Hunting Horace For Halloween

What with all these Next Fest demos, I haven't been playing all that many MMORPGs lately. About all I've managed has been a couple of logins to Noah's Heart just to keep my guild from kicking me for inactivity and a couple more short sessions in Dawnlands to do pretty much nothing of note. 

And yes, I know Dawnlands isn't an MMORPG. It just feels like one when I'm playing it, just like Valheim did. All the survival games do, when your normal MMORPG playstyle is mostly to solo in mostly empty areas of low-oppulation games, like mine is.

One thing I did get around to doing was the new "quest" Darkpaw added for this year's Halloween event, Nights of the Dead. I put the word quest in inverted commas there because I think it's arguable whether From Regions Beyond is a quest or a collection.

Oh, alright, it's not a winnable argument. Technically, it's defintiely a quest. It goes in your Quest Journal and the NPC you have to talk to to get your reward isn't one of the Collection guys so, yes, it's a quest.

Mechanically, though, it might as well be a collect. Here's what you have to do....

... normally, at this point I'd just link to the Wiki or EQ2 Traders or some other website with a full walkthrough except, in what I can only consider an ominous and worrying non-development, five days after the event went live, no-one's done one. 

To be less panicky, EQ2 Traders does have a full and comprehensive write-up of this year's Nights of the Dead although naturally it only concerns itself with the elements that directly involve crafting and decorating. The new quest gets a mention and there's a picture of the rweard but it's just bundled into a two-line section headed "New From Gravedigging", which covers changes to a pre-existing part of the event.

Of much greater concern as a straw in the wind for the future of the game is the full entry for the Halloween event at EQ2i (AKA the wiki.) This is where I'd normally go to read a full, in-depth rundown of everything that's been added this year. If you try that today, closing in on a week after the event began, this is what you'll find:

It probably hasn't escaped your notice that it's not 2022 any more. No-one has bothered to update the entry for this year at all, let alone to add a write-up of the new quest. I don't believe that's ever happened before and it cannot be a good sign.

I got the basic inforomation on how to begin the new quest from EQ2 Traders, where I learned that "a
"Mystic's Crystal Orb"" would eventually drop for me if I got out my shovel and started digging up graves, as you do this time of year. 

Examining the orb begins the new quest, From Regions Beyond, which is when I begin to question the nomenclature, although Tunare only knows why since we've had plenty of "get a load of drops and call it a quest" quests before. I'm just being nit-picky.

All you have to so is keep on digging. Inbetween the presents with your name on them, the ghosts who want to fight, the ghosts who want to dance, the angry rats and vicious undead, both of whom need a damn good clout with a shovel, you'll eventually find two (Or maybe it was three?) more drops that update the quest.

I'm not sure now whether all of them were drops off creatures that had to be killed or whether one of them came out of a present. If I'd known at the time I was going to be doing a guide I'd have made some notes. In the end, it doesn't matter anyway. You'll just have to keep digging and dealing appropriately with whatever pops up until finally you have everything, at which point the quest will tell you to go speak to Horace Tobin in Antonica.

Antonica, as anyone who's played EQII will know, is a big place. I could really have done with a little more information. Fortunately, in the modern game and especially as an All Access Member playing a max-level character, getting around isn't the time-consuming process it used to be. 

I used my map to insta-travel to the Antonica docks. No sign of Horace there. I had a tracking scroll already running so I started tracking him by name and set off to fly what I thought was the most likely route - along the road past both Qeynos gates then out to Windstalker Village, which was where I thought he was most likely to be hanging out.

Tracking got me nothing. I stopped at Windstalker and walked around. Nothing showed on my map or on track. I googled Horace by name. Again, nothing.

I flapped my wings and carried on, making a full circuit of all the salient points - the McQuibble Farm, where the Scarecrow King spawns, all the various named keeps and towers, the Thundering Steppes zoneline (A popular neutral spot all factions back in the day), Archers Wood, the Claymore...

After fifteen or twenty minutes of that I got fed up and logged out. I was annoyed. It seemed like a lot of unecessary effort for a fluff holiday quest. If the blasted halfling (I was betting he'd be a halfling with a name like Horace Tobin.) couldn't put himself somewhere I could find him then he didn't deserve to get his stupid stuff back.

I left it a couple of days in the hope someone would post his whereabouts online. Then last night I checked and found this. Apparently the little bugger had been spawning under the world, making him impossible to find. 

