Furglebin's Journal 3 : EQ2

So, I gets a room in Freeport in an Inn called The Jade Tiger. It costs 5 silver pieces a week, which is nothing! I can make that much in a minute just by setting Tiger on orcs. Commonlands is all over orcs so no-one is going to miss a few. I don't know how the Jade Tiger stays in business charging these rates but they must be doing alright 'cos there are people coming and goings at all times of the day and nights.

Health and safety mate? Never 'eard of it.

Once I am settled ins I go for a walk around town. I am looking ups at the Arcane Academy where all the finger-wagglers study how to blow things up and I am getting a crick in my neck cos it is so high, when some ratonga hisses at me. His name is Sneel Valiyn and he is the Ratonga Mentor or so he claims. He starts telling me some long story but I don't really listen until he asks me to go to Temple Street, which is where ratongas all used to live in Freeport until The Overlord decides to have a big tidy-ups.

Ratonga mentor or conspiracy theorist in a bathrobe?

Well, I go to Temple Streets and there are Ratongas there alright, but they have beens spending too long around gnomes, which cannot be good for anyone. There are mechanical mens strutting about everywhere and all the gnomes and all the ratongas are mumbling and plotting right and left and if Lucan finds out what they have done to his walls he will not be happy, let me tell yous!

Right you kids! Scrub that off this minute!

I do what Sneel asks me to do. Some clockworks get broken but never mind cos the gnomes will enjoy fixing them I expects. Best if gnomes got stuffs to do cos if not then they come up with Ideas and no-one wants that. Then Sneel sends me off to talk to some ratongas around town what think they have seen Roekilliks. I never heard of Roekilliks befores but as soon as Sneel says the word all the hair on my back stands up and Tiger growls.

Spend too long around gnomes and this could happen to you

Not much later I knows what they are. Bad rats. Very, very bad rats. I meet a few and it is a few too many. Tiger makes short work of them and it is in a secret hidey-hole what they skulks in so no chance of anyone finding what is left of them and getting me in trouble with the Militia. Although I think the Militia would probably give me a few silver and thank me for saving them the trouble. Sneel is so pleased with me he gives me a special ring only for Ratongas. I am very glad I met him cos now I am not so confused about my place in the worlds. I am beginning to feel like I belong in Freeport.

Standing next to a giant anchor does not give you gravitas.

Since then I have had a lot of adventures what I do nots have time to write about. I am very much tougher now and I know a lot about being a Beastlord. One really exciting thing did happen that I should say 'cos it is why I have not learned any new stuff for a while. I am strollings around Freeport just sniffing the salt air and thinking about what I am going to have for tea when two gnomes starts calling out to me. I know I should keep on walking but I am curious, it is my weakness, so I listen to them when they tell me all about testing my skills against other adventurers and it sounds exciting and a good idea the way they tell it.

I should know better than to listen to Gnomes with Ideas but this one time I think it turns out okay. But that is a story for another day, when I write about my adventures in the Battlegrounds.

The Village Green Preservation Society (Freeport Chapter): EQ2

I was going to get Furglebin to give his thoughts on the new, instanced versions of Freeport's villages (or " 'hoods" as the EQ2 dev team has somewhat embarassingly chosen to start calling them ). Furglebin never saw the original versions, though so he's going to have to keep his thoughts to himself for a while and let me compare old with new.

 So far I've seen behind the gates of Temple Street, Beggars Court and Scale Yard. Some of us who've been around Norrath for a few years now had built up quite a store of affection for those villages. Before the Age of Discovery arrived there were requests for one of the old zones to be kept open for nostalgia's sake, so we could go on living in the village Inn and pass on Lucan's unusually generous offer to have his personal housemovers (I forget whether they're trolls or ogres) move all our precious stuff to the ever-unpopular Jade Tiger in North Freeport. Or as we must learn to call it, the North of Freeport. No zoneism under the Overlord's enlightened rule.

Gnomish equations. Who knew?

Failing that, people asked, could we have a nostalgia tour, where we'd be whisked around the old zones on a look-but-don't-touch trip. Maybe on a Maj'Dul carpet, since the many pleas for a Sedan Chair mount continue to go unheard. But no, there was to be no last-minute reprieve. All six villages were converted into Instances, their high, ironbound gates firmly locked to those without the requisite quest in their journal.

A few weeks ago I went round my favorites (Temple Street, Beggars Court, Big Bend) using EQ2's spiffy newish in-game video option to make my own documentary on the Way We Lived. I'm quite glad I did because the new villages are very different and it'll be nice in a few years to look back at the good old days, but if I had in mind that the villages might be ruined, or just wasted, I needn't have worried.

