All Roads Lead To Gnome : EverQuest, WoW

If there's one thing I don't need it's a new character in EverQuest. I have no idea how many I've left behind over the years, idling in banks or inn rooms or camped out in the wilds somewhere. For the longest time I tried to keep most of them ticking along, logging them in now and then, adding a level here and there. Now, though, as the years pile up like autumn leaves and my characters and I approach winter together, for many it seems less and less likely we will hunt together again.

Like Telwyn, who alluded to it in two consecutive posts this week, I believe strongly in character permanence. I, too, like to check in once in a while and touch base with my imaginary friends and alter egos. But nearly two decades and a hundred and fifty MMOs makes for an awful lot of characters. Some I'll never see again, far less play.

So why start another? And why a gnome? As Mrs Bhagpuss said, when I told her what I'd done, "Haven't you got enough gnomes?".

Well, no, apparently I don't. And you can't ever have too many gnomes, can you? As for why now, I think there were two proximate causes. First there was something Syp said in an offhand comment at Bio Break. When he described the first dozen levels in WoW as "slow and boring" it triggered a burst of nostalgic desire in me for some good old-fashioned low level gaming.

I couldn't disagree more strongly with that sentiment, finding as I do the very low levels in WoW to be the best part of the game that I've seen. Indeed, the very low levels of most MMORPgs are among the best for some very good and well-known reasons.

The lowest levels represent the game's shop-window, so they tend to be designed to please. They are also usually the content that most closely represents the original vision for the game and as such are more coherent, consistent and convincing than most of what follows. Finally, staring zones have usually been around the longest so they have been repeatedly polished until they positively glow.

In terms of core RPG gameplay the hook never sets so deep and firm as in those first few levels, when every upgrade makes a substantial and noticeable difference to gameplay. Not only does your characters increase in power and capability almost with every item that drops but the way they look changes too.

The low levels are the most playful part of almost any MMO. There's room to experiment, to find out who your character wants to be. The time will come when decisions have to be made, points have to be spent, rotations have to be set. Eventually your "role" will have little to do with roleplay and much to do with learning your dance steps but in those first, few levels you're still free to move to whatever music you hear in your head.

So, that's why I made a new character. I wanted some of that. As for why a gnome, well I blame Isey for prompting me to realize that I really should have saved the title of the previous post for one about gnomes. And once I start thinking about gnomes it's only a short step to making one.

Given where I began, with that quip from Syp, I might have made a gnome in WoW. I'm currently playing WoW a little most days, pottering around on my endless free trial, exploring and evaluating the implications of the new level scaling.

Mostly I've been leveling up my Worgen Druid, spending almost all my time in cat form. It's been fun. The level scaling seems fine. Everything takes three or four casts or hits to kill, which is still ridiculously fast by any standards other than WoW's recent own.

I already have a level one Gnome there, ready to go, but he's a Rogue and I really don't want to play a Rogue. I have no idea why I made him. There were probably reasons.

When it came to it, though, there was no point fooling myself. I wanted to make an EQ gnome, start in Ak Anon and level up in Steamfont for a bit. So I did. Ah, the whirring and ticking of clockwork. There's nothing like it.

I'd actually managed to forget that Steamfont was one of the few Faydwer zones (the only one?) to get a visual makeover many years ago. Which is surprising considering I must have crossed it literally hundreds of times in the past few years, taking my highest level character to Dragonscale Hills and the rest of the zones in 2007's excellent Secrets of Faydwer expansion.

Even so, the new Steamfont has itself now been around so long and I've leveled up so many characters there (all of them gnomes) that it has its own nostalgia. Come to think of it, I'm not sure I can really remember what it looked like before. I might need to log in to P2002 and remind myself.

As in WoW, leveling in EQ is not the uphill slog it once was. Even so, it's hardly a downhill sprint, either. It took me about forty minutes to get to level two. It would have been faster but I had to run back to Ak Anon to zone a mountain lion and I died when I pulled a Krag Chick. They are still the same insane undercon they were in 1999.

