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Week In Gaming 12/5/2015

December 6, 2015 by Belghast

Sunday Madness

Today my posts and the AggroChat podcast are coming out a little late, because reasons. My wife has this thing at church this morning, and stuff was not going very much as planned. So instead of wrapping up the podcast when I got up, I went into the mode of attempting to support my wife as she flailed around the house trying to get everything ready. I don’t really do the religion thing, but it is important to my wife so I’ve always attempted to support her in whatever way she needs. Normally speaking I would have been further along in the podcast creation process by the time I slept last night, but instead I decided to have a knock down drag out fight with Amazon. There is an item that starting last Tuesday, has been updating daily to tell me it would be there by 8pm the next day. This has drug on for several days… and the FedEx tracking that I finally received shows that there is no way it is going to be here until sometime at the end of next week. Needless to say I was more than a little perturbed, and ended up trying to get to the bottom of it.

Where I feel bad however is that I know I took out some of my frustrations on the agents that were working the case. I realize why companies hide their chat functionality, but overall it is a horrible practice, that only leads customers to be pissed as hell by the time they FINALLY get a hold of a person to talk to about their issues. I know I probably came off as a mad man, but seriously… I’ve been an Amazon customer since around 2000, and been a prime member for I think as long as the program has existed. I keep that active so that I can have items here in two days… and there have been a lot of times in the past where they actually have it here next day. Since the swap to using the US Postal Service however, I have had several delayed orders… and this one just seems to be another in that line of problems. The worst part about it is.. that after spending over an hour last night trying to get someone to tell me where the ball was dropped… no one seemed to have any answers. I did however get two months of prime added to my account apparently to appease me, so I guess that makes up for some of the frustration. I have no doubt that the item will arrive and be just fine… but man this situation has been annoying. It is nothing nearly as bad as Tam and Amazon quite literally losing his shipment.

The Week of Warcraft

For the most part this was in fact the Week of Warcraft as I am attempting to play both characters on Argent Dawn Alliance side… and the joined The Scryers server Horde side. This means there are two different communities that I am trying to be an active part of, and as a result pretty much everything else I am doing has fallen by the wayside. Part of my Sunday ritual is to go downstairs and watch a sequence of television shows until ultimately it is time for bed. However during this sequence I got pulled into the Horde side guild raid with my friends in the awesomely named Facepull. Between some gear upgrades from drops and some crafted gear by the amazing Brerhoof it took me to around the 670 range. Now after some LFR this week I am sitting at 679 so a stones throw away from 680. I have two parts left to do of LFR and my hope is at some point before this evening I can actually get them knocked out and will hopefully see some more upgrades. My lowest piece on the Paladin is his necklace which is still the level 640 boosted green gear. In theory if I get lucky I could get a baleful item to drop while I am doing dailies… which I also need to do at some point. I have everything enchanted and gemmed… at least with cheap enchants and gems so my performance as a whole should be better tonight… that is if they still want me to come and pewpewpew things.

Then Wednesday night I was invited to raid with some twitter folk that I have known for ages. There I brought my Alliance Warrior Belghast, and similarly have made some jumps in gearing as the week went out. I started the week at 680 and have bumped it a little bit up to 684. This is still a long ways off from the 705-710 range that I need to be in order to really function in Heroic for the Friendship Moose fun, but whatever I am enjoying the process. In both cases I was mostly a fly on the wall as the raid went about their business, but I could see myself enjoying both situations greatly. It is my hope that in both scenarios are am invited back for future weeks, and in spite of my crummy gear I still managed to end up I think 3rd in total damage done for the raid. My burst dps is still on the weak range, but I am throwing out a lot of total damage which still is nice. Gladiator is such a fun spec that I am really going to hate losing once the expansion ships. I guess there is hope at a later date that they might revive the spec, but I seriously imagine it was just too hard to balance when it essentially took all of the same gear that tanks did… which means that my overall survival is among the highest of the dps classes. In any case I am having fun… and that is what really matters right?

