I See A Darkness : EQ2

Darkness and night-vision have long been contentious topics in MMORPGs. At one end of the argument you have the "Night-time should be Freakin' Terrifying" crew, mostly survivors of the Rivervale - Kithicor - Commonlands run or those few Barbarians who actually owned a Greater Lightstone.

At the other extreme comes Team "Mommy lets me Sleep with the Lights On".  They feel a gentle blue tint is more than enough to let you know darkness has fallen.

There seems little doubt where the good folk at Daybreak Games stand on the matter. Allow me to illustrate:

Antonica at Dawn. A little too much of the Roger Deans, perhaps, but bright and cheery with it.

Antonica at Noon. Overcast. Looks like rain. Visibility: good.

Antonica at Sunset. Air pollution index: high. Or possibly I am. 

Antonica at Midnight. Good thing my pet's made of granite. Granite's radioactive, didn't you know?

Also, isn't it lucky I'm a Conjuror? We have Infravision! Look what a difference that makes!

The sea around Antonica seems to be mildly phosphorescent. Doesn't help much, does it?

This is The Caves. It's underground. Can you tell how it's different to Antonica at night? No? Well, this is The Caves in day time!

Antonica, just before Dawn. You can tell it's just before dawn because the crickets start chirping. And it gets just light enough to find out where in the hell you are.

It's A Boot Time : EQ2

You might not think getting to Level 10 in an MMORPG much of an achievement. I'd agree with you, although longtime veterans of EverQuest and its contemporaries could give you an argument, I guess. As far as EQ2 is concerned, however, reaching your tenth season, as the roleplayers used to say, is something to be celebrated.

That's actually going to kick me in the small of the back...

When my Conjuror dinged 10 last night not one but two banner headlines flashed across the screen. There was the regular accolade for hitting double digits that the game hands out on any server - usually in the first hour or so, if you haven't been slacking - but there was also a second pat on the back for doing it on the new, time-limited progression server, Fallen Gate.

I say "pat on the back". It was a bit more than that. More like a kick up the backside.

As has been observed elsewhere, Daybreak chose to sweeten the progression pot this time around with a variety of rewards that apply not only on the new server itself but to any character on the account, regardless of which server they call home. The most prominently promoted of these has been the execrable Pedipowered Posterior Punter.

This abomination has the effect of a mount (29% ground speed bonus) and it goes in the Mount slot but visually it's a back item. As a Fae with wings it looks terrible. Even more terrible, that is, than on anyone else.

The "Leaping" effect also seems to cancel my Fae "glide", a short, aerial coasting effect that kicks in every time I hit the space bar. At least it doesn't cancel the Fae "featherfall" racial trait that eliminates falling damage.

Fortunately, the joke mount, which I am never going to use on any character that has anything else to ride, obviously, isn't the main cross-server benefit of playing on Fallen Gate. If you get to Level 30 there's a boost for the newly-added Familiars that looks worth having. There are also account-wide rewards for completing any Heritage Quest.

I'm a bit hazy on what those rewards might be. From a modicum of research it appears to be infinite access to the HQ reward itself, for free, in perpetuity for any and all characters you might make on that account... always providing the vendors that supply them are a) present on your server and b) present in game.

Any color you like so long as it's orange.

At the moment the Inheritance Merchants are disabled due to some exploit or other. I fully expect that, if and when new Progression servers appear, those Merchants will be on vacation in much the same way the /claim window on Fallen Gate is miraculously empty.

Well, almost empty. For some arcane reason (appropriately) there's single item left in my claim locker: the Arcanna`se Effigy of Rebirth. I believe this has survived because somewhere in the small print of the sales literature for the last expansion it stated that this freebie would be useable on TLE servers.

Should be applied to inventor.

Of course, no-one said it would work there.

I'll save claiming my effigy for the Live server (actually I'll probably forget to claim it at all and even if I do I'll certainly forget to use it...) but it made me think about the whole outlawing of claimable items on Progression servers. The intention, supposedly, is to avoid tainting the pure, retro ambience with all the fluff and powercreep of later expansions. It's an explanation that doesn't really bear up under even the most casual scrutiny.

Anyone who's played EQ2 for a while - even a few hours - has access to a number of rewards that include things like speed boosts and xp potions. These weren't in the original game, true, but then neither was the Lucky Wolf Paw, a 17 % speed boost, charm slot item that the game virtually gives you in an attempt to lure you into taking up a tradeskill. Neither could you buy all your Expert crafting books from 1-10 from a vendor in the crafting hall when the game first began - or for a long time afterwards.

After swimming my wings lock in the downward position which makes me look like some kind of steampunk angel

The cloth of the supposedly "original" game is riddled with such holes in this unconvincing reproduction to the point where you wonder if it could possibly fool anybody. As for potions to improve the sluggardly rate of xp, excluding the large number of free ones veterans can claim might come across as more "authentic" if you couldn't just buy the very same potions in unlimited quantities from the Daybreak Cash Shop. Could there be some connection between those two facts? I wonder...

