A Well-Crafted Introduction To Kunark : EQ2

Two posts in one day? Is it a sign?  Are the End Times upon us? Or could it be that GW2 is having connectivity issues for the third day in a row, leaving me with an unexpected hour to fill before I get my second wind for yet more questing?

I spent most of the afternoon and early evening working my way through Kunark Ascending's crafting quest-line and I have to say it's pretty entertaining. Domino certainly knows how to put these things together.

Without giving too many spoilers, the tradeskill and adventure quests fit together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. As far as I know, if you're both an adventurer and a crafter, you can do the quest-lines in either order but I'm very glad I did Adventurer first.

The whole crafter storyline has you coming along after the adventurers have hacked and slashed their way to Kunark, leaving you to deal with the mess they left behind. As a story it works very well indeed. I particularly liked Queen Alwenielle's account of the actions of the party of adventurers she accompanied, which, of course, are the actions I carried out as a player only last night.

The biggest advantage crafters have over adventurers is that instead of waking up in a cave the crafters get teleported to a beach. Also Queen Alwenielle has time to explain what she's doing in a little more detail so the transition is less confusing. That all makes for a much more pleasant introduction to the new zone.

It also helps a lot that instead of being threatened by Iksars and sent to fight Sarnaks crafters get to deal with a series of Goblins who seem to fancy themselves as stand-up comedians. I appreciate some people may prefer to be barked at by lizardmen than gurned at by goblins but it got a laugh out of me.

The questing itself is relaxed and laid back. There's plenty of picking up driftwood, catching crabs and making simple structures for simple fisherfolk. The usual routine that, if you're a level 100 crafter in EQ2, which you must be if you're there in the first place, you can almost certainly do in your sleep.

It sounds dull, perhaps, but for dedicated crafters this kind of thing really does never get old. This is DBG playing to the gallery and my experience of EQ2 over many years has been that crafting is often a crowdpleaser when adventuring falls flat on its face.

As yet I haven't run into any brick walls in either quest line so it's not true to say you have to do all the pre-reqs to get started. I am already past the point where you have to speak Goblish for the crafting line (something my Berserker could already do) but I spotted a stone tablet on the beach that would help with that. You could do it on the fly if you arrived under-rehearsed.

There's a handy forum thread giving tips on how to approach the new content, most of which applies to players planning on raiding or doing the harder Heroics. Of the suggestions there I would definitely endorse the advice to come prepared with some form of tracking. I use the scrolls you can buy from the cash shop but there are many free alternatives.

As a max level crafter I also have the ability to track harvestable nodes, which includes many kinds of non-craft-related ground spawns too. I can track shinies in other words. That has to be the single most useful ability in my entire repertoire when it comes to questing. Hard to imagine how I ever managed without it. In my opinion it's worth maxing crafting just for that even if you plan on being a pure adventurer ever after.

With two types of tracking to call on the absence of quest markers seems to make very little difference. I've had to refer to the wiki only infrequently, usually because I couldn't understand the particular mechanic the designer had chosen to employ. There are so many ways now to activate a quest item sometimes I miss the bleedin' obvious.

All in all it's going swimmingly although I do find questing quite exhausting somewhere into the fourth consecutive hour. Which is why I took a break to play GW2 and then, when that failed me, write this.

And now I'm refreshed it's back to the Goblin Workbench.

Kunark Ascending - First Impressions : EQ2

Kunark Ascending, the thirteenth expansion for the twelve-year old MMO EQ2 landed yesterday, bang on time. I wasn't in a tearing hurry to get in, anticipating the usual launch day glitches, patches and frustration, so I carried on with my dailies in Tyria until I was good and ready.

I logged in about half an hour after the servers came back up from the five-hour pre-launch downtime, expecting a lengthy patch but there was none. Presumably the relevant files have been filtered in already over the past few weeks without my even noticing.

That smooth transition continued for the three hours I played. I didn't encounter any technical issues, the servers stayed up and stable and every quest and activity I engaged in worked flawlessly. No doubt there will be problems to come but thus far it qualifies as an extremely clean launch.

So much for the technicalities. What about the fun?

Long-time EQ2 player and blogger Kaozz has a post up in which she expresses disappointment with some of the design choices and frustration over the general direction DBG is taking. Several of the points she makes did also occur to me while I was playing and I definitely felt less thrilled by the return to Kunark than I would have liked, but I had a very good time nonetheless.

