Everquest II Archives - Page 8 of 11 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Everquest Current

August 2, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning everyone, hopefully you got a bit more sleep than I did last night. I ended up with another minor round of panic attacks and as a result did not actually make it to bed until after 1 am. However I seem to be mostly functional. Thanks a ton for all the warm wishes I received yesterday through either the blog, twitter, google+ or in game. We didn’t do anything really insane… just went out to dinner and then came back and chilled out downstairs. I piddled around a bit in Rift and eventually made my way over to the SOE Live twitch stream.

What Happens in Vegas

Normally we think of what happens in Vegas… stays in Vegas… however at SOE apparently what happens gets live broadcast over Twitch.tv for free. Having been a long fan of the SOE franchises, namely Everquest 2 I figured I would tune in last night for a bit and see if there was anything interesting happening. I have been immensely curious to find out what is coming down the pipe with Everquest Next. I have so many fears about how the game will turn out… sandbox can mean so many things and not all of them good for the long time survival of a game. So I like many tuned in thinking I might see a teaser for EQNext before the official unveil at Noon PST today.

You could tell that pretty much the only thing the crowd wanted to hear about WAS EQ Next and when Smedley took the stage… he did a pretty thorough job of baiting and teasing the crowd. However he did bring out the very famous Jeremy Soule of Skyrim fame to showcase his work on the Everquest Next theme. Within moments of it happening in the live broadcast the above theme was available on Youtube. I have to say… I am more than a little disappointed. Granted this is “sketch” as they called it, an early synth only version of the theme… but quite honestly it feels a little generic for lack of the better word.

If you listen to the Everquest 1 and Everquest 2 themes… there is definitely a shared lineage there. I expected this theme to carry on in a new way with the original “Everquest Notes” much in the same way that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim take the same skeletal core of “TES Notes” and make them their own. But what we have is something vastly different and really does not feel at all like “Everquest” music to me. It feels way too ethereal, and not bombastic enough to represent an over the top franchise like Everquest. Apparently however gauging opinion from twitter and Google+ I am in the minority of my opinion.

I listened to the track over and over trying to find some shared lineage back to the original themes… and I think maybe just maybe I figured out what Jeremy Soule was trying to do. In the original Everquest theme… there is an odd little segment that always felt a bit out of place… that starts at roughly 0:46 and continues to 1:06. The more I listen to the EQNext theme the more I think he chose this odd little section to expand into a larger theme. I guess my hope is that Soule was starting with this segment and fading his way into the “EQ Notes”, and that the part that did the unfinished fade down is where the theme would pick up and grow into something we recognize.

I have a lot of faith in Jeremy Soule, I have a 4 disc set of Skyrim music that I listen to at work on a pretty regular basis. I was just shocked at what I heard and how little it represented “Everquest” for me. It also makes me afraid that they are really distancing themselves from the past, and kinda abandoning the Everquest lineage that came before. I love Norrath and probably always will, and while I don’t think I could ever return to playing Everquest 1 I am still a huge fan of everything that Everquest 2 has become. I want Everquest Next to draw upon this pedigree and not just completely abandon it.

Everquest Current

So much emphasis has been placed on Everquest Next, but last night was really about showing off Everquest Current. Both Everquest and Everquest II are seemingly unstoppable juggernauts of content. In the video above they announce the 20th expansion for the original Everquest, Call of the Forsaken. It is completely staggering to think of any MMO in todays climate making its way through 20 separate expansion packs. That is really one of the things that the SOE model has done… is allow aging communities to survive and be nurtured by what seems like extremely dedicated product teams.

I don’t really play Everquest other than occasionally logging in to my station account and remembering just how primate the old days were, so the first half of this trip down “everquest current” was interesting but had no real meat on its bones for me. I started to get a little excited when the EQ2 portion came up. While I am knee deep in Rift and living it… I will always have a deep nostalgia over EQ2 and all that it represents. As a result I want it to be awesome, and I want to to successfully draw players. In the above video they announce the 10th expansion for EQ2, Tears of Veeshan.

