Evil Is As Evil Does

It seems very old-fashioned now, but when EverQuest launched back in 1999, good vs evil was a real thing. Among a number of really quite significant choices you had to make at character selection was whether you were going to be a goodie or a baddie. Yes, Virginia, back then that sort of thing actually mattered!

If you chose to be Evil with a capital E you'd pick an Officially Evil race, Troll being the most reviled until the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, when they had to cede that honor to the Iksar. Ogres came next followed by Dark Elves, who were more your suave, sinister evil masterminds. Or you could pick a good or neutral race and be Necromancer or a Shadowknight, which would mean your career would overwrite your racial heritage, a popular choice for anyone who wanted to be a Bad Gnome.

Most races had a city of their own and there were a lot of races. For maybe the first decade, most MMORPGs came with multiple races, alignments, classes and starting cities. Extensive choice was was one of the defining principles of the genre. If you picked an evil class that had to share space with goody-goodies, you'd get your own secret hideouts within the walls, often underground or in the sewers.

And you'd better have done your homework before you started. Character creation in the early days didn't mean tweaking sliders until you had something you could bear to look at. It meant getting a character you'd be able to play for more than a few sessions before you were forced to re-roll and start over. 

It was entirely possible to gimp your character, that being the awkward term in common use back then. If you picked the wrong race/class combo you might not even know anything was wrong until you started to look for groups and found no-one willing to take you on. 

The more immediate problem, though, came when you walked past some innocuous-looking guard standing next to a tower along the roadside out in the middle of nowhere, only to find yourself back at your spawn point, when it turned out you were the evil monster he was guarding that tower from.

In EQ, all of that was fixable over time. You might start out evil (Or good.) but you didn't have to stay that way. Every race had Faction and Faction was a Stat and one of the often-forgotten aspects of EverQuest's gameplay is that it includes a whole raft of stats that go up with use. Everyone talks about leveling up in that game but no-one talks about raising skills, even though EQ is as much skills-based as it relies on levels.

Another, mostly uncelebrated, fact about EverQuest is that at the start it was much more of a sandbox than a theme-park. There was no central storyline and questing, even though it was right there in the name, mostly seemed like an afterthought. There was a great deal of setting your own goals and working towards them and one goal a lot of players who'd picked Team Evil at the start liked to set for themselves was Getting Everyone To Like Me.

I did a bit of that. Not as much as some but enough for it to be the main thing I did for a few weeks on certain characters. My Ogre Shadowknight killed scores of corrupt guards until his faction was good enough to let him hand in their helmets for extra credit, then scores more until eventually he could stroll into the bank in North Freeport and get service like a regular citizen.

I did it partly to see if I could, partly because killing guards was great xp, and mostly because otherwise banking was a fucking nightmare. I'd have had to go all the way back to Oggok in the swamps, three or four zones away, or else to the dark elf city of Neriak, a trek to get there only to end up wandering the maze-like corridors for far too long before I figured out where I was going wrong. 

Before the second expansion, Scars of Velious, which added the icebound city of Thurgadin, filled with dwarves so cut-off from civilization they'd lost most of their prejudices and would trade with anyone, Evil characters were very restricted in things like where they could bank or shop or find services of any kind. Even traveling on the roads through what looked like open countryside could be fatal. The same thing applied to Good characters in reverse, of course, but somehow it never seemed to inconvenience them nearly as much.

The difficulty was compounded by race, meaning evil humans or gnomes would get a pass in places where Ogres and especially Trolls would be killed on sight. Dark Elves flitted somewhere in the middle, their options often hugely improved by the class choices available to them. There was a very good reason why so many DEs decided to become Enchanters, a class with a whole line of spells designed to let them impersonate other races or fool people into treating them nicely.

Thurgadin was all very well but it was even more inconvenient to get to than the racial starting cities. It wasn't until the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, opened travel gates that took us to the moon, where no-one knew or cared what your alignment was, that it became practical to stay all evil, all the time. 

From then on, alignment and faction gradually lost their power and influence. Well, I say "gradually"... It was more of a landslide.

The fourth expansion, Planes of Power, didn't just add a completely neutral city, it filled that city with every conceivable service and facility, making it by far the most appealing place to set your bind spot, particularly since the expansion also came with the game's first instant, on-demand travel service. Granted, you still had to get to a physical object in the game-world, a "Book", and click on it, but there were Books outside every starting city and in plenty of other places, too, so that wasn't much of a problem.

That was, to most intents and purposes, the end of Good and Evil as a limiting factor in the game. There was and still is a residual effect - try rolling up a High Elf and strolling into Oggok and see how far it gets you - but for almost all practical purposes, it makes no difference any more. We're all murder hobos together and every newly discovered continent or plane or dimension can't tell us apart.

Planes of Power came out in 2002, a couple of years before EverQuest II appeared. You might have thought the experience the dev team had garnered by then might have led them to the understanding that, while some players quite enjoyed the challenge of a faction grind, most preferred to be able to play the game without having to prep first.

Not a bit of it. EQII launched with a hard-coded Good/Evil split that made even Classic EQ look like Hello Kitty Online. Everyone had to be either GOOD or EVIL. The big difference from the elder game was that your alignment was no longer tied to your race. You could be a good troll or an evil high elf. Unlike before, though, you couldn't be a neutral anything.

That was because in EQII your alignment was decided not by anything so crass as what you looked like. What mattered was where you lived. When you reached the end of the introduction on the Isle of Refuge, you had to choose to take ship either to Freeport or Qeynos. Going to Freeport meant you were evil. If you went to Qeynos you were good.

And don't think it wasn't going to matter much in the long run, either. Years after EverQuest had made it seamless for all races and alignments to work together, EQII decided it would be great if it wasn't only the characters who couldn't mix. How about if the players couldn't, either?

You could be in the same guild together but to form the guild everyone had to be of the same alignment and the guild hall would be in that alignment's city so good luck to anyone from the other side who joined later, trying to use the facilities. There was no mailing items to the opposition and quest credit and guild status had some sort of blocks on them, too, as I recall. Shared guild missions were supposed to be a big content driver but apparently no-one in the dev team had thought about that.

That was on a PvE server, of course. On a PvP server you couldn't even group together, let alone share a guild. In fact, screw grouping - you couldn't even talk to the other side. The two cities spoke different languages. But hey, PvP, right? Suck it up!

You didn't have to do that. In both PvP and PvE there was a long and complicated process you could undertake to switch sides. If you were really bloody-minded abut it, you could pause in the middle and become de facto neutral, but that only meant everyone hated you.

Was it popular? Maybe for PvP. On the PvE side of the divide, hell, no, it was not! Everyone hated it, surprise, surprise. Faction restrictions were some of the earliest to be revised and eventually removed. Even before the whole game was revamped by Scott Hartsman a year or so after launch, most of the alignment restrictions for PvE players had already melted away.

A residue remains, all the same. The two cities still nominally retain their alignments although these days there are plenty of other starting cities to pick if you want to be free of the worst of it. Those tend to lean towards one side or the other, even so.

