Eviction Notice

Just a little FYI for any EverQuest II players out there. There's got to be someone, right? Two weeks from today, on March 21, the Kaladim server will be merged into Antonia Bayle. The Tarinax PvP server is also merging into AB at the same time, although I'm pretty sure that's not going to affect anyone reading this.

None of this should come as much of a surprise. It was in the roadmap, after all. I confess I'd completely forgotten about it, all the same. According to that schedule, Tarinax will be replaced by a new PvP-TLE server next month but there's no new PvE-TLE server this year, hardly surprising since the most recent, Varsoon, hasn't yet unlocked the third expansion, 2006's Echoes of Faydwer.

Kaladim is "only" four years old. I put only in inverted commas because I remember when John Smedley speculated in an interview that the original EverQuest might, with luck, last three to five years. EQ is twenty-four this month. EQII will be nineteen later this year.

Still, by modern standards, four years isn't much of a run. I was surprised when I logged in this morning  to see the announcement. I'd have thought Kaladim might have had a while longer to go before the inevitable roll-up. It just goes to show the industrial nature of Daybreak's special rules server operation, I guess. They roll out, they roll on, they roll up. No drama. And now I come to think of it, at the automated pace of Time-Limited Server unlocks, I suppose four years is the full, expected life.

The process is streamlined to a fault. There's an astonishingly re-assuring FAQ on what you need to do to prepare: in short, nothing. Over the years, during what must by now amount to dozens of similar events, every possible problem has been revealed and solved. Banks, houses, inventory, mail, even those dungeons you made to store tens of thousands of housing items (Yep, that really is what the hardcore decorators use that old, mothballed feature for.) it all just moves seamlessly across.

About the worst that's likely to happen is you might get an x or two added to the end of your name. That's happened to me a few times, even though I generally pick very unlikely names. For Kaladim, though, I chose something so obvious I was excited enough to have snagged it I made a post about it. I'll be miffed to lose my rights to Lana. I never did give her that surname...

I'm actually mildly irritated to find the server is folding at all. It's not as if I play there often but I have been in the habit of dropping by for the holidays to do some quests, pick up a few sticks of furniture, maybe a hat... I had things quite nicely set up and I particularly liked the way everything Lana owns is something she's picked up for herself at low level by doing the kind of things someone who lived in a world like that might feasibly do for fun or profit.

Of course, it will all transfer with her, unchanged, but it won't have the same metaphysical imprimatur. It's the sort of thing that used to mean a great deal to me, when I took virtual worlds a lot more seriously than I do now. Vestiges of that level of attachment still surface occasionally.

I also don't much like Antonia Bayle. It used to be the official roleplaying server - may still be, for all I know - and for a long time it was by some margin the most highly-populated. Then something happened to it - I don't know what - and the population crashed to the point that Daybreak were actively trying to encourage people to transfer there for a while.

I'm guessing it's still the lowest population of the mainstream servers because every merge seems to take Ant Bayle as its destination these days. I don't have anyone there at the moment but only because the last time this happened I moved somewhere else before I was pushed. 

You can do that because Daybreak is happy to give you the choice if you care enough to take it. As the FAQ explains, "Right now, if you log in to your character, you will find a character transfer token that will allow you to pick the server to which you wish to transfer. You will be able to use this token until the servers come down for the merge on March 21, 2023."

I'm going to get right on that as soon as I finish this post. I haven't decided yet where to go. All my other characters bar one are on Skyfire so that's the obvious choice but moving there will strip away any residue of originality that might be left. Once on Skyfire, Lana will have access to all the wealth and resources of my high-level characters, instantly rendering her insignificant and meaningless to play.

In fact, her very isolation over on Kaladim was what held my interest in how she was doing. It was a small reminder of the way I used to play, when I'd regularly start new characters on fresh servers just for the pleasure of having to raise them by their own bootstraps. In the case of Kaladim, I particularly appreciated the way certain overpowering Veteran and special event  items I'd normally have been able to claim on any character I made were blocked until the server caught up with the apropriate era, although it's fair to say that by now all those have unlocked anyway.

Not counting Kaladim, Tarinax, Test and Beta, there are currently eight servers to choose from: the aforementioned Antonia Bayle and Skyshrine plus Halls of Fate and Maj`Dul all use the standard ruleset, while Isle of Refuge is the "Free Trade" server and the most recent addition, Kael Drakkel, is flagged "Lore and Legend". The current TLE server, which, as I said, is Varsoon, also uses a free trade ruleset and the final server is the EU-based Thurgadin.

I'm still mulling over my choice of destination. I'm tempted to give Varsoon a try. If not, I might go to Isle of Refuge. They both at least offer the possibility of something different to the experience I can already get on Skyfire. I already have a character on Kael Drakkel, where you start at 90 and stay there because everything, everywhere is the same level. I tried it for a while but I really couldn't see the point so I won't be going back.

I note that the instructions on the server transfer token, unlike those in the FAQ, do stress that shared banks, mail and broker boxes need to be cleared before moving, so there's some housekeeping I'll need to attend to before I leave. With the deadline just a couple of weeks away, I suppose I'd best get started.

Boost Me Up

By way of a public service announcement here's a paragraph from today's update notes for EverQuest II :

Destiny of Velious – New Heroic Character

Start your adventures in Destiny of Velious with a free limited 85 heroic character! With the launch of Destiny of Velious, each account will earn a single Level 85 character boost upon logging into the Kaladim server.

This boost is granted once per account and grants gear appropriate for starting adventuring in Destiny of Velious overland content, and may be placed in the shared bank.

Yep! Another one. 

As you might guess from the headline, this particular boost is in honor of the opening of the Destiny of Velious expansion on the Time Limited Expansion server Kaladim. It's kind of a big deal for several reasons, not least that a lot of people have been waiting none too patiently for it to get here.

DoV is one of the larger and more favored expansions. It added the hub city of Thurgadin, consolidated Public Quests as a central feature and it was also the expansion that introduced flying mounts, something that, as we all know, can often be a literal game-changer. I believe the raiding was well-received, too, although that's a long way out of my remit.

