Made It! Top Of The World!

To no-one's surprise more than my own, I spent the whole of today in Cantha. As lukewarm on the whole expansion as I was before it arrived, I expected to have to talk myself into spending time there but I'm delighted to say that so far the only thing I've needed to persuade myself to do is take a break.

This morning, I carried on from where I left off last night: exploring New Kaineng. This is the city ArenaNet seem convinced has a cyberpunk vibe. There are a lot of very tall buildings with mirrored windows, robots on every corner and the back streets and alleys have all the charm of deserted parking garages (I even got jumped by a vicious gang of thugs in one of them.) so I guess they have a point.

I started out with the intention of clearing all the fog of war from the map like a good Explorer should  but pretty soon I was chasing Points of Interest and Heroic Challenges and Mastery Insights with all the fervor of a true Achiever. The game can turn into a puzzle as you try to figure out a) where the point marked on the map actually is and b) how the heck you're supposed to get there.

I spent a couple of hours trying to get as high as possible. On my griffin, that is. It started when I saw a Mastery Insight near the top of one of the highest buildings and only ended when I was sitting on top of the tallest structure in New Kaineng, a titanic pillar of jade.

Over the four and a half years since Path of Fire launched in September 2017 (I really has been that long.) I've said many negative things about mounts in Guild Wars 2 and I would still far rather they'd never been added to the game. I have, however, also said a few nice things about two of them, the Roller Beetle and the Griffin. 

The beetle is a fun toy, more of a vehicle than a mount. It's far too limited in what it can do to break the game in any way that matters and beetle racing is fun. The griffin was enjoyable to get, one of the best "quests" in the game, but despite having been deemed essential at one stage, compared to the vastly more useful Skyscale, it now feels quaint and old-fashioned, almost nostalgic.

Getting to the top of anything on a griffin requires both planning and luck. The thing's too heavy to fly. All it can do is lurch a few yards into the air in the hope of finding somewhere to land that's further off the ground than where it started. You spend most of the time clinging to ledges, landing on roofs, perching on towers, always looking for the next place to land. It feels a lot more like climbing than flying.

I would far rather have used my glider, which is infinitely more maneuverable and looks elegant and suave rather than clumsy and clumping. Once I was high enough, gliding to other parts of the map was a practical and pleasant alternative. There are, however, no updrafts in New Kaineng, so gliders only go one way, down.

As I was exploring the rooftops I saw zip wires everywhere. On the ground levels there were plenty of elevators. The entire city is littered with power batteries. No-one is using any of these things yet because all of them require some form of Mastery and no-one has the points. 

No-one has a Jade Bot, either, or no-one I've seen. The bots have a Mastery line that eventually allows you to create your own updrafts. Once I have that, always assuming it doesn't come with too many restrictions, I should be able to swoop around New Kaineng like it was Verdant Brink.

I was thinking about all this as I heaved my cumbersome catbird into the clouds. I think what Anet have done here is smart: good map design and good gameplay. 

The clear intention is that you do the story, which opens the maps and introduces you to the new features and systems, then you work on the Masteries until you have the full functionality. With that, you have freedom of movement and access everywhere you go. In the meantime, if you want to run on ahead and explore, you're very welcome. You can use your mounts and your gliders and see how far you get. Good luck, have fun.

I don't own a Skyscale, not being willing to put in the hours required to get one, but given what I was able to achieve on the griffin, I imagine there aren't many places you can't reach with the game's closest thing to a true flying mount. There may be some, though, because you certainly can't use your Skimmer as a skiff. ANet haven't been that generous in grandfathering mount functionality into End of Dragons.

There are events that require a skiff and fishing spots, too. I tried both on a skimmer without success. I've been doing a fair bit of fishing. It's not my favorite implementation of the genre staple but it's not bad and I can see it will improve considerably as the Masteries fill out. That's another tick in the "Pros" column for EoD: the Mastery tracks all look worth doing.

I had a browse through them today and I could immediately see the appeal. That's not something I could say of either of the previous expansions, where there were quite a lot of Masteries that didn't seem worth the bother. It does, of course, rely on a player finding fishing, sailing, exploring and bot-owning appealing in the first place, but assuming an interest exists, the upgrade paths look solid.

