Finished? I'm Just Getting Started!

One week after the launch of EverQuest II's latest expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, I find myself in the unusual position of already having two level-capped crafters and a level-capped adventurer. It's clear that the whole concept of levelling has changed. What surprises me a little is how much I like it.

I've always been a firm believer in the concept of levelling as an essential element of core mmorpg gameplay. To me, making the number next to my character's name go up has been a major motivation, almost an end in itself. When the levels stop coming, it's time for a either new character or a new game.

That said, I've never particularly liked the way levels seem to stretch to fill the time available. Back in the glory days of EverQuest it was possible to spend a whole week grinding mobs for several hours a day just to get a single ding. We called those hell levels. It's true the satisfaction I felt when that ding finally sounded was intense but an unhealthy proportion of that supposed satisfaction was really relief. Any rush of pleasure it brought dissipated all too quickly with the realization that now I had to do it all over again.

Over the years the length of time it takes to complete a single level in most mmorpgs has shrunk considerably. Games that expect you to spend several hours on a single level tend to be seen as grindy throwbacks, something that seems quite ironic when you consider how pleased with ourselves we used to be if we managed to knock off a whole level in a one session.

Even so, it was a big shock two years ago when Blood of Luclin arrived and many of us found we'd done most of the ten new levels by the end of the first day. There were those who suspected it was a bug of some kind but no, behind the scenes someone had evidently decided that levelling was passé, no longer a focus activity, just something to be disposed of quickly before the real fun began.

And to my considerable surprise they were right. As a casual player with a stable of characters, many of which I rarely found time to play, BoL marked the first time I was able to guide as many of my team to the cap as I would always have wanted. 

In previous expansions, the time commitment had proved too much. It generally took me the whole two year cycle between level cap increases to get everyone where I wanted them, at which point the whole thing rolled over and I was back to where I began. Being able to take characters from the old cap to the new in a matter of hours rather than days or even weeks meant all I needed to decide was who went first.

Just because levelling itself has been all but trivialized doesn't means levels don't matter. They remain vitally important in that much of the damage-scaling derives from the relative difference in level between character and mob. That's perhaps even now one of the most significant factors in a fight. Levelling also opens upgrade paths for everything from spells and combat arts to armor and weapons. In the modern game, though, all of those are starting points not endings.

The old grind that used to live inside the number by your name hasn't vanished with the accelerated pace, it's just moved somewhere else. If you care about being the most powerful fighter, the most effective healer, the sturdiest tank, now you need to make the numbers go up next to so many things apart from just your level. 

Your mount, your familiar, your mercenary (if you don't play exclusively in full groups), the grades of your spells or CAs, all of those need to be levelled in some form or other. Hitting that level cap in a new expansion barely takes you over the starting line.

On paper it sounds as though it should be an anathema to someone with my preferences but in practice it's very much the reverse. The way the game is now suits me far better than I would ever had imagined had someone described to me years ago. It's a classic case of "You think you don't want it but you do".

The way things used to work for me, expansion after expansion, was that I'd spend weeks levelling one character, occasionally taking a break to level another as a change of pace. I'd work my way through the long sequence of quests, which weren't always collated in the tidy way they are now, until eventually I'd accrue enough experience to make it to the cap. 

I always made it with at least one character but it sometimes took so long and involved so many quests that when I got there the thought of doing it all over again with a second character was more than I could bear. Even though I had ten or a dozen characters it was rare for more than a couple to cap out in any one expansion cycle.

That was adventuring. Tradeskills worked slightly differently. EQII has full, quested storylines for crafters and I would always work my way through each of those at least once but for many years it would be just that - once. Crafters had the luxury of being able to level by doing writs rather than by questing, meaning you could grind out the levels in a day or two just standing at the tables in the crafting hall. Dull though that could be, it often seemed a more palatable option than repeating many days of questing. I usually  had more capped crafters than adventurers for that reason.

Adventurers used also to have a non-questing option for levelling. They could grind mobs in dungeons. Not any more, or at least not once you get to Level 100. To level an adventure class after that you pretty much have to do the quests in the appropriate expansion. When that takes a week or two, it can look quite unappealing prospect by the time you come the third character on your account.

Until recently I might have said you'd need to do the whole Signature questline every time, something that was certainly true as recently as 2017's Planes of Prophecy. Controversially, it's still the only option for anyone trying to get from 100 to 110. From BoL onwards however, almost  every quest, Signature or Sidequest alike, gives so much xp there's more than enough to take you over the line, even if you don't do absolutely everything.

In Visions of Vetrovia, levelling is sidelined even further, although I have a suspicion that may not have been the original plan. While there is a level cap increase in this expansion, it's only five levels. There seem to be more than enough quests for at least five more.

It does look as though the natural flow of the expansion would see a character dinging 130 somewhere in the last of the four new overland zones. My Necromancer dinged 125 without even making it as far as the end of the second. And that's not even considering the experience that would come from doing the instanced dungeons that form part of the Signature questline, something I haven't really touched.

