and interesting than its bad reputation suggested. Played competently, let alone well, a Beastlord could tank, heal, buff, handle crowd control and provide decent dps both at range and in melee. There was always something for a Beastlord to do in almost any situation or any group make-up. Shamans hated them for it because they did everything people wanted a Shaman for - not as well but well enough for most groups - and a lot more besides.

As I'd seen, though, since we frequently played in groups with a top-class Shaman, the two classes were perfectly able to sync if the players were willing. But then, in those happy days most of the players I grouped with regularly were both skilled and socially competent. I know! Hard to believe, isn't it? Shame it didn't last.

I do remember that those were my reasons for making a Beastlord. I just don't recall now why I needed a new character at all. Just looking at the dates, it's unlikely verging on impossible that whatever it was Ratha was meant to do ever got done. Not unless it only took a couple of months and in those days very little in EQ took as little time as that.

What actually happened that summer before the beta is lost to time but afterwards, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I finally abandoned the listing wreck that was EQII six months post-launch and returned to the safe harbor of the original EQ, literally no-one we knew there was still playing. They'd all left for... who knows? We only ever saw one of them again.

For that and other reasons, we declined to pick up where we left off on our established characters and instead started playing new ones. I've already written about our times on Stromm, which I remember relatively clearly, but how Ratha fits in is much more cloudy. She might also have been on Stromm for a while but if so I've forgotten about it.

What I remember very clearly are the times I spent playing her in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss. We had a good go at Depths of Darkhollow, the September 2005 expansion that all happens underground and we did a lot of the Serpents Spine expansion together. Ratha was my main character for both of those. I think we got to about Level 50 in TSS, probably stopping before we got to the end of Goruka Mesa, a zone that goes to the mid-fifities.

When we came back for our final duo tour in Seeds of Destruction three years later, it was for a hugely enjoyable romp through dozens of zones that had previoulsy been far out of our range. Playing as a "duo" comprising a Necromancer with a powerful pet, a Beastlord with an even more powerful pet and two full-time, dedicated Mercenary healers made us not that far off being a full group. 

It certainly allowed us to explore most zones in every expansion from Gates of Discord through to the opening of Secrets of Feydwer, few of which either of us had seen before. If the game was a theme-park, then anything earlier, even the once-impenetrable Elemental Planes and the Plane of Time itself, was the equivalent of the kiddies' tea-cup ride.

We had a great time. We kept it up for months, working our way through expansion after expansion, starting all the way back in Planes of Power and working our way up, swapping to the next if it ever got too hard, picking up AAs by the thousand and adding real levels steadily too, thanks to EQ's deep vertical progression that means expansions several years old frequently still bring in at least a dribble of xp, providing you can kill mobs by the score.

All good things... as they say. By the starter zone of Secrets of Faydwer, the expansion immediately preceding SoD, our levels had almost caught up with the cap and we had to play properly. Duoing was still practical and fun but it was clear we weren't going to get much further and knuckling down to grind out a few per cent of a level each session, while taking care not to get killed, wasn't nearly as much fun as romping across whole zones leaving a trail of smoking corpses in our wake.

That was the last time we visited Norrath together. We moved on to duo in several more MMORPGs, eventually settling down for another decade in Guild Wars 2. Mrs. Bhagpuss is probably done with MMORPGs now, after two full decades playing them pretty heavily. I continue to pick away at the genre, albeit with considerably less enthusiasm these days.

As for EverQuest, as I said, I've been back plenty of times since that final run in Seeds of Destruction. As I recall, the first time I returned alone, I did pick Ratha back up in the expectation of adding a few levels. She did get a couple more but, while she's a competent soloist with a mercenary behind her, it seemed awfully slow compared to what I'd been used to doing with her. It didn't last.

She ended up, beached in the mid-80s (Like a lot of us...) I did think about using last year's free Level 100 boost on her but there's not really much point. I would never play her and if I was going to boost anyone it'd probably be my Necromancer... who we'll meet next time. 

Didn't I already have a Necro, though? I did! Well remembered! He's still around. Somewhere. Just not in the right place. So the new Necro it would have to be.

Nikolaiovitch is his name. I'll tell you all about him another day. 

Trust me, it won't take long.

Heralding The Heralds

Jenn Chan, Darkpaw's "Head of Studio" dropped another Producer's Letter for EverQuest II yesterday. I imagine she posted one for the elder game, too, but I can't even pretend to be playing EverQuest any more so maybe I'll just skip that one. I wouldn't really understand what any of it was about, anyway.

Before I get started on the content, I have something to say about the nomenclature. Is Head of Studio" a new title? It's snappy. I like it. Although it kind of makes a nonsense of the whole "Producer's Letter" thing, doesn't it? Aren't they called that because the person writing them is the game's "Producer"? Shouldn't it be called the "Head's Letter" now? 

Except that sounds ridiculous. Like something your twelve year-old brings home from school to tell you the dates of the next school play and that the science block needs a new roof and would you like to help run a stall at the school fair to raise funds for repairs? 

Whatever she's calling it, Jenn Chan writes a good letter. She's affable, friendly, informative and she has a great line in what I think we're going to have to accept, much though we may not want to, are now generally known as "Dad Jokes". I'm minded to say she's the best Producer (Head of Studio.) the game's ever had although I'm not claiming I can remember all of them. She's certainly the least pretentious and most agreeable.

Her Producer's Letters are also very predictable, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. She's established a form and a structure and she's clearly happy to just keep going with it indefinitely. At least half of every letter is a recap of the previous one, detailing what she said was going to happen and confirming that it did or, if it didn't, which is rarely the case, why.