It's been a tradition for a good while now that EQ2 expansions  begin with a communication summoning you to speak to a king, queen or potentate, who then sends you on either a fact-finding mission or something more urgent. Consequently, I wasn't particularly surprised by the set-up, although I do have issues with my ratonga berserker, a Freeport Citizen, being placed at the beck and call of Queen Cristianos Thex, the sociopathic despot of the Dark Elves.

Usually the form is a little chat in the throne room followed by a boat trip, not a full-blown quest sequence followed by an instance. Like Kaozz, I was somewhat disconcerted to begin with a trip through Neriak, followed by a couple of quests in Thalumbra and then a full solo instance before I finally reached Kunark

That said, the whole Beyond The Veil introductory questline was engaging, fun and not at all difficult. What's more, once you've done it once it opens access to the new zone for your whole account. I turned General chat off to avoid spoilers and went into full explorer mode.

As Kaozz mentions, DBG have decided to row back on the very overt quest-markers SOE added in the latter days of their tenure, so you can't simply follow the glowing breadcrumb trail any more. It's not a choice I particularly approve of but quest design and structure in EQ2 is generally sound. I was able to complete the questline without once referring to the Wiki or updating EQ2Map.

The instance itself was gorgeous. It reminded me a great deal of the instanced version of Durmand Priory. I very much appreciated the freedom to roam and explore the book-lined rooms and museum-like corridors without having to fight mobs every inch of the way. In fact I believe there were only four or five mobs inn the whole instance.

In terms of mechanics this part played out more like an adventure game than an MMO. There were objects that highlighted a use and other objects to find and pick up. It's a style common throughout EQ2 but here I thought it had been particularly well done. I felt a real sense of satisfaction when I powered up the portal and met up again with Queen Alwenielle, a ruler I would very much prefer to be working for rather than, as it seems, behind her back for the House of Thex.

It would scarcely be a spoiler to say that at this point the villain of the piece, Lanys T`Vyl, appeared. The villain of the piece always appears at this point. It would only be a spoiler if we ever got to this stage of a quest and I told you the villain didn't appear. I was slightly surprised to see her henchwoman, Tserrina Syl`Tor, mistress of The Tower of Frozen Shadows, alongside her. I'd forgotten she was in on the plot.

By this stage of my long exposure to Norrathian myth and history I do recognize names if not much more. Every time significant figures like these pop out of portals or descend from on high it does give me a frisson. I can barely make sense of most of the lore even as I read the rococo quest dialog but understanding it and feeling it are two very different things. Lanys scares me. She always did. And Tserrina and I have history.

After that confrontation, which climaxed in a hasty exit on my part and an unseemly awakening in chains in a cave in Kunark, the actual introduction to the new zone was an anti-climax. I'm never impressed by starting in a cave and beginning with a "prove your worth by killing eight of our enemies" is just adding cliche to cliche

It was all the more annoying because the quest text clearly alludes to the pre-existing relationship
between your character and the Iksar force holding him or her prisoner. This is the same bunch that had us running around Kunark in search of The Greenmist. Rather than setting trivial tests of loyalty they ought to be cheering my arrival.

Then there's the question of the mobs they want killed. Ye gods but they're tough! Tough as in have a gazillion hit points. You expect the enemies in a new expansion to be tougher than anything in the rest of the game, even when there's no level cap increase, but quadrupling the hit-points of basic, solo mobs seems a tad like overkill.

That was the low point. In a cave, beating on hit-point sponges, competing for the limited spawn with a bunch of other people on the same stage of the quest. A bottleneck made worse by the total disinclination of EQ2 players to do anything at all to make any situation easier. Of course no-one (including me) invited anyone else to group so we could share credit. Of course everyone tried to snatch every mob that spawned. Of course it all took far longer than it needed.

On the other hand, look on the bright side! A day or two into the lifespan of the expansion and there will never be competition for those mobs ever again. The problem for the rest of time will be trying to single pull them so you don't get pounded into the cave floor by all eight at once.

With that out of the way my Berserker found himself no longer kill on sight to the roaming triple-up guards (he found out the hard way that they one-shot well-geared solo level 100s without breaking stride) and was able to head for the great outdoors. Which turned out to be a lava zone. And a forest zone. And a snow and ice zone.

In fact, due to budgetary constraints under the new order, what would probably have been three or four full zones back in the days of Rise of Kunark has turned into a single portmanteau map in Kunark Ascending. Coats are being cut according to cloth, that's for sure.

Fortunately it looks like a dense, detailed, gorgeous and very interesting zone. Warslik Woods, for example, may be little more than a coppice now but I look forward to exploring it all the same.

