Apparently, I'm a victim of piracy...

Yesterday, my computer packed up. Wouldn't boot up at all, said the operating system needed reinstalling. Naturally, I spent about five hours searching for one, and when I found one I thought 'well, superb, the problems are solved'.

But they weren't. Oh no, because Windows won't install - apparently, I didn't have a hard drive installed. I started swearing to myself at this point, because I really didn't want to lose a 200 gig hard drive and everything on it, but I figured it was a bit too late to do anything about it. So I set off across the road to buy a replacement, costing a whacking £45, and then come back to install it.

But then my computer boots up fine. Completely fine, no problems with my hard drive nor my operating system. So I'm sitting there, Windows install disk in one hand and brand new £45 hard drive in the other, and my PC is working like a charm. This does not make me happy.

What makes me even less happy is that my PC keeps crashing, which I have surmised is down to it overheating. My CPU fan isn't spinning, which is probably the reason, though the heatsink is going quite nicely for hours at a time (allowing me to type this). Thing is, the fan IS working - it powers up for a good few seconds every time I start the PC, but then it just stops. I've twiddled the BIOS, I've downloaded programs to control it, but nothing works. It's all rather stupid, as I don't mind if my computer physically breaks but I get quite pissed off when it is capable of working but chooses not to.

Oh, and to make things better, Windows Update has downloaded a new patch that apparently thinks it is helpful to tell me I've been a victim of counterfeiting every 30 minutes. So that screws up whatever I'm doing every half an hour, as it alt-tabs games down, and I can't seem to dislodge that either. Even as I type this, it's done it again. Do they honestly think I don't KNOW I'm using a pirate version of Windows?

If I go quiet for a few days, either my computer has actually melted from the lack of fan action or I've thrown it out the window in a fit of rage. Either way, the computer loses. I hope it thinks about that carefully before it decides to fuck with me again.

Cross platform gaming? Xbox 360 and PC gamers set to collide over Team Fortress 2...

Or at least, the option is there. Apparently the Team Fortress 2 coding allowing cross-platform play has been completed, but Valve are as yet unsure as to whether they will be implementing it.

I'm of the belief that within five years the majority of cross-platform releases will involve cross-platform play. However, I'm starting to wonder what this means for the evolution of the next-gen consoles - or even the current batch (and indirectly, for the future of the PC). MMORPGS play quite a big part in this, so if you're only interested in that aspect of the article then bear with me.

Currently, the only game out there that allows cross-platform gaming is Shadowrun - and I imagine most games will follow a similar model at first (basically, Xbox 360 players play on Xbox-Live, while PC players have to upgrade to Vista and then pay a fee for XBox-Live membership). With only Shadowrun available I don't see this as a particularly great idea, but if some flagship titles start to bridge the gap, we might see this become more popular. Team Fortress 2 is clearly going to be one of these titles, but it's going to be immensely popular anyway. When PC players are perfectly able to find a game of TF2 without upgrading to Vista or paying for it, there's no reason to pay for Xbox-Live. Thus, I think the logical progression will be to link Valve's servers (Steam) with the Xbox-Live ones, so the PC gamers don't have to jump through hoops to play against console players, while Microsoft still get their cut from the Xbox 360 players playing online. This solution isn't just applicable to Valve, of course, because the majority of gaming companies offer similar online support.

In a desperate attempt to break even, the Peruvian government finally allowed tourists to do what they had always wanted to do in the country's Inca ruins: sniper rifle duels.

The next issue, then, is balance. For FPS games, mouse and keyboard is king. Yeah, people who are really good on consoles might be able to stay in touch, but a mouse generally gives far more precision than an analogue stick. Shadowrun got around this by implementing a heavy auto-aim system for everyone, and giving PC gamers twice as much recoil on every gun. That's not an ideal solution, and don't expect to see many more like it. Instead, I expect to see a mouse and keyboard becoming increasingly common on consoles. But I don't expect to see that happen too quickly, because I think consoles are trying to resist the idea of being a computer that you can't upgrade.

Thus, I don't expect to see FPS games being the sparks that ignite the fire of cross-platform gaming. Instead, I fully expect it to be MMORPGS - specifically, Age of Conan. With an MMORPG, you don't have to worry about all the jazz with PC gamers having to pay - they have to pay a monthly fee anyway, they're used to it. Other MMORPG games also will always want more subscribers to earn more money, too, so the large markets of the Xbox 360 crowds will be tempting for them. But overall, the type of game is well suited to console gaming because the combat system is less based on instant reflexes - with the introduction of online voice chat, you probably wouldn't need a keyboard at all. Thus, I expect to see quite a lot of cross platform MMORPGs coming out after Age of Conan starts to capitalise on the market after it's Xbox 360 release. I think the Xbox will see more of them due to its close links with Microsoft, but I believe by the time the next gen of consoles comes around Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony will be bending over backwards to incorporate cross-platform play into their machines.

This leaves PCs in a slightly strange position, as the increases in chip power will obviously be utilised in servers, but with gamers possibly migrating to more inexpensive consoles instead, the desire for high-end graphics advances will fade. Perhaps they'll trudge along as media stations for a while, but I see the consoles eventually snapping up those markets too. But by that time they'll probably be very PC-like themselves, except they won't be upgradable. I must admit, I quite like the idea of just buying a new console every 4 years and knowing that the playing field is perfectly level between everyone - it's much less hassle than gearing out a new gaming PC every few years, only to realise most of your friends can't play the same games as you because they've not managed to buy a good enough machine yet.

Microsoft's ongoing problems with weight reached crisis point with the release of the Xbox 740.

Having said that, there are already two versions on the PS3 on the market. By the time of next-gen consoles, can we expect to see several different models available? I hope not, otherwise the point of the console - ease of use and less complexity when compared to a PC - will have been lost.

But we'll have to wait to see what'll happen, won't we? Keep your eyes on Age of Conan for Xbox 360, too. If it does well, expect to see others follow in its footsteps, and expect to see the MMORPG market get even bigger.

Hektor.

Blizzard's next-gen MMO?

Before the announcement of Starcraft 2, there was some speculation that the title announced would be World of Starcraft. This was not entirely unsurprising, if a little hopeful - Blizzard had put up a couple of recruitment ads on their site a couple of weeks before, looking for designers to work on a 'next-gen MMORPG'. Now, we all know Starcraft 2 was the game announced, but that doesn't answer the question of what Blizzard are going to do next in the MMO market.

Let's look at the facts. World of Warcraft is hardly flagging (currently at 8.5 million subscribers and with a net taking of around $1.5 billion annually), but it is coming up three years old. It's not going to last forever, but even if 99% of the population left there would still be 85,000 subscribers left in the game - more than enough to warrant continuing to support the game. I also expect to see at least one more expansion, likely three more, the next of which will be Northrend (from the Frozen Throne), in an attempt to keep WoW going/growing for as long as possible. There's little argument that Blizzard WILL bring out another game, and I imagine we can expect it in about three years - some time in 2010, by which point WoW will be six years old and most certainly have had its day. And I imagine it'll completely dominate the market again, at least for a while, because at the end of the day Blizzard do make high-quality games. That, and their success automatically breeds a level of hype in the gaming world that is literally unparallelled by any other gaming company or franchise (maybe Halo and Half-Life come close, but not within touching distance).

WoW has a female night elf on the box cover. Half Life 2 has Gordon Freeman. I think I may just have solved this mystery.

Now, about the content. There's four options here, the first being a MMO set in an entirely new universe and the remaining three being a title set in one of Blizzard's established universes - Warcraft, Starcraft or Diablo. Diablo is a rich universe that could transfer well to a MMORPG universe, but it lacks the depth of the Warcraft universe - nevertheless, it could translate well. I can imagine the Evil side would have a lot of choice of monstrous races, while the Good side would have humans and angels (and they could probably think of some other ones too). The classes could be numerous, given that there were 7 in Diablo II alone if you include the expansion. Most people write off Diablo as being too WoW-like, but by the time the next MMO comes out I doubt that'll be an issue. Diablo is quite an adult world, but then a lot of the criticism aimed at WoW is that it's cartoony and seemingly geared towards kids. If Age of Conan's realistic style succeeds, Funcom may find Blizzard aggressively expanding into their territory.

A World of Warcraft II has a certain appeal, too. First up, it's a familiar world that might well lure old players back with a wave of nostalgia if they're thinking about giving up WoW around now. If the game is set in the future, you've got an excuse to change the world considerably, keeping the experience fresh. Having said that, my money is not on a WoW2. This is because, in order to change the world enough to create a different gaming experience, Blizzard would have to have a catastrophe strike Azeroth, or set it at least a century in the future. And remember that WoW is not the only game in the Warcraft Universe - I fully expect to see a Warcraft 4 in the future, continuing the storylines of WC3 and WoW. And revealing the future or wrecking the world would make this prohibitively difficult to achieve, so I don't expect to see a WoW2. Not until after a WC4, at least.

Starcraft. Now, this IS an interesting topic. With Starcraft being considered one of the finest games of all time and a universe that has the potential to be very cool indeed (though it's rather underdeveloped with only a single game and expansion pack to its name), it's definitely a fertile ground for MMO exploitation. What form this will take is debatable, though. Let's look at the facts. SC2 is looking to be very good indeed (see an explanation why Blizzard will make it amazing, regardless of budget), and will doubtless expand the universe of SC a great deal. I expect to see it hit the shelves in late 2008, given the state it appears to be in at the moment seems quite advanced - but given the slow speed at which Blizzard are currently releasing information. This would give between 18 months and 2 years to my supposed release date for the next-gen MMORPG. Currently, the universe isn't particularly suitable to a WoW-style MMORPG, for a series of reasons. Firstly, basically everyone except one unit per race uses ranged weapons. Secondly, there's a lot of vehicles. Thirdly, unlike Warcraft in which battle raged across Azeroth, SC takes place across a multitude of different planets and thus there's no real defined setting for it. There's a defined feel, true, but that's not quite the same thing. Now, I fully expect SC2 to flesh things out a bit, completely intentionally making the universe more easily ported in the MMO world. About what I think they'll do with it - well, I'll mention that in a moment.

The only thing likely to reunite Korea.

Firstly, I have to dismiss out of hand the idea that they'll do another MMORPG set outside their existing franchises. I don't see them doing that at this stage, because there's not really much for them to gain by doing it. WoW didn't actually bear much resemblance to the Warcraft games I've played, true, but at least it was a recognisable name that I subconsciously associate with quality even if the Blizzard label were not present. I, along with many others, would be very surprised (and disappointed) if Blizzard did not use their existing franchises for their next gen MMOs.

So, what do I see coming, Starcraft or Diablo? Well, here's the thing: I see both of them coming but, perhaps surprisingly, I see a Diablo MMORPG arriving first. Why do I think that, when most people predict a Starcraft game coming first? Well, because I can't see Blizzard releasing a SC MMORPG. Nope, I see them releasing an MMOFPS. I see an MMOFPS as a logical progression of the current trend in online shooters to have character progression and large scale battles, as demonstrated by Battlefield 2 (and no doubt soon Quake Wars and Unreal Whatever It's Called). I don't consider vehicles to be a good addition to the current system of timer-based fighting that exists in MMORPGs, but they sure as hell work in BF2 and the like. Whether or not the players would get to use vehicles/play as the heavy zerg units, I don't know, because it could work either way.

In my eyes, the game would be about 50% PvP and PvE. The PvP would take place between the different races, like a glorified game of BF2. PvE would involve levelling up and raiding, too - but how could you raid in an FPS game? Well, quite easily really. Get together the 40 people, split into groups of five, and then zone into a large instanced zone full of NPC bots. Certain parts of the map would need certain classes to get past, like getting around the perimeter walls might need snipers to take out turret gunners, while clearing a minefield might need a player with a shield generator to cover a class capable of minesweeping. If you have a series of objectives that had to be hit in a co-ordinated strike between different groups, it would be quite complex as well. One group might have to hold a computer terminal for 2 or 3 minutes against an enemy assault, while their hacker brought down the target base's shields - at which point, a group that had taken over an artillery turret would have 30 seconds to shell the defense systems to cover the advance of the rest of the units, who would then have say 5 minutes to fight their way inside and shut down the defences, so that the other two squads could join them. If it were like CS, where a dead player is out for the duration of the game, it'd be quite exciting (and there'd be a use for medics), and it were done well it'd be really good fun. You could gear up like in WoW, where you get armour that increases your survivability (or perhaps contains functionality like limited auto-aim or IR detection or something), while weapons could do more damage or have bigger clips or better scopes etc. This would be a game with far more player skill than WoW currently has, and it would actually be truly revolutionary (and people would use gear due to personal preference for its features as much as stats, which would be nice). Games have tried this kinda thing before, with limited success, but for this to work you would need tens of thousands of players, so it would seem like a proper war was raging. Blizzard's name would guarantee that, and an MMOFPS would open up a whole new market to Blizzard - FPS games. They'd make a LOT of money out of it, and it'd be another feather in their collective caps.

