Ding 135!

Geez! It took long enough, didn't it? At around 11.30 am on Saturday 11 April my Necromancer, Mordita  finally dinged 135, the level cap in EverQuest II. It only took four months (To the day, near enough.) What is this? 2004?

Well, no, I guess not. In 2004 the level cap in EQII was 50, I think. Pretty sure. Wait, let me check... Yep, that's right. MMORPGs usually capped at fifty on launch back in those days. No idea why. What's so special about fifty? Okay, my favorite number is and has always been five so fifty is cool with me but I don't think they did it just to please me.

As of the release of the latest expansion, Rage of Cthurath, in December last year, the cap went from 130 to 135. Remember when expansions went up in tens? That's been a while...

Leveling has changed so much over the years. In all games but let's stick with EQII. At launch it was slow as hell but still a lot faster than we'd been used to in EverQuest so we weren't complaining. Much. It stayed like that for a long time or at least that's how I remember it. 

To get xp in those days, you could do quests or kill mobs or mix it up and do a bit of both. Your choice. Also, you could hand in Collections. They gave big xp and the collectables were tradable so people would hoard them up and then hand them in on the day the new expansion arrived. That way, you could rack up the new levels in minutes. 

Later, after chronomagic came in, you could mentor down and solo dungeons for a level or two a run. Or have a high-level friend drag you round on follow. Or pay someone to power-level you that way, if you didn't have any friends. And then came mercenaries so you could get an NPC to do it and pay them peanuts in plat. That pretty much put the power-leveling professionals out of business.

There were loads and loads of ways to tear through the levels at little effort and no risk. For a while it was all about the Dungeon Maker and I'm sure there were other exploits tricks I've forgotten. Pick one, slam down an xp potion, get your head down, knock the levels out in a few hours. It was hella fun for the first hour or two, then not so much, then dull enough to have you screaming. Still, we all did it, even if we complained about it all the time, too.

This is where I get to quote Joni Mitchell, isn't it? Well, you never do, do you? Who'd have thought I'd be gazing back wistfully at those Sunday afternoons going round and round and round Chelsith or Sebilis? Round and round and round until my teeth ached. Halcyon days...

Well, they put a stop to that around the time the cap hit 100. For our own good, I think they said it was. Oh, they didn't do anything as crass as ban it. They just started counting the xp needed to level in numbers orders of magnitude larger than anything you could get in old content. 

Suddenly, killing mobs  got you absolutely nowhere. Mobs still gave xp, sure, but it was like trying to fill a swimming pool with an eye-dropper. From then on about the only way to gain enough xp to make a difference was to do quests. 

And for a while that was slow but not so slow you'd really hate it. Constrictive and coercive, yes, but not ineffective. New normal, all fine. 

Then in one expansion, I can't remember exactly which, the new quests started filling the entire bar in two or three hand-ins. Instead of taking a couple of weeks to hit the cap it took a couple of days. Maybe a couple of hours. Seriously, it was that fast.

Leveling to the cap in a new expansion turned into something so trivial there didn't seem much point in having levels at all. Some people liked it, particularly the ones with big stables of alts. Others hated it. Either way, as always, we all got used to it.

And then they took it away again. A couple of expansions back it switched back, without warning, to little dribbles. Actually, I think the dribbles are bigger than they were before the surge but it's like when you were a student, isn't it? A room in a shared house seemed fine but once you get used to living in your own apartment, who wants to go back? 

Only it's not like anyone gave us a choice. These days, there's about one way to get xp in the current expansion and that's do the damn quests. Nothing else makes a dent in the bar. Hah! Dent? Doesn't move a pixel!

And it's not just any quests, either. Do the Signature line, the core story, the MSQ if you will. That's where all the xp is. But don't expect it to be enough. I finished the Sig and it left me about 70% of a level short. It's taken me about as long to cobble together enough xp to finish that last bar as it took me to do the previous four levels.

OMG was it bad! Repeatable quests. Don't you hate them? I hate them! I've always hated them. This is where I get to quote David Byrne. Yes, that line from Psycho Killer. Of course, that line. And well he may ask! Why? Eh? EH?!

I've been grudgingly chipping away at that last 70% for what feels like weeks now. Okay, sure, I could have done the whole thing in a day or two, but only if I could have stood it, which I couldn't. I couldn't even bring myself to do a couple of the damn repeatable quests each day.

I did manage a couple every few days though and the singularity the level cap was getting nearer. Slowly. Horribly slowly. 

And then today it finally occurred to me to check if I really had done all the non-repeatable quests. 

It took me about three-quarters of an hour. Just to check, that is. The quest structure is so convoluted now. Who knows what's anywhere any more? I went through my Active Quests, my Completed Quests, I compared them to the Timeline on the Wiki... In the end it was only by going through the Quest Achievements, something I almost never look at, that I worked out there was a ton of stuff I hadn't done. 

I'm really out of the loop on Achievements. They spent so many years being completely useless for anything other than being able to say you'd done them that I stopped paying attention to them altogether. Which meant I'd missed it when they turned into something useful, not to say necessary. 

They all come with rewards now. Mostly Status but Status is the new Platinum. Hyper-inflation made NPCs stop asking for money. Now all they care about is how famous you are. Status buys you everything.

Anyway, that's probably a post of its own. The important thing is, I was going through the Quest Achievements to see what I might have missed and it cued me into a whole bunch of side-quests I didn't have and among those there turned out to be several where the xp wasn't the pitiful 1.2% of the repeatables but a big, chunky ten per cent!

I spent a happy hour or so finding and finishing those and suddenly there I was, just a couple of per cent from capping. Just right for one last heave...