Reaching Diamond City

The original plan for this week was to record our final Fallout 4 show last night, and because of that I felt this overwhelming need to have completed the storyline. This means that a good chunk of this week I was pushing hard to get through the main story, and I have to say… it was some of the most miserable I have been playing Fallout ever. My play style is very much a “forget the story exists” method, where I wander aimlessly and go explore whatever happens to suit my fancy. This means there is a lot of ADD induced gaming as I see what that building over there in the distance is, or go explore that wrecked vehicle there because it looks interesting. The result is that I spend a lot of time playing, but not a lot of time getting anywhere specific. With the severe content density that is the Commonwealth, it means I had at 70 hours not gotten anywhere vaguely close to Diamond City. I knew where it was, but I was busy wandering around the Cambridge area and exploring lots of little nooks and crannies.

Instead this week I forced myself to follow the storyline, and while it is really awesome… and there are lots of interesting characters… the entire process feels forced. I mean it IS forced, because I am trying hard to play in a style that is not natural to me. I talked about this for quite a bit on the podcast last night, but essentially most of the time I don’t like it when games end. In Mass Effect 2, I enjoyed every moment of the side missions… but it felt like all of my fun was being sucked down a drain the moment I started that sequence of events that lead to the end of the game. I want these worlds and settings.. and characters that I have created to essentially live on forever… and the sooner I “beat” a game… the sooner that fun for me is over. I think in part this is why I like the MMO so much, because my characters never have to go away… they just keep going on and changing and adapting as new content is released. So as it looks like we are pushing off the Fallout 4 show a bit… I am going to try and find a happy medium where I alternate between following story… and also spending some time following my heart.

Week in Gaming 11/22/2015

November 22, 2015 by Belghast

Missing Breakers

During this segment I generally run down the gaming I have done during the previous week, however this week I am going to regale you with a story from last night. As I have talked about a bit on my blog we are currently going through some minor home renovations. We seem to be nearing the end however, and other than a few minor problems that they are working on… things seem to largely be done. During part of this process we had a big extension cord coming out through the garage door so they could do work on the front of the house, and as part of their wrapping things up they asked me to go inside and raise the garage door so they could unplug it. When I got out to the garage however… the door would not open, and around about this same time I noticed that our freezer was off. Thus began the mission to try and sort out what breaker was flipped.

The breakers are in a horrible location in our house, which is on the garage wall… but someone in their infinite wisdom decided to build a table and attach it to the wall in front of the breaker box. When I say table… I mean it is a 4 foot deep and 8 foot across shelving unit made out of full sheets of plywood. Sure it is sturdy as hell but it is super awkward and fiddling with the breakers means I have to essentially crawl up onto the table. The problem being… none of the breakers were flipped which began a hunt through the house because the contractors were convinced that this could not be the ONLY breaker box on the house. Please note that at this point we have lived in the house going on eighteen years…. we were absolutely certain this was the only breaker box. Finally after running around and flipping the damned house main in the back yard… someone noticed that the outlet in the garage that the opener was plugged into… had a ground fault switch. We flipped that and magically everything started working again. So yeah… that was a fun way to spend a good chunk of my night.

Final Fantasy XIV

This week finally saw my return to Final Fantasy XIV as it also announced the release of the 3.1 content. I talked about this a bit during the week, but it feels a little bittersweet. The content was really good, but also really really short. Usually we have some big boss fight as the pinnacle of the content patches, and this time around…. nothing. Sure there was a big fight but it wasn’t on the same level as a new Primal or an encounter like Gilgamesh. Also there is the fact that we still don’t have a new segment in the Hildebrand chain… or nothing to really replace the hole it has created in the content. I feel like they spent a lot of time on the Lords of Verminion minigame and as a result a bunch of other stuff slipped to the 3.15 patch later. I still have yet to do any of the dungeons, but hopefully I can get that going soonish.