I remember spending a lot of time farming the North Temple of Veeshan for rep and gear back in the original game… and to some extend I always knew that EQ2 would take us back there. Additionally they will be opening up High Hold Keep, a zone that I travelled through numerous times on my way to the Karanas but never actually leveled in the area surrounding it. Apparently in the storyline we have dug too deep below the keep… and uncovered a band of Goblins that have taken it over. As a result it looks like similar to Kaladim, it will be a former city turned dungeon as you “retake” the keep.

What I found extremely interesting in the talk of going to the “Nexus Core” supposedly an area that powered the Nexus on Luclin. I have always hoped that one of the expansions would take us back to moon and see what remains of it, so maybe this will open the door to that actually happening. I really loved Luclin, I guess in part because this was the first expansion I was actually a loyal player for the release. I started playing Everquest just shortly after the release of Velious, and there was something magical about experiencing my very first MMO expansion pack.

The big reveal it seems was the addition of a 26th character class The Channeler, which is apparently on the SOE Live floor. The shots they showed of the class looked pretty cool, but it also seemed extremely confused. It is a priest archetype, but has a giant mage like elemental construct but wears leather and wields a bow. It will be interesting to see what the class plays like, and whether it feels like a ranger turned pet class or not. The unique mechanic is that the construct is customizable with the ability to swap abilities and appearances to make it into whatever the player wants. Again it will have to be something I see in action to be able to make sense of it.

Finally at the TAIL end of the video Holly Longsdale teased what was coming for expansion eleven. Based on the images shown… I would guess that the Everquest 2 timeline will be discovering the lost continent of Taelosia as see in the Gates of Discord expansion to the original game. I could be wrong… namely because I was not actually playing EQ at that time, but based on some of the artwork I remember… these odd tribal lizardish men look to fit that theme. I am not sure but I believe Taelosia is the last major landmass that has not made an apperance at least in part in the broken world setting. It is good to see that they have a long range plan of where to take the game next. I still would love to get a trip back to the moon however.

Wrapping Up

I am looking forward to seeing the actual Everquest Next announcement today around noonish pst. Additionally from Quake Con there is supposed to be a live demo of Elder Scrolls Online at 1:30 EDT so that should be awesome as well. I will likely be listening to both in the background as I work on various things today. I really hope that both are as awesome as I have built them up to be in my head. I hope you all have a great Friday, and that it leads to a great weekend. Hopefully other than picking up around the house and doing a few chores mine is pretty relaxing. Tonight at 8pm CDT House Stalwart is hosting a League of Legends beginner night for anyone that wants to get their feet wet, so that should be enjoyable. It has been so long since I have played that I am really looking forward to doing it for a few hours.

Story Problems

July 31, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning cadets… welcome to the flight deck… err I mean… never mind. It is in fact another morning, and I may or may not have actually gotten some sleep last night. Enough that I was able to wake up ahead of the alarm clock and get a minor head start on the day… that I have gloriously squandered. I have a huge day ahead of me, namely that I have to fix an issue that I did not realize was broken until yesterday. The old process is a rats nest of ancient visual basic… so here’s hoping I can gut it and replace it with something that works better.

Story Problems

Yesterday Syp from Bio Break posted an article that rang true for me, called Living Story, Dead Interest. In the article he talks about how the whole “living story” construct in Guild Wars 2 seems to be lacking any real traction for him. That the rapid fire biweekly story changes are happening too fast for him to really know what is going on in that world. Based on the comments to the post including one from me… it seems like there is a wide variety of players that just are not getting into the direction that Arena Net has taken the game.

Ultimately for me my malaise with Guild Wars 2 goes a little bit deeper than this. There are so many things I like about this game. I think the world is gorgeous and does an amazing job of disguising that it is running on a relatively primate graphics engine compared to its peers. I think the combat is fun and easy to get into and gives an almost arcade quality to the experience. I love the changes they made to inventory management, and I love the ability to dump your crafting materials in the bank wherever you happen to be… and then later access your bank from every crafting machine in the world.

The problem is… even with all this good.. I just simply do not care about the world. It is wild and expansive… and feels completely dead to me. There are interesting races and locations, but I don’t feel like I know anything about them. The game chose to abolish two things… roles and quests, but the problem I have is that in neither case did they really replace them with something anywhere near as engaging. I am one of those people who actually does at least skim through quests as I am doing them. I feel they give me a sense of purpose out in the world.

