The View From The Long Grass : EQ2

When the EQ2 team announced their intention to follow up the surprise success of Everquest's third batch of Progression Servers with some nostalgia-based fun of their own I wasn't all that interested. The original 1999 version of Everquest thoroughly deserves the "Classic" tag but the only classic thing about the 2004 release of EQ2 was the classic misjudgment SOE made by releasing it at the same time Blizzard released WoW.

Over the long, hard decade since that brief fight was fought and lost an enormous amount of work has been done to retool and reshape EQ2 into a very different offering from its much more successful competitor. For my money, and I've been a subscriber since launch, the huge majority of those changes and innovations have been all to the good. I play the current game and I'm very happy with what's on offer there.

As a subscriber, when the subscription-required Time Limited Expansion (TLE) servers launched I was planning on popping in, running around for a while, enjoying the fresh New Server smell then logging off, never to return. At character creation I even had a wild fantasy of rolling on the open PvP server, Deathtoll. That lasted about five seconds before I settled on yet another good old PvE plod.

I spy with my little eye something beginning with L. Yes there is. Look up.
I know there shouldn't be. But there  it is.

The surprise return of The Far Journey and The Isle of Refuge carried me through a couple of sessions but I was still expecting to quit soon after my SK landed in Freeport. Only that didn't happen. Somehow, there I was, renting a room at The Jade Tiger, putting down my free table and bulletin board, then running out toThe Graveyard for a seemingly endless questline given by one of The Overlord's many impossibly verbose henchmen.

After that I found myself killing Brokenskull Pawns in the Ruins and ghostly pirates in Sunken City...on and on it went. Another session, in The Commonlands now, fetching ingredients for Mooshga's dubious dishes, killing more orcs from a different clan, culling armadillos, wild dogs and wisps. I've been all through Thieve's Way and down into The Decrepit Crypt. I've soloed thirty ghostly orcs at the start of Wailing Caves and picked up my Doom Stick from Cog Burn.

12 SK LFG. Oh, wait..SK..belay that, I'll just solo it.

I've gathered and mined and fished because, and I can scarcely believe I'm saying this, I'm crafting again. Yes, crafting. Let me tell you about the crafting. I ran all the way from Freeport to Qeynos just to use the World Bell on the Antonica Dock to get to Halas just to do the Tier 2 crafting questline.

It's a long run but it was worth it. After most of Tuesday spent in EQ2 my Shadowknight sits at level 15 with a Scholar level to match. He's going to be an Alchemist when he turns 20 so he can at least keep his spells and combat arts up to scratch. And he's going to get to 20, too.

Why? Why is this server getting traction with me that none of the three iterations of EQ nostalgia ever did? That's very easy to explain. Stormhold, the PvE server, isn't really about nostalgia at all.

That rhino is definitely not "vanilla".

Leave aside the ancient boat ride and the revived Isle (both of which, I'm pretty sure, will soon become starting options on the regular servers) Stormhold really isn't much different from a Live server. The main changes are in pace and population.

Because of the hype and because of the chance for a new start there are a lot of people playing. The world feels vibrant and busy and bustling. That would - does  happen with any new server but because of the specific TLE ruleset here it's especially effective. With only the base game available the options to spread out and get away from each other are limited. Without access to public teleports and flying or hyper-fast mounts the world is filled with people traveling.

You missed a memo, Kurdek.

When I wanted to go to Halas I had a choice: find a Druid or a Wizard to take me (and there are a few advertizing their services) or run it myself. I chose to run and it was fun and easy. I died just once, trying to bull my way past a pack of Level 24 wolves milling around the path in Nektulos Forest. I was level 13 and they made very short work of me but I revived a hundred meters away with nothing worse than a little xp debt that took just a couple of Discoveries to clear as I ran on again.

In 2004-5 the trip from Freeport to Qeynos via Nektulos Forest was notorious, especially at low level. Fish flew above the river, firebats nuked you from the sky, everything was aggressive and it all chased you forever. When you died (and it was always when, not if) you picked up huge xp debt that took an age to clear. It was a trial, a rite of passage, in so many ways. On Stormhold it takes a while but it's a pleasant jaunt.

I took the scenic route. Hey, my time's my own...

What the TLE ruleset has achieved doesn't have as much to do with nostalgia as it does with returning the game to a pace that feels natural, somewhere that rests very happily between the attrition of the first year after launch and the Benny Hill chase of leveling on Live in 2015.

Live, of course, has to be where it is. Over the years, as the level cap recedes beyond the horizon of a new player, XP gain in the Live game has been tuned up and up in everything but "current" content so that fresh starters and alts can catch up. Heroic characters allow you to begin at level 90 and Mercenaries replace the other players who no longer exist to fill out groups in the 20s and thirties (or indeed the 70s and 80s).

