everquest Archives - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Everquest For Reasons

April 13, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I did some nonsense “for science” or mostly to refresh my mind so that I was no longer talking completely out of my arse about Everquest. Prior to last night the last time I had played was apparently in 2013 if my screenshot archive was to be believed. So not exactly the most up to date information about the game considering it is still receiving updates and tweaks. Prior to starting up… or more correctly as the game downloaded I watched a video from Cohh to sort of re-familiarize myself with the game. This video included a link to Brewall’s Everquest Maps pack… which I then installed to have slightly better guidance than the default options.

The game presented a series of servers… some of which were flagged as preferred… something I am not completely certain what it actually means. However it did get me to end up rolling on Vox instead of one of the classic servers that slowly got joined over the years. This is technically a newer account than the one that I had while playing the original Everquest, but it is the one that I have the vast majority of my EQ2 characters on… so if I am going to sub somewhere it would be here. On my older account however my characters are spread between Veeshan and Xegony… neither of which sounded like an amazing option for starting fresh so I just went with Vox the new standard ruleset server that was being presented in the preferred list.

Originally I created a Gnome Shadowknight… but the fact that I could not change the color of the eyebrows from grey to something else caused me to ultimately delete that character and roll something completely different. This time around I went with a Troll which was a more min-maxery choice given that the latent regeneration has always been a little broken. Essentially there are three races that are large enough to be able to Slam… or essentially shield bash without the requirement of having a shield. So you if you play a Troll, Ogre or Barbarian you can interrupt casting while using a two handed weapon… which always seemed to fit the feel of a Shadowknight better than sword and shield. Yes these are things that I was somehow able to dredge up from the past and summon forth to advise my judgement.

The user interface still makes me deeply frustrated because it is sort of a much worse version of Everquest 2… and I have never thought the EQ2 interface was that brilliant. After about thirty minutes of tweaking I managed to get things moved in a way that didn’t make me quite so frustrated… though still not entirely happy. The hardest part was the mouse but after tweaking both the X and Y sensitivity I managed to get mouse look feeling a bit more normal. The next step was trying to figure out how to get tab targeting to work properly which lead me out onto the forums to sort out which of the keybinds would actually do what I wanted it to do. It turned out that basically I wanted to bind two things to tab… nearest npc and cycle extended targets… which combined sorta give me the style of tab targeting I am used to which is target the nearest thing or cycle through the things I am currently engaged with.

Over the course of the evening things started feeling significantly better as I got adjusted to this window on time. The combat is still largely non-interactive at low levels for a melee character and it was not long before I set up my old “Taunt and Slam” macro so that I could have a single button to train both abilities up with. Originally I had lumped Sense Heading in there but it seems that you maybe no longer need to train that like you did before. Most combat involved me pulling with my single spell Spike of Disease then starting up the auto attack and hitting my single ability button anytime taunt or bash/slam were up. It was not glamorous… but also pretty chill to hang out downstairs while watching television.

Unfortunately as of writing this… I am finding out that they apparently moved the spells so you start to get something new every level instead of not giving Shadowknights much of anything until around level 10. So I just bought Sense the Dead, Locate Corpse, Invisibility vs Undead, Disease Cloud and Siphon Strength which should serve to make combat significantly more interesting. The other thing that makes this entire experience more reasonable is the introduction of mercenaries… so I am running around with I believe a Human Cleric allowing me to do my tanky nonsense almost indefinitely receiving the occasional heal to keep me alive and functional.

All in all it is not a bad experience so I do need to back pedal a bit regarding some of my comments the other day when talking about Project Gorgon. That said I do think the interface for Gorgon is leaps and bounds ahead of this one, and it is probably the single most frustrating part of the experience for me. I feel like I will spend some time soon trying to clean the interface up a bit or seeing if I can hide some of the interface elements to reduce the size of everything. I am linking in a picture from Project Gorgon for reference… as there is just way less stuff on the screen but providing most of the same information that the Everquest screen does. Regardless it was interesting enough for me to get to level 8 and it is highly likely that I will keep leveling for a bit just to see how the experience expands once I leave the newbie cave.