In the world of Guild Wars 2… I can’t even recall the name of the world mind you… I feel like I have no purpose at all. My entire gaming experience is about popping around the world and performing whatever task is needed to check off various flavored dingbats on my map. The story just is not there for me, and the class quest line story is too few and far between to really matter. I don’t really feel like I care about any of the cast of characters I am supposed to. I don’t like the characters, I occasionally like that I recognize the person doing the voice acting.

Back to the problem at hand… the Living Story. My big issue is that Arena Net has chosen to create a series of disposable content, rather than fleshing out the world over time and making the entire experience permanently richer for it. Additionally I hate all content that expires.. I hate feeling like I am in a rush to experience it. The end result is not me being pulled into the content and running around in a mad dash to try and experience everything… but instead me simply giving up on the game entirely. Right now I end up logging in roughly once a month when the whim hits me… I kill a few things and log out, never really finding a purpose for playing.

Battle Bards

I tweeted about this yesterday, and often times retweet each time a new Battle Bards post is made, but I feel like this does not give enough credit to just how amazing this podcast is. One of my vices is gaming music, namely the grand sweeping tracks that are usually associated with massively multiplayer online games. Twice a month the Battle Bards… Syp, MMOGC, and Syl bring you a themed show delving into the truly excellent music that accompanies your gaming experience. If you are not listening to each new show you are really missing out because this is one of the best podcasts out there.

This latest post was especially nostalgic for me in that they chose to focus on the music of Everquest 2. I have so much love for the world of Norrath, and a good part of this is wrapped up in the music that has always been associated with it. I fell in love with Everquest the first time I heard the opening theme… it was so grand and sweeping and did not feel like any other game music I had experienced. Sure it sounds dated now but at the time it was a midi masterpiece, and I love the way that Everquest 2 drew upon this same musical style for its opening theme.

One of the interesting side commentary I had while listening to this podcast surrounds their feeling about the theme for Antonica. While everyone seemed to like the track, they did not feel that it sounded like an outdoor zone theme. It was commented that it sounded like something from a movie soundtrack and not that of a video game. While I agree with the last statement, I feel that EQ2 outdoor zones have a very movie aspect to them.

It would not be a fitting track for the scale of say a World of Warcraft zone, but for Everquest 2 it works well. Essentially all of these outdoor zones are on a scale that just isn’t seen in other games. Antonica for example is roughly 5-6 times the size of Elwynn Forest in World of Warcraft. It encompasses numerous distinct biomes, is the entry way to half a dozen dungeons and instanced zones. The sheer scale is very movie like and dramatic, so as you are roaming around it… this jaunty theatrical music seems to fit.

Ultimately this has always been the overwhelming thing that I loved about Everquest 2. Everything about the world feels epic in proportions. There is a dungeon out in in the Jarsath Wastes on Kunark called Chelsith that you have to approach by water. As you are swimming out you approach what appears to be a rock partially submerged, but as you dip under the water you see that this is the tip of the head of an ancient Iksar statue that has been long submerged… and that the entrance to Chelsith is t the base of its feet. There are so many moments like that, that just say over and over again… this world is massive.

Stalwart Online

Yesterday we soft launched our new guild website, and are super pumped that it is starting to get some traction among our users. It is still very much a work in progress and there are various bits and pieces that we want to do to expand it. The graphical style and skin work is 100% the product of my co-worker and our master guild hall decorator… Audrae. I know she has some future plans like to make the background swap each time the page loads, and have it pull from a pool of user submitted scenic shots. Right now we have a promotional shot from Elder Scrolls Online as a static background, but that should change before long.

Essentially to move to a more living and easier to use website, we needed to completely abandon our previous site. As a result we are soft launching this site and will eventually set the old forums into a read-only mode. They will always be accessible off the archives link in the menu, but this is only to keep from losing almost a decade worth of posts and material. Once we have made this shift we will redirect housestalwart.com to point to the new site as well as stalwartonline.com.

Essentially this is a revision in a long line of attempts to move Stalwart from being a game centric community to a larger multi-gaming community. We have had a presence in almost every game released in recent years, but the previous forums were extremely World of Warcraft focused. Despite my efforts to juggle the content in a way to keep them from being that… the old format just did not work that well. Now we are switching to a more discussion and category based system that lists all the new content equally without burying it under a series of folders.