So much for levelling your adventuring class, an activity once considered the core of an expansion but now scarcely more than a gentle introduction to the real new content. And again, I have to stress I prefer it this way. It turns levelling into the kind of relaxing fun I always claimed it was (It was, too, mostly.) without taking anything away from the meat of the expansion, all of which remains solidly attached to the new backbone, the Signature questline. 

Or so I assume. I've barely started the Sig line yet. The adventure one, that is. The Tradeskill questline, that one I've finished. Twice.

This whole post was originally going to be all about the tradeskill Signature questline but I'm conscious there are several regular readers who play EQII, at least two of whom have already mentioned they've bought this expansion. The crafting questline is very... interesting. There's a lot I could say about it. Unfortunately, much of what I'd want to say would involve spoilers. 

I thought of a few approaches that might let me work around the salient plot points but really I'd need to be very specific to make the criticisms I have in mind so I've decided to let that ride for now. Maybe in a few weeks, if anyone's still interested. Me included.

Putting those specific concerns to one side, overall I loved VoV's crafting Signature questline. It's not all that long, maybe three or four hours, but it's perfectly formed. Niami Denmother's pawprints are all over it in the best possible way. 

It's coherent, involving, compact and satisfying. Everything you're asked to do is either gathering or crafting. There's no pseudo-adventuring such as we've been force-fed in recent years. Better yet, the whole thing from start to finish has been carefully designed to be accessible to crafters who don't care to adventure at all.

It's possible to do the entire thing from start to finish without ever aggroing a mob or having to venture into a dangerous area. Every time you're asked to gather materials, all the nodes you need are right there, close to the NPC who gives you the quest or near the crafting station where you make the items. 

When you need to move from one part of a zone to another you get to ride on a dinosaur but best of all, each time you finish the last quest in a zone you unlock flying in that zone for your character. That's a very good reason, if you have a character that's both a crafter and an adventurer, for doing the crafting Signature line first.

The reward for completing the whole thing is really excellent. It gives you a teleport item to Renfry's Basement, which is where you'll be getting all your daily crafting quests, unlocks the new Blueprint system and provides a Bonus Prestige Point (Very hard to come by.) but the real gem is the mount, Orita Skyquaker. 

The base stats on the mount are way better than the maxed-out mount my Berserker was riding, although I think that one comes from BoL so it's probably not such a huge upgrade for mounts from the last expansion. The key factor for me is that it has both adventure and crafting bonuses on the same mount, meaning no more swapping them in and out, something I never remembered to do anyway.

In action, the mount is also one of the weirdest I've ever seen. It carries you about by your arms in a fashion that looks both hideously uncomfortable and horribly dangerous. I flew it around just long enough to take some screenshots and then popped soemthing more comfortable into the appearance slot.

Next I plan to cap the Berserker, then my Jeweller, then my Bruiser. After that I'll begin to think about the real upgrades, all those mounts and familiars and all those spells and combat arts I need to craft. Beyond that comes Adorning, which I haven't even investigated yet. 

At some point I'll have to make a serious run at the adventure Signature questline, including the instances, but before then I plan on making sure whoever takes it on is overgeared for the content. I might even consider starting an armorsmith or a tailor to make Mastercrafted armor, which I understand has been returned to its former status as transitional gear for moving beyond solo content into Heroics.

And that's just the beginning. So much more to do than just level up and I'm really looking forward to it all.

I believe I may have been assimilated but I'm not going to fight it. It feels too good.

We Choose To Go To The Moon: EQII

I am having a wonderful time in EverQuest II's latest expansion, Blood of Luclin. So much so that I wish I had at least a week off  to give it the time and attention it clearly deserves.

Playing it in short sessions after I get home from work, tired and with other demands on my time, is far from ideal but it brings back those feelings from a decade, a decade and a half ago, when a new expansion or a new game would drop and there just wouldn't be enough hours in the day to play.

I was always pre-disposed to love this expansion. I've been waiting for a return to the shattered moon for fifteen years, pretty much since EQII launched in 2004. Looking up at the scar of Luclin's ruin night after night, I always believed we'd make it back there one day.

When the rogue dragon Kerafyrm was sealed inside a remade Luclin in final fulfilment of the epic Age's End prophecy, driver of  EQII's lore since inception, and we looked up to see the moon made whole, I knew we be going back. And now here we are.

For me, the nostalgic impact of Blood of Luclin dwarfs anything I felt during my time in WoW Classic. I have only ever been a tourist in Azeroth and any frisson of familiarity is on the level of revisiting a town where I once spent a happy holiday, years ago.

I lived on Luclin for a long time. It was the current expansion when I returned to EverQuest after a year in Dark Age of Camelot. It was also where Mrs Bhagpuss and I began, yet again, returning once more from adventures elsewhere, at the launch of one of my favorite server-homes, Stromm, where we went on to found a guild and make many new friends.

It's fair to say Luclin and I have history. And now we have more. If there's one thing Daybreak know how to do it's to haul on those levers of memory. My last few evenings have been an unceasing procession of "Oh wow!", "Is that...?" "OMG!". Every time I see a familiar mob - Thought Horrors, ShikNar, Lightcrawlers, Sambata - it's like seeing an old friend. Well, if by "friend" you mean someone who'd kill you as soon as look at you.