Wandering Aimlessly

April 10, 2018 by Belghast

Right now I find myself struggling a bit to gain purchase in most of my MMO options right now. World of Warcraft I am back and active in because of the Wednesday night Mythical Nonsense thing we are doing. I was logging in every night to try and eek out the last bits of experience needed to unlock the Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei but even then… I have faltered considerably. I really do not enjoy Argus, so logging in every night and grinding every single quest available just seems grossly unpalatable. Final Fantasy XIV failed to catch my attention with Eureka, and I lost momentum catching up on the main story quest patched in with the latest expansion. Destiny 2 is sitting there largely untouched because when I log in… there is really nothing that I want to be doing which is ultimately where that game falls short of the original.. there are no long running breadcrumbs for me to follow when I spin out and lose purpose. Monster Hunter World is always easy to get back into… but there are nights that I just don’t want to spend my evening upstairs and the fact that my PS4 is there limits my play time.

In the end I keep coming back to Project Gorgon and its weirdly charming neostalgic experience. On the podcast Tam talked about the game feeling like the way we remember playing Everquest. While this might sound confusing at first… this is exactly what this game feels like. We have incorrect rose tinted feelings about how Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot for that matter felt to play. If you go back today you end up with a cludgy mess of a game that feels ancient and quite honestly not that enjoyable. However our in our memories the Everquest experience is still vibrant because we have edited out the rough spots and filled in the way those actions made us feel in place of the hard facts of just how limited that game actually was. Project Gorgon remembers those things that were lacking in Everquest and has supplied the spackle and paint needed to make those memories feel true and vibrant.

Sure I am doing the same kill ten rats quests I have been doing my entire MMO gaming career, but the fact that I seem to have a relatively limitless quest log… and the fact that I can complete the quests by killing ANY ten rats… not just the ones five feet away from the quest giver makes the experience feel more open ended. If I have a quest to kill wolves… Sickly Wolves, Mangy Wolves, Supporting Wolves, just plain wolves… specific named character wolves… all count towards a quest that says “kill wolves”. This means you can do the quests while roaming around the world and exploring… rather than feeling tethered to a specific location to be able to clear out your log. There are quests I picked up on my first day that I just managed to finish two weeks later because I had not actually encountered the thing I was needing to find yet. I dig the long tail that this cycle has and the fact that it feels like you are “questing” for something more than just completing a task list.

I am sure some of this is just my inherent lack of familiarity with the world or the fact that the maps don’t really have locations marked on them, or my habit of running the opposite direction I need to go. Whatever the case the specific combination of broad objectives and happy accidents along the way lead to a very immersive experience in spite of the fact that you spend a good deal of time running along and encountering nothing at all. The only real complaint I have so far is the fact that most of the gear that I use looks like complete nonsense… like right now it feels like I am wearing thermal long-johns… but they were unfortunately the best item I had and finally got rid of that horrible yellow bandage appearance.

At this point I have managed to hook two more people on this game, in part because I knew it would be down their alley. For the most part I am limiting myself to just Sword and Psychology… but I am contemplating trying out a few other secondary skills. I spent the 2000 councils aka gold to learn beast taming so it might be interesting to try a pet secondary for awhile. Similarly I now have the ability to learn fire magic, so that might also be interesting to shim in over top of Psychology. The one thing that I am finding weird… and cannot quite reconcile is that our hotbars have six abilities on them… but right now I have seven in both psychology and swords. I cannot however seem to be able to replace the spells from my bar… so how exactly do we use that last one? I might try dragging it to the optional bar and see if it becomes usable that way. Among all of the other games that I have access to at this very moment… this one feels the most comfortable and suited to whatever I am needing at this very moment. I’ve not really streamed much because nothing I am doing right now seems interesting enough for someone to watch. Grinding factions in WoW is boring as hell… and I am afraid me wandering around aimlessly in Gorgon will also be boring to watch.