And that was about where I ran out of time. I flew around, took some screenshots, grabbed some shinies and then ported back to Freeport to check out the new Wardrobe feature (about which more another day) before logging for the night.

My initial impressions are that Kunark Ascending is going to be about as good as we can expect from a small developer with limited resources. I look forward to following both the Adventure and Craft storylines, to meeting Raffik again, to setting my gathering goblin free and re-hiring him on a more equitable footing, to acquiring and working out what to do with an Ascended Class and to playing dress-up with my Mercenaries.

Lots of possibilities. Plenty to do. Let's just hope for no more caves.

You Wait All Year For An Expansion... : EQ2, WoW

My intimation that I might get the Legion expansion for World of Warcraft for my birthday turned out to be entirely correct. Of course, back in the summer, when I added the box to my Amazon wishlist, after I decided not to buy it for myself, I had no idea that the EQ2 expansion would get scheduled for the same week

Then there's ArenaNet, trying to get a foot in the door as usual. They may not even have given their expansion a name yet, let alone a release date, but that doesn't mean they can't contribute to my bandwidth overload. I'm typing this as Legion installs and not only is Kunark Ascending on its way later this afternoon but that's when GW2 will patch its regular, bi-weekly update too.

It's just as well I'm not planning on buying the EQ expansion, Empires of Kunark, (not this year anyway) because that's due tomorrow. Also not on my agenda: jumping right on the EVE goes F2P bandwagon the moment it starts to roll - also happening today I believe. Seriously, do these people not compare diaries?

When am I meant to find time for all this anyway? As it happens, I do have a couple of free days this week but generally, when you work in retail (and much though we booksellers like to pretend otherwise, bookshops are part of the retail environment) this time of year is when you get the absolute least opportunity to take time off. The predilection gaming companies have for piling all their releases on top of each other come mid-November isn't exactly what I'd call convenient.

Nevertheless, I'm sure time can be found, probably at the expense of GW2, which has lurched, stumbled, slumped into yet another malaise. WvW is in freefall, sPvP is on some kind of time-out (I don't really follow that mode) and the Living World has gone into a coma.

Since the new "Quarterly" schedule for Living Story 3 was announced ANet have successfully managed to release two episodes. The first arrived somewhat later than anticipated at the end of July but the second came a month early in mid-late September. At a generous estimate each episode so far has had about a couple of weeks content at best. Maybe a month if you really like farming and/or have a lot of characters you want to keep updated.

That's not to question the quality, which has been high, but it's clear that one major content drop every three months is going to leave a lot of thumb-twiddling in-between. That is, if it does turn out to be "quarterly". The asynchronous delivery of the first two episodes does muddy the waters somewhat on when the third  might be considered overdue.

Are we counting in three month tranches from the start of the process, in which case we have until the end of January before the next episode is due? Or does the clock reset each time an episode drops, meaning Part Three should be here just before Christmas?

No idea. Nothing's been said. For all we know it could appear this afternoon (it won't) or any time before the end of the month. Based on precedent from LS2 I might speculate that we're unlikely to see a big content release scheduled across a major Holiday - Wintersday is Coming - but the last episode kind of crossed over with Halloween so who knows?

EDIT: And guess what?  Color me surprised. No, make that amazed. I guess there are two months in a quarter now.

Whatever they have planned, including, I very much hope, some more of the Current Event crumbs in today's update, my feeling is there will be plenty of time to fit in some WoW and some EQ2. Probably a lot of the latter and a little of the former, which is why, although I'm (still!) patching Legion as I type, I haven't yet decided whether to pull the gun on a subscription.

Since it's a trivial cost and since I'm not one of those folks that feels obligated to play a game just because I'm paying for it, I'm minded to sub up for the rest of this year even if I don't have much expectation of doing Legion justice. I've been reading several people's accounts of how easy is to make money in Legion, funding a sub by selling herbs, so I might give that a try. Or I might just pay money.

Either way, first the dam' expansion has to install! I wasn't taken aback at Legion's immense footprint since I'd read somewhere that it weighs in at 40GB but why is something that I cannot begin to fathom. My existing installation, which is complete up to and including Warlords of Draenor, which got dumped on me for nothing back in the summer apparently, is only 28GB. How can a single expansion come in at 150% the size of the base game and the previous five put together?

What's more, even though I have the DVD, apparently that only installs about 10-15% of the content. The rest has to be downloaded and even with Blizzard's fast download speeds that's taking a while. I did imagine that writing this post would occupy the time but apparently not. As I write there's still 20GB to go. Then it's on to Kunark.