Perhaps the greatest legacy of those bad, old days are the two mighty starting zones, Antonica and Commonlands, the former stretching out from the gates of Qeynos to the Thundering Steppes, the latter from Freeport to Nektulos Forest. Together with the cluster of very low-level zones attached to each city, these vast stretches of land kept most adventurers both busy and apart for the first twenty levels or so.

Back in 2004, I found the whole thing confusing and counter-intuitive. By inclination, I prefer to play neutral or good-leaning characters but Qeynos lagged so badly at launch I couldn't stand to be there. As I remember it, which may not be strictly accurate, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I started off trying to play in Qeynos but had to re-roll because it was just untenable. Freeport had its problems but at least it was a lot easier to move around. 

That we'd also both preferred Freeport to Qeynos in EQ was probably a factor. In EQ, Freeport was more like a neutral city than an evil one. Trolls and Ogres weren't tolerated but Dark Elves and evil classes could move safely through the parts of the city not controlled by the religious factions. Qeynos was a lot less sanguine about that sort of thing and felt a lot more restrictive.

That was how we ended up playing multiple characters on both side of the ideological divide, especially once the lag got sorted out and I'd upgraded my PC. It meant I got to know both Antonica and Commonlands pretty well. 

Maybe next time I'll even get around to talking about one of them.

Getting Into The Zone

Remember when I said that if I ran out of things to write about, I might start an irregular series on The Zones of EverQuest II? It's time to make good on that threat  promise! The question is... where to begin?

First of all, how many zones are there in the game now? Yeah, like that's an easy question to answer. I suppose I could go round the game and count them. Maybe we could meet back here in a few months?

Or I could look at the wiki. They have lists by various definitions there - level, tier, update and more - and none of them is either complete or up-to-date. The wiki, once transcendent, is fading slowly away.

Still, it's a start. I count 68 outdoor zones on the "By Level" list, which doesn't include the last two expansions so let's say about 75ish. That's way, way more than I'm ever going to cover even if I run this series for the life of the blog. But it isn't even all the outdoor zones, not really.

That count collates the Freeport and Qeynos starting zones into two bundles for a start. And it doesn't include any of the open dungeons, which I'd say count as "zones" rather than "instances", even if they aren't always outdoors. Although some of them are outdoors anyway.

Those are listed separately on the wiki as "Shared Dungeons" and there are 34 of them, a count that stops at the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion, which came out a decade ago. I know shared dungeons have been out of fashion for a while but I'm pretty sure we've seen a couple of new ones since then.

Just sticking to open and shared zones and avoiding any mention of solo, duo, single-group or raid instances then, and the count is already over a hundred. Except that for most of the life of the game the bulk of content has been instanced. 

I'm not about to start counting all of those but maybe one of our friendly AIs could do it for me. That's exactly the kind of thing they're meant to be good at, isn't it? 

I asked Google "How many zones are there in EQII in 2026?" and the AI Overview, which I assume is powered by Gemini, replied instantly

"Based on information leading up to early 2026, EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, with some estimates in previous years exceeding 900, including overland areas, dungeons, and instances."

Previous years? Just how previous? And even at that Gemini wasn't convinced, covering its imaginary backside with the caveat 

"For the most precise number, players typically rely on community-maintained wikis like eq2.fandom.com to track specific zone counts across the numerous expansions."

Well, shoot! That takes me right back to where I started, doesn't it? If I wanted to check the wiki I could have done it myself. I did do it myself! And these things are going to take all our jobs? Something, something, keep a dog, something, something, bark yourself...

How about Co-Pilot, then? Certain bloggers I follow claim Microsoft's AI is better than the rest. Let's give it a chance to prove it. Same question:

"Short answer: EverQuest II has hundreds of zones, and by 2026 the total sits at roughly 867 zones, based on the most complete public listings available. This number comes from the major zone index used by the EQ2 community and continues to grow with each expansion and event update."

Okay, that's a lot more specific. I'll let that fatuous "roughly" slide. It's just trying to pass for human, I guess. A lot of people would give a highly specific number like that and then claim it was approximate. You literally cannot have "roughly" 867 of anything unless you can also count that thing in fractions of a unit, which certainly doesn't apply to zones of Norrath, either before or after the Shattering.

And now here's a twist. I'd finished the post, added the pictures and was about to do the final edit when I noticed Blogger was idling and not updating. The Preview Panel was working normally, showing the complete post with pictures but there were no screenshots in the edit. 

If Blogger fails to update to its cloud servers, it always gives an error message and there hadn't been one so I figured something was glitched locally. I closed the Preview and the Edit and guess what? When I reloaded I'd lost the second half of the post. Everything above the last screenshot was here. Everything below was gone.

Usually I keep a copy of the text outside of Blogger but nothing like this has happened for several years so I'd gotten slack. My bad. Still, it was a pretty short post. I could remember most of it. Just needed to bash the second half out again. 

Only I'd also closed the AI result tabs and apparently Co-Pilot, unlike Gemini, doesn't automatically keep a record of the ongoing conversation, not if you aren't logged in, anyway. I just ran the query in Firefox anonymously and it was as gone as the rest of the post.

Never mind. Easy enough to ask the same question again. I have the exact wording there in the text that didn't vanish. Just need to run it past Co-Pilot again and... get a different answer.

"Short answer: There’s no authoritative public source that states the total number of EverQuest II zones as of 2026. The game has hundreds of zones accumulated over two decades, but no official 2026 count exists. The closest reliable figure comes from large fan-maintained databases."

Hmm. Look at that. The whole very specific, not rough at all, "867" is gone, replaced by the much more wooly "hundreds of zones". And there's a plain statement that "no official count exists".

So where did the 867 come from? Co-Pilot is only to keen to explain:

🧭 What We Can Say with Evidence

📌 1. The largest maintained zone list shows 867 zones

The Fanbyte/ZAM EverQuest II database lists 867 zone entries in its public index. This is the most complete zone list available, though it is not guaranteed to be exhaustive or fully up to date for 2026.

For some reason, Co-Pilot thinks ZAM is the resource most EQII players use. I'm certain that's not true. The ZAM EQII zone database , linked in Co-Pilot's reply, ceased updating with the Age of Discovery expansion, which came out in 2011. No regular EQII player is going there for anything after that.

That "867" number is the count that appears on the first page of ZAM's thirty-five page list of zones, where it warns you you're "Viewing 1 to 25 of 867 entries. You may want to add some filters.". A quick flip through the pages shows quite a few of those "zones" aren't adventure areas at all. The list includes Housing and the Dungeon Maker for a start.

Co-Pilot is happy to build on that shaky foundation all the same:

📘 Best Estimate

If we combine:

• 867 zones listed in the major database (pre‑2026)

• Dozens of new 2024–2026 zones from expansions and updates (e.g., Rage of Cthurath and 2026 map additions)

…it’s reasonable to estimate that EQII has well over 900 zones by 2026, though no source confirms an exact number.

Yes, I guess it is reasonable to assume that, especially given there have been fourteen expansions since ZAM last added any new zones to their database. Not to mention at least twice as many biannual Game Updates.