As someone in the thread points out, there is a way to get NPCs in that state to communicate but you do have to know they're there in the first place. Even after reading the thread, I still didn't know where in Antonica Horace was. Luckily for me, someone else hadn't done their due diligence and searched the forums before posting. There was a second thread made by someone who couldn't find the guy and in reply someone had finally revealed the location - Windstalker Village!

Right where I started. I knew that was where he'd be! 

Off I went again, this time forewarned that a) he might be under the world and b) he was inside one of the buildings. When I got there this time I could easily see the big, red book on the map that indicates a quest hand-in. It was somewhat obscured by other map icons, though. It's possible I might have overlooked it the first time.

I checked track and Horace wasn't showing up. I went inside the building and stood next to him. Still no sign of him on track. That's probably why I missed him the first time. He may have been under the world but since I didn't go into the building I can't be sure. 

What I do know, which I'd forgotten, is that not all quest NPCs show up on track. Why, I have no idea. It's worth remembering you can't just expect tracking to do everything for you, though. Sometimes you actually have to use your eyes.

Heavily enhanced image so you can see Horace's "outfit" in all its glory horror.

I had a brief chat with Horace, who turned out not to be a halfling after all. It was dark in there but as far as I could tell he was a human, wearing a ridiculous floppy wizard hat, pantaloons with voluminous lace turn-ups and lime-green cosy slippers. He gave me some ridiculous spiel about a seance and some angry ghosts. I assume they were incensed by his dress sense. Who wouldn't be?

He also gave me his Mysterial Spirit Board, basically an off-brand Ouija board with a planchette that actually moves. I put it on a table in one of my many dens and it looks pretty spiffy.

Amateurs!

While I was in Windstalker Village I happened to notice another guy standing around with an exclamation mark for a hat and when I spoke to him it turned out to be Professor Heribert for the final stage of the aforementioned Scarecrow King questline. Apparently I'd done the rest years ago, then bailed at the stage where you have to fight the Epic X2 king himself.

I checked that one with the wiki and as I suspected, even though it theoretically scales to level, anyone much over seventy, the original level cap when it was introduced, is a shoe-in to solo it. I flew over to the McQuibble Farm, waited a few minutes for the Professor to show (Someone else just having done the quest.) then one-shotted the King when he popped.

From that I got a nice floaty, glowing skull pet and the satisfaction of having finally completed a quest I probably started more than a decade ago. No need to rush these things. With the very nice Phantasm Witchcraft Cloak I got from one of my gravedigging presents, I thought it all went rather well.

All I really need to do now is buy the latest Nights of the Dead crafting book and I'm done for another year. Although I might wake Mitsu up and do a few Halloween-themed quests with her. It's often more satisfying to do holiday content on characters on servers where I don't have everything already stashed in the bank.

While I'm there, I might do some of the expansion prequels with her too and maybe the Panda quests. I was enjoying levelling her up a few months back and I forget now why I stopped. I imagine something else came along. 

It usually does.

Graverobbing For Fun And Profit

New World continues to eat every other mmorpg's lunch but I did manage to get some time in EverQuest II this weekend, courtesy of a couple of days at work. By the time I got home I was too tired to deal with my aging and underpowered PC struggling to cope with the demands made on it by the weekend population surge, even with graphics set to Low. I didn't log into the game at all on either Saturday or Sunday.

It was a fortuitous break. I'd been meaning to check if there was anything new in this year's Nights of the Dead festival in EQII. I realize this isn't a news site but I still feel mildly uncomfortable if I miss the oportunity to report on any significant changes in the handful of games I play regularly and thanks to New World I hadn't even made time to look at the EQII Traders write-up, let alone to log in and see for myself what was happening.

As it turns out, there's quite a lot that's new. I won't get out my soap-box or my loud-hailer and bang on yet again about how Darkpaw seem to be able to add more content with a small team than other developers manage with one ten times the size, even though I'm not alone in having noticed the discrepancy, but once again I was impressed. 

There's a gigglegibber goblin who'll cast an illusion spell on you that cycles though a selection of creepy costumes. It lasts until you click it off. I particularly liked this one.

The EQII Traders article gives full chapter and verse on all the new content so I won't rehash all of it. There's a new quest (which I have done), a new crafting book (which I have bought and used - I strongly recommend the beautiful Rubicite windows.) a new collection (which I have finished) and a number of new rewards for old quests (a couple of which I have acquired.) There are also some new things to buy on the Nights of the Dead vendor, several of which are very nice. I haven't bought those yet but I will.