On Stormhold, for the while, it's not like that and it doesn't need to be. Everyone is moving and progressing at a relatively stately pace but don't kid yourself it's anything like it was Back In The Day. Compared to 2004-5 this is still EQ2 on speed and your character is on steroids. In 2005 I would not have been pulling four or five yellow-con mobs at once and coming out last rat standing. I wouldn't have been soloing my way through The Decrepit Crypt at Level 12. I wouldn't be 15/15 after less than a full day's play. I think that took me the best part of a month first time round.

How much can it hurt, right?

No, the TLE dev team have tweaked some specific stuff here and there and made some well-judged modifications to things that were glaringly overpowered but in most respects this is modern EQ2 slowed down. And that is exactly what I've been asking for for years!

It still doesn't mean I'll be sticking with it long term. The timing isn't great. I was just about to get back into WoW, there's F2P Wildstar coming down the pike and I have so many other MMO projects on the go. Added to that, Mrs Bhagpuss isn't interested in coming back for yet another run. We came to the game together in beta and played alongside each other on Steamfont, Oasis, Test and Freeport. There are plenty of MMOs I'll happily play on my own but playing EQ2 without her feels a bit odd.

And anyway, to some extent I've done this all before, when Freeport launched with the original, restricted F2P ruleset. I've leveled so many characters in EQ2. I've started over from scratch and gone to the then-cap on several different servers. Do I really want to go through it all over again?

Smart Loot? I thought it was my lucky rabbit's foot.

I'm not sure. For now, though, I'm having a great time. My plan is to level up at least far enough to have a vote when the thirty days are up, which means I have to get at least to Level 30. If I make it I'll be voting against the unlock but my sense from within the game is that the majority will want to move on. Desert of Flames is a big expansion, though, with a lot of high-end content. I'd be surprised if a majority is done with that in a month. Subsequent unlocks may not come so easily.

It's an odd time for EQ2 right now. Stormhold is a clear success and I think it will remain a busy, well-populated server. On the other hand, those extra servers they had put by in case demand matched what was seen when Ragefire launched haven't been needed yet and server merges are coming for the Live game. How many of the players on the TLE servers are new or returning and how many have just moved next door from another Live server is hard to guess.

What do you expect for 5 silver a week?

What is clear, though, is that Daybreak is quietly managing a return to a form of Subscription-based gameplay as the default for the Everquest franchise. With the Arch-Priest of Free-to-Play now free to devote more time to his EVE online corp, that's a trend I expect to see expand and grow in the months and years ahead.

I'm happy with that. I'm getting my money's worth and, if the Progression/TLE servers are any kind of indication, this is a team that, finally, seems to be learning who and where its audience is.

Stops Along The Road: Everquest

With the opening of a second Progression Server, Lockjaw, things have quietened down on Ragefire to the extent that I can log in without facing a queue at any time during normal EU play hours. That's not to say it isn't still very busy. The Qeynos newbie yard is still fizzing with new starters and the lifespan of a gnoll in Qeynos Hills is measured in seconds.

Blackburrow is heavily camped but the trains are still running. I pulled a small one myself yesterday but it was derailed long before reaching the surface. For my money, leveling up in Blackburrow remains one of the most enjoyable ways to spend time in any MMO. The eerie yipping and howling of the gnolls add to a strangely-pleasant sense of claustrophobia and impending doom unmatched by any of the other low-level dungeons.

The loot, of course, is not of great interest. It never was, especially to a caster. Yesterday someone linked a Black Alloy Medallion in chat, a low level item that has genuine utility. That drops in Runneyeye, which is a dungeon I've always found to be very dangerous. Still, I might have to make the trip.

 Time to pick over the corpses, Genartik.

Seeing it started me wondering what's happening with all of the zones that were added independently of expansions, like The Warrens, Stonebrunt Mountains or Jaggedpine. Typically those are attached to and seen as part of the "Classic" lands but which, since they were added later, have significantly better drops. I expect that was all hashed out in the discussions that took place before launch but I wasn't paying attention.

For now I'm quite happy with the full set of cloth armor I got from kobolds and orcs on my journey to Qeynos. Despite the extreme efforts players make to get their hands on it, and the extortionate prices currently being asked by the campers, gear really isn't all that important during the original leveling game, particularly for casters. If you discount the focus effects, which were added quite a lot later, the addition of a few points of Int or Wis is scarcely game-changing.

As Keen observed it's all about the levels and the spells that come with them. As a caster levels up in Everquest he or she gains access not just to upgrades that are very noticeable improvements but to completely new abilities. It goes a long way to explain why people who developed their understanding of what MMORPG gameplay consists of are so strongly attached to the leveling process.

I always meant to ask you, Tillin. What do you do with all these gnoll teeth I give you?