Oh well, they have to make money somehow. And I'm finding the leveling speed on Fallen gate just about right anyway. I looked at the xp potions for a minute or two before realizing that, no, it's not about the cost - I don't want to go any faster.

There are worse places to settle down.

So much for Adventure. When it comes to Crafting, as yet I still can't see any difference between tradeskilling on FG and the way it works on a Live server. The bald statement in the official FAQ that "Tradeskilling should look similar to the original EverQuest II launch" seems to be out-and-out nonsense. I'll persist a little just to see if that changes but I think it unlikely.

Apart from that I imagine I'm done with Fallen Gate for now. Or, rather, FG will become yet another server on which I have a character who I like but rarely play.

Perhaps the most useful thing about the whole exercise has been the discovery that I enjoy playing a Fae. Conjuror, I'm not so struck on but being a little floaty thing with butterfly wings? That works for me.

Might have to buy another character slot...

Getting My Wings : EQ2

Yesterday, in a move that would have had my grandmother wondering "if Johnny jumped in a lake, would you jump in too?", I made a character on the new EQ2 progression server, Fallen Gate.

I had said I wouldn't, and even when Wilhelm flagged up the launch I shrugged it off . Stargrace's brief exposure to what can, these days, be the somewhat toxic atmosphere of the EQ2 vet pack in full cry did little to make me change my mind.

But then I read Atheren and Telwyn talking about it in warmer tones and it was Sunday and the sun was shining and I didn't have much in mind for a blog post that day...

As with the Secret Worlds Legend revamp, the whole (arguably the only) point of the exercise is to keep the money coming in. Therefore, you need a subscription to play on Fallen Gate, even though, "subscription" still being a dirty word at Daybreak Games even with Smed long out the door, the scheme must be referred to at all times as "All Access", as though it was some kind of exclusive backstage pass.

I notice, however, that someone, possibly someone from Legal, possibly some off-message long-timer in a windowless cubicle somewhere at the back of Marketing, has seen fit to add an asterisked line in very small print to the All Access page, clarifying that, yes, $9.99 a month really is a "12 month subscription". So, you need a sub.

Don't you hate getting your wings wet? Oh, and Spoilers! Sorry!

I have a sub. I have two, actually. Mine and Mrs Bhagpuss's, which I pay for and which she hasn't used since the day GW2 launched and will, most likely never use again. Still, the proprieties must be observed.

It's been more than a month since I logged into EQ2. I may even have missed one of my monthly stipends of 500 Daybreak Cash, something I am assiduous in making sure I never do, even though I rarely spend any of it. Even before Columbus Nova took over the reins, old SOE changed the rules so you have to log in and claim that imaginary money, rather than have it stuffed into the sock under your ratonga's bed automagically, as happened in the good old days.

That was another good reason to jump in, make a character, wreck around for half an hour, log out and write it up for laughs. Only, in order to make a character you not only have to have a sub - you also have to have a free character slot. I didn't.

I think you get eight slots as an All Access member. I have nine on that account. All full.

They also serve, who only stand and bank.

I absolutely detest deleting characters. To me, they are all people. Deleting them is murder. Still, I did look, just to see if anyone might be expendable. Nope. All of them are freighted with history of one kind or another, even the Level 17 channeler I'll probably never play because I really don't understand how the class is supposed to work.

The only possible candidate for oblivion was the Level 3 wizard. Never played, never going to be played. A female human I don't even much like. But...she is one of the founders of our guild.

Indeed, the account she's on was started specifically to bump up the numbers when the first of SOE's F2P servers, Freeport, began. You needed six separate accounts to make a guild and we didn't have enough, so, since it was free, I made another and the Wizard was the character I pushed through, taking all the default options at character creation so as to get into game as soon as possible.

That's why I'll never play her and never delete her. So, what to do?

Hardly made a dent.

Well, remember all that DBC I mentioned, stacking up, month after month, with nothing to spend it on? Turns out I was hoarding more than 16,000DBC on that account. Extra character slots come at 1000DBC each.

Next question: what class? I thought about that for a good while. I looked at all the options. Scouts I just cannot get along with in EQ2. Never could. I've tried Swashbucklers and Dirges and Rangers with not much pleasure and no success at all. The only "Scout" class I've ever enjoyed and leveled to the (then) cap is the Beastlord, which to my mind is no kind of "scout". Should always have been a Fighter, like it is in EQ.

Beastlord is a lot of work, though. Scouts out, I looked at Priests and Fighters. Plenty of excellent options there but that's the problem: I already have all the ones I like, multiple times. I don't want another Berserker or Inquisitor or Shadowknight or Bruiser. Playing one of those will just remind me of all the other, more established versions I should be leveling.