Huxley (named after the author of Brave New World) is probably the first real attempt at a MMOFPS, but I only heard about it today when I typed the term 'MMOFPS' into Google. If this was a Blizzard game, even my cat would be excited. Not that he'd be any good at it: lack of opposable digits, you see. That's why your pets never beat you at Halo. Unless they're monkeys. Or children.

Diablo, however, I see as the logical progression of the fantasy MMO genre. 2010 will be a decade after Diablo II came out, so it's more than possible that Blizzard will stick to what they know and will bring out Diablo III as their next MMO. I'd like to think a SC MMO would be the next one they release, but I have a sneaking suspicion it's going to be Diablo. So thats what I'm going to predict. A Diablo MMO coming out in 2010, with a SC MMOFPS following in about 2012.

Only five years to wait to see how right I've been, then. Comments enabled on this page, so you're welcome to post what YOU think too.

Hektor.

Everquest 2, suddenly a worthwhile choice again?

About a week ago, I resubscribed my Everquest II account that I had played for one month upon release of Echoes of Faydwer about 4 months ago or so. I did it on a whim, I'll admit, but it has turned out to be quite interesting. Read my player diary for more information on that.

Anyway, the point of this post is not to talk about my experiences in EQ2, it is to talk about EQ2 in relation to the rest of the MMORPG market. Now, it is no secret that Everquest 2 was a bad game when it came out. Most of the players will freely acknowledge that, and in some ways the stigma of EQ2 appears not to have washed off even after nearly three years. However, the game has changed greatly since release. Some would argue it is for the worse, but the game has become much more solo friendly and casual-friendly, and the new development team have taken the game in a new direction after the relative success of Echoes of Faydwer. They are intentionally bringing back familiar EQ1 content (though usually with a fair few changes), and they've started to take longer over expansions to make them more polished. This can only be a good thing, as the new expansion recently announced brings back Kunark, probably the most distinctive and well-loved continent of the old Everquest. This isn't just good for nostalgic EQ1 players, because Kunark was well loved for a reason - it was awesome. If they can capture the forlorn grandeur of the original Kunark, this expansion will be an excellent experience for EQ2 players.

Everquest II - now officially not shit.

Now, that's slated for a November release, nearly six months away. In the meantime, however, the dev team are churning out monthly game updates. And, no, we're not talking little changes to balance and bugfixes in each update. Last Game Update saw the return of the Dark Elf city from EQ1, Neriak, and the starting zone Darklight Woods just outside it. This brings the number of starting cities up to 4, with at least another one slated for release in the expansion. And I have to say, I LOVE Neriak and the Darklight woods. They're both very characterful and well designed, with Darklight easily being my favourite starting zone in EQ2 so far. It's almost a shame when you zone out into the lvl 20+ zones around it (which have both been there since the start of EQ2), as it really shows how much the devs have improved since release. In the next Game Update, coming out four weeks later, the features include a complete revamps of AA trees (similar to talent trees in WoW), an addition of the 'dressing room' feature to allow you to preview what armour looks like when worn, as well as another entirely new zone - this one a high-level raid zone. Tradeskills are also being revamped.

Despite their hard work, the dev team have still not quite got around to implementing gravity.

Seeing this kind of workrate in the dev team is really something, and it really gives you a lot of hope for the future. If the Rise of Kunark turns out to be a really good expansion pack (and the devs keep working like this for the next 6 months), I imagine that EQ2 might honestly be a genuine challenger to WoW and AoC in terms of popularity. I'm not saying that the game is flawless, but I definitely think it is underrated. As said above, if you want a more detailed analysis of the game, read the first week of my play diary on the sidebar to the left.

Hektor.

Warhammer Online, eh?

To be brutally honest, I'm not particularly excited by Warhammer Online. I used to play the miniature based game when I was about 13 (though I played the sci-fi equivalent), so I do actually know the world quite well. It's certainly quite a detailed world, and it has probably more premise than most of the MMOs today are gifted with. It's just what they're doing with it that doesn't really convince me. Mostly because I think it looks horrible. I don't want to play a game that looks crap, basically. The screenshots I've seen really don't impress me. The two below, at full screen, both have horrible texturing. If you're going to the trouble of making an MMORPG, you may as well make it look nice.

There were concerns among the beta testers that the dwarves had an unfair advantage.

I'm also not sure I want to play a game that's so heavily geared around PvP. For the uninitiated, the idea of the game is to sack your opponent's city. You choose from one of three races on each side, and one of four classes in each of them (presumably they all play differently, giving you a total of 12 classes per side). You then engage your opposing faction - Empire vs Chaos, Dwarves vs Greenskins and High Elves vs Dark Elves - though you are allowed to move fronts and fight in a different area to your starting city. It's kinda like a big campaign, and the lines off battle ebb and flow depending on how well the PvP battles go. You also have integrated PvP and PvE on the same maps (on all the maps, possibly - I'm not sure on this). The combat seems interesting enough, though, as it's quite tactical and involves a lot of blocking. You can't move through someone, friend or foe, so the big tanks literally do act as meatshields for the casters and archers behind them. It could work very well, if done well, but I'm not convinced.

Van Helsing gets ready to make another god-awful movie.

What doesn't convince me is not the combat, however. I can't predict how that'll turn out, it could go either way. What concerns me is what you'll do in Warhammer Online. I get the impression the game may be very shallow, as PvP might get old quite quickly. I'm not sure what they're doing in the way of raid content or tradeskilling, if there is any. Their site is not as comprehensive, informative or well designed as the site for Age of Conan, which annoys me too. I might revisit this game in more detail when I get some gameplay movies of it, or a more comprehensive FAQ, but right now I see it as a gigantic Alterac Valley. And while I loved the concept of Alterac Valley, I wouldn't buy it as a stand-alone game.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

Hektor.

Age of Conan? But I don't like Arnold Schwarzenegger...

EDIT - As this page remains inexplicably popular on Google, I'm adding a link to my Age of Conan play diary and ongoing review here. (http://mmodusoperandi.blogspot.com/2008/05/age-of-conan-player-diary-level-1-20.html)

For those of you who aren't a fan of the Governator, his loincloth-clad form is officially not in this game. I can't speak for what he gets up to while ruling California, but one would hope that also does not involve him wearing a loincloth. I hope that gave you an unpleasant mental picture - if not, I've helpfully provided you with a physical one.

Scantily-clad Arnie NOT included in box. Probably the best advert for Age of Conan you will ever see.

But onto more pressing matters. My tip of the week is this - buy some shares in Funcom, because Age of Conan is going to be big. Why have I come to this conclusion? Well, these guys were behind Anarchy Online, which means that they're not new to this MMORPG malarkey. I'll admit, that's not a guarantee of success (just look at what EQ2 was like on release, followed by the rather abject failure of Vanguard - both made by the person who created the original EQ)They've also got some ideas that, while not revolutionary, certainly are a little different.

Realism = man in skirt shooting a bow at a bear. Apparently.

First up, it's meant to be fairly realistic. That's as in low fantasy rather than high fantasy. No elves and dwarves and stuff like that, just a lot of humans with sharp objects and anger management problems. Much like real ancient history, everyone seems to solve their problems by shooting them full of arrows or stabbing them through the face. This is a good thing, because it gives the game the grown-up feeling it is going for. There are scantily clad women in it, and lots of blood, and some quite impressive finishing moves and stuff. It's also meant to be quite morally grey, which is always slightly less patronising than:

'Help, I've lost my pet dog! Will you help me?'

A) Yes! I will risk life and limb to save your dog, for no reason other than the good of my pure pure heart!
B) No. Now I'm going to murder you and burn your village to the ground for asking. Then I'm going to eat your dog.

Probably the most unique feature of Age of Conan is the combat system, however, and it's here I'll stop mindlessly prattling away and actually voice my main concern about the game. It's going to be skill based in a big way. You actually aim your arrows, like in Oblivion. When you're fighting in melee, there's no auto-attack button, you kinda just hack around with your weapon and hopefully de-spleen some of your opponents. Or stab them through the face. I believe there is a low-end targeting system in there to make it bearable, but that unconfirmed at the moment. This might all sound hideously imprecise, but I've not seen it in action so I couldn't possibly comment. Fact is, though, for better or worse there will be a lot of player skill involved. The concept kinda reminds me of the combat in Fable, for some reason, though again I'll reiterate the fact I've never actually played it. Similarly, there's a spellweaving element for casters, which again is affected by the skill of the player involved.

I was going to say something funny, but instead I'm just going to gawk at how gorgeous Age of Conan actually looks.

Now this is either going to be awesome or completely rubbish. I don't see much in-between space with this game. If their combat system fails, it's going to be clunky and difficult to use, completely unplayable on any connection that isn't awesome, and generally a very-hit and miss affair open to a lot of exploitation. If it goes well, it'll be an exciting break from the norm that may well revolutionise how we play the genre. PvP will be nail biting and intense, and realistic to a new degree.

THIS IS SPAARTAAAAAA!

Oh, you're looking for Corinth? No problem. Three villages along, second on the right. No, don't worry about it, really. Happens all the time.

Time will tell which. Age of Conan is currently in beta testing, so hopefully it'll be a very polished game when it comes out. It has a lot of cool features I've not listed here, like player-made cities and siege PvP warfare between guilds, and PvP player levelling. If any of it catches your fancy, check out their FAQs on their website. Funcom are really aiming for the stars with this one, and if they deliver then they're going to have rewritten the genre. It's looking good so far, with impressive visuals and a lot of work going into animations, sound and armour suits too (as well as zone design), and it's definitely a game I'm going to buy on release. I'm tipping it to be the best MMORPG that will come out in the next twelve months, however, and I'm watching it very closely.

Hektor.

Age of Conan FAQ - http://community.ageofconan.com/wsp/conan/frontend.cgi?session=cwul1uhnwzgvtvfbw94v2ftd8m1gv3&func=publish.show&func_id=1029&table=PUBLISH&template=news_no_feature&selected=1029

The saga begins...

$1.5 billion. Random figure, perhaps? Well, not really - in fact, it’s very relevant to MMORPGS today, because that’s how much money World of Warcraft is taking in annually (assuming a few less than 9 million players at $15 a month). Yeah, I’d always thought MMOs were nice little moneyspinners, but when I did the maths I couldn’t believe it. Blizzard are taking $1,500,000,000 - if you were earning $10 an hour and working a 40-hour week, that’d take you just shy of 80,000 years to match. Nice little moneyspinner? I’d say so.

With the current levels of WoW subscriptions, the money brought in could buy a space shuttle within 15 months. They cost $2.1 billion.

Now, I don’t play WoW any more, but I think it’s still a good game. It’s far from perfect, but I admire Blizzard for taking the bull by the horns and COMPLETELY rewriting the MMO genre. It’s quite interesting, because I was reading the book ‘No Logo’ the other day (an interesting read), which talks about companies like Nike simply selling themselves and an image, rather than actually selling clothes. Blizzard haven’t quite reached that stage yet, but I seriously doubt WoW would have got the attention it did had it not been made by Blizzard, with their outstanding pedigree. This has an upshot, if you think about it. Blizzard know their name is valuable, as they’ve canned duff games before, even when they’ve spent years making them. Warcraft Adventures, anyone? Why this is good is simple. Starcraft 2. Blizzard are going to make that game awesome even if only to protect their brand name, no matter how much money they need to spend. It’s fairly clear they’re also going to be priming the SC universe for a MMO set there, too - but that’s another story. See ‘Blizzard’s next-gen MMO’ for my thoughts on that.
So, back to more immediate concerns. What’s going on in the world of MMOs? Well, at this moment there’s a lot up in the air that, frankly, could come down anywhere. The Burning Crusade came out a while ago now and with no other expansion looming for at least six months, WoW is probably at it’s most vulnerable point yet. It’s a veritable pensioner by now, coming up three years old in November. A few weeks ago now, the lead guild downed the end boss of the most recently added expansion, Illidan. As far as I’m aware, at the time nobody else had even seen him - the nearest competitors were nine bosses behind. The 20-30th ranked guilds (in the world, we’re talking guilds that dominate their sever here) were entire instances behind them. I don’t see Blizzard adding any new high-end raid content for a while, so basically these kiddies have ‘completed’ WoW. All that’s left is farming the instances to gear up, and then butchering people with it in PvP. Woo. Whether or not this the raids being available from expansion launch is a good thing is debatable when contrasted with the previous mode of gradually releasing new content when a significant number of high-end guilds had existing content on farm (see my debate on ‘raid progression’), but it does seem like WoW might be starting to falter a little. Should Blizzard be worried? Well, possibly, if they scan the horizon.

Burning Crusade, already been completed. Is WoW starting to falter or is it only getting stronger?

Two big names are on their way in. Age of Conan should be hitting stores in late October, while Warhammer Online is also chugging steadily nearer, slated for an early 2008 release date. LOTRO seems to be doing well enough, but we’ll give it a few months to see what happens with it. Everquest II also seems to be quietly growing in popularity after the announcement of the upcoming Rise of Kunark expansion scheduled for November, which aims to bring back arguably the best loved continent of the big daddy of all MMORPGS, the original EQ. If they do that well, you do wonder if EQ2 might enjoy a mini-renaissance. Given what the devs currently seem to be churning out, it’s certainly a possibility. Next post, I’ll go into the upcoming games in more detail.