I have so much to say I have no idea where to begin. I also have just one day off work before Christmas and for once I'd really rather spend it playing the game than writing about it. I think I'll just stick to an introduction, rather than digging into the incredible amount of detail that's whirling around my mind right now.

How about how I got there? As Wilhelm says, one does not simply walk to the moon. Getting to Luclin turned out to be both simple and complicated. There was a reason the prequel events all related to the Wizard Spires, Norrath's longstanding means of cross-continental travel. All the work we did these last few months was to upgrade the Spires for interplanetary transport.

The Duality (and who died and made him boss I'm still not sure - I remember him when he was plain old Al'Kabor. Or half of him was, anyway...) doesn't pass out tickets to the moon to just anyone. Before you can see the new link on the spire map you have to have completed either the Adventure or Tradeskill prequel quests that were added back in September.

I'd done the crafting quest on both my Berserker/Weaponsmith and my Warlock/Alchemist so all I had to do was chat briefly to a couple of crafters in Teren's Grasp and off I went. A click on the spires and there I was in The Blinding, the entrance zone for the expansion.

For the first hour I was so gosh-wowed out, running about taking screenshots, figuring out I was in Mons Letalis, finding my way to The Grey, now re-named The Wracklands (no doubt incorporating other areas remembered fondly or otherwise from the elder game) that I didn't exactly notice all I was being given were crafting quests. It turns out that while you can get to Luclin on just your crafter cred, no-one wants to trust a tailor or a carpenter with kill missions. Go figure!

By then it was bedtime so I camped out on the terrace overlooking The Umbral Ocean (quite an upgrade from The Twilight Sea). The next evening, like Wilhelm, I found myself backtracking to complete the prequel I'd neglected. It turned out I had the quest in my journal, I'd just never bothered to do it.

I had a reason for that other than laziness. I vaguely remember hearing it was pretty tough going for casual solo players back when it was introduced. Wilhelm's post makes it very plain that was no exaggeration. Solo instances in EQII can be brutal if you're undergeared or underprepared.

Fortunately, thanks to my crafter pass, I was all kitted out in the free expansion gear from the Tishan's box I found next to me right where I zoned into The Blinding. It doesn't really look like much of an upgrade from the 2019 Panda quest gear but this is not my first expansion rodeo and stats don't fool me.

I took the trouble to take some notes when I swapped my gear. Moving from Bold Crusade gear to Veilwalker took my Berserker's hit points from 62 million to just over 80 million. His potency went from 54k to 76k.

The key to judging whether gear is an upgrade is usually Resolve. Ironically, it's a stat solo players don't even need. It applies only when you move up to Heroic (Group) content but it serves as a kind of shorthand for the kind of Item Level other games use.

It's not an exact science - there are lower Resolve pieces I still wear for various reasons - but it's a decent rule of thumb. All the new starter gear has a lot more Resolve so I figured it would be an upgrade and so it proved. Wearing that lot I had no trouble with the prequel instance. It took me about forty minutes, at least ten of which were taken up with backtracking to find bosses I'd missed.

With my Adventure qualifications established it was back to Teren's Grasp for a short briefing. Then off I went to the moon! Again!

As Wilhelm points out, just completing the first entrance quest gives a huge amount of xp. And huge amounts of quest xp seem to be a feature of Blood of Luclin. Looking at the wiki walkthrough for the Signature Quest for adventurers (which, I might add, I have not yet needed, so clear and straightforward are the in-game instructions) I see I'm only on Step Three of thirteen and yet I'm already Level 117.

It's true I've done some non-Signature quests but compared to any previous expansion this is astoundingly fast progress. It highlights one of the things I'm finding most appealing about this excellent expansion: it's fun!

Although I personally have enjoyed all of EQII's post-SoE expansions, it is definitely true that around the time of Terrors of Thalumbra and, especially, Rise of Kunark, there seemed to be a desire at Daybreak both to slow people down and make the content seem more "important". It led to things like the removal of map-markers for quests, a boatload of pre-reqs involving ancient quests going back years, a lot of language-learning and a heavy focus on NPC faction.

That approach really began to shift around the release of Planes of Prophecy in 2017 and the trend ever since has been towards a more alt-friendly, inclusive approach - at least for the casual player. Apparently, for the Heroic and Raid gamer, not so much, but that's not my thing so I won't comment.

Blood of Luclin, from what I've seen so far, doubles down on casual fun. It's really great to hear a deafening DING! and see your character gain two levels. Far from being concerned that it might mean nothing to do in a week or two I'm thinking how easy it's going to be to get all six of my 110s to 120.

Then there are the fights. In the open world, so far, I haven't experienced anything of that expansion hump, where you struggle through the first few days until you manage to cobble together enough gear to hold your own with a badger. In the free gear from the box, time to kill on overland mobs was measured in seconds from the start. For my Berserker, that is. Not tried anyone else yet.