Project Gorgon

April 2, 2018 by Belghast

I am not entirely sure why, but this weekend I decided to buy into Project Gorgon on Steam. Now in theory I could have been playing it for free all of this time given that based on the titles I have… I played both in Pre-Alpha and Alpha. I remember picking up the game in the past and finding it undeniably charming… but also very raw and unpolished… which was not something I was looking for at that time. However with several games either out or on the horizon that seem to be vying for the “Everquest Nostalgia” demographic… I thought I should probably give it another shot. Knowing how shoestring of a budget the game has been lead me to just go ahead and purchase it on Steam even though in theory I could have still logged in via my original account that I linked to while setting the game up.

Part of the charm of this game is that it plops you into the game with no real warning or advisement about what you should be doing. This can be a bit maddening if you are not in the right mindset, but in doing so the “newbie island” helps to set your focus on how this game works. There are clues and directions out there… but you need to spend time pouring over quest text and scribbling down notes as you go. Which is handy because they do in fact give you an in game notepad to do so with. One of the sequences on the island involves going around and scribbling down coordinates that you will ultimately need later on, and not writing down the correct coordinates could have dire consequences.

I am extremely late to the game, because I know that some of my friends have been playing for ages. However I still felt like I needed to talk a bit about it this morning to try and explain why it is so damned charming. Compared to modern MMORPGs this is going to feel extremely spartan but I believe that is in large part the point. This is a game where everything has an equivalent skill that can be raised, including death… and a game where you have no classes or true levels to speak of. You go out into the world and do things, and those things ultimately give you skills… which you then blend together into something resembling your own personal “class”.

For example everyone can have a primary and a secondary combat skill. I’ve chosen sword for my primary and bow for my secondary allowing me to play a EQ ranger sort of flavored character starting combat off with ranged attacks and finishing it up close and person with sword slashes. I could have gone with other options which would have had their own leveling system and their own sets of attacks. I’ve not actually encountered anything that would come across as traditional magic in the game, but I am certain it is in there… just has to be discovered and unlocked like everything else seems to be.

I am currently in a mode where I am just not sure what is useful and what is not. It seems like everything that drops can in theory have a use… but I may not be able to discover it yet because I lack the skill to do anything with it. I spent a large amount of time yesterday learning how to cook and garden so that I could ultimately create some hashbrowns… to gain favor with an NPC to be able to do something else. Similarly there are half a dozen combat quests that I am slowly chipping away at as I go out into the world and take down mobs. There is a significant amount of learning the lay of the land going on… which of course has its own skill associated with it called Cartography… that increases as you clear the fog from various areas of the map.

Like I said literally everything seems to have a skill associated with it that can be raised and that will ultimately unlock abilities if you get them high enough. Combat right now can be extremely challenging because there is no formal “con” system like Everquest or DAoC had to guide you. In theory you need to fight something… before you can really determine if you are strong enough to be able to hunt them regularly. Since Death is its own skill… dying over and over to something eventually makes you heartier and raises your maximum health and in theory doesn’t seem to have much in the way of negative effects. There is some sort of a hardcore mode that acts more like Everquest or a similar game… but that is not a thing I will ever be enabling. What makes it even more entertaining is that you gain “Bonus Death Experience” for dying in new and interesting ways… turning it into a bit of a mini-game to see if you can figure out new ways that you can shed the mortal coil.

Anyone who played Everquest during the Shadows of Luclin expansion will recognize this scene… with lots of vendors lined up in an area that looks very reminiscent of The Nexus. The positive here is that each of these stalls is an NPC that can be rented by the players allowing for a much better shopping experience than players having to AFK all day to sell their wares. One of the things you are going to need to get used to in playing Project Gorgon… is that it is a much slower paced game hearkening back to an era where there was plenty of time to throw out chat messages in between attacks in combat. As a result from what I hear there is an amazing community that has grown up in the game and based on the forums at least… I would say they are more than willing to help new players get started.

