Say Hello, Wave Goodbye : WoW

My subscription to WoW runs out in a couple of days. I had a think about it this morning and decided to cancel.

On the one hand it's only a tenner a month and that's buried in the monthly credit card bill. I could leave it running and not notice. That would mean I could log in on a whim and play my Hunter or my Warlock or anyone else.

I could explore the changes wrought by the Cataclysm and adventure through Pandaria, which just about everyone seems to have re-assessed as one of WoW's highlights. I could try Pet Battles, take a look at my Garrison, get to 100 and open all those boxes in the bank. I could, eventually, buy Legion and join everyone else in what, by then, will be stale, old content, as we all wait another two years for whatever comes next.

The thing is, though, I'm  not playing WoW right now. I was playing, almost daily, for several weeks. Before the Invasions started I was happily leveling my Gnome Hunter and once the dreadnaughts started disgorging demons I was there every night along with everyone else, battling the hordes and soaking up the xp.

Once the invasions ended though, and I decided not to buy Legion just yet, I pretty much stopped logging in. Momentum carried me through the first few days, when I took the Hunter to begin what seemed to be the start of the main Pandaria questline but it felt flat and a little bit, well, dull.

After the excitement of the invasions, much though I complained about certain aspects of them at the time, the prospect of completing dozens, scores, hundreds of quests as a way of leveling up seemed strangely unappealing. After a couple of hubs I flew to The Timeless Isle, about which I'd read some good things on various blogs a year or two back.

Can I at least get a change of clothes before I go?

There I had fun for a while, running around killing mobs that dropped things that might be upgrades if only they were for my class. I bought a few items on the Auction House to fill in the slots the Invasions had missed. Briefly there was a future where I'd grind quests and gear up and Azeroth would be a place I lived...

And then I stopped logging in. Mostly I went on playing GW2, which I play for several hours every day and a lot of hours every weekend. DBG announced their expansion program, handed out Level 95s and fired up a double xp weekend so I went back to Norrath, both flavors. That made me remember I was paying a subscription that included DCUO so I got that fired up and I played last night, did a couple of levels and had a blast.

This morning, home all day with the house to myself, I thought about what I might play and a whole flurry of options presented themselves. All of the above for a start. Then there's the long list of MMOs I haven't logged into for a while but still think about logging into most days - Dragomon Hunter, Riders of Icarus, Dragon Nest, Rift, Landmark... And the ones I was in the middle of and enjoying and then dropped for no reason - Black Desert, Blade and Soul, ArcheAge...

As I was thinking it over I watched a little of MJ's First Look at Twin Saga. I considered downloading that. I thought about AdventureQuest going into Open Beta in a few weeks. And round about then it occurred to me that all of these options plus dozens more were available to me for free. Even the two EQs and DCUO, for which I do pay but don't have to.

My turn again!

And then I though some more and realized that not only could I also play WoW for free under the Starter Edition but that I would probably enjoy that more than playing "real" WoW in dribs and drabs, here and there. WoW is a great MMORPG. It has a vast wealth of content, a huge and fascinating world and something for everyone. Unfortunately, it also seems to have the vampiric ability to suck all the joy out of itself in remarkably short order.

It's been noticeable how the tone has changed as people progress through Legion. The initial reaction was almost universally positive. Gevlon may have been the only naysayer and even he doesn't find that much to complain about. And there could be a simple solution to the main issue he's highlighting: perhaps Gevlon's Girlfriend could follow Belghast's lead and start the conversational ball rolling herself - or Gevlon could sub up and make it his mission to Get Azeroth Chatting. I think we'd all like to see how that might pan out...

A month in, though, and some people are already over Legion, while some still plugging away wonder how much replayability there can be. The general theme seems to be that Legion was a very good expansion and well worth the cost for the solid 4-6 weeks of intense gameplay it offers. Thanks, Blizzard! We'll all get back to you when you have something new to offer.

I guess this works as a business strategy. I mean, any software developer that could spend two years developing a product and then sell 3.3 million copies in the first week would probably consider it a solid return on investment, wouldn't they?

Mark Jacobs would probably lay any malaise in the genre squarely at the feet of the change in payment models. Mark, of course, has always been dead set against the entire concept of Free-to-Play so he's just being consistent when he says subscription gaming "is the model I have always believed in". He's been around long enough to remember how, when the handful of MMOs that existed all had subscriptions, that in itself was seen as some weird aberration by the vastly larger community of non-MMO-playing gamers.