Enough. I don't think I can string this out any longer. Maybe I'll go and listen to my new Limananas CD or watch some Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated or start reading Diana Spiotta's Lightning Field...

Laters!

A Quest By Any Other Name : GW2, EQ2

There was a time when questing in MMORPGs had fallen very much out of fashion, both with developers and players. Five years ago, when GW2 was powering up, all the talk was about how Dynamic Events would sweep away the outmoded system of quest hubs and questlines for good and all.

Supposedly it all began with Warhammer Online and its "Public Quests". They weren't quests as we knew them. You didn't need to accept them, just be in the right place when they happened. Rift picked up that ball and ran with it but for all the mold-breaking, both those MMOs operated with a safety net of traditional quests hanging below the high-wire of their fresh, communal gameplay.

GW2 tried to go that extra mile, launching with nothing that could easily be identified as a "quest" or a "hub". Hearts had some similarities to both but ANet did succeed to a degree in diffusing the whole "go there, do that" paradigm into something less authoritarian. It was a conviction in the future of the genre that didn't survive contact with the players.

From the very earliest days you could routinely hear new players plaintively requesting directions in map chat. "I'm level 13 and I've done all my Hearts in Queensdale - where do I go next?" Or, frustrated, "I can't do any more of my Story. Where can I get more quests?"

Wait a moment...you realize this requires social capital?

It wasn't long before GW2 acquired a whole tangle of quasi-questlike activities. I think I first noticed mission creep around the time of the Great Karka Invasion, less than three months after launch. By the time the first Living Story arrived in early 2013 it was obvious ANet were searching for a way to coral players and move them through a narrative. It wasn't entirely working.

As the months and years rolled by the experiments continued. We had mysterious benefactors, unsolicited correspondence, personal, meta and hidden achievements, collections... You name it, ANet tried it.

Some of the systems worked better than others. Some barely worked at all. Syp condemns what he calls "the Jenga Tower of MMO gear complexity" but the same problem afflicts all systems. GW2's ersatz quest analogs form a thick palimpsest that hides meaning and access from the unenlightened. As MMOs age they thicken.

Perhaps we've outgrown all these tricks to draw us in and lead us on, anyway. Clearly some developers continue to hope so. Tyler F.M. Edwards fears Blizzard may have lost faith or interest in narrative and if WoW stops telling stories will anyone else bother? We've come a long way from the days when BioWare sought to re-make and dominate the genre with Story and The Fourth Pillar, that's for sure.

SW:TOR turned out not to be the future after all. Instead the huge, ongoing success and popularity of those online games that take some inspiration from MMOs but decline to bother with the complexities or the expense of creating coherent, continuing storylines, The MOBA and Survival genres, has begun to bleed across.  Following the money would seem to indicate that all players really require is a playground, some toys and a few basic rules.

Snail Games, the people behind the re-emergence of Dark and Light , seem to think so. The game everyone thought was dead, assuming anyone ever thought about it all, which seems unlikely, is back but not as anything we'd have recognized as an MMO when it first flamed and burned a decade ago. Fifty players to a server and the first concern keeping fed and warm is a far call from GW2's opening-day charge.

Of course the reward's an achievement. I had to do six quests to get it, didn't I?

And yet, the more things change the more they stay the same. For me, this last week has been all about the questing. In EQ2 I spent hours finishing up the basket of quests recommended for the Kunark Rising expansion arriving on Tuesday. When I'd finished that I began running repeatable Heroes Festival quests for statues, paintings and furniture.

Along the way my Inquisitor somehow managed to pick up the preparatory questline for the introduction of Channelers to the game - back in 2013. She finished that although I can't explain why, other than that I'd forgotten most of the story and it was fun doing it again. She also started the introductory questlines for two previous expansions because...well because someone with a feather over his or her head offered them to her, I guess.

You're not fooling anyone, ANet.

Even GW2 offered no safe haven. There may be no questing in Tyria officially but what would you call an "Achievement"
that comes in multiple stages with a checklist of activities to complete, each of which ticks off and counts down as you criss-cross the world, speaking to NPCs and collecting items? Ducks. Walking. Quacking.

My feeling is that Tyler shouldn't worry too much. The need humans have to find and follow a plot is too strong to be denied. There are countless forms of entertainment that don't require a story, but once you place a backdrop that contains characters then story is going occur, whatever you try to do to stop it.