For once, the basic Level 85 boost is entirely appropriate. DoV shifts the cap to 90 so 85 is the starting line for what will be end-game content for a good while to come. If anyone had been thinking about playing on Kaladim, this would definitely be the time to do it.

You would, of course, need a subscription. Sorry! A membership. EQII's free to play offer, while still generous, is no longer anything like as inclusive as it was back when Smed was trying to convince everyone F2P Your Way was the future.

I do have All Access membership. And it's the account where I made my character on Kaladim back when the server started. I would not be averse to starting a new level 85 there and running around with the leveling crowd for a week or two.

Shame I don't have a free character slot.

I did consider buying (yet) another one. It's not like I don't have the Daybreak Cash. Thing is, I just did that a few months ago when I made my Vah Shir and I haven't even finished levelling her yet. It seems a bit of a stretch to imagine if I made a fresh 85 on Kaladim that I'd actually play them.

There is another option. It's not a free level 85 character Darkpaw's giving away. It's a free level 85 boost. And as I said I have a character on Kaladim already. I could bump her up to 85. 

I considered that too. The thing is, I really like her. I haven't played her much recently but I did get her all the way to level twenty back when Kaladim launched and that certainly wasn't nothing. She's wearing all her starting armor in her appearance slots and she looks great in it. And I named her Lana. That pretty much sealed it. We bonded, she and I.

Any excuse, eh?

From experience, jumping an existing character sixty levels makes for a disconnect. I've done it a couple of times and it tends to derail the process. It would probably be okay if I went straight from boosting to levelling up to that 90 cap. That would give some context and continuity. 

I'm not going to do that, though. Partly because I have too much else going on at the moment and partly because I've done those levels in Velious a few times too often. I enjoyed it the first two or three times but I'm not keen to see it all again just now.

So that'll be yet another character level boost in the bank. At least it's a bit different from the rest in that I can only use it on one server. Is that an improvement?

The level boost is a freebie but naturally Darkpaw would also like to sell you something. Normally I don't even bother to mention the packs that they put together for occasions like this but I have to say the Destiny of Velious Crate is pretty darn good for the price.

It costs $34.99, which is a lot, but there's a lot inside. There's a flying mount, appropriately, although perhaps less-appropriately it's a dinosaur. Now that's new. Then there's a Velium Multi-forge you can place in your house that acts as any craft station. Incredibly useful. 

There's a 66 slot bag, always very welcome, but this one "includes a friendly (antagonistic) goblin that will jump out and make faces at people behind you. " Seriously, who doesn't want one of those? And there's an NPC who'll port you "right outside all of the critical Velious dungeons". I might want to see a list of which ones count as "critical" but that sounds spiffy, doesn't it?

There's a load more in the crate and it's all good, useful stuff. I'm not going to go through the whole lot. Just go check the link if you want to know. If I go on much longer about it here someone's going to start wondering if I'm being paid to plug the thing. Which, sadly, I'm not. I just know a bargain when I see one.

All the stuff can be used on any server and frankly if this was at a different point in the expansion cycle I'd be seriously thinking about buying one. It's that good. Yet again, though, it's not a good time to invest in EQII because I have too much else going on and it wouldn't get the use it deserves.

Wilhelm had a post up recently about some unusually timely and relevant advertising Daybreak had been doing. I do think this pack looks better targeted and better priced than some we've seen before. I wonder if EG7's influence is beginning to make itself felt?

There's stuff going on in EQII that doesn't require either membership, real money or much of a time commitment, too. I ought to mention that while I'm here.

The Oceansfull festival is back with some nice, new rewards and a new three-part Overseer mission. That will get you a house pet, a permanent illusion and a title. I'm going to run it on several characters. It doesn't take long. Oceansfull runs 'til the 18th and then Scorched Sky begins a week later on the 25th.

I think that's about it for now. Oh, except to honk my own horn a little. I put in a bug report back at the beginning of April and today's patch notes confirmed it had been fixed. Always nice to know someone's listening.

I'll leave you with this mysterious message, also from today's patch notes:

Names

• All servers, except Thurgadin, will now enforce English character names.

Really? We all have to call ourselves things like Nigel or Hilary? 

Bags me Arbuthnot!

Rusty Time Machine

As I was logging in to EverQuest II this morning I spotted something strange in the launcher. It said on the news feed that Destiny of Velious is scheduled to arrive next week on the time-limited expansion server, Kaladim. 

That didn't sound right. In my mind, DoV is a fairly recent expansion and although I don't play on Kaladim all that often, I was under the impression it was still lagging well behind Velious.

But what do I know? Not much, it seems. Granted, the headline is misleading but not nearly as misleading as my memory.

To make it clear, Destiny of Velious does not go live on Kaladim on May 11th, even though the forum thread linked on the launcher clearly says it does. If you call a thread "Destiny of Velious Opens on May 11th!" what else are people going to think?

The truth of the matter is, as you find when you read past the title, it's the beta for DoV that begins on the eleventh. The beta is set to run for four weeks, so a more infornmative headline might read "Destiny of Velious Opens on or around June 8th, after four-week beta." Not so eyecatching but a lot more accurate.

Moving on to the substantive issue of whether or not Destiny of Velious is, as I thought, a fairly recent expansion, I'd like to hedge a little and bring out the old relativism argument. It depends on what you mean by "recent", doesn't it?

 

Yeah, I'd like to do that but it's not going to fly this time. EQII has had seventeen expansions so far. DoV was the seventh. It came out in 2011. Ten years ago. That's not recent in gaming terms. Not even for an mmorpg.

And yet it feels very recent to me. Even though it happened four years before Sony Online Entertainment gave way to Daybreak, who themselves have now given way to EG7. Feels more like three or four years ago than a decade.

I think I know why. Destiny of Velious was the last EQII expansion before the launch of Guild Wars 2. That means it was the last one I played with Mrs. Bhagpuss and the last while our guild was active and busy with anything up to a dozen members popping in and out. It was the last EQII expansion I played with people I knew and because of that it has become fixed in my mind as a separate thing from all the expansions I've played since, on my own.

Except even that isn't entirely accurate. Destiny of Velious wasn't the final EQII expansion we bought and played together, just the last normal one. In December 2011, just nine months after DoV, we got the highly controversial Age of Discovery. Instead of the usual overland zones, dungeons and new features that made up a traditional EQII expansion, AoD only had features. 