When I dinged (that sound still so satisfying) I took the book to Plane of knowledge. I was very happy to see that well outside of U.S. primetime, on one of the less-popular servers, there were still over 70 players in PoK and a couple of hundred vendors trading in The Bazaar. Life in the old game yet.

After a visit to the bank, where my new gnome helped herself to a few hundred platinum from the shared vault, thereby bypassing about a year's gameplay from the  good old days, I logged out. Will I ever log her in again?

Who knows? What I do know is that one gnome leads to another. And if you can't find a gnome then a dwarf will do. Or any anthropomorphic animal that walks on its hind legs.

I have all next week off. I wonder how many new characters I could make in how many MMOs?

I Wish I Was A Little Bit Taller : Level Scaling in World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft has always had the reputation of being an easy game but all things are relative. Back in 2004 the wider gaming public, if they thought about MMORPGs at all, considered the genre to be so appallingly slow and grindy that few outside the niche cared to waste time there. WoW changed all that - at a cost.

The journey began with a revelation: you could level up by wandering the world like the Littlest Hobo, blowing into town after town, righting wrongs and solving mysteries. Out went hiding in a corner, chain-killing trash mobs by the tens of thousands, praying you didn't get run over by a train; in came questing 'til your fingers bled while generally debasing yourself before NPCs with punctuation marks for hats.

Over the years the format refined itself into oblivion. By the time a decade or so had passed we had soloists in Heirloom gear one-shotting Elites and tanks pulling entire dungeons while the healer watched Netflix on another screen. Or so they tell me. I only know from hearsay. I missed both the sublime and the ridiculous.

My time in WoW was straight down the middle. The concept of the "quest hub" was already old hat and leveling by doing endless tasks for NPCs too lazy to walk to the corner of the street had become the norm in most MMOs.  There were already murmurs of discontent.

Conversely, I didn't stick around in Azeroth long enough to see it slide into self-parody. I turned up somewhere in the middle of Wrath of the Lich King and left before whatever came next. While I was there the leveling game felt solid enough; occasionally it may even have run a little slow.

But then, I was playing my first character, or at least my first collective of first characters. I never leveled anyone high  enough to benefit from heirlooms and when I returned, off and on, I mostly pottered around the starting zones on a free account.

Eventually even that proved no protection against out-of-control power creep. By the second decade of the 21st century even the very lowest levels were showing the strain. The moment any character I played left the extended tutorial of their racial starting instance it became apparent that "challenge" wasn't what the leveling game was about any more.

Last year Blizzard must have decided the situation was unsustainable. The population had migrated into the canopy of a bloated endgame, the final, meaningful ten levels of the current expansion perched precariously atop the etiolated and rotting trunks of every abandoned expansion and associated "endgame" that came before.

Eying, no doubt, the apparent success other MMOs, particularly Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2, in keeping much of their older content permanently in play, the decision was made to do something similar for Azeroth. Or to it. The practicalities were ironed out in the Legion expansion, where for the first time it was possible to have the mobs match you level for level, regardless what order you chose to progress through the zones on offer.

That must have gone well because this week that process was rolled out across the game.  As the patch notes to update 7.3.5 put it, it's now A Scaling World:

"Every zone in Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Outland, Northrend, Pandaria, and Draenor now use the level scaling system introduced in Legion. This new scaling system greatly increases the amount of options you have when deciding where to quest and when to move on to the next zone."

 And for good measure:

"All corresponding dungeons and the rewards therein now scale as well."

I logged in to take a look at this brave new world. There's only so much you can tell when your highest available character is locked at level 20 by the contingencies of not paying a subscription but the difference was immediately apparent all the same.

Waking up in a comfortable dwarven cottage outside Ironforge, the first thing I noticed was that everything in the Dun Morogh foothills conned even or thereabouts. All those leopards and boars in the forest, every elemental around the lake, the whole lot of them. From memory those would normally have been around level eight or nine. Now they came at me in the late teens.

And come at me they did. This formerly safe area for a mighty level twenty was suddenly somewhere I needed to be on my guard while traveling. Not merely because of the inconvenience of being attacked when I would previously have gone unmolested but because every one of these creatures is now capable of putting up a fight.