Hektor, over and out.

Everquest II Player Diary Levels 40-45

In today's installment, Choraz marches past the level 40 mark and reaches the giddy heights of level 45, though the journey was not quite as rosy as it was from 30-40. To kick things off, I headed over to the Feerott to do a 'Heritage Quest' for the Stein of Moggok. A quick word of explanation here; Heritage Quests are multi-stage group/raid quests that reward you with a famous item from the original Everquest for completing them. The old Stein of Moggok was a powerful caster weapon which had the additional plus of making you look like you were an alcoholic. Sadly, the EQ2 version of the Stein (though still making you look like a drunkard) isn't a particularly good item given the level you need to be to earn it, but that didn't bother me too much - as a plate tank, I was hardly going to be using it anyway. No, I was doing the quest because you get an pretty respectable amount of valuable achievement experience for doing so.

In the end, though, I never managed to finish the quest. I'm not sure if my group had actually been formed from the ranks of the mentally disabled but, if not, they certainly fooled me. The first part of the quest involves killing 4 named ghostly ogres, who unfortunately are rare spawns. This in itself is nothing unusual, but the placeholder monsters roam as freely about the zone as do the actual quest mobs. So not only do you need to spend an eternity camping spawns, just like the old EQ1 days, you've actually got to track down the spawn every time you clear it. Now, despite knowing this, my group did not bother to recruit any scouts who could track the ogres. This meant that we were running about all over the place trying to find the placeholders (with half the group afk), and then when we did find them we had to get everyone together to actually fight the damn thing - the placeholders were triple heroic mobs, just like the actual quest mobs. Needless to say, the two hours of my life spent on that quest were wasted entirely. Thanks, SOE - I thought we were meant to have moved on from EQ1?

Despite this bad experience, however, I stayed in the Feerott until level 42 - while I do generally prefer the expansion zones over in Faydwer to the old-world zones, the level 40 Faydwer zone is still the Steamfont Mountains (and I'd spent quite a while there already). The visual style is okay, even quite good in places. Yes, it is just another forest twisted by evil forces, but I do quite like the tropical rainforest vibe. In the original EQ the zone was the starting area for the Ogres and some trolls, and it's the kind of place you could see them hailing from. Appropriately, there's quite a few troll/ogre type monsters running about alongside the infamous lizardmen and some quite cool plants. Beyond that, though, the choice of monsters is just like every other old-world EQ2 zone - bats, spiders and snakes. When compared to a game like World of Warcraft, the repetitiveness of the monsters you fight in the old-world zones is quite striking.

The quests, too, are the standard 'go kill x monsters' fare leave you feeling rather underwhelmed, seemingly no matter where you go in the zone. And there are a lot of areas to go - the Feerott another giant zone that stretches across two map pages, just like the Commonlands (and naturally you can't switch between the two halves of the map without physically walking there). The size of the zone does mean there's a lot of Achievement Experience up for grabs for exploring it, but it also leaves the place feeling a bit unfocused - it just seems like an endless series of monster-infested roads, trees and steams, all liberally dotted with ruined temples and lizardman camps. As there's no named creatures in most of the ruined temples/camps, there seems little gain to be had in bothering to clear them - it seems more sensible to have only put two or three into the zone, and actually made it worthwhile attacking them.

You also can't help but notice that the zone is PACKED with monsters, probably more densely than any other place I've seen in EQ2. Irritatingly, most of them are hostile. It's pretty much impossible to do anything in the zone without getting jumped by something, which is a real pain if you're harvesting or trying to run to one of the dungeons in the zone. What makes it worse is that many of the creatures in the zone are either linked, heroic, or both. A lot of the humanoid camps are linked heroics that would need 3-4 people to take on. Given the fact that there's little reward for clearing said camps, why would any group do it when they could just visit one of the two dungeons in the zone instead? All that the heroic content in the Feerott does is close off large areas of the map (and a lot of quest chains) to solo players, and result in incredibly annoying deaths when you're fighting/harvesting/walking and a triple heroic WHICH LOOKS EXACTLY THE SAME as all the other non-heroic monsters of that type. A lot of EQ2 veterans who played the original say the like the risk this brings, like in EQ1 where there were level 40 monsters wandering through level 20 zones, killing everyone that came near. I remember stuff like that well, like when I was crossing the Desert of Ro and I was killed by the Terrorantula. What's the difference between that and EQ2's version? The Terrorantula was FIFTY FEET TALL, that's the difference. You couldn't really miss it, and it was quite clearly something you wanted to avoid. In EQ2 triple heroics and non-heroic monsters share exactly the same name, level and model (and often spawn within a few feet of one another). By the time you realise your add was actually a triple heroic, you're dead.

Linked content, too, is badly utilised in that zone. You can quite easily accidentally aggro two mobs and suddenly find yourself fighting eight (and then die) because they were actually both parts of linked groups of four. You can't even escape from the spiders, thanks to their snare spells. But anyway, enough complaining. The zone has potential, but sadly it just demonstrates all the hallmarks of the appalling original EQ2 design philosophy that got this game lambasted on release. It needs a revamp, badly.

So, at 42, I headed to one of the two dungeons in the Feerott, the Obelisk of Lost Souls, whereupon things got even worse. You know how I said Fallen Gate was a rubbish dungeon? Well, this one is much worse. It's quite possibly the worst dungeon I've ever seen. It is HORRIBLE. Basically, when you zone in, everyone gets sent to different places in the zone. Obviously, split up, you can't do much because the monsters are Heroics. You can all end up in the same place by dying, or using an evac spell (sadly mine came at 44, not 42), because there's only one spawn point in the zone - right at the bottom. So I had to kill myself to meet up with the rest of my group, which is possibly the worst concept I've ever come across in my entire life. Believe it or not, though, things actually managed to go downhill from there.

So, from this spawn point at the base of the Obelisk, you have to do a quest to reach the dungeon proper. The quest involves killing five named monsters in the great big cavern you're in but, guess what? Yeah, they're not always up. Once again, you have to camp placeholders to get the quest target to spawn. As far as I'm aware, there is one other named monster in the cavern, but another group killed him before we could attack him ourselves. I spent the best part of an hour running around killing things, trying to make these 5 named mobs spawn, but at the end of it all I had one. Yes, that's ONE of the FIVE I needed. We saw a second one spawn, but another group got there first and killed him (naturally the dungeon isn't an instance). Thus, if you want to do the Obelisk, you have to spend two or three hours camping the cavern BEFORE YOU CAN EVEN START the dungeon. I can't even begin to imagine what the designers were thinking when they dreamed the Obelisk up, but I can't think of even one good thing to say about it. Even the visual style is awful, unless you really (and I mean REALLY) like purple. Seriously, if anybody was at all in the dark about why World of Warcraft completely destroyed EQ2 on release, all they need to do is to go and take a trip to the Obelisk.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, things picked up after I left the Feerott. I was Level 43 and I decided to go along with a Deathfist Citadel group searching for a plate tank in world chat. The Citadel is a very popular zone for the early forties, and it's easy to see why. It doesn't get to crowded, either, as it is an instance. I've been screaming out for instanced dungeons for a long time, and the Citadel simply reaffirms my opinions. Respawns are on long timers so, unless you mean to stay for hours, dead orcs will stay dead. Patrols will respawn fairly quickly, but they're only single mobs and easily dealt with. This is superb if you lose a party member and need a replacement, or if you need to go back and forth through the citadel for a quest (and you will). The amount of tedium it cuts out is unbelievable.

Secondly, the zone is a rather cool concept. When you first break in, you do a circle around the base of the keep and clear the orcs there. There's plenty of Achievement exp on grabs for exploring and killing named (expect 2-3 AA points if it's your first go), but while you do this you will find archers on the towers above shooting down at you. It's a nice touch, and leads logically to the next section where you head to the tops of the towers and clear the archers and siege operators from the catapult towers. Then once you've done that, you head into the interior of the castle proper. Overall, the design of the zone is excellent and the visual style is also good (I'm not sure if I prefer it to Crushbone, but it feels very orcy). The linear progression through the zone also helps keep it focused and exciting - there's no quibbling about where to go next, you just keep on fighting.

The third attractive feature is the challenge. Once inside the castle, the bosses are generally pretty hard. My first group wiped once on each of the first two bosses before wiping conclusively a little further in, and it's because the bosses aren't just the run-of-the-mill EQ2 bosses that act like tougher heroics. The first one were tackled was a Priest who will heal himself unless you interrupt him, and the second was an orcish Prince who had an AOE fear spell and a powerful melee attack. Both fights were far more interesting than any in the other EQ2 dungeons I'd visited, so I returned a second time with a better group later that day.

The rest of the bosses are equally cool and compelling, like the alchemist boss who mind controlled me and set me attacking the cloth-wearing caster classes in my group. There was also the Arena (the devs obviously having taken some inspiration from UBRS in WoW), where Emperor Fyst appears on a balcony to lecture you and then set his minion on you. The Arena Master was the penultimate boss and was great fun to fight, as he has an absolute ton of hitpoints and deals out a lot of damage. I'm pretty well geared for my level, but the priest was having to work overtime to keep me alive. Also, in addition to his punishing melee attacks the Arena Master has an AOE knockback attack that can knock players into the spikes mounted on the walls of the Arena and killing them instantly. That didn't come into the fight too much as we negated it by fighting him in a corner, but again it's treating the players with a bit more respect than most of the EQ2 dungeons do. The players aren't idiots, so it's just patronising to have the bosses as simple and straightforward as in most of the EQ2 dungeons I've played thus far.

The final boss in the instance was Emperor Fyst himself, back on his throne on the roof of the Citadel. He's surrounded by bodyguards, but the devs have not linked them together - thus, a skilled puller can get them one at a time. Once we'd cleared them, we took on Fyst himself. He turned out to be just as hard as the Arena Master was, with a similar knock-back attack. We had to pull him indoors, because if you fight him outside his knock-back attack will throw you off the roof of the castle, but even with his special attack negated he took an awful lot of punishment before he went down. When he did die, he dropped a frankly awesome sword that I had the good fortune to win. I left the zone extremely impressed, and not just because the previous dungeon had been the Obelisk of Lost Souls. Deathfist Citadel is a fun, well-designed zone with excellent exp, AA and drops, but best of all it's a zone that actually challenges your player skill. Well worth a visit for every EQ2 player.

Now, as DFC is in the original EQ2 zones, you're probably wondering how it can contrast so much with the Obelisk mentioned above. The answer is simple - DFC was revamped in a game update somewhere around the release of Echoes of Faydwer, turning an underused zone into an excellent and fun one. Thus, the zone is the work of the NEW dev team, rather than the old one. That's why it rocks. I only hope they continue to revamp the dungeons, starting with the Obelisk and then Fallen Gate. They also added new tradeskilling recipes using Blood Iron Ore that drops in DFC, giving crafted armour sets to all classes (and it's damn good stuff, too). So, full credit to the dev team for DFC as it's an excellent zone, and I'd particularly like to see the light respawns continued in other zones.

After I finished DFC I was about a third into level 44, so I headed to Lavastorm to hit 45. This zone is a mixed bag, to be honest. Visually, it's excellent. It's an island volcano, with fire raining from the sky and lava and heat haze everywhere. It all looks superb, and you genuinely feel that you've made progress from the newbie zone level 1 when you land there and take a look around. The zone itself, though, is much like I imagine Zek used to be. As the original level cap in EQ2 was level 50, both Lavastorm (and Everfrost) seem designed as outdoor dungeons for high end players to stomp about in. Most of the content is double or triple heroic, so you can't get far by yourself, and there's not many quests. Those that there are involve killing a LOT of goblins or whatever, with nothing interesting about them. The monsters are reasonably varied, though you'll have seen all the models before, but overall the zone does put across the feeling of raw and untamed energy brilliantly and I'm willing to forgive it a lot for that. At the very top sits a dungeon, Sol's Eye, another returning zone from EQ1, but I wasn't able to get near it (though I intend to return in five or ten levels or so). In the end, you have to conclude that Lavastorm suffers in the same way that the Feerott does - it's a product of the old-style EQ2 design school. It's intended to serve a purpose that's now defunct - nowadays level 50s just want to level on up to the new level cap, so they don't need a place to pass time and hunt level 50 heroics. EQ2 has changed with the new expansions, and Lavastorm (and the Feerott) need to be updated to reflect that.


All in all, level 40-45 was okay. It had its high points (Deathfist Citadel) and it's low points (Feerott and Obelisk of Lost Souls), but most was just average (everything else). At this point my internet connection went south as far as gaming goes, so I took a three month hiatus. In the next entry, exploring some of the content of the first expansion, Desert of Flames.

Everquest II Player Diary Level 35 - 40 (Part Two)

Following on from my visit to Nektropos Castle, I headed back to Steamfont for a while. Continuing the pattern of the content from level 30-40 being excellent, Steamfont was a lot of fun. It's a zone from the original Faydwer of Everquest 1, the homeland of the gnomes and their city of Ak'Anon. Though I did quite like the old one, this version is far better. Right from the outset it hits you with bright colours and sunny landscapes, very much in the vein of the Enchanted Lands. The zone is reasonably large as well, which yields plenty of standard and Achievement exp for exploring it.