Even I might get a turn..and I'm an elf!

Still, you do have to wonder whether he might not have a point. If all the games on my want-to-play list used either the Buy to Play or Subscription model, would I have unsubbed from WoW an hour ago? Might I not have thought it better to pay one small monthly fee for access to a very big, polished, stable and reliable game and just stick at it rather than squirrel around all over the place trying this and that and the other for five minutes here, five minutes there?

Well, no. I didn't unsub to WoW because of the cost. I unsubbed because the gameplay in the Free Starter edition is, to my tastes, superior to the gameplay in the paid-for game. What's more, I would actually pay a subscription to have access to a WoW that went on being more like the Free Trial but without the restrictions. And I told Blizzard that in the "Why Are You Leaving Us?" box.

I'd like a simpler, slower, less gear-focused version of WoW. One where the concerns are small, the problems human-sized (or Gnome sized). Especially I'd like a version where you don't feel that every minute is vital for Progression of Your Character and a moment missed is a failure on your part to Do Your Job. I'd pay good money for that.

In short, WoW's free Starter Edition feels like play but paid-for WoW feels like work. That can't be the right way round, can it?

So for now I'm back to being a F2P scrub. Looking forward to it in fact. I've enjoyed my paid time and as I told Blizzard in my resignation note I'm "very likely" to re-subscribe at some point. But for now I'm done.

Backwards Into The Future : AdventureQuest 3D

The death of the traditional MMORPG has been on the cusp for a while now. Blog Nation goes through repeated spasms of fear, self-loathing and schadenfreude over the topic. Recent reports that the MMO craze is beginning to wilt in its last remaining stronghold, South Korea, stirred a flurry of concerned chin-stroking and a spat of smug I Told You Sos.

The original article is tucked safely behind The Financial Times' Pay Wall but Google has a ladder that will let you peek over the top. If you take the time to read the actual article you'll find that the FT weren't bemoaning the decline and fall of the diku-mud model per se but pointing out that South Korea needs to pull its socks up if it's going to compete with China and, to a lesser extent, Western competitors in the freemium field.

Part of the problem - a big part - appears to be the ongoing and accelerating switch by consumers (we used to call them gamers, I believe) away from large screens connected to big boxes that sit on special desks in front of revolving chairs to tiny screens they can carry around in their pockets and tap away at anywhere. Convenience, accessibility and, naturally, a vast saving in upfront costs makes mobile the smart choice for the future.

Only the story isn't quite so simple. Blizzard just rang up 3.3 million sales in the first week for the latest expansion to their unfashionable, aging, very definitely not zeitgeisty diku-mud World of Warcraft. That matches "the all-time record achieved by previous expansions...making it one of the fastest-selling PC games ever".


Blizzard, never the fastest to react to changing trends, has recognized the lure of the small screen for its customers. Smartly they've acted to tether those dangerous phones and tablets to the subscriptions already being paid. The Legion Companion app has been well-received and who can say what it presages for an integrated WoW experience further down the line?

If that comes, though, Blizzard will, as usual, be playing catch-up. There before them, with a fully-integrated MMORPG that you can play on your Windows PC, your Android tablet and your iPhone, comes Artix Entertainment, creators of the AdventureQuest IP.

What's more, if  you're on the PC, your friend is on his tablet and your wife is on her phone (this is beginning to sound like a sitcom) you can all play together, in the exact same virtual space. All you need is a Magic Word. Ok, now it's definitely a sitcom. Probably I Dream Of Genie.

AQ began as a single-player online RPG a long time ago. A really long time ago - 2002 in fact. It was successful enough to spawn a fully-blown, if still resolutely two-dimensional MMORPG version, AdventureQuest Worlds, in 2008. It's one of a surprisingly large number of long-established, successful MMOs that no-one in Blog Nation ever mentions. Or plays.

I've never played it. It kind of slipped under the radar, plus I had it confused in my mind with the Cartoon Network's Adventure Time. Not a good thing.

Unsurprisingly I wasn't paying attention when Artix announced a Kickstarter for the third iteration, a real 3D version this time. Had I noticed I very much doubt I'd have kicked in and probably wouldn't have taken a second chance to get on-board early when they were selling alpha access packs either, even if I'd spotted what was happening.