I wouldn't go so far as to say I was in any real danger but it didn't take me long to realize that if I wanted to get anywhere in a hurry I'd have to avoid drawing agro. True, it only took three or four arrows to bring down a wolf or a boar but every battle whittled a bit off my health or chipped the paintwork on my mechanical rabbit and if there's one way that WoW still feels old school it's in how long it takes to get your health back.

A quick visit to the forums showed reaction to be mixed. There are clearly two factions in play: those who like leveling and found the situation over the last few years unbearable and those who were more than happy to be able to one-shot their way to any content that they needed. I have sympathy for both sides.

I love leveling. In any MMORPG where I stick around for a while I level up anything from two or three to twenty or thirty characters. I've complained before about how the sheer speed of leveling in WoW sucks a lot of the entertainment out of the lower levels and I'm very pleased indeed to see that rectified.

On the other hand, it is very possible to have too much of a good thing. The reason I never hit the level cap in WoW on my first run through was that after several months, which is how long it took me to get into the 70s, I was fed up of running errands for NPCs.

According to many angry comments on the forum, questing is now the only viable means of leveling a character other than by buying a $60 level boost in the cash shop (which is exactly what most of those commenters believe is the reason behind Blizzard's changes). Dungeon xp is reported to have been nerfed through the floor, although whether by an actual change to the amount rewarded or simply by the hugely increased difficulty that comes with the scaling effect is a matter of conjecture.

Again by report, quests that require the killing of Elite mobs or the completion of content flagged for groups now actually require a group to complete. Which would be fine if there were groups to be had, but the complaint is that nothing has changed, or is likely to change, about the paucity of population in the leveling game. Content that could happily be soloed last week is now likely to go untouched, or so is the fear.

As an interested but largely uninvolved observer I can afford to sit back and watch how this develops. At worst it will enhance my low-level pottering. I already feel the urge to make a new character and try it out. I have to say, though, that if Daybreak decided to do something like this to EQ or EQ2 I would be incandescent with rage. i am very much not a fan of any "one size fits all" solution to problems that may not even be perceived as problems by everyone.

EQ2 currently enjoys the best of several worlds when it comes to older content. If there are specific quests you need to finish you can keep your own level, blitz through grey cons, getting no agro and one-shotting everything. I prefer to quest that way. The oft-repeated mantra that outleveling a zone means you can never complete the quests there seems completely paradoxical to me. Questing is more fun when you can concentrate on the plot and the dialog and forget about the fighting.

If you disagree with that opinion you're free to mentor down to whatever level gives you the challenge you feel most suits your tastes. If you want to help a friend who's leveling up you can mentor to them or if you want to solo you can visit the Chronomancer and self-mentor.

Mentored characters are more powerful than characters of the "real" equivalent level but if you want to be a real purist as you level you can level-lock your character whenever you feel you might be about to outgrow content you haven't finished. Call or dismiss in your Mercenary for even more granularity.

There are so many ways and means and styles to leveling in EQ2 that I feel spoiled for any other system. I would always opt for a toggle that puts the choice in the hands of the player but that isn't how Blizzard rolls.

I feel this particular change will take a while to shake out. Stargrace already reports changes to the way it affects old raid content. I'm looking forward to reading more bloggers' impressions, like Bhelgast's and Atherne's. For now, I would say my own impression is broadly favorable but I really don't have the perspective to make a meaningful judgment. Maybe when I finally get around to reactivating my account to play through Legion.

It's a big change, though, that's for sure.

Gnome Is The Hunter : WoW

When Blizzard announced the forthcoming sixth expansion for World of Warcraft almost a year ago it occurred to me that I might, for the first time ever, buy in at the beginning. The whole package sounded attractive, much more so than either dull Draenor or potty Pandaria.