Here is hoping that our members will like the switch and that the new forums will revitalize our community. Over the last year or so the old forums have been completely dead. As a result users have just stopped checking in over time. Here is hoping that the new content and new approach can draw them back out of the shadows and participating again. Our Rift guild has been wildly successful, and my hope is to harness this new energy to do some really cool stuff. In the past two week we went from 5 members and questioning if this was actually a good idea… to over 40 members and wondering what exactly we are going to do with everyone. It is definitely a good thing.

Wrapping Up

Well I have rattled on again and squandered whatever time I gained by getting up before the alarm. I need to get off here and finish getting ready. This morning I need to wake my wife up and make sure she is getting ready because she has a few things that she needs to get done today. I have a mountain of work awaiting me when I get to the office, and I feel like it is going to take every last bit of it to get through the day. I hope you all have great days… and feel free to check out our new website. I feel like the majority of my readers are guild members already.

Abolish Faction Walls

July 25, 2013 by Belghast

Good morning you happy people out there. I joked yesterday about opening a real life air rift, but in reality I guess it felt a bit like that. We managed to get through the storm relatively unscathed, but not everyone did. Yesterday the report was that roughly 100,000 customers were without power, and in on the drive in there were numerous intersections that were reduced to four way stops. The neighbor across the street lost the entire fence on the front part of his yard, and the shopping center my favorite game store is in was pretty much demolished by the winds. It is so odd to have tornadic style damage without the Tornado.

Race and Class Restrictions

Yesterday Rowan posted a thought provoking pieces on whether or not there should be class and race restrictions in games. Namely this was spawned by Wildstar, but the question carries over to every game. Why does it make sense that fanatical characters should be limited by some sort of pseudo real world logic? In an example he gives… why CAN’T a robot do magic… isn’t that just imposing some kind of logic on fantasy gaming that doesn’t really exist? Is it not just as fantastical that humans can perform magic?

Ultimately I am against class and race restrictions… but even more so I am against faction based restrictions. My general theory is… that in every situation… ideology never breaks down solely along racial boundaries. There will always be people that play across the lines and are branded as either Sell-swords at the best, or Traitors at the worst by their own faction. One of the worst experiences you can have is when a new game comes out… and you are super pumped about one specific race… only to find out that every single friend you have wants to play the OTHER faction.

My mantra has been anything that gets in the way of you playing with your friends is bad. Faction based race restrictions get in the way of you playing what you want to play… and also playing with your friends that might have different tastes. I will go one step further and say that Factions in general… are generally bad, but more so games that try and set up an artificial “red versus blue” faction wall. That essentially feels like imposing artificial limitations on your players just to solve poor design problems. If have to rely on polarized faction based combat to keep your game moving, you made some bad decisions somewhere along the process.

Abolish Faction Walls

Some of the most liberating gaming experiences I have had come from games with much more flexible factional boundaries. The Everquest series probably takes the cake for its ability to give the player malleable faction alignments. Essentially you start out as either aligned as an Evil race or a Good race… and that sets up certain default racial relations that you have with other factions in the world. Given the time and the inclination… you can perform tasks that will alter these boundaries through lots and lots of player faction work.

Iksar for example started off hated by everything and could do business nowhere but the neutral Nexus and Cabilis their home city. However I had a friend who through lots of work managed to become maximum reputation with the Halflings… and he was treated as a favored guest in their territory. I myself took my Half Elf ranger which is natively a good aligned race… and managed to get him the same reputation with the Evil Erudite city of Paineel. This experience of letting the player dictate their alliances through their interactions with the world is the best possible scenario I have seen. Sadly… no one since has adopted this model.

In Everquest 2 you had something similar… defacto good vs evil racial set up… but over the course of the game you could decide to betray your home faction and begin gaining rep with the other. While this was not as rich and robust as the Everquest system… it was still a far better choice than the archaic “red versus blue” mentality. Additionally no where in the Everquest realm are you ever limited in who you can group with, communicate with, and trade with. All players can interact regardless of their personal choices.

Faction as Fiction

Singlehandedly one of the best choices Trion has ever made with Rift is to release the fabled “Faction as Fiction” patch abolishing strict faction walls in that game. While not as open as a game like Everquest that was designed NOT to have firm factions, it was a great way to “hack” that functionality into an existing game. Essentially in one pass they allowed Guardian and Defiant characters to group and guild freely, and set up a new neutral three faction based PVP system called Conquest. Players essentially act as mercenaries for three different political factions and wage proxy battles for them.