A couple of repeatables and over the line! Ding 135! There's an Achievement for that, too.

And now I don't have to think about it again until December 2027. There won't be level cap increase this year. It's fallow.

Of course, I do have all those alts. But they can wait until I'm in the mood. Which might be never, now I've found the Necro Hack for EZMode. I really only need them to keep their crafting up to date and thank god tradeskill levels are still relatively easy to get. (Shhh! for gawd's sake...)

Of course, hitting the cap just means the real work begins. Every piece of gear needs replacing and every spell upgrading. Plus all those Achievements and Collections that I'm starting to realize are core content these days, not optional extras like they used to be. 

Only now I can take it all at my own pace and enjoy the experience. 

Free! Free at last. Free!

For now...

Strolling Through The Void - Rage of Cthurath On EZ-Mode

I haven't exactly finished the latest EverQuest II expansion, Rage of Cthurath. In many ways I've barely started. But I have finished the two Signature Questlines for both Crafters and Adventurers. It's enough, I think, for me to give some kind of appraisal, even if it's not enough for a full review.

The first thing I'd say is that I like this expansion a lot. It's been fun. I'll get to why that is in a bit but I'll say up front that I'm speaking very specifically from the perspective of a fairly casual solo player. What it's been like for group-oriented players or raiders I have no idea.

It's also been pretty good value, I'd say, although it's incredibly hard to judge whether any expansion for any MMORPG offers a good return on however much you paid for it. With single-player games you can get to the end and do that "hours-per-dollar" calculation. On top of that, especially if it's one of those multiple ending deals, you might make some allowances for replayability.

With an MMORPG, the expansion provides a springboard for other content as much as it represents anything complete in itself. And then there's the question of alts. If you play a number of characters, as many people do, it's likely you'll take more than one of them through the expansion and also that other characters on your account will benefit from hand-me-downs and account-level flags and unlocks.

In my case, I've started three characters on the two Signatures already. Eventually I'll probably take as many as half a dozen through both. Does that mean I should multiply the value by the number of characters who complete one or the other or both?

Probably not but it does suggest any hours-per-dollar calculation shouldn't just work off a single run. And even if it did, I'm most likely already getting close to the traditional dollar-an-hour break-even.

So, I'm very happy with the quality and the quantity, then, am I? It certainly sounds like it, the way I'm talking. 

Yeah, no, maybe not really... I'm not sure...

The Signature quests are definitely getting shorter. I don't think there can be any doubt about that. There was a time when it took me longer to to finish one instance than it takes me now to do the entire thing. Or it felt like it, anyway. And there were those couple of expansions where absolutely everything seemed to revolve around raising multiple factions before you could even get anyone to give you the damn quests.

Is that what I want? No, it's not. What that did was put me right off the idea of taking multiple characters through the storyline. It took ages, it felt like a grind, it didn't seem to get any faster with experience and it wasn't anything I'd want to repeat. I was mostly just glad to have gotten it done at all..

That's not the case here. It's fast and entertaining, even though the storyline in Rage of Cthurath is thin, there's no denying it. And obviously, it makes no sense. That's a given. No EQII expansion's storyline has made sense for years. It's fine. It's expected. This tale, though, seems perfunctory even by recent standards. 

Here's my best attempt at a spoiler, based on what I can remember, without looking anything up. 

Lord Lucan, in his never-ending search for a means of world-domination, has gotten his hands on a McGuffin that's turned out to be more than he bargained for. Somehow, it attracted the attention of a Lovecraftian Elder God and now he's a puppet.

Meanwhile Lady Najena, who used to be a villain, has somehow gotten involved, only this time she's on our side. A whole load of spooky portals have popped up all around Norrath, spewing out Void entities we're all familiar with from previous invasions. She's trying to put a stop to it because I have no idea why. I guess she's just annoyed it's not her that's doing it.

She recruits the Player Character because of course she does or there wouldn't be much of a story, would there? She sends the PC on a mission through a portal of her own and some space-goats hijack it and divert the PC into the Void so they can get some help to escape.

This inevitably leads to a big, exciting adventure... Hahaha! I'm kidding! No, it doesn't! It leads to a bunch of trivial errands, things like pulling up weeds and making dinner for a dog (Alright, a wolf. Does that make it any better?) before Najena herself arrives in The Void and gets things back on track.

From then on it's mostly a series of dungeons instances in which the PC has to plant a whole load of runes so as to... erm... I don't know. Protect something? I think I drifted off when Najena was explaining that part.

Anyway, it's all very important (And repetitive.) and means you have to kill a lot of named mobs, all of whom drop gear better than what you got out of the Tishan's Box at the start, so there's plenty in it for you even if you're not entirely clear on why you're doing it.

Eventually you stick the final rune where it's supposed to go and that severs the connection between Lucan and the Consumer, which is the really rather ill-considered name someone chose to give the Big Bad. There's one final confrontation in which the PC gets to fight The Consumer and Najena gets to summon some big rocks for the PC to hide behind when it all gets a bit much.

The Consumer disappears back to whatever nether-hell he came from, issuing dire threats of retribution, and Lucan is a free sociopath again. Except apparently he's had some kind of existential experience while under the influence because instead of getting straight back to the world domination, he announces he can't go back in case The Consumer has another go at him, mentally weakened as he is. Like he ever cared about Norrath before. other than to be in charge of it all.

The PC wonders, not unreasonably, what that means for Freeport, which Lucan has ruled with an iron fist inside an iron glove since at least 2004, Earth time. Najena tells them not to worry their pretty little head about it because she'll sort it all out and it'll all be fine, which isn't anything like as reassuring to hear as she thinks it is.