There was going to be what sounded like a very welcome shift in gameplay to a more modern, less directive approach, borrowing from the trend begun by Guild Wars 2. The whole enterprise had a looser, more relaxed, less intense vibe than the war-torn drama and earnest work ethic of WoD, yet without crossing the credibility barrier into cartoonism that so tried the patience of the hardcore prior to the release of MoP.

Admittedly, a lot of the tent-pole features didn't do much for me. Order Halls sounded eerily like yet another way for Blizzard to wriggle out of offering real housing (something that, were they ever to take a proper run at it, would probably bring back literally millions of their missing subscribers and hold them, not for months but years). Demon Hunters didn't catch my fancy any more than Death Knights had. Artefact weapons are a thing I actively avoid in any MMO that has them.

There were ten new levels though, and although I tapped out at 69 on my original run, the expansion was set to arrive with the now-traditional boost to the previous cap, meaning I could start at 100 and go on from there. The half-dozen new zones of The Broken Isles sounded interesting. The new scaling mechanic meant they could be approached in any order and I've always been a sucker for an archipelago.

Move your ears, can't you? The reception's terrible..

There were, however, two standout features of Legion that made a re-up more likely than ever before: a real appearance system and Gnome Hunters. Add the super-sweetener that gnomes get clockwork pets and really, what more is there to say?

My highest character in WoW is a Dwarf Hunter. I found the class eminently playable and very enjoyable. As a rule I like dwarves in MMOs but playing a dwarf does have a certain effect on my demeanor and in-game personality. I tend to joke less and act more soberly. It's still more fun than playing most tall races but noticeably less amusing than playing a goblin, a ratonga or, yes, a gnome.

For this last year the prospect of being able to roll a gnome hunter at launch and take him or her clothes shopping as a career has kept the possibility of an early purchase of Legion alive. It was never a done deal because I have a lot of MMO pots on the boil right now and the end of August might not turn out to be the best time to commit to a subscription, but on balance I would have said it was more likely than not.

And then came came patch 7.0, forever to be known, around here at least, as The One Where They Gave Away The Farm. Not the Pandaria farm (anyone remember those?). No, just the very parts of the expansion that I would have been most willing to pay for.

The patch largely removed my need to buy the expansion but it gets better still (or worse, from Blizzard's point of view). As someone who has always tended to enjoy the ultra-low level game in MMORPGs most of all, I don't even need to subscribe to indulge my whimsy. Both gnome hunters and the new transmog system are fully available in the free starter edition that lets you play WoW with few restrictions up to level 20.

With that, I dusted off my old log-in details and gave birth to a new gnome. Thus far (level nine) it's been a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

The character creation screen seems to have changed a little since I made my Goblin nearly three years ago. It seems slicker and shinier than I remember, with a nice sliding-panel that shows off the limited selection of looks. It was easy to get a face I was happy to look at in screenshots and a hairstyle I could stand to look at from behind for hour after hour.

The Gnome Hunter arrives fully petted up - with a mechanical rabbit. It's an odd choice. I realize "rabbit" says "small woodland animal suitable for a newbie" but it's a machine not a mammal. I didn't have to go out at level one and tame it. If you're going to make a mechanical animal to fight for you, wouldn't you choose something more intimidating than a bunny?

None of which logic affects the simple fact that the rabbit looks great and fights like a tiger. Oh come on, you know what I mean...

As a major addition to the game, Goblins get what amounts to an entire ten level RPG of their own. Gnomes, being ever the Unlucky Alfs of Azeroth, probably need to count themselves fortunate to get even a very short introduction. I did initially take it to be something new for Gnome Hunters but on research it turns out to be merely the general post-Cataclysm reboot for the race, which I hadn't seen before.

Gnomes don't really do elegant, do they?

It's a short, tight tutorial with a couple of nice set-pieces. WoW does tutorials as well as MMOs tutorials can be done - in the world and not in your face - and Dun Morogh is one of the most aesthetically pleasing of the starting areas, so the first few levels passed very pleasantly.

I'm currently playing a ratonga bruiser on EQ2's new Race To Trakanon server, which has reduced leveling speed and higher difficulty settings, akin to those on the Time Limited Expansion servers. The difference between that experience and the one I'm having in WoW is instructive.