It had mercenaries, the Dungeon Maker, the Beastlord class, reforging and tradeskill assistants. Maybe some other stuff. You could buy the lot as an "expansion" or the individual items piecemeal in the cash shop. Also, just to confuse matters, at the same time the whole game went free-to-play.

 

We carried on playing for another six months and then first The Secret World and after that Guild Wars 2 took over. The next EQII expansion I bought was 2014's Altar of Malice. In time I played through the ones I'd missed and I've paid for every one that's come along since but Mrs. Bhagpuss hasn't set foot in Norrath since 2012 and the last member of our guild logged out for the final time only weeks before I returned. It's been just me for the last seven years.

I guess that's why Destiny of Velious seems like it wasn't all that long ago. Particularly when you look at the expansions that came immediately after, Chains of Eternity and Tears of Veeshan. Those two are EQII's Shadowlands. 

They're set in the realm of the dead, or at least one of them, the Ethernere. They have a very different, floatier feel than the solidity of both frozen Velious and  subterranean Thalumbra which bookend them. Even though I did eventually finish both their signature questlines it was with overleveled characters who'd already outgrown them and they remain insubstantial in my memory.

It's not until Altar of Malice, whose re-introduction of the Isle of Refuge and masterful playing of the nostalgia card finally lured me back from Tyria, that expansions begin to feel like somewhere I once lived rather than somewhere I spent a couple of weeks on holiday. Given that history, it begins to make sense, the way Destiny of Velious seems to have landed so much more recently than a decade ago.

But of course our memories are always unreliable. We forget so much and what we think we remember is so often wrong. Which is why facts always need to be checked.

For reasons only they could explain, Daybreak maintains a complete archive on the official EQII website of every news item they've ever published there. It starts all the way back in April 2004, well before even the first closed beta, with a somewhat bathetic entry that reads (in full) "Introducing EQ2.Graffe.com. Once concerned with wizard-only EQ II information, EQ2.Graffe now offers info from the perspective of all EverQuest II classes."

 

In common with most of the websites linked in subsequent press releases (and there are many of them), EQ2.Graffe is no more. The news items are peppered with links, almost all of which are dead, not least because so many of them go to SOE forums or pages that vanished when the company was sold.

Some of the articles, interviews and videos can be found elsewhere with a google search but for many there's nothing but dead air, particularly when the entire piece only ever consisted of a hyper-linked headline. Others survive as stubs and some are still there in all their original arcane and archaic glory. There's some very peculiar and fascinating reading to be had and some unexpected things to be discovered or, as I have to keep reminding myself, re-discovered.

For example, I always knew EverQuest II was popular enough in Japan for there to have been a Japanese localized server. It was called Sebilis and it survived until 2016, when it was finally merged into Antonia Bayle. 

What I had forgotten, if indeed I ever knew it, was that for the first couple of years, including the release of Desert of Flames, the first expansion, EQII was published in Japan by Square Enix. EQII was once a Square Enix game! That boggles the mind, particularly when you consider that SOE was a division of Japanese megacorp, Sony. Why did they even need a Japanese publisher?

As I dug through the archive I came across plenty of things that didn't seem to make sense or more likely didn't match my memories of them. The servers at launch, for example, don't include Steamfont, where we made our first characters and which was our home until it was eventually merged with Oasis, a server which was there at launch. 

EQII launched on November 9 2004 with a dozen servers including three in Europe. Steamfont wasn't even in the first wave of extra servers added to absorb the influx of players keen to play the game the press had been hailing as the first true second-gen mmo. It didn't come online until 11 November 2004, two days after the date usually quoted as the official launch, when demand was so high another ten servers had to be added. 

I don't have an explanation for why we might have waited two days before making our first characters. Wikipedia quotes separate launch dates for the US and EU, with the EU launch date not coming until November 11 so maybe there was some delay. If so, it's not recorded in SOE's breathless commentary and I certainly don't remember it, although I do remember that we had intended to play on the Test server but had to change those plans because it wasn't until December 1st we even had confirmation there was going to be one. 

History is so hard to parse. Even relatively recent history. Fragmentary notes like these help a lot to build a picture but occasionally the fractured pieces just won't line up. Still, it's wonderful to have evidence of some things I've always believed but couldn't prove, such as the attritionally slow levelling speed.

 

Imagine an mmorpg launching today in which the level cap was fifty and you didn't even get to choose your class until twenty. And then imagine the fastest players in the entire world taking two or three days to get there. To level twenty, that is! 

Three days grind before you even got to play the class you've chosen would be enough to sink most launches nowadays but back then it would have been a pace most EQII players could only gaze at in envy and disbelief. I think it took me about two weeks to get my first character to twenty. Or maybe it was a month...

I'll probably never know for sure. Add it to the list. Of course, if I'd had a blog, I could just go and look it up. 

If I'd given the post about it a helpful headline, that is. Something like "Ding! Level 20 in EQII at last!". Maybe I should think about future me when I'm patting myself on the back for being so clever with these post titles. 

Yeah, and maybe someone at Daybreak should do something about all those broken links. They did archive all those SOE pages when they took over, didn't they? Didn't they??

We all have a responsibility to history, after all.

Too Much Information

The last couple of weeks felt like something of a fallow period for the blog but this morning I woke up with enough ideas for several posts. I considered doing one of those portmanteu pieces with bullet points for unrelated topics but then I thought why not do several short pieces and  pad my post count for the month give each of the topics room to breathe?

Yesterday saw two of the most pointlessly overinflated sets of patch notes I have ever refused to read. Guild Wars 2 dropped its long-threatened "Competetive Content Update", Call To Glory, while EverQuest II unlocked the gates for the delayed opening of the Echoes of Faydwer expansion on the prgression server Kaladim.

The GW2 update brings a number of things to the game, including the long, long promised Swiss Tournaments for PvP and a new Reward track giving a skin for the Warclaw mount in WvW. Mostly what it does, though, is attempt a combat reset for both player vs player modes by way of draconian nerfs across the board to all classes.