Credits roll. End of Episode One. To be continued in next expansion, probably. Oh, except do just pop off to the Unknown and see if you can find this other McGuffin, would you? You weren't doing anything important, right now, were you?

It was just as well there was a post-credit sequence because the main questline only took Mordita to level 133. There are two more levels to go so any quests are welcome, however trivial. No other way to get the xp, these days.

The Tradeskill Signature line is basically the same only without nearly everything I just said. If the Adventure Sig is thin, the Crafting one is positively skeletal. Mostly it's gathering mats, making stuff out of them and waiting several hours until you can do it again. 

What do you want from a crafting questline, though? Narrative? I just want the recipes for the five new levels, mostly. And I have them now, so I'm happy.

And I'm happy about the Adventure timeline, too, because the fighting was actually fun for once! How many expansions are there where I would have been able to say that with a straight face? Not very many.

Why was it fun? Because it was very, very easy, that's why. And I like easy. If you like challenge, you are not going to be anything like as happy as I was. There isn't any.

Okay, a slight caveat. I have never taken a Necromancer through the Sig Line of an expansion before. Not first up, anyway. I don't have a benchmark for how easy that would usually be.

And it's true that the main reason I wanted to swap from my Berserker was to make things easier for myself. I totally did not expect it to be this much easier, though, and I can't help but think there's more going on than better DPS.

Midnight : tiny but mighty.

There's one thing I noticed that I find very hard to explain: Mordita's combat pet never seemed to take any damage. None at all. Ever. 

A Necro has excellent healing options. I also had a healer mercenary ready to heal both Mordita and her pet. Neither I nor the NPC needed to heal the pet at all.

After a while I started to wonder what was going on so I began paying close attention to the pet's health bar. It didn't move. Not a pixel. 

It was 100% all the time. I never saw it drop even one per cent. I moused over it to see the numbers. I never saw them change. Not on huge overpulls. Not on bosses. Not if I just stood back and watched to see what would happen. The pet seemed to be effectively invulnerable throughout the entire Signature line. It was also extremely good at getting and holding aggro, allowing Mordita to chain-cast every damage spell in her artillery without a pause.

It's not like the mobs weren't putting out the damage, either. Mordita needed plenty of healing when adds got onto her before the pet grabbed them. The Mercenary even managed to get himself killed a couple of times. The pet, though? Didn't take the tiniest scratch that I ever saw.

So that can't be working as intended, surely. Maybe it's one of those good bugs. I've had invulnerable pets before. Just for a session, though, not for weeks on end. 

Even without the invulnerable pet, though, the whole thing seemed much easier than usual. For one thing, none of the bosses had any really irritating tricks. No mana drain, either, which is a huge improvement, although it's been a few expansions since that was in fashion.

Even the tricks they did have mostly involved running about, standing in certain spots or clicking on things. Nothing that wasn't immediately easy to understand and simple to do. 

Who are you and what have you done
with the real Lucan?

Bosses didn't have ludicrous health pools, either. They took damage at a very satisfying rate. I don't think any boss fight took more than a couple of minutes. I remember expansions where the trash took longer than that and the bosses took more like a quarter of an hour. As for the regular mobs, TTK was two or three seconds for most of them. 

All of that made me actively look forward to every instance, something I very rarely do. When I messed
something up in one of them (Only for a side-quest.) the thought of having to do the whole instance again didn't make me want to give up and play something else instead - it made feel like that might be fun.

All the instances are also quite compact and easy to navigate. There are lots of teleports and portals so you don't need to slog through miles of empty corridors to get anywhere. And visually the whole thing is spectacular. It doesn't come over in screenshots but in game there's a huge amount of three-dimensionality, lots of particle effects and movement. It's a pleasure to spend time there. 

There have been complaints about the pacing, particularly the way players have been left to cobble together a path to the cap involving side quests and repeatables but I'm quite happy to meander through those final two levels. It'll give me a chance to gather enough rares to upgrade Mordita's spells. 

Not that there's much sign of her needing the extra power. She went into the expansion with almost every spell at Expert level from the tier below and it seemed to give her more than enough firepower, not just to get the job done but to get it done quickly and easily. 

Rather than try to race through the last two levels with her, I think I might take a couple more characters through both the Adventure and Tradeskill Signatures first. The crafters should have a very easy time of it, what with every capped character giving a 20% xp bonus to those coming after and those also getting a reduction in waiting-time on the gatekeeping quests.

All in all, I'm very satisfied with Rage of Cthurath so far. I think it might be my favorite expansion for quite a while. But then I always say that, don't I? I'm a cheap date when it comes to expansions.

One Thing, Then Another

What I wanted to write today was a review of the first season of Arcane, which I finished watching last night. Bit late but still...

That, however, requires some time and thought and I have, if I'm lucky, about an hour to get this post written, edited and published. So that's not going to happen.

I will spoil my own future review, should it ever come to be, by saying I found Arcane to be one of the most impressive animated series I have ever seen. And I've seen a few. The animation itself is quite possibly the most detailed, fluent and expressive I've ever seen outside of a cinema or for that matter inside and the script was pretty damn fine, too. Not to mention the voice acting.

Better stop before I really get into it. I just wanted to say it was magnificent and I'm an idiot for not watching it when it came out. Maybe I'll save the full review for when I've seen the second season, although that could be a while. I need a breather after the emotional beating the first one gave me before I get back on that particular horse.  