These days, even on Ragefire, you get access to something new every time you ding. If this was really 1999 you'd have to wait four full levels between each new set of spells. Four levels could take a week to do - or a month. By the time you were approaching that threshold the last lot of spells would be almost too weak to allow you to kill the creatures you needed to kill to progress.

Conversely, each time you'd struggled over that four level line and found an NPC who'd sell you your spells (often entailing some long and dangerous excursions to towers on obscure islands or unfriendly guilds of other classes) and completed the lengthy process of scribing the spells into your spellbook, for a level or so there, you felt like a boss. Well, a mini-boss.

And then the cycle would start over. I loved it. I loved having to explore and travel to find spells. I loved the way some spells could ostensibly only be made by players through the Research tradeskill but that that barrier could be circumvented by knowledge if, for example, you knew that another class got the same spell as of right. Shadowknights, for example, use some of the Necromancer pets that Necros are expected to research but, being too dim (as we always claimed) to make them for themselves, are allowed to buy them from their guild vendors. In Everquest knowledge is always power.

What's that strange, wailing sound?

Everquest doesn't really do convenience and never less so than in Classic. It's not just that player-friendliness wasn't much of a thing in 1999, although as EQ's longtime strapline "You're in our world now" always suggested, it certainly wasn't. It's more that convenience was intentionally designed out in the belief that having everything your own way isn't much fun, whereas struggling against the odds is.

As WoW profited by demonstrating, a lot of people don't share that attitude. I would have said I didn't either and aspects of it certainly chafed back in those supposedly golden days, when there were, without question, far more players complaining about the difficulty and inconvenience than were willing to stand up and defend it. I have to say, though, revisiting it once again, if in an ameliorated dosage,  it really is the irritation and frustration that makes the pearl when it comes to leveling.

I think the great reason leveling is now looked down on by many as an annoying speed-bump on the way to the real game is that the leveling process has become so bland and meaningless. And, yes, easy.

If I was old Van there I'd spring for a Name Change potion.

When people talk about MMORPG gameplay being all about journey it's often assumed they mean it literally - that it's the exploring and the sightseeing and the going out and about in the world that matters. That's true enough as far as it goes but what really made leveling in Everquest and its ilk so sticky was the way the journey always felt like you were getting somewhere.

It wasn't a journey in the sense of getting on a plane in London and stepping off in New York with no sense of having yet been anywhere at all. It was a journey like Laurie Lee's, as he walked out his front door one morning to walk from The Cotswolds to London and eventually found he'd walked all the way into the Spanish Civil War.

I'm a firm believer in the leveling game but to mean something it has to have far more structure, purpose and weight than it's been allowed these last few years. GW2, much though I love it, began with a very weak leveling game and then watered it down because focus groups and metrics showed it was too hard.

Convenience is all very well and I'm not advocating awkwardness for awkwardness's sake, but in the end each task you undertake needs to matter, somehow, and what's more it needs to matter at the time you do it, not as a mere marker on the road to something further down the road. This is a balance that, from all accounts, Vanilla WoW got exactly right. I wish now I'd been there to see it.

Have Pet, Will Travel: Everquest

This week I found myself in the annoying position of having a lot to say and very little time to say it. There was nowhere near enough time to play and blog as much as I wanted to, and in the end I cut the short end off blogging to get a few more hours on Ragefire.

As others have commented, the ability of Everquest to sink its claws in and hold on remains undiminished after all these years. Tobold is right to imagine this won't go on forever and with the experience of Fippy Darkpaw behind them, Daybreak Games clearly would have preferred not to open a second server, but the continuing popularity and concomitant pressure on Ragefire meant they were unable to hold that line. Lockjaw inc!

I'm staying where I am. Unlike Stargrace I've had no real trouble finding plenty of stuff to kill in the ultra-low level starting areas and I haven't even tried to use the /pick command to swap instances to avoid the crowds. I pottered around my gnomish homeland for a while until I hit level three and then, with a vague plan to get to Qeynos, where the hunting is pleasingly gnoll-based and the scenery is more authentically 1999, I meandered my way out of Steamfont, along the high zone wall of Lesser Faydark then along the paths of Greater Fay until I reached the Butcherblock Mountains.

Didn't want to hunt kobolds anyway. Mutter...grumble...

That all went without mishap and I was probably overconfident in taking a shortcut straight through the Butcherblocks to the docks, what with just about everything conning red and the dwarven guards viewing me as criminal scum. Overconfident, yes, but I got away with it, largely due to everything being camped to beyond an inch of its life.

I was more cautious at the dock, swimming (excruciatingly slowly) around the barrier walls and conning the dwarf fishing by the pilings, who glared at me threateningly but declined to swat me as I edged past him on the very edge of the wooden boardwalk. Too near the edge as it happened - I was so nervous of getting too close to him that I fell off the jetty into the water and narrowly avoided being devoured by a scowling aqua goblin as it emerged from the sea.