The bulk of my final fantasy time consists of me logging in, and doing my Beast Tribe dailies for the new Vanu Vanu tribe along with some of the old world quests. What makes this pretty great is the fact that at the current level cap… all of the old world quests are super easy to do. So essentially my daily pecking order is… Vanu Vanu > Slyphs > Sahagin. Mostly I just want to be a tiny lalafell riding along on a giant goobue. Last night we also revived the tradition of doing stuff on Saturday nights as we ran bits of First and Second coil with the guild. I was not there for Turn 5 but I got pulled in on the second coil fun. We managed to get all the way up to turn 9, and put in a few attempts before Ashgar and I had to leave to prep for the podcast. My hope is we can get people in the habit of showing up on Saturday nights to do stuff like this and pony farming. That would go a long way towards revitalizing the Final Fantasy experience for me.

Destiny

I am continuing to play Destiny but a significantly reduced pace. Each Sunday afternoon we do a Star Wars pen and paper game, and right now Destiny seems to be my game of choice to play while doing that. It is something I can play on a machine that is not my main computer, and still be able to pay attention to what is going on in the roleplaying. Destiny is for the most part muscle reflexes at this point, so I am spending the time doing bounties and missions and such. I did however play quite a bit on Wednesday, or at least long enough to do my various weapon missions. I still very much love this game, but Fallout 4 has largely taken the place it held of the game I am spending most of my time playing. There are still a lot of things I want, but more than likely I am going to mostly do the Armsday/Xursday thing each week and then focus if there are objectives and goals that I really want to accomplish. There are a few interesting looking weapons this week that I am hoping turn out to be pretty awesome from the Gunsmith.

Fallout 4

I am still slowly wandering my way through the commonwealth. I am roughly sixty hours into the game and have yet to go to Diamond City. That said I have done a whole slew of side quests, but more often than not when I get one… I have already been to that location and cleared it out. When I went to help the Brotherhood of Steel for example… I had already completely cleared that location other than the areas that the Brotherhood ends up unlocking for you to go explore. As far as the Minutemen, I am tasked with taking back the castle, but the castle is a long ways off from where I am. Right now I am largely exploring the Cambridge area and delving into the ruined buildings that you find there. The hospital at Cambridge was one of the more interesting areas, so if you have not been there I highly suggest checking it out. There has been some crazy shit happening there… but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. At this point I am still largely using my crappy pipe gun, that has been upgraded as much as possible…. but that is largely because I have a truly silly amount of ammunition for it.

World of Warcraft

I am weak…. and nostalgia is strong. Over the last few weeks I knew deep down inside that I was fighting a losing battle. Finally yesterday I gave in and started playing my sub level 20 horde characters since I could do that for free. When Scryers and Argent Dawn merged, I ended up creating an entire accounts worth of Horde alts with the thought of playing with some of my Horde friends on the Argent Dawn server. I tried to create one of every race and class… and some of them I am probably going to simply re-roll. For my Warrior… I ended up going Blood Elf because I remember at launch Warrior was not an option for them. Also I have gotten kinda sick of playing Orcs, and my Deathknight is an Orc, and my Paladin is a Tauren. Maybe I am mellowing in my old age, but the whole “elf” thing is annoying me far less right now. Maybe it is the nostalgia of him wearing what is essentially a set of Wrath armor from Molten Core. In any case I am poking my head around World of Warcraft, and we will see how well that takes.

Week In Gaming 11/15/2015

November 15, 2015 by Belghast

Two Times the Monday

I’ve mentioned this before, but this week we got off in the middle of it for Veterans Day. While I completely support this holiday, I question the good of cutting a week down the middle. What it basically created for me at least was a whole lot of time I seemed to be occupying space in a chair but not getting much accomplished… because individuals smarter than me ended up taking either the entire front half of the week off… or the entire back half of the week off. Those people apparently did not coordinate well, which meant there was a skeleton crew on board and few of the people you actually needed to talk about this item or that available and ready to discuss. My hope is this coming week we can make up ground for all of the perceived lost time from this fractured week. On the gaming front though… this was a week entirely about Fallout 4. However while prepping the AggroChat episode I watched another sequence play out on twitter that I am going to get into towards the end of the post.

