Yesterday evening, after I'd finished running a Blood of Luclin solo instance on my Necromancer for the sheer fun of it (something I find it hard to imagine saying about many previous expansions just a month after release) I was sorting my bags, when I noticed there seemed to be an unprecedented amount of sitting and reading going on all around.
I was in Sanctus Seru, a decent-sized city set on two levels, replete with most facilities including banking, brokerage, crafting and entry points to cap-level instances. Despite all of that there rarely seem to be many players there, probably because, unlike most expansions in recent years, Luclin has quite a few potential gathering and service points, not just Sanctus Seru but Grieg's Landing and Recuso Tor in The Blinding and a couple more in Aurelian Coast.
Even without players, Sanctus Seru feels very lived-in. Someone has gone to a significant amount of trouble to make it that way. The EverQuest II art and design team have always been strong on atmospheric detail but they seem to have come up with a few new ideas this time around.
One thing they seem very pleased with is the ability of NPCs to sit on seats. I'm not sure whether this has always been a thing. I really should know after fifteen years but I don't, not without logging in to wander around some older zones and check.
I don't remember noticing it before, but in Sanctus Seru it's very hard to miss. There are citizens sitting on every available flat surface, although that pretty much comes down to benches and walls. There are also two points during the crafting questline when the player character has to sit down, which strongly suggests to me that someone has a new dev tool to show off.
The humans sit very convincingly but the dwarves have an unfortunate tendency to let their feet clip. I'd be very interested to see how some of the other races look, sitting down. I wonder what happens to the tail on an Iksar?
As well as enjoying a good sit down, the Seruvians do like to get stuck into a book. Once again, I'm not sure I can remember seeing anyone in Norrath actually holding a book before, although whether it's the kind of thing you'd notice is another matter. But then, I'm noticing it now, which suggests it's unusual.
Sitting on chairs is a thing in lots of MMORPGs. Some, like World of Warcraft, just have it and don't make a fuss about it. Other developers go into a big song and dance when they add it to the game and, in the case of Guild Wars 2, turn it into yet another revenue stream. I haven't felt the need to buy a chair in Tyria but I'd pay a decent sum in Daybreak Cash for my characters to learn how to sit properly. Even more if they could hold objects in their hands. imagine the tea parties!
Performing musicians have been around EQII for a good while, to my certain knowledge. I wrote about the band in Maldura, hub city of the Terrors of Thalumbra expansion back in 2015. There are some very similar musicians dotted around Sanctus Seru, playing the same highly distinctive, minor-key, hauntingly off-kilter jazz-folk.
How this particular musical style has taken off so successfully in two entirely separate communities, isolated as they have been for half a millennium, both from each other and from the central culture, is likely to remain one of the eternal mysteries of Norrath.
One thing we've seen often is NPCs practicing archery. I believe there was someone doing it in Qeynos back at launch. I can't remember seeing anyone having arrows stuck in the ground around their feet and pulling them out to shoot before, though.
Sanctus Seru is a heavily martial culture and also very religious. There are altars in the street in a couple of places, which is a lot more blatant than I'm used to seeing. EQII has had craftable altars for every major god in the pantheon for a very long time, going back to the days when choosing a god and sacrificing to him, her or it was a meaningful part of gameplay. Actually, I think it still is, only you don't need an altar to do it any more.
Once again, I really ought to be able to name the god by looking at the altar but I'm not sure I can. It looks like the Rallos Zek one to me but I definitely wouldn't put any money on it. Maybe it's Mithaniel Marr. He gets a mention in one of the quests but it slips my mind which. Might have been that one with the ghost who likes fruit in Recuso Tor. It's not that I don't pay attention - more that nothing much sticks. I'd blame it on my age but I've always been this way.
Perhaps the most unusual aspect of Sanctus Seru's streetlife are the Affirmations. I have no idea what these are and I wouldn't even know what they were called if it wasn't for one particular Boss in the first instance. He's a musician and to make him attackable you first have to hail, then kill, the half-dozen people in his audience.
All of them berate you for interrupting their Affirmation. In the peaceful city itself, the musicians don't seem to be Affirming anyone but there are a scattering of orators who look to be very much in the Affirmation business.
They stand there, waving their arms and glowing, with a blue ball of light hovering nearby. Passing citizens stop and listen and once in a while the blue ball will swoop down on the watcher and light them up. The satisfied customer then leaves.
I believe this to be Affirmation in action. I think I heard someone mention it. Maybe. What it means, I have no idea but I know this much: wondering about it is a big part of why I play these games in the first place.
When I hit Feedly this morning the very first thing I saw was this:
What a great way to start the day. I do love me some Charli XCX and her boisterous bounce suits Nintendo perfectly. Well, my idea of the company, at least. Although what I know about Nintendo could be written on a mushroom with a marker pen. We did have a Nintendo system of some kind back when the children were children and I have vague memories of playing some Mario game a few times back then but that's about as far as it goes.
Anyway, Charli gave me the astonishingly original idea of posting some videos of songs about video games on this blog that's about video games and sometimes features songs. I know, right? How did I ever think of it? Sometimes I just amaze myself.
It would be pretty nuts to do a post like that and not begin with Lana's Video Games. The original is in the dictionary under "perfect" but that never stops people thinking they can do better. Boy George, with Mike Nicholls behind the camera, very nearly pulls off the impossible. I can't quite work out whether Nicholls misunderstands the lyrics completely or nails them to absolute perfection. It's genius, either way.