That was about as dangerous as the entire trip to Qeynos got. There's nothing facilitates safe travel so well as a full server - nearly every danger along the way was either dead or fast on the way to it as hordes of groups camped every tasty pull spot while every class that could solo roamed the paths and thickets in search of prey. The addition of Soulbinder NPCs in all starting cities and a number of other useful locations offered valuable insurance against time lost and I was very glad to take it but in the end I didn't run into any trouble at all.

Pretty sure this used to be the LDON questgivers' camp. Nice of her to arrive six expansions early.

Outside Qeynos itself I ummed and ahhed for a while, trying to remember if gnome necromancers are kill on sight to anyone there, a significant factor when you're bound in The Arena off Lake Rathetear and the Qeynos Soulbinder you need to speak to to save you a half-hour run back is deep inside the city, right next to the bank. I tried Google but the results were inconclusive. In the end I decided to chance it and once again my luck held.

The entire journey took around three hours but I did take a goodly amount of time out to jump on any unsuspecting creature I thought wouldn't give me much of a fight along the way. I killed frogloks and alligators in Innothule Swamp and jungle spiderlings and lizardmen in The Feerrrott. Once I got to Rathe Mountains, though, I saw the deep, deep red giant skeletons stomping around, pulled my running boots on (metaphorically speaking of course - no JBoots for me - didn't even see Hasten), put my head down and ran.

Swimming across Lake Rathetear was painful and trotting through South Karana nerve-wracking but the run across West Karana was just long. I always used to believe it was a flat fifteen minutes from one side of West Karana to the other without the benefit of SoW or Selo's.

You get better at Swimming (8)

For the first time in the entire sixteen years, when I could have done it but never did, I had the presence of mind to time the run. It turns out that from the South Karana bridge to the Qeynos Hills zone line is ten minutes on the button. Add in the extra distance from East Karana and I think that fifteen minute ball-park figure comes pretty close. That's some hike. How many modern MMOs have zones that take 12-15 minutes to cross in a straight line?

As I jogged towards the finish I took a long, hard look at Brother Trintle as he strolled around just outside the barbarian fishing village in West Karana. I was trying to remember if he was a good priest or a bad. Trintle was an even con at Level 5, which I'd dinged on the way, having stayed in Freeport until I hit Level 4 so I could get my spells and my lovely new yellow-con pet. I knew he had some kind of a drop and I was 95% sure he was a wrong'un.

He was so very tempting but in the end caution prevailed. Didn't want to blot my copybook with the Qeynosians even before I arrived if it turned out he was the good priest after all. Didn't want to have to run all the way back from The Arena if it turned out he was an overcon. These are the kind of decisions you have to make all the time in Everquest. It's a thinking player's game and a gambler's, too.

I'll be back, Paw. One day. Mark my words. But for now I'll just go the long way round.

Safely bound outside the Qeynos bank and with no-one actively trying to rip my head off I just had half an hour to go gnoll-hunting. Blackburrow was predictably camped to Sunday and back but I found a good number of scouts and watchers in Qeynos Hills whose short and unhappy introduction to my bony pet made the first inroads into improving my standing with the residents of the Karanas and the Qeynos Guard.

It was all going so well. And then Holly Windstalker came up out of nowhere and started yelling, as she does. I was nowhere near any of her precious wild animals either! Apparently she has no truck with gnomes or necros or both. Okay, it's necros. I knew that, really, or rather I worked it out as I sprinted for the West Karana zone line, while my noble pet gave up his unlife to act as a speed bump.

I would have made it, too, if the bloody woman hadn't rooted me. Respawning at the bank I called it a night. At least I know to keep an eye out for her in future. And since she hates me anyway her bears and wolves are fair game from now on.

That was where I left it. Haven't had a chance to get back on since due to the aforementioned time pressures. There's no rush though. Mrs Bhagpuss and I are off on our travels again soon but I have a few free days before and after and anyway those gnolls are aren't going anywhere.

Common Fluency : Everquest

Playing on Ragefire these past couple of days has reaffirmed an uncomfortable truth: for me, after more than a decade-and-a-half and well over one hundred MMORPGs, nothing the genre can offer has ever surpassed the effortless, natural pleasure of starting a new character on a new server. To step out into an unforgiving world with little more than the clothes you stand up in and an empty backpack waiting to be filled, well it's the pure essence of what drew me in all those years ago and held me ever since.

In creating the concept of the Progression Server SOE and now Daybreak Games have had to make many necessary compromises. A list of all the ways the current systems differ from any of the variations that existed during the twelve or so months between the April 1999 launch and the arrival of the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, would fill this blog post several times over. Every single one of those changes has made the game "easier" than it used to be. And yet it's still not easy. Not easy at all.