Sandbox fans love to claim the player is the story but in reality the player is just a part of a much wider narrative. Not always the most important part. Even if they don't need to follow the plot it seems most people do at least need to know it's there.

In the end it's an MMO thing. Games can get by without narrative just fine but MMORPGs, despite the increasingly archaic acronym, aren't just games. If you want to have any kind of a virtual world you have to have story. You can tell it an infinite number of ways but you can't not tell it at all because without story all you have is a game.

Questing is a cliche, yes, but cliches are a form of shorthand that arises from the need to express quickly and plainly a concept so familiar it needs to be codified for convenience. There may be smarter, fancier, flashier ways to tell stories in MMORPGs but while there are stories to be told quests will be there to tell them.

Even if we call them something else.

And Still They Come : Revelation Online, Hero's Song

Almost from when I first began playing MMORPGs back in the very late 90s, third-party websites were an essential adjunct to gameplay. I don't think I lasted a week before I started searching for better information than Verant Interactive deemed sufficient for EverQuest players.

Caster's Realm, Allakhazam, EQ Atlas and a host of others found their way into my Netscape Navigator bookmarks but in those days knowing where to look up quests or guides or maps was only the first step. Next you had to find a way to access that information when you needed it.

In those days you couldn't even tab out of most MMOs reliably. Chances were you'd crash the game. For EverQuest it wasn't even legal to try because running EQ in anything but full screen was a bannable offense. The only way to do it was via the EULA-breaking EQWindows, which I never even downloaded.

Dual monitors may have existed back then but for most players the virtual worlds of their choice played out on a single 14" CRT screen. Most players' second monitor was probably a lever-arch file with a sheaf of printouts. I still have reams of pages from the three key EQ sites above in a cupboard somewhere.

Over the years third party websites have proliferated and increased enormously in sophistication and scope. Any MMO worth its salt has a wiki up long before launch. Twitch streams and YouTube videos have become mainstream alternatives to word-and-picture websites but as yet they show no sign of replacing them entirely.

Most resource sites are dedicated to one game. It's unusual to find one that caters to several unrelated MMOs, let alone one that's compiled and fronted by a single person, but that's what Dulfy.net appears to have become.

Dulfy was there from the beginning in GW2. She's so embedded in the process she even has her own permanent namesake in Tyria. I only really began to notice and rely on her regularly-updated, accurate information a couple of years ago and as far as I can recall at that time her site only covered GW2.

Since then it's expanded to include full divisions for SW:TOR, Black Desert and ESO. Checking something on Dulfy yesterday I noticed she's added another: Revelation Online.

I don't believe I've mentioned RO here before but I've had it vaguely in my sights for a while. I have the official website bookmarked and I pay attention to the mentions it gets on MassivelyOP and other news sites. My attention was first drawn to the game by the averagely-spectacular "World Trailer" but it was only when I found out it could be played (optionally) in full tab-target, WASD "WoW Mode" that I added it to my list of probables.  It also didn't hurt that it's published by MY.com, with whom I already have an account for Allods.

After a small hiccup, Revelation Online went into "Closed" Beta four days ago. Of course, its a beta that's closed only as long as you refuse to open your wallet. The final payment model for the game has yet to be announced (bet on Buy-to-Play with hyperactive cash shop) but right now you can join the Closed Beta for the price of a Founder's Pack, the cheapest of which is just $17.99.

Dulfy has an excellent New Player Guide that lays out what you can expect most clearly. I read it yesterday and felt myself getting flashbacks to several recent MMOs, most particularly to ArcheAge. Although it's been promoted with the usual sandbox features that have become de rigeur of late, RO looks, on paper, somewhat more PvE Theme Park oriented than either AA or Black Desert.

To quote Dulfy's guide

It is a high fantasy game with some scifi elements set in an ancient Chinese Wuxia backdrop. It has action combat, dungeons, raids, 3v3 Arenas, battleground (10v10, 20v20, 30v30), territory/guild wars, open world PvP, reputation grind and minigames. It has a very large open world with no load screens (unless you are teleporting around using waypoints).

All of which sounds very familiar. This, also from Dulfy, less so:

(RO) is not your typical Asian MMO grinder. Leveling up is easy but to actually progress in the game you need to do doing group content with other players. Endgame is all high end group content like hard dungeons and raids.

If I was in an MMO lull right now I'd stump up the eighteen dollars (or sixteen euros) and give it a run. Based on my previous experiences in ESO, AA, BDO and Blade and Soul over the last couple of years I could reasonably expect to get four to six weeks of fairly intensive play and have a lot of fun before suddenly stopping for no definable reason and never playing the game again.