Crafting xp is just as generous and as for gathering... Words fail me here. I am so used to rare crafting materials in current expansions being, well, rare. As in almost never seen. In Blood of Luclin I'm getting two rares from a single node! And not just as a one-time, freakish rng miracle. It's happened several times.

I'm already at the point where, if I don't get a rare every five minutes that I forage I think something's gone wrong. In the last several expansions I'd have been lucky to get one a week!

Once again, this could backfire. If rares aren't rare do we care about rares? Except that they do actually have a use. In the last few expansions, rares have been so valuable in the marketplace I've never known whether to use them or sell them. This time it looks as though that won't be an issue. I can finally put my crafters to work making stuff. Seems like better design to me.

The needles for progress, acquisition and combat are all set very firmly in the green, then, but the real joy of Blood of Luclin so far is the way it harks back to the kind of expansions we haven't seen since at least 2014's Altar of Malice. Arguably since 2007's Rise of Kunark.

According to an article in Forbes, Blood of Luclin has no fewer than six new, non-instanced zones: "The Blinding, Sanctus Seru, Aurelian Coast, Fordel Midst, Wracklands, as well as the Ssraeshza Ruins and Vault." That's far more than any expansion for a long, long time. (And that's seven, Forbes... I don't think Fordel Midst should be in there).

I would guess that Ssrashza Ruins and Vault are dungeons of some sort - not found them yet. The other four, though, are proper open-world zones and I've at least set foot in all of them. They're not as sprawling as the immense zones of old but they are big enough. And the exploration potential is huge.

Sanctus Seru is a glorious city. We haven't had a new urban hub like this since Thalumbra and the last time we had a city on this scale that was also open to the skies must have been Sentinel's Fate's Paineel.

I took a lot of screenshots but it's hard to do justice to this kind of monumental architecture, so overwhelming in game. In fact, none of my EQII screenshots ever seem to look anywhere near as good as the same scenes appear inside the game itself. I wonder if there are quality settings I should be tweaking?

I'll go look into that when I play next, which is going to be right now! I have a ton more to say but I feel the hands of time moving ever faster. I want to go... Back to the Moon!

Making Your Own Entertainment : EQ2, EQ2, GW2

One thing I'm really feeling the lack of in my MMORPG diet these days is crafting. Tradeskills, if you prefer. It's historically ironic because there was a time, back around the turn of the century, when I positively seethed at the very existence of crafting in my virtual worlds.

Back then I had some very specific and, looking back, bizarre ideas about what MMORPGs were supposed to be. I came to the genre looking for a kind of always-on version of the tabletop rpgs I played for much of the 1980s.

You can't buy style.

 I imagined the computer as a species of tireless, patient, selfless G.M., handling the ruleset and setting out the miniatures and maps, while the magical internet would provide an endless supply of willing players to make up my surrogate gaming group.

Things did turn out something along those lines. When it came to adventuring, EverQuest and the rest of the early offerings managed to look at least a little like the gaming sessions I remembered from the eighties.

There were goblins and orcs and dragons, for sure. We whacked them with swords or fried them with fireballs. We had hit points and armor with stats and we talked to NPCs to get ideas about where to go and what to do and then we took a long time getting there and argued with each other as we traveled. So far, so familiar.

But then there was all this other stuff. An economy, for a start. I found myself bartering with other players for things I needed. What's more, if I wanted anything specific I had to spend half a session traveling across the world to some kind of souk, where I was expected to stand around for hours listening to people hawking their wares.

An entire Sunday's gaming might consist of nothing more than an extremely risky cross-country trip followed by three hours of reading a jumble of text scrolling up the screen, just so I could come away with a new sword that was just ever-so-slightly better than the one I started with.

It was exciting to do once or twice but as as far as fantasy wish-fulfillment went it seemed an awfully long way from dragon-slaying. I developed a strong antipathy to the very existence of player-run economies in MMORPGs and for several years I believed that all in-game economic activity should be restricted wholly and entirely to player-NPC transactions.

I felt almost as strongly about crafting. It was an alien concept to me. My tabletop group never once in five years of Sundays crafted anything. We played a lot of different RPG systems - AD&D, Swordbearer, Dragonquest, Golden Heroes, Paranoia, Call of Cthulhu and at least three rulesets devised by members of the group - but I don't recall any of them even having rules for crafting, let alone anything in the games relying on make-do and mend.

The most I ever recall us doing would have been to take something to an NPC and come back a week later to pick up whatever we'd had him make for us. The idea that we'd sit down at two in the afternoon and spend three hours knitting chainmail, driving studs into leather or scribing spells into a book would rightly have been treated with derision. We had dungeons to delve and mysteries to solve!

Progression servers - the one place crafting still really matters.

Cut to EQ. Even now, the best part of twenty years later, I remember the afternoon I spent negotiating with a tailor to craft a set of studded leather armor for my druid. I remember haggling over the price, traveling to a meeting point, hanging around waiting for him to craft the stuff, opening the trade window and handing over most of my savings.

I also remember that I did it because, even though it took a couple of hours out of my adventuring schedule, to have made it myself would have taken me days. The entire process was time-consuming and laborious.

You had to kill animals to get the skins and they didn't always drop the right skins and you couldn't easily find the right animals. You had to buy basics from NPCs and they weren't always in the same place as the devices you needed to use to make stuff (although at least as a tailor you could carry your sewing kit with you).

Even when you had all the stuff it wasn't just a matter of clicking a button and the thing magically appearing in your bag. You had to have the skill and you got the skill by making stuff and you could fail to make stuff. You often failed and when you failed you lost the mats and had to get more. The worse you were the more likely it was to happen. You began bad and you got worse before you got better.

And yet you had to do it  - or pay someone to do it for you. In those days crafted gear was often not just the best you were likely to get - it was all you were likely to get. It was bad enough in EQ but DAOC took it to the next level. That's where I learned to loathe tradeskills.

Oh, my dear, no. I don't think there's any hope for you at all...

For some years my ideal MMORPG would have had no player economy whatsoever and if it had tradeskills they would have been purely for fun. Dropped or quested gear would in every case be superior to all crafted gear of equivalent level and much easier to get. At a push, maybe, crafters could make gimmicks, like tinkers.That would just about be acceptable, provided no-one actually needed anything they made for anything important.

And then, somehow, over the years, all that changed. The arrival of the Broker system with EQ's Shadows of Luclin expansion (actually about six months after, which is how long it took SoE to get it working) changed my entire belief system on economies.

My time in EQ from SoL through Planes of Power and up to somewhere around Depths of Darkhollow could be accurately characterized as The Dumpster Diving Years. I probably spent - literally and without exaggeration - more time trawling through NPCs' resale stock for items to put on the broker at vastly inflated prices than I did adventuring.

Meanwhile EQ2 and then, especially, Vanguard turned me into a crafter. I took up Provisioning at the start of EQ2 because it required the least effort. It was a useless craft at launch but once the devs actually added stats to food and drink I began to make made a good deal of money out of it.

And I enjoyed it. Crafting in EQ2 was a lot more active than in EQ. Although EQ crafting involved considerably more than just pressing a key and watching a progress bar, most of that was in the prep work. When it came to the moment it was just that - a moment.

Not really what you'd call a "crafting station"

In EQ2 you had to stay with the process from start to finish, nudging the machine along, playing progress against durability, fixing problems as they arose. You could even die if you got it wrong at a dangerous device like the Forge. It felt involving, active, entertaining.

Vanguard ramped that feeling up by a couple of orders of magnitude. Crafting in Telon was the first
time I felt as engaged by tradeskills as by adventuring. There were quests and factions and discoveries and the process itself was challenging and satisfying. It's still by some considerable margin the best implementation of crafting I've seen in an MMORPG. I miss it a lot.

Coming out of the end of Vanguard I ran straight into Domino's dominance of EQ2's crafting scene, a period when the whole tradeskill aspect of the game flourished and grew beyond anything I, or probably most players, had ever imagined. The end result was that I became a convert to crafting and you know how zealous and evangelistic converts can be.

For the last five years all I've really had to work with has been Guild Wars 2's dry tinder. The first few weeks after launch were exciting. I returned to my provisioning roots and took up Cooking.

What do you mean, "pothead"?

One way that GW2 tried to make crafting engaging was by dint of Discovery. You can follow recipes or you can just combine various ingredients and hope for the best. All crafts allow some discovery but Cooking runs entirely on random combines out of which you can learn to discern patterns.

That was fun for a while but soon there were lists online of every possible combination. I had the willpower not to read them but just knowing they existed took some of the purpose out of the process.

As the years rolled on, the GW2 developers ceased even to pay lip service to creativity in crafting. The focus moved from discovery to grind, from quality to quantity. You needed to make a lot of things and the things needed a lot of mats.

After a while crafting ceased even to be a craft. Many of the combines for anything worth having moved from crafting stations to The Mystic Forge and, lo and behold, there we were, back at my own original understanding of the concept of "crafting" in Adventureland.

In the modern conception of crafting in Tyria you collect a bunch of stuff and give it to an NPC, in this case the Genie Zommoros, who lives somewhere on the other side of the Mystic Forge. He then magically, flawlessly and instantaneously converts what you give him into the thing you want. And that's crafting.

I thought about this last night when Mrs Bhagpuss showed me the astonishing and astonishingly ridiculous Eggnog Helmet she'd just made. When I finish this post I'm going to log in and "craft" one for myself. It should take me about two minutes and most of that will be traveling from the bank to the forge.

It's a very, very far cry from anything I'd call real crafting. Fortunately, I do have a fix on the way. The missing tradeskill Signature line that wasn't ready in time for EQ2's Planes of Prophecy expansion is due sometime in the New Year. Let's hope it's a good one At worst it'll be another ten levels of Weaponsmithing and Scribing and that's not nothing.

Still, I wish I'd taken more time to enjoy my crafting back when it was good. I wonder how the crafting is in Project: Gorgon...

The Drug Fields of Calpheon : Black Desert Online

Black Desert Online comes on in a rush. From the moment you step out of character creation into the small country town of Olvia you're assailed with contradiction, confusion and chaos. Almost all "First Impressions"  pieces begin with some variation of "I had no idea where I was or what the hell I was doing".

If you give the game the reins it immediately hands you over to the Black Spirit, a disembodied entity with a cartoonish appearance and a voice that sounds like the untranslated yipping of some forgotten Saturday morning sidekick. That Black Spirit is both the most unreliable of narrators and, I have long suspected, the falsest of friends.

Oh, you look harmless now...

The first and among the worst of the many bum steers and gobbets of bad advice he, she, or most probably it, throws your way is a swiftly accelerating sequence of quests that seeds from the moment you make the mistake of listening to anything he says. Before you have any chance to get your bearings or orient yourself the animated smokestack sends you spiraling off across the landscape on an increasingly frenzied and purposeless series of murders.

It begins, bizarrely, with wildlife; weasels, foxes and wolves, all of which mill around the fields and meadows of Olvia in an existential funk, predators absent prey, merely awaiting their own pointless predation, by you. From there the Spirit moves you to slaughter various denominations of imp, to desecrate their holy places and generally tear their playhouses down for no more reason than as a test of your mettle for his amusement.

Like that's going save you, Mr Fox.

Before you have even the inkling of an idea of what you're about, your discorporate director of operations has you half way down the road to the bustling seaport of Velia, by which time you are thoroughly lost, both morally and cartographically.

Most accounts of play sessions thereafter move on to fishing, boat-building, trading and the road to Heidel and the South. The Black Spirit has you where he wants you - in thrall to his agenda.

But what if you hadn't listened to that wheedling voice? What if you'd quit after the weasels, said the hell with this, turned back to town and just got on with your life as if it were, indeed, your own? What's so bad about Olvia, anyway, that the first thing you have to do is leave?

Everything's a little blurry around the edges. I wonder why that might be...

Well, maybe Olvia has something to hide. Perhaps the Black Spirit has reasons to move you along, before you begin to look around you too closely and start to notice things.

Olvia on the surface seems as interesting, or as uninteresting, a small town as any other. It has most of the facilities you'd find anywhere: storage, trade, stabling, shops. It has the regular industrial and residential opportunities. It also has access to a fine, sandy beach with abundant fishing. As the locals will tell you if you stop to chat the coastline is underdeveloped industrially because of the fine opportunities it offers for leisure and tourism.

The key thing about Olvia that your Black Spirit won't tell you, however, is that it's on the high road to Calpheon. And I mean "high".

Wait a minute. Why am I the only one doing this?

After all those days pounding the highways to the east in search of the great city it turns out it was barely an afternoon's ride away to the south-west from where you started. The hinterland is studded with farms, most of which seem to be involved with the alchemy trade.

Alchemy. It was never "respectable" but here, there's something hazy, even shady, about the whole enterprise. The piles of herbage literally glow. The workers appear dazed.

Why did I come up here again? I feel sleepy. I'm just going have a little lie down.

Robed men in floppy hats that hide their faces smoke pipes as they eye the childlike Shai tending to the poppies that grow in the thatch of the roofs. Slow-spoken giants mumble to themselves as they haul huge baskets to the wagons. Make no bones: there are indisputable narcotic overtones.

Yeah, and I bet they talk to you too, right? Backing away now...

There's money being made here, too. Big money. The adventurers' addiction to "potions" drives the economy. In Black Desert you'll soon learn to chug with one hand while slicing up imps with the other or you'll not be an adventurer for long. Here, in the fields of Calpheon, is where they bottle those demons.

I just bet they did.

And don't let anyone tell you its "safe". That it's "just a potion". Look around you. Wake up and smell the "herbal medicine".

I mean, just how stoned would you have to be to design and build a production line that has you extracting alchemical ingredients by bouncing up and down on a giant set of bellows? What would you need to be smoking to come up with the idea of harnessing racoons as an energy source? Just how far gone would you have to be before you allowed birds to nest in your beard?

Give them the sweet taste.

The trip from Olvia to Calpheon is Black Desert in a nutshell. On the surface it appears to be the most naturalistic, authentic representation of a fully working environment, architecturally, socially and geographically. Look closely and the realistic veneer peels away to reveal the seething madness beneath.

The drug fields of Calpheon, They explain so much.

If It Ain't Broke: EQ2

EQ2's Time-Limited Expansion server Stormhold continued to exert an unexpected hold on me across the weekend even though I had other plans. When I logged out at around midnight on Sunday my ratonga shadowknight had just dinged 19. Earlier in the evening he'd reached the same level as a Scholar.

One of the many, many original functions, features and foibles that caused EQ2 to struggle so badly at launch was the tri-partite class system. In the original game, using a mechanism that seemed new at the time, your character first stepped out into Norrath in the guise of a basic archetype - Fighter, Scout, Priest or Mage.

Although something similar was soon to become a defining cliche common to any of a hundred, generic F2P MMOs, in most of those games the story ended there. Not so in EQ2.

At level 10 the path you had chosen took a tripartite split. A fighter had the option to become a Warrior, a Crusader or a Brawler. Scouts shaped up as Bards, Predators or Rogues. Priests had a very traditional choice of Druid, Cleric or Shaman, while Mages settled for Sorcerer, Summoner or Enchanter.

The choice you made at ten, somewhat confusingly as it would turn out, was your character's true "Class" but it wasn't the end of the process. In another ten levels the road forked once more, leading to a third and final decision at Level 20 that would set you forever in a Subclass that almost everyone would henceforth refer to, erroneously, as your "class".

The Zam Network has a handy chart that makes it all very clear, although there have been a few additions to the structure in the decade since. The whole thing was made even more complicated by the harsh, rigid and entirely inflexible Good vs Evil binary represented by Freeport and Qeynos, something which deserves a post of its own. Suffice it to say that the choice of Classes, and therefore Subclasses, throughout the first year of the game was even more restrictive than shown in the Zam chart.

All that changed in January 2006. This Producer's Letter from December 2005 spells out in great detail not only the changes that were made to the Archetype/Class/Subclass framework but the reasons behind those changes:

 Despite all those very sound reasons (so sound, indeed, that you might wonder why they didn't occur to someone a year or two earlier, when the game was still in beta) the change was not greeted with unrestrained joy and celebration. The opposing viewpoint is well summarized in a pithy comment later in the thread by someone named Foolsfolly:

"I can't believe you are removing the class progression 1-20. IMO, this is the worst change since the creation of this game."

As Wilhelm often observes, there's no feature in any MMO so bad that you can't find someone, somewhere willing to defend it with their dying breath. I felt at the time that it was a good and necessary change, one of very many such needed to pull the game around from the disastrous course it had set, which otherwise seemed to be headed straight for the rocks.

All the same I did have some reservations. We were the players, after all, who had struggled through all these obstacles and come out the other side. Even now, more than a decade later, I can recall my Cleric's rite of passage to become a Templar with disturbing clarity. It wasn't fun. I'd done it once in beta and I dreaded doing it again on Live. But I did do it.

As with most awful enterprises taken up voluntarily and successfully concluded, when it was over I felt pretty good about myself. This is what people mean when they sing the praises of "challenging gameplay". The trouble with challenge of this kind is, to my mind at least, it's only fun after you've done it.

Which, really, was the whole problem with the Archetype system. It was based entirely around deferred gratification. Over the years MMO gamers have demonstrated time and again that they're willing to wait a long time and put in a lot of hard work to get something they want - an Epic, a Legendary, a Title - but before they'll commit they need an emotional connection to their character that binds them to the fire. That isn't going to happen in the first twenty levels.

So, it was a bad idea and it went away. Which makes it all the odder that here we are in 2015 with the exact same structure still in place for crafting.

I decided that my SK should become an Alchemist because that's the crafting class that makes spells and combat arts for what used to be the Fighter Archetype (there's another post there on how deeply interdependence is still woven through EQ2 and I may even get around to writing it sometime). You can't become an Alchemist just like that, though.

The structure for crafters is a little simpler than it was for adventurers but it looks very similar. Everyone begins as an Artisan for the first ten levels. At 10 you take your Class as a Craftsman, an Outfitter or a Scholar and when you ding 20 you decide on your Final Class or, if you prefer, Subclass. Alchemist in the case of my new ratonga. Again, Zam has a table although the person who wrote it muddles his terms in the introduction, which just goes to show how confusing people have always found the whole thing.

Why, then, do we still have the original scaffolding for the tradeskill professions when that structure was swept away for adventures what seems like a lifetime ago?  My guess is because crafting in EQ2, despite what some people may tell you, is a lot easier than adventuring.

True, that wasn't always so. In the dark days of interdependence, when Provisioners were the only crafters who didn't rely at least in part on other classes to make components for them, when Mrs Bhagpuss named her horse Stinky Ink after the millstone round her Sage's neck, crafting was hard.

Once that was swept away, however, crafting became the doddle it has always remained, at least compared to adventuring. For example, it took my Shadowknight around eight hours yesterday to quest and kill his way through levels 17 and 18. It took him less than fifteen minutes to craft through those same levels.

As for a "rite of passage", there isn't one. There never was. When he hits the buffers as a Scholar at the end of Level 19 and stops gaining crafting xp he won't have to fight his way down to the bottom of Vermin's Snye and enter an instance filled with aggressive mobs his own level to save the life of the idiotic knight, Sir Wembley. He'll just have to toddle around the counter in the crafting house in West Freeport and ask the trainer to sign his papers.

He'll be doing that later today all being well. It's an old system, largely unchanged in all these years, but it still works.

New Year, New Dungeon: EQ2

As I write this there are nine hundred and sixty one published player-made dungeons on the Freeport server. Really, who thought it would be this popular? Apart from EQ2 producer Smokejumper, of course. He loves the Dungeon Maker so much he was on the official forums answering threads about it on Christmas Day.

So, there are a lot of them already. Less than a month in and we have nearly a thousand on one server alone. We're down with quantity, how's quality? Well, that's the hard part, isn't it? In a way, your guess is as good as mine, because I can only tell you what I've seen and so far I've played through maybe a dozen.

This is what I know. First you have to decide who you want to be because you can't be you. You choose from a list of "Adventurers" who appear to have been drawn from the dregs of the Norrathian underworld. The default selection offers a Drolvarg, a Drachnid, a Siren and a couple more ne'er-do-wells that you're more familiar with seeing on the other end of your sword. You can add to this selection with Adventurers that drop in chests around Norrath. (That's a sentence almost devoid of semantic content in the outside world). Mrs Bhagpuss got a very nice Ettin in The Feerrott and he seemed significantly more powerful than the regular tank adventurer.

Each of the Adventurers fills a traditional role - tank, healer, dps, utility and so on. They each have four abilities and autoattack. They are all level 50. It takes about 30 seconds at the most to get the hang of any of them. Once everyone's pressed the big "Ready" button, off you go.

What happens next varies wildly. Players made these things, you know!. Every one is different. Well, kinda. I didn't mention layout yet. Makers only get a relatively small number of set layouts to work with. Something like four or five subsets of each of four themes - Crushbone, Mistmoore, Chardok and Lair of Scale. Some people don't seem to be doing much more than throwing down some mobs and calling it a day, but in most of the ones I've done, even the least ambitious, there's been some creativity on show.

Did I leave my umbrella somewhere?

I've already seen several really impressive decorative efforts. I was expecting that, given the astonishing work that's been done over the years in EQ2's housing instances. Almost anything you can place in a house you can place in a dungeon and it really is about time SoE added a Kitchen Sink recipe for Carpenters because some people are already using everything but.

What's apparent already, though, is that the Dungeon Maker is attracting people whose creativity lies in areas other than decorating. Like comedy. More specifically, puns and satire (I use the term loosely. Very loosely). You can name all the mobs you place and give them a number of different things to say. It's been a surprise to me to discover just how many Norrathian creatures watched 1970s sitcoms and know the lyrics of hits from the Golden Age of Doo-Wop.... Tells you something about the age profile of the average EQ2 player...

The family that slays together...

So, some of the dungeons look good and some of them raise a laugh (or the hackles on a roleplayer) but how do they play as dungeons? Again, they're made by players, remember. Some play wonderfully smoothly, a joy to fight through. Others maybe not so much.




The Dungeon Maker is designed to scale with the number of players in the group. If you go in solo then the dungeon is automatically a solo dungeon. If there are six of you it's the full Heroic. The way this scaling happens is very basic. The mobs just get tougher according to how many players there are. So far I've only done them solo and duo and the difficulty setting of the mobs has been the same in both: even-level "No Arrows" mobs with a smattering of "One Arrow" and the occasional yellow-con boss. I usually play the Drolvarg, who I think might be a Guardian (hard to tell with only four combat arts to look at) and he easily ploughs through anything up to four mobs at a time.

I was having a small discussion with Stargrace over at MMOQuests  about this. It seems to me that all dungeons are all soloable by default. There is no penalty at all for dying and you are often back in the fight faster after a death than you might have been if you'd won and had to heal up (although that only takes a few seconds). Consequently you can wear down by attrition anything the creator throws at you simply because your Adventurer respawns and his mobs don't.

/shout Derv 2 is CAMPED !!!

Whether a dungeon is enjoyable to solo is another matter entirely. That's down to the player who made it. Another Dungeon Maker surprise has been what a huge difference placement and pacing makes to otherwise identical dungeon layouts. It should be obvious but it's very clear that some people get it and others don't. I played one last night where the creator had chosen to put the word "solo" in brackets at the end of the name on the Leaderboard. It's just as well I was doing it in a duo, because about eight mobs attacked us before we could step off the zone-in point and both of our Adventurers were almost dead before we dispatched the final rat.

Enough with the minutiae already! Are the damn things any good? Are they fun? Are they worthwhile? Are you enjoying them?

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

Some of the dungeons are just laugh-out-loud funny. I really enjoyed "Everquest 1999", unsurprisingly and the T.V. and Dr Seuss themed ones had me loling. Some have been well-paced, fast hack-and-slash romps that have kept my attention focused and left me satisfied. Some have handed me a whole AA and a thick purse of Dungeon Marks (the currency that buys you some very nice stuff for your regular character) and some have had me exploring and taking screenshots after the mobs were cleared just because the set design was so impressive.

I'm guessing the one on the right is winning.

Dungeon Maker dungeons are a Lucky Dip. There are hundreds to choose from, you can do one in anything from ten minutes to an hour and a half, you can go alone or with friends and anyone can group regardless of level. The quality varies wildly but the Like system will winnow the chaff. In the end we should be left with the gems that combine excellent playability with great art direction, witty dialog and a compelling plot. I've played one or two that are almost there already.

Build them and we will come.