Aywren asked in yesterday's comments for advice and information on the appropriateness and practicalities of soloing under the new ruleset and I replied that I have always believed EQ to be a very solo-friendly MMO, which I have. It occurred to me today, though, how very much that solo-friendliness depends on experience and knowledge. Much, much more so than any MMO that I've played, or at least any that was released in the last ten years or so. 

Six-boxing means never having to ask for help. Which is just as well because everyone hates you.

As you join Ragefire, your character is inserted automatically into a number of custom chat channels. Yesterday I found myself listening to chatter from characters in my level range, my class, my geographical location and more. Everyone was asking questions. Where do I go? Who do I speak to? What level do I need to be?

These are the kind of questions you expect to hear in any new MMO but they mask a deeper concern: how do I survive here, let alone prosper? How do I even get started? For example, where are the quests?

Famously and perhaps surprisingly in a game that has the word in its very name, Everquest does not use quests as a framework for gameplay. There are quests of course, many hundreds of them in the classic game alone, but there is nothing to tell you where they are, how to find them, how to proceed if you do or what you might get if you succeed. There are no exclamation points, feathers of flags above the head of any NPC. There are no tidily arranged "hubs" marking a breadcrumb trail across the zone.

Players aren't used any longer to being cast so adrift, especially right at the beginning of their journey. Worse still for many, at no point do you ever find out if you are "done" with an area, whether it's time to move on, or if it would profit you to stay a little longer.

Backing away...backing slowly away....

It's not even something you can tell easily by looking at anything as basic and fundamental in most MMOs as the level of the mobs around you. In Classic the scope of opportunity in most zones can span almost the entire level range of the game.

This morning in North Ro, where my Level 3 necromancer was happily hunting Level 2 aardvarks and decaying skeletons, someone trained a Crypt Mummy to the nearby inn. The mummy was somewhere in the mid-teens, capable of killing my necro in a couple of blows. It hung around the doorway for a while, preventing anyone from using the facilities (which didn't bother my necro, who had already been told he was persona non grata there due to his filthy proclivities). A little while later, further out on the sand hunting Level 3 Young Pumas, he saw a Sand Giant serving up rough justice as it wiped out a group a few levels higher than him as they camped the very same camp of undead from which the mummy had been trained.

In Norrath everyone is very much in it together, for good or for ill. The Hill Giants and Griffins that send you running for cover as they wander by are the prey of other players whose level you one day aspire to reach. Everyone is on their honor to look out for everyone else and the example of the reward for hard work and determination is always there before you: power, freedom of action, revenge, wealth.

New-fangled conveniences... mutter mutter
Actually this one's a big improvement and long overdue

You cannot help but be aware of the danger posed by creatures outside of your level range but unlike other games you equally cannot be quite certain what is and is not within your capacity to handle. Mobs do have exact levels but that information is concealed at all times. You are merely permitted to see a range of colors and descriptions that encode vital information, which you must learn to decode by trial and experience.

Before you attack anything - or even if you intend to run past it - you should target and "consider" it to assess the risk. Only at this point do you learn whether your target is higher or lower than your own level, something you have to derive from the color of the text. Only if it matches your level exactly will you be certain - mobs of your precise level have their information in White. Below you comes grey, green, light blue and dark blue and above you comes yellow and red.

That helps but not as much as you might imagine. Each color encompasses a level range that is itself variable according to your own level, something that really matters a great deal when considering things that are more powerful than you. In Everquest levels mean a lot but then so do many other factors and many of those are invisible.

It's true that you can tell the attitude of every creature from its description but its easy to forget as an experienced player that the hard information comes with a figurative wrapper. Before you can make a full risk assessment you have first to be able to parse the descriptive language for meaning. An animal that "scowls" at you will attack , unprovoked, from its maximum agro range while one that "glares" will let you pass by unharmed unless you almost trip over it, whereupon it will turn and fight. A "dubious" creature will only attack if you attack it first.

Let's not even start on which creatures are worth killing.
Armadillos drop several stackable items
worth almost 2 gold each though.
Just sayin'

Which would be all very well if you could see the aggro range somehow. You can't. Or if the aggro range was constant. It's not. Or if every creature of the same level was of comparable difficulty. They aren't.

Over time and with experience you will come to know without having to check, for each kind of creature you encounter, in a particular zone that you feel you now know well, what will or won't attack, how close you can approach before something unpleasant is likely to happen and how likely you are to survive the experience. When you get to that point you may feel you're really beginning to make progress but there's so much more to learn before you can begin to think of yourself as a seasoned professional adventurer. For one thing, there's the matter of faction.