Most of the covers I've seen are either faithful retreads or lostgirl lonely wannabes but this, by the evocatively named The Young Professionals, goes heavy on the gaming, light on the trauma. Way to go to miss the point, guys! And yet they manage do something a lot more interesting than most of the people who "get" it. Comes with a really good example of the kind of fanmade video Lana's songs often inspired back at the start of the last decade. Bonus!
If "video games" isn't catch-all enough, how about "computer games"? We used to call them that back in the '80s. Do we still? George Clinton, Funkadelic/Parliament legend, released an entire album called Computer Games but I'm going for Mi-Sex.
I'm pretty sure they named themselves after the Ultravox song. I always thought they'd sound like a knock-off Japan but they're from New Zealand so I should have known better. This reminds me so strongly of someone but I can't quite place who. Devo, maybe? Goes on too long, which is appropriate. Most computer games do.
Let's just cool it down, as a snatch of a lyric I can't quite grasp has it. Geez, where's that from? Sun 60?Something from the '90s... Oh, for a decent memory...
The past is factual, the future is fictional but the present is fundamental. It's where you find all the best things. If you want proof, here's Billie. Ilomilo was a puzzle game released in 2010 for the Windows Phone 7, apparently. Beautiful flowers grow from the strangest seeds.
Billie tunes into the deeper meaning but Del Tha Funkee Homosapien just loves his games. Proto Culture is a love letter to actually playing the damn things. Check the reportage:
"I remember my homie Ed Coats had the most A Colecovision-every week I'd visit Playing Donkey Kong Jr., Venture, Roc'n Rope Games I thought was dope While my moms was watching soaps"
None of the videos for this are up to much and the one live performance on YouTube is too badly recorded to be enjoyable. This slideshow is the best I could find.
Del's Gorillaz bandmate Damon likes games too. But he's... well, he's Damon Albarn, isn't he? So it comes out differently. The "hostiles" he's singing about are what we'd call "mobs". I have to admit "hostiles" is more evocative.
Del drags up every game he's ever played while Damon asset-strips a concept for metaphor but Publicly Anonymous get so specific this next one comes with a spoiler warning. I've never played Bioshock but I've read so many people going on about how great it is I sometimes feel I must have. According to The Houston Press, Bioshock inspired "a fair amount of songs", which is hardly a ringing endorsement. I like this one, although I'd take some convincing the rap section was a good idea.
And finally, something I'm ashamed to say I didn't know until today; Lou Reed was a gamer.
I know. It makes no sense. How is it even possible? And how did I not know? I was something of a Lou obsessive once. Before he turned into rock aristocracy. And it's not like he made a secret of it. He's holding a joystick on the cover of New Sensations. It has a song on it called "My Red Joystick" for heaven's sake!
There's another track on that album called "Down At The Arcade" but it's about playing pinball, as Lou explains in the introduction to this live version. Somehow pinball seems a lot more New York underbelly than Space Invaders and Pac Man.
I bought New Sensations it when it came out in 1984. At that point I'd bought everything he'd done, on release, since "Berlin", ten years earlier. But by New Sensations my love affair with Lou was starting to fade. I got that one and 1986's "Mistrial", but I barely listened to either. 1989's "New York", his most successful release since "Transformer", I didn't like it at all. Still don't. The only Lou I bought after that was "Songs For Drella" and I only got that because of John Cale.
New Sensations, of course, was the happy Lou. Yes, there was one. He'd just got married for the second time and he was making a bid for chart success. Things didn't go so well, neither the marriage, which ended in divorce or the chart run. The only single from the album, the catchy "I Love You, Suzanne", was a radio hit but it peaked at 78 on the Billboard chart.
At the time I didn't object to his new direction but I didn't jump all over it, either. I have to say it sounds a lot better now. Aged well, I think. Which is more than anyone could say for the extremely eighties video for My Red Joystick. Also, what's with both videos opening on a ringing telephone?
And... we're done. There are hundreds more songs that relate in some ways to video games but most of them seem to be... quite old and not very good. I guess gaming is so mainstream now there's no cachet in call back. These days even very well-known bands are more likely to be writing songs to feature in the games themselves - or even doing live shows inside them.
Let's end with something along those lines. Something extremely au courant . This is Cvrches contribution to current critical darling and favorite of Endgame Viable, Death Stranding. It's... very video-gamey. Ironic, that, considering the supposedly mold-breaking nature of the source material. Also, it's stadium rock. Get your phones out, people!
It's just shy of of a month since Blood of Luclin released. I think I've seen enough now to confirm my initial impressions. For me, as a regular, committed-but-casual solo player, this is the best expansion for five years, since 2014's Altar of Malice.
There are several reasons behind my positive take, not least among them the strong nostalgic feelings the setting evokes for me, but perhaps the key factor is the surprise design decision taken by Daybreak to completely upend the normal levelling process.
In retrospect, you could say we've been working towards this for several years. The Days of Summer questlines, first introduced in 2017, the annual "Gear Up, Level Up" events, the introduction (with 2017's Planes of Magic) of the Tishan's Box of gear at the start of an expansion, the inclusion of a Level Boost item with even the basic expansion package; all point towards a desire to get everyone on the same page for the start of each new era.
All of that has worked well, putting most players on a reasonably equal footing on Day One, even if the usual tribal lines re-establish themselves only hours later. Even so, for all the work being done on facilitating easy entry into each new expansion, one important aspect of the game seemed to have been forgotten.