Irrational Desire

I am admitting here again that I am still struggling with an irrational desire to log in and play World of Warcraft. I think part of it is simply because I know that as much as I loved Gladiator… it will be going away in the coming expansion. Part of me wants to spend some more time playing as a DPS sword and board warrior while it still exists. Then the rational mind kicks and tells me that there is still nothing really there for you. The raid is gone, the guild is mostly gone… there just isn’t an infrastructure to return to. Similarly I realize that other than faffing about and running old content… there is nothing much there that I would really want to do. This reached its peak over the weekend while I was anxiously wanting to play Fallout 4, but not able to do it yet without VPN hackery. The problem is even though I am wallowing fully in the goodness that is post apocalyptic Boston…. there is still a bit of nostalgia tugging at my coat tails telling me that I would really like to log into World of Warcraft still. I have a slew of new content to go experience in Final Fantasy XIV as well, so hopefully between it and Fallout 4… I will slowly quell this desire. I am still really damned interested in seeing how Legion feels, so not giving up hopes on maybe being able to wrangle a beta invite somewhere… but unfortunately I think my past points of access are no longer available. If I had them I would have definitely tried to exercise one for access to Overwatch.

Viva New Vegas

Monday night I got so low that I booted back up Fallout New Vegas and spent a good deal of time wandering around there. I only managed to get as far as the Vikki and Vance casino before finally attempting to get Fallout 4 going. I have to say… it might be nostalgia talking… but I still absolutely love this game. I even popped in for a bit this morning to get this screenshot… and there is absolutely a direct lineage between Fallout 3, New Vegas and 4. The world feels the same… albeit considerably prettier in the newest incarnation. I guess this is why in part folks who hated Fallout… still hate it… and the folks that loved it… are having some of the best times of their life. New Vegas really raised the bar for the way the world felt, and it seems like Bethesda rose to the occasion and answered this narrative call. That said… there is a part of me that kinda hopes that we end up with a DC Metro and New Vegas reboot using the Fallout 4 engine… much the same way as we have one of those under works for Morrowind and Oblivion using the Skyrim engine. I would love to be able to roam around these areas with the fidelity that the new engine provides. Even then… I could still see myself returning to New Vegas time and time again… and loving every moment of it.

Critical Mass

The bulk of my week has been spent wandering around the Massachusetts area in the new Fallout 4 on the PC. Firstly I have to say… I am pleased and amazed at just how good this game looks and how well it runs on my fairly aging hardware. The game auto selected Ultra for me, and I have been playing on that since… with limited hick-ups. The game runs between 50-60 fps at all times and just works flawlessly. Folks are reporting all sorts of bugs… and honestly I haven’t really seen them other than the usual floating objects type issues when you are dealing with a complex open world game. For example… if you remove a table out front under a vase… there is a chance the vase will just hang there indefinitely rather than fall to the ground. This sort of stuff does not bother me at all, and I come to expect it when a game has physics and the ability to place objects. That said there are apparently a number of the traditional day one Bethesda bugs but I am happy to say that I have not encountered any of them… game breaking or not. Maybe I am simply lucky, or maybe I just have not gotten far enough into the game to experience them.

According to steam I am roughly 50 hours into the game… the problem with that is that I accidentally left it running one day while at work… so you can discount about eight hours of that time as that event happening. The rest of the time however is absolutely real… and I have built up at least partially every settlement that I have come across. That is the part of the game that is the real hook for me… especially now that I have trade routes going between the towns. I’ve said this before, but my big take away from why this game is more enjoyable than the previous incarnations is that it feels like I am actively making the world a better place. In other Fallout games… you were the good guy, simply because you were killing off all of the bad guys in the world. There was very little you could do to actually improve the lot of the other denizens of the wastes other than the occasional donation of money or fresh water. In this game… from the very beginning you are actively improving segments of the world and making it a decent place to live in. Sure the world is dangerous… but you are making it far less so for a group of settlers. That right there is the hook, and when I am out in the wastes… every hotplate and desk fan… excites me because I can go back and build something really cool with the parts.

