Being the only player in the Outpost of the Overlord is like being the only kid at Disneyland. Rides aren’t as fun without someone else there! But at level 10, there’s absolutely nothing that gives my little coercer any experience.
Once she leaves the Outpost, though, it’s gone forever. No characters can start there any more, and this beautiful little island will never see a new struggling newbie, nobody will plead for help with the cave or the pirate or the graveyard, and one of the most wonderful starting experiences I’ve ever had will be forgotten.
Remember when you got to the island in a boat after being fished out of the water by passing traders, thus starting your long association with the Far Seas Traders to whom you literally owed your life? Remember when you’d just figured out how to move around on the ship when drakes attacked? When you finally came safely ashore, someone demanded of you your class — fighter, mage, scout or priest. The original Four Archetypes of EverQuest 2. The same four you see in Rift, today. As in Rift, you soon specialized — and then again, finally choosing your subclass at level 20 after having been given a brief look at every choice along the way.
I wasn’t one of the ones who hated the archetype-class-subclass system. I liked the tests and challenges, made leveling a new character fun. But, like the Outpost of the Overlord and the Queen’s Colony. those little bits of adventure are gone forever, like the Glory of the Empire, the song my Freeport Bard had to sing to some orcs to earn her Troubadour stripes.
7 thoughts on “EQ2: The Outpost of the Overlord”
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I also liked the four archetypes and also that we had to complete quests to attain our chosen classes. I loved getting the special class weapon at the end of the quest. It’s sad when I go through Freeport now and see the door with the cats sitting outside looking at it, and knowing that newer people may never know that there was a reason for that door and those cats. (It was for one of those class quests.) It was fun earning the right to train and become a chosen class.
Loved the starting islands too! Maybe they will return with the Freeport/Qeynos revamp.
I liked the system — I thought it made a lot of sense. But having to go through the same damn thing however many times for each alt in the same archetype got old in a hurry.
Plus there was that thing where the “fighter” wore chain and could use swords, but then the “brawler” who supposedly built on those skills suddenly lost the ability to wear heavier than leather or use edged weapons as they advanced. That didn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Still… I did like the system in theory, just in practice with alts it didn’t work so well.
And I loved starting on the islands. I was very sad when they got taken out.
I’m with Pkdude. The starting island was great. The old “play for 20 levels to get to the class you want to try” I didn’t like so much.
I feel terribly sad after reading this post. I hope you never move that coercer on to the main game, if only because I don’t have to opportunity to roll a character there anymore.
Sorry to post here, but I can’t find the Mount Contest results. When will you be posting that? There’s a mount sale and I wouldn’t want to buy something I might have won!
Thanks
I just mailed out the winning codes. Posting about it now.
I also have a character who lives permanently on The Isle of Refuge. He’s on a server where I otherwise don’t play and from the moment I created him the intention was that he would never leave the island.
Of course, that was many years ago and I had no idea he’d end up alone there, waiting for the apocalypse. I was very surprised to find that he was still there when I first logged him in to check after the Far Seas Traders closed their rescue operation down. I thought the Isle would just be removed from the game and I’d find him in Freeport (him being a ratonga). I’ve played him a fair few times since, just wandering round the island doing ratonga stuff.
In fact, I never liked the Isle much, and I certainly never liked anything at all about the original archetype system. I played EQ2 from beta (early September) and there was a LOT I didn’t like about it. Most of the things I did enjoy got removed during beta and the game that actually launched was arid, dessicated, dry as desert dust.
The launch of EQ2 split my then-group of EQ1 friends. Many came to EQ2, others didn’t. Of the group that came to EQ2, all but one had left within six months, as had almost all the new friends I’d made there. By the late spring of 2005 EQ2 was in what looked like terminal decline, population in freefall. The last person I knew from EQ1 who was still playing finally threw in the towel and went to try this new MMO people were all talking about: WoW.
Mrs Bhagpuss and I went back to EQ1 and didn’t come back to EQ2 for almost a year, by when the Scott Hartsman Revolution was beginning to show some progress. Eventually, he threw out most of the terrible design decisions that had sucked all the fun out of the original game (fun that was actually already there when I first got into beta and was visibly and distressingly removed piece by piece the nearer the game drew to launch – a process I saw repeated with Vanguard) and slowly turned EQ2 into the topnotch MMO it should have been from the beginning.
The archetypes went, unmissed by me. The Isle stayed. It became increasingly irrelevant and misleading as an introduction to the game, but then all tutorials tend to be badly disconnected from the games that follow. After a while it became permissable to jump straight off the Isle to Freeport or Qeynos as soon as you arrived and I tended to do just that when I made a new character.
When they finally announced it was going, I can’t say I was much interested one way or another. I’d always prefer things are left in place for those that like them, rather than removed, but if and when I finally log my island ratonga in and find him on the Temple Street dock instead, I don’t imagine I’ll shed any tears.