The new quest is fun. It's nominally a crafting quest but it requires no actual crafting skill. You trot around Freeport (or Qeynos, if you're that way inclined) gathering burial dirt, scarecrow bats and ephemeral frights to use as ingredients to make "fright conjuration powder". 

The frights are easy to spot. They're blue wispy ghosts that swirl about in a very obvious and striking manner. The burial dirt comes from mounds of earth next to the gravestones that dot the capital cities at this time of year, the same ones you dig up with the shovel to get all the various goodies, including two of the three collections, one of those being the new one that was added this year.

You might want to draw me a picture, Zintris.

 

I had a bit more trouble finding the scarecrow bats, mostly because I seem to be as blind as one. A bat, that is. It took me ages to notice there are scarecrows next to many of the pumpkin patches. After I'd run past about a dozen of them I finally realized what I was missing and clicked on one, which was how I got my first bat.

The quest, when completed, gives a very nice vanity pet in the form of a set of those whirling ephemeral frights. It also allows you to use the three fright dispensers you placed around the city for the second part of the quest. Every time you do that you get either a trick or a treat. 

The first time I did it I got swarmed by bats. The second time I got five charnel caramel bars. I ate one and next thing I knew I was surrounded by a shoal of what looked like ectoplasmic eels... or something even less savory. There are several more candies with aura effects and they're non-tradeable so it's well worth stocking up while the event is on.

Is it just me or are those bats flying upside-down?

 

There's still time for that, I'm happy to say. Even though this post comes unhelpfully late, Nights of the Dead runs for another ten days, finishing on November 4th. Plenty of time to get everything you want.

Compared to certain other Halloween holidays in games I won't mention (*cough* Guild Wars 2 *cough*) doing all that's required to fill your bags with all that's needed is a relaxing and enjoyable experience. There's still the inevitable rng to contend with, naturally, but at least if luck doesn't go your way you can sometimes buy your way out of a lengthy grind.

I spent over an hour digging up graves in the hope of completing the new collection but there was one piece that eluded me. I know it would have shown itself eventually but I already had more grave mounds, bloody toothed skeletons, snuffed candles and patchwork baby dragons than I knew what to do with so I stopped digging and checked the broker for the elusive Unholy Chains of Fear.

 

The reward is a very striking and deeply horrible plushie of something called the Dream Scorcher. I assume it's a raid boss in some raid I've never done and I would certainly not want to meet it on a dark night or even in broad daylight for that matter. 

Probably fortunately, given its looks, it can't be re-sized so it shouldn't give me the heebie-jeebies every time I use the storage chest I've set it to guard. It's too small to be scared of. So I keep telling myself.

I still have a few more things I'd like to do before the event ends. I got all three of the Phantasm Witchcraft pieces from my grave-robbing exploits but they're attuneable (aka bind on equip) and also heirloom (aka account bound) so I need to get them again for my necromancer and maybe my warlock, too. That's going to take a while.  

Which is fine by me. Digging up graves goes very well with listening to the T20 world cup on the radio and it's something to do in the evenings when New World gets too laggy to be fun. 

I also need to get a few rounds of the Public Quest in, if people are still doing it. There are Familiars to be had. New ones.

All in all, another fine holiday event from the game that does them best.

Pumpkin, Pumpkin

It's that time of year again. Pumpkins, candles, spooky stories, all that stuff. It's going to be a bit of a strange one out in the real world. Can't imagine too many people wanting to take their kids trick or treating in the middle of a pandemic, although then again...

Nothing to stop the celebrations going ahead as usual in virtuality, though. There's no need to socially distance in cyberspace although ironically most of our characters are probably wearing masks anyway. 

Next week sees the return of the indescribably dubious Mad King shenanigans in Guild Wars 2. Seriously, does anyone at ArenaNet ever actually listen to the argument between Mad King Thorn and The Bloody Prince? It was disturbing enough when I first heard it nearly a decade ago but the world has changed quite a bit since then. There are things that sounded "edgy" in 2012 that just sound completely off in 2020 and that routine is definitely one of them.