Neither is clearly "better" than the other - they are just different. There's a lot said about how incredibly fast leveling is in WoW these days but I suspect that's mostly hearsay, based on the accounts of players who burn through the levels using Heirlooms, Recruit-a-Friend and other leg-ups. With none of that, leveling is sprightly but no sprint. On RTT, by contrast, it's definitely a marathon.

It's also my feeling that the actual difficulty of the encounters and quests has changed a lot. I leveled through the pre-cataclysm Don Morogh several times back in 2009 and I remember it very clearly. Some of the quests haven't changed much, if at all. When I was killing Wendigos last night I had flashbacks to the frequent deaths I had in their caves in the past. I'm about certain that with one character I had to postpone that entire sequence and come back a level or two later because I couldn't solo it. Now it's a cakewalk.

Hunter's Moon. So it's told.

Even so, I managed to die twice. The first time was on the quest where I was meant to call on High Tinker Mekkatorque for "orbital" strikes to help kill sub-boss Crushcog. I was so busy enjoying the mayhem I forgot to notice Crushcog's many minions had killed my rabbit and were finishing up the job on me.

The second time I died while AFK looking up how a quest worked. For all its much-vaunted slickness and simplicity, I have always found WoW to be at least as fiddly and unintuitive as any other MMO and more so than many.

The quests use a myriad of systems that are often explained only vaguely if at all. In this particular one my admittedly perfunctory scan of the quest text led me to believe the gears I wanted were ground spawns when in fact they were drops. Close reading of the text could have cleared this up but so could the quest helper - which was no help at all!

Acquisition of gear and abilities at low levels is a  slow and steady process at best. At level nine my gnome is wielding a Poor (grey, vendor trash) bow rather than the Uncommon (green, quest reward) rifle because the grey one has better DPS. Same happened with two pieces of armor.

Gnomes come from Sunderland, apparently. Who knew?

The quest rewards can be odd. At level eight a quest gave me a choice of four items, the only one of which I could equip was a cloth robe. Since the patch also gave Hunters the right to wear Chain from level one (they previously started in leather and had to wait until 40 to equip chain) doing half a level in a dress seemed an idiosyncratic option at best.

Still, at least the frock didn't expose her bare, pale gnomish skin to the wicked Don Morogh wind. At level nine she replaced the robe with what appears to be a chainmail sports bra. Here's hoping something better drops before she gets frostbite.

 It's a racing certainty this gnome will make twenty. I like WoW. Every time I play I have fun. There's a vast amount of content I've never seen. It's highly likely that at some point I'll buy Legion and resubscribe.

For the moment, though, any sense of urgency to grab the digital download or buy an actual box in a real-world store has ebbed away. I still might jump on board at the end of August - the new expansion buzz is always a draw - but it all depends on what else is happening at the time.

For now I'm happy pootling about in Don Morogh. I always liked it there but it's even better with a robot rabbit.

New Horizons : EverQuest

Take a look at the screenshot above. What game might that be? The graphics suggest something quite elderly although with the ongoing fad for retro-visuals that might be a red herring. It's clearly something with a technological theme, possibly space-based, perhaps post-apocalyptic. Fallen Earth, maybe?

It's EverQuest. Well, of course it is. Okay, the title of the post might have given it away but anyway, I mean, doesn't that shot just scream "fantasy"?

Received wisdom has always been that the great majority of MMORPGs sit squarely in the "fantasy" genre but that's an assumption that has never stood up to even a passing appraisal. You'd have to define fantasy pretty broadly to fit in everything from airships to space travel to robots to motorbikes, any and all of which appear in most so-called "fantasy" MMOs.

You can put a lot of this down to gnomes. Actually, you can generally pin it on any race that has to stand on a box to do the washing-up. Short races make up for what they lack in physical strength and social standing by building their own mechanical friends and protectors.

New mount, new pet, new frock, new you!

Asura, goblins, gnomes, ratonga - they're all at it. Dwarves too, although they tend to claim to a spurious kind of craftsman's gravitas that places them above the dilettante tinkerers, at least in their own estimation. Do any games have a tall race as the primary purveyors of technological advancement in their world?