The plan is to slow everything down, bringing fights back to the supposedly manageable level of a few years ago before Elite specifications from two expansions turned power creep into power sprint and fights degenerated into a competition to see who could hit their one shot skill macro fastest.

I can't say I'd really noticed. I play a Staff Elementalist in World vs World on all three accounts. I play that combo whether it's in fashion (like it was when Meteor Shower was buffed to one-shot whole zergs) or out (almost all the rest of the time). I might occasionally tweak a skill here or change a rune there but mostly I'm playing the same build on all three characters that I was playing before Heart of Thorns.

Consequently, even though I have getting on for twenty Level 80s covering all eight classes I only bothered to read the section on Elementalists, and then only the skills I use. Just as well. It's an opening paragraph and twenty-five detail entries. All the other classes get the same, often more.

The gist is "all your attacks do a lot less damage". They could have left it at that as far as I'm concerned. I went and soloed a Tier 1 camp this morning to see how bad it was (it was too busy last night - I literally couldn't take a camp without three people arriving out of nowhere to "help").

It was noticeably slower and I did have to back off and heal but I was still able to run into the middle, fire off everything as soon as it came off cooldown and clear the lot, so I'm happy. I wouldn't fancy trying it on an upgraded camp but even those should be fine if I go back to the old ways (aka playing properly) and actually pull stuff .

There was one change to Elementalist I really liked. ANet have buffed the heck out of the summoned pets. They now last two minutes on a forty second cooldown, meaning you can have one up most of the time if you want. It almost turns GW2's Elementalist into EQ's Magician, which works for me.

Even though I personally don't feel any need to read the nit-picking detail of every change to every ability of every class I play I can at least see the logic of tabulating them all out for everyone to study. Something will matter to someone in every case, I'm sure.

The same surely cannot be said about the torrent of detail unleashed in EQII's patch notes yesterday. Here's a sample:

• Wind-Scoured Confessor's Bracelet: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 6, Stamina increased by 6, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 1.8, Offensive Skills increased by 3, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Wind-Scoured Stalker's Bracelet: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 6, Stamina increased by 6, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 1.8, Offensive Skills increased by 3, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Facet of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 2, Hate increased by 1.9, Mitigation Increase increased by 0.9, Defensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Earring of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, Haste increased by 1.4, Offensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Earhoop of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, DPS increased by 2, Offensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Hoop of the Silver Dragon: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 55, Primary Att increased by 7, Stamina increased by 7, Potency increased by 0.5, Crit Bonus increased by 0.2, Crit Chance increased by 0.5, Haste increased by 1.4, Offensive Skills increased by 2, Base Resists increased by 1.
• Medallion of the Sky Warrior: Requires Echoes of Faydwer expansion, Equip level is now 60, Primary Att increased by 13, Stamina increased by 13, Potency increased by 1.3, Crit Bonus increased by 0.4, Crit Chance increased by 1, DPS increased by 3.8, Hate increased by 3.8, Block increased by 1, Defensive Skills increased by 6.

That is just a tiny fraction.  A tiny, tiny fraction. Seriously, it has to be seen to be disbelieved. It goes on and on and on like that for pages. It took me fifty seconds just to scroll through it at top speed using the mouse wheel! I am not exaggerating - I literally just timed it.

Who needs to know this stuff? I'm sure someone working at Darkpaw does but players? I mean, it's reassuring to know they've put that much effort into re-itemizing and balancing EoF for the Time Limited Expansion server.. I guess... but I would have taken their word for it. I didn't need to see every single change in full.

Imagine being the one who had to type all that out. Then imagine having to proofread it. I'm going to have nightmares.

I know, I know. I shouldn't complain. It's supposed to be vague patch notes we get all twisted about not over-detailed ones. But I like patch notes. I look forward to reading them. Getting something like that is like ordering a steak and the waiter bringing a whole live cow. Not that I'd do that, being a vegetarian. Alright, pescatarian, but that's such a made-up word.

It has at least made me consider playing on Kaladim again. I have a level thirtysomething I was playing there - a Dirge, I think she is -  and I'm very well aware that EoF is a major gear reset. I could do a couple of sessions with her, questing in Butcherblock, and probably replace everything she's wearing.

I'm not sure I want to, though. I take SynCaine's point on progression but sometimes it feels just a little bit too obvious to be enjoyable. Still, good to have the option and EoF was a decent expansion.

Also, if anyone was thinking of jumping onto Kaladim and making a character for a bit of prog server fun, now would be the best of times to do it. Faydwer comes with a complete new starting area, a new race and a full leveling path. There will be lots of people starting over, plenty of groups, a buzz in the air (literally, with all the bixies), all that good stuff.

I think I might just have talked myself into it...

On "Difficulty"

Last night I felt like playing a little Pillars of Eternity. I got it last year as a free Amazon Prime/Twitch offer and I put quite a few enjoyable hours into it before I got stuck in a quest cul de sac and stopped.

The Twitch Prime promotions have been considerably more successful in re-introducing me to single-player gaming than my own efforts over the past few years. On the few occasions I've tried to branch out into non-MMO territory on my own I've mostly chosen games that look, feel and play like MMORPGs (Yonder, Tanzia) but don't have anyone in them but me. Unsurprisingly, that leads to feelings of isolation and pointlessness.

Through Twitch Prime I played The Banner Saga. I thought the plot was thin and predictable. I was unimpressed by the writing in general. Perhaps the stellar reviews led me to expect too much. As for gameplay, the combat was labored and the resource management tedious.

Visually, though, it was very striking. The best part of the game was the atmospherics, which kept me interested long enough to finish it. The last video game I can remember actually finishing before that must be Baldur's Gate 2 back around the turn of the century.

I certainly didn't get enough out of The Banner Saga to want to play the second one, which also came free with Twitch Prime. So far the only other freebie on offer that's appealed to me at all has been Pillars of Eternity.

PoE was Kickstarted as the spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate. From what I've seen so far it pretty much hurdles that very high bar. It looks and feels similar and the questing is all but identical. There are some oddities but on the whole it's a lot more "BioWare" than anything BioWare are known for nowadays.

I ought to love it. I don't. I like it. When I'm in the mood. And I really do have to be in the mood.



