The Shadow Odyssey

No, really, I’m sure there are millions of puns out there about “crafting” and “tradeskills”. No laws against them. They aren’t WEA-PUNS of LAUGHS INSTRUCTION, after all. So, yeah. Still shocked and awed by the coolness of the Shadow Odyssey crafting quests. No killing. NO FRIGGIN KILLING. I had a quest to rebuild a cannon for some quick ballistic travel between a couple of areas, and after gathering ore, it asked me for a wire from a sweeper bot. “Okay,” thought I, “finally some killing!” ...

The Shadow Odyssey is like a really big book… but you only have summaries for each chapter, and you’ll be having a test on it the next morning. At 7AM. At least, that’s how it feels to me. Way, way too much to digest at once. New dungeons all over the place, or re-imagined old ones. The whole plot that runs through the Moors of Ykesha. All new crafting! All new AAs! ...

What looks sillier than a very tiny fairly, with an even tinier fairy stuck to her shoulder, riding a huge, massive bear into a huge, massive bear convention with a group of gnomes in a steampunk city made out of mega-works and rusted iron? Not much, actually. That’s pretty much as silly as it gets. Or maybe the retailer support for EverQuest II’s latest expansion would be a little sillier. I went to Best Buy and two Gamestops last night hunting up the retail box. In between the hundreds of WotLK boxes, and many Hellgate: London boxes, the rows of Lord of the Rings Online boxes, the huge Warhammer Online displays (with collector editions!), were two copies of Rise of Kunark and one copy of Secrets of Faydwer, last year’s EverQuest expansion. ...

Just want to point out (I have a slightly longer expansion article scheduled for later so will be brief) that Kendricke has posted the Game Update 50 patch notes up on the Clockwork Gamer blog. Some nice changes. Nothing that makes the troubadour particularly more fun to play, but some nice stuff in there. Mostly just balancing, though.

Via Taymar at MMORPG Info (always a fantastic place for information about EQ2 and other games), EQ2’s game update 49 – the last one before the expansion – is live. GU49 introduces guild halls, multicore support, and more. Perhaps another chapter in the Anashti Sul world event? I THOUGHT they were doing a tailoring update with new colors and patterns, but I can’t remember if that was expansion or pre-expansion. My tests with the multicore support on my Core 2 Duo-powered laptop showed a significant improvement on Test.

The EverQuest 2 GU48 world quest deals with, from the evil side, anyway, discovering who is responsible for the death of a Qeynosian Seeress who died mysteriously just before she was to make a pronouncement. All the signs point to work by Bertoxxulous’s disciples, but the high priest of the god of disease swears that though they have no love for any follower of the Prime Healer, Rodcet Nife, it wasn’t them. They were framed. ...

SOE has a great preview of their re-imagining of the dungeon of Najena on their web site. I loved the original Najena – it was the first raid I ever did with the guild I’d just joined, United Norrath Coalition, and I must have been all of level 19, and Drelzna hated druids so much, she harm touched me to death every time she popped. Good times. I don’t expect it to be the sort of casual fun Najena was in EQ1 (which, despite what people say, was pretty much the ultimate casual, social MMO), but it will be nice to see what it has become. ...

I’ll be seeing these live hopefully later today, but here’s my first reactions to the expansions. EQ2: The Shadow Odyssey So, we’re getting Lost Dungeons of Norrath, EQ2 style. I don’t know if this means the return of the Wayfarers, but I kind of hope it doesn’t, as the Wayfarer’s led into the ugly Gates of Discord and Omens of War expansions, which kinda broke the whole fantasy feel of EQ with their SciFi aliens from across the 8th dimension, a mistake finally corrected with Dragons of Norrath. ...