By the time they got around to flagging up the open beta, though, something had caught my eye. I read Syp's cautiously positive preview at MassivelyOP, and goggled at a later news item which seemed implicitly to question the sanity of taking such a totally unfinished project from Closed to Open Beta in a single week, something that, fortunately, Artix eventually decided against.

Open Beta got pushed back and I waited, not particularly patiently. I even considered buying in to the Closed Beta but it seems I was too late for that. And now the wait is over. Almost.

AdventureQuest goes into Open Beta in October. I will be playing. Whether I'll still be playing in November we shall see but the possibility of playing on my tablet and, possibly, my iPod Touch is very intriguing. I already play some MMOs that way but being able to integrate across all three systems is really taking the next step.

Of course, what matters more is whether it's any good. Going back to where we started, given the uncertain future for full-fat diku-mud MMORPGs, I hope it takes off like a rocket. I'm pretty sure it's going to be more appealing to me than Smed's upcoming offering at any rate.

If anyone can't wait until October there will be some giveaways of Closed Beta keys as Artix do "interviews with popular gaming news websites starting Thursday". I think I can hold off until the end of the month but if I happen to see a key then I won't say no.

Here's hoping there's life in the old diku dog yet.

No More Hero : DCUO

I've always had a soft spot for DCUO. Hardly surprising, given I've been a DC fan since I was four years old. Playing DCUO, though, that hasn't been so much of a thing.

The game's been around for well over five years now. I beta-tested it back in late 2010 and played for several weeks when the game launched in January 2011. The level cap at release was a low-bar 30, something that's never changed and probably never will, because DCUO is effectively two different games.

The first thirty levels offer a very enjoyable, free-flowing, rough and tumble sort-of open world MMO, filled with traditional questing and some exciting all-pile-on large-scale events. If you rolled on a PvP server, as I did, there was also plenty of ad hoc Hero on Villain action along the way.

At thirty the game changes utterly, becoming an intense, group-oriented experience built around instances, raids and an ever-receding chase after the increasingly essential yet ever-elusive Combat Rating.

Here's a guide to what to expect when you turn thirty. I'm not vouching for the accuracy. I've never even gotten that far. All my information on what comes after the watershed I take from Tipa's long-running, highly entertaining but ultimately off-putting tales of life with Team Spode.

That's really not my kind of thing at all but flying through the blue skies of Metropolis or clinging to the rain-drenched rooftops of Gotham very much is. My first character made it into the low 20s before I lost focus and my second, created a couple of years later, stalled somewhere in the teens.

At least I think she did. Hard to be sure. She's not around to ask.

But wait, we're getting ahead of ourselves. First let's get the game installed.How hard can that be, right? I mean, they want people to play...

I hadn't logged into DCUO  for a year - could be two. There's a copy sitting somewhere on one of the HDDs I removed from my old PC but not the one I currently have fitted into a USB enclosure. Rather than swap them over I thought I'd just re-install. We have an excellent cable connection, it's around a 20GB download - should take what, half an hour, tops?

So, about a week later it finishes downloading. Say what? Well, there's a bug in the launcher. Of course there is. For reasons no-one can explain for some people the launcher simply keeps closing itself without warning, sometimes after a few seconds, sometimes a few minutes.

There are umpteen suggested fixes, none of which I bothered to apply. I took the recommended brute force method and just kept restarting the launcher every time I noticed it had closed. Only since I opened it and then left it to run in the background while I played something else I mostly didn't notice it had closed, which is why patching it up took me all week.

 In the end it got done and I logged in to my old account. Of course, in keeping with my entire convoluted history with SOE/DBG, that account is no longer the one I'm paying money for, meaning my old characters are subject to DBG's somewhat intrusive F2P restrictions.

Which we will get to in due course. First, though, there's The Case of The Missing Hero. She's just gone. Not at character select. Vanished. Why? Well there's the mystery.

A F2P player is entitled to two character slots and a "Premium" (ex-subber) six so it's not that. The handy Restore Deleted Character button tells me I have no deleted characters, which is to be expected since I almost never commit virtual murder. Or is that virtual suicide? Whatever.

Maybe there was some kind of low-level purge? I thought she would have been high enough to escape a cull if so but who knows? She was on a different server - a PvE server - but if there's any way to select servers I can't find it.