There are certain aspects of the game that really lend to this… for example it uses an EQ item drop system allowing players to just throw something on the ground that anyone else can pick up. As a result there are often tons of viable items just laying around in town that high progressed players have discarded because they are not actually worth trying to sell. One of the concepts that is hard to get used to is the fact that vendors have a limited amount of gold on them, and each of them will only buy certain items. There is one vendor in town that will buy pretty much anything… but you are going to run her out of gold very quickly and have to wait seven days real world time for her funds to regenerate. This means that you need to get to know which vendors are the best options for buying which items… either that or just drop it on the ground for someone else to use.

Another really interesting system in the game is that you can “Hang out” with certain NPCs while offline, allowing you to do some measure of progression while not logged into the game. You can only have one of these activities selected at a time and as far as I can tell you don’t need to be anywhere near the actual NPC when you log out to make it happen. For example in the first image of this post there is a little note at the bottom the screen saying that I finished hunting Myconids with Mushroom Jack, which was a 4 hour long Hangout I chose before logging out for the evening. Generally speaking you need to get to a certain faction level before these start opening up with NPCs, but doing so gives you an interesting way to push up their favor and also potentially gain items.

It took me awhile to figure this out, and in my sluggishness at arriving at this conclusion… it lead me to miss out in a very important item on the newbie island that I am deeply wishing I had. In fact I am starting a second character just to try and get said item… and in theory will swap it over via the extremely expensive shared account storage. The only problem I see with the game right now is that since I seem to be able to eventually learn how to do everything… I question the need for alts. At some point during my play through I decided to drop unarmed combat as my secondary attack and pick up a bow… and even though it was grossly behind in skill I seemed to be able to catch it up quickly. If you have the time and money… you seem to be able to do every possible tradeskill… so I question what the hook is for running up additional characters?

Over the course of the weekend I played eight hours of the game, and in doing so have become hooked. While doing this Tam was apparently playing Shroud of the Avatar, which I myself booted up last night to see how the two compared. They are both vying for that 90s era early MMO nostalgia… and quite honestly Project Gorgon scratches the right itches for me personally. Shroud was extremely well funded and had a relatively large development crew to create… but comes off as this extremely janky product. Project Gorgon however has at its core a husband and wife development team, and a composer… and a relatively low funded kickstarter…. and comes off as this completely charming and competent version of that Everquest era game that ultimately FEELS better to play.

Sure it needs more work, for example the game consumes a ton of system resources… far more than it should for the level of graphical fidelity. However client optimization will come in time, and based on the little note you see before logging in the team realizes that is a problem. However what is there is extremely sticky, and extremely impressive for such a small development team. I feel like I have barely scratched the surface of the game because each time I play I figure out something new. Hell there are entire areas of the first major zone that I have not explored… and with it likely NPCs that I have not talked to or encountered. Ultimately this game is not going to be for everyone… but if you ever wanted to see what playing Everquest felt like back during the early days Project Gorgon is a great starting place.

Fixing Everquest 2

March 15, 2016 by Belghast

Tale of Two Games

Last week we had the somewhat bittersweet news that Everquest Next was officially being cancelled. For those who were utterly confused about what Landmark, Next and the rest of the EQ games actually are… here is a quick rundown. Everquest of course is the granddaddy of the big hit MMOs. Then mere days before the launch of World of Warcraft…. Everquest II came out as an attempt at rebooting the world. Everything in that setting happened after a huge calamity that saw Luclin the moon shattering and sending shards to earth. The world was changed, the land fractured, and in many ways it allowed for a much larger scale game world than the original. Everquest Next was the concept for what was ultimately going to be the third Everquest MMO… so in truth you can just think of it as Everquest III. Landmark on the other hand is ultimately the tool that they were using to build the world of Everquest Next. After playing around with it the folks decided that this was actually a really fun thing to play with in itself, in the Minecraft style. Landmark was really never a fully fleshed out game, but more of a sandbox toy that players could fiddle with. Since its launch they have made it more “game-like” but it still is missing a lot of the core features folks expect in an MMO.

