While I have tried out some of the EverQuest time limited servers, I’ve never jumped on that bandwagon with EverQuest 2, The new stuff on the live servers was more compelling than replaying the old, and in any event, I haven’t been playing EQ2 for years, and really hardly play MMOs at all, any more.
But then, Wilhelm was talking about it, Bhagpuss took a look around Freeport, some other people brought it up, so I figured – what the heck. I’ll patch it in. I’ll see what’s up.
It’s always bothered me that you arrived on the tutorial island without any past. With the original home cities in the original EverQuest, it was pretty clear that you’d just grown up in the area; everyone knew you, and you were just coming of age and about to find your place in the world – inevitably, adventuring, but one could become a crafter and never leave your home city, a common fate for crafting alts.
In EverQuest 2, you’re a blank slate with no past. NPCs regard adventurers as their own race and culture, separate from theirs. You are not expected to know anything of the state of the world. In Baubleshire, they didn’t expect my halfling fury to even know of Bristlebane, the god of Mischief and creator of the halfling race.
Reminds me of the anime Log Horizon, where the NPCs were very well aware of the true origins of the adventurers – visitors from another realm entirely.
I didn’t take any video or screenshots from my time in the Queen’s Colony. I grouped once. Tradeskills were broken. I did all the quests I could find, and left the island at level 6. Dropped into Baubleshire, ran around until I found a door to the Down Below, went down below, couldn’t get out, died trying to find another exit, and then…
Well, that was that. The game didn’t offer to return me to my bind point, so I lay dead in a random corridor in the dungeon until I force quit to desktop.
The next morning – still dead, same place. My /report hadn’t been answered. When I mentioned my plight in general chat, though, a player tracked down my corpse, rezzed me, and showed me the way out.
People are nice!
The haffers in Baubleshire are OBSESSED with pie. But, I didn’t head right there. The Down Below exit brought me eventually to Qeynos Harbor. Good! I could finally get some crafting done. But, bad! Qeynos Harbor is a glitchy mess! So I returned to Baubleshire. There is no crafting in Baubleshire! Not even pie!
I did eventually find a tradeskill instance in another neighborhood, but I still haven’t crafted a damn thing. My spells need help!
Life and quests eventually brought me to the Forest Ruins. I was surprised just how much I remembered of the place. It has been a long time since I played EQ2, and even longer since I started a new character in Qeynos, but it still felt very, very familiar. I soloed for awhile. A group of higher levels tapped me to help heal in their Ruins group, so I did that for a little. Later, someone on the same quest I was on invited me to group up. We eventually found a third, (we were coercer, assassin and fury at that point; three evil classes playing on the good team, something that was not allowed back in the day). We knocked out some tricky Forest Ruins quests and moved on to the cave.
We were hunting oranges and reds – much higher level than my 7 at the time. Experience was amazingly… terrible. It was awful. I had no rest experience, having spent my night dead in a dungeon rather than sleeping in a comfy halfling bed. I dinged once, and once only, to level 8. And that’s where I left things, when the group broke up.
The server is going to be wiped at some point before it launches for real – this is just in Beta, now. It’s clear they need to do a lot more work on it. And the good, helpful, friendly people in this beta will be replaced with the normal double boxers, power levelers, min maxers and all the other people who have helpfully reminded me how wonderful single player RPGs can be.
But.
The world of Anashti Sul is a dangerous place. You can’t buy overpowered master-level gear from the broker for pennies. You’re going to die a lot. You’re not going to hit 50 in a week and spit on anyone who doesn’t believe raiding is the one and only reason to play an MMO. You’re going to have time to really explore Thundering Steppes and the Enchanted Lands and spend some time in these places. Might even meet some people who are still there the next day. Hard to tell.
Am I going to be playing this server when it goes live? It depends. All of these time limited progression servers place a huge bounty on being there from day 1, becoming part of the community, and moving to the new content as it’s unlocked. Wait too long, and you might just as well start on a live server, because if you stall too long, the window where you can find easy groups and experience the game as it was meant to be experienced will past, and you’ll be left without the systems Daybreak has added over the years that make soloing regrettable but possible.
Secondly – I have done EQ2. There’s plenty of stuff I haven’t seen, but it isn’t at this end of the leveling curve. I’d just be doing the same old things again, but this time, without any of the people that made the game fun the first time through.
Specifically, playing a Fury, which is the evil druid variety. I played an inquisitor and a defiler already in EQ2, before moving onto the troubadour and finally a berserker. Of them all, the berserker was the most fun. As I moved to other MMOs, like Neverwinter and Final Fantasy XIV, I stuck with the tank role. I chose a druid this time because my first real character in EQ1 was Etha, a halfling druid, and I tend to come back to that in EverQuest. I enjoy the healing role, too. EQ made druids bad healers before they made them good again, but it was when I could no longer find a group (“You’re a druid! Go solo!”), I switched to rogue and learned to love big numbers.
Anyway. Being a healer in EQ2 means you are always looking for a tank. Being a tank means you are always looking for a healer. And being DPS means you are always LFG. Same as everywhere.
I’m not sure I want to do that again. I do know that I do not like my current GW2 profession, which is Engineer, and seems to be bad at every role. That’s probably just me; but if I can’t even make the effort to log in to a game where RL friends actually play, I don’t really see it happening for EQ2.
But. I might. We’ll see.