If only they'd released The Terminator in Norrath, the gnomes would have known this was going to happen.

While the quests are the standard fare, the setting really makes the zone impressive. There is a lot of green grass and impressive mountains, mixed in with geysers and enormous cogwheels and other machinery that suggest a certain untamed power to the landscape (much like the original Steamfont). The best part of all is the Gnomish outpost, though. It's called Gnomeland Security, which elicited a smile, but it's a very colourful and characteristic outpost that is far more memorable than most of the others in the game. The gnomes are also generally insane, which is both amusing and endearing. There's one particular quest where, if you make the right conversation choices, you can insist that a quest NPC squirts hot burning oil in both of your eyes - and he promptly obliges, blurring your vision for a couple of seconds and knocking a chunk of your health off. EQ2 generally isn't a particularly amusing game, but that bit nearly had me falling off my chair with laughter, simply because I couldn't believe they'd actually put it in.

Gnomeland Security headquarters, where you can insist on having flaming oil squirted into your eyes - a must for tourists or visitors alike.

The monsters in the zone are initially kobolds, minotaurs and the local wildlife, but later you get to tangle with the weaker renegade clockworks (who have taken over Ak'Anon and turned it into Klak'Anon), and finally some weird bird-man things that were quite high level and not something I wanted to tangle with pre-45. By this point you'll have seen most of the models in at least one place before, but they are still quite well animated and the rest of the zone makes up for the repetition of models. There's not really much else to say about it: it's well worth a visit.

'Your rock is leaking,' Choraz pointed out helpfully.

Anyways, I spent up until about mid-level 38 in Steamfont, only leaving because someone was recruiting a Runnyeye group. Steamfont is one of the best zones I've encountered thus far, so kudos to the dev team for making it - there's not much I'd change about it, which is rare.

Runnyeye is cool. 'Nuff said.

Runnyeye, too, was a lot of fun. Though people kept leaving and I literally spent upwards of four hours in there, I generally had a pretty good group in there and I thought the zone was reasonably well-designed too. It's located in the Enchanted Lands and is set into a mountain, and it has a good visual style right from the outset. It's nothing particularly special, but it has enough colour and consistency to make it effective. The fact the tunnels in the zone often head upwards and downwards also gives you a feel that you're actually working your way towards something, so even though the surroundings don't really change the dungeon manages to get around the problems of unclear progression that most other EQ2 dungeons seem to have. There's generally only one path to take, so it's a question of fighting through the place and that's actually quite fun.

Eyes are probably the most squishy and vulnerable part of a person, so being a giant eye must suck. Especially with a throne that spiky. If he's not careful, he'll have his eye out (ho ho ho...oh, I'll get my coat).

After you clear the main dungeon, there's two instances for you to do. There's some storyline about a rebellion in the Evil Eyes that I didn't really understand or care about, but the first instance involves killing the Runnyeye chieftain and the second one involves killing the big old Evil Eye in charge of the place. The fights were straightforward enough - the chieftain was a basic ring event with a couple of waves of monsters before he appeared, the evil eye boss was a straight fight - but the loot wasn't particularly good for us. Still, running the dungeon got me a lot of exp and AA, and I was basically level 40 when I'd finished it. And even after spending four hours in the place, I'd run it again. Much like the rest of the content from 30-40, it's very good.

This is a bridge. Sadly there's not much funny or interesting to say about it, beyond the fact you get ambushed by 5 goblins when you try and cross it (basically, this is as far as I could get into the instance solo when I went on my screenshot trip).

Naturally, it's not perfect though. Firstly, many of the quests would involve running the dungeon twice. Why do that? Because of the limited level range of each dungeon, you'd have to run the same place twice in about 48 hours, which is tedious. Secondly, there's a lot of named monsters that aren't up most of the time, instead with placeholders there. Just have them spawn every time, and turn down their loot drop frequency if you have to. I don't want to run the place twice with the same character, so I want to get the full experience on one run. And why not instance the entire thing and keep respawns to a minimum? In EQ2 it's very annoying if a groupie drops from the group, because it means you have to use an evac spell to get back to the entrance then fight right the way back to where you were. That can often take half an hour, and it's a real problem that can spoil things big time. Instancing would solve a lot of problems, and it really needs to be implemented.

Overall, though: level 35-40 was a very enjoyable experience with some excellent zones to play through. I just hope level 40+ maintains the same high standards.

Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 35-40 (Part 1)

This entry is split into two sections as it includes a great deal of zones. The dungeons of Nektropos and Runnyeye are discussed in some detail, along with Zek and Steamfont, which is far too much for a single entry.

As an aside, at level 35 Choraz passed the point where his namesake in EQ1 called it a day. I decided to celebrate by giving myself a surname. You can do this from level 20+, and essentially it just adds a surname to your character name. The game also contains Prefix and Suffix titles, the former earned from Achievement Experience trees or from city status, the latter from killing a lot of one type of creature (Hunter of Undead etc). Nice to have that extra layer of customisation of your character, so I thought I'd mention it even though it doesn't directly affect the gameplay.

I popped over to Steamfont at level 35 and killed a few things, but I spent more time there around level 39 so I'll discuss it in Part 2 of this entry. I visited Zek for a level or so too, to see what it was like. Impressions were mixed, but probably on balance good. The zone is quite distinctive. You land in a little outpost that is under siege from the orcs, which gives it a very warlike feel, and the rest of the zone is all orcs (Deathfist Citadel is at the far side of the zone). There are a number of quests in the outpost, at least three of which involve killing orc grunts. This is fine if you get them all at once, downright annoying if you miss one and have to do it again. Most of the orcs were blue when I got there, so even the linked mobs were soloable in the early part of the zone. I finished a number quests, then moved on to other areas. This is when I began to experience some annoyance with the zone.

This is the 'newbie' area (the fort is the player outpost), but basically the entire zone looks like this. Except with more orcs - no idea where the blighters are hiding in this screenshot, because there's normally loads.

Firstly, there's a LOT of orcs here, often very close together and with patrols. You'll often get attacked by a second orc when you're fighting, which might spell doom. I don't mind that, personally, but often the wanderers are heroics and that is just irritating. The respawn point is also STUPID, as it's on one side of the map and you have to basically fight ALL the way around the map to get back to your original position if you die anywhere near Deathfist Citadel. That needs to be fixed, pronto. Generally, though, there's a lot of heroics about. You know my thoughts on group content - it should be in out of the way places, ideally dungeons/instances, and the outdoor zones should be 99% soloable content (if you're skilled enough to single-pull it). It's quite a frustrating zone to solo in, therefore, but there is good Achievement experience from exploring it. Visually, the zone is...well, red. Lots of reds. It doesn't look bad, though. It gets depressing after a while, but it is meant to be the Orcish Wastes. And it does look like a wasteland, and it does look unique. So while it can be a little ugly and depressing, I guess that's the point. It could just do with being made even more solo friendly (it used to be ridiculously hard before it was made easier, but they haven't gone far enough).

Deathfist Citadel. Complete with lovely pink fireworks towards the rear of the castle.

I hit level 36 in Zek, and halfway to 37 I found someone putting together a group for Nektropos Castle so jumped right in (despite hating basically everything about the zone it was situated in, Nektulos Forest). Turns it that this was a good move. Though Nek castle was also an EQ2 release zone, it's actually very good and contains most of the elements I've been moaning about when I covered Fallen Gate or Ruins of Varsoon (and Crushbone, to a lesser extent). It's frustrating to know that the team were clearly capable of making good instances, but they just didn't...well, most of the time.

Most important point first. Nektropos castle is an instance. You go up to the big, ruined castle looming up ahead and click on the door, then you're in your own private instance. Bam. It's that simple. Inside, the courtyard is full of ghostly dogs and some gargoyles, with several doors leading off it. The graphical direction is nice, as the creepy castle feel is well-done, though there's too many small and pointless rooms. A minor complaint is I think it should be more grand, but that's only a small thing.

Nektropos castle - usually dark and gloomy, but shown here with lovely ambient lighting from the fearsome spells of my companions. And who said fighting never solved anything?

However, the zone isn't perfect. One of the big problems is that you won't know where to go unless you've got someone who's been there before. We did a full run with a couple of people who had (and had EQ2 Atlas), but it still took us three hours to do. With an inexperienced group, it could literally take all day. Anyway, we went around and killed a load of ghosts and zombies, when we killed a named mob and a ghostly woman appeared in front of us. She told us the story of her father, Lord Everling, and how he had her trapped in eternal torment in the basement or something. Point is, it caught my attention and we were given some direction.

Off we went, looking for the keys to progress. It didn't take long, as we knew where they were. You have to click the head of a boar and take the eye out, then run across to the other side of the castle and put it in another boar head, which gives you a key. Then you find another eye in a box somewhere and run back to the first boar head, which lets you open secret passages in the wall. It's a lot of running about (and fighting through monsters), true, but you feel like you're solving a mystery and unlocking the secrets of the zone. It's quite rewarding, really. Having said that, a group of complete beginners would never know where to go - the directions of your ghostly guide need to be more specific to keep it enjoyable for those without the benefit of previous experience.

Even the undead need time to relax and chill out with some chess or a quick game of pool, so every good evil master villain will install games room for his faithful zombies. I mean, it's not like their medical insurance costs much, is it?

Once you get through the secret passageways you find yourself in one of five towers that lead to the ramparts and some very confusing passageways that run between them. By the point, the castle is looking far more warped than it did at the start. Everything is misshapen and there are some neat perspective tricks employed. Gives the zone lots of character and makes you feel like you're getting closer to your objective. The next part, you have to kill the five daughters of Everling and take their necklaces so you can progress onwards to the basement. I really liked this part of the zone, as there are diaries and stuff over the place that show the last few days of the sisters before they were murdered. Then you have to fight their ghosts/zombies, and it's quite effective at giving the zone an evil feel (as the bedrooms are still bedrooms and the girls were quite young). Only problem is, again, there's not much direction as you can go to any tower in any order. There should be a set order you do the towers in, with each of the sisters getting harder to beat. You can get lost rather easily here, and end up clearing a tower you've already cleared (which takes a while). Going round in circles is always frustrating and can break the interest that was building in the mystery story. A rather impressive Epic level 40 monster appears in one of the towers, too, but it's permarooted so it's not too dangerous. Dunno why it's there, but it's cool.

If you're leading a group through a dungeon, this is NOT what you want to see when you round a corner. Trust me on this.

And then down to the basement, to free the woman from Everling. There are some nice monsters in there, with some strange animated dolls and the weird manakin that controls them, then to your ghostly guide. Who promptly betrays you ('my father will reward me for bringing him fresh subjects for his experiments!'). I didn't see that coming, so I thought it was good. Anyway, you kill her and some other guy who was apparently possessing her, then go down to Everling. I was expecting something great, but Everling is just a bloke in a robe. Again, boss visual design sucks (and the fight was also quite easy), so sort it out please. Anyway, cool zone overall and well worth a visit. Gained a level and a half, lots of Achievement experience, and had a really good time. The zone just needs less freedom, as it's too easy to get lost.

Part 2, Steamfont and Runnyeye.

Everquest 2 Player Diary Level 30-35

At level 30, I headed over to the Enchanted Lands. It's easy enough to get to - just like much of the EQ2 zones from release, you just run to either Nektulous or Thundering Steppes dock and click a Mariner's Bell. This is easy, but I'm really not a fan - I think there's something to be said for running your way across a zone, and having them blend together like a coherent landmass (like Faydwer is and hopefully Kunark will be). The original coders for EQ2 clearly just took the most memorable zones from EQ1 and didn't bother with the rest, having areas of water where interconnecting zones used to be. The Enchanted Lands used to be Rivervale and the surrounding area in EQ1, but they seem to have emerged from the Shattering quite well.

Enchanted Lands is a lovely, pleasant place that would be ideal for a picnic. I wouldn't leave the lid off the Coke bottle, though - the wasps here are not to be trifled with.

Overall, I have to say I liked the Enchanted Lands a lot. A lot of players I know say it's their favourite zone, and I'd rank it right up there with Darklight and Neriak. Why is it so good? Well, first up, it's a very bright and sunny zone. It's very pleasant to level there, even if it is infested with giant, hostile wildlife. It's got a very distinct visual style that's almost ripped straight out of the Lord of the Rings movies, perhaps understandably as Rivervale was the home of the halflings. So it looks nice, with some striking features like a huge wooden palisade wall and some beautiful lakes and mountains. Some of the monsters are quite cool and unique too, like weird half-raccoon half-scorpion things. The actual design of the zone is excellent, with long quest lines that are generally fun and varied, and keep you exploring the zone. Think Darklight, but twenty levels higher.

The local YMCA offered their help to the EQ2 art team, who promptly found the Enchanted Lands bathed in beautiful shades of pink that 'really brought out the feminine side of those rugged mountains'.