The thing is this: Pillars of Eternity is demanding. It requires effort. A lot of effort. There's an inordinate amount of inventory, skill and party management. There's not an awful lot in the way of handholding. Travel, which is frequent and required, takes forever. Combat, when it occurs, goes on and on and on.

Then there's the talking. A lot of NPCs are partly voiced and the voice acting is not bad. I like to listen to the spoken parts but it slows things down. And when the voiceovers stop the conversations carry on. There's a lot of reading.

And choosing. So. Much. Choosing. Choices with consequences, too. I hate that. Always have. I don't mind flavor but I like to know I can't screw things up by making a stupid decision on a whim. The inevitable result is that, whenever I reach any obvious nodal point, I have to go check a wiki to be sure I take the right turning. Which makes everything take even longer.

Last night I fired the game up for the first time in months. It was surprisingly easy to get back into the swing of things. In a few minutes I was questing. Well, I say "questing"...

It took me around an hour to finish a single quest. It took place in two adjacent districts of the same town. It involved no combat whatsoever. All I had to do was talk to a guy, walk to a building, take a thing from a place, take that thing to another guy, talk to a third guy and finally go back to the first guy and talk to him again.

I did that using a walkthrough and it took me an hour. Partly that was because, during all the walking and listening and talking, four members of my party levelled up. Independently, at separate times, for reasons unclear. The time I took to allocate their various points is included in the hour.

When it was over I sat back and thought. That was one, tiny side-quest at around level five. I knew from previous experience that it was entirely typical. If I did nothing else with my free time but play Pillars of Eternity, finishing the game could probably keep me occupied for the rest of the year.

Twenty years ago that would probably have seemed like a positive. Not any more. Or not so much, at least.

Before I fired up PoE I spent a while on EverQuest II's new Time-Limited Expansion server, Kaladim, where similar time-to-entertainment issues were evident. My Dirge there is Level 21. There's plenty she can do solo but none of it appeals.

Transport options are limited. It takes a long time to get anywhere. It's not practical to dart around looking for interesting quests. Leveling alone is excruciatingly slow, despite Kaladim supposedly having accelerated xp for a progression server. It's also not very interesting, consisting mainly of grinding slowly through various native species - bears, snakes, hawks, wolves...

It's hauntingly close to how I remember the game a few months after launch. Among other reasons, it's why I left. Daybreak Games have done a disturbingly good job in recreating the feel of pre-Hartsman EQII although why anyone would want to is another question.

Most mobs that used to be tuned for groups have been returned to that state. Intentionally, everything worth doing, above and below ground, relies on groups. I've been in a few and they weren't horrible but it mostly served to remind me what I felt back in 2005: EQ2 is not a great game for grouping.

The pace and flow of group combat in EQ2 has always felt off to me. As a healer I never felt I had time to adapt to situations the way I did in EverQuest. As a DPS I'm never really sure how much of what I'm doing is effective or required.

I think EQ2 combat absolutely shines in a duo or trio, where there's ample opportunity for tactics, strategy and subtlety. Full groups always seem to devolve into either mincing machines that move through corridors annihilating all in their path or fractious, failing collectives that fall apart on the first bad pull.

These two experiences, PoE and Kaladim, contrast sharply with my choice of gameplay for this morning. I ummed and ahhed for a while over what to play before deciding to level my EQ2 Shadowknight on the Antonia Bayle server. He'd just dinged 86 and I'd been taking him through Stonebrunt Highlands, a zone from the Sentinel's Fate expansion of 2010.

Rather than carry on there, I took him to the Chronomancers in Freeport and had them drop his level to 80 so he could start the main quest line from an even older expansion, 2008's The Shadow Odyssey.



In a couple of hours of extremely enjoyable questing my SK did just under two levels. I was never bored, always entertained. I read most of the quest text, even though I've done all these quests before, because much of the writing is amusing and because I had plenty of time to appreciate it.

I was soloing and there was no-one around me (I saw one other player) but I didn't for a moment get that "why am I doing this again?" sensation that comes when you realize you're teetering on the edge of an existential void. Twice I had to turn the general chat channel off, not because of anything offensive (conversations were relaxed and friendly) but because I was enjoying what I was doing too much to countenance distraction.

As usual, I'm not going anywhere with this, or not anywhere specific. I'm recording my thoughts so I can refer back to them later. This is an ongoing project. I do find the way that both my expectations and experiences have changed over a couple of decades fascinating. I'd like to understand those changes better.

I could really use a compulsive, new MMORPG with an old-school approach to benchmark against. Am I becoming less and less interested in "difficulty" (or is it "complexity"?) because my jaded palate needs refreshing from a fresh, pure wellspring? Would all the old love of slow travel and painstaking detail return if prompted by something genuinely inspiring?

Or have I finally matured to the point where I understand that life really is too short for all that. Cut to the chase, get to the point, are we having fun yet?

I guess I'm going to find out if a playable version of Pantheon ever appears. Until then I'll go on running experiments on the limits of my patience and writing up my findings here.

Drives A Little Slower: EQII

Isey, from I Has PC, chose to celebrate EverQuest's twentieth anniversary with the closest thing he could find to the original experience, Project 1999. It was, as he said in the title of his post, "Slow Progress...":

"I spent three hours this morning on my 7 Enchanter at Orc hill.... By the end I had barely dinged 9 (I was only one bubble away from 8 when I started)... three hours of gameplay for a full level and a bit."

He also lost his level on a bad pull when he was Level Eight and when it was all over, all he had to look forward to was

"...an incredibly non efficient trip ... to High Keep (from Gfay) – my level 8 pet spell is only sold there. I can’t remember how long of trip it is but if memory serves it’s something like 4 or 5 zones plus a boat trip." 

I can't quite match that but my progress, leveling a Dirge on Kaladim, EverQuest II's new Time Limited Expansion server, has been mightily slow, too. I logged out a few minutes ago, immediately after she dinged Eleven. My /played shows I've played her for just over a dozen hours so far.

Allowing for the extremely short time it took to do ten levels of tradeskills (the crafting tutorial gives insane xp compared to anything an adventurer could hope for) that's about an hour per level. My progress wasn't anything like as smoothly distributed as that. I did four levels in a couple of hours on the first day but the next time I played it took me the best part of three hours to do a single level.