 

It is interesting that both Gemini and Co-Pilot come up with the same estimate of something over 900 zones, although neither really makes a convincing case for it. Still, it's probably about right. And even if it's not, I sure as heck don't plan on counting them, so I suppose it'll have to do.

 

This wasn't intended to be another post about how flaky AIs can be, even after all the supposed improvements and Great Leaps Forward, but it's always useful to remind ourselves just how unreliable they still are. I do sometimes get sucked into believing the AI summary at the top of the results although never for anything that isn't totally trivial. Convenience trumps caution, occasionally.

 

Then again, as this seems to demonstrate, even the trivial is well beyond the AIs. In fact, the more trivial the topic, the worse the information. The problem with the question I posed isn't so much that the AI's can't answer it; it's that it can't be answered. And since AIs don't like to admit when they don't know something...

 

Someone must know, of course. It's not ineffable. I imagine Darkpaw know how many zones there are. Maybe some players do, too. I bet there's someone out there who still keeps a ring-binder file with every map printed out. And speaking of maps, I guess someone at EQ2Map might have a pretty good idea.

 

Whoever does know, they're keeping it to themselves but it doesn't matter much anyway. It's not like I was going to write a post about every last one. I'm not going to live long enough to do that, even I was crazed enough to try.

 

What I'll most likely do is cherry-pick my favorites and the ones I have something to say about. If I get through a couple of dozen I'll be surprised. In fact, since I'm only likely to post at all if I have absolutely nothing better to write about, I guess the fewer I get through, the better.

 

Not to mention so far I've managed two posts about the feature without ever saying a word about any of the actual zones! I wonder how long I could keep that going?

 

I'll try to close that worrisome possibility down by saying here and now that the first post in the as-yet unnamed feature will either be Antonica or The Commonlands. I did think of starting with the old neighborhoods and city-based starting areas or the two major cities, Qeynos and Freeport, themselves but if I went with that idea, I might never get out of the cities at all. 

 

In fact, now I think about it, when I first thought of this project, if I'm going to glorify it with the name, I was in Antonica. So that's where I'm going to begin.

 

When? That's entirely another question. 

Before The Shadow: Big Skies, Small Horizons

Before The Shadow is turning out to be a very good purchase. I've only managed three sessions so far but they've been lengthy- a couple of hours and more each time. It's mostly been proper, focused gameplay, too. I've been sticking to the main questline, only picking up side-quests as and when I find them. Which is often. There are a lot of quests.

Even so, after as many hours, I'm still less than halfway through level 7, suggesting I could be at this for quite some time. With a reported "expansion cap" somewhere around the low thirties, I can see this becoming my second-longest run in Lord of the Rings Online to date.

I first picked up the game sometime back in the late noughties, when I made it to around Level 40. (The cap was 50 at the time.) If I'm remembering correctly, it took me about three months to get there but it might not have been quite as long as that. Maybe it just felt like it.

I do know that by the end things had gotten very grindy indeed and when some stranger royally pissed me off one Sunday morning, making some entitled roleplaying demands I wasn't interested in meeting,  I grabbed the opportunity to flounce out, taking Mrs Bhagpuss with me. She's never played again. I have, many times.

I'm in there, somewhere. Hobbits are, like, really short, y'know?

I'm even still playing on that same server, mostly because I'm too mean, stubborn and lazy to move. Frankly, it hasn't improved much in the last decade. Last night I had to switch World chat off because I couldn't take the ceaseless bickering over whether housing is or isn't a core part of the game and whether Standing Stone are or are not justified in making housing items the lead attraction in their Black Friday offer.

Without the players, however, Before the Shadow becomes a charming divertissement indeed. The new zones are as huge as these screenshots suggest. I got distracted by the sheer scale of the landscape while out questing last night and found myself climbing to the tops of several crags just to get a better view.

While I was exploring, I ran into some orcs, brigands and footpads, for none of which had I been given quests to hunt or kill. Naturally, this being an mmorpg and I a seasoned mmorpg player, I killed them anyway and I was very glad I did. Several dropped armor and weapons that weren't just far better than anything I had but also much better than anything any questgiver had seen fit to hand out as a reward. 

Yep, these planks all seem fine to me.

This seems like an interesting quirk. The structured gameplay in the new starting zone is clearly defined, with a central narrative and regular breadcrumb quests leading the player to each new quest hub. It would seem sensible, therefore, to stick to the schedule, go where you're sent and do as you're asked, an approach that's become almost compulsory in most modern mmorpgs. 

Despite that, and even though Before The Shadow is entirely composed of newly-written content, it seems the old ways persist. When LotRO launched, back in 2007, World of Warcraft had already begun resetting the parameters for the genre with its quest-based levelling mechanics but the pre-existing practices of older games like EverQuest or Dark Age of Camelot, where grinding mobs for both xp and gear had long been the baseline, still exerted a powerful influence on game design.

All this second-person reported speech takes a bit of getting used to. It has a serious distancing effect on the narrative, too.

You might have thought the supposedly good currency of questing would have driven out the bad of random mob-killing by now but evidently not, at least in LotRO. Good for Standing Stone! I love levelling up by wandering about, killing anything that can't kill me, then stealing their stuff and using it for myself. It's a simple but eternally satisfying gameplay loop.

Of course, the nature of the quests I'm being offered might have something to do with my enthusiasm for off-piste slaughter, too. I know the early stages of the game have a reputation for cosiness, particularly when Hobbits are involved, but some of the things I'm being asked to get involved with really stretch the definition of "adventuring" well past breaking point.

I forgot the one about finding
some guy's lost boot...

There was the butcher who wanted me to go round the village, collecting next week's meat orders, tacked to his customers' front doors. Or how about the mother who sent me out to look for her five children, none of whom she had the least clue where they might be, just to tell them their tea was ready?

Things like that make the time when I was tasked with retrieving a single, lost arrow, supposedly stolen by a mysterious beast, only to be asked to wash it when I brought it back because it had monster spit on it, seem almost reasonable. Even something as straightforward as swimming across the river to look behind a waterfall, just in case something might be hiding behind it, as one paranoid Hobbit had me do, felt like reckless risk-taking by local standards.

So determinedly trivial are many of the quests that simply being sent to check out some hill where orcs might be hiding (They aren't.) or to retrieve a book from some bandits seems like high adventure. The civillians are bad enough but the local authorities are even worse. 

The bridge inspector, who didn't feel up to working one day and sent me to check the planks for her, had a better claim on my time than the so-called Mayor, a Hobbit so lazy he couldn't even be bothered to tack his weekly meat order on the door but still expected me, a total stranger, only in town to warn him of the impending orcish threat, to go out and kill animals for him just so he could feed his blasted dog!

And yet, somehow, none of it sends my blood pressure soaring. Rather, it all feels surprisngly relaxing. It's old school mmorpg gameplay with all the sharp edges sanded away to leave nothing more than a gentle nub; the adventuring equivalent of a cosy armchair and a pair of slippers. 

If things carry on like this for another twenty-five levels, I won't be complaining - although that might just be because I'll be fast asleep.