Then again, maybe my pop culture compass needs re-calibrating. I watched the first episode of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina last night. It felt like it would be seasonable and I thought it would make a nice wind-down from the harrowing six seasons of Bojack Horseman I just put myself through. I mean, it's Sabrina the Teenage Witch, right? The girl from the Archie comics? The one with the extraordinarily badly-animated cat?

 

Yeah... no. Not really. So, Sabrina's an actual satanist now. And the cat's a demon. And her wacky aunts drain the blood from human corpses for their satanic rituals before eating the leftover flesh for dinner. But, hey, Sabrina's gender politics are impeccable, so there's that. I will, of course, be watching the rest of the series. The first episode was pretty good, even if I did literally have to close my eyes for two whole scenes. A fluffy, relaxing romp, though? I don't think so.

Bad taste dialog notwithstanding, I'll most likely still end up running round and round the Mad King's maze with my Necromancer, firing off ground target AEs and hoovering up the loot. Some people do it all day for the entire event and make tens of thousands of gold or so they claim. It was always mindless but with the addition of the autoloot mastery it's now so mechanical it's hard to stay awake. I can usually manage about an hour before I'm literally nodding off at the keyboard. 

Other than that I probably won't bother with any of the other activities. They're always the same, near as makes no difference, and I've done all of them more than enough times already. 

Nights of the Dead has already begun over in EverQuest II. The options there are staggering. It's one of the big holidays of the year and SOE/Daybreak/Darkpaw add something new every time. In a decade and a half that really adds up.

The quality is high, too. There are several big set piece events - the Hedge Maze, the Haunted Mansion, Wake the Dead and so on - as well as a wealth of collections, achievements, quests and crafting activities. New this year is a series of Overseer quests given by a halfling on the Nektulos Forest docks and an upgraded version of the Headless Horseman public quest, now with new loot.

I did the PQ twice yesterday. It was popular. There were three instances of Nek Forest up whenever I logged in and people were calling the event as it started and sending out raid invites. It took about ten minutes to kill him each time and everyone was very good humored about it.

Drops were good, although I have to wonder what the point is right now, with the panda quests already giving out items for just about every slot that are better than anything else I've had all year and certainly better than the PQ drops I've seen so far.  

If the last few years are anything to go by, the panda quests will upgrade most anything a solo player's likely to be wearing, then a few weeks after that finishes we'll get the expansion and a box on the floor next to the first questgiver will upgrade the panda gear. Then the quest rewards from the signature questline will upgrade the stuff from the box and the drops from the third season of Overseer quests (not yet confirmed but you know there will be one) will upgrade everything from the Sig line and on we go with the dance.

It's how the game works. Nothing is permanent and most things barely last a couple of months. I like it. It gives me things to do along with a spurious sense of purpose and satisfaction but I can see how some people might find it wearing.  

I might do a few of the other Nights of the Dead events just for fun. The PQ requires someone to have the lost necklace from the Hedge Maze to get it started so there's an element of social responsibility there. And even as I fact-check for this post I see there are a couple of events I can't remember ever doing so maybe I'll give those a go, too.

I imagine just about every MMORPG will have some kind of Halloween-related event on the slate. Probably quite a few unmassive live service games, too. Like Christmas, it seems to be a holiday no-one can resist. I never really paid much attention to it at all before I started playing MMORPGs but it's firmly on my calendar now.

Pretend We're Dead: EverQuest II

It's that time of the year again. Almost. The second week in October feels a little early but there's so much to do. Earlier the better.

EverQuest II's Halloween celebration, Nights of the Dead, is one of the biggest holidays in a calendar chockful of major events. Over fifteen years the program has expanded to include nearly twenty quests, half a dozen collections, a couple of races and a slew of Achievements.

For crafters there are a dozen books filled with themed recipes and the number of items to be bought from special vendors with the event currency, Candy Corn, is frankly insane.

I seem to be shifting into something of an EQII phase right now. Whether it's the fallout from the Blizzard Bombshell or just that there's a positively overwhelming amount of stuff to do in Norrath this Autumn I'm not sure. A bit of both I expect.

This year, to make things easier, all the items from earlier years are on the vendor to the left (the tall one) and all the new stuff is on the little fella to the right.

The thing that I perhaps don't stress strongly enough about  EQII is the sheer quantity of things the game offers that I genuinely want my characters to own. Every holiday comes stuffed to bursting with house items I covet and appearance items I want my characters to wear. This is a sensation few MMORPGs give me.

There are also mounts and familiars and petamorph wands that turn your boring old elemental or undead pet into something far more aesthetically pleasing. All of it free if you just play the game. A few top items take some effort but the tokens to buy most things can be earned in minutes. Unless you want a lot of them, of course; then it's a lot of minutes.

I could very easily spend most of each month doing the current event (or, often, events - there are so many they frequently overlap) if I was so inclined. In the past, when EQII was my primary MMORPG, that's exactly what I did.

The game also has the best cash shop I have seen in any game, by which I mean there's actually stuff in it that I both like the look of and find reasonably-priced. This morning I broke into my savings to give my Necromancer something she's always wanted - a witch's broomstick to ride. I may well buy another for my ratonga necro on my older account, too.

From left to right: Necro Undead Tank Pet, Clockwork Mercenary Dok Tok, Bat Familiar (comes with the broom), Black Cat, (also comes with broom), Snowman Appearance Pet (doesn't know what month it is). The pumpkin's not mine.

Before that I ran my Berserker through the excellent new quest, "Night of the Barking Dead". There's a short walkthrough on EQ2Traders but I didn't need to refer to it. Everything you have to do is fully signposted in game.

The quest begins when you dig up an NPC named Thieving Hardy, a fresh addition to the regular gravedigging event. I got him on about the fourth or fifth dig. He drops a "gnollish terraporter rune bone". When you examine it a quest pops up, sending you to where any veteran would have gone instinctively - the infamous Splitpaw Gnoll terraporter at Mirror Lake in Thundering Steppes.

This infernal device used to be the bane of my life back in 2005. It was the way into the second Adventure Pack, The Splitpaw Saga and if you'd bought that, which naturally I had, every time you happened to aggro one of the gnolls standing near it you'd be hoiked into Splitpaw.

The Splitpaw Saga was a very popular addition to the game in its day, largely because certain parts of it could be run and re-run for very good, fast xp. I liked it well enough the first time but I never felt much need to go through it again. Being yanked off my feet and stuffed into an underground cave just because I happened to have passed a foot too close to a gnoll was something I found quite annoying.

Don't yank my chain.

Unless you had Call To Home up (and it had a sixty minute cooldown) you were stuck in Splitpaw unltil you could fight your way out. That took ages, assuming you were even playing a class that could solo well enough to do it at all. Most of the Gnolls were Heroic mobs meant for groups. I died a lot trying to escape that dog-hole.

Worst of all, Splitpaw used a new mechanic that the developers were determined to show off at every opportunity. You had to find and carry boxes and barrels from one part of the dungeon to another, stack them up and climb on them to get over various obstacles. Fun the first time - infuriating the fifth.

Thankfully, the new quest doesn't make you do any of that. All the kidnapping gnolls have been temporarily removed so you can approach the terraporter and enter the Splitpaw Crypt in your own time. When you get inside all you have to face are at-level solo mobs.

"I didn't want these old bones anyway!

Best of all, at no point do you have to carry anything anywhere. There were two places where mobs were up on platforms above me, one of which has to be killed for the quest to progress, but there's a handy ramp up to the first and the second I pulled easily with an AE.

The quest itself is a simple story, familiar but well told. I enjoyed it as a classic fireside cautionary tale. It took me maybe fifteen minutes to complete. The rewards were worth it - a choice of two good house pets or twenty-five candy corn, a sum that will stand you several worthwhile purchases at the event vendors.

All being well, I plan on running that quest with a few other characters on various servers and accounts. I'd also like to farm some Candy Corn and go on a bit of a spending spree. There's a lot from previous years I haven't picked up yet and I want it!

"I choose you!" Oh, wait, wrong game...

There are also two new collections that I'd like to do but they involve throwing pumpkin bombs at other players. This posed me two problems this morning: I didn't have any pumpkins and there were very few other players. Hardly surprising since I was on a U.S, server at about three a.m. Pacific. I'll have to work out how to get the bombs and then come back in the late evening my time, when people in America are just settling down for an evening's fun.

I also want to run through the repeatable pre-expansion quests a few times while they're still around. I haven't yet taken a look at either of the two main quests for that event, either. Not to mention Fabled Kael, the dungeon that was added a month or so back...

My annual All Access subscription just renewed, too, reminding me I'm getting close to having too many subscriptions. When I get back to work I think something might have to give, especially if the EQII expansion makes it for November.

All things considered, it's a great time to be an MMORPG player. Well, depending which games you play, I guess.