Norrath, Doctor? Are you certain?

All three of the villages I've seen so far look very much as they did. They're immediately recognizable as the same places, the zone architecture largely unchanged. What's really changed is that the villages have come alive.

Yes, isn't it weird? All the characters controlled by living people have been booted out, leaving only computer-controlled NPCs and yet the villages feel more vibrant, more lived-in, more "real" than ever before. In Temple Street, where gnomes and ratongas always lived an uneasy, uncomfortable truce, the removal of any need to pander to commerce with players has freed both sides to give fullest expression their shared technological insanity. Clockwork excrescences have appeared on the buildings like barnacles on a boat and tin men walk the streets where pigs frolicked. It's like Ak'Anon with added ratonga.

Beggar's Court, longtime den of minor ganglords, thugs and receivers of stolen goods, has made full use of the meridian wall that was always its signature. Below, indentured craftsmen whipped straight from the refuge boats (those are still coming? Really?) slave at the forges and workbenches, while above the gangmasters lounge around tables laden with roasted poultry (looking suspiciously like Vulrich), drinking ale beneath the newly-planted palms.

A gnome would not be my first choice for Prison Cook.

Scale Yard is a prison. The Freeport Militia have annexed it and filled it with surly and unruly "criminals" and many of the inmates and the guards seem to be Iksars and Sarnaks. Hence the name. And once again there's a table groaning with food and ale for the Overlord's favored to enjoy.

The stories are pretty good, the small segments I've seen so far. The Beggar's Court one was actually too morally disturbing for even my "evil" ratonga characters. If it goes on the way it started I'll have to skip that one with the rats and let my Iksar Necromancer and Troll Shadowknight take over. One way or another, though, I'm going to explore these new villages and their stories. There's more going on than I ever knew and much more than I expected.

Just what is it that makes today's ratongas so different, so appealing? : EQ2

 

Cast your mind back 500 years. Seven if you prefer. Either way you wouldn't have found any three-foot tall rats scurrying through the streets of Freeport. No overgrown rodent would have tried to draw you into a plot to poison her sister or discredit a commercial rival. It was safe for a gnome to walk the streets in full confidence that he'd never have to look anyone straight in the eye, much less turn a corner to find his path blocked by a raddled rodent grinding her verminous hips beneath a tattered ballgown and giving him the old come hither.

Here kitty kitty!

When EQ2 was in development and even while it was still in closed beta, ratongas were under heavy suspicion. On the ever-inflammatory Everquest forums opinion ran strongly against their very existence. We never asked for more rats, they complained. Why, we're hardly using the ones we've got!  Even let's say we did need more rats, why would we want these new-fangled "ratongas"? What's wrong with the good old Chetari, then? Eh? EH!?

I remember when I had dialog

It's fair to say that public opinion was divided. About 80% against if my memory serves me right. Still, ratongas always had their supporters. All-ratonga guilds were being lined up. Cheese-based names were being reserved. And when the time came, after all the Shattering and Rending that split the earth deep enough to let in the dim Freeport light, up came the ratongas to the Norrathian equivalent of a golf clap.

As the years passed, though, it seemed that almost all that bad feeling just melted away. Ratongas simply fitted. The snide remarks and open criticism so familiar to players of ratongas over the first few months gave way to the kind of genial racial banter gnomes and dwarves have always found so welcoming. With their extraneous esses and their skittering gait ratongas became emblematic of the new Freeport. Devious, disturbing, unsettling yet always that strange, dangerous promise of intrigue.

"You want somes company?"

Temple Street was my favorite village from the start. It had character and characters. Chef Schmenko. waving his cleaver, chasing cats around the central square. Arms Dealer Schinka with her deals you couldn't afford to miss. Vlepo and Vleko, locked in their eternal vendetta with the Togglesmeets. Not to mention the terrifying Spezi. Please, not to mention.

All the original EQ2 villages were vignettes. Short stories. Miniatures. Meticulously detailed pocket-size zones filled with incident and intrigue. Temple Street had the trump card, though. Ratongas and gnomes. In Qeynos not only were there no ratongas at all, but the gnomes had to share their little patch with halflings. Halflings, I ask you!

They do say that nothing good lasts long, and it was a sad day when the ill-advised Simplification cleared out most of the village quests, sweeping away back-story and depth along with them. Soon it's going to happen again only this time round Temple Street will turn into an instanced dungeon. Let's hope it brings a storyline worthy of its history and preserves both the look and feel of a place that's been home to two of the shortest, oddest races on Norrath. And me.