Across The Desert By Track And Shrine: Notes On New World's Brimstone Sands.

Belghast put up a long, post today, detailing some of the major ways New World has changed since its fall from grace last year. He knows the game far better than I do, having not only engaged extensively with the previous endgame mechanics that I completely ignored, but also having levelled to sixty under both the old and new regimes, so I don't plan on elaborating on anything he's covered.

I did, however, already have a vague plan to post a bullet point list of a few things specific to Brimstone Sands that I'd noticed since I came back to the game, things that seemed like improvements to me. I even went to the trouble of jotting down a few notes, so rather than waste them, here they are.

• Brimstone Sands Is New World's First Expansion
  

It's not been billed as one and Amazon haven't taken any money for it but after a week playing it I can't see it as anything less. To be specific, it reminds me surprisingly strongly of the kind of expansion I'm used to from EverQuest II. 

There's a central questline that leads you through the new zone, which feels like it could be about the size of the three or four EQII zones that make up the average expansion these days. There's the new hub city, the new mob models, the new crafting materials and recipes, and the wealth of upgrades that almost immediately invalidate what you came in wearing. It all feels very familiar.

My first Legendary weapon. Shame I don't know how to use it.

It feels like it's going to be about the same length, too, at least as far as the storyline goes. I've been following the main questline pretty slavishly and so far I've opened just over half the zone. I'm guessing that means I'm about halfway through but I haven't looked ahead to check. 

It might be a bit less. So far I've had six Legendary weapons from quest rewards. I'm assuming all fifteen types are coming - it would be a bit unfair if anyone got right to the end of the chain and found their weapon had been left out.Of course, they may not be distributed evenly. I'm pretty sure I got at least one from a side quest. Either way, there's plenty still left to do.

• They Don't Call It The Empty Quarter For Nothing.
  

The changes to fast travel that make it almost as easy to teleport around Aeternum as it used to be in Tyria, before ArenaNet decided they'd rather people used mounts, presumably because you can't sell skins for waypoints. This morning I was jogging across the dunes on my way to a quest objective, when I decided to take a detour to open a Spirit Shrine, the game's version of a waypoint. When I got there, I could see another Shrine so close by I was able to open it as I ran back without taking a detour. 

There's no shortage of jump-offs, then, but the problem hasn't only been one of availability. (Or cost, for that matter, another non-issue now it's been reduced to almost nothing.) Part of the difficulty with Shrines has always been ease of access - or rather lack of it. Travel doesn't really feel all that instant if you have to fight your way through hordes of wolves to get to the bus stop. Too much of my time in New World has been spent either fighting or running away from endless guards, undead and wildlife, all of which seemed hell-bent on chasing down and killing anything in a hundred meter radius. It certainly put me off using the Shrines that weren't right on the roadways, which hardly any ever were.

Got the place to myself again, I see.

In Brimstone Sands you can hike for miles across the desert trails without coming into aggro range of so much as a single scorpion. Mob density throughout is exceptionally light. If you go off-track and head out into the scrubland you'll be very unlucky to meet much more than the odd jackal. Even when you start poking around the many ruins and collonades that litter the landscape, you'll find their forgotten treasures largely unguarded.

It makes exploring a genuine pleasure. I have to make a detour when I want to kill something, which makes me feel like I have agency, rather than as though I'm only in the gameworld on sufference. One can only hope for a similar sanity pass across the rest of Aeternum.

• Sneaky Sneaky Dodgy Guardy
  

Whereas the vast tracts you need to cross to get to quest locations are largely devoid of annoying interruptions, the larger temples, crypts and complexes that form your primary loci of interest very definitely are not. They're well-guarded and daunting to explore, as they should be.

Let's see any of 'em catch me up here!

That doesn't mean you have to hack your way through a score of mobs to get to every checkpoint. I mean, you can, if that's your thing, but if you want to play it smart there's often a sneaky approach that'll get you to your quest objective without a weapon being drawn.

I've had as much fun working out covert routes to glyphs and chests, sneaking behind pillars, climbing up broken walls and shinning along aquaducts as I've had going full berserker on the sentries on gate duty. It adds a welcome degree of puzzle gameplay to even out all that combat and I find it just plain fun.

• You Call Them "Jumping Puzzles", I Call Them "Vistas"

I saw a certain degree of nervousness expressed in some quarters over Amazon Games' stated intention to add a little variety to questing in the form of "Jumping Puzzles". I suppose people were imagining something along the lines of the often challenging set-piece content in other games, for example Guild Wars 2. 

I've taken several quests so far that required me to climb to the top of something to open a box or read a glyph but thankfully none of them have been any more difficult than an average vista in GW2. Easier, really, since New World comes with a degree of automated parkour baked in., "Climbing" is mostly a case of positioning your character and letting the game engine do the rest. 

Getting up here was easy enough. It's getting down that's the problem.

As for jumping, if you don't quite make it across a gap, your character will often grab on to something and haul themselves up rather than plummet to their death. It turns what could have been a stressful, frustrating experience into something of a jolly romp, something which is beginning to sound like a fair description of New World itself.

• A Busy Map Is A Happy Map
  

As has been widely reported, New World's population, having bottomed out at around 1% of its former peak, has rebounded vigorously of late. The addition of Fresh Start servers have taken concurrency back into six figures for the first time in a long while.

The starting regions of those new servers must be heaving but where I'm playing the focus seems to be very much on Brimstone Sands. New Corsica, the full-service capital of the zone feels lively as a busy city should but even in the far-flung corners of the parched desert you can't go more than a few yards without crossing paths with another adventurer.

Thanks! I can take it from here!

As I discovered many years ago, when mmorpg designers began to move away from individual ownership towards a more collectivist approach, other players doing the same quest as you are always welcome. There's no longer any need to party up, although you can if you want to be sociable. Either way, you can fight side by side as you push forward through the ruins or follow in the slipstream of someone more powerful as they blaze a path towards your mutual objective. I like to take it in turns, leapfrogging from mob to mob, allowing  each player to kill half as many mobs as they would alone, while moving considerably faster towards the goal.

• Risk vs Reward... But Mostly Reward.

I'm not a big fan of risk vs reward. I like the reward part well enough. I'm just not so fond of the risk. 

In Brimstone Sands, the balance seems to have tipped very much in my favor. There's treasure everywhere. Epic items drop from jackals and scorpions at a rate that seems much more generous than I remember from other parts of the game and as for chests, their ever-repleneshing contents remind me of EQII's paradoxical pandas, the ones who boast of never leaving their homeland and yet somehow manage to find an  infinite supply of powerful gear to give away to anyone who wants it.

As for quest rewards, in addition to the aforementioned Legendary weapons there's a torrent of mats needed for their upgrades plus a steady trickle of the sought-after gypsum orbs used to craft yet more epics. My only real issue is that I don't yet fully understand how those systems work. When I've done my research, though, I should have plenty of resources to put my learning into practice right away.

• Brimstone Sands: More To See Than Just Sand!
  