A lot of that could well be down to the way I play. For some reason I seem to be incapable, in any MMO, of sticking with the content meant for my level. Dressed in the most basic imaginable gear (actually, nothing at all in about half the slots) my Dirge has been running face-first into the brick wall of quests and mobs meant for characters three or even five levels above her.

She must have died, at a conservative estimate, thirty times at least so far. I've certainly had to do full repairs from 20% three times, plus a few more before things got that dire. It's been extremely difficult to break the bad habits of Live and I have to admit the absence of any meaningful death penalty has contributed heavily to my lackadaisical, not to say suicidal, attitude.

Despite those frequent deaths I've been having plenty of fun. Progress has been slow by modern standards but very fast in MMORPG historical terms. And therein lies the rub. It seems there's something of a battle raging on the forums between those who feel XP is about right and those who feel cheated that it isn't as slow as it was at launch, something that was (kind of) promised in the FAQ.

Will experience values be tuned for Kaladim?
Experience values will be slower, similar to how it was at original launch. Tradeskill experience will be the same.

Leaving aside the bald claim about tradeskill XP, which seems to me to be quite simply crazy wrong, this opens up a whole barrel of issues, not least what was XP like at launch? Presumably Daybreak has some numerical data to rely on but all the rest of us have are decade-and-a-half old memories. Which is enough for many people to make statements of absolute certainty about how things were and how they ought to be.

General chat this morning was ringing with reminiscences of how wonderfully, magically, immersively awful slow it all was in 2004. All those people claimed to have been there. So was I but I have no genuine certainty over how long it took me to level back then. Mostly what I remember was how attritional it felt, which is not the same thing at all as as being "slow".

In my memory, everywhere and everything required groups, not just dungeons but almost all overland content as well. I remember how excruciatingly rare it was to find spell upgrades as drops, while crafted versions were prohibitively expensive because of the appallingly badly designed tradeskill sytem (the same system a few masochists even now hold up as the paradigm of how crafting should work).

None of that difficulty - literally none of it - has been brought back for this or any other TLE server, thank heaven. I'm sure it's someone's dream - forming a full group to go grind heroic difficulty crabs on a strip of Antonican sand for hour after hour in the hope of getting a single spell book to drop, a book which, inevitably, will be usable by no-one in the group. It's not mine.

Neither, I would hazard a guess, is it commercially viable, even in today's sophisticated nostalgia market. All these things some people remember so fondly were changed because a lot more people stopped playing rather than put up with them. It's possible there could be enough potential customers who a) genuinely preferred the way EQII played in its first six months and b) still have sufficient interest in reprising that pleasure to pay a monthly subscription for the privilege, but I doubt it.

Were the genuine status quo ante ever to be recreated in all its true horror, I suspect the unfortunate experimental server in question would bleed population even faster than the original game did all those years ago. As I said, there's slow and there's awful. If there were ever to be a P2004 server for EQII, I very much doubt it would attract and sustain the kind of population P1999 enjoys. EQII at launch was no Classic EverQuest, that's for sure.

Even so, by and large, I'm in favor of slow, if "slow" means "time to enjoy the scenery". The restrictions that apply on Kaladim are having that effect on me so far. There's no Fast Travel, no Broker Anywhere, no flying mounts, no access to housing other than by going to your front door. Getting anywhere from anywhere takes time and it really does make the world feel much bigger.

I'm enjoying it now but I'm not sure how long that will,last. It's very interesting to be able to compare the situation on Kaladim with what I'm enjoying on Live at the same time. I did over twenty levels on my Shadowknight yesterday, from around Level 60 to the mid-80s. I had 100% vitality (for a while), 140% veteran bonus, 100% server bonus and 100% XP Potion, all at once. It was exhilarating and satisfying and I had a great time.

That "great time" consisted of me burning through as much content in an afternoon as took me about six months the first time round. Of course I didn't really see all that content this time, any more than you "see" Europe as you pass over it in a plane. I just saw a few selected highlights as I flew across zones and Fast Travelled from era to era, cherry-picking a few favorite quests and completing in minutes what would once have taken me hours or possibly weeks.

Even though I'm using the same launcher to get to them both, EQII on Kaladim and EQII on Live might just as well be different MMORPGs altogether. They may both nominally share the same content but that's like saying five sets of tennis and a game of fetch with your dog both use the same ball.

As the release date for WoW Classic draws ever nearer I'm increasingly curious to see how Blizzard's reluctant entry into the nostalgia market plays out. From everything I've seen so far in MMORPGs from EverQuest to Rift, one person's faithful recreation is another's slap in the face. The difference this time is that World of Warcraft is big enough for a slap you can hear around the world.

New Kind Of Neighborhood

When Daybreak announced that one of the tent-poles for EverQuest's 20th Anniversary celebrations would be yet another round of Timelocked/Progression servers I was underwhelmed. I understand that they're popular and they make money but I felt I'd been round that particular track a time or two too often already to get excited about doing it again.

Silly me. Since I made characters on Kaladim in EQII and Selo in EQ last night, apart from sleep and eat I've done nothing else. I'm rushing to get this post done so I can get back and play some more and since I don't have to go to work until next Saturday there's a good chance I won't be doing much besides playing EQ/EQII and writing about it for the rest of the week.

Just what is it about starting over on a new server that has this effect? Is it really that MMORPGs - both as games and as worlds - work much better when played in something approximating their original context, where leveling takes time and there are people everywhere you go?

Or is it just nostalgia? The deep thrill of cheating time. We can't grow younger but we can pretend we did.

I spent the morning on Selo, leveling my Bard in Shar Vhal, the Kerran city on the dark side of Luclin, where it's always twilight and Norrath hangs low in the sky like a threat. It was really something to begin there instead of outside the gates of Qeynos or Freeport. I haven't started in Shar Vahl for a decade or more but it all came flooding back.

It took me an hour just to finish the introductory citizenship quest. I remember doing that when Luclin was new. It took me all of a Sunday afternoon, back then. They may have reverted a lot of stuff but I'm convinced it's still easier than it was.