As I was finding and communing with Insights across several maps, I remembered something I'd forgotten about new Masteries. It isn't getting the points that slows you down, it's getting the experience. 

I don't believe I'd had to think seriously about XP in GW2 for about four years. I'd all but forgotten it even existed. The bar at the bottom of my screen has been solid yellow from end to end for as long as I can remember. 

Now it means something again. I have a bunch of Mastery points but I need a full "level" of Mastery XP every time I spend them. So far I've filled my bar once! Of course, I haven't been focused on XP. 

There's a lot more I can do to speed things up if I want to do that. It did make me think, rather fondly, of the sessions I spent during the first few weeks of Heart of Thorns, buffed to the eyebrows, chain-killing until the "not been killed in a while" bonus faded. Good times. Well, those good times are back.

Another long-lost pleasure that returns with each expansion is the requirement to gain "Hero Points" to buy your new Ascended class skills. As a World vs World regular, I do have an alternative source for those. I could just play WvW as normal and spend the tokens I get there at the Heroic Notary, who'll kindly open random Heroic Challenges on the relevant maps for me just as if I'd actually been there.

ANet, as I said, can be smart, sometimes. They don't want everyone saving up their chips to spend them all on Day One of a new expansion, then stand around complaining in Team chat they're bored because there's nothing left to do. 

Each new expansion requires its own, separate tokens so the huge stacks I have from the last two won't do me any good at all in this one. I don't know exactly how long it would take me to get enough EoD tokens in WvW but I'm pretty sure it would be longer than exploring the maps. Which, of course, I was going to do anyway.

That just leaves the question of whether I can do the Heroic Challenges. One of the big complaints about Heart of Thorns was that some of the Heroic Challenges there actualy were. They required a group. It turned out not to be all that much of a problem because GW2 really does have a better-than-average community. Even today, years later, it's not hard to find HP "trains", where someone tags up and leads as many people as care to follow around a whole map (Sometimes a whole expansion.) doing every Heroic Challenge and Mastery they can find.

If memory serves, all Path of Fire's Heroics were, at least theoretically, soloable. Don't quote me on that. I've blanked a lot of the detail. So far in EoD, all the ones I've found have been, technically, solo affairs but I use the term advisedly.

My glorious flight across the skies of New Kaineng came to an abrupt end when I swooped down onto a ruined tower to grab the Heroic Challenge there and found it guarded by an Elite mob. In GW2, "Elites" are classed as solo mobs. They're one step below "Champions", which are meant for several players, although plenty of people can solo those too.

The Elite wasn't part of the Heroic Challenge. He just happened to be standing next to it. The "Challenge" itself required no more than clicking an object and watching a progress bar fill for a few seconds, just to prove you'd been there. 

Technically, as I said, it was wholly solo, unlike the group HCs in HoT, which spawned very tough mobs when clicked and required you kill them to get the credit. If you can somehow fill that progress bar without getting beaten to death by an angry mob who "just happens to be there", that's perfectly acceptable!

I hadn't even seen the Elite was there. I landed on top of him, jumped off my grifin, clicked on the HC and got punched in the back of the head. By the time I'd turned round I was half dead and before I could get my Earth Elemental out to tank for me I was all the way dead. 

I was lying there thinking abut it when a hulking great Charr on a Skyscale dropped out of nowhere and tried to rez me. The Elite was having none of it and in moments he and the Charr were going at it while I lay there and watched them.

The Charr seemed to be standing up well but the Elite didn't seem to be taking much damage. It occured to me I was playing a very high DPS glass cannon kind of character, who also has some of the best healing in the game and now I had my very own tank. I popped a Revive Orb, something I always carry and hardly ever use, stood back up and joined in.

Together we made pretty short work of the Elite, then we both communed with the challenge point, said a few words to each other and went our separate ways. This, lest we forget, is why soloing in mmorpgs is a totally valid playstyle and also why mmorpgs make better memories than single player games, even when you play alone.