I feel pretty, oh so pretty...

To cut what was a twenty minute internal debate short, I went with Conjuror. I only have one of those and although he's in the 90s I never really gelled with him. I named him after an author I liked and later found out I'd misremembered the author's name, so that always niggles. Plus he has a mustache. What was I thinking?

After class comes race. First choice is always ratonga. If it's not a ratonga it's going to be a gnome. Not much else even gets a look-in. Kerra, maybe, or Dwarf, but I have never really liked the models for either.

Then, for some inexplicable reason, I looked at the Fae. I have tried to play a fairy before but it's never taken off, so to speak. Those wings, though, they're really pretty...

I played with the sliders and the drop-downs for a while and got a character I rather liked. It's not like I'm going to be playing on Fallen Gate for years, anyway. Why not?

Off with the Old Old, on with the New Old.

And so my new Fae Conjuror was born. Having, if not broken, then at least slightly cracked the mold, I determined to carry on in the same vein. I took the option to skip the ride on The Far Journey and when I arrived at The Queen's Colony, instead of leveling all the way to seven or eight as I usually would I went to speak to Captain Varlos when I was still only Level 2.

As befits a Fae I continued to flit around. I tried The Peat Bog, Forest Ruins, The Caves and Oakmyst Forest, searching for somewhere I could kill something. Anything I could kill had no quest attached and gave little xp. Anything that a quest required I couldn't kill, either because it was Level 6 and I was Level 2 and almost naked or because a dozen other newbies were queuing up to kill it too.

Experience gain and leveling speed on Fallen Gate have supposedly been pegged back to resemble (vaguely) what people remember (inaccurately) from launch. It was, let me tell you, much slower than this back then. Much, much, much slower.

My time spent exploring the options available turned out to be far from wasted.The xp you get from discovering a new area doesn't seem to have been adjusted at all. I was getting half a level just from poking my nose into a new zone. Well, maybe not half but as much as dozens of mob kills would have given me and in a tiny fraction of the time for no effort whatsoever.

Screw authenticity. Where's the loot?

What I wasn't getting was any gear. Embarrassing myself as I remembered the pompous and passive-aggressive comment I'd left on Telwyn's blog, where I claimed "I don’t have a lot of time for any of the four recommended starter areas, regardless of the fact that they drop much better gear and have much better quest rewards", I took the Mariner Bell to Frostfang Sea so I could do the starter quests and get better gear and drops.

As a Fae, where I wanted to go was Greater Feydark and its city, Kelethin, built by elves but now the Official Home of The Fae, but it wasn't on the bell. I'd forgotten; it wasn't rediscovered until the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. That was EQ2's seventh. At the set unlock date of once every three months we should see Kelethin sometime in early 2019.

So, Frostfang Sea it was, except that the Bell drops you next to Halas at the Level 19 end of the map. I did almost a level in discovery xp just getting back to the starting area. Once there I bedded down and did some quests, got some gear, killed a named rolling rock (twice) and generally had a good time.

I'm sorry, could you say that again, only slower? I'm trying to take notes...

For a quarter of an hour or so I planted myself in the path of an endless stream of orcs emerging from the sea and slaughtered them all. It was like a conveyor belt to an orc chipper with me doing the chipping. I got a ton of drops, learned to speak Orc and completed Orc Mastery.

Not sure any of that was remotely in keeping with a return to the spirit of the original game. Try that back in 2004 and you'd have had xp debt up the wazoo and enough soul shards to start your own graveyard, which is where you'd be waking up after each wave of orcs was finished with you.

No, playing on Fallen Gate is nothing like the game at launch, praise be to all that's holy and Scott Hartsman. It's fun for a start. So much fun that the half hour I meant to spend there turned into an hour, then two, then three.

I was hoping to get to Level 10 so I could take a picture of the execrable mount you get then. Despite not being launch-era slow, however, xp on Fallen Gate is slowish. I stopped at Level 6 with my crafting at Level 7.

I wish I could say this is what I made for myself but actually this is Legacy gear I bought from my trainer, displaying from the Appearance slots, something else we didn't have Back In The Day.

Speaking of crafting, there was some talk about it being similar to how it was at launch. Indeed, the official FAQ claims "Tradeskilling should look similar to the original EverQuest II launch." This caused a lot of excitement in certain secure facilities where the walls are soft and the inmates write in crayon but as far as I can tell crafting on FG is identical to crafting on Live at the same level.

Because I'm not a masochist I wasn't hoping for the return  of WORTS and class interdependency but I did feel a tremble of excitement at the though that we might once again be able to level up on tradeskill discovery xp. Nope.

Anyway, I made myself a full set of crafted armor and jewellery. All I have to do is make all my spell upgrades and I will be as ready for action as it gets.

Bring it on, Level 10!