When I'd made enough money killing grimling skeletons in The Pit I went to buy my new songs. Then I broke for lunch. Half an hour later I took a trip forward in time - five years or five hundred, depending how you look at it - to Kaladim and EQII, where I've been dying a lot leveling my Dirge in Sunken City and The Sprawl.

I was having such a hard time I ended up buying a full set of no-stat chain armor from a vendor. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. It was awesome! And it made hardly any difference at all! I still had trouble just trying to get from one questgiver to the next without being eaten by wild dogs.

It was all a much more immersive, involving, satisfying, fun experience than I was expecting. Despite - or possibly because of  - all the being killed, getting lost and generally getting piled on, everything was comfortably exceeding expectations. And then I remembered that DBG had restored the original starting villages for this fresh start.

The villages, when they were around, were something of a mixed blessing. Original EQII began with a lengthy lead-in before you arrived at what you might call the "real game". I don't mean the end game. I mean long before that.

There was the bit on the boat at the start, then the Isle of Refuge, then you had to go to either Qeynos or Freeport and find your racial starting area, where you'd get an inn room and your class quests. I think that's how it went.

The class quests themselves went all the way to Level 20, which took me a couple of weeks first time out. Maybe longer. Most of it happened down in the sewers as I recall. You got into those by way of a drain in your village.

Well, the quests are still missing but the villages are back and so is the drain! I had no idea how much I'd missed them.

Of course, the physical locations never went away. They just got repurposed and repopulated years ago. On Live there are questlines for every race that send you to your racial village every ten levels. Most of those questlines are top notch. I've done quite a few. I probably should do the rest some day.

The problem is, when they did the revamp, Sony Online Entertainment shut off access to the zones for anyone not doing the quests. Since the quests were unique to specific races that meant most characters would never be able to go in most of the villages again and even the right races could only go in when they had the quests active.

What's more, the new storylines put all the villages into a state of conflict. And they scaled with your level, assuming you did the quests as they became available. Even if you could get in, all you'd find was a combat zone. Which was never what any of the villages were about.

And what was that? I'd actually forgotten. They were, like much of the original game, there to tell the tales of ordinary Norrathians, living ordinary lives in an extraordinary world. There were little stories everywhere, vignettes of how it might be, to live cheek by jowl with talking animals, monsters and giants.

The quests are no more but the vignettes and the characters live on. I spent the best part of an hour wandering from village to village, talking to gnomes and ogres and trolls, taking screenshots of cats and pigs and crazy people, like Spezzi the "Street Hag" (we all know what she is...) and Chef Schmenko, psychotic ratonga with a meat cleaver.

These characters may still be running their scripts over on Live, behind the closed doors of the quest instances. Good luck finding out. Here, on Kaladim, you can stroll about in peace, just like we did in the good old days, soaking in the ambience.

What's more, you can bank and shop and craft. All the vendors and utilities have been restored, including the subterranean tradeskill instances. Best of all, you can rent an inn room and settle. Forget your billett at the Jade Tiger's Den in North Freeport (although you have to take a room there too, if you want to complete the starter housing quest). Come back to the village that raised you. Buy yourself a candelabra.

As I was going round I got so excited I felt I had to tell someone. General chat seemed a bit too focused on arguments about leveling speed for the kind of gosh-wow fluffiness I had in mind so I gosh-wowed in the Test channel instead, where fluffiness is a way of life.

Someone promptly sent me a tell asking me if I wouldn't mind going round all the villages in Freeport to run a zone query to get the official map names so he could submit them to EQ2Maps. I was very happy to oblige.

He'd been asking since yesterday and found no takers and I only saw two other players in the villages as I was exploring. My excitement seems original if not unique. Maybe there will be more interest in the restoration project when it finally hits Live. TLE servers do tend to attract the more hardcore end of the playerbase.

Or maybe no-one will care. I didn't think I would. Not until I went there. Now I care enough that I'm going to make another character over in Qeynos so I can see those villages too. Well, I might. I'd have to buy yet another character slot for that. Maybe I'll wait 'til the project comes to the Skyfire server where I already have some Qeynosians.

The one thing that puzzles me is why this is all happening in EQII now, when we're supposed to be celebrating EverQuest's 20th. EQII has its own fifteenth anniversary coming in November. I just hope they've left a little in the tank for that.

Happy 20th BIrthday, EverQuest!

I was going to save this for tomorrow but since I can't log in right now I might as well do the next best thing and blog about it...

Even this morning I hadn't decided whether or not to roll a character on any of the four new Time-Locked/Progression servers Daybreak span up a couple of hours ago: two for EverQuest, two for EverQuest II. In the end, though, I couldn't resist.

I started with EQII's PvE server Kaladim. As usual, All Access Membership (or "a subscription" as we used to call it) is required to play on Progression servers. I had the sub covered there was still a problem: all my character slots were full on that account.

I've been playing EQII a lot more of late. Six of those characters are max level and the other four are too established to delete, not that I ever delete characters anyway. There is a Level 3 wizard on that account, who you'd think would be expendable, but she was a founder member of the guild we formed on Freeport the day EQII went free to play so she's got grandfather rights. Grandmother rights. Whatever. Point is, she's not going anywhere.

Oh, oh, the hokey-cokey!

So I dug into my Daybreak Cash reserves and bought another character slot. Then I made a Dirge. A ratonga, naturally. I've never played a Dirge before. I don't generally get on with Scout classes in any MMORPGs but I've had a Dirge mercenary running alongside my Inquisitor for a while and it looked not that bad. Plus Mrs Bhagpuss used to play one and I remember it being badass.

When it came time to choose a name I did something I almost never do: I went for something that loads of other people were bound to have chosen before me. Only no-one had. I got it. I couldn't believe my luck. Now, even if, as I expect, I never end up playing this character beyond the first few levels, I have that name in the bag.

What's more, if I make it to level 20 (I think you still have to do that first) I can use /lastname to name my Dirge... Lana DelRey! I probably won't do that... maybe Lana Lang...

Room for a little one?

Everything went very smoothly. No login queues, no lag, no crashes. I whipped through the opening sequence on The Far Journey, before stepping into instance #19 of the Isle of Refuge (Outpost of the Overlord), where I hung about just long enough to turn straight round and get back on the boat to Freeport.