In fact I couldn't find a way to choose servers even after I decided to stop looking and make a new character instead. At the end of Character Creation (which is as counter-intuitive and badly explained as it always was, which is how I ended up with a character with yellow lips...) the game simply dumped me into the world with no server choice required.

Some quick research tells me that you no longer have to decide from the get-go whether you want to go PvE or PvP. In fact, far from not having to decide, you aren't allowed to make that choice. You have to PvE to level 10 now, at which point you can swap via a teleporter. Not sure if you can come back.

Not wanting to carry on leveling on a PvP server was one reason I decided to start over. The PvP is a lot of fun but I would like to have a chance to remember how the heck to play this game before I front up to any passing supervillains with a whim to kick some clownfox butt.

The other reason was the aforementioned F2P restrictions. Even grandfathered in on a Premium account I didn't have anywhere near enough inventory space to hold all the things I was...um... already holding. I had to spend the first twenty minutes selling and destroying things just to get down to having full bags.

Then there's the currency limit of $2000 - my character already had $5k on him so most of that went into escrow. I looked at the rest of the rules, including having to use DB Cash to use the broker, and decided y'know what, I have an account I'm actually paying for that I could use for this. So I did.

There were a few new options available when it came to powers and such. I took Skimming as my travel power which turned out to be an amazing experience: two discs strapped to my feet and a superb sense of movement. I could have skimmed all over Metropolis only the discs disappeared when I pressed something and I haven't worked out yet how to get them back.

Movement in DCUO is reason enough to play for me. Flight, wallcrawling, super-speed and now skimming - they're all viscerally thrilling. When I used to play I tended to spend more time just haring around than I did fighting anything. And taking screenshots, of course.

I also chose Wonder Woman as my mentor this time. I haven't been tutored by her before so that will add a new frisson. Not that Ambush Bug ever did much for my previous character. Then again...Ambush Bug. What were they thinking?

Anyway, for better or worse, for longer or, almost certainly, for shorter, I'm back in DCUO. Now if I can just work out where I put those skimming discs...

Blogroll Blues

It would appear that my blogroll is broken. In fact I suspect it's not just mine.

I noticed a few days ago that there seemed to be fewer new posts than I'd expect. If I only used my blogroll to read blogs then I might have just thought it was a quiet week but I read most posts via Feedly and that was still fizzing away like usual.

Cross-checking showed that plenty of blogs were pinging new content to Feedly but weren't being picked up by Blogger. All the ones that don't use the Blogger platform.

A closer investigation suggests that Blogger blogs are updating the roll as normal, including a timestamp, while all the rest have been shuffled to the bottom of the pack. Blogger blogs that haven't seen a new post in months or, in some cases, years now take precedence over non-Blogger blogs that posted earlier today.

Some kind of communication between Blogger and its enemies competitors compatriots must still be taking place because the pack of undated blogs is shuffling itself according to most recent activity - or at least I think it is.

The blogroll just seems to have established a new hierarchy that favors its own. I'm assuming this isn't intentional. It certainly wasn't announced.

It's also possible that it's nothing to do with Blogger per se. For months there have been issues with comments using a WordPress login and I'm wondering if all the affected blogs in the roll are WordPress ones too. It may be a WordPress issue rather than a Blogger one.

If anyone's seeing their non-Blogger, non-WordPress posts being demoted to the lower leagues perhaps you'd call it out in the comments, just for a bit of triangulation. Similarly, if other people are seeing Blogger blogrolls working as normal, please mention that, too. I guess it could be just me...

I doubt that, though, because I took the trouble to check several other Blogger blogs with lengthy blogrolls - Nils, The Grumpy Elf, I  Have Touched The Sky, Null Signifier for example - and as far as I can tell they are all being affected in the same way.

I know that the Blogger blogroll is a well-used and much appreciated convenience, here on my blog and on many others. It would be a very great shame if it ceases to be reliable and trustworthy due to negligence or disinterest on the part of either Blogger, WordPress or any other intermediary. Let's hope someone who can do something about it is paying attention.

In the meantime, until normal service is resumed, you might want to take the trouble to scroll down once in a while.

That's Exquisite! : EQ2

Something odd happened. I was taking the newly ninety-fived Inquisitor for her first mentored-down circuit of Chelsith (still pound for pound the fastest, if not the most thrilling, xp ride I know). I've been on this merry-go-round so often I could... something something amusing metaphor.