There are visible factions you can see and measure and affect. Each time you kill a gnoll you'll be given a list of all the groups in Norrath who approve or disapprove and a numerical value for how much more they like you now because of your gnoll-killing ways or, conversely, find you increasingly detestable for picking on poor innocent gnolls (it's mostly gnolls who feel that way and who cares what they think?). You can and probably should make concerted efforts to curry favor with certain groups, not least because it may stop some guards, who you might have imagined were placed there to help and protect the characters of paying customers like you, from instead attacking and killing your character on sight.

Norrath is a world that seethes with intrigue from the pettiest official to the mightiest cabal. You can get on the right side of some of them but there's always someone on the wrong side of you. There are NPCs who will kill you for the class you chose or your race; they will kill you because you cast an illusion or because you killed someone they like, even though you had no idea they even knew each other.

And after "What Do I kill?" comes "How Do I Kill It?" Let's slide over that one for now...

Even animals have their alliances. I had completely forgotten that Fire Beetles in the Deserts of Ro consider all beetles to be their kin and come racing to the assistance of Scarabs. At least those two look alike. Often creatures that are normally disinterested, like Decaying Skeletons, will become hostile if they notice you  attacking one of their ilk but sometimes creatures that seem to have nothing in common at all will leap to each other's defense. There's literally no way, in game, to know what social ties underpin Norrath's wildlife other than by observing and remembering each encounter.

I could go on and on and on but the the detail doesn't really matter. It's understanding the  level of complexity involved that's the key to survival when you set out to solo your way across Norrath. Compared to any modern MMO you care to name Everquest, even now in its much-simplified and ever-increasingly user-friendly form, offers a ferocious learning curve. It's all very well for me to claim blithely that anyone can and should jump in and solo away but I really ought to remember that it took me months of playing 20-40 hours a week just to get to the stage where I could comfortably and confidently run a character from one end of a zone to the other and expect to get there alive.

So, yes, if you haven't played for a while or ever, do give it a try. I firmly believe that beginning a new character afresh on a new server remains the most compelling experience MMORPGs have to offer and Everquest retains all its magnificent potency. Just don't expect it to be easy. Or painless. Or quick.

It's like learning a language. You can pick up enough to get by in quite a short time but proficiency takes years. I'm nowhere near fluent yet but I'll keep trying.

Fifth Time's The Charm : Everquest

After a turbulent first couple of days, worthy of any full MMO launch, it seemed that Daybreak Games finally have all their orc pawns in a row. Ragefire, the new Voting/Timelocked Progression server (catchy...) is up, stable and devoid of Level 50s, although scuttlebutt has it there was a six-boxer already pushing Level 35 last night. As of this morning they even have a system up and running for handling log in queues and kicking AFKers.

With a couple of hours to go before bed, after finishing up my dailies in GW2, I thought I'd give it a try and see if I could make a character. It was still mid-afternoon on the US West Coast so maybe there was a chance I'd get in. And get in I did. At first I got the expected Server Full message but going with the launch-time vibe I kept on clicking and to my considerable surprise it took just a couple of minutes until there I was at Character Select.

In the last round of Progression, on the Fippy Darkpaw server, I went with a gnome necromancer. In the end, this time, I chose to do the same. I did toy briefly with the idea of going Magician but, while my highest level EQ character is a Mage and the class is arguably the most powerful solo specialist at the top end, I've always found the low level gameplay a little disjointed and frustrating. I also rather fancied being a Dwarf for a change but one look at the Classic options for Dwarves (Cleric, Warrior, Rogue, Paladin) quickly put a stop to that plan.

So, Necromancer it is. That makes my fifth in sixteen years. All gnomes. It's a class I have played and enjoyed a lot and yet with which I've never really made much headway. Over the years I've played alongside some extremely skilled and versatile Necromancers, not least Mrs Bhagpuss, who used to main one for a while, insofar as either of us ever "main" anything. A well-played necro can pretty much fill in for every role in the game. They, not Bards, are the real all-rounders of Norrath.

The trouble is, knowing how good they can be is quite intimidating, especially since a lot of them...aren't. You really don't want to be That Necro. There's a lot to take in if you want to give full service to a group as a Necromancer and I can't see myself putting in the hours. It's never to late learn, as Jeromai rightly observes, but I fear it would end up being a project almost on the scale of his latest venture and I don't think I'm ready to commit to that.

Apart from my Heroic Level 90, who has never adventured further than Plane of Knowledge, the highest I've ever taken a necro is somewhere in the 40s. It's extremely unlikely that this latest addition to Bertoxxulous's Dark Army will get even that far. Indeed, odds are very good that he'll get no further than his Progression server predecessor, who topped out around Level 12.

At least I think he did. I can't check because, even now, if you want to play on the old prog server, Fippy Darkpaw, (which I'm guessing almost no-one does any more) you still have to have a paid-up All Access account. Which, of course, I do - only not the right one.