This might be the biggest surprise of all. I've seen a lot of desert zones in mmorpgs and while I like them well enough, I wouldn't claim they're the most diverse of environments. Brimstone Sands makes a strong case for variety, while somehow managing to stay consistent with its theme.

It does help that one of the big threats in the region turns out to be the Angry Earth, Aeternum's druidic/elemental race. Everywhere the Angry Earth go, flowers bloom, something that seems to hold true as much in the arid desert as in the temperate zones from which they come.

Yep. Still in the desert.

Oases add a burst of welcome color but the real variety comes from the built environment. Graeco-Roman ruins and Egyptian pyramids battle for attention with flickering science-fantasy engines straight out of the pulps. Aeternum has always offered a grab-bag of architectural styles but here the range extends well beyond the historical and into the phantasmal.

The natural world more than holds its own, creatively. Blistering pools of acid hiss and bubble, sending out clouds of bilious, olive mists. Wind-carved spires of sandstone stretch upwards from the sand like the deformed fingers of giants. And then there's the sky. The endless, sweeping, overwhelming desert sky, roseate at dawn, glaring at midday, subtle pastels at sunset, shimmering starfields by night. I do love me a good skybox.

I'm sure there's much more I haven't yet discovered. Brimstone Sands is deep with content and all of New World these days is a cornucopia of entertainment. As Belghast puts it "What You Know about New World is Wrong". 

Unless, of course, what you know is that New World's a very good mmorpg. In my opinion it always has been but now I think it's better than ever. Who said there are no second acts in mmos?

Don't Mind Me! Just Passing Through! I VIsit Every Territory On Aeternum And Live To Talk About It.

Once I'd cooled off on the idea of buying that three-story yellow house in Everfall, it seemed like it might be an idea to go take a look at all of my options - or at least as many as I could get to at Level 35. That meant poking my nose into places I wasn't supposed to know about. Fun!

I've kind of gotten out of the habit of taking low-level characters to high-level zones. I used to do it all the time up until a few years ago. It's a good way to get the feel of a new game. It tells you a lot about how the developers were thinking when they were putting it all together. 

In some mmorpgs it feels as though the devs want us to take the game as seriously as they do. There are rules and they're there to be followed. Sometimes you get the impression anything less might be taken as a personal insult.

Those are the games where mobs have faultless radar that locks onto any character more than a certain number of levels beneath them. You've barely set foot in a new zone when everything in a five-hundred meter radius comes barrelling out of the bushes, snarling and spitting and howling for your blood. 

Instant death follows, of course, because those are the same games that ramp mob damage up exponentially against lower-level targets. One hit is all it takes and since all your defenses are automatically negated as soon as you set foot anywhere you're not meant to go, every attack does hit.

 

When I run into something like that, it tells me the whole game is going to be very much an on-rails experience. The devs will tell you where you should be and when you should be there and don't even think about having any ideas of your own.

I haven't run into all that many mmorpgs quite that bad and of those that come close I've purged the memories. I tend not to stick around where my preferred playstyle isn't just unsupported but actively discouraged. Of the games I have played for a while, the one that sticks in my mind as being a little like that is World of Warcraft, although I suspect it falls more into the next category.

These are the games that use some kind of sliding scale to decide how far you're allowed to push your luck. There's not the same kind of cliff-edge you get with the really harsh mechanics of the first category but there's a pretty treacherous slope all the same. 

In zones above your intended range you get some leeway as aggro ranges increase and mobs get more vicious but you can edge past if you're careful and you might survive a few hits. If you keep on testing the waters, though, you will eventually find yourself in over your head. When your level is sufficiently far below the intended level for the zone the devs take away the safety net and it's back to one-shot kills and nowhere to run.

The third category doesn't much care what you do. Aggro ranges might vary by mob type but level has nothing to do with it. A tiger in a starting zone has the same aggro range as a tiger in the endgame. Hits get harder but incrementally not exponentially. Exploring in those worlds is purely a matter of watching where you're going. Don't bump into anything and you'll be fine. Probably.

 

There are, of course, infinite gradations and variations. So many factors come into play: aggro range but also run speed, line of sight, ranged attacks, crowd control effects, visibility, terrain... Even in games that don't differentiate at all by level, some zones are easy to cross while others are all but impossible for any number of valid and less than valid reasons.

In all the time I've played mmorpgs I can't remember a single game where any of this has ever been overtly explained. Usually, about the best you can hope for are a couple of indicators on the mobs themselves (A death's head or a grinning skull is generally a bad sign.) and a note on the map telling you what the intended level might be.

The only game I can bring to mind that marks the exact aggro range of every mob on the map is Guild Wars, where I have to say I always found it intensely irritating. It turned exploring into a peculiarly geometric affair, where you stare at a series of circles on the mini-map and maneuver yours in such a way that it never intersects with any of the others. I'm sure someone enjoyed it but I can see why no other game copied it.

A more common system that I've seen a few times is a radar ping on a mini map or a heads-up display that notes when some mob has noticed you trying to sneak past. You get a small window of opportunity to pull back or freeze or go into stealth, whatever seems appropriate, before the creature launches itself at you. That I also find quite irritating.

When we get right down to it, I don't like any mechanics that make looking at a map or a HUD the optimal way to travel through dangerous territory. I like to look intensely into the screen and feel myself there, in the world. 

 

I like visual triggers, mobs stopping what they're doing, looking up or casting around, as if for a scent. The more that's done with animation or sound, the better but I'll also settle for a big exclamation point appearing over a mob's head to show it's thinking about something. At least it's in my field of view. 

In every new mmorpg, learning the local rules, the physics of the world, the various behaviors of the different mobs and the trigger cues is one of the best parts. Then the next best part after that is learning how to play them to your advantage.

How well all those myriad factors balance and especially how fair it feels is one of the defining factors in how much fun exploring can be in any given mmorpg. Some, Guild Wars 2 for example, are so permissive there's virtually no thrill in exploration at all (Although in GW2's case, the stellar work of the art department often makes it a glorious pleasure, all the same.) Others (I thought Phantasy Star Online 2 was one, from the little I saw while I was briefly there.) are so restrictive there's no point even trying to explore.

After several hours travelling the highways, byeways and unmarked dirt tracks of Aeternum today, I would tentatively describe New World as both fair and exciting when it comes to going where you're not supposed to go. The main reason I'm slightly cautious is that my character at 35 might be a little too high for a real test. Somewhere in the mid-teens would probably have been more conclusive. 

I'm not rolling a new character and levelling them up just to find out, though, so we'll have to make do with what I learned today. Which was that most but not all of the non-elite open world map is accessible to a determined explorer, provided they don't want to go too far off-road and always keep their eyes very firmly open.

 

The map, when used for planning, is trully excellent. Possibly the best I've ever used in an mmorpg. Not only are all the roads and trails clearly and accurately marked but you can see quite plainly where a road goes through a village, town, hamlet or ruin and also when the road itself breaks up and becomes impassable. 