I spent a few minutes questing in Sunken City, died three times, made Level Four and logged out. I was itching to get started on Selo, EQ's new superfast unlock server.

Back in the elder game things went somewhat differently. When I made it to character creation, which took a while, I found myself faced with a blank slate. Eight free character slots and no buttons to press. I went to the forums where I found plenty of people talking about that.

By the time I'd read the thread and posted an ironic comment, my character slots had made themselves available. I looked through the various options. I wanted to start on Luclin as a Vah`Shir but the class choices - Shaman, Warrior, Rogue, Beastlord, Bard - weren't doing much for me.

My first time in Luclin, back in 2002, I rolled a Vah`Shir Beastlord. I didn't play her that much right away but a few years later she ended up being my main and for a long time she was the highest level character I had. But Beastlords are a slog at low levels. Didn't fancy it. Rogue and Warrior were right out. Shaman is solid but again it takes a while to get going.

Dark and lonely

Then I thought, why not? I've just made a Dirge on EQ2. Why not make a bard in EverQuest? I know they get tough to play eventually but it's not like I'm planning on playing her all the way to the cap, after all. She'll be lucky to get into double figures.

Riding my luck, I tried for "Lana" again. The server took something like ten minutes to respond. Someone already got it. Surprise. And then I had a bit of a moment.

While I was running around Sunken City I noticed in chat that someone had nabbed "Buffy". I'm currently deep in a complete watch of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, start to finish, on Amazon Prime. I got to Season Five last night. Why not? I won't get it anyway. Someone will already have it. Bound to.

Nope. When the server finally acknowledged my request it went right through. I now have a Bard called Buffy. When she hits 20 I could give her the last name Summers. I wouldn't, obviously. Probably. 

It wouldn't technically be breaking the Naming Policy if I did. I checked. They've changed it since I last looked. In both games. I'm certain it used to forbid well-known names from either popular culture or real life but now there's just this:

5. Do not pick a name that violates anyone's trademarks, publicity rights or other proprietary rights. In the event that the holder of any trademarked or copyrighted material contacts Daybreak Game Company LLC and requests reference(s) to their intellectual property be removed, any names containing trademarked or copyrighted material will be changed.

I can live with that. I mean, who's going to dob me in? Spike?

So, having established myself as having a mental age of about fifteen I was set to go. Only, so were a lot of other people, it seemed. Unlike EQ2, which either has much better hardware or a lot fewer players (and I know where my money's going on that one), EQ's login server was melting under the pressure.

Take a look at what you could have won.

The first couple of times I tried I couldn't get a response at all. Then Mrs Bhagpuss arrived home from work with a takeaway so I took a half-hour break. When I tried again I got the 46 minute warning above. It's been longer than that now and I'm still not in.

All of which suggests a nice problem for Daybreak to have. And for all the complaints and chuntering about how come they never learn, you know every MMO company really wants to see news items about how their servers couldn't cope with the demand.

There's a 20th Anniversary Producer's Letter up with some solid news about the promised fan gathering, or one of them at least, and a very nice new Infographic that I'm going to be referring back to instead of the Wiki when I want to know the date an expansion launched. This party's just getting started!

I'm going to give up on Selo for tonight. Tomorrow will be easier. I have the whole week off work (by sheer good luck - I didn't book it to co-incide with EQ's twentieth. I haven't lost all reason) so I can afford to dawdle. There's also a whole new, major update to EQII Live to dig into but that deserves a post of its own.

It's all jolly exciting! Happy Birthday EverQuest. Let's hope for many more to come!

Bring Back The Good Old Days : EQ2

This just popped up in my news feed. I thought I'd share.

There's nothing particularly surprising about Daybreak launching a new Time-Locked Expansion server, of course. We used to call them progression servers back in the day, didn't we? Even nostalgia sometimes hangs around long enough to develop rose-tinted memories all of its own. There's something particularly unusual about this one, though.

When it comes to nostalgia, DBG are past masters. Remember when they brought back The Isle of Refuge? They do and they've done it again:

Return of the Hoods

We will be reopening the hoods and villages for Kaladim, like Big Bend, Longshadow Alley, the Baubleshire and Nettleville. Quest content in these villages will remain changed, but the hoods themselves will be there to access and reminisce.

That alone would probably be enough to get quite a lot of people to make a character or two on the new server, Kaladim. Only you don't necessarily have to:

In time, these hoods will also be available for all other servers.

Just as you can now start on The Isle of Refuge on any Live server, in time you'll be able to stroll around  Greystone Yard or Temple Street with your regular characters, whenever you get the fancy, not just when you happen to have the right quest access to unlock the gate.

I don't remember anyone calling them "Hoods". I thought they were generally know as Burbs. Still, what's in a nickname? Just so we can take the trip down old memory lane.

The server also has a number of other sweeteners on offer, including Heritage Quests and Collections that provide account-wide rewards and what sounds like better thought-out itemization and a more immersion-friendly ruleset than some other TLE servers have had. It's the chance to revisit the haunts of our extreme youth that will grab most of the attention, though.

Alongside this new PvE offer there's also the rebirth of Nagafen, EQ2's infamous PvP server, to tempt those of a confrontational disposition. Apparently it passed the audition in the recent beta.

As the news release says, there's a lot to take in. I'm not planning on playing on Nagafen and I don't propose to precis the ruleset here either. Go read it for yourself if you think you might be interested. I can guarantee that whatever the rules happen to be, almost no-one playing there will like any of them. They never do.

Both servers go Live on Saturday March 19th. Saturday is an interesting choice. Very player-friendly. Not so much for the poor DBG staffer who draws the short straw and has to come in all weekend to try and keep the servers up.

It's all part of the celebrations for EverQuest's 20th birthday. Probably. It doesn't actually say so but the timing is right. I might start a character on Kaladim if only to wander round a few of my old haunts. An All Access account is required but I have one of those. Not sure I have a free character slot on it though.

You might worry it was stretching things a bit thin. I mean, how many servers can EQ2 sustain? Always room for one more, eh? At least for a while.

Anyway, it sounds like fun. Can't knock fun!