Five years back I made a fresh account to play on the then-new Freeport F2P server in EQ2, which is how I ended up playing my best-geared, most rounded, highest level character, by far, on a free to play Silver account instead of the one I was actually paying for. Last year, finally, I decided to fix that. I cancelled payment on my longstanding All Access account, which in turn booted my best-geared, most rounded, highest level character in Everquest, the aforementioned Magician, who happened also to be on that longstanding account (which itself is registered in Mrs Bhagpuss's name because we swapped accounts almost a decade and a half ago for reasons which would totally have made sense back then, I'm sure...) onto a F2P account...

And so it goes... After sixteen years of chopping and changing, from illegal account sharing, borrowing and taking over each other's discarded characters, to server merges and payment model rationalizations and being sold off like chattels - twice - our SOE/Daybreak accounts are a hideous tangled mess, almost as much so as that paragraph above. It's something that is not going to get any better. Ever. So I just live with it.

Anyway, remind me; why am I playing on Ragefire, again? It can't be to get a nostalgia fix. I never stopped playing EQ. It's still a current experience for me and you can't be nostalgic about something you never stopped doing, can you? And don't I have a whole raft of characters I'm - verrrrry slowwwly  - working on, any of whom would be a better investment of the limited time I can find to spend in the elder game than a fifth necro?

And besides, the version of Norrath currently showing on Ragefire would surely make for a very poor nostalgia trip for anyone, wouldn't it? There's so much that just isn't even the tiniest bit like it was in The Good Old Golden Olden Days.

There are no real corpse runs because you keep all your gear on death. You can't even lose a level any more. Your pets zone with you and don't explode with a cry of anguish and despair when you thoughtlessly turn yourself invisible. Your spells scribe instantly. Come to that, the entire research system is different. When you arrive at a new city on a different continent there's no need to spam /ooc and /shout, increasingly desperately, "Looking for Bind at Gate", terrified that at any second someone could pull a train over your hiding place and send you back to your bind spot two hours travel away. Nowadays, in our Brave New Classic World, you just stroll up to the Soulbinder NPC and presto, safe.

There are a thousand ways the current version of "Classic" is nothing of the kind. I haven't played on the now officially sanctioned Project 1999 but I'm pretty sure that if you want anything that even begins to approximate the genuine Everquest experience that's where you have to go - and I bet even there it's a damn sight easier than it was in the one and only original 1999.

Thing is this: you can't turn back the MMORPG clock. Wish you could but you can't. Unlike static, offline games that genuinely never change, online games are living constructs. Their very essence is change. How can you hope to re-create the Classic Everquest experience when the game was patching in changes almost from the day it launched?

Have you ever read the patch notes for EQ from the first few years? Allakhazam has the full record archived for posterity. It's fascinating reading. The game changed, substantively, month by month, sometimes almost week by week and it never stopped changing. The EQ we were playing right before Kunark was already a very far cry indeed from the EQ that had launched just a year earlier and yet somehow we're supposed to lump it all together and call it "Classic".

Over in WoW, the game that snatched Everquest's ball, ran away with it and never gave it back, Blizzard will have no truck with Classic servers and programmed nostalgia. So they say. Yet they still seem to believe they can turn back time. To the dismay of many and the delight of, I would guess, very few, this week Blizzard announced that all flights over Draenor and any future New Lands have been cancelled - for good.

I say "Blizzard". All the recent controversial news from the world's biggest MMO seems to have come from interviews with Lead Designer Ion Hazzikostas. One assumes he has the backing of Management when he claims "Having looked at how flying has played out in the old world in the last couple of expansions, we realized that while we were doing it out of this ingrained habit after we introduced flying in The Burning Crusade, it actually detracted from gameplay in a whole lot of ways". Yes. It was almost certainly the detraction from gameplay caused by flying that cost the game three million accounts in the last quarter. Except, wait, didn't that happen just after the expansion that didn't have flying? I must be missing something...

Well, you can make a player a walker but you can't make him think it's for his own good. Grounding the mounts won't be taken as a joyful return to a golden age of exploration and mystery, just a bloody nuisance. As Pike's perfectly chosen quote from Leonardo da Vinci puts it "Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return."

Meanwhile I'll be out there today with the rest of the would-be time-travelers, trotting across the Steamfont Mountains with my bony pet, hunting down decaying skeletons for bone chips and kobold runts for cloth pants. It took me an hour to hit Level 2 last night so some things haven't changed.

Oh, and as to why I'm playing on Ragefire? I've remembered. Forget the ruleset - it's got that New Server Smell. Can't ever get enough of that.