I feel like this decision point more than anything has allowed House Stalwart to grow so much recently. Many of the players that we were pulling in, tried it shortly after the release of Rift, but felt limited by the race and faction based choices. We were a Defiant guild, but many players just feel more comfortable with the kinder, gentler, greener… Guardian starter experience. Being able to tell them that “faction no longer matters” has almost become a rallying call as I get new folks invested in the game again.

I cannot help but think that games like World of Warcraft and Wildstar would not be far better served if they threw off the mantle of “red versus blue” and embraced letting players choose their own alignments. While we have extremely rabid Horde and Alliance players… I was one of those players that had friends on both sides of the pond. When Stalwart originally launched with the release of WoW, we had an Alliance Guild on Argent Dawn and a Horde Guild on Silverhand. The intent was to play in both places, so that we could stay together… but over time the majority greatly favored Alliance… leaving a skeleton crew manning the Horde bulwarks.

So instead of having like Fifty players all happy and acting together… we had 35 happy alliance players, and 15 unhappy horde players that felt abandoned. Any design choice that forces potentially pits players against their friends… is ultimately a bad one for the sake of building long lasting communities. Had we been able to BE an Alliance guild, but also had a number of “Horde” race sell-swords… I feel as though this would not have been a problem. The players didn’t care about the faction… they cared about the available races to play… and ultimately went to the side that they could play what they wanted to.

Looking Forward

One of the biggest detractors for me in everything I have heard about Elder Scrolls Online is the fact that once again there will be three distinct and insular faction groups. While choosing which faction to align to was easy for me… since I always play a Nord, Argonian or a Dunmer… it will not be quite so easy for my friends. I have a few friends that prefer Altmer for example… and I tend to go out of my way to kill them when playing Skyrim. The Elder Scrolls is a setting where there have NEVER been absolute race based factional boundaries. There are always Nords that are willing to sell their blade to the highest bidder, as well as Altmer that throw off their heritage and adventure freely in the world.

My biggest hope is that there will be a way for my friends to be in Ebonheart Pact where I plan on building the House Stalwart guild… but be able to play whatever they want to play. This will ultimately determine whether or not a Stalwart guild succeeds in this game. I realize that this is probably just a pipe dream, because everything that we have seen to this point seems to enforce the strict racial boundaries. But I guess I can hope… I realize factional boundaries are easy for companies to enforce, that they greatly simplify many aspects of the game. However this does not stop me from feeling like they are bad for the players.

ESO is still a long ways off, so I have the smallest glimmer of hope that they might rethink the firm racial limits, however Wildstar feels as though it is right around the corner and has set up the same tired walls. We are going through the same problems with that game as we have every other faction based title. Granted I am only really mildly interested in the game… but various Stalwarts are EXTREMELY interested. The problem is… each of us seems to natively align ideologically with one faction or the other… and currently it the sentiments seem to split down the middle. All of this is generally because we prefer to play one type of race over another. They could really serve to take a book from Trion and make guilds transcend factional boundaries.

While we are on pipedreams… one of the biggest flaws in The Secret World is the fact that Cabals are faction locked. This game is so liberating in certain fashions… you can group with any player on any faction or shard. However the fact that their guild system is limited based on a specific faction really throws a monkey wrench in this whole openness scenario. It has essentially forced guilds to manage three separate factional units… and then try and communicate between them using server channels. Everything would have been far simpler had they just said that cabals were free floating. I really hope this is a decision they revisit in the near future.

Wrapping Up

Well it is that time again… I have wasted another perfectly good morning rambling on. I had intended to talk about all the awesomeness that we did last night as a guild, but that yarn can wait for another day. On a related note however.. I totally suggest you check out Fynralyl’s blog post about her entry into the guild and reentry into Rift in general. Warms my heart to see that folks are enjoying themselves in an environment I have pulled together. Any questions I had as to whether or not forming a House Stalwart in Rift was a good idea… have long since gone out the window. I hope you guys have a great day, and that the weekend comes quickly.