That is crucial for safe travelling because although the larger roads are mostly safe, almost any settlement other than a player-town will be crawling with aggressive mobs, many of which will spill onto the road as it goes through. Bridges, especially the huge, partially-ruined ones, are also always swarming with undead. It's essential to know when you need to come off the paved highway and cut across country to avoid murder-gauntlets like those.

The map also makes it very clear which areas are impassable. The shading and color even tells you if the obstacle is a mountain or a cliff or deep water. Again, invaluable when planing a route.

As far as mob aggro goes, I think there's a sliding scale. I found it hard to be sure. My feeling is that there's a static upper radius that attaches to mobs your own level and all those above, meaning no mob spots you from further away just because it's higher level than you. The reverse, though, affects mobs as you level past them. The higher above them you get, the less notice they take of you, until eventually you all but have to push them out of the way to get their attention.

I would stress I'm not entirely sure about that. I have a suspicion predators may work differently. In the whole time I was travelling, it was always either wolves or cats that seemed to attack from a greater distance. Especially wolves. Bloody, sodding wolves. I hate wolves! Oh, and alligators, too. 

 

Run speed seems to be identical for everything, players and all mobs, although once again, I felt wolves seemed to be able to catch me up when nothing else could. I think that's because of a particular lunge attack they do, though, rather than any specific speed buff. I don't think wolves get Spirit of Wolf in Aeternum and I certainly don't see why they should, when no-one else does.

There seem to be few mobs that use crowd control effects or maybe I was just lucky. I did get killed once when I tried to run through half a dozen humanoid mobs and got chain-stunned but only once and it was in Shattered Mountain, which is a 50-60 zone. I probably should have expected it.

Shattered  Mountain was one of only two of the fourteen zones in which I failed in my mission to visit  all the marked player hubs in the game. Both were zones meant for players between 50 and 60. More importantly, I think, they also have no real player towns. They aren't, as far as I can see, included in the territorial PvP set-up and there's no housing available there. 

Those two zones, along with Great Cleave, which I was able to explore, only have "Outposts" for players to craft and bank and sell. The other eleven territories all have Settlements, one per zone, largeish villages or small towns, filled with activity of all kinds. These three each have two Outposts, which very much resembe those in the original alpha. Just a fort with the basic facilities inside, nothing else. 

I did manage to get to both of the Outposts in Great Cleave and one of the two in Edengrove but Shattered Mountain proved too tough, mainly because of the "mountain" part, which meant I couldn't cut around obstacles without getting trapped against a rockface. Even though none of the Outposts had housing, something I didn't realize until I got there, it was still well worth the trip. Now I have fast travel options and respawn points for all of them.

I had no major issues getting to the player hubs in the other very high level Territories. I'd already been to Reekwater, which is supposedly the highest zone in the current game. Mourningdale and Restless Shores are technically within my level range, although only just. 

I had a bit of trouble with some goats outside of Mourningdale, which would have been a very embarrassing way to get killed, but I made it past in one piece. Restless Shores saw me arrive at the gates with four or five slavering withered chasing me in the traditional Benny Hill manner but they were never close to catching me.

The nearest I came to disaster in sight of the safety of the city was coming up the road into Ebonscale Reach, a zone intended for 55-60. It was so close my Berserker death save kicked in so technically I did die but I didn't fall down. Somehow I kept going and got away. 

It was my first visit to Ebonscale Reach, the zone Belghast compared to somewhere in Mists of Pandaria and for very good reason. I'm planning a post on which towns I'd most and least like to own houses in so I'll probably say more about Ebonscale then but for now I'll just say I did not expect anything like that!

On my run I took about eighty screenshots. I would have taken a lot more. There were plenty of times when I wanted to but couldn't stop for fear of near-certain death. 

 

Mostly I only saw what you can see from a road but it very much looked as though Kaylriene's critical observation about the very limited range of mob models in New World remains true right to the cap. I saw the same mobs just about everywhere, occasionally with slightly different skins. 

I don't think it matters. In a way it makes the place feel more convincing. And convincing is the word for much of Aeternum, although possibly not all of it. The nordic forests of Great Cleave are some of the best I've ever seen in an mmorpg but what's going on with all the tropical flowers in Edengrove, right next door, I have no idea. It must be magic.

All in all it was a lot of fun, exciting, involving, immersive and of great practical benefit. I now have fast travel options across the entire map (almost) and a pretty good idea where I want to live. 

All I need to do is grab another four or five levels and start working on my Standing in yet another Settlement. Which one? That's a different post but I'll give you a clue. You can see the house I want to live in somewhere on this page.

Who Would Live In A Place Like This?

The delightful scene above is a pretty fair representation of what I've been looking at for most of the afternoon. That's Weaver's Fen in New World. Charming, isn't it?

I've had it in mind for a few days to say something about how New World follows the unfortunate pattern of most mmorpgs in making the zones increasingly unatractive, not to say hellish, the higher up the levels you go. That's certainly been my experience so far, with the bright, colorful, coasts of First Light and Monarch's Bluffs shading into rich farmlands and autumnal glow of Everfall, before the gloom descends with the haunted house aesthetic of the ironically-named Brightwood and the dismal swamps of Weaver's Fen.

My faction, Marauders, by far the weakest on Zuvendis, holds just a single zone now. We did have two but we lost First Light days ago and despite warring for it ever since show no signs of getting it back. 

Our stronghold, such as it is, is the truly awful Reekwater, a zone that is, I'm sad to say, very accurately named. I imagine the only reason we hold it is because no-one else wants it. No-one with anywhere else to go would dream of setting foot on the rotten, rickety planks of the shanty town it calls a capital, let alone raising a flag.

I went there to see what our faction town was like, just in case I might have wanted to settle there. I think you get some benefits for crafting and so forth in zones owned by your faction. In my case that gives me a choice of one.

Reekwater is apparently a level 58-60 zone but I had no trouble whatsoever getting there in my early thirties. Well, maybe I did have a little trouble. The first time I tried to come in via the road that travels eastwards out of Everfall but that turns out to run right through the middle of a ruined village populated by angry ghosts. I took one look and thought better of it.

Next time, I came down from the north, along the road from Weaver's Fen. It's one of the bigger roads, not just a track. By and large in Aeternum, the wider the road, the safer it is. It helps that just about everything seems to have the same run speed. Provided you get past something, it can't catch you, so long as you don't turn around to see how far behind you it is.

And this is the nice part of town...

One quick trip around the waterlogged decks of Reekwater town confirmed all my fears. It's a classic mmorpg end game zone - ugly, dark, miserable and depressing. They're always either that or frozen solid or on fire.Of the three, I think swampland is the worst.

Based on everything I've seen for myself so far, I'd have been justified in lambasting Amazon's designers for falling into the trap of making the path from character creation to cap a journey from comfort to despair, visually at least. Only I've heard otherwise.

Belghast dinged fifty today and he's been pondering where he might settle down when he caps out and buys a house. He's thinking about Ebonscale Reach, a level 50-60 zone, which he describes as "...really gorgeous... its layout somewhat reminds me of the temples in Pandaria with everything terraced out of the face of a mountainside." 