Streaming and Games

While prepping this post today I watched a little exchange on twitter. Essentially one of my friends challenged streamers to do more with the games they are streaming. That it would be nice to have streamers take a mostly educational stance on either showing other gamers how to do something… or working through problems. While I think that might be pretty cool, the truth is that is not at all why game companies seek out streamers. I am going to give an analogy that is going to be a bit long winded, but stay with me. I grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, and in this part of the land there are few things more important than High School sports. I have my own damage thanks to this fact, and having no interest in sports at all… but that is a tale for another day. In a small town the team is the center of pride for the community… and while high school athletics has the possibility of making money for a district… in a small town it is mostly a giant hole that you pour money down. So when it came to maintaining facilities, it was always a struggle… and knowing this soft drink companies would often times ride in on a white horse to save the day.

There was not a small town anywhere near me that did not have either a big Pepsi logo or a big Coca-Cola logo on their score board. Of note I have no clue who’s scoreboard this one actually is, but I am just using it to illustrate my point. They would offer to sponsor the scoreboard, make sure the school district had a free supply of cups, lids and straws… brand new pop machines… and a discounted rate on the soda itself just so long as they would sign an exclusive contract with the brand and only allow their products to be sold at school events. The schools needed the goods they were offering… and could make money selling the product which then would end up supporting the school. Pepsi got advertising out of the deal and more than likely converted a good segment of the townsfolk into loyal Pepsi or Coke drinkers for life. My small town had Pepsi and it is probably no small coincidence that I grew up in a household that drank Pepsi and still drink predominately Pepsi products. The indoctrination works, and goes back for generations… so much so that when a school changes affiliation there is often times an uproar in the community.

But What about Streaming?

So you are asking yourself… Bel… you just told us an elaborate story… but you said it was about streaming? This is precisely what is happening with game companies and streamers. There is a natural symbiosis at work. The gamers need a fresh supply of whatever happens to be the hotly contested games to stream, in order to keep the eyeballs on their channel, and the companies need to have their games placed strategically on as many channels with as many eyeballs as possible. So even if there is no payola happening under the table… the streamers are actively promoting the products of these games companies. In fact there is a not so subtle desire on the part of the streamers to keep from burning any bridges with a company… because that could very well mean that they would lose their privileged access to new releases. On the part of the company… all they really want out of the deal is for this streamer to look like they are having a really good time playing their product, that way someone leaves the channel and gets convinced to subscribe or pre-order because it looked so appealing.

Sure it would make sense for them to serve a greater educational purpose… but honestly… the big popular streams aren’t doing this. The popular streamers are entertainers first and foremost. They are selling themselves playing this game more than the game itself. They build up loyal followings because the people are interested in the person, not so much what they are doing. The advertising still works however because it is subtle. They might have their back wall decorated in products of the company they are streaming for, or be wearing branded merchandise that the company provided… or even giving away items for the game on their streams. While all of these seems fairly natural and filters into our subconscious as benign… it is absolutely planned branding and ultimately we are the dollars that the companies and the streamers are trying to get. Once upon a time… game companies cared deeply about what the blogosphere was saying about their game. That time unfortunately is over, and over the last few months I have come to realize something. Blogging is not dead by any means… and nor is Podcasting really… but in the gaming sphere neither are they growing. Once you leave the land of MMO gaming… you are hard pressed to find ANY blogs devoted to games.

For example I have crawled the internet trying to find a source of news and information about Destiny other than Reddit. There is simply no one out there blogging on a regular basis and producing content explaining how the finer points of the game work. There are however hundreds of YouTube channels and streamers devoted to this niche. There are almost no blogs devoted to Call of Duty, but similarly there are thousands of channels devoted to it. While blogging was the comfort zone of my generation that grew up reading game forums… and podcasting is the natural extension of that… the next generation no longer really cares about it. They are completely connected to YouTube and Twitch as their game information sources, and as a result… I feel like the bloggers really don’t have much sway. I am not trying to do this as a living, so in the grand scheme of thing it doesn’t matter too much other than the fact that I don’t have much of a shot in hell of getting into this exclusive alpha or that limited beta. The companies know exactly what they are doing… and quite simply they are playing the numbers. They are putting their product in front of as many eyeballs as they can, and doing so in the medium that has the largest majority of those eyeballs… Twitch and YouTube.