Sorry - Chelsith does that to a person. Anyway, I was killing the nameds one by one and each time an Exquisite Chest dropped.

EQ2 has an ascending sequence of increasingly ornate chests whose degree of ornamentation indicates the attractiveness and value of the contents. It's a concept that's widely used in MMOs but EQ2 was the first place I ever saw it.

In fact, I was there in beta when a patch replaced body-looting, familiar from EverQuest, with the intrusive, alien and utterly immersion-breaking ker-plunk of a wooden box popping into existence from...where, exactly? I sent some blistering negative feedback and waited for another patch to revert the idiocy. Like Diana Ross, I'm still waiting.

The long years have trained me to salivate when I see rusted metal. Or at least to feign excitement. It's not like anything that drops in Chelsith is going to be any use to me. Still, Fabled pink retains a little luster and Masters do sell, sometimes.

As I continued my gallop around the circuit, knocking down fishmen and scooping up the loot, two things became apparent. Firstly, every named was up. That is unusual. The big water worms are triggered and always available but all the Yah`Lei bossfish have placeholders and there's always one or two on a smoke break.

Not this time. Okay, can happen.Thing two, though? Not so much.

Every single named in the zone dropped an Exquisite Chest. I have literally never seen that happen. Not even close. About half way round I began to anticipate each kill, expecting a regular Ornate but no, the Exquistes kept dropping all the way round and back to the beginning.

I ended up with no fewer than four Fabled chest pieces, two sets of legs and possibly the best-named Fabled Footwear ever. Plus a club and a selection of jewellery. If I had a level 80 he'd be made - for a few levels at least.

Just when I thought it couldn't get any further over the top, on the very last named - two Exquisite Chests! One from the boss and another from some random grunt. If this was real life I'd be looking around for the hidden camera. Or running out to buy a lottery ticket.

It even occurred to me that maybe there was some special bonus loot deal bundled in with the Labor Day xp (that being the reason I was trundling round Chelsith in the first place) but no - I went and checked and nothing.

So, freak alignment of the rng planets or what? I'm not going around again to check and not just because I'm on Lockout.

It certainly brightened up what could have been a desultory trip. And the Inquisitor dinged 96 and made a good dent in the level. Overall this has been a profitable weekend in Norrath, both flavors of which were enjoying a rain of bonus xp. I didn't play that much but as well as a doing a full level on the EQ2 Inquisitor the Magician over on EQ added nearly 50% onto level 92. Might not sound much but if you solo in either game you'll know different.

I also noticed a couple of oddities about being hoicked all the way from nowhere to 95. DBG cover most of the bases but they forgot about Status. When I went to Chrono down for Chelsith I couldn't pay the Status bill. Fortunately I had a bunch of stuff in my bags to sell for status so it wasn't a problem but you do have to know to do that.

On the plus side, everything everywhere gives you AA, every other mob you kill starts a Lore and Legend or a Language quest and every shiny you spot goes straight into your collection bag. It's like the game loves you. Enjoy it while it lasts.

That'll probably be it for a while. We're promised bonus events all the way down to the Expansion and treats spoil your appetite for regular food. They do taste good, though.

Exquisite, even.

A Horse Is A Horse : EQ2, WoW, GW2

This line in the latest patch notes for EQ2 confused me somewhat:

All characters who were upgraded to Heroic and did not receive Opegaz, Horde Bane have had it granted.

Opegaz the what? I made a bunch of free 95s and none of them got it, whatever "it" is. Or, at least, I assume they didn't. I didn't see it but then I wasn't looking. Not that I'd probably have recognized an "Opegaz" if I saw one.

When I logged in the same announcement was Message of the Day. Still nothing. And then, finally, when I changed accounts, a banner flashed across the top of the screen to let me know Opegaz had been added to my Mount tab.

Oh, so it's a mount! Why didn't you say that in the first place?

It turns out that all free 95s come with the flying skill already activated, thereby avoiding the simple, enjoyable but moderately time-consuming quest the rest of us had to do back in Velious, five expansions and an Adventure Pack ago. Naturally, if you have the flying skill you need a flying mount to go with it and Opegaz is it.

Apparently good ol' Orp first flew into our lives back in 2015, when the bar for Heroic Characters was raised from 85 to 90. I have to admit I totally missed that.