Someone else (I apologize to whoever it was. I know it was someone whose blog I follow but I can't remember where I read it.) was talking the other day about one of the later zones looking like the Plains in Valheim, an aesthetic that strongly appeals to me. Unfortunately, I also can't remember which zone it was. This isn't helping much, is it?

The point is, there's anecdotal evidence building up that not every endgame zone in New World is dank, dark and deacayed. It looks as though there's actually some geographical logic to it, not just a desire to exploit the inevitable correlation between the aesthetic tastes of players most likely to make it to the level cap and the kind of imagery traditionally found on the covers of heavy metal albums.

It seems that, from the center to the south-eastern coast, the isle of Aeternum is covered by one massive swamp. Upward from that, along the coast, by all reports the climate improves. I'm going to have to go and check it out for myself.

So far I've visited eight of New World's fourteen zones. I find almost all of the game's progression systems compulsive but by far the most satisfying of them all are the Standings. In a way it's nothing more than the faction we're familiar with from many games but the mechanics and implementation and the fact it's linked directly to the towns themselves make it feel different. And desirable.

Where would you rather live? I mean, come on...

 

Improving my Standing in Everfall made up the main thrust of my gameplay from the moment I decided that was where I wanted to buy my first house. I only changed focus when I started to feel a little burned out from running town and faction missions back to back, session after session, by which time I was already Respected, the title you earn at Standing 15.

At that point I was also Standing 13 in Monarch's Bluff and Standing 10 in Windsward, meaning I could have bought a house in any of them. I'm also at least Standing 5 in First Light, Brightwood and Weaver's Fen by now. Everywhere I go I make an impression, it seems.

You can't really help it. The missions bring in the most credit, of course, but just as everything you do gives you xp, so it gives you Standing. Even running along a road from one side of a new zone to the other without stopping will usually get you enough Standing from discovery xp to raise your profile from Stranger to Newcomer.

I took a couple of sessions off from grinding Everfall faction to go level up a bit. That took me from the late twenties into the early thirties and also filled all my resource pools to the brim. At Level 32 this afternoon I couldn't receive any further Azoth rewards, faction tokens or faction reputation. If I could change one thing about New World it would be to take those caps and hurl them into the ocean.

I made some armor I didn't need and ported somewhere I might just as well have walked to get my Azoth down. I bought a rune of holding for 3000 tokens (and 500 gold, which I could ill afford) to let me earn yet more tokens.

The faction reputation, though, I could do nothing about. I'd run up against the hard cap of a new Rank. 

Ranks have a different name in every faction. In the Marauders, the third rank is Ravager. To become a Ravager you need to do a "Trial", just as you did for the previous rank, Gladiator. 

The trial, which is just a fancy name for a quest, is recommended for Level 35. The Gladiator one didn't just recommend Level 30, it required it or so I thought. I think now I may have misunderstood what was going on because I was able to get the Ravager quest at 32. 

Except when I got it it said it was recommended for Level 40. Gulp! Oh well, it's not like anyone stays dead in Aeternum, is it? (Actually it is but that's a whole other post...) So I followed the marker and went to see how far I could get. 

All the way. With ease. Literally the only difficult part about it was getting to the first of the three or four villages I needed to cleanse. That one was inconveniently crammed between a cliff and a town full of highly agressive Elite mobs, capable of sending me back to spawn in a couple of hits.

Once I'd navigated a route past those obstacles, though, despatching the requisite ten mobs was ridiculously easy. Yes, some of them were six or seven levels higher than me but mobs in New World vary incredibly in difficulty and threat compared to most other mmorpgs I've played. These were all Lost and for my build at least, Lost are just about the softest of kills.

So now I'm a Ravager, which means I can buy the third grade of faction armor. I don't want to, because I don't need it, which is just as well. I can buy it but I can't equip it. Clearly the developers did indeed expect players wouldn't be doing these quests until they hit 35 or even 40 because those are the level requirements to wear the bloody stuff!

Seriously? What do I have to do to get some respect around here? Arm-wrestle alligators? Because I will!

 

Never mind. At least I can gain reputation with the Marauders again and make my way towards the fourth trial so I can become a Destroyer. And there are some useful utilities I can buy for tokens.

Along the way I did do a few more missions in Everfall. My Standing there is now 19, just one level short of being able to buy the Tier Three house I wanted. Note past tense.

I might still want it. I'm not sure. It's a great house. And Everfall is a great town. There's just one problem. It's also an insanely busy town. I get more frame-rate lag there than anywhere else in the game. I can barely move after eight in the evening. I'm begining to think it would be a mistake to settle there.

Then again, I have all that Standing. It would be a shame not to take advantage of it. I can't see myself waiting until I hit the mid-50s to start all over again in Ebonscale Reach, no matter how delightful it is. 

And in the long run, it'll be the endgame zones that are busiest, won't it? It usually is. By then, Everfall might have slipped back into being a quiet, low-level backwater. 

I hope so although I suspect not. It's just too conveniently placed and as we all know... location, location, location.

One thing's for sure. Wherever I end up living it won't be Reekwater, no matter how damn quiet it is. I have some standards, at least!

In Exile

Exile's Reach is World of Warcraft's new, all-race, all-faction, all-purpose starter zone. It sailed in on the update formerly known as the Shadowlands pre-patch, blown loose from its moorings by the storm that pushed the expansion back to an as-yet unknown release date. 

Sorry. Sorry! It's hard to avoid the maritime metaphors when you've just hauled yourself up onto the beach from yet another MMORPG shipwreck. How many times have we done this now? Let me think... when was the last time? Oh, yes, that would be the New World showcase back in the summer. That long?

I love the classics, though, don't you? I mean, why re-invent the wheel, right? But I did find this particular cover version particularly ironic, what with the similarities to WoW's contemporary and so-far-back-in-the-rear-view-mirror-it's-barely-a-dot "rival", EverQuest II, but Norrath does have separate islands for the factions so it's not exactly the same. Is it?

Hard to be sure. So far, I've only run through this thing once, as a goblin with the Horde. Come to think of it, I can't recall seeing any dirty Alliance scum hanging around. Maybe there are two islands after all.

However it works, all brand-new players have no choice other than to begin in Exile's Reach. Experienced players, by which I believe Blizzard means any account that already has a character over level ten, get to choose whether to take the shipwreck or begin in their traditional racial starting zone.

Every character on my regular account (I have two - maybe three - I forget) belongs to the Alliance but I'm planning on starting a Vulpera as soon as I can get the pre-reqs done, which means having a Horde character of high enough level to do the quests. I maybe should have thought of that when they were running the months-long double xp promotion...

To kill two birds with one stone, or at least stun one of them a little, I thought I'd make a goblin and run her through the new starting experience. That also allowed me to take a look at the revamped character creation options. Hey, three birds! What is this, hunting season?

It's been so long since I last made a character in WoW I couldn't really remember how it used to be so any comparisons I might try to make between the old and new versions would be fairly meaningless. Also, WoW seems to be having some fairly serious connectivity problems since the big patch so I didn't see things at their best. 