I was lucky, though. Considering its the second day of the expansion, it's been exceptionally quiet. I played for almost two hours this morning before the first person spoke in map chat. All day, wherever I went, I only saw people traveling in ones and twos. Mostly ones. 

There were events happening everywhere, some of them very large scale. Most of them were unattended. I did quite a few, about half solo and half with one other person - a different person each time. I don't believe I did a single event with more than one other player or with the same player twice.

For me, it was almost perfect. I was wholly immersed much of the time with no-one buzzing about doing or saying anything weird to pull me out of the moment but just enough activity going on to make the place feel alive. It did seem odd, all the same. Maybe everyone is studiously working through the story. (It is good - I did a couple more chapters this afternoon and I'd love to post about it but... spoilers.)

I'm enjoying having Cantha largely to myself for now. I don't suppose it will last. The place will be awash with people by the weekend, I'm sure. Whether they'll be enjoying themselves as much as I am, I wouldn't like to say. 

I hope they are. I'm having a high old time.

Visions Of Vetrovia: A Lot More Fun Than Gates Of Discord And You Can Quote Me On That.

I'd like to preface this post by making it clear I consider myself to be very much at the easily-satisfied end of the mmorpg-player spectrum. A long reading of this blog should support the proposition that I've rarely met an mmorpg I didn't like and that I can find something good to say about almost anything the genre throws my way.

With that caveat, my tentative early assessment of EverQuest II's Visions of Vetrovia is that it might be the game's best expansion for years. Of course, I have to immediately add another layer of qualification: I'm talking purely from the perspective of a solo player. What the heroic group or raid experience is like I have no idea and most likely never will. 

Down in the weeds with the rest of the scrubs, everything's looking peachy. The screenshots don't really do the graphics justice. There's an astonishing sense of space and air about the first two open zones, Svarni Expanse and Karuupa Jungle that can only really be appreciated and experienced by wheeling through them on a flying lizard or a winged horse.

The third zone, Mahngavi Wastes, is bleaker and emptier, as befits its name, but it, too, feels wide, wild and free in a way few, if any, of the zones in the last several expansions have. Although the whole storyline revolves around the undead, only the last zone, Forlorn Gist, has the perpetually darkened, foreboding, closed-in feeling you'd expect when werewolves and vampires are doing the decorating.

All of the zones feel substantially larger than we've come to expect, although I'm not sure a surveyor's report would bear that out. I suspect it has something to do with the way they're designed, They all make great use of dimension and even better use of contrast. 

In the past, designers have employed some well-worn tricks, convoluted twists and turns, various means of blocking line of sight, to make small spaces feel complex and confusing, thereby creating an impression of something larger than its visible bounds. Here, there are broad horizons and vast, vaulted forests. If there's one thing the EQII graphics engine excels at it's foliage and in Vetrovia it gets its best run-out since 2012's Chains of Eternity. I can't remember ever seeing so many leaves.

Gorgeous graphics make a great foundation but a strong expansion needs much more than pretty pictures. In the case of EQII, what that usually means is a strong central narrative and a seemingly never-ending gear ladder. 

Most mmorpgs rely heavily for incentive on hierarchical content that requires players to replace their gear at regular intervals but EQII has always taken that process to extremes. The expansion has only been out for a couple of weeks and so far I'm only on stage six of the thirteen part Signature quest sequence and yet I've already upgraded some slots no fewer than four times. 

What's more, I know from experience that by the time I get to the end of the questline, most of the items I'm so pleased with will have turned into usless kipple fit only to be transmuted into mats. And that's a good thing.

If upgrading gear was a struggle, such relentless progression would be stressful and frustrating but here it's the opposite. The joy of this expansion is that the first set of gear, the starter equipment in Tishan's lockbox, is more than good enough to get you started and every quest reward and drop after that just adds power to an already-powerful baseline.

The result is a highly satisfying sense of empowerment. Only a couple of weeks ago I was tentatively pulling singles as I edged my way across the platforms and rope bridges. Today I'm barrelling into piles of pygmies, sweeping them up into an angry mob, then unleashing an explosion of AEs that fell the lot of them outright. 