Of course, most of my characters have access to mounts that can fly, even if the characters themselves haven't yet reached the exalted level that permits them to take advantage of the extensive stable of /claim and event-related mounts all my accounts have acquired over the long years. Come to think of it, didn't I just do the hard levels on the Race to Trakanon server to earn a Patchwork Pegasus for everyone? Well, everyone on that account, anyway.

So, I wasn't that excited but a new mount is a new mount and free is free. The least I could do was open the stable door and take a look at him.

With an honorific like "Horde Bane" I was expecting some ferocious, drooling, snarling, smoldering hell-horse. (Which "Horde" would that be, anyway? The one from the Chains of Eternity/Tears of Veseshan storyline, I guess. Never really understood who they were supposed to be...) But no, he turns out to be slightly dopey, rather friendly-looking horse of the kind you might expect to find stretching his thick neck across the top of a five-bar gate in the vague expectation of an apple or a lump of sugar.

Apart, that is, from the wings. And the rather paw-like hooves. And the being blue.

Okay, he's not actually a horse, is he? Nor even a purebred pegasus. I'd say there's a bit of griffin in there somewhere. Doesn't matter! I'm not planing on showing him, just riding him through the sky and for that he's very, very good indeed.

EQ2 has something of a checkered history with mounts, flying or otherwise. From the plague of carpets that drove Wilhelm to WoW and me to the test server to the infamous anatomical anomaly that was the first cash shop mount to the proliferation of bizarre and unlikely rides regularly pimped in front of the South Freeport Bank, mounts in EQ2 have tended to be something of an eyesore.

Everquest has better mounts, strange though that seems. The Guild Lobby is a veritable showroom of weird and wonderful ways to get from A (Arx Mentis) to B (Burning Woods). I often swivel round as I wait for MGBs, doing a 360 goggle at the tamed and trained menagerie around me. In EQ2 I tend to avert my eyes and hope they'll all just go away.

My recent stint in WoW reminded me that Azeroth is most likely where the craze for crazy mounts began. The sheer insanity and variety there is almost certainly unmatched throughout the Virtual Universe. Blizzard's animators do a fine job of making most of them appear feasible, unlikely as that seems, which must be why, somehow, they don't seem to jar the eyeballs in the way EQ2's often can.

In latter years, quite probably since the arrival of animated animator and undisputed master of the forum one-liner Ttobey, EQ2's mounts have improved quite noticeably. There's still a major disconnect between what can be ridden and what should be ridden but at least now the proportions seem to be in order and all the limbs move in sequence.

In fact, perhaps the current leading contender for the Worst Mounts in an MMO Award is a game that doesn't even have mounts - GW2. Instead of mounts what ANet delight in supplying is an apparently endless barrel-scraping of "mounts" that you carry, rather than ones that carry you.

For far too long we've been subjected to a deluge of extremely badly animated back items, mostly some sort of "wing", for want of a better description. They connect to random points of the varied racial anatomies of Tyria, finding particularly poor traction on the shoulders of Charr and Asura. They lurch and shudder where they might be expected to unfurl and beat the air, giving all who wear them the air of buckshot pigeons in a death spiral. The wing analogs that don't come with feathers are even more hideous, hard though that is to credit.

Apart from gliders, about which the least said the better, the nearest GW2 comes to an actual mount are some of the "Toys", like the carpet, broom or sonic tunneler. These at least have the benefit of decent animations even if all they do, practically, is replace your running movement. I do have a soft spot for my Magic Carpet, even more so since it was tweaked to come back after combat without my having to ferret around in my bags to recast it.

Whether real mounts will ever come to Tyria we will have to wait and see. ANet did, I believe, say "never" but then they tried to say that about expansions and look where that got them.

Looking at the visual clutter in Azeroth and both Ages of Norrath I'm not sure I would vote for mounts to be added in GW2. On the other hand, though, couldn't we all use a horse like Opegaz, Horde Bane?

Or, as I think I'm going to call him from now on, Gazzer.

Fall Of Kunark : EQ, EQ2

At long last some information has appeared about the forthcoming expansions for EverQuest and EQ2. Wilhelm, as linked, posted about both yesterday so I won't go over the details, such as they are.

Actually, what details? There aren't any. In total, what we know so far is that both expansions are set on the continent of Kunark, and...that's about it. Oh, there's a new Sarnak model for EQ (see above) and "new zones like Scorched Woods, Chardok: War March, Lceanium, Droga, Kor’Sha, new monsters, armor, weapons, items and more!"