I got disconnected just before I finished making my first goblin. Nothing saved so I had to make another. That one glitched half way through and changed several of the options I'd picked. It was hardly a slick, polished process. After about twice as long as I expected I managed to get a goblin I was happy with, a shaman, a class I don't believe I've ever played.

Things began with a short cinematic with very hyped-up voiceover bigging up the gung-ho collective responsibility of the Horde in what I thought was a peculiarly uncomfortable fashion. I wasn't quite sure if I was joining an anarcho-syndacalist collective or the U.S. marines. That tone, unfortunately, persisted for the entire time I spent in Exile's Reach and seemed set to continue into Orgrimmar, where I ended up, being given the tour by a relatively un-brainwashed goblin, ten levels later.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. How was Exile's Reach itself? 

Buggy, in a word. Really quite buggy. Like, late beta buggy. That buggy. Which I found surprising. Isn't Blizzard the company that's famous for its polish? Maybe that's Old Blizzard, as SynCaine would say.

After a few extremely basic tutorial steps (WASD, how to hit a target dummy)  I got sent to kill murlocs and retrieve First Aid kits they'd stolen. Yeah, didn't make any sense in game, either. Unfortunately I couldn't target any of them."Invalid target", every time.

I couldn't cast my one spell, a lightning bolt, but it didn't stop me killing the little blighters because right-clicking on them and auto-attacking worked fine. Didn't help as much as you'd think, though, because I couldn't loot anything I killed, which meant no first aid kits, which meant I couldn't complete the opening quest.. 

 

I fiddled around with that for a while and got annoyed. Logged in and out a couple of times. Tried another character to see if it was just happening in Exile's Reach (it wasn't). Eventually I found a supposed solution online (you just have to press "Alt" apparently) but when I swapped back to my gobin shaman for the third time the problem had magically fixed itself.

Not the greatest of first impressions. It occured to me that, had I been a brand new player, at this point I might have been thinking of playing something else. Since I'm a veteran I carried on. 

Some more bugs I experienced over the next couple of hours: 

• being told to eat some food to recover my health every single time I opened my bags even though I was always at full health already
• having as many as four flashing prompts on screen at once, all overlapping each other so none of them could be read
• and finally (after I foolishly ate something to get the flashing prompt to go away) getting a huge banner stuck across the bottom of the screen telling me "Don't move while eating. Watch as your health recovers", which would not go away no matter what I tried.

Despite the flurry of irritating and inaccurate messages I persisted. It took me a couple of hours to get to level ten. I was quite surprised when I checked the time at the end. It seemed shorter. I probably lost twenty minutes fighting bugs so I guess it was. 

 

Experience and levels seemed to come pretty quickly and as advertised there was something to get excited about each time I dinged. Mostly a spell, which the game was very, very insistent I should know about. I was understanding of the first animated prompt to tell me how to open my spell book and move a spell icon onto my hotbar but less so when it was still happening at level nine.

The early stages involved a considerable amount of business around making sure my character was prepared for the danger of the fights to come. It seemed ironic considering the speed everything died. At no point was I ever in the slightest danger from anything. Most mobs fell down in two or three hits. If my goblin took any damage I didn't notice it.

Somewhere around level six, as I was running somewhere to do something for someone (to call the storyline generic would be rude to genres) I spotted a big mob with a fancy border around its name so I piled into it to see if I could get an actual fight. 

It wasn't touch and go, let's say that much. The thing did drop an eight-slot bag, though, so I was happy enough. I also received a ten-slot from a quest. With last year's Classic experience still quite fresh in my memory I suspect I may have gotten more excited about getting those bags than was wholly appropriate.

 

Visually, Exile's Reach is impressive. The opening area on the beach doesn't really set the scene for what follows, a romp through some very picturesque and spooky swampland. The ghost army was worth seeing, too.

In retrospect I kind of wish I'd gone a little deeper into the swamp, poked around a little, but the entire experience is very much on rails. There's little incentive to explore. The main sequence questline is extremely linear and although there's the odd side quest none of them actually take place off to the side.

As far as gameplay goes, the designers have managed to throw in several of their favorite tropes:

• the one where you get turned into something else
• the one where you ride an NPC as though they were a mount
• the one where you dangle from a flying contraption
• the one where you destroy hundreds of baddies with massive air strikes. 

Plus, naturally, all the kill ten and fetch quests you'd expect. I don't recall there being an escort quest but I may well have done one and forgotten about it.

The finale involves that nemesis of all introverted would-be soloists, the unavoidable, compulsory group instance. Being WoW, this is as automated as it possibly could be. A dungeon finder window opens, you click it and if you're lucky like I was you're in a group in less than five seconds. 

Astoundingly someone did actually take the trouble to type in "Hello everyone", to which I felt obligated to reply "Hi there", by which time the two players who hadn't taken time out to introduce themselves had already killed most of the trash and were lining up for the boss. We killed him and then (spoiler!) the real final boss spawned so we killed him too.

 

I was nominally playing a healer. A shaman is a healer in Wow, right? Or maybe it's not. Certainly nothing happens in Exile's Reach to suggest anyone ever needs healing of any kind. Well, other than that that blasted "eat your greens" prompt. Anyway, I did keep an eye on the other party members' health but since no-one ever went under 90% it seemed like a moot point.

There was loot that looked like it might be nice. It was blue, at least. I'd barely registered anything had dropped before I found myself alone again. I've never seen people disband so fast. I guess they had somewhere to be.

Back in the open world again, all that was left was a quick debrief and a wyvern ride to Orgrimmar. The wyvern person warned me it was a one-way trip. Frankly, I couldn't think of a reason I'd want to come back. Unless it was to bring a dictionary to show them the correct phonetic pronounciation of "Wyvern". It's Why Verne ffs, not Wivv Urn! What is it with voice actors? They do the same thing in Guild Wars 2.

Anyhoo... there I was in Orgrimmar, still bugged with that stupid food message. I was going to stop but the guy giving the tour was right in front of me and there was something about getting a mount so I carried on for a while until I got my three-wheeled hog. Or Goblin Trike as the game less than thrillingly has it.
 

According to Rohan at Blessing of Kings taking the tour option locks you into doing at least the Battle for Azeroth starting quests. I might as well do that anyway, since it will all be new to me. And I want my fox person!

Overall, and assuming the bugs get fixed, I wouldn't say Exile's Reach is bad. The story is perfunctory. Although there are a few amusing lines now and again, it all feels very bland. It's unoriginal but functional. It moves along at a good clip. I was never bored, at least.

But, compared with the rich, complex, involving storylines of the goblin or worgen starting areas, just to pick a couple of races, Exile's Reach is a huge step back in immersion and quality. Back in 2013, when I last played through the goblin Isle of Kazan, I called it " a fascinating place" and "genuinely laugh-out-loud funny". I also seem to remember it taking me something like two full evening sessions, maybe five or six hours, just to get to level five there, and all of it fun.

Somehow I can't see Exile's Reach ever fostering the kind of nostalgia that led Daybreak to spring the return of the Isle of Refuge on EQ2's audience as a glorious surprise. It does a job and I guess that's about as much as anyone expected.