 It's been hard not to find myself musing along these lines while my Magician spent hour after hour in the clanking, whirring confines of Fortress Mechanotus and Gyrospire Beza. She even ventured into Meldrath's Majestic Mansion itself, the impressively riveted and excessively fortified home of Norrath's premier Mad Scientist, Meldrath The Malignant.

For days her bags filled up with gears and cogs as she forcibly dismantled clockwork after clockwork. She also compiled stacks of Gnome Meat and Gnome Blood from Meldrath's many minions. Disturbing work, what with her being a gnome herself. She'll have bad dreams.

So sorry, Madame. The Master is not at home. Please leave before I am forced to kill you.

These are delightful zones to solo. Well, perhaps not so much Meldrath's Mansion, described by Allakhazam as "One of the most challenging single-group zones ever introduced to EverQuest". That was then. Things have moved on but even so a maze of small rooms filled with crazed gnomes and tight corridors patrolled by anthropocidal clockworks is still no picnic.

So mainly I stayed outdoors, where Meldrath's landscape gardeners have laid out some huge squares and lawns, perfect for slaughter. Due, presumably, to some over-enthusiastic application of magitech explosives in a former experiment, most of Meldrath's holdings hang on unsupported islands in the sky. Access is by way of being shot from a cannon, although once you land there are some impressive elevators for more traditional access to the upper storeys.

The skies are clear, bright and all around. Just don't fall off the edge. Health and safety inspectors don't seem to have arrived in Norrath as yet. I fell off once but I got away with it, landing back in Dragonscale Hills on top of a pack of wild clockworks, which was generous by the standards of EQ. My mage survived the fall and killed the clockworks, which was a better outcome than I expected.

I also played my druid. I'd forgotten just how many trees there are in Kunark.

It's one thing, coming back to an MMO you haven't played for a few months or more. Imagine the culture shock coming back, as one person despairingly announced in General Chat while I was playing last night that he had done, after twelve years.

EverQuest hasn't only been around a very long time - it's been actively, some might say aggressively, updated for its entire run. The expansions my Magician is currently being sent to explore by the inexplicably well-funded and dubiously motivated Franklin Teek range from The Serpent's Spine (September 2006) to Veil of Alaris (November 2011).

Yes, I'm only five years behind! Although I've played reasonably actively if somewhat sporadically for the entire seventeen-year run of the game, there are whole expansions into which I have never set foot. Even among those that I know there are plenty of zones I have barely even visited let alone explored.

Valdeholm. Home of the Frost Giants and very poor xp.

Yesterday my Magician dinged 91. That's a level in not much more than a week, incredibly fast progress by my modern-day standard, soloing in EQ as I do for not much more than an hour or so each day. She was helped considerably by the current bonus XP event running over the 4th of July weekend. Interestingly, in EQ you don't apparently need to be an All Access member to enjoy this boon. In EQ2 you most definitely would.

Moving into the 90s is taking me to places I have never seen before. As I began by observing, this doesn't mean more castles, dragons and medieval villages as you might expect from a fantasy setting. The Buried Sea expansion seems to mix pirates with magitech, with some Ancient Egypt thrown in for spice. Secrets of Faydwer swings, like Faydwer always has, between the twin poles of sub-Tolkienian fantasy and quasi-steampunk clattering.

Seeds Of Destruction, of which I have seen more than enough by now, remakes an alternate version of Norrath under a gauzy green tint. Underfoot and House of Thule remain rather too tough to explore alone, although Franklin Teek likes to tell me otherwise.

The Crucial Three in Dawn over Beza

One of the best aspects of EverQuest is that those expansions will come to me in time. My Magician will grow and grow in strength and destructive power. Most importantly, so will her pets.

Yesterday she went to Argath, Bastion of Illdaera (no, means nothing to me either), the somewhat safe starting city from the 18th expansion to buy her level 91 spells, including a new Air pet. New pets are a big deal to a Magician and the Air pet especially so to a soloist. The 86th level pet has retired after long and exceptionally violent service. Presumably back to The Plane of Air, although Brell knows there's most likely not much in that place I couldn't solo these days.