I don't want to skip a posting day just because I can't write the post I wanted to, though. I'm aiming for 300 posts for the calendar year, which means I have to come up with ten in the next nine days. The Advent Calendar has me covered for three so it's seven in nine but of those nine I'm working three and I generally don't work and post so it's really seven in six. 

Can't afford to skip a day, then. Hence this half-assed excuse for a post.

One card any games blogger can always play is the good old "What I've Been Playing" number. In my case, that'd be EverQuest II. Quite a bit of it, in fact.

Enough that my Sage is now halfway through Level 134. The cap is 135 so he's nearly there.

He would actually be there already if it wasn't for the shameless time-gating. I'm not just talking about the reputation grind, the details of which I laid out a week ago. I got that done in about four days by doing the three-hourly quest once in the morning and again in the evening each day, much the same as I used to do the Overseer missions. 

With that finished, I thought it would be back to regular questing until I got to the end of the Signature quest and hit the cap. I was half right.

There's no more time-gated content within the questline itself. The problem is that there isn't much more questing at all. It took me one more session to finish it all. 

It was fun. I enjoyed it. I have no complaints about the quality. It's the quantity I'm not so pleased with.

When my Sage reached the end of the Tradeskill Signature, he was still some distance from the cap. It took him to the very beginning of Level 133. It also gave him a Familiar, an Advanced Spell Book with some of the new recipes and granted him license to fly in the two opening zones of the new expansion. 

All of which is very nice but it's not the end. He still needs two more books and the power of flight in the third zone and for all of those he has to be Level 135. So how is he supposed to get there?

By doing time-gated, repeatable quests, of course! There's a single quest available and it has an eighteen-hour refresh. That's a lot more manageable than the three hour refreshes of the last one but also less amenable to shrinkage by super-human effort (Aka Obsessive and Unhealthy Gameplay.)

Putting a positive spin on it

On the plus side, the quests are very easy and the xp is substantial. If he'd bothered to pop a potion before handing them in, he'd be 135 already. I wasn't in that much of a hurry so I left it until today to do that. He's now one more boosted hand-in away from the Big Ding, which should come... let me see... I did the hand-in around two o'clock this afternoon so... eighteen hours... hmmm... breakfast time tomorrow.

At that point he'll be able to buy the other two recipe books from the vendor in The Unknown and fly anywhere he fancies. Then he's going to need an unconscinable amount of rares for all the Expert spells he'll have to craft for himself, Mordita the Necromancer and possibly the Inquisitor and the Wizard, too. If I have any sense, which is a debatable point, I'll take him through the Adventure Signature line first, so he's robust enough to do his own foraging in the new lands. Otherwise he'll have to use the silly magic hand and that's soooo sloooow....

The issue with the Adventuring Signature is the speed of leveling. Mordita is on the final stage now and once again I have to say it's been an entertaining story with enjoyable gameplay. I'll maybe do a proper write-up on it when I've finished. She just has one instance left, according to the wiki. It should only take her another hour or so.

And then she'll be right around where the Sage was at the same stage, I think. About two levels shy of the cap. Only I don't think Adventurers get a nice little 18-hour repeatable that gives half a level every time you hand it in. I think what they get is a whole load of side-quests, repeatables and collections that each net maybe 4% of a level. 

I could be wrong. I hope I am. I guess I'll find out when I get there. I fear it could be a while before Mordita caps out, though, and if Barnabus is going to do it too, he has at least a dozen or so hours ahead of him to get to where she is.

I said it was entertaining. I didn't say it made sense.

Which, I suppose, is the standard, intended, expected gameplay of an MMORPG. After all these years of going on about how much I like leveling and how the journey is the best part, blah blah blah, I can hardly complain if I don't get given my five new levels in the first five minutes, can I?

Except there were several expansions where that was pretty much what happened. Okay, not five minutes, but fast. The questline gave you so much xp you were capped long before you got to the end of it. 

And I liked that.  It was a great example of giving someone what they want not what they ask for. If they'd done a poll in advance, asking if I wanted to level faster, I bet I'd have said no. But they didn't ask. They just did it. And it turned out that was what I wanted, even if I didn't know it.

And then, a couple of expansions ago, the whole thing went into reverse and then some. We didn't even go back to how it was before, when the main questline in an expansion would take a good, long while but you'd come out the end of it there or thereabouts at the cap.

Instead, the current model has you still in the middle of leveling up when the story reaches its conclusion. After which you have to cobble together whatever sources of extra xp you can find to make up the difference. There's always enough, somewhere, but you have to go look for it. Or in my case read a guide.

These things change all the time, of course. If they don't, all the complaints are about how stale and repetitive the expansions are getting. If they do, it's all "Why try to fix something that wasn't broken?" There's no winning with MMO veterans. 

For all that, I think this is a pretty good expansion so far. I can quite easily imagine taking multiple characters through it over the course of the year. And we get a pass on leveling for the next one with the bi-annual rise in Level Cap, so really I have two years to bring everyone up to speed.

Always assuming, that is, that there is another EQII expansion in 2026. And 2027. If I had to bet on it, I'd bet there will be but I wouldn't bet my shirt, let alone my house. 

I should probably just be grateful we're getting expansions at all and stop nitpicking.

I Wasn't In That Much Of A Hurry Anyway - Time-Gating In EQII's Rage of Cthurath Tradeskill Timeline

Rage of Cthurath is shaping up very nicely. Then again, almost all EverQuest II expansions do. I think I usually come here in December, singing their praises in the first few days and weeks, before wandering off to play with some shiny new toy in the New Year.