That's not to say it doesn't have flaws, though. While most of the monsters aren't linked, which makes it nice and solo friendly, there are some hostile triple heroics (read, 4-5 player content) wandering around in quest areas and in general travel areas. What's worse is that they look just like the normal half-raccoon half-scorpion monsters, so you can get attacked by one and not realise that it's the particularly dangerous variant. In that case, you're dead before you can get away. Similarly, the villagers and the goblins are also heroics - linked heroics at that. I never really understand the mentality behind that, because it means you need a full group to tackle them. I'm not a fan of full group quests in open-air zones, because most people tend only to group for dungeons. Content that needs to be duoed, perhaps. But not linked Heroic mobs, because it's instadeath for anyone who runs into them (and there's no skill involved in trying to single-pull individuals from the group). Also, there's a couple of quests to kill spearfish - I had to spend forty five minutes swimming up and down the coast to try and find the dozen or so I needed to kill, because they're rare spawns. Quest targets should not be rare spawns, or it just makes things frustrating. Not to mention the ocean floor has at least one named (heroic) foe who will attack you as you swim by in search of spearfish - and he isn't too far from the docks/outpost, either. Finally, a very small quibble: there's no mender in Enchanted Lands. To repair your gear you have to mariner's bell to Nektulos Docks and back again. It's not far, but it's just a bit silly to have to go through two loading screens for it.

"Don't leave your stuff around Hobbiton, friend. I once left a ring there by accident and by the time I came back for it the little bastards had thrown it in a volcano." - Sauron

I spent around three levels in the Enchanted Lands, then went to the Ruins of Varsoon. Varsoon is a dungeon in the Thundering Steppes, predictably enough the ruins of something or other ruled over by a chap called Varsoon. Level 33 was towards the upper limit of the dungeon, so it was quite an easy ride for me, though it might be a bit of a challenge to clear the entire zone and instance with a party of level 30s. Overall, I thought the zone was mediocre. It had some good points, and some bad points.

First up, visual style. The entrance is not particularly visible and I think a ruined outpost of the scale of Varsoon should have a more impressive entrance. Once inside the early parts of the zone, things don't really improve. You're in some tunnels and caves that are frankly ugly at best, fighting some bats and sludges and the like. There's also a big named spider we killed, but there's very little to comment on in the early part of the zone. It's ugly and the monsters are boring, despite a few named mobs dotted around. Having said that, if they made the place look a bit prettier I wouldn't mind it so much because it serves as a nice entrance zone that can be soloed by someone without a group, but then it should lead to an instance which would be the Ruins of Varsoon proper and the group content.

You want dull and dreary? Well, evidently SOE thought you did.

After fighting your way through the tedious entrance zone, you find yourselves in some man-made tunnels. The feel of Varsoon is very much an underground lair of an evil necromancer, which comes across quite well once you get to the middle part of the zone. Golems wander the halls, with factories for making the creatures dotted about, and there are plenty of undead and vicious books in the libraries to amuse yourselves with. I quite like the concept of Varsoon, I have to admit, but the execution is lacking. The monsters are all pretty samey. Like skeletons and featureless brown golems? Good, because you'll be seeing a lot of them, almost to the exclusion of all else. The zone looks dull too, because the walls are browny and look depressing and dreary, but not in a good way (like Nektulos castle). Instead, it seems like the textures for the zone basically couldn't be arsed. Yes, it is a dungeon from the release of EQ2, but it looks boring. You think Varsoon himself will look cool, once you get to the end of the instance? Nope, he's just a ghostly figure. In fact, he's an average sized, featureless ghostly character. It's such an anti-climax to reach him in his instance, because he looks EXACTLY like all the other ghosts you've been fighting since like level 5. Show me one WoW dungeon where the end boss is exactly the same model as common grind fodder and I'll give you a fiver.

Already smeared from head to toe, Choraz's ogre companion challenged him to a bout of mud wrestling.

Anyway, the zone is good exp and has some nice loot in it. I had a good group and I had fun there, gaining a level and a bit, but I wouldn't really want to go back. There are a lot of named mobs, but as there's no instances they aren't always up (and if they are you may have to compete for the kill with another group). This is stupid. Make it instanced, and have every named mob up in each instance. Then you don't have to mill about for ages, looking for a rare-spawn named quest mob that only one of your group needs. Reduce the frequency of their good loot drops if need be, but right now the system is infuriating. I feel Varsoon seriously needs a revamp because while it's good loot and exp (normal and Achievement), it's neither exciting nor atmospheric. And it's a shame, because it should be. If it was the first dungeon I ran in EQ2 and I had a bad group, it might put me off that game. And I say that honestly - really, the designers should pay at least as much attention to lower level instances than high-level ones.

The most colourful part of the zone. I shit you not.

And after Varsoon, I had passed level 35. Next entry, Zek and Nektropos Castle.

Everquest II Player Diary - Level 25-30

After hitting level 25 with my adventures in Fallen Gate, I decided to broaden my horizons somewhat and travel to the new zones in the Echoes of Faydwer expansion. Though these zones range from levels 1-70 (you're perfectly able to hit max level without ever leaving the new continent, if you so desire), I'd already played a character to level 20 in Faydwer in the one month I played the game on release of EoF. I only decided to head back when there would be new content for me to discover, in this case, Crushbone Keep.

To get to Faydwer, you catch a boat from either the Thundering Steppes or Nektulous Forest. Unlike the zones in the original game, you can't simply click a Mariner's Bell - you actually have to catch the boat. However, the dev team have made this relatively painless and I feel it is actually a wise choice by them. The boat is on something like a five minute timer, which is enough not to inconvenience a player too much but is sufficiently long to give you a genuine sense of travel. I hope they continue the good work when Kunark is released, and bring back the enormous ships used to travel to Kunark in EQ1. At the end of the day, travel between continents should not be instantaneous (unless you have the wizard or druid teleport spells), because it takes away some of the sense of scale that a good world should enjoy.

Choraz broke out the popcorn and watched the ships playing chicken.

On arrival, you land in Butcherblock. This is a level 20-30 zone, so it's pretty dangerous to run through until you hit at least the minimum level. It's a nice introduction to Faydwer, as it is a real visual treat in some areas (the dock being one of them). I picked up level 26 by grinding blues here for half an hour after I finished Crushbone, and I'm also quite a fan of some of the monsters. The spiders here are different models to the ones in the original EQ2 zones, which is nice - especially as they look pretty damn unpleasant now. The gorillas are well detailed, with nice fighting and death animations. The rock elementals are the same models as before, but when you're fighting one that's ten feet tall you'll appreciate that they are quite impressive. There's also a lot of Kobolds, but they're generally linked groups or Heroics so I didn't attack them. The Aviaks (birdmen) were also nice to see, as they too were nicely animated. Only complaint I had about the zone as a whole were that some areas were far too grey and rocky. At least make the ground grassy, and then you have a very attractive zone indeed. Anyway, kudos to the developers for their work on Butcherblock. Nice zone.

In the grassy areas, Butcherblock is a very striking zone.

From Butcherblock I went to the Greater Faydark, a zone I'm pretty familiar with from playing my wizard there a few months ago. I'm not as big a fan of it as I was Butcherblock, because it's quite a dark zone and I'm not a fan of the design, which uses a lot of different levels. This makes the zone a nightmare to navigate, as you'll frequently run towards the place you're looking for, only to find your path blocked by a river or a cliff face. Then you'll have to follow it for two or three minutes until you find a way around it, then head back to your intended destination. It can get very frustrating indeed, which is a shame as the zone is well-designed in other aspect. The problem gets a little easier at higher levels where you can survive the damage entailed with falling off a cliff, but it's still rather irritating. Maybe the new minimap will cure some of the problems, but the current in-game maps really are totally inadequate to displaying multi-levelled terrain. Choraz also couldn't use Kelethin, as he was an evil character, but the city is okay. It's all one zone, which ranks it about Qeynos and Freeport, but it's not as well-designed as Neriak in terms of layout nor visual style. Currently still the best city for a good character to start in, though.

Clan Crushbone lies in one corner of the Greater Faydark, and contains an awful lot of orcs. The initial camps of orcs provide some decent soloing opportunities, despite being linked. Then there's some higher-level group content outside the castle, and finally the castle zone itself - Crushbone Keep, which is where I was heading. Inside the castle are three levels of orc-filled fun, the top level containing an instance for players in their late twenties. There is actually another instance for level 50+ people in the castle, but Choraz didn't fancy visiting that so I'm not going to cover it.

'That's one big tree', Choraz thought.

First thing to say about the zone is that I liked the look. It looked like it had been partially inspired by Blackrock Spire, with lots of fire dotted around, and it looks good. It's definitely darker than the original Crushbone of EQ1, but in a good way - it's grown up. However, I do have some quibbles. The orcs are too samey. Remember Blackrock Spire, with the robed caster orcs and the leather clad assassin orcs with hoods and daggers (actually dual-wielded Brutality Blades - nice!), as well as the warrior orcs? Well, there isn't that much variation here. It's a shame. Yes, not all the orcs fight in exactly the same way, but we could do with a lot more graphical differentiation between them. Secondly, I'm going to complain about the layout of the place again. Before I begin, I'd like to say that the zone is a step up from Fallen Gate and it doesn't annoy me anywhere near as much, but it could still have been done better.

Choraz started to wonder if he had taken a wrong turning on the way to the hairdressers.

First up, the zone isn't an instance. I don't see why not. There's plenty of content outside the castle for people to share, so the castle should be an instance (alternatively, make the upstairs an instance with an entrance right by the front door and keep the other two floors as is). I also think the progression isn't very logical. I'm all up for having a zone where you can choose to fight in different areas if you so desire, but it should be structured that you can choose a path from the entrance and then fight down it until it reaches its logical conclusion. The EQ2 dungeons are too open-ended, which makes them more like an outdoor zone except with a group - instances should be a different type of play to that.

Once you actually reach the instance (the D'Vinnian Throne), things get rather confusing. You've got to run all over and kill various Orcs to get keys to open various doors so you can challenge D'vinn at the end of it. This is a silly idea. Obviously, this means that there IS a logical progression in the way you do the zone, because you have to kill the orcs in a certain order. Thus, get rid of the puzzle element and make the zone a single straight line with a series of boss fights to unlock the doors the D'vinn. The visual style of the zone is, again, okay - but it doesn't get steadily more impressive as you approach D'vinn. You should be able to tell how far you are from the end by looking at the decoration of the room you're in. There's also no set-piece battles. Think of Blackrock Spire, with the little arena you have to endure before you fight the orc leader Blackhand. Given the way the zone ends, this would have been an ideal thing to implement.

Anyway, after all the messing around we finally reached D'vinn, who promptly buggered off after he called in Vindicator Crush, the final boss. Crush's pretty easy, really, but he does look pretty damn badass and he dropped some nice loot. I think it's a shame that the encounter wasn't done more to the tune of the UBRS encounter with Blackhand mentioned above, where Victor Nefarius looks on in a similar way to how D'vinn does. Only thing was that the room design was much more appropriate in World of Warcraft, whereas in EQ2 the final room is basically like all of the rest of the previous rooms. It makes the whole thing feel less cinematic and that much less of an achievement to do.

At the end of the day, I finished the Crushbone instance at level 30 after having spent about 5 hours in the zone - mostly because every time I managed to assemble a full group, someone dropped out and we had to replace them. I enjoyed it, but I do think that there is wasted potential there. I found the World of Warcraft dungeons far more fun to play, and while Crushbone was not unenjoyable I think it could have been excellent. I'd love to see Everquest 2 become the best MMORPG on the market in every way, so I really hope some of the designers upgrade it a bit.

I will say that Crushbone did not really feel like grinding, as I gained the levels without really thinking about it, and I enjoyed the grouping. I learned how to tank properly in the zone, and a couple of times I looked at my experience bar and realised I'd gained half a level without realising it. I'm also a fan of the new expansion zones, as they are much better designed than those from the original EQ2 lands. Playing the game on Extreme graphical settings (which I can do when I'm soloing), the game looks beautiful. It's just a shame there's still a few issues with the zones that stop EQ2 from being completely brilliant. Next entry, up to level 35 - Enchanted Lands and maybe Ruins of Varsoon. We'll see.

Everquest II Player Diary - Level 20-25

At level 20, a character can start their armour quests (AQs). These involve a series of six quests, each giving you a single piece of class-specific armour. I had mine finished by level 25 - the first three quests were soloed, then I duoed with an assassin to do the remaining three (calling in a healer for the final one). My main complaint is that I really resent having to look up quests on sites like Allakhazam to know what I'm doing or where the monsters I'm meant to kill are, so I was disappointed that the quest descriptions just told me which zone to go to and the names of the monsters I had to slay. Some of the zones are pretty big and so you're unlikely to find your targets by blundering into them, so some directions would have been nice - I always feel like I'm cheating when I look something up online, and I feel it doesn't add to the immersion of the game. Frankly, I shouldn't have to do it. I don't mind spending 5 minutes finding a location 'in the East of Nektulos Forest', but these quests expect you to know where a small group of monsters spawn in a very large zone, without any directions whatsoever.