Ahead lie another fourteen levels and four entirely untouched expansions. There's yet another in the works, name and theme as yet unannounced. Based on past experience it could be set just about anywhere. I should be about ready to take a look at it sometime around 2021-2022.

It's okay. I'm not in a hurry. Just keep a server up and I'll get there one day. Meanwhile I'll just keep looking around and enjoying the view. There's always something new to see. And something new to kill.

A Shoulder Pet Is For Life, Not Just For Gnomekindle : Istaria

Telwyn at GamingSF asks what it takes to tempt a player to log in over the Christmas holidays. For him, the double xp extravaganza offered by Daybreak Games for EQ2 did the job.

I also managed a little light leveling in Norrath over the weekend, a mentored-down run through Karnor's Castle that took my Warlock to level 94. Even with full vitality, server-granted double xp, a 20% Veteran bonus and a 110% xp potion running, though, leveling in the 90s is slooooooow.

Istaria's extensive map.

On Yak's Bend apparently all it takes to get people to log on after the presents have been opened is a superstar Commander running riot across the borderlands. WvW, about which I have much to say that I'm still formulating, slipped into a deep, deep malaise for many weeks after the release of Heart of Thorns but slowly, ever so slowly it appears to be reviving.

Last year, when The Bend was under enormous pressure as a very unwelcome addition to Tier 2, Christmas Day saw a miraculous change of fortune. There seems to be some desire to turn this into an annual tradition even though our current, unexpected position as top WvW server NA hardly justifies the effort.


I did spend some time in The Mists over the holidays but I spent a lot more in Magus Falls and just about all of Christmas Sunday was taken up with Wintersday achievements for my third account and an orgy of bank sorting that lasted almost eight hours. I know how to have fun, don't let anyone tell you otherwise!

No, the one thing that tempted me not just to go online over the winter break but also to patch up and log in to an MMO I haven't looked at for a long time was a simple press release. Every year whoever it is that runs Istaria (the game that, as Syp points out, might as well never have changed its name from Horizons) sends me a catch-up email detailing all the things that have happened to the game during the year.

Anyone up for Christmas at the beach?

It always makes me curious enough at least to visit the website, which is looking better-maintained and more attractive than ever, with forums that show a lively and current interest in the game. This time the lure of a Winter holiday event offering "shoulder pets" was incentive enough to get me to hit Play.

Well, I would just have hit Play, had Istaria been one of the many MMORPGs I'd included in The Great Updating a few weeks back. Ironically, even though the icon is right there on my desktop, I skipped it because, to quote myself, Istaria is one of the MMOs "I really can't see myself getting back to any time soon". Twerp.

Logic problem.

The first hurdle was finding my account. Not my account details, which I have safely recorded, but my actual account. Istaria is technically F2P although, based on the large number of subscription-required Dragon players I always see whenever I visit, my suspicion is that most of the playerbase is paying to play.

Last September, apparently, the management re-organized the F2P offer so that you need to log in once a month to keep your free account active. If you have an old, free account it remains valid and your character remains safely mothballed but you need to go to the account page and reactivate it before you can patch and play.

With that sorted out there was the inevitable hefty patch. That took half an hour. Eventually, though, there I was in an all-too-familiar position: staring bemusedly at a screen full of icons that no longer signify. Fortunately, Istaria is a very old-school MMO that uses very familiar controls. It all comes back quite quickly and painlessly, even how to use that weird, floating flying saucer thing that carries your heavy loot.

What turned out to be a lot harder was finding the darned winter festival itself. Of course, if I'd read the press release or the update notes with anything like my full attention I'd have known it was all happening in somewhere called New Koraelia, which would at least have given me a hint on where to go. I found that out about an hour in with the help of Google and the excellent Istaria Wiki.

Hmm. This looks familiar.