The whole way I play MMORPGs has completely changed over the last five years or so, though. Before, even including most of my time in Guild Wars 2 (Which was hardly overburdened with the expansions while I was there, let's be honest.), a new expansion for my current game generally meant I'd be doing little or nothing else until I'd at least finished the storyline and quite possibly for several months after.

Now, I don't even seem to be able to stick at it until the end of the main story quest. I do finish in the end but sometimes it takes two or three goes, separated by weeks or even months, usually when I'm off playing other games. Last year, if I'm remembering correctly, it was Spring by the time I wrapped things up on the first character. 

Or maybe I'm imagining that. It's a bit fuzzy when you take multiple characters through the same content. Perhaps I did finish the Signature Timeline on my Berserker before I moved on to something else. I'm pretty sure I would at least have finished the Tradeskill line, if only because those always take a fraction of the time the Adventure ones need. 

[Hi! I'm the Inventory Full Fact Checker. I'd just like to jump in here and say that, actually, that's not quite correct. More to the point, it's totally wrong. As this post confirms, the Berserker (Whose name is Conkers so why not call him that?) didn't get around to completing the Tradeskill Signature Questline for last year's expansion, Scars of Destruction, until nearly the end of January. January 24th to be precise. And let's face it, precision is what I'm here for...)

Okay. Fine! Thank you for your service. Now bugger off. 

But that post is very helpful in making the point I was about to make, namely that this year, in keeping with the loophole-closing I was talking about only on Friday, someone at Darkpaw obviously cottoned on to the way people like to race through the crafting timeline just so they can get flying in all the new zones, before going back and doing the Adventure timeline on the same character. Being able to fly for that makes it so much faster and easier. It totally makes sense to do it that way round.

Only two problems with that plan this year. For one, I forgot to do it that way around. I was so eager to see how my necromancer would handle promotion to Expansion Lead, I never even gave a thought to the Tradeskill quests. I just slammed her into the first zone and started killing stuff to see how it went. 

And since it went really well, I kept on doing it. Right up until she dinged Level 131 yesterday, at which point I thought to myself, you know what? It would be really handy if my Sage, Barnabus, was high enough level to make Mordita's new spells for her as she was ready for them.

With that in mind, I swapped over yesterday and had him start on the Tradeskill line. It was exactly as expected. Some chatting, some sneaking, a lot of gathering and loads of crafting. All very entertaining and enjoyable. I was having a great time.

XP was rattling in, too. I thought about using an xp potion to speed things up even more but it hardly seemed worth it. It looked as though it might take about as long to do the whole tradeskill line as it had taken to do just the first zone as an Adventurer. I hadn't made my mind up whether to keep swapping between the two or to blitz through the crafting quests and get that finished first, when this happened: Problem #2.

That's the final part of Quest Four (Of Eight.) Halfway through the full questline. On paper, anyway. 

It took me about ninety minutes to get there. Maybe a couple of hours. I wasn't timing it. At that rate I'd have had it finished this evening. 

I will not have it finished this evening. I might not have it finished this week.

The final part of the fourth quest is very heavily time-gated. You have to "prove your worth" to the goat-folk of Yon Gorroth before you can get any further and boy, are they hard to impress. In the old days, you'd probably just have had to grind out some crafted item they wanted until your fingers bled, taking the same repeatable quests over and over again. Not any more.

Well, yes, still that, sort of... You still have to make them stuff they're too lazy/snotty to make for themselves, just so they can do you the favor of treating you like a hired hand rather than a potential criminal but now they're being a lot more controlling about it. And exploitative, too.

First, they want to charge you a fortune just for giving you the opportunity to work for them. Five hundred platinum pieces and a rare before they'll even consider giving you the work. Then they tell you it's going to take a full week, real time, before they're going to hand you the merit badge that lets everyone else know you're fit to be trusted with even more menial labor.

At this point you could just sit the week out, if you had the patience. The timer will tick down with no help from you. Feel free to log out and go play someone - or something - else for  few days. 

Is it just me or is that a bit of a risky mechanic for a genre that generally likes to keep people logging in every day? 

There is something you can do about it, assuming you'd quite like to play your character before this time next week. You can take a repeatable quest from the same guy and do that for an eight-hour reduction in waiting time. 

It's not obvious. If I hadn't had the walkthorugh on the wiki open, I would never have known. You have to Hail the goat to get him tell you there even is a repeatable quest. Who hails NPCs these days? Is it 2005 all over again? It's like they don't want you to know. 

Once you find out it's there, though, the quest only takes a few minutes. That's not so bad, is it? You could probably get the whole thing done in a couple of hours and be on your way to the next level and the end of the questline in no time. 

Yeah... nope. You can only take the repeatable quest once every three hours.  

Even if you were insane enough to stay up all day and all night, grabbing each opportunity as it came, it would take you a couple of days. Any normal person is only going to manage three or four of those time-cutting quests a day, if that. Maybe you'd get it finished in three or four days, assuming you played every day or at least remembered to log in every time the damn quest was up. 

Unsurprisingly, there's a thread complaining about it on the forums, hyperbolically entitled  The Tradeskill Timeline Sucks In This Expansion Like Never Before. Having played through every one of those Timelines I would  categorically deny that. There have been plenty of worse ones. 

Then again, I am a Crafter and an Adventurer. This doesn't critically affect my enjoyment. My immediate response was to make my mind up to carry on with the Adventure timeline and just do the repeatables as and when I think of it. I don't really care if it takes all week.

I might be a little more irritated if I only played a Crafter but I can guarantee that almost every player who does also has a whole stable of them, so it's not like they haven't got something else to do while they wait. Plus there's all that gathering to do if you want to have enough Rares to make anything worthwhile.