It's immensely enjoyable. What's the point of gearing up if it doesn't make you stronger? Of course, if it made everything utterly trivial I imagine that might get boring eventually, even for me (Although, if I'm honest, I'm not sure about that. It rarely has before.) but that's not what's happening at all.

As the regular open-world mobs cease to offer any kind of threat, more of the storyline moves into instances. I've completed two so far, Heart of Conflict and Dedraka's Descent. They each took me something like an hour and involved some deaths, a modicum of swearing and much reading and re-reading of walkthroughs.

Compared to many previous such instances I've done, I felt these were pitched just about right. Setting out, they appeared daunting. There were moments where I found myself wondering if I'd have the enregy to get through to the end but the difficulty was such that each time I anticipated failure, success came instead, albeit sometimes on the second attempt.

I was most impressed with the items that dropped from the bosses. In the past, two of the more annoying things about instance bosses have been the uselessness of the things they leave behind them when they die and the irritating mechanics involved in getting your hands on them.

There had been some kind of quasi-exploit some years back that necessitated the implementation of a convoluted system to make sure only the person who killed the mob in a solo instance got the reward. I forget the details, if indeed I ever knew them. 

Whatever it was, it seems to have passed, because this time the bosses just drop good, old-fashioned steel chests that you click on to loot like we did fifteen years ago. It's a much more organic method of looting a mob than having some UI frame open. You wouldn't think it would matter that much but it does.

What's in the boxes is what really matters, though. I was surprised and delighted to find that every last boss I killed (More than a dozen so far.) dropped at least two pieces of armor or weaponry. Some dropped three. 

The items weren't always things the character who got them could use, something players of "Mains" might not like, but my characters were forming a disorderly line behind the Bruiser, who unaccountably has ended up being the one I'm taking through the story first. Yes, I know I said it was going to be my Necromancer. I have no more idea why it's not than you do.

The final boss in one instance even droppped a familiar. I don't think I've seen a familiar drop from any boss in the last five years. I know they can. In my experience they just never do.

Whether that was just some fantastic luck or whether the loot table is much more generous this time around I guess I'll find out as I carry on through the rest of the story and its associated instances. I hope it does turn out to be a more common thing than it used to be - that familiar was a massive upgrade.

The tuning of the instances seemed fine enough that I found it worth my while pausing when any item my Bruiser could equip happened to drop, so he could swap it out for whatever he was wearing. I can't recall ever doing that before, possibly because hardly anything that useful has ever dropped during a run, let alone several times in the same instance.

I may very well be over-selling this. My memory of the last few years of expansions isn't that clear to begin with and I'm playing a different character this time. Even so, it feels different. The whole expansion does. Visions of Vetrovia feels as though it's had a better pass for playabilty than usual. It trucks along.

That said, I have a couple of warnings for anyone following along behind me. Warnings and advice.

Firstly, if you're playing an adventuring character who's also skilled enough in a tradeskill to do the Signature crafting questline - do the tradeskill Sig Line first. It's way, way shorter than the adventure line. It'll only take you two or three hours at most and at the end of it your character will be able to fly in the first three zones.

I'm quite a fan of the modern practice of withholding flight until a character's explored the whole of a new zone on foot. I would recommend doing that for fun anyway. The zones, as I said, are wonderful to be in, with all kinds of sights to see and EQII is blessed with relatively forgiving mob density in most areas.

For all the fun of exploring on foot, I have to say the Adventure questline goes better by air. There are a lot of long runs and long runs back and even with the mobs well spaced there can be a lot of extra-curricular killing before you get to the places you need to be. Being able to swoop through the skies and see the land laid out like a map beneath you makes the whole thing fly by, literally and figuratively.

Secondly, do read the timeline carefully before you proceed. I know, spoilers. And not everyone likes a walkthrough the first time. I don't. I try to do it on my own until I get stuck.

The thing is, there's at least one part where you can't really know you have to do a set of side quests before you do a section of the Signature line. Strictly speaking, you don't have to do it first. You'll just wish you had when you realize you didn't.

It's no biggie if you just bumble through like I did. All it means is you have to go back and do the subquest before you can carry on.. only then the subquest takes you into the same instance you just finished. Now you're going to have to do it again. 