Oh, and I'd get a dozen or more blog posts out of it and a month of increased page views for covering the new hotness. So there's that.

In practice, though, Revelation Online has landed at a bad time for me. I have the EQ2 expansion coming in a week or so and there's a good chance I will get Legion for my birthday, which is also just around the corner. With that and GW2 there isn't really a space in the calendar for yet another MMO.

Not that that will stop me indefinitely. I still want to take a look but that can probably wait until Open Beta, which will no doubt be the real soft launch. Can't discount the possibility I might still buy in early on a whim, though.

So far I feel no such draw towards Smed's pixel-art project, Hero's Song. That odd duck, which seems to be neither Massive nor Multiple, having no official servers, but which is definitely Online and purports to be an RPG in some not entirely clearly defined fashion, went to Steam Early Access today.

By most accounts I've read it isn't anything like ready. The consensus seems to be that its been forced out of the door by financial constraints. The first flurry of Steam reviews are very positive, though, with the almost universal caveat that Hero's Song has great potential but is currently nothing like ready to be played as a working game.

The comparisons to EQ and the suggestion that the game may be quietly re-using some of the more interesting concepts originally touted for EQNext have, I must admit, managed to shift Hero's Song from the  "not interested at all" pile to the one marked "hmmm...maybe one day", which is progress of a kind, I guess.

Once again, though, I think I'll pass for now. Too much on my plate already. And I have to leave some room for Heroes of SkyRealm.

Feast and Famine : EQ2, GW2

I'd been hoping, expecting even, that Tuesday's bi-weekly update to GW2 would include a new Current Event. Last time we got one the storyline, if that's what you call it, was teetering on the brink of becoming interesting.

We didn't get anything like that this time. Instead we got a bizarre Schrodinger's Cat option for previewing the contents of unopened boxes, along with an unheralded extension of the Halloween event for a further week, a decision that struck me as offering altogether more than we needed of a thing that wasn't all that good in the first place.

This longueur coincided with a particularly lackluster period in WvW. Neither players nor developers seem to know what they want or how to achieve it if they find out. Meanwhile, over in EQ2, preparations for the expansion move on apace, with bonus xp, bonus loot and two more events on  the ever-busy calendar.

Hey, I did another two levels of Inquisitor and thirty of Carpenter but no-one cares about that, right? No, it's all about the rats. Always it's all about the rats.

Consequently this last week must be the first time in a year or so that I've spent more time in Norrath than Tyria. As well as the regular late evening post-GW2 sessions, I've been working on all kinds of things at every opportunity I can find. Right now I have more aspirations and goals in EQ2 than I can comfortably manage, whereas in GW2 I struggle to think of anything to do after my dailies are out of the way. The most satisfying thing I did in GW2 all last week was a major clear-out of my bank vaults.

By contrast, there's so much going on in EQ2 right now I hardly know where to start. It seems busier than I've seen it for while, too. Heroes Festival has loads of people out and about, running the repeatable quests and beating on the patchwork pinatas. The rewards are very good - especially so for anyone conditioned to austerity by four years of GW2 - and it's one of the most relaxed, easy-going of all Norrath's many holidays. It's also short so there's no time to hang about, especially if you want a lot of the goodies on offer.

All levels welcome. These bosses don't hit back.

Norrathian Hop doesn't have the same ring to it.

This year the Festival is also live on the Time Limited server Stormhold. I wasn't planning to go there but then there was 12th anniversary mount that flies at Level 35. On Stormhold it only leaps but even so... My SK ended up doing some crafting as well and next thing you know he'd added five levels of Alchemist and two of Shadowknight to his resumé. I foresee more TLE fun in his future.

Stormhold was strikingly busy with players everwhere I went  but even on Skyfire, my regular server, things are bustling. It's very evident that plenty of people are working through the same check-list of pre-expansion requirements as I am. Criss-crossing Kunark at the behest of Cazic-Thule I repeatedly ran into others doing the same.

I hope it all made more sense for them than it did for me. The lore, or perhaps I should say the logic, behind this Heritage Quest is baffling. Why would a ratongan citizen of Freeport, who worships Rallos Zek, spend hours of his time helping an Iksar rebel rally resistance to Venril Sathir with the intention of re-instating Cazic Thule's primacy and kickstarting another wave of Iksar expansionism?

Is this the part where I wake up?