Choraz paused to wonder how exactly a wolf managed to get to level 23. Then he stabbed it to death, allowing him to pass an arbitrary experience value and somehow increase in power. Ah, the glamourous life of an adventurer.

The armour you receive is pretty good, particularly if you've got a horrible patchwork of armour on, but I found myself replacing it only five levels later. You see, even the basic player-made armour at 30 is better, and the mastercrafted player-made armour you get at level 22 is far superior to it. However, you're talking around 10pp for a set of mastercrafted gear, and I've only got about 5pp in the bank even at 35, so mastercrafted gear is more for rich players with a level 70 as their main character.

If I were a level 70 creating an alt, I'd not bother going through the hassle of doing it - but for a first-time player, they're pretty good. Having said that, if I was the EQ2 dev team I'd make the entire quest line soloable at level 22 or so. It's pretty gut-wrenching to throw away gear you spent a day questing for only 24 hours later. I also find it disappointing there's no more armour quests after the ones at 20 - I'd like to see a new set every ten levels to upgrade the old set, each time giving a reward better than normal tradeskilled armour but not as good as the mastercrafted stuff. And I'd make it look different, depending on what city I got the quests from (though with the same stats). I think it'd give the different cities some real character and give the game a real sense of advancement when compared to just going to the broker and buying the new set of player-made gear every ten levels.

Anyway, these quests took me all over. Firstly over to the commonlands, then down into the sewers below Freeport (I pity the man who tries that quest without a map), then a lot of killing stuff in Nektulos Forest. Nektulous is, again, not one of my favourite zones, though I do like the visual style of the zone (though I think I might get prtty sick of dark forests at this rate) - this time because you can't run across the zone in a straight line, as they've put a lot of pointless (and unclimbable) geography in to block your path. You can travel from one part of the zone to another from the griffon stations, but the griffon models are atrocious and the griffons stations aren't put by the zone entrances either, so you have to wade through the forest to get to them. The zone does a good job of making you feel like you're in a dangerous forest, but it almost feels too big and too crowded. There are monsters literally everywhere and the zone is massive, so I think it could take a leaf out of the book of WoW's design team and be built more along the lines of Darkshire. I'd have the zone a bit smaller, with two friendly outposts - one reachable by running for a couple of minutes through fairly non-dangerous parts of the zone from the Darklight and Commonlands zone lines, and the other at the docks. I'd make the first outpost a small town under siege by the nasties in the forest, then have Nektropos Castle at the far end of the zone(maybe on a high hill visible from the outpost), with the critters getting harder as you get nearer to it. Like a proper movie where you travel a dangerous, winding path to travel to the dark castle dominating the landscape.

Choraz began to regret accepting the 'Renovate my House' questline from the master of Nektropos Castle.

Aside from armour quests, the other notable thing I did between levels 20 - 25 is to run my first dungeon, the Fallen Gate. It was originally the outlying parts of a certain city called Neriak that has recently reappeared in the game, and it's packed with undead. Running it with a good group was fun, but I feel the place does suffer as it's not an instance. On several occasions we found bosses we wanted to kill had already been killed by someone else, so when we found bosses that were up we had to hurry in case someone else came up and stole them from us. Isn't too conducive to completing the zone at your own pace. In terms of overall character, the zone is a cool concept. It's full of rebel Dark Elves, with one quest line (given by a ghostly halfling) reliving the events five hundred years ago that caused the tunnel to collapse. It has quite a dark and unpleasant feel, with one quest being to find a missing halfling that ends when you find the unfortunate victim as a skeleton sitting in a pot after having fought through a legion of gruesome zombie feasters. The loot can be good too, which is always a nice bonus.

As always, though, that's not the full story. Guess what I'm going to complain about? Yeah, you got it first time, it's the zone design. Even the zone-in starts badly - it's just a gate, set into the the end of a sandy canyon in the Commonlands. Not much indication a major dungeon lies behind it. Come on - this was once the entrance to Neriak! You can see what the current entrance looks like in the diary entry on levels 1-10, so why is this one so crap? And why does it look so pristine after 500 years of wear and tear (and why does it look so ridiculously out of place)? I want to see something massive and imposing and dark and grim and ruined, surrounded by broken statues that showed signs of fighting five centuries ago. I want to see some low-level undead around the entrance, warning you of what you're going to be facing. Right now, the entrance looks like it was cobbled together by one graphic artist in his lunchbreak (just like the rest of the Commonlands).

In an interesting twist on traditional fantasy lore, the original EQ2 team set the Dark Elf city in the middle of a bright sunny zone, full of sand and savannah. Recently uncovered plans show they intended to continue this 'outside the box thinking' by setting the Wood Elf city underwater and moving the Coldain dwarves from frozen Velious to their new home in the middle of a volcano.

Inside, the zone is not at all intuitive. Once you've run it once or twice, you get a feel for it, which is okay - but the first time you run it, you're too busy trying to work out where you're going to have much fun. It's also not very linear (in a bad way), because the path through the zone that involves killing all of the bosses and getting all the quests sees you doubling back on yourself several times (additionally, there's not quite enough monsters to finish your Far Seas Requisition quests in one go, so you'd have to do it twice if you wanted them). The entire zone is quite long, then it is followed by a short instance where you kill a big demony thing. If you want to do all the quests and finish the instance, expect to spend at least four hours in there with a pick-up group. The visual style stays pretty much the same the entire way through (and there's not much grandeur, given that it's meant to be Neriak), too, which doesn't lead to much sense of progression - and I'd later have the same complaint with Crushbone.

A couple of bosses into Fallen Gate.

To contrast this with the Deadmines (I played Alliance in WoW), Fallen Gate comes off badly. Deadmines has a very logical progression, because there's nothing left behind you as you clear the zone. It has a very visual and obvious progression, too. You start off in some mines, then fight your way into a workshop, then you head into wood-processing plant, then you find yourself in a huge underground cavern with a hulking ship in the middle of it, which you fight your way to the top of and kill the end boss. You feel like you're unravelling the workings of the Defias as you go, whereas in Fallen Gate you kinda just know you're going forwards and you can't tell from looking around you how far you're in, or how far you've got left to go. As soon as you see the ship in Deadmines, you know what you have to do, and the final fight is cinematic and as much of a blast as the rest of the zone. You have to kill a fair few normal monsters between the bosses, but not too many. In Fallen Gate, the whole place is PACKED with monsters, and the bosses generally don't look very distinctive. If it wasn't for their names, you probably wouldn't realise they were bosses. They need to have noticeably more impressive armour, or if they're a type of monster they should look bigger and stronger than those around them. Again, I think the zone needs a graphical restyle to add some progression, then a bit of a trim - more isn't always better, particularly in low end dungeons. They should be short-ish and sweet, in my eyes.

A couple more bosses in. Note the frankly ridiculous number of monsters in the room (you kill them one at a time).

The last thing I want to mention is the mentoring system. After all of the above, slagging off EQ2 in comparison to WoW, the game does have one huge factor that I can't recommend enough - the mentoring system. If you need to find a group but all your friends/guildies are too high for the dungeon, you're not out of luck. They can mentor down to your level with a few clicks of the mouse (allowing them to gain Achievement exp, though they only earn 50% normal exp), which is a brilliant idea. I do feel that a level-70 player mentored down is still FAR too powerful - ideally, they should be LESS powerful than a player of the level they are mentoring, to make a genuine lower-levelled player more worthwhile to group with than one mentoring down, however that should not detract from the fact that the mentoring system is a brilliant concept, particularly when you're in a guild or just wanna see a zone you've outlevelled but never properly played.

A little further in - this room actually contains a boss, though he's been killed by a high level player farming the zone. When full this room contains twice as many monsters as you see here - and it still looks basically the same as the first screenshot. And it will stay like that all the way to the end.

It does make you wonder, though, why a team that can come up with that system is so poor at designing dungeons. It's not rocket science, people. Don't make a player's first dungeon an overly long and dull experience. I enjoyed mine, but it was only because I liked the company I was with when I did it - overall, the dungeon itself was average at best.

Hektor.

Everquest II Diary - Tradeskilling

Tradeskilling in Everquest 2 is quite involved. You don't skill-up like you do in most MMORPG, oh no, you have a full set of tradeskill levels. Yes, all the way from 1-70. And they're not limited by your character (adventure) level, so you could quite happily have a level 1 Assasin who is also a level 70 Weaponsmith. This tends not to happen, however, as the harvesting nodes for each tradeskill level are in the corresponding zones for that adventure level, and a level 1 harvesting in a level 50 zone isn't going to last long (and buying on the broker gets expensive).

Given the fact my class is a platemail-wearing tank class, I decided to turn Armourer. The tradeskill system works how the EQ class system worked originally, in that you can make stuff from any tradeskill at level 1-9, then you first choose one of three classes at level 10 to pursue before eventually specialising down into one of three sub-classes of that class at 20. At 10, I went for Outfitter, who make tailored armour as well as platemail, and at 20 I became the Armourer I intended. There are a total of 9 tradeskills, which cover pretty much any in-game item you might want to make between them. The more unusual skills involve making furtniture for the in-game housing, or making food (which is actually quite lucrative, as everyone needs to eat and the good food gives major benefits over standard vendor stuff).

This is a forge. Used for weaponsmithing, armour-making and disposing of unwanted pets/children.

Now, to actually tradeskill, you have to go to the correct tradeskill machine - in my case a forge - and then select what item you want to make. Successfully producing the item then gives you tradeskill exp, providing the recipe is sufficiently close to your tradeskill level, which will eventually lead you to level up. Each item needs a recipe, the basic ones brought from the tradeskill trainer with new ones each level. They also need the materials, which are harvested in the world of Norrath. There are four harvesting skills, with two different types of resource node for each. Armouring primarily uses ore from Mining, but it also uses furs from Trapping and roots from Gathering. Each node has about 5 different items that you can harvest, probably only about half of which will be of any use to you, the rest used in different professions. The best items, however, use rare harvests - items that are worth an awful lots and (as the name suggests) are only found very rarely. Sadly, new players often don't realise the value of these items and frequently destroy them to make room for conventional loot - at level 25, I destroyed a rare harvest worth about 25 gold, more than I had paid for all of the armour I was then wearing.

In the foreground you see two resource nodes. In the background you can see the abandoned home of a necromancer, complete with fiery blue mood lighting. Legend says he left after new laws were passed cracking down on CO2 emissions from flaming skulls.

The other bonus you gain from harvesting is collectibles, which appear as small golden orbs on the ground, marked with a '?'. If you harvest them, you get a collectible item that you can put in your collections. Once you complete a collection, you can hand it in for Achievement exp and usually a coin and item reward. There are a lot of collections, some of them very large, so collecting is quite a good fun pursuit - especially as the items usually sell quite well on the broker if you've got doubles. The collection system is a nice little addition to the game, in my opinion.

And here we have a collectible item. Gotta catch em 'all (much like Pokemon, or STDs).

Onto actual tradeskilling, where I'm going to talk about how it will work in the next patch. Basically, to create the item I gather the materials and make sure I've learned the recipe, then go to the Forge and start work. I get a screen that shows four different levels, with a blue bar representing progress that starts empty, and a green bar representing item durability that starts full. The idea is to fill the blue bar up before the green bar drops below the 75% mark, and if you do so you get the item. If not, you lose some of the materials (depending on how badly you did) and start all over again. Fairly regularly a complication will crop up and you have to use one of your three tradeskill abilities to correct it, or risk losing a substantial whack of durability. The three tradeskill abilities can also be used when not countering complications to increase durability or progress, but at the cost of power (mana) - and if you run out of power you won't be able to counter any complications that might occur, which is inevitably bad news. If that sounds like a tricky balancing act, it's not particularly hard in reality. You just press the right button to counter and spam the other buttons when you feel your durability is dropping; the rest seems dictated largely by luck. It's certainly an involved crafting system that can make some very good items, but I really don't find it as interesting as adventuring. Certainly, though, it's nice to have the option there (and it's nice to be able to outfit yourself, as well as making a tidy profit on the broker if you're willing to put the hours in).

This may look smithing, but in fact I am in the process of setting alight the small fairy beside me. Evil gotta do what evil gotta do.

Everquest II Diary - Day Three (15-20)

Levels 15-20 took considerably longer than 1-10 and 10-15, though I don't actually have any proper figures to give you because I spent a considerable time playing with tradeskills in this period. Still doable in one afternoon, though.

I spent until level 18 in Darklight, finishing the quests there - the newer zones tend to have better quest rewards than the older games, and having played in the Commonlands when back when I played the month on the EU servers, I was well aware of how much I disliked the zone. Nektulous Forest was the other option, but that's a relatively dangerous zone that's best suited for level 22+ players. So after the three levels in Darklight, I took a bit of a break from adventuring and decided to tradeskill. That's covered in the next entry, which is entirely devoted to tradeskilling, due to it being quite an involved system. Harvesting for collectibles is also covered there too.