With two dozen classes and nearly as many races, EverQuest II, perhaps more than any MMORPG I've played, encourages the creation of a stable of characters. Playing "alts" may even be the norm rather than the exception. When DBG made the decision to eliminate the longstanding practice of levelling up to the new cap in old content whenever the maximum level changed, they also closed the door even for more casual, solo players to get a bunch of characters end game ready in timely fashion.
It's not that getting to the cap became unreasonably difficult. Just time consuming and repetitive, a problem which, ironically, the change to xp in older zones was supposed to address. Instead of running laps round Chelsith or Sebilis, for the last few years, about the only way for solo players to hit cap has been to take every character, Adventurer or Crafter, through the Signature questlines of the latest expansion.
I have a very soft spot for the storylines in EQII. They're nonsense but they're my kind of nonsense. Even so, once is generally enough. Twice, with a long gap, maybe. If, like me, you have ten characters, at least half a dozen of which you would quite like to keep up to date, the prospect of hearing the same dialog and seeing the same cut scenes over and over again is less than motivating.
The last two expansions really doubled down on the difficulty of alting. Planes of Prophecy had huge faction requirements while Chaos Descending, although nominally taking place in outdoor zones, managed to feel much more like repeating a series of instances.
Blood of Luclin stands all of that on its head. Other than Star Wars: the Old Republic's sixfold storyline xp phase, I can't think of another MMORPG that's put the hammer down on levelling the way BoL does.
It's not just that xp comes breathtakingly fast. It's also that you don't even have to follow the Signature line to get it. At least, not if you're levelling an Adventure class. Crafters, for now, do still have to follow the narrative, although they don't have to follow it even halfway before they'll hit 120, and it only takesa few hours to get there.
For adventurers there are plenty of side quests to be picked up around the new zones. There are NPCs scattered across the moonscape just waiting for a handy adventure to pass by and help them out. There are also lots of quests that begin from dropped items. You can't level by grinding mobs but you probably could level by grinding mobs then doing the quests that spawn from bits that fall off.
If that seems like too much trouble, there's even a short sequence of quest, starting on the platform where you arrive in the opening zone, which concludes in a repeatable quest to kill mobs about fifty feet away. And the mobs aren't even aggressive. How much easier could it get?
So far, I've levelled my Berserker, Inquisitor, Necromancer and Bruiser to the cap. I also have a max level Weaponsmith, Alchemist and Sage. That's in less than four weeks, during much of which I didn't have a lot of time to play.
I have never had that many characters at cap that quickly after an expansion. Even in the days when I played EQII every day all year round. It's weird but it's good weird.
When I saw the astonishing rate of gain as my Berserker dinged two levels on zoning into Luclin for the first time, my immediate concern was that if levelling to cap was going to take hours rather than days (or weeks) there'd soon be nothing for me to do. That concern has turned out to be completely unfounded.
Even as someone who relishes the levelling game, I love this change. It's amazingly liberating. The biggest benefit, by far, is that I'm now playing all my characters. Levelling them is fun. It doesn't just make me want to level all the ones I have, it makes me want to create more so I can keep on doing it. And since I have several leftover level boosters allowing me to start at 100 or 110 I definitely will.
Better than that, I've been discovering something I'd forgotten: in EQII different classes play very differently. I've been thinking of my Berserker as my "Main" for so long now, I'd been treating his abilities as a gold standard for solo play. When something seemed slow or difficult I'd work out how to improve his abilities to get over that hump.
Playing my Inquisitor and Necromancer through the same content has been a revelation. I'd expected the Inquisitor, as a healing class, to be a slog. It turned out to be faster than the Berserker. As for the Necromancer...
Combat on my Necro is like putting the game on fast-forward. Or setting the difficulty to "Easy". With the highest level tank pet, an upgraded Cleric mercenary in support and the Necro tooled up to the eyeballs with AEs, single target dots and ferocious "limited pets", large groups of mobs die two or three times faster than the Berserker can dervish them down.
When it comes to bosses, things get even better. No more ten or even fifteen minute fights. No running out of power and taking twenty minutes to auto-attack my way to "victory". Time-to-kill on the bosses my Necro's met so far is around two or three minutes.
There is some risk. Putting out that much damage does draw aggro and she's not wearing plate armor. Even so, the days of cloth casters not being able to take a hit are long past, in solo content at least, and if things really go south there's always her 100% guaranteed Feign Death to fall over on.
Far from closing down my options by making the additional ten levels the work of a single session, this radical change to xp gain has raised my eyes to the horizon. So much so, in fact, that it's made me re-assess my assumptions about levelling altogether.
No longer do I see it as an unalloyed good. Circumstances evidently alter cases. I have two months of posts from last autumn confirming old-school levelling still works its wonders. WoW Classic proved that. But Blood of Luclin proves that other approaches can work equally well, can be equally satisfying, equally compelling.
After years of attempts to reconcile access to current and end game content with a long tail of legacy gameplay centered on levelling, it looks as though developers are finally begining to find a format that works. If you relish the old ways, WoW's Classic and EQ/EQII's Progression servers have you covered. If you just want to get to the new stuff, EQII's level boosts and supercharged xp and WoW's upcoming Level Squish gets you where you need to be, fast.
I'm sure we'll see more iteration on these systems but at last we seem to be getting somewhere: player choice. I'd love to see EverQuest, Lord of the Rings Online and Final Fantasy XIV, among many others, develop and expand on these ideas.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a Wizard and a Warlock to level. I'm off work until Wednesday. That'll should give me plenty of time.
I've had it in mind for a week or so to post something about crafting and tradeskills in Blood of Luclin. The expansion's been out for a month or so. You might think I'd be in a reasonable position to come up with something by now.
After all, I've completed the tradeskill signature line on my Weaponsmith. My Alchemist is more than half way through it, too. And they're both level 120 crafters. I ought to have a decent overview of the state of the tradeskill game. You'd think, right?
I ought to. But I don't. I have no clue what's going on and neither, as far as I can tell, does anyone else.
I didn't notice last expansion
but the icon
for CAs has changed to be the same as the one for Spells.
Why would that happen?
Over the last fifteen years, crafting in EverQuest II has had its ups and downs. I loathed the version we endured for the first few months after launch, with its extreme co-dependency between disciplines and its multi-stage construction processes. I chose to level a Provisioner back then, even though food and drink was ignored by most players at the time, almost entirely. I chose it because it was the only self-sufficient tradeskill.
That odious iteration was replaced by an improved version that reduced passive-aggressive behavior among the playerbase. Then Domino arrived. Over several years she turned crafting into a complete, standalone game in its own right. Even gathering got full questlines and a story.
She left, then came back, then left again but her vision persisted, more or less, even while the underlying mechanics changed often, as all things in MMORPGs must. Anyone who didn't play the game back then is just going to have to take my word for it. I don't propose to summarize a decade and a half of iterative growth in a paragraph or two of a blog post. That way madness lies.
The point is, at no time did I ever feel I didn't understand what was happening. There were numerous occasions when I didn't like what I saw but I always understood what it was.
Well, not any more. I've looked at the information available in the game itself. I've read what EQ2Traders and the wiki have to say. I've browsed the forums. I do know more than I did when I started but that's really not saying much.
I should mention at this point that the miasma of mystery doesn't seem to extend to some of the more physical trades. As far as I can tell, Carpentry isn't much different than it ever was. Making weapons and armor seems quite close to how it has always been, although there are issues with the final products in that they seem to be universally inferior to quest rewards from solo content in the expansion, making them functionally worthless. Alchemy and Jewelcraft, while they have some quirks, are very recognizably the same crafts they always were, at least as far as making potions and jewellery goes.
The more powerful the spell,
the less skill you need to craft it.
That makes sense...
The real issues arise from those crafts that produce spells and combat arts. This used to be quite straightforward: Sages made Caster and Priest spells, Alchemists made combat arts for Fighters and Jewellers supplied the Scouts. You bought your Essential recipe books from NPCs and mobs dropped the Advanced books.
It began as an elegant, simple progression. Apprentice abilities were auto-granted to adventurers. Crafters made the first upgrade, regular mobs dropped the next, crafters made the one after that and Bosses dropped the final tier.
It hasn't worked that way for a long time. More tiers were added, more means of acquiring both the recipes and the abilities found their way into the game, the lines separating which classes made what upgrades blurred. And yet things remained coherent and comprehensible. More complex, yes, and confusing to the uninitiated, but within a reasonable timeframe and with a moderate amount of background reading, anyone could find their feet.
Good luck with that now! The path to acquiring upgraded abilities in Blood of Luclin is fraught with confusion and barricaded by obstacles. Some of those barriers may be unintentional, the result of mistakes made in the rushed conclusion of the development of the expansion. Others are almost certainly bugs waiting to be squashed.But some of this is almost certainly a change in direction, the introduction of new concepts with which we players have yet to come to terms.
Here, for my own benefit as much as anyone who might be reading this, are some of the salient points I think I understand. At least I know they exist.
These are the Quality Tiers I can remember: Apprentice, Journeyman, Adept, Expert, Master, Grandmaster, Mythical, Celestial. The last two may be in the wrong order. I may have missed one. Ancient comes in there somewhere, maybe?
The traditional trade classes can make Journeyman and Expert spells, like they always could. They can now also make Adepts, which until now were only ever dropped by mobs or given as quest rewards.
Any crafter can make Grandmasters, the recipes for which are found in books for which the only requirement is that you be an Artisan, which is what you become when you speak to the crafting trainer and ask to become a non-denominational tradesperson, before you decide what you want to do with your life at Level 10.
Artisans (that's everyone with Level 2 in any tradeskill) can also make Journeyman and Expert spells for the four Ascension classes. They can even make Mythical spells and abilities for any class, at least as far as I can tell from the recipe books being sold for millions of platinum on the Broker.
That's a muddle but it's not impossible to untangle. Let's add in Shadowcrafting.
As part of the Blood of Luclin tradeskill signature questline you receive a Shadowed Staff of Luclin. This allows you to "see seeping shadows" and handle the resources they provide. Stripped of the lore, what this does is let you see different gathering nodes which contain new "shadow" materials. These are required to make Expert spells and CAs.
Staying in my backpack for the foreseeable future.
I'll skip over the current major issues with this mechanic, which have already led to a kludged "fix" in the latest update and which will almost certainly result in further tweaking. If it doesn't, the whole thing is borked.
Sticking with the underlying concept rather than the botched implementation, we now have an entirely new means of acquiring the rare mats needed to make Experts. As for the recipe books for that tier, they too have a new distribution system because the old version, which still exists, now gets you the ability to craft Adepts - something players have never been able to do.
Confused yet? Just imagine how I feel! I'm actually trying to do this stuff!
I spent a couple of hours this morning on my Alchemist, buying the Essential books from the crafting trainer then making Journeyman CAs for my Bruiser and Berserker. That was easy enough, although working out exactly what was an upgrade certainly wasn't.
A Journeyman spell will, of course, always be better than an Apprentice spell from the same tier but whether it will upgrade an Adept from the tier before that, or a Master from two Tiers back... well, the only way to be sure is to get both full descriptions up and compare.
The complexity is compounded by the fact that many abilities in EQII do several different things. I found numerous examples where the max-level Journeyman ability I was considering upgraded one aspect of a higher quality, lower tier CA but was weaker on another.
And so it goes. The sense is very much of a runaway train, picking up speed as it careers downhill. Whether anyone knows where the brakes are or how to apply them is uncertain. There are voices on the forum claiming the sky is falling. But then, when weren't there?
There's a conspiracy theory that says all of this has been planned meticulously to drive players into the waiting grasp of the cash shop. You can side-step all of the issues I've mentioned by simply opening your wallet and paying for time reduction on the automatic process that lets any character upgrade any skill to any quality via the UI. It would cost many thousands of dollars to bring all of a characters skills to the highest level overnight but we all know there are people out there who would do that.
Note greyed-out "Buy" button. Because I don't have that kind of cash. But a lot of players do.
I'm sure there's some of that thinking behind it all. I'm more inclined to go with the other conspiracy theory, though: there's no dedicated tradeskill developer on board right now and whoever drew the short straw to finish up crafting for Blood of Luclin made a hash of it. That accounts for the shadowcrafting fiasco. The rest of it is down to the usual attritional overwriting of old systems by new without any real attempt at coherency, bacuase tying up the loose ends takes too long and anyway, who knows what you might break by trying to be tidy?
And, truth be told, I really don't mind. As Wilhelm observed the other day, figuring out how things work is part of the entertainment around here. Indeed, I'd go further and say it's part of the gameplay.
Things are undeniably a bit of a mess right now when it comes to crafting but I don't believe it's the kind of extinction event claimed by some of the Chicken Littles running around the forums. I see plenty of requests in chat for crafters to make Experts and I'm not seeing the same people ask repeatedly, which suggest they're getting replies. There are also plenty of Experts starting to appear on the Broker, albeit for eye-watering sums. But then, everything in EQII costs a fortune these days, what with the hyper-inflation we've been having. I may not have figured it out yet but someone clearly has.
And those Adepts that crafters can now make with the same facility they used to make Experts? They solve a problem that's been dogging the game for a couple of years, since drop rates were nerfed into the ground. In the last two expansions, at this stage, Adepts on the broker ran in the high six figures. Today, just a month in, I can see plenty on for low fives.
You need two of those to make an Adept. Adepts are selling for around 40-50k at the low end. Decent mark-up.
As a solo player, this is actually an improvement in many ways. The recipe books to make the Adepts are reasonably priced on the Broker. Some of them, at least. I've bought several already. Adepts use the normal rares, so I don't need to bother with the shadow stuff until and unless they fix it. And as a solo player, a mix of last-tier Masters and current tier Adepts will be more than adequate.
Is it ideal? No it bloody isn't! "Ideal" was how it worked ten years ago. But we had Domino then. Nothing's ever going to be that good again. I'd say we didn't know how lucky we were but in fact we did, most of us. So, no, it's not ideal but it'll do until everything changes yet again. I'm enjoying myself and that's about all I can hope for, isn't it?
And anyway, who's to say we won't look back in a few years time and reminisce about the sunny uplands of Blood of Luclin crafting? Things can always get worse!
It seems that EverQuest II is now my main MMORPG. I always knew I'd end up playing a lot of EQII with the release of the new expansion but the extent to which the game has shouldered everything else aside came as something of a surprise. I certainly didn't plan it!
Digging down, there are reasons, not least of which is the dire state of Guild Wars 2.
I've played GW2 for longer, consecutively and without a break, than any other MMORPG. I think. I don't keep notes or run software that tallies my playtime, unlike some people. This blog has been running longer than that game, though, which means I don't have to reconstruct what I thought about GW2 over the years from dim, partial memories, I can just read my own recorded thoughts on it.
I think it's fair to say that I've found GW2 both compulsive and infuriating in equal measure for most of the close to eight years (including open beta) that I've been playing. Until last year, though, I plainly never found it boring. Now I do.
The unpalatable truth is that for an MMORPG of its longevity, content in GW2 is very thin. There's more content in EQII's housing offer alone. Arguably. And I'd take that argument.
ArenaNet, always infamous for the glacial pace of their development team, seem to have slowed almost to the point of stasis. More damagingly, almost all the replayable content they have been able to add over seven years is highly repetitive and extremely samey.
It's worse than just the slow dripfeed, though. What they haven't done, which many (most) other successful MMORPGs manage, is to continually increase the type and variety of systems within the game. Adding new features can be disruptive but it's also motivating. And exciting. Yet another map with yet another currency to buy yet another ascended item just isn't, no matter how hard the art department work to cover it up.
The Alpine Borderlands, where every day is Wintersday.
Even the holiday events, usually an easy win for developers, have been left to wither. In the last year or so there's been something of an attempt to spruce them up and flesh them out but it's pitiful compared to what we see in other games. I couldn't bring myself to bother with Wintersday this year. I just hope the upcoming Lunar Year celebrations are better but I'm not holding my breath.
Most de-motivating of all, the absence not only of a third expansion but of any hint one will ever happen has pretty much capped off my long-term interest in GW2. If the developers can't be bothered, why should I?
By comparison, EQII is insanely rich in content. With a fraction of the resources they manage, somehow, to pump out not just an annual expansion but a whole raft of pre-expansion events, mid-year content drops and additions to the extensive holiday calendar. Not only is there always something to do, thanks to the game's enormous depth of legacy content, there's almost always something new to do, too.
No matter what their resources, any developer can only produce so much content. Players are always going to consume it faster than it can be created. That's why most would-be forever games rely on continual improvement and progression mechanics, something GW2 made the unhappy decision to eschew.
Someone has been slacking.
EQII has this down to a fine art now, to the point that they may have found the tipping point where too much progression becomes counter-productive. My own list of daily checks and tasks in the game is daunting.
Every morning or evening, depending whether or not it's a work day, this is what I do:
Check progress on Mercenary Training on ten characters
Check progress on Mount Training on ten characters
Check progress on Spell/Combat Art Upgrades on ten characters
Check Pot Plant on two characters
Empty Pack Pony and Reset on two characters
Check Overseer Missions on an as-yet undetermined number of characters
Complete Loyalty Dailies on the account
There are a lot more things I could - and should - be doing, like the daily Transmute, Tinkering and Adorning quests, which I seldom get around to and the daily Familiar quest, which I never remember - but those are the key ones. I'm running through them as I write this post. It's actually a fairly swift process to do the checks themselves. It's all the logging in and out that takes the time.
I could also avoid 90% of it by keeping a spreadsheet of all my characters and their various timers. I'm sure there are plenty of players who do it that way. Not really my thing, spreadsheets. Or being organized.
The embarassing thing is, I enjoy it. Especially after work. It's a nice, relaxing way to settle into the evening. Because I don't mind if I miss a few characters or a few timers here and there, I feel I'm in charge. And when the timers are up I get something I want - an upgraded spell, a new gear slot for my merc or mount, some rare mats. It's like getting a present and I love getting presents.
I particularly like the new Overseer system. I get ten missions a day and the longest I have so far is two hours. You sometimes get new quests (missions) or new agents as rewards. These seem to be per character not per account. It's all quite confusing and getting to grips with how it works is fun. Plus sometimes the rewards are worth having.
Dresses like a horse, looks like a disc. I love Appearance.
The new expansion also comes with ten more levels for both adventurers and crafters, which means new gear and recipes for everyone who levels up. Not only do I have six characters (at least) to take through the (very fast) leveling process, I then have to get them all kitted out and upgraded.
That's going to take me all year. Seriously, it will. Even with EQ2 as my main game. There's a good chance I'll get fed up of it before then and drift off to something or somewhere else but if I do, that will be my choice.
What matters is that the character progression systems are all there, in place, ready to act as a scaffold for my gameplay. The game offers me pre-determined goals, which I'm free to approach in a number of ways, at a pace of my choosing. They are both compulsive and time-consuming without being onerous or claustrophobic, which has the effect of making me play more EQII because I enjoy it.
I know it's not working for everyone. I can see that on the forums. I can think of ways it could be done better and probably please more people and it puzzles me sometimes why those ways aren't the ones being taken.
For all its flaws, in the end it's an approach that's very successful in holding my attention. It's far from unique and it's probably been done better but it suits me almost perfectly. WoW Classic, using much the same mechanics, had greater bite and traction in the first forty or so levels but there it all grinds to a halt in the fifties, unless you embrace the group-centric ethos of the game like SynCaine and Wilhelm.
EQII supposedly still has a solid group game, too. I wouldn't know. It's an alone-together affair for me these days. Ironically, that was the role GW2 performed to perfection for a long while. Not any more. And whether it ever will again I very much doubt.
But something will. EverQuest II is a great MMORPG and I'll be playing it as long as it or I last, but surely not as my main game. This is an unexpected, unplanned reversion to old behavior. It has to be. It can't last.
Wilhelm's post-Christmas totting up yesterday gave me the idea to follow suit. Whether anyone really wants to read my "what I got for Christmas" list is another matter, but I'll stick to stuff that might possibly be interesting to someone. No reviews of my jumpers. Although they were great...
Mostly, what I asked for - and got - were books, CDs and DVDs. I wonder sometimes whether any of those three things would still exist if it wasn't for people needing physical objects to wrap and hand over at Christmas and birthdays.
I do still read most of my fiction on paper, from choice, even though I do read some eBooks on Kindle, which I find equally satisfying. The romance of the physical is overrated, sometimes. And anyway, in its neoprene snug, my tablet is extremely tactile.
As for viewing, almost everything I watch on a screen shows up on my Kindle Fire, usually by way of Amazon Prime. Before I broke my Windows tablet I used to transfer my DVDs onto that to watch but doing the same for the Kindle is too much fuss.
These days, I mostly put the DVDs on a shelf and forget to watch them at all. I did get through a lot of the backlog while I was off work last year, though. Those, I watched on my portable DVD player, which has pretty poor definition compared to the HD Kindle Fire. If it's a good story that doesn't matter at all.
As for music, there are pretty much only two ways I consume tuneage these days: on my decade-old iPod Touch as I travel to and from work or on YouTube on the PC or the Fire. I spent much of yesterday uploading my new CDs to iTunes before transferring them to my iPod. You can drag and drop from iTunes to your device now, which I always forget until I've already spent far too long trying to remember how to do it the old, stupid way.
I am not an Apple fan. I'd love to move outside of their peculiar bubble entirely but so far I've been unable to find any real alternative to the iPod Touch. I have other MP3 players and they are useless by comparison. When my iPod finally packs up I expect I'll grudgingly replace it with a new one.
So much for the how. On to the what. Here's my haul, or at least that part of it that somewhat fits the thrust of this blog:
Books:
The ones I've read so far.
Station Zero - Philip Reeve - The third and presumably final book in the Railhead Trilogy. Some of the very best space opera I've ever read - and I've read a lot. Philip Reeve is marketed as a Young Adult author by his publisher but this is pure, unadulterated adult SF.
Reeve doesn't waste time on nitpicking detail when it comes to world-building. The strokes are broad and bold. His greatest strengths are characterization and plotting. I'd recommend this series to anyone but particularly to fans of Ian M. Banks' Culture novels or M John Harrison's Kefahuchi Tract series. And that's heavy company.
Wayward Son- Rainbow Rowell - Another author inaccurately marketed as Y.A. Her first few novels were written for adults and published as such to little intererst from anyone. Her publisher decided to re-brand "Eleanor and Park" as Y.A. and it took off, so everything she's done since has to be labelled the same way.
This is the second novel set in the world of Simon Snow, a kind of twisted mirror image of Harry Potter, if Potter had left school, was gay, had wings and a tail and couldn't use magic. The first, "Carry On", was the entire seven books of Harry Potter rolled into one volume and done a hundred times better. I didn't thnk she'd be able to follow it but she has. Wonderful stuff.
The ones I still have to read.
Early Riser - Jasper Fforde - He infuriates me. He's a much better writer than he's usually given credit for, which is hardly surprising given the extreme self-indulgence of most of his output. I enjoyed all his Thursday Next novels and the Nursery Crimes series too, but it was the extraordinary "Shades of Grey" that really woke me up to his abilities.
Unfortunately, "Shades of Grey" sold badly compared to his series titles and although it was very obviously intended as the start of a sequence of novels he simply dropped it cold. This is not what creative artists are supposed to do. He does at least seem to have learned a lesson from that experience and "Early Riser" is described as a standalone novel. It's also supposed to be as good as "Shades". We'll see.
Marked, Fallen, Bound- Benedict Jacka - That's three different books, by the way. One of several followers in Jim Butcher's wake, I quite enjoyed the first few Alex Verus novels. They were beginning to get quite bleak when I stopped. I suspect these will be bleaker still, going by the titles.
Mortal Engines, Predator's Gold, Night Flights - Philip Reeve - The series that made Reeve's name and spawned a blockbuster movie that flopped. I've just started the first one and it's pretty good. Apparently this series was also conceived by the author as adult SF, or so I read, but unlike the Railhead books, my immediate impression is that this is core Y.A. Which is more than fine. I read a lot of Y.A. because so much of it is excellent.
WundeRSmith - The Calling of Morrigan Crow - Jessica Townsend - That central capital R is correct although I have no idea why it's like that. Follow-up to Nevermoor, this is a proper children's book (9-12 in publisher-speak). Nevermoor was the best book for that age range I read in 2017. I read a lot of children's books, too. 2017 was a long time ago and I can't remember much about it except it used umbrellas as a motif. Looking forward to reminding myself what it was all about and where the story left off.
Pumpkin Heads - Rainbow Rowell - A graphic novel about which I know nothing other than it's by someone I trust unreservedly to entertain me. I only discovered in the summer that she moonlights as a comics writer. A lot of authors try to make that transition and most of them fail horribly but I've read the first volume of her "Runaways" reboot and it's top flight comics writing. Infinitely better than the execrable Brian K. Vaughan original, which I thought was one of the worst comics I'd read in fifty years. I absolutely hated it!
I got a couple of other graphic novels that Mrs Bhagpuss found reduced somewhere, including the dreadful "Superman: For Tomorrow" by Brian Azzarello and Jim Lee (no fault of Lee's - his pencils are fine) and the very enjoyable "Legends", written by Len Wein, but let's move on to music.
CDs:
Cleaning Out The Ashtrays - Lloyd Cole - A longtime favorite of mine, Lloyd has settled into a peculiar role as custodian and creator of his own legacy. He re-packages and re-issues his body of work as though managing a posthumous estate. This is a luxurious, four CD boxed set of demos, B-sides and out-takes, complete with individual sleeves and a lengthy booklet. For fans only. Fortunately I am one.
Guesswork- Lloyd Cole - His actual new album. The first for a couple of years. Haven't heard it yet but he hasn't made a bad record in thirty years so it's a safe bet I'll like it. Some of the tracks are a lot longer than his usual running time, which is intriguing.
Loops In The Secret Society - Jane Weaver - Someone else who seemingly can't make a bad record. I've been following her since her Kill Laura days in the '90s. The world suddenly woke up to her with her last release, Modern Kosmology, in which she perfected her unique meld of psychedelic folk and krautrock motorik. To my surprise, Loops comes complete with a hardback book book and a DVD. I listened to the album yesterday and it's superb. Haven't watched the DVD yet.
Mighty Joe Moon - Grant Lee Buffalo - Their debut, "Fuzzy", is old favorite from the early '90s but for some reason I never followed it up with any of their others. Better late than never.
Client, City - Client - Again, that's two different albums. I happened upon this peculiar duo by way of a YouTube algorithm last year and was instantly taken with their lack of affect. I like my electronica to sound like the music of machines and this does. I was more than a little taken aback to learn later that Client is what Sarah Blackwood did after Dubstar split up. I mean, I didn't mind Dubstar but who would have predicted this?
Fish- Shitkid - Is that the name you want to go with? Seriously? Oh, well... Purveyor of disturbingly NSFW videos and as I now see from the inside cover equally disturbing lyrics (sample: "burnt up a dog and got away with it"), Shitkid (aka Åsa Söderqvist or "The weirdest musician in Sweden") is really quite scary. Catchy tunes, though.
MeadowLanePark - Le SuperHomard - Another YouTube find about whom I know nothing. Except I think they're French. And they're on Elefant Records, which means they're bound to be worth a listen.
And finally...
DVDs:
None of which I've watched yet.
Avengers Endgame, Captain Marvel, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 - Still playing catch-up with the MCU. I watched almost all of the others last summer. These are the ones I missed.
Jessica JonesSeason 1 - Was there a season 2? Marvel without the costumes, I believe. I have the vaguest memory of her from before I stopped reading comics but why and how she got her own show I have no clue. Nor why I wishlisted it.
Young Sherlock Holmes - I was dumbfounded to get this. Apparently it was on my Amazon wishlist. Once again, I have no idea why.
Veronica Mars: The Complete Collection - The TV Show and the Movie. I know next to nothing about this (do you sense a theme developing?) other than it came up in a search I did for things to watch after I reached the end of seven years of Buffy and was feeling bereft. Wikipedia calls it "an American teen noir mystery drama " which does look to be right in my wheelhouse.
And that's about it. I might start feeding in a few more tv, movie, book and comic reviews as the year goes on. I certainly have plenty to say about that stuff. There's a surprise...
In the years between the closure of our original, launch-era home, Steamfont , and the opening of the game's first Free to Play server, Freeport, Mrs Bhagpuss and I played almost all our EverQuest II on the Test server. It was a small community, insular even, and it was exceedingly difficult to avoid learning the names and at least something about the personalities of almost everyone who played there.
One of the most active and vocal members of the community was Cloudrat. She was always around, usually building or decorating some house or other, often offering advice and assistance, sometimes chiding, usually encouraging. I thought of her as a Test local but over time it became apparent she played on just about every server.
Long after I stopped playing regularly on Test I could still hear her chatting away on the cross-server Test Channel. When SOE added Leaderboards for housing her name began to appear prominently in the lists of award-winning houses, not because of her amazing decorating skills but because she worked tirelessly to install fully-functioning public transport hubs wherever she played.
Cloudrat's Dojo is a small, two-room house stuffed to overflowing with just about every portal and transport device ever added to the game. You can go from there to pretty much anywhere. Whenever something's happening in some obscure corner of
Norrath - a guide event in Cardin Ward, for example, or the recent Heroes Festival event in Obol Plains - and someone asks plaintively in General chat how to get there the answer, likely as not, will be "Use Cloudrat's Dojo".
I'd noticed back in the Autumn, playing a lot more EQII this year as I had been, that I'd not heard her in chat for a while. I wondered if she'd finally had enough of the game, as even the most dedicated players eventually may.
It also crossed my mind that she might no longer be well enough to play, or even that she might no longer be with us at all. As long as I'd known her, she'd always been unwell, in some unspecified manner that she'd mention but not dwell on. MMORPGs do tend to become homes and playgrounds for those whose options in the physical world are limited and both EQII's Test server and its housing community have historically attracted more than the average number of such players.
When this Winter's Frostfell update arrived at the beginning of December, one of the new items was a Ratonga Tree Topper Plushie, ideal for placing on the highest branches of one of the game's many seasonal trees. Being a huge fan of both Frostfell and ratongas, almost the very first thing I did to clebrate the season was to buy one.
As soon as I examined my Tree Topper I exclaimed out loud "That's Cloudrat!". She'd long had a signature look: a tiny, honey-colored ratonga, reduced to the smallest possible size (which in EQII is very small indeed), dressed entirely in flowing white with a circlet of flowers on her head and fairy wings to carry her on her travels.
The Tree Topper was her to a tee. I was as sure then as I could be that Cloudrat had levelled up, ascended, passed on.
Sure enough, over the next few days several people asked the question in chat and those who knew her much better than I ever did confirmed she'd died during the summer. Someone at Daybreak had taken the trouble to immortalize her in the game she'd loved (and found infuriating) for so long.
I went back to the goblin vendor and bought ten of her effigies but it wasn't until today that I got around to placing some of them. My Berserker keeps two Frostfell trees, year round, in the entrance hall to his Maj`Dul Mansion. Both of them now have a small, white, winged ratonga at the very top.
He also maintains a Frostfell crafting area at his Mara Estate, where he and all his imaginary friends come to craft. Cloudrat's avatar looks down on the crafting tables there, smiling.
I hope she'll be happy there. I hope she's happy, wherever she is. She wasn't Aradune but she had an impact on Norrath that won't soon be forgotten. Norrath remembers its own.
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