I'm guessing "Lceanium" is a typo, something becoming increasingly and worryingly common in press releases from Daybreak Games, although even if, as I suspect, it's meant to read "Lyceanium", that's hardly any better. Maybe it's just rendered phonetically from the original Sarnak. Also, they're really missing a trick going with "Scorched "  over "Burned" for the new "Woods" zone.

Classic box art

 Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's Producer's Letter for EQ2 is even lighter on detail than the one she wrote for the elder game (and I'd forgotten she's now Franchise Producer for both). The animated gif features an as-yet unnamed monster that I'm guessing is some kind of goblin. If you want to  see it move, and the Sarnak above, you'll have to visit the official pages. I'm not sure it's worth making a special trip.

Apart from plug-ugly up there all the information we're getting so far is that "Danger awaits you in the Crypt of Dalnir, Kaesora, Warslik’s Wood and more!" We have to wait until October for anything concrete like how many zones we're getting, whether there's a level -cap increase, any new features added to the game...

Which is fine. As Wilhelm points out, neither SOE nor DBG have ever really made much of a meal out of the run-up to expansions, the way many other MMO companies do. They prefer to, y'know, actually produce expansions. Twice a year for many years.

What's more, in the maturity (I use the term with conscious irony) of the EQ Franchise, the contents of expansions have become increasingly codified. Some might say calcified.

Looking at EQ2, The last time SOE attempted to depart substantially from the pattern was with Age of Discovery back in 2011, an expansion that was all features and no content. I liked it but I was in something of a minority and even I would admit the features it contained would have been better suited to being split up and sold individually through the Station Store.

 No, for a long time now EQ2 expansions have remained reasonably consistent. We get one -  occasionally two - open zones, suitable for solo players, a half dozen or more instanced zones that do double service for both Group and Advanced Solo (read duo or player-plus-NPC-Mercenary), a few Raid instances and sometimes an open, "Contested" dungeon for good luck.

Approximately every other expansion there's a level cap increase, these days pared down to five levels rather than the traditional ten. Bundled in there will often be some significant quality of life change or a new type of content entirely - a new class, a deity system, Public Quests...

Then, of course, there's a new "Signature" storyline, a whole bunch of new quests, including the ever-popular Heritage series, and all the general item, gear and skill power creep everyone complains about but complains even more bitterly if it's not there.

In other words, by now EQ2 players know just what to expect. I don't believe I've bought an EQ expansion since Secrets of Faydwer back in 2007 but I'm fairly sure they, too, follow a similar, set pattern.

Not so much...

Reaction is always somewhat negative because both EQ and EQ2 players tend to be curmudgeonly, grumpy and set in their ways. In the end, though, almost everyone who plays at the level cap buys each expansion as soon as it becomes available because what else are they going to do? Meanwhile, anyone like myself in EQ, lagging behind the cap, thinks "I'll skip this one" and carries on with whatever they were doing.

The opportunities for DBG to do a Blizzard each time the expansion rolls around are limited. The regularity, reliabilty and frequency of the expansions makes them less of an event, certainly for anyone not currently playing. The separation between endgame and potential returning players is immense, especially in EverQuest, and even offering a Heroic leg-up to somewhere close to the cap can backfire.

This is perhaps why we find ourselves returning to Kunark. As one of the most popular settings in both games and the home of two of the most successful expansions either game has ever had, the name Kunark carries a lot of weight with current and lapsed players alike. Just having "Kunark" in the title of both expansions is probably worth more in sales than a month of frenzied ANet-style promotion for some new location we've never heard of before.

If there's one thing DBG have proved they understand much, much better than SOE ever did it's how to bottle nostalgia. The former management recognized the potential but seemed to be almost ashamed of exploiting it. No such scruples for DBG, thankfully.

So, I'm looking forward to yet another trip back to Kunark. The last two didn't go as well as they might have done - I actually quit EQ2 for six months as a direct result of things I didn't like about 2007's "Rise of Kunark" expansion - but on balance my interest in and affection for the jungle continent remains  strong.

I'm particularly looking forward to seeing what they do with Warslik's Wood, a zone where I spent many happy hours camping the Forest Giant fort and hunting goblins. Anyway, I'll be buying it. Honestly, they had me at "expansion".