After getting my tradeskill level to a comparative level to my character level, I set about heading for the big two-zero. Done with Darklight, I headed off into the Commonlands. It's a big zone, and simply exploring it would give me a fair bit of experience and Achievement exp. So off I trundled off into the Commonlands, whereupon I found a sprawling great zone full of what I consider to be cardinal sins in terms of zone design, meaning it's one of my least favourite (I hear rumours the zone is being updated a little in the next Update to fix some of these issues, but we'll see). They're less noticeable when you've just come from Freeport, which I also dislike immensely, but coming from Darklight made them all very apparent very quickly.

Several of the problems quickly became apparent when I headed to the Crossroads, which is the main quest hub in the zone. As the Commonlands is so big that it fills two map pages, it's quite a long walk. The original EQ2 designers (not the current dev team), in their infinite wisdom, thought it would be a good idea to put a lot of aggressive Heroic monsters on the map, for seemingly no reason. There are a sizable group of level 16 monitor lizards that are double Heroic in the middle of the zone (which means they are much, much stronger than normal monsters of that level and really need groups to tackle), who have mauled me to death on several occasions, as well as numerous other seemingly-pointless Heroic foes littered around. Did I add that monsters will chase you for miles in this game, too? Basically, the zone is unnecessarily hazardous, and if you spend a couple of levels here I guarantee you you will be jumped and killed by an overpowered Heroic at some point. It just seems unnecessarily frustrating, though the old-guard of players usually argue 'it keeps you on your toes' and stops EQ becoming too easy. I'd argue that arbitrary death is simply annoying, rather than exciting. Get rid of the heroics, replace them with normal monsters - if one of them kills me then fair enough, but group content really shouldn't be strolling around attacking soloers (as the majority of players are).

These are some of the aforementioned bastard fucker monitor lizards. What the hell is the point, honestly? It's almost like the EQ2 team sat down and thought 'How can we make a zone that is less fun than being shot in the face?'. Well, they came up with this.

Second problem with the Commonlands is that it's incredibly tedious, mostly because it is so vast. There's not much design variation in the zone (it's literally just an enormous rectangle), just endless plains dotted with semi-wrecked towers. There are a lot of different monsters in the zone, but they're standard fare: savannah wildlife, skeletons, bandits and orcs. The zone would be fine if it was smaller and more compact, but it's just a huge desolate (and colourless) space that is not at all interesting to run across. In EQ1 the Commonlands were equally vast, but they were two separate zones, and the EQ2 version just seems pointless and bloated. There are numerous instances leading off them, but they're mostly pointless quest instances that all use the same map over and over, and seem to be there just for the sake of it.

The entire zone looks like this, and boy does the old 'empty, flat' look get old fast. By this point, being shot in the face was starting to look downright appealing.

The absolute WORST bit, however, is the Dervish quest line from the Crossroads. The quest giver is very much in the Eastern part of the Commonlands, while the dervish camp itself is literally as far West as you can possibly go. So if you actually find the bloody camp (surrounded by heroics and hidden behind two mountain ranges), you then go and report you've done it, which takes 5 minutes to run, then get told to kill some of the dervishes....so you run another 5 minutes back, slaughter some dervishes, then run back to the Crossroads, get told to change some plans around, so you run back and then run around the dervish camp for about ten minutes trying to find where the plans are (the quest gives you no instruction), then run back to the Crossroads, to be told you need to kill the dervish commander. So you run back, only to find that the damn commander is a rare spawn and you'd have to camp the dervishes (there's a LOT of them) for hours to finish the quest. It doesn't take a genius to see why EQ2 sucked at release, and I really hope the new dev team will find it in their hearts to remake the Commonlands. Because I honestly think if I had started in Freeport rather than Neriak with this diary, it would have ended with me cancelling my account before I hit level 10. No jokes. And don't even get me started on the fact that you can't see the other half of the Commonlands map, because I think I might end up stabbing someone (likely myself, which I would probably regret).

You will learn to hate this dervish camp with all your heart and soul. Oh yes you will.

Okay, so it's quite clear I hate the Commonlands, but there are other things to talk about too. First among them is guild recruiting. I found myself a guild, which is remarkably easy to do - it's a process that many other MMORPGS could learn from. Basically, you press 'U'. That brings up a list of the guilds that are recruiting, some info on them and what they are looking for, a description of themselves and a list of the recruiters who are online. You pore over it until you find one you like the sound of, then click a button to get in contact with a recruiter, who will usually only be too happy to bring another member on board. Very easy to do, almost left me impressed enough to stem the rising urge to kill that being in the Commonlands had brought on.

Second thing I did was get my first house. The housing in EQ2 is all instanced and multiple people can own the same property, so there's no shortage of it. Consequently, people are unlikely to visit your house and thus decorating the thing is more for personal enjoyment than anything else, but the option is certainly there to be pursued if you so desire. The main benefit of housing lies in the fact that owning property allows you more on the broker. With no house, you have one broker slot, which you naturally put a bag in. This usually allows about 12 items to be sold, though you do get containers up to 60 items big. Getting an inn, which all players get for free (with only a small weekly upkeep), allows you a second. Progressively larger houses allow you more slots. If you buy a salesbox, this allows people to visit your house and buy the items you are selling on the broker without paying broker commission (usually 20%), which allows you to mark up your prices slightly.

Third thing I did was run my first dungeon, the Fallen Gate. But that's a story for another time as I did it at level 20, so I'll cover that in the next entry along with the mentoring system that comes with it.

Hektor.

Everquest II Diary - Day Two (11-15)

After having levelled from 1 to 10 yesterday, I set myself the target of going from level 10 to 15 and then getting to level 20 tomorrow. This all happens in the Darklight Woods, just as it did yesterday, because the zone ranges from 10-20.

Levelling from 10-15 was, again, not unbelievably time consuming. It was not as fast as 5-10, but even a relatively casual gamer willing to set an hour or two aside a night would likely by able to progress reasonably well in EQ2. There are a number of one-off quests to do, but the quest lines in the Darklight Wood at the third quest hub were numerous and actually quite interesting. Two stand out: the first being the worshippers at this crater trying to summon a big flame demon. Over the course of five or so quests, you have to kill increasingly hard members of their group until you eventually drop their leader and take her summoning staff - which you then get to use to summon the demon they worship, except not exactly as they intended. If you wait a couple of minutes the demon appears and goes on a rampage, killing everyone in the crater. That kind of stuff has been done before in other games, but it's still a bit more of a reward than you normally expect from a quest.

The citizens of Darklight Wood rejoice as they finally receive the industrial-size stove they had ordered.

The second quest line I enjoyed involves some mushroom people, who you are hired to cull. Unfortunately, every time you kill one it spawns a load of little shoomlings. I won't tell you what the eventual solution the quest-giver comes up with to deal with these shroomlings is, but it's quite an amusing quest go on. Certainly more entertaining than the normal 'go to xxx and kill 10 xxx' quests that we get so many of in every MMORPG. Here's a picture of the third quest hub, which sums up the kind of fusion between dark setting and light-hearted cheerfulness that makes Darklight so enjoyable.

This is the third quest hub. I can't think of anything funny to say about it. But that doesn't matter, because you're reading this article for its informative factual content, right? (that should have made you laugh, at least)

Levels 11-15 was the first time I found myself in a party, too. I grouped with two other people to finish the quest lines marked above, and I had a good time. Most of the community in EQ2 seems quite mature, though I won't deny I've met some people that piss me off too. But duoing a quest is much more fun than soloing and after a couple of hours of grouping you might find yourself adding a new player to your friend list. You can kill monsters much quicker with two or more, as well, so you can find yourself gaining a lot of exp very quickly. With some more unusual classes in the game, such as enchanters (who mind-control enemies to fight on your side), grouping can be quite an interesting challenge. Duoing with an enchanter when I was a Shadowknight (basically, a hybrid tank class with limited necromancer abilities) was fun, because we didn't have any healing and the enchanter's damage mostly came from the mind-controlled enemy he was using to fight with, which could break the controlling charm spell at any moment. Grouping in Everquest 2 is made much easier with the mentoring system, but I'm going to go into that in the next entry as it's a fairly large topic and I've got other things to talk about for today.

First up is the Achievement trees. These act like the talents in World of Warcraft, except you gain them in a slightly different way. In WoW, you get one each time you level up, beyond level 10. In EQ2, you have to gain them by 'levelling up' in Achievement Experience, the maximum being 100 Achievement points. The Achievement Experience bar is easily visible by right clicking on your normal exp bar, or it appears at the top of your Achievement tree page, and you can earn this special experience by completing quests, exploring new areas, or killing named NPCs for the first time. It's quite a good system, as it encourages people to quest and gives an additional bonus for killing those rare named spawns.

This is one of the AA trees. Not a very good one, sadly - as a class, Shadowknights are generally regarded as a wee bit wank.

If you have all the expansions to EQ2 (buy the boxed Echoes of Faydwer set, it contains the others for the price of downloading just one), then you have two choices for where to put the points. You have an archetype tree common between both the good and evil equivalents of your class - Choraz, for example, shares his Shadowknight archetype tree with the Paladin - which serves mostly to boost your stats. The second is a class-specific tree that serves to boost your abilities, and you're entitled to put 50 points in each. This does provide a lot of customisation as you can usually have up to 8 points in each improvement, but the archetype tree will tend to have two of the five trees generally useless to your class. My Shadowknight, for example, has no use for the Wisdom tree (presumably put in for Paladins), and in the Intelligence tree there is an improvement for healing that is of no use to me whatsoever - in fact, unless I put four points in it, I can't continue down the tree, so it's actually rather annoying. There is an Achievement tree rebalance coming out in the next Game Update in two or three weeks, so perhaps they'll fix that. I hope so, anyway.

The other tree, the SK-specific one. Again, it's not terribly useful - but on the plus size, I'm a giant lizard with an axe. Just like Jesus.

Next up, I'm going to chat about the interface. It's excellent because it is almost completely customisable (in a way that WoW never was when I played it, up until patch 1.9), though I admit I've still not fully got to grips with it. You can easily change the colour of any type of text you desire, and create new tabs or entirely new windows and choose what text goes into them. I've split combat text, NPC tells (usually quest stuff) and player chat/game info into three different windows. You can also set the opacity of windows, with different values for normal and on mouseover, which prevents everything looking too cluttered even if you have a lot of information onscreen. This is a great touch, as EQ2 is a far more complex game than most MMORPGS. You'll have a lot of different buttons, quests, three different types of exp to keep track of, your own health and buffs, the health and buffs of your group, and all the game chat. WoW's less customisable interface is not necessarily a flaw with WoW, as you don't NEED the same level of customisation for WoW - but for EQ2, it's a necessity. Kudos to the dev team for making it work. The only thing it's lacking at the moment is a minimap, a feature most MMORPGS have, but that should be coming in the near future courtesy of the dev team.

Speaking of which, the development team is one of my favourite parts of EQ2 (as I've said before, and I will say again). Currently, their workrate is phenomenal and they are not short of ambition, either. The last expansion was Neriak and Darklight, both of which were of excellent quality. A new race was also added, the Arsai, who are the evil equivalent to the good fairy-like Fae. Before that, the last couple of Updates mostly added a few quests and minor improvements like new mounts or quest sharing, or a change to the raid loot system so that only items usable by someone in the raid would drop, but the one that preceded them added the Estate of Unrest - another old EQ1 favorite, now a large high-end zone but limited to only one group at a time - giving options to those who want to play endgame content but don't have the manpower for large 24-man raids. The next expansion has the much-needed 'dressing room' feature that allows you to preview what armour looks like before you buy it, as well as letting you try out mounts before you buy. It will also have an Achievement tree rebalance and another new high-end raid zone in the middle of New Tunuria - formerly Felwithe, for all of you EQ1 fans out there. It looks amazing, as this screenshot hopefully illustrates - sadly, it's a raid zone now, rather than the High Elf start zone it used to be.

Felwithe is considerably cooler than it used to be, though it's now packed with level-60 vampire elves. I can see fans of Japanese anime salivating at the mere thought.

I've got plenty more to talk about, actually, but I'll have to leave that to the next entry because I've gone on far too long here. Next time: mentoring, tradeskilling, guild recruiting, collection quests, legend and lore quests, and why you want to gouge out your eyes when you zone out of Darklight and start to visit zones that are three years old.

Hektor.

Everquest II Diary - Character creation

The character creation in Everquest 2 is one of the game's strengths, as it allows a very impressive amount of customisation (particularly facially) that, frankly, leaves a game like WoW in its dust. If all the characters took their gear off, you're not likely to find many that look alike. You can alter the size of your character, his skin colour, tattoos and headgear (spines and scale patters if you're an Iksar or Froglok), eye colour, and pretty much all the proportions of the character's facial features. It's good fun to play around and create a striking avatar for your adventures, but if you're not interested in doing that, then you can just press the 'randomise all' button until you find a look you like. There is, in fact, two entirely different sets of character models available - the original EQ2 models, and the SOGA models (made by the Asian branch of Sony Online Entertainment) for the Asian EQ2 release. Opinion is divided over which set is better, but I feel that the SOGA models are far, far superior, so I'm using them - even though they can occasionally look a little anime-esque.