Prog Rocks : Everquest

The Open Beta for Everquest's third round of Progression Server fun has been up and running for a few days now. As Wilhelm observed, now they've been freed from the shackles of the Sony Megacorp, Daybreak Games seem determined to demonstrate their fleet-footedness and general joi-de-vivre. Everything is careering along at a breakneck pace that would have given the old SOE terminal whiplash. As far as I know there's no official launch date for Ragefire but I would bet on it being sooner rather than later.

As the years roll on, I am becoming increasingly certain that my days of doing volunteer Quality Assurance work in my leisure time are behind me, most especially for projects that I plan to play when they go live. My attempts to grab one of the dropped beta portals for the next round of Heart of Thorns testing in GW2 were desultory at best. Where some people devoted the entirety of their playtime for day after day until they got lucky I managed less then two hours.

Don't listen to Nusback. He's just our Belts guy. I'm your real Guildmaster!

Someone said in map chat that today is the last day the portals will drop and still it literally did not even occur to me to go and have one last try. When a couple of people linked their purple portals in chat at Fire Elemental this morning my immediate reaction was "Congrats! Now you get to test unfinished content on a temporary character!" I may even have said as much in /map.

As we move uncertainly into the era of buy-in betas, Early Access and the rest it seems likely that my interest in beta-testing will be limited to MMOs that are only available in that form, that are likely to remain so for a good while and that don't require me to do much more than give an email address to apply. Other than that I reckon I can manage without, thanks.

There's an NBI Talkback Challenge going on concerning Early Access vs Kickstarter to which I guess this post is some kind of response. Kickstarter doesn't interest me greatly. I don't have much faith that anything very significant will come out of it. I see it either as a way to place a long pre-order for projects that look solid and which offer good perks at an affordable price or as a way to express solidarity, as I did with both Project:Gorgon and Massively OP.

Oh come on! I can get through there! I'm a dwarf fer Brell's sake not an Ogre.

Other than that Kickstarter campaigns are a kind of low-involvement entertainment in and of themselves. Crowfall has been fun to follow, for example, regardless of how the game eventually turns out, as was EverJane before it. In the end any real choice and certainly any meaningful emotional commitment won't arrive until there's something I can actually play, and I don't mean a tech demo.

When it comes to Early Access, I'm a lot more interested. As I commented after the The Mystic Mesmer's post on the subject:

"Early Access is just a very straightforward purchasing decision like any other. The unfinished game is a product/service that you can examine and accept or reject according to whether you think it’s worth the price being asked. The only real problem (particularly for consumers who are not interested in buying unfinished games) is whether a wide acceptance of Early Access will lead to a drop in availability of “Finished Quality” products."

The apparent commercial and to some degree critical success of barely started, let alone finished, games like H1Z1 may set warning flags for those who prefer a polished product but it's still Skyrim and GTA5 that make the big headlines and the big bucks so I feel we're safe from any kind of sea change away from quality finished product for the time being. On the other hand, when Microsoft announces the end of discrete versions of Windows in favor of the kind of on-the-fly patching MMO players have come to know and love then I guess anything could happen.

Did the cracked staff go out of fashion or what?

With all that rattling around in the background, today I finally got around to making a character on the EQ Prog Beta. Since I definitely plan on playing it when it launches, albeit sporadically and to little purpose, I'm sure, it seemed like a good idea to download the client and make sure it worked, which it does.

I have it installed on a 64GB USB stick (it uses about 10GB) so I can in theory play it on my Tablet. I'm already playing EQ2 on the Tablet in my lunch hour now and then so I'm guessing EQ should run okay. So far the only MMO that won't play nicely with the Tablet is GW2, which won't even let me update the client.

I made a dwarf warrior and spent a quarter of an hour getting her out of Kaladim - and that was with the in-game map we shouldn't really have. Another fifteen minutes killing decaying skeletons and goblin whelps just in front of the gates took me to level two, at which point I logged off. It still has the magic but I'm saving my energy and excitement for a permanent character.

I might log in again while the beta lasts. There's some kind of reward for participation, most likely a bag, that will be redeemed when the game goes live. Well, sometime after the game goes live. Daybreak will decide what it is and when we get it. They're very clear on that in the new, plain-speaking style they seem to have adopted and which, I think, is going down quite well with their core audience.

They don't say how many of the tokens we need to acquire, which is very Classic EQ, but at least, unlike the GW2 portals, its a very common drop. I was getting one for about every three kills. While I was playing a serverwide broadcast announced that the progression-required raid target, the White Dragon Lady Vox, had been killed. The victor popped on to general chat to confirm that yes, he'd just soloed her and her loot was rotting if anyone wanted it.

The shape of things to come? Let's hope not. Even if it is, though, it's not going to affect me any. I very much doubt I'll get further than Blackburrow. Still, I fear it could be a long six months in end game for some.