That would be, shall we say, shortsighted but when the conclusion of the questline turns out to be facilitating a full-scale Iksar naval attack on East Freeport, any sense of who my character might be goes right out the window. This is one of the rare situations when I really would have liked some dialog options that actually branched, rather than the hand-wringing "Lucan's really not going to like this" dithering that was the only response on offer. In the end, of course, I did as I was told, but unless I missed some crucial plot point along the way my Berserker is now simultaneously one of Lucan's most trusted, loyal citizens and an openly declared rebel and traitor.

It would bother me more but I do have a get-out. The whole farrago began when my Berserker touched an idol of Cazic Thule and came over all peculiar. From then on, as far as I'm concerned, Cazic was driving the car. Anything I did was his fault and if Lucan doesn't like it he can take it up with The God of Fear. I wouldn't put it past him at that.

The gnomes seem to have gussied these things up a little since last time I flew the course.

With Greenmist completed I've done all the necessary adventuring tasks ahead of Kunark Rising other than, y'know, actually having an Epic or Mythical weapon. I was never planning on going that far - I just didn't want to be locked out of the Signature questline.

When it comes to crafting, which has it's own Signature, then I'm more interested in going all the way, even if I'm somewhat less prepared. But only somewhat. As I mentioned in my reply to Topauz in the comments after the last post, it turns out I have done almost all of the very lengthy pre-reqs for the upcoming expansion's Crafting content after all. What's more I did them on the character I'll be playing. Great news for me if somewhat worrying for the state of my memory.

I wonder if they have Patchwork Trakanon on the Race To Trakanon server? I guess that wouldn't be much of a race...

I just need to find someone to make all the items for the final step, which shouldn't be all that hard. I can make two of them myself and I am fairly sure Mrs Bhagpuss can make the rest. The hard part might be persuading her to log in and do it since she hasn't played EQ2 since we moved to Tyria four years ago.

At the moment I have to say I'm enjoying EQ2 a lot more than GW2. Much more seems to happen in Norrath, or happen faster. In GW2 we're glad for any crumbs of content whereas in EQ2 there's feast after feast.

This view is alive with sparkling motes and shimmering mist. Not that you can tell from this postcard.

Also - and this is surprising, even confounding - EQ2 often looks better these days. I have no idea why this is and frustratingly it can't be borne out by screenshots, which reliably fail to look much like the vibrant, deep-focus in-game views they purport to represent.

For whatever reason, possibly my more powerful PC and GPU, which by now approximate a decent gaming rig from two or three years ago, even older zones look fresh and remarkable, while newer ones are positively eye-popping. Tyria, on the other hand, suffers from over-familiarity, its astonishing watercolor vistas dulled from too many commutes.

In Norrath we really know how to hold a feast. And get down off the table!

With almost every other major MMO dropping or threatening to drop some form of Expansion or Expansion-like update before the end of the year, you'd think the endless, informationless drift towards the unnamed XPack #2 that we're told lies somewhere beyond GW2's event horizon would hurt the game's attendance and retention figures, but it seems not. Everything just trundles on much the same as always. I can't say the servers seem any less busy now than a year or two ago. Apparently cash shop sales are holding up nicely.

With Wintersday due in just a few weeks I'm not holding my breath for any substantive new content like, say, the next chapter of Living Story 3, this side of 2017. Fortunately I have other eggs and other baskets.

Back to Norrath it is.

Here's One I Didn't Make Earlier : EQ2, EverQuest

Just when I thought I was almost ready for the arrival of Kunark Ascending Niami Denmother popped up a "quick warning" that the crafting questline in the forthcoming expansion presupposes you will have completed the erstwhile "crafter's epic", Earring of the Solstice.

This celebrated and somewhat feared quest was added to the game back in February 2008 and I can't say with any certainty whether I ever did it or not. You'd think with it being such a landmark in any EQ2 player's crafting career that I'd know but after all this time it's all a bit muddled and for good reason.

The EQ2 Solstice Earring was created as a call-back to the original EverQuest crafting "epic", the magnificently-named "Protection of the Cabbage". I very definitely did that one, which didn't in fact require any crafting at all, or at least not by the player who completed it, since every one of the nine required components is tradeable. I bought all of mine apart from the ones Mrs Bhagpuss made for me.

When the quest was re-imagined for EQ2 that shortcut was partially removed. All of the equivalent items are No Trade. Since any character in EQ2 can max out only a single tradeskill that would appear to make the quest an impossibility to complete, which is where the Commission System comes in.

Everything happens at once!