MMOs Worth Playing – Everquest II

November 13, 2015 by Belghast

Perforated Week

This week was a strange one, because it essentially consisted of two Mondays and two Fridays since I was off Wednesday due to Veterans day. This week also pretty much was completely lost to Fallout 4. So I contemplated just doing another post about that and skipping the MWP feature for a week. That said I decided to fall back on an “oldie but goodie” that I could write about without much prep work. Once again the MMOs Worth Playing section by intent is to highlight some of the awesome games out there, that maybe don’t get as much love as I feel they should. This has been the pattern other than last week when I did a special BlizzCon edition, and this week we are continuing that pattern with some talk about Everquest 2.

Launching Against a Juggernaut

When it comes to underdog games… it would be near impossible to find one that more fits that title than Everquest II. Back in 2004 there were two games vying for everyone’s attention… the sequel of sorts to the wildly popular Everquest and the newcomer with a strong pedigree World of Warcraft. By the time we got to November of that year… there was quite literally one game on everyone’s minds… and it wasn’t the return to a calamity stricken Norrath. EQ2 had the misfortunate of launching sixteen days before the game that would for the most part change the landscape of MMOs. I was pretty torn as to which game I would end up playing, and I even pre-ordered Everquest II and spent a good deal of time in the alpha and beta processes. However when it came time to launch… there were a few people from my EQ1 days that were going to be playing… but the vast majority of my friends were simply waiting for World of Warcraft. So since money was very much a thing back then… I simply didn’t pick up my EQ2 pre-order and waited for the coming of Azeroth.

Roughly six months into that experience however I got a patch of wanderlust like I always do and drug a group of friends over into Norrath and found that I really liked the game. Just as I know eventually I will be playing World of Warcraft again, I will also be doing the same for Everquest II. The sort of experience it provides is just different than you would find in most games. For me at least the magic is the setting. Norrath is world I am deeply nostalgic of, and with it comes little references to the good times I had in Everquest. I realize for many at launch this was a huge problem… because instead of continuing where Everquest left off they chose to reboot the world of sorts and bringing the players in after the moon Luclin had exploded raining down shards around the world. This event sundered the world causing it to break apart into small islands, and much of the theme of Everquest 2 has been one of exploration and rediscovery.

Unearthing Greatness

The players are helping to recover the lost grandeur of the past, and with that we are uncovering locations that I remember extremely well in the original Everquest. The big thing that spoke to me about the game however was the epic scale. These zones are huge… so huge that often times they are made up of several distinct sub zones that all exist together in one seamless area. What makes them work so well is the fact that they are really content dense, with all sorts of hidden treasures and events stowed in between what would normally be something you simply rode past. One of the things that made EQ interesting was their construct called a “Ring Event”, which involved fighting certain mobs… which would spawn other mobs… which would ultimately culminate in a boss. So as you wander the world, you never quite know what thing you are killing might lead to something far more interesting spawning. I remember one of these particular in Nektulos Forest, that ultimately lead to a rare named boss that was used for a quest.

Another aspect of the game that I have always loved that follows this exploration and recovery feeling, is the Heritage quest. These are truly epic quest chains that tend to require twenty or so discreet steps to complete and often involve you spending a considerably about of time crawling through dungeons and catacombs to find bits. Each of them represents the attempt to uncover an item of fabled power from the old world, and as a former Everquest player… I know almost every single item referenced by heart. What makes them even cooler is that they function dual fold when you complete one. For starters you get a really nice piece of gear that at the level you can get it serves to be some of quite literally the best gear you can get. However when you out level it, you can turn it into a trophy item that you can then put in your player housing to remember your journey. So it feels really cool to walk into your house and see all of these past accomplishments displayed in physical form. Each item you hang on your wall or stash on a shelf is a memory of an event that you did in game, which makes the whole thing feel more important than simply earning points or titles.