If you'd known that in advance you could have prepared. Then, when you killed the fourth of five bosses as you went through the instance for the Sig line, you'd also have gotten a quest drop for the subquest. 

It does tell you that in the wiki. I saw it. I even did some of the subquest. I just didn't finish it. Now I have to do the whole instance again. Which is fine. Did it once, can do it twice. And more loot is always good. Still, would have been neater the other way.

Here's where things stand for me right now. I've taken three crafters all the way through the tradeskill questline. All three of them are doing the crafting dailies, which take about ten or fifteen minutes each. 

Those can reward Advanced crafting books, which would allow me to make upgrades for all my adventuring classes except the Swashbuckler (I still don't have a high-level jeweller.) Those books are rare, though. I've had one so far, an Armorsmith book. I put it on the broker for nine million platinum. If it sells I can buy one I need, when someone offers one. So far there are hardly any for sale but it's early days. There will be, once all the guild crafters have their recipes.

The Bruiser is doing very well in the instances so I'm carrying on with him for now. He's feeding all the gear he can't use back to the team so if he starts to falter, the next in line will already be somewhat geared to see if they can do better. I still think the Necro would be the most powerful but I'd rather have some of her spells upgraded before she tries to prove me right.

Everything is spinning along so nicely I feel confident I'll be playing mostly EQII through Christmas and into the New Year. The sense of progression is very satisfying and there are several clear paths to follow to keep that going. 

There's also more than enough variety to keep things feeling fresh and I have more ideas of things I want to be doing than time to do them all. It's always something like this at this stage of an expansion cycle but this time it feels even more like it than usual.

Naturally, I reserve the right to come back here in a day or a week or a month to rant about where it all fell apart and what a diabolical bait and switch the whole thing turned out to be. I am, after all, not even halfway through the questline yet. Plenty of time for things to go horribly wrong.

I can only report as I find, though, and so far I'm having a fine old time. Here's hoping it continues.

I Can See Your House From Here!

Virtual worlds allow us to do many things we'll never really do. Fight with dragons. Conjure demons. Swim lakes in full plate armor. Close to the top of most of our lists is flying.

Immersion? We don't need no steenkin' immersion!

Really, who wouldn't want to be able to fly? We dream about it all the time. Although in my dreams of flying I'm not usually sitting on a reindeer.

The problem is, our virtual worlds are also games. Allowing players to move with complete freedom in any direction isn't always a great idea. Why would you fight your way through a heavily defended  pass if you could just fly over the mountain and wave? In the jargon it risks trivializing content.

  In MMOs that have flying hardwired into the milieu it's not an issue. You couldn't really have a superhero game without flying.

Wallet? Check! Keys? Check! Jetpack? ...

 It's when flying gets bolted on to a game that's managed without it for years that the trouble can really start. I was very apprehensive about the introduction of flying to EQ2. I didn't really think it would work. Well I was wrong.

Evaporation? Wash your mouth out!

Not only does flying work wonderfully well in EQ2, in all but the oldest zones it works seamlessly. All those desert mountain peaks, islands in the sky and vast plains seem to have been made for free flight all along. I suppose it really shouldn't come as such a shock. We've been cadging lifts from NPC flight-masters for years, after all. EQ2 had griffon flights even in beta. The real surprise is that it's taken so long.

No fair! I wasn't ready!!

The way that new freedom of movement for our characters has been introduced is exemplary. If I was skeptical about flying I was positively scornful of the proposed Leapers and Gliders. Ludicrous! Ridiculous! Laughable! But they really work. It's a great progression, from a ground mount to one that makes prodigious jumps to hang-gliding on the back of a giant flying lizard. Culminating in the glory that is true free flight.


The different mounts don't even supersede each other. There are places easier to reach with a leap upwards than by flying around and down. The ground mounts are much faster on land than the flying ones. It actually makes some kind of sense!


I'm not saying I'm sold on flying in every virtual world. We don't have it in Rift yet and I'm not sure what it would add there. But I'm much more sanguine now about the prospect that all MMOs will inevitably go airborne in the end.