The Commission System allows a crafter to make an item and have it deposited on creation directly into the inventory of another player. You both have to be in the same virtual physical space, standing next to each other, with a UI window open between you. It's the very essence of MMO gameplay, condensed down to a mechanic.

When EQ2 was a busier game than it is today it was commonplace to hear people asking  on the trading or crafting or auction channels for crafters willing to make some (or often nearly all) of the required items "on commission". My Berserker, who has also always been a max-level Weaponsmith, has taken the Bell to Mara a few times in order to knock up a quick Mistletoe Cutting Sickle for someone.

I've also helped Mrs Bhagpuss get the earring on more than one character and helped guildmates to do the same, back in the day when there were other people in our guild who still played. Consequently I'm really not sure whether I ever did the whole thing myself or not. (Edit: I checked; I didn't.)

Spoiler Alert - The Necro didn't do it.

If I did, though, it would very definitely have been on my Necromancer and once-maxed Sage on Test, not on my Berserker on Skyfire (née Freeport). I know that for certain because she's the only character I have who ever ground her way through the lengthy and tedious process of gaining the required faction with the Sarnaks of Bathezid's Watch.

Whereas the original EQ version was gated only by EQ's arduous, time-consuming and nail-bitingly tense crafting process itself, something entirely avoidable if you had sufficient platinum pieces to spray around, the EQ2 quest is a genuine Epic. It comes in five parts, all of which require a daunting amount of running around, foraging, crafting, currying favor and generally fulfilling the kind of busywork requirements that put some people off MMOs for life.

Yesterday's post touched on the predilection of MMO developers to cater to a supposed "hardcore" of players willing to put in the time and effort, making them worthy of attention. EQ2 started with very much that attitude, only to be forced to row back from it when the hardcore audience failed to show up and the casuals jumped ship en masse for what was then seen as the very much more casual-friendly World of Warcraft.

I swear I'm gonna kill that kid...

From Scott Hartsman's appearance until John Smedley's departure the story of EQ2 has been one of a game continually trying to broaden its appeal by removing barriers to entry. From F2P to quest markers on the map, the direction of travel has always pointed towards inclusivity and ease of access.

With the consolidation of new ownership under Columbus Nova and new management under Russel Shanks, that longstanding trend has not just halted, it's been thrown into reverse. The coming expansion, like the last, will eschew quest markers. It also comes, for the first time I can remember, with a basket of pre-reqs for any character hoping to complete either of the Signature questlines, Adventure or Tradeskill.

DBG has clearly abandoned all hope of attracting any significant number of new players. They've been playing the nostalgia card for a while now and the imminent return to Kunark, along with the revisiting of the Epic adventure and crafting questlines that came with the first Kunark expansion is another expression of the belief that the future of Norrath lies in its past.

At this stage it surely makes commercial sense. If there are any new players curious to try EQ2 - and there's always a trickle of those - they are beyond amply served already by the generous F2P offer and the overwhelming breadth and depth of extremely casual-friendly content it contains. Those fresh players aren't going to need or want any paid-for expansions for a good while so it's entirely understandable that the focus on selling and selling up for the three tiers of digital download coming in a couple of weeks is on the committed, experienced core.

Donkey, donkey, don't you stop.

And in truth I'm in two minds about all this. I wasn't expecting to have to do pre-course reading let alone to take an exam but then I really have been meaning to do To Speak Like A Dragon for a decade now, yet I always found some excuse to dodge actually doing it. Ditto the final (so far) part of A Gathering Obsession, which I didn't have to do for Kunark Ascending but ended up doing anyway because all the prep-work put me in the right frame of mind.

My Berserker can now speak Draconic and has a pack pony that can gather rare and holiday harvests. That is undeniably satisfying and very materially contributes to his development as a character. I can't say I'm looking forward to doing the lengthy series of quests in Kunark that will eventually net him the Earing of the Solstice, but I am very sure that I'll be glad to have the earring in the end and to have the quest tucked neatly in the "Completed" chapter of my journal.

Perhaps the thing to remember is that this isn't a race. There's no timer running. The "pre" in pre-req doesn't mean pre-launch. This expansion is here to last us all a year at least. There's nothing that's needed that can't be picked away at, casually, over time.

So, my Weaponsmith will be starting out to do the crafting epic he probably should have finished years ago but he's going to take his time about it. First he has to finish the Greenmist Heritage Quest and that's going to take a while. One thing is for certain - I'm not about to find myself short of things to do this Autumn.

I guess, when you come down to it, there's a little hardcore in us all. It just takes more bringing out in some than others.