Rich Systems

Everquest II is this impossible game, because quite literally I don’t think it could have ever been created in today’s climate. So much time was spent on systems that feel casual and exploratory gameplay, that enrich the player… but don’t really make up much of an “endgame” in the traditional sense. I just mentioned housing and that is absolutely a crucial one. Dark Age of Camelot was the first time I had experienced player housing, and I knew that I was absolutely hooked. The problem there is it took up large tracts of physical real estate in the world. That meant a limited number of players could ever have housing, because there were a limited number of deeds available. EQ2 went in a completely different direction, and at first I was not terribly certain of it… and later I have come to realize it was a stroke of genius. Instead of making housing exclusive… they simply made it part of the base gameplay experience by giving you an Inn Room that serves as your first house while going through the early levels. From there the player gets used to the notion of checking into their room periodically and quests giving them items that they might want to display there.

As you progress you can keep getting cooler homes with significantly more expensive weekly upkeep costs. While player housing is awesome… where the game really shines is the introduction of Guild Housing. In each guild I have been in, the house became a hub of activity for its members. Due to the ability to place crafting machines, bankers and brokers all in the hall… it means that there will be a constant flow of players coming in and out as they do their business around the game world. While it might seem silly… because we already have an always on guild chat… but seeing players in their physical avatar form just feels different and almost magical. There are tons of people in the game world that I might talk to on a nightly basis… but it could be weeks before I actually cross paths with their characters in game. Having this nexus meant that the guilds were actually more communicative that they might have been were it just left to text only conversation. There was also always the added benefit of having some shared goal that the guild as a whole could work towards. I remember doing all sorts of things that could grant “status” in the guild, which then could be spent as a currency to help pay the expenses of owning the guild hall. Contributing status made it feel like I was helping… even though what I was actually earning was just a drip in the bucket comparatively.

Overwhelming Content

I could literally write one of these posts a week, for the next few months and not have scratched the surface of talking about everything in this game. The game is nearing the launch of expansion number Twelve Terrors of Thalumbra. In the same time World of Warcraft has had six expansions, and this is not counting the mini adventure packs, which I believe there have been four or five of at this point. The amount of content of all types that is available is just completely mind boggling, and at any given level you usually have multiple paths that you can take to get to your goal. My favorite part about the game is that they still have public dungeons. This is the aspect that made the original Everquest feel so vibrant to me, was that you could go into these super dangerous areas with your friends… that were huge NPC warrens that felt like working areas. If you went into the kitchen, then you found a chef… if you went into the dungeon… then you found a jailer or a warden. It felt like we were actually raiding bases, rather than taking a theme park ride where at the end we got loot for our trouble.

These big public dungeons were places you could just go and hang out with your friends… where the difficulty level was enough to make bringing friends along for the fun worth while. All of which made it all the more enjoyable when you finally reached a level of gear where you could actually go into these places and survive by yourself. I remember the amazement the first time I saw a friend soloing Sebilis for example in Everquest… and then was shocked when I reached the point where I could solo tough mobs like the Sand Giants in the Oasis of Marr. Everquest even in its more modern version is really good at setting up these goals that you want to go back and achieve later. If you can’t take on this monster now… then you will likely go back later and get revenge on it when you can. I’ve talked before about how fear is missing from games… and wandering these public dungeons brought it back. That if you were able to keep up with the spawn rate, you could stay in there in a tentative state of safety… however if one thing went wrong… you were running back in after a death. That era in games seems to be all but extinct at this point.

Dated But Good

At this point Everquest 2 is feeling its age, and with recent Daybreak mess… it is unlikely that this is going to change at any point in the near future. The engine is old, and has not had the benefit of having frequent face lifts in the same fashion that World of Warcraft has. As a result the model detail is a little off, and the world building itself can feel a little cludgy in the early zones. There however is an amazing artistry as each time they release an expansion they push this old engine beyond its limits and find new ways to keep this game interesting. This is absolutely a game that I would suggest everyone play at least once, but in doing so you have to go into it knowing that you are essentially playing an artifact of a bygone era. They simply do not make games like this one any more, and to some extent I am regretful of this fact. The amount of detail that can be found between its cracks is enough to drive you completely mad if you try and assimilate it all. If you do start an new character I highly suggest you either roll in the Neriak/Darklight Woods starting zone or Kelethin/Greater Faydark… because as the game went on they got significantly better at doing the starter experience. If you do end up trying the game, I would love to hear your own impressions.