At this point I do have to wonder what the substantive difference is between a Producer's Letter and a Roadmap, other than that a Roadmap looks much flashier. In terms of content, they seem very similar. I don't in the least mind getting both but there does seem to be a deal of overlap.

According to the July letter, everything that was promised did indeed come to pass. There's an overview and a month-by-month breakdown of events since April, all with hyperlinks to the relevant press release or explanatory article on the official website. It really is about as well-documented a piece of reportage as you could hope to see. I would guess either Jenn is an excellent administrator herself or else she has one in her employ.

Following the studio's uninterrupted support for Pride Month this year, it perhaps shouldn't be a surprise to see the second paragraph of the letter celebrating Darkpaw's latest donation - $5,000 to the San Diego LGBT Community Center - but in the light of certain less admirable decisions made by other gaming companies (*cough* Jagex *cough*) it's more than usually heartening. 

I did manage to remember to pick up red pandas for all my characters on my main account although I'm not sure now if I got them on any of the others. Too late to worry about it now! Speaking of things you can have for (a given value of) nothing on every character, there's an odd promotion going on right now that gives you a Fabled Mount: Zhufeng, Harbinger of Mirth for every Krono you buy. 

Why they're specifically promoting the purchase of the "in-game objects that can be redeemed for 30 days of membership time" and also traded for Platinum within the game I'm not sure. They do cost $3 more than a regular monthly sub though, so I guess that would explain it. Presumably no-one actually uses Krono to pay for their subscription, only as a way to get the vast amounts of in-game currency needed to buy anything much on the broker in the age of hyper-inflation caused by people trading Krono...

You get one of those mounts for every Krono you buy, too, and twenty-five of them if you buy a twenty-five pack of Krono, which I did not even know was a thing you could do until I read the press release. Why anyone would want to buy 25 Krono at once is beyond me but apparently you can if you want. As to what you'd then do with 25 ugly flying fire-dragons... invade Freeport, maybe?

After recapping everything that's happened since the last time she wrote and reminding us of the current cash shop campaign, Jenn Chann goes on to tell us what to expect over the summer, which pretty much means recapping the roadmap and re-iterating what we can see in the handy in-game Events Calendar. I doubt anyone playing the game needs to told that after Tinker Fest comes Scorched Sky and Oceansfull any more than they need to know that after Thanksgiving comes Christmas and then New Year.

After all of that, we eventually come to something we didn't already know. Or that I didn't know, at least. 

Firstly, there's going to be "a Content Creator program" established later this year. What exactly that means we'll have to wait for the official announcement to find out but I'm assuming it means streamers. Not that I'd bother applying even if old-school blogs counted. I'm technically a "Content Creator" for Stars Reach and all that's done is make me feel uncomfortable posting about the game at all so I'd rather remain independent.

Next, we get to the really interesting part - some information about the upcoming expansion. Well, actually about the pre-expansion event, which has a name of its own - Heralds of Oblivion. We don't know what the expansion itself is called but that at least sets the tone.

In my experience, pre-expansion events, or "Preludes" as Jen calls this one, for any MMORPG fall into one of two categories - low-key and trivial or hyperactive and essential. There doesn't seem to be much of a middle ground. Either you're doing some busy work for a bunch of tedious NPCs who hand out rewards barely worth the bag space or the entire server is howling around in a huge gang, descending on every event like a swarm of locusts, desperate to hoover up the insane XP and/or huge upgrades.

As Jenn halfway acknowledges in the letter, we haven't had one of the good ones since 2018, when I described the rewards as "fantastic". Here's hoping this one at least matches it. It certainly seems to have some depth with "5 tradeskill quests, 5 adventure quests, 2 public quests, 2 collections". Pre-expansion PQs tend to be very popular and profitable in the first couple of weeks, until everyone has what they want, so I'm going to try and make sure I get in on the action early this year instead of leaving it to the end with all the other lazy bums.

As for what the expansion itself migh be about or where it might take us... no clue, really.  Jenn often ends with a pun that's supposed to offer a clue but this time there's just a picture of her standing in some kind of crater or hole and the tagline "No Bones about it, this is going to be good!", which I'm not even sure refers to the expansion.

It might just as easily refer to Game Update 129, also discussed in the letter and due to arrive in August. That one's called Fear of Eternity and includes Solo and Heroic versions of some of the dungeons or instances from the Chains of Eternity expansion from 2012.

I would have said I wouldn't be doing any of that, since I can't do very much of the instance that came with GU128 yet. That, however, should be fixed with the new one because it comes with a "Gear Catch-up Crate" designed to "get you straight into the GU action".

I'm probably going to do a separate post on this, for which I'll wait until I've been able to see the gear and the stats, but welcome though all this free stuff is, I can't help thinking the whole gear-ladder-catch-up thing in EQII is getting out of hand. It looks like we're going to get three complete new sets of upgrades to all our gear given to us for free in just four months - the GU Catch-Up crate in August, the Panda gear in September and then the Tishan's Box with the expansion in November. Is that overkill? Certainly starting to look like it.

The Herald's of Oblivion Catch-Up Crate is, however, only available to All Access members and the Tishan's only for those who buy the expansion, while anyone at all can get the panda gear just for the trouble of doing some very quick and easy quests, so there is an argument for all three, I guess. Best not to be inspecting the dental records of any gift horses too closely.

And that's about it. Another letter sent, received, read and discussed. Let's all meet back here in three months and we'll do it all over again.