In my last two attempts to play Istaria I have never left the starting areas of Spirit Isle and New Trismus. I hadn't quite appreciated just how big the world of Istaria is. When I scrolled the world map all the way out it was pretty impressive. And daunting.

Fortunately, Istaria also has an extensive teleportation system using large, shimmering portals that look very, very similar to Asura Gates. They are at the same time more and less convenient than the Tyrian equivalent, offering menus and prices and multiple options.

It took me some considerable time and concentration to work out which station I needed for the next connection. Before I finally found myself standing at the foot of the long slope up through the snow to New Koraelia's Winter Festival grounds I first visited Kion, the desert home of Istaria's cat people (why is my character not one of those?).

Kion, City of Saris. Or should that be Kion, Kitty of Kats?

I wandered around there for a while, picking up a quest or two and appreciating the newly-added ambient sounds and behaviors of the locals. Cat people are scary when they growl. After a brief visit to a balmy palm-fringed crescent isle just off shore, to which I walked, underwater, there being no swimming in Istaria, eventually I stopped lollygagging and got on with it.

Istaria's winter festival is run by Gnomes (Why isn't my character a gnome? I don't remember but I'm guessing racial choice is limited for F2P accounts). It's called Gnomekindle, which raises disturbing images of gnomes being set on fire, and is a recent innovation according to Hermey Misfit Gnome (actual name) who sent me to visit the Elves to find out what a real Winter Festival might be like.

Oh come on, that's Felwithe. It's even called Feladan ffs!

Well, that set off another bout of portal travel, taking to me to an impressive city filled with what must be High Elves rather than the usual Wood variety. It reminded me of Felwithe. A lot. The elves there were typically flowery and patronizing as they described their ancient traditions in rich and convincing detail. I did wonder why we weren't celebrating with them instead of decorating trees and feeding reindeer with "Mayor and Mrs Clause". Then again, who would you rather spend Christmas with, Gnomes or Elves?

As a level 11 Scout it turned out there wasn't a whole lot I could do to help after I'd returned to Hermey with the elves' encouraging words. Most of the Gnomekindle quests I acquired seemed to require the dismantling of golems or slaughter of winter wolves that could send me back to my bind spot in a matter of seconds.

Never ask an elf a question if you haven't got half an hour to spare.

There was one quest to kill Treants that I could manage, though, because I remembered killing plenty of treants back in New Trismus and supposedly any Treants would do, even the saplings. Back to New Trismus I went, where I competed for a while with a young dragon for the small spawn of walking trees.

The dragon player was clearly trying to communicate with me, presumably with a view to sharing treant-killing duties, but Istaria has an arcane conversation interface that I have yet to fathom and while I was fiddling with the controls trying to get a signal he finished his wood-chopping and vanished, leaving me with the spawn all to myself.

Istaria, the only MMO with proper snowdrifts.

Just as well because the quest requires fifty bits of wood and it's not a guaranteed drop. Probably seventy or so treants will have to die before I get the planks I need. That's a lot of grinding and even then it'll only gets me a couple of Express Checks at most. I need three to buy a snazzy red santa suit from Dolly Day.

Luckily the treants also drop blue ornaments, the currency required by the gnome who sells shoulder pets. I think he wants seventy or so. Treant kills are probably going to run into three figures before I get there if my interest doesn't run out first.

You just decorated the one tree then, Hermey? Ran out of treants did you?

I do like Istaria. It's surprisingly visually pleasing for such an ancient MMO and the old school game systems are comfortable and reassuring. There always seem to be plenty of players flitting about, many of them dragons, which makes the place seem lived in despite the total radio silence caused by the complete lack of anything resembling a default general chat channel.

Were there but time enough it's a world I'd like to explore. Sadly the days are too small for all the fun there is to fill them. I hope to get my shoulder pet, which I think should be a treant, given the provenance (and the creepiness of the other two choices - a maggot or a spider - who wants either of those two inches from their face?) but I'm not promising anything.

If anyone's looking for a well-developed, lovingly-maintained, regularly updated true old-school MMORPG, though, they could do a lot worse than try Istaria.

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.