Now in the above paragraph I mentioned a key fact… that Everquest II launched on November 8th of 2004… and then was completely overshadowed by the launch of World of Warcraft on November 24th of that same year. The two games took significantly different paths, and produced really different results. Everquest II was this rich tapestry of cultures and game systems that provided a really deep game play experience that worked on so many levels. World of Warcraft was a much more streamlined experience that asked less of the player, but ultimately became easier to pick up and play without an excessive amount of research. We all know how the tales goes… that WoW becomes the juggernaut of MMO gaming and EQ2 becomes this sheltered garden with an excellent community and lots of great content… but always treated as a second tier experience. Right now Everquest II feels extremely dated, like an artifact of a different era whereas World of Warcraft feels somewhat evergreen. The major difference there is that each time WoW releases an expansion they do significant systems overhauls that cause some sweeping changes to not only the fidelity of the game client itself, but also the back end systems. Everquest II on the other hand has been this “Weasley House” of MMOs with content constantly being tacked on top of the older foundation. The new content feels like modern content, but you experience a sort of whiplash as you shift between the different layers of the content and see just how drastic and inequitable the improvements have been.

Renovation Is Due

The above image has been floating around for a few weeks now and represents some work that the Everquest II team is doing to update the orc model. It seems that the newest expansion content that they are working on heavily focus on orcs, and as a result they are just updating the base model to bring them up to modern standards. Seeing this however made me realize just how bad the old models look. I mean it has always been one of those things in the back of my mind, but when you see what the team is capable of producing today… placed against something that has existed since 2004 it is staggering. Now that Everquest Next is no longer a thing… I would love to see them pour some of those resources into producing a graphical upgrade to Everquest II. The big problem with the game are just how dated the models and the animations look, and going back there is always an adjustment period and largely just hand waving off a bunch of details that get under my skin because the content itself is so amazingly rich. I realize this is a massive undertaking, and it is the sort of thing that could be rolled in over time. If you remember the original Everquest went through the same problems and with the release of Luclin they released new and updated character models. Unfortunately in the case of EQ2… we need a lot more than just characters. I would love to see this great game get a second life, because for so many of my friends that I have tried to get to play this game… the ugliness of the assets was a barrier they simply could not get past.

Now fixing the graphics isn’t going to fix the game entirely… but it would go a long way into making it feel more playable. Next up however we really need to talk about the user interface, that has always felt a bit cludgy. I’ve not played the game in the last decade without first installing some sort of third party addon user interface. For years I played with Fetish Nightfall, and within the last six years or so I switched over to being a Drums UI guy. With these UI extensions the game becomes rather good, but the whole process of acquiring a UI and keeping it updated… feels needlessly arcane in a manner I have not experience in any other game save for maybe Dark Age of Camelot where they had no official support for addons. So the entire User Interface could use a bit of a facelift. Finally we have to talk about the way combat works in this game. I feel like this is the step that would actually cause rioting in the streets by diehard Everquest II fans… but I also feel like it is the point that is the most needed. The game really really needs to simplify combat in a way that does not require me to use 30+ abilities in a combat rotation. The above picture is of my Shadowknight, and at least 30 of this abilities are ones that I pretty much used in every single round of combat. It was even worse on my Dirge and I had these super complex patterns memorized… that even today I can sit down at the keyboard and automatically cycle through them.

The problem is… it doesn’t really feel fun. I feel like I am playing some sort of a musical instrument instead of actually experience reactive combat in a video game. Now I am not saying water it down to the level that single hotbar games have done… or simplify it to the point of an action MMO. I just would love to be able to have one primary hotbar of abilities that get used every round… and then a bunch of optional abilities that throw in for flavor or when special conditions are met. The cooldown of EQ2 abilities is so long that you need something… anything… to fill in the gaps so you quite often are simply mashing the next button that is off cool down. Please understand that I am a huge fan of Everquest II… but every time I leave it is the cludgy combat system that eventually drives me away. For several months I can overlook it and just blend back into the rich and vast game world… but I always reach this point where I need to play combat that simply “works better”. I think maybe this is a ship that has already sailed, and after doing several combat passes early in the game… I am not sure if they have the intestinal fortitude to attempt another. All of this aid… simply making the game look better would go a long way into making this a more attractive experience to new players, but in doing this post I am talking about all of the things that I wish were different. Combat will always be a huge part of that.