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.
That doesn’t sound like the best comeback experience…
I didn’t remotely try to play the beta in any meaningful way, but all the time I was on, which would be the middle of the night on the West Coast I think, or at least no later than breakfast time, and on a weekday, too, there was a constant stream of chat in general, people talking endlessly about their experiences in 2004 and trying to put groups together and so on. There were two instances of the Overlord’s Outpost or whatever the Freeport version of Isle of Refuge is called. Obviously people were playing.
But not in Freeport. I didn’t see a single player the whole time I was there and a /who brought back just one name – mine. I think it takes a special kind of obsessive to play seriously in a beta for a server that’s going to go live in around a month and a half, especially when the content will be entirely old and extremely well-trodden. I plan on coming back when it starts for real and even then I don’t expect to do more than wander about for a while, enjoying the buzz while it lasts.
For my money, as someone who’s there or thereabouts played for the whole twenty years, I think the current content is hands-down better than the old stuff. The modern zones can be stunningly lovely, something you really couldn’t say with a straight face about the older ones. I never really liked EQII much as a group game. It’s best in a duo, in my opinion, then solo with a merc, which is also kind of duoing. It’s probably the best set-up MMORPG for duos I know – it certainly has more dedicated duo content than most. Groups in EQII, though, I always found cumbersome compared to EQ. The vast number of classes and abilities make things fussy and fiddly. There’s none of the elegance of EQ of a comparable era.
Then again, I was dumb enough to play a Templar at launch. A duller class has never been invented. I had a lot more fun when I went Necro. Healing in a duo on challenging content with the pet tanking and a demented bruiser doing DPS beats any full group I ever was in in the younger game. I don’t think I’ve ever really tanked in EQII, though.
I actually had a similar experience, in Qeynos. I didn’t see anyone there, probably because the entire city was glitchy and largely useless. Your experience in Freeport seemed better, but I would guess people were in the leveling places and not in the cities.
I updated my PC awhile ago, after I last played EQ2, so I was wondering if I finally had enough computing power to make this game look as good as they always insisted it would — when they developed graphics for future systems, not the systems anyone had at that time.
Which was… like… the worst thing they could come up with.
I don’t mind the graphics, but they still look plastic and unconvincing, and the state of the art has moved on quite a bit in the time. EQ can get away with looking low poly, because that is part of its weird charm, but EQ2 had higher ambitions it never quite reached.
I was doing a lot of soloing in EQ2, before I quit. It’s always… if I don’t log in for a night, or a month, or a year, nobody will notice, so there is no pull to get me to log in, so I eventually stop. I was in a few guilds in EQ2. I wasn’t hardcore enough for the raiding guilds, even though raiding in EQ2 was pretty much the best fun. I love raiding. I just can’t make it my life anymore. So I eventually parked in a nice enough guild, which died eventually. I like grouping, and being in guilds, but there is just so much emotional effort in making new friends and trying to fit my character into what is both needed and fun for me.
I was in several EQII guilds over the first decade or so. The first was very active from launch but imploded when the guild leader rage quit out of the blue one weekend afternoon, when we weren’t even doing anything much. Killing gnolls in Thundering Steppes, I think.
He never came back and everyone drifted away to other guilds or left the game. I forget the sequence after that (In fact, that might even have been my second EQII guild…). I just deleted a couple of paragraphs where I started to go through the sequence of guilds I was in after that because I realise I have no real sense of what order any of it happened. I might work on that for a 20th anniversary post later in the year.
Guilds are so weird. I undoubtedly had some of my best MMORPG times in guilds but also my most stressful times. On balance, I don’t think the stress is worth it and as you say there are only so many times you can do the whole “meeting my new best friends” routine. I kept it up for about a decade and I think that was enough.