I really don't see what the rush is, anyway. The expansion is with us for a year. Does everyone really want to be done with it by Christmas? There are people in the thread speculating that someone might have "taken time off from work just do the TS signature quest" and now they're screwed, to which I'd say if they did then the problem probably lies more with that person's life choices than any flaws in quest design.

The upshot for me is that I'll get back to adventuring for now and shelve the plan to make spell upgrades as I go. So far there's no sign Mordita needs them and anyway. The way spell upgrades work in EQII now means even the Expert versions of the new tier that Barnabus could make for her probably won't be better than the researched versions she has of older ones. It's a very unintuitive process in some ways. Experts used to be the gold standard for casual soloing but now you mainly need them as a stage in a much longer upgrade path.

As for progress in the Adventure questline, Mordita can now fly in the opening zone and she's just arrived at the first solo instance in the second. I need a clear couple of hours when I can count on not being interrupted for that one, which isn't guaranteed to happen... ever.

If it's time gating your worried about, you should try living with a dog... 

(Oh, and in case you're wondering what the weird pictures of a fiery, disembodied hand are all about, that's the device you craft that allows high level crafters who don't have an equivalently elevated Adventure level to wander about the map in complete safety. It's slow but it gets the job done. Eventually. 

It's also a great way to take close-ups of mobs, something I hadn't realized until today. I may make more use of it for that.)

Into The Unknown -or- Blimey, These Bags Are Heavy! What Have You Got In There?

That post title would work better if you were, in fact, looking into The Unknown in the screenshot above. You're not. That's the Oogothl Sprawl. Only, "Into The Oogothl Sprawl" doesn't have the same ring about it, does it?

And anyway, I haven't really been "Into" either of them, not in the sense of having gone somewhere and done something. What I have done is finish the first stage of the Signature Questline (MSQ if you prefer.) thereby gaining the Account flag that lets all my characters use the Spire to teleport you from the opening zone, Yon Gorroth, to the other two explorable zones, Oogothl Sprawl and The Unknown.

Getting that far has taken me around six hours although maybe an hour of that was spent giving my Necromancer's bags a serious clear-out, including swapping the bank boxes she was using for proper backpacks. 

That was something I wasn't expecting to need to do. Ever. I've been using the two kinds of containers indiscriminately for as long as I can remember. The only difference was what the icon looked like and which crafters made them. Tailors make bags, Carpenters make boxes.

Only very recently, in July this year, Darkpaw decided to get serious about the supposed weight difference between wooden boxes intended for vault storage and leather backpacks used to carry stuff on your character. I'm not about to do a full research project on it but as I vaguely remember it was that way when the game began but fairly quickly got changed so both sorts were effectively weightless. I think maybe weight itself was was removed from the game and boxes and bags just went along for the ride.

Then in July this happened:

Strong Boxes in inventory will now slow characters unless the character is in The City of Freeport, the Qeynos Capitol District, the Qeynos Province District, Neriak, City of Hate, or any house or guildhall.

It's an interesting change in a couple of ways. Firstly, there's still no weight to the boxes as such. Instead, there's a debuff to movement speed. Secondly, only some starting cities are exempt. In Halas, Kelethin and the Sarnak starting town, the name of which I can never remember (It's Gorowyn. Had to look it up.) new players will need to make sure they only use bags right from the get-go.

There is a reason for that, as pointed out by someone in the eight-page complaint thread on the forums this apparently minor change generated. The exempted areas are all discrete instances, whereas the other cities are areas in much larger, open zones. The "slow walking" code is obviously being applied zone-wide and there was presumably no easy or quick way to limit it to certain spots.

As many commenters also pointed out, no-one appeared to be asking for this change. EQII doesn't have exactly the split World of Warcraft does between "Retail" and "Classic" but it does have "Live" servers running the most recent iteration of the game and a whole bunch of Time Limited Expansion and Special Ruleset servers, on which different rules apply, including an "Origins" server that's probably the closest to the "Classic" concept.

With that amount of choice, it seems reasonable to assume that anyone who hankers after the good old days of 2005, when dwarves were dwarves and anyone seen walking the streets carrying half a dozen wooden boxes would rightly be pinned to the ground by the sheer weight of public disapproval, could jolly well pack their artisan-crafted traditional bear-skin backpacks and bugger off to Origins.

Even Origins, it seems, had to have a think about it first. The change was introduced there only after a period of anarchy, when sprightly Elves could be seen tripping merrily across the high walkways of Kelethin with half a dozen bank boxes bound around their waists as if they were made of thistledown. Although, given they were Elves, I guess they very well could have been.

Conspiracy theories were raised in the thread about the move being forced on Live by the need to service Origins or its having something to do with boosting sales of large bags in the Cash Shop. Unfortunately for the conspiracists, Origins has a completely separate code base that doesn't rely on compliance with the Live game and at the time of the change there didn't happen to be any large bags for sale in the Cash Shop at all.

A much more cogent complaint was that "no-one asked for this". It certainly wasn't a hot topic of conversation on the forums before the change was made. There is an in-game Feedback system that's invisible to all but the sender and whoever at Darkpaw has the unenviable task of reading it but it stretches credulity a little too far to believe there could have been a flurry of private requests for really heavy bank boxes.

Apparently the given reason for the change was so that larger vault boxes could be offered in the future. We used to get bigger boxes with every expansion that also came with a level cap raise. New recipes were added to Tailors and Carpenters books and everyone changed out their old boxes and bags for the more generous sizes. That stopped a long time ago for the very sound reason that the servers just couldn't handle the increase in the number of items they had to track as players moved around the world with the equivalent of a pick-up truck full of miscellaneous goods trailing behind them.

I suppose the idea is that boxes in banks won't need to be tracked in real-time to anything like the same extent, bank vaults tending by tradition to stay in one place most of the time, so it might be possible to make them larger. So far we haven't, as far as I know, seen any recipes for bigger boxes but then I haven't started leveling my Carpenter to 135 yet. Maybe she'll get a pleasant surprise. 

I doubt it. It might be in the long-term plans but what seems much more likely to me in the short term is that there's a faction within the development team at Darkpaw that just doesn't like seeing players "getting away" with things. They're always tightening up on imagined infractions for what often looks, from the outside, like loopholes being closed for the sake of it. 

For example, the recent changes to utilities. The patch that came along with the launch of the current expansion had a few unpleasant surprises for slackers who weren't keeping up to date with the latest nutritional advice:

Expendable item effects such as food that grant Crit Bonus, DPS, Fervor, Flurry, Flurry Multiplier, Haste, Melee Multiplier, Multi Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer grant that stat bonus in expansion zones released after their intended expansion. For example food from Ballads of Zimara will not grant these stats in Scars of Destruction or later expansion zones.

Non-expendable item effects such as food that grant Crit Bonus, DPS, Fervor, Flurry, Flurry Multiplier, Haste, Melee Multiplier, Multi Attack, or Weapon Damage will no longer grant that stat bonus in the second expansion released after their intended expansion. For example triggered or passive permanent effects from Ballads of Zimara will grant these stats in Scars of Destruction zones, but will not grant these stats in Rage of Cthurath or later expansion zones.

I guess Provisioners will be happy about that. Personally, I rarely even remember to use food or drink at at all so its a bit of a moot point. Given that older food will inevitably provide lower benefits, though, it's hard to see this as a necessary change to maintain some kind of even playing field or to ensure the game runs more smoothly. 

And then there was this:

Many triggered item effects from equippable gear must now be worn to maintain the effect.

That, at least, could be argued to have some relevance to gameplay, if fights have to be tuned with every possible unequipped clicky in mind. There was a time when I would drag the icon of an equippable item in my bags to a hotbar so I could trigger it without having to either open the bags or, Tunare forfend, actually put it on! But that was a long time ago. I'm not going to miss it now.

I did expect a lot of complaints on the forum about both changes but I just had a look and I couldn't find any so either no-one cares or no-one's noticed yet. Which is possible. I only noticed the box thing because a bloody great red warning notice popped up when I ported my Necromancer out of her home into Antonica on the first day of the expansion. 

Even then, I ignored it because she was riding her broomstick and the speed debuff is either mitigated or completely annulled when you're on a  mount. It was only when she had to get off the broom for some reason and I saw she was hobbling along like a cartoon witch that I thought to take a look at her inventory.

She was using three bank boxes and had a couple more in her bags. The weight restriction counts for unequipped boxes as well. Carpenters, who have to make and move the things, aren't happy about that.

Once I'd decided to replace the three boxes she was using with bags, my first thought was to grab some off the Broker. I was only saying the other day how it's usually faster and nearly as cheap to buy crafted items as it is to make them yourself. 

I'd be grateful if you'd forget I said anything so dumb. It's nonsense. Some things are very cheap and very widely available but many are not. Big bags, for one. Unless you want pay half a million plat for a 48-slot bag, I suggest that, if you have a Tailor on staff, you get them to make it instead.

Which is what I did. Eventually. First I had to figure out why Mordita didn't have the recipe. That was easy enough. She doesn't have most recipes. I boosted her to 130 Tailoring with a Cash Shop token and crafting boosts don't come with a fully up-to-date set of recipe books. The only recipes she had were ones she'd picked up from holidays and quests. 

Luckily, most of the books are on the NPC vendors in the craft halls these days, where they cost silver and gold, which isn't even pocket lint. I bought the lot. Over two hundred books and scrolls. Every one of which I had to purchase separately. 

And then I scribed them all. One. At. A. Time.  

That took a while. It also filled all the available slots in my bags when I was only half-way through so I had to do it in two goes and then my mouse finger got cramp from all the clicking. I got it done in the end. Then it was time to swap everything over. 

Fortunately, I remembered that there's an easy way. Couldn't remember what it was, of course. I had to google it. It's simple when you know how. Just drag the icon of the bag you want to empty into an open slot of the bag you want to fill and the contents transfer themselves automagically. Leftovers stay in the original bag so just keep decanting into another new bag until you're done.

It was weirdly satisfying. I was almost sorry I didn't have more bags to swap. I might do it on a  few more characters now I know the trick.

All that took an hour or so out of my steady progress through the Signature Quest and now writing about it has taken up almost all of this post. Funny how these things keep happening, isn't it?

Maybe next time I'll actually get to post something about the Unknown. Or Oogothl Sprawl. 

I bet you can't wait. 

EverQuest II : Rage Of Cthurath - Very First Impressions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All The News That's Fit To Steal: EQII Rage Of Cthurath, Soulframe Preludes and Guild Wars Reforged

This isn't a news blog. Is there any such thing? Still, sometimes a bunch of stories turn up in the news cycle all at once with at least some relevance to what I do here. And sometimes they turn up when I'm short of time and happy to link a few press releases and embed a few promos and call it a post. 

Am I selling this? Yeah, maybe not...

So, anyway, let's start with the most relevant piece of news, which is that we have a date for the new EverQuest II expansion Rage of Cthurath. It's December 10, 2025. 

Obviously it's 2025. A bit pedantic of them even to mention it, isn't it? I mean, it really would be news if it was December 10, 2026, I guess. It's not like Darkpaw is Rockstar or something. (I've never actually played a Grand Theft Auto game, by the way. Maybe I should do something about that sometime...)

As part of the promotional push for the expansion. Darkpaw did a Livestream on their YouTube channel yesterday. It's pretty long. Nearly two and a half hours. Does anyone have time for that? If so, knock yourselves out. Here it is.

I certainly don't. I watched about fifteen minutes at the start, where they're flying through the new zones (Which look gorgeous, by the way.) until the swooping camera started to make me motion-sick. After that I skipped through to see what else was in there and didn't find much of interest. I guess I watched maybe half an hour altogether.

There's a full transcript on YouTube that I also flicked through. As far as I could see they don't really go into anything that affects me - a lot of stuff about group and raid dungeons and the new Public Quests, for example. I won't be doing the first two and PQs I always figure out as I get to them.

Other than that, mostly just confirmation that the outdoor zones are big and have record amounts of verticality. That makes sense when you consider the creatures that live there can all fly. Of course, we won't be able to fly, not until we've explored the whole place on foot, but I'm sure we're all used to that by now.

It all looks very impressive, visually. Solo content sounds solid. There are three overland zones and the Signature questline wraps up at the end of the second, leaving the third, I'm betting, for sopping up enough extra xp to hit the cap. If it's anything like the last two expansions, leveling will be slow going. I'm looking forward to it, although I'm not promising I'll get all that far this side of the New Year. Bad timing for me, these December releases.

Next up, something that got a mention in the comments of Tuesday's post, namely Soulframe. In case you either didn't know or had forgotten, which would be easy to do since it barely seems to get a mention in anything I read, Soulframe is the in-development MMORPG from Digital Extremes, makers of the very sucessful and also rarely mentioned around here Warframe.

Warframe is SciFi. Soulframe is fantasy. I tried Warframe a few years back, didn't hate it but didn't much like it either. It was the setting as much as anything that put me off. The gameplay seemed okay. 

On that basis, I'm mildly interested to see what the same game looks like with a fantasy skin and I'll be able to satisfy that curiosity very soon because in just five days DE is going to start selling "Founders Packs" giving access to what they're calling "Preludes".

Preludes is DE's name for pre-alpha so this is a buy-in pre-alpha. Are we really desperate enough for those now? Ohh, yes!

How it works is a bit confusing but there's a video. It's only about seven minutes long. I watched it and didn't learn much. Here, you try.

There's also an hour-long livestream video that I haven't watched. Maybe that tells you more. I wouldn't know. I got all I needed from the FAQ,which I read in about a minute. That seemed way more efficient.

I am definitely not interested enough in Soulframe to buy into a pre-alpha. I mean, not unless it costs, like, five dollars or something. I don't think they've announced the pricing structure yet but I'm sure it won't be that.

And finally, something for free! Always my favorite price point.

Of course, it's only free for people who already own the base product, which in this case is the original Guild Wars. They are lowering the box price for those who don't, though. 

I do own Guild Wars, as it happens. All of it. The game plus all the expansions/DLC/whatever they're called.

This is relevant to the blog in a couple of ways, the first being that it's a game I have played and written about before but second and more important because Guild Wars has been in maintenance mode for more than a decade and look! People still play it! It still gets good service from the developers. You might almost say it has a future.

When Maintenance Mode gets mentioned, I can immediately think of two games that have been almost thriving under the regime: Guild Wars and Final Fantasy XI. What they have in common is that they're both under the protection of game developers who genuinely care about them, even though they each have newer, much more successful MMORPGs on their books.

New World (That's where I'm going with this but I'm sure you were ahead of me.) had a development team that cared for and valued it but I don't think many people believe it was beloved of the company that owned it. Maybe the comparison isn't valid. Or perhaps, since ArenaNet is a part of the much bigger and generally hard-hearted NCSoft, it might be.

I can think of another example, too: Rift. Rift also wasn't well looked after by the company that owned it, or at least not in the end. Trion sold Rift to Gamigo, who gave it a bit of attention for a while and then effectively put it out to pasture. 

No-one generally has a good word to say about either NCSoft or Gamigo but in a face-off with Amazon, I suspect both would coming out looking like the good guys by default. At least they've kept the servers up and even Gamigo manages to keep some events recycling in Rift to give the illusion someone cares. The game is currently experiencing a bit of a dead cat bounce thanks to a player-led initiative. It's not a lot but it does at least show that maintenance mode doesn't mean the end.

For Guild Wars, Reforging might even be the end of maintenance mode. There's yet another video. It's thirty seconds long. It went up on YouTube two days ago and it has nearly two hundred thousand views already. 

For comparison, the EQII video I linked has a tad under two thousand views. The Soulframe one has eight thousand. A lot of people are interested in a version of classic Guild Wars with updated graphics and Steam Deck compatibility, apparently.

Given a response like that, it's hardly surprising ArenaNet are hinting there could be new content, too. We'll see, I guess. I haven't played through all the old content yet. I was planning on it either but if there's a shiny, new version I'm going to get for nothing, I might change my plans.

At the moment, though, I'm enjoying New World. It's a really good game. I always knew it was, seeing as how it's my second most-played game on Steam at over 250 hours. And counting.

I just hope someone at Amazon notices what other companies do with their old MMOs and at least doesn't want to make things look even worse than they already do by closing the whole thing down at the earliest opportunity. I'm not counting on it, though. I doubt we'll ever get to see New World Reforged.

EQII Rage of Cthurath - Welcome To Our Nightmare

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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