The in-game human characters could apparently afford platemail trousers but not a shirt.

The class and race system is large and extremely varied, too. Basically, you can one of eighteen different races, divided into Good, Evil and Neutral (six races in each), that vary from the standard humans, elves and dwarves to the lizardlike Iksar, catlike Kerra or the distinctly amphibian Froglok. Depending on which you choose, you'll be able to choose from up to 4 starting cities - Qeynos & Freeport (the two original starting cities, the hubs for good and evil respectively), then the good city of Kelethin in Faydwer, or the evil city of Neriak near Freeport. Neutral races become either good or evil depending on their choice of starting city, so you can't actually be neutral in game. It's worth thinking about your choice, but you can betray citizenship in game if you desire, so if you make the wrong choice its not the end of the world.

The water between the collection of islands near Qeynos represents EQ1 zones that the EQ2 team couldn't be bothered to redo. Instead, they claimed that it was all flooded. Great save, guys.

After that, you've got your choice of class. There are a grand total of 24 to choose from, though it is somewhat constrained by your choice of alignment - I think only 16 are available to each side. If this seems like a lot of classes, don't be fooled. There are 12 archetypes, each with a good and evil equivalent. If you want to be a Cleric, you will be a Templar if you're good-aligned and you'll be an Inquisitor if you're evil-aligned. Both the good and evil equivalents of the class have the same basic function, though there is some differentiation between them - some more than others, admittedly. A Monk and a Bruiser have only minor differences between them, while a Paladin and a Shadowknight are very distinct classes from another. The same can be said about Rangers and Assassins, too, but sometimes you can't help feeling that the EQ2 team have emphasised a wide class selection to the detriment of the overall game.

After working on the movie Troy, Achilles decided to try his hand at adventuring through Norrath. Intelligently, he decided to bring a pair of metal shoes this time.

If some of the most similar classes were merged, it would make things a lot better in my opinion - some of the classes seem to exist only for the sake of having both a good and evil equivalent, even when it's not really necessary. Things get worse when one class is more powerful than the other, like in the Enchanter archetype the evil Coercer is considered superior to the Illusionist. As both good and evil can freely group with one another, it's a bit of a shame really. You can change to the equivalent of your class by betraying to a city of the opposite alignment, so a character of whatever race can in fact be any class with a little work. My Iksar can't choose a Monk at first, because he's evil, but if I want to be an Iksar monk I can create a Bruiser and then betray to Kelethin or Qeynos.

At the end of the day, though, I don't want to be a Monk. My main in Everquest 1 was an Iksar Shadowknight called Choraz. With Kunark (the Iksar homeland) coming back, it seemed only right to bring him back into the world 500 years after he first walked it. Sadly, instead of Cabalis in Kunark, he's now had to stoop to starting in Neriak with all the Dark Elves. Next entry, we'll see how his adventures go.

Everquest II Diary - Day One (1-10)

Choraz starts his aventures in the world of Norrath. He's been created on the Antonius Bayle server, which is a Roleplay server - but is also the most populous of the EQ2 servers at the time of creation. I like my MMORPGs to be populated, because I hate not being able to find a group, and I hate empty zones. It's a US server, but despite being in the UK I'm playing on it. At peak times Antonius Bayle is marked as 'Heavy Load' - I've never seen the two EU servers go above the lowest setting, 'Light Load'.

So, having chosen Neriak as my starting city, I find myself in the Darklight Woods. These zones are only a week or two old, having been released in the previous month's Game Update (#35). First thing I do is play around with the graphic settings - EQ2 is well known for being demanding. My system isn't top end, but it's pretty respectable. I figure I should be able to play on maximum detail, so I turn graphics up to 'Extreme'. For reference, I'm playing on a system with an Intel Core Duo 6300, 2gb of RAM and a 256mb ATI Radeon X1800. This turns out to work pretty well at first, but I quickly turn it down to a lower setting when I start running a dungeon with a full group as things start to chug big time with all those characters and particle effects onscreen at once (and as the main tank, that's far from ideal). The screenshots in this entry are shown at max detail settings, though. This is the first thing I see, the newbie outpost not far from Neriak.

What do you mean, it looks like Azeroth? How dare you! I'll have you know Darkshire is entirely a result of our own creative processes! Oh, dammit, I called it Darkshire again, didn't I? Sorry, guys...

Well, the early levelling doesn't take too long. I hit level 2 inside of five minutes of logging in and level 5 just shy of twenty five minutes in. The quests at this point are very simple, generally 'go and kill ten wolves' or 'go and gather me 5 pieces of wood'. You don't have to run to far to do them and they're good exp. The quest chain also serves to direct you to the next quest hub when you're about the right level, so it has a dual purpose. If you complete all the early quests, you'll also find yourself rapidly improving your gathering skills too, which come in useful if you decide to develop a tradeskill, another nice touch. The fighting is not particularly challenging at this stage, but nevertheless it's still enjoyable. The monsters with red-ringed names are hostile, which makes it easy and convenient to tell the aggressive beasties from the more docile ones. Finding quests is easy enough, as quest-givers have a large quill above their head (as in the picture above) if they offer a quest, and a red book above their head if you can hand a completed quest into them. A summary of your selected quest appears in the top right of your screen, and you can change your 'selected quest' simply by clicking a new one in your journal. You don't need to have a quest selected to recieve credit for completeing part of it, and indeed you actually get a message pop up telling you when you kill a quest monster - which act as a handy reminder to finish quests you'd forgotten about.

Choraz decided to wait for the Ghostbusters to arrive before he went for a dip in Neriak's swimming pool.

Reaching level 10 takes me around two and a half hours, after which I shut down EQ2. By that time, I've visited Neriak for the first time and moved onto the second quest hub in Darklight Wood, out of four. It's been a very enjoyable introduction to the game, and the game has a lot of features that really stand out for me. Firstly, the Darklight Woods and Neriak are superb zones. The Darklight Woods have an excellent graphical style, which is dark but not oppressively so. The guards look cool in their Dark Elf armour, especially the mounted ones. The quests aren't stunningly original (though they have their moments), but they are fun and give you more to do than simply grind away. The zone is actually quite large and packed with content and quests, but the design is excellent and thus it feels like a small zone when you are travelling it. It's also fairly safe to run through, even at a low level - the monsters are generally not on the roads, unlike some of the EQ2 zones where you'll unexpectedly find yourself getting jumped by high-level critters. All in all, Darklight was a real pleasure to level 1-10 in.

Now THAT's travelling in style.

Similarly, Neriak impressed me a great deal. It has a very distinct visual style that is both dark and ornate, yet creative and easy on the eye. It is relatively compact as a city (all one zone) and, once you complete a simple quest, you gain access to the teleporters in the city that make travel through it even easier. It really is a perfect example of how EQ2 cities should be made, instead of the rather ugly sprawling mess that is Freeport or Qeynos. It has also been designed for convenience in other ways besides simply travel - for instance, there is a small tunnel in the city which has everything needed to practice any tradekskill you might desire, as well as a banker and a broker (like an auctioneer in WoW) and a vendor that you can buy arrows from, as well as selling your vendor crap too. It's incredibly convenient, and it really makes you appreciate the effort the devs have gone to to make your stay in Neriak as much fun as possible.

At this point, I was starting to wish I'd created a Dark Elf.

In terms of the game system itself, a number of things have impressed me. Firstly, quest items usually aren't actually stored in your inventory - they're just noted in your quest log, saving a lot of space which you'll need early on. Late game you get some very big bags indeed, but at the start you'll not have very much space - you start with a 12 slot bag and I got another one from my veteran rewards that came with buying the boxed game (other rewards include bonus exp potions, which I think are a really cool idea). Secondly, the system of 'mini-dings' is a nice touch - every time you reach a 10% exp milestone through the level, you regain all your health and power as you do when you level up (ding) in most MMOs. For levels one to ten, this really reduces your downtime as it happens pretty regularly, and it's an occasional nice bonus in the later levels too.

Choraz started to wonder if it was possible to hijack a warg.

There is also a remarkable number of skills for each character, far more so than in World of Warcraft. By level 5, I had autoattack and four special attacks/spells, as well as four more buffs (some self-buffs and others group buffs). This increases rapidly - by about level 25 you'll have two or three full bars of different buttons. It gives you a lot of options in a fight, but it can be quite overwhelming at times, particularly as some skills will inevitably share the same icons. Whether you like the variety is down to personal taste, I suppose, but I personally think they could cut down on the number of skills by 20% or so and simply give the remaining ones more regular updates.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on my first two or three hours of playing EQ2. Check the next entry to see how Choraz's adventures continue to unfold on Day Two.

Hektor.

Everquest II Diary - Intro

Okay, so I resubscibed to Everquest II. Why would I do that? I played it for a month and while I thought it was alright, it didn't really have a huge pull for me. Reason was, underpopulated server. I had the misfortune of living in the UK and thus I chose to play on an EU server, which frankly was foolish. I levelled one character to 21 and a couple more to mid-teens and never once did I get a full group or run an instance or a dungeon.

Well, I did it because Rise of Kunark was announced for November. Following on from the last expansion discovering the lost continent of Faydwer, the development team have decided to continue the theme of rediscovering old EQ1 content. This is a fairly astute move, actually, as it will serve to bring back older players who may be playing other games (it worked on me), and it also allows really effective areas from the original to appear in EQ2. I personally loved Kunark, as to me it really felt like an ancient world full of history and outlandish creatures. It was also something that many other areas in Everquest weren't - bright. It was full of bright colours and spectacular scenery, and felt really raw and untamed. One of my main quibbles with MMORPGs that try and look 'realistic' is that everything seems so grim and dark. Kunark was full of horrible monsters, true, but it was also full of unkempt creativity and brightness. Them bringing Kunark back is enough to bring me back to EQ2 - but if the expansion pack is poor, it'll be enough to make me quit for good. And there'd better be an Iksar city there, too.

But without further ado, here's my diary of my EQ2 experience. It's easily accessible through the sidebar on the right, in case you hadn't spotted that.

Who the hell is this Hektor guy, anyway?

For the uneducated among you, Hektor was a character in Homer's Iliad. He was the leader of the Trojan armies, and arguably the hero of the work - in any case, he was portrayed as the most sympathetic of the characters in the book - who dies at the end of the work, killed by Achilles in single combat. The final chapter of the book is his funeral, which happens only shortly before Troy falls to the invaders. That's who Hektor is.

Who am I? Well, that's another story. Maybe I'll tell it some time.

What I will tell you is my experience playing MMOs. It's not as extensive as some people's, but I've played enough to have worked out what is a good thing in a game and what isn't. I started way back with Ultima Online, when I was about thirteen or fourteen or something. Good game? Well, I enjoyed it, but I was young then and easily amused.

The first game that really hooked me, however, was Everquest - which I picked up at about the time Scars of Velious was released. I played most of my time in Kunark with my Iksar Shadowknight and the rest of it around the Faydark with my Wood Elf Warrior, explaining my irrational love for Kunark and Crushbone. I never got above level 35, though - I was content to spend most of my time exploring the world. Loved that game, and I still think it has the most immersive game world of any I've played. I'm not telling people to go out and play it now - it's just a bit dated nowadays - but if you never played it, you missed out on the start of an era. EQ1 was crude and buggy, but it was full of energy and creativity and lore in a way that modern games aren't - probably because of the way the game industry has moved on since then, becoming more organised as the years passed.

After that, I took a break from playing MMOs for a while as I was at a boarding school to get my education finished. Played network Age Of Empires II, Warcraft 3 and Counterstrike, but I was craving for a little more by the time I left.

Enter World of Warcraft. Played that for long enough to level to 60, join a raiding guild and clear out Molten Core and ZG, then start on Blackwing Lair. I left at patch 1.9 (when AQ was released) after my guild fell apart, mostly because no raiding guilds actually wanted more rogues so there was little point in me playing. So I unsubscribed, sold my account and never really looked back from there.

I went without MMOs for a while, occasionally playing some network Halo with a dozen or so of my hallmates at uni, but not doing too much. That changed when I picked up Everquest II on release of Echoes of Faydwer, having read reviews saying the game had turned itself around and thinking 'hell, Crushbone and Kelethin are back, I've really gotta check this out for at least a month'. Only played for a month, because the EU servers were empty and I couldn't get a group. Instead, I found myself playing on my family Xbox 360 or on Company of Heroes, until I read a preview of Age of Conan.

Oh yes, I thought. I was back into MMOs in a big way, awaiting October with bated breath. And then EQ2 announced Kunark, and I suddenly had divided loyalties. I figured I had until October to play EQ2, at which point I could decide whether I wanted to pursue AoC or EQ2 or both. So I signed up again for EQ2 again, this time ensuring I did so on a populated server. You can read my experienced with it here. I've started a blog in the meantime, because perhaps someone out there might want to read my thoughts on the genre as a whole.

Contact Form

You can use this form to get in contact with me, you lucky little things. No guarantee of a response, though. I might be busy, it might get caught by my spam filter, or I might just not care. But there's no harm in trying, eh?

Your name:


Contact E-mail address:


Subject line:


What you want to tell me: