Everquest II
Fantasy MMORPG Hack-n-Slash Sequel, by Sony Online Entertainment.
Well, because I'm a sucker for both nostalgic reverie, and anything with the word 'Free' in it, I've gone hook line and sinker for the recent and quite unexpected SOE Living Legacy shindig. All strikes me as quite a clever marketing campaign; how can we get ourselves back in the headlines again? Answer; bung everyone that left a few free months on the house. Ostensibly, this is all so we, the fickle and disloyal ex-Everquesters can see what's new, and how it's all improved over the months and years since we last had a go. Fight with...
Ah, my old friend, the Exit Survey. Seen quite a few of these now, often several for the same game, as I buzz about MMO obsession like a bluebottle on a windowsill, or something. It's that page in the web-based account management setting where they get to try a bit of minor post-mortem on a love gone awry, in the hope that the answers you give might help the game do a better job of maintaining the spark of romance with it's other hundred thousand lovers, and indeed, help it make itself more attractive for future reconciliation.
I often find you...
Was tidying up after another protracted, but enjoyable EVE CCG session last night, staring at my unusually dormant PC and had one of those brutally frank examinations of self, realising that I seem to have drifted out of Everquest 2 again. Normally this is my cue to start ranting and railing at game design, grinding, monotony and the nature of fun, but to be perfectly honest, I don't think it's actually EQ2's fault this time.
At a purely mechanical level, it remains a good solid game - well, I think so anyway. Various refinements over the years have made it...
Old news now, of course, in this whirling helter-skelter of Information Superhighways and what not:
Slashdot: eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
All quite complicated, and still on-going I think, but the basic gist of it is that the megalithic online car-boot sale that is eBay, has decided that it wants nothing more to do with the mind-wrenching conceptual hijinks that is Online Virtual Asset Ownership, and have decided to just pull the lot. Including imaginary stuff from Ultima Online, which is actually allowed to be traded in this manner, and yet not including imaginary stuff from Second Life...
Flush without resounding success, mentioned previously, in 'A Bold Confrontation', the guild was all set to tackle the second Guild Writ in the series - 'A Daring Confrontation'.
Not that I've ever had much experience with WoW Raiding mind you, but so far as I can see, EQ2 does seem to do, if not a better, than certainly a more flexible job of the same kind of gaming experience. For starters, the Raid Instances I've seen so far seem to scale dynamically, based on the average level of the members of the raiding force. The various set-pieces and event-attacks still...
Life continues to be good to me in Everquest II, with rate of overall progress both satisfying, and almost accidental at times. I'll be just out there, doing my thing; exploring, questing, defending myself from wandering monster attack, indulging in the odd pick-up group dungeon crawl, and all of a sudden, 'Ding!', which is exactly as it should be; a pleasant surprise, not the focus of my existence.
I remember the dark old days of Everquest 1, when you'd be sat there, driving yourself progressively more insane by spending the lengthy, and frequent downtime (at times, 14 mins in every 15...
Hmph. Seems as if I was completely wrong in my vulture-like glee-filled pessimism about The Burning Crusade launch, with pretty much everyone else actually being able to buy, install, patch, connect and play the blasted thing with no problems at all. See, well, any of my sidebar links, for a glowing tale of praise, joy and post-Lv60 exuberance. I'd post specific links, but Blizzard have basically made me look a like fool in front of the entire Internet, so I'm far too cross to fiddle about with <a> tags now. Grrr!
Seriously though, it is nice to see a company get...
Level 40-49: A_Banqueter says, 'CH Raid, LF DPS!'
This is usually how it starts. I'm running along, from A to B, and the occasional capricious mood hits me, partly based on psychological self-harm, partly because it's an anecdote, and I can't just bang on about Second Life the whole time, but mostly because part of me still wants it to work - despite all my bitterness, I still want to be a hero. So pausing only to deconstruct and translate the acronyms (CH - Cauldron Hollow, a raid instance off the Nektulous Forest zone in Everquest 2, LF - Looking For,...
I’m awake, I’m awake! A rather low-key, but quite pleasant seasonal period, which I spend in my traditional manner – obsessively playing MMORPGs and gradually going insane, feral and nocturnal, in various order. This year it was mostly the turn of Everquest II to play host, with a smattering of Second Life and the odd day out in Guild Wars.
All very agreeable, but EQ2 really does deserve special mention for it's Christmas..er..."Frostfell"...offering. You sort of get used to the Typical MMO Seasonal Event after a while - Valentine, Halloween, Christmas - a chance for an MMO to do something a...
Back to some more typical MMO fun and games, this time, in Everquest II, and my new guild. I do this every now and then - a kind of soloist's guilt descends on me, based in an awareness that "I'm not playing it properly", and that "I might as well be offline".
Much of my time online is spent avoiding random idiots - partly because I'm arrogant, and partly because they genuinely do seem to be either very young, very impulsive, very inarticulate, or a combination of all three, and more often than not, my experience of grouping tends to be...
Hmm…something positive then…how hard can that be? Ah, Echoes of Faydwer, impressions and explorations!
I grew up in Faydwer. My first real MMO experience was Everquest, and my first real character was a wood elf druid, (back when I was young enough to think that elves were mysterious, otherworldly and cool. I go for short comedy races nowadays...). Kelethin was my home, in quite a real sense. True, it was Rallos Zek, which lent a certain paranoid fear to my wanderings, but up on Kelethin, the wood elven treehouse platform city, there were generally enough guards wandering about to provide...
Not something I do often, but...
Tobold's MMORPG Blog: Dear Mr. Aaron R. Conklin
I've always had a great deal of respect for Tobold, and indeed would probably have to cite his blog as the initial, and ongoing, inspiration for my own. His engaging style, wide ranging and varied focus, and incisive insight make for a regular and required addition to the old RSS reader, and indeed read like articles one would expect from someone whose job is to write about MMOs for a living. This Aaron Conklin chap on the other hand...
Leaving aside for the moment the inherent doom attendant...
Well, exhibiting typical self-control, I caved in like a badly timed soufflé and got myself the currently available Everquest II expansion meal-deal – the original game, Desert of Flames, Kingdom of Sky and the new fellah, Echoes of Faydwer, all in one handy box. (Thanks for the heads-up, Zygwen!). SOE have always been prolific with expansions, far more so than any other online gaming company, and while this can be a good thing overall, it does present a bit of a barrier to entry for new folks further down the line: at new player starting EQ1 now, is going to...
Iiiiiiit’s me! Huzzah! Back once again, like the renegade master, and all that, and as usual, I take time off and the MMO world goes crazy, with the most notable bombshell being the sudden, startling and ongoing collapse of Nevrax, the company behind Saga of Ryzom. Odd really – I thought it was doing quite well; shows how much I know. More on that later. Mostly my last week has been spent being pleasantly surprised by Everquest II.
It’s been quite some time since my last foray in there, which was brief, and spent largely puttering about the Freeport 10-20 levels,...
Well, this explains why I couldn't get into EverQuest 2 last night:
EQ2 Forums: Live Update 19
Now this won't be news to regular readers of Aggro Me who has been analysing what looks to be a huge set of changes to the newbie game, class progression, guilds, travel, er...well, pretty much everything really. I wasn't paying as much attention as I should however, and this lot has really caught me by suprise. I used to religiously follow patch notes, once, but nowadays, I just play.
I shaln't try to analyse the changes here - go see Aggro's insightful thoughts for that,...
And so the wheel turns again, and I’m back to Everquest II. Thinking back, I’m not sure I’ve ever played one MMO exclusively for more than a year – well, not since Everquest was new anyway, and I wonder if any of them are supposed to be fun for 4+ hours a night, every night for a year. Is that even possible? It could just be me, I guess, but I’ve even managed to get bored of World of Warcraft at least once already…pre-level 60!
Anyway, having the SOE Access Pass, and a set of EQ2 discs, it was only a...
I've always been rather awed, and not a little frightened, by the continuing tradition of the SOE Fan Faire. I've never been, you understand, and am never likely to go, but each year, the photos come back:
EQ2 Warcry: Photos
EQ OGaming: Photos
EQ2 Fan Faire Board: Photos
And many others. (Pay attention, MMO Art Directors - this is what Real People look like! Take notes.)
The idea that players of any online game can be so enthusiastic that they not only travel thousands of miles for The Gathering, but then dress up like their character when they get there disturbs me on a number...
Last night I finally gave in and admitted a dissapointing truth. I don't play Everquest II anymore, and indeed, haven't logged in for some weeks. Time to uninstall and move on.
It is a shame though...I did want to like it, and for a time, did. The graphics were good, some of the most fundamental gameplay problems with the previous generation of MMO had been looked at and addressed, and they had spent an awlful lot of money on voice acting. It would almost be chirlish not to like it really. Also, I picked EQ2 instead of WoW, so felt that...
Well, after a hectic few weeks of campaigning, spin and speculation, the results are finally in:
EQ2 Site: Poll Results
I missed the poll myself, being too busy with Operation Cheapseats to play EQ2 recently, but apparently it came in the form of a set of incomprehensible, unreadable and unanswerable questions in a pop-up box. (N3rfed has screenies)
Looking at that, I'm not entirely sure what the question is, but suspect it's not something that can be answered by 'True' or 'False', and I can't believe anyone would offer 'Don't Care' as a serious customer survey choice. Still, the results of that, somewhat...
Meanwhile, in other SOE Nutter Network News, it seems they're looking for a Queen Antonia Bayle Look-a-like to make young impressionable visitors to EQ2 Fan Faires awkward and uncomfortable:
Games.Slashdot: Sony Online Seeking Queen of Everquest
I guess Heather Graham must have freaked out when the approached her with The Outfit then, which is understandable. Afterall, I expect she'd rather like to continue a proper career in real movies at some point. Anyway, if you look anything like this:
Queen Queen Antonia Bayle - Proving that Royalty Needn't Always Be Frumpy (SFW, just about...)
...then you'd best watch this space:
"The Quest for Antonia" -...
So like, I’m in the Crypt of Betrayal, having a go at ‘AQ4’... one of the core armour quests for the dapper level 20-30 adventurer about town. There are six of these, resulting in one piece of uber armour for each body location, ensuring that I never need to go and try buying player-made armour from any money-grabbing player-crafter.
This is handy, as not being able to go afk-merchant myself for long periods of time, and not having any phat lewts of my own to pimp out, I generally can’t afford to buy anything useful made by other players, and so...
On the subject of obsession, clinical addiction and games-become-reality, Everquest 2 seems to have taken one more step into the Matrix-like dystopia Daily Mail columnists fear...the '/pizza' chat command.
When typed into the chat-box, it fires up your browser of choice, and takes you to a specially designed page on the Pizza Hut website, where you can order pizza to be sent to your PC Gaming Cryopod, thus negating the typically tedious business of going off and having a meal, etc.
I guess it was always on the cards, although it does seem a bit sinister in some vaguely indefinable way....
So a quick recap of The Blogless Days, just in case anyone is wondering what I’d been up to in the intervening months.
Canceled Planetside; reason cited this time:
“Big Robots, Bombers and Artillery make the game very unenjoyable for Infantry”
Which I thought was a fair and objective assessment, despite me usually being the first grunt to get hit by the bomb/megadeath plasma shell/big robot foot. However, this recent patchnote made me perk up a bit, and I may be back there some month soon. It still remains one of the more unique and awe-inspiring online experiences currently on offer,...