Original Norrath

July 4, 2013 by Belghast

The big hullabaloo at work ended up going far better than expected… however since the meeting time was at 1 pm I spent most of the morning in an overall sense of dread. I am a “rip the band-aid off” person, not peel it back slowly… as a result I detest suspense. I want to get the pain over with so I can get on with my life. In class I usually volunteered to give my speech or presentation first so I could get it out of the way and relax. But I survived… and now I am on vacation for awhile.

Original Norrath

Thanks to my Everquest 2 account and having station access I have had the ability to play the original Everquest for some time now. For whatever reason I never really took advantage of this. From time to time I would boot up a copy of the game playing one my favorite emulator server, but I had no real interest in ever returning to the real thing. On a whim I decided to fire up the game client and see if the game experience had improved as a while. A few months back I did the same for Dark Age of Camelot, and was surprised at how well the game actually stood up against modern titles.

The Good

Honestly many of the features of the game have been drastically improved since I last played it on an older emulated copy. Firstly most of the NPC models I encountered had been drastically improved, but honestly I never had an issue with graphics… I play minecraft afterall. The problems I always had with the game were just how bad the user interface was. Luckily this has been improved a lot, and they seem to have fixed the horrible mouse look system from the early days. For the most part it controls out of the box like you would expect any modern MMO to control.

Additionally they have completely gotten rid of the corpse recovery aspect of the game. This was the biggest sticking point with me, and the cause of lots of marital strife for myself and my friends. The inability to simply disconnect without dire consequences caused many a fight, and I can still remember getting a call one Sunday afternoon begging me to come home right away and resurrect someone because they got stuck in a bad place and were about to lose all the gear on their corpse. All in all there was nothing positive about that system.

What happens now is if you die you respawn back in a safe area with all your gear just like modern MMOs. After level 10 you begin to lose experience just like you used to in the old game. From my understanding you still can lose levels through death, but this is acceptable I suppose. Temporarily losing progress on death is something you can deal with, permanently losing everything you have spent years acquiring on your characters… that is not something you can deal with.

Additionally they have added in a return to bindpoint functionality that lets players rapidly get out of an area. This was another huge problem with the game as a whole, the inability to safely leave the game at a moments notice. Things happen, and you cannot always plan when you might need to leave a game. Modern MMOs have taken this into account, but it is nice to see they have gone back through and added this functionality into what was always the most painful game on players.

The Interesting

The thing that I find most interesting is all of the ways that they have essentially “hacked” modern features into an extremely old and limiting engine. The name Everquest used to always be a joke, since for the most part the game itself had very few “quests”. They have remedied this by adding in a full quest journal system, and through some clever scripting given you an overarching quest for each area that essentially leads you by the hand to the other quest givers. This way players at least know who to /hail to get the quests in a given area.

Additionally they have incorporated new features, like treasure chests that are commonplace in other games. They had no real way to do this in the traditional sense… but instead creatively created ground spawn stationary mobs that look like chests but don’t fight back. So by destroying this “chest” the player can then loot the contents. I have to applaud the devs for coming up with extremely creative solutions around complex problems and limitations of their game engine.

Additionally I find it interesting that they have come to a point where they expect mudflat ion to occur and that players need certain stats to be able to survive. Through the tutorial quests you manage to get a really nice set of gear, probably better than I had in my 50s in the original game… and include with it the ever important 10% haste item. This was a must have item, and I remember hours spent farming various drops for the guild to make sure that every dps player had at least the most basic of haste items.

The Bad

Today’s post was essentially spurred on by one of my friends blog post yesterday. Over on West Karana, my friend Tipa posted an article called “Why I Stopped Playing Everquest”. Her commentary could almost exactly double for whatever I am about to say, because the same things that do not appeal to her… are what I noticed indulging this whim. Ultimately it is honestly the same problem I had with Dark Age of Camelot as well. The game play is to slow and prodding… and quite frankly boring after being used to today’s MMO standards.

I played a Cleric in the original game, and my little circle of healers used to joking refer to the game as AFKquest, in that we spent far more time alt-tabbed or talking than actually doing anything active on our characters. Unfortunately playing a melee is not much better. I have reached a point where I just cannot handle passive and slow combat, and literally doing nothing as your character auto attacks down a monster. The above golem took a good 15 minutes of waiting on my character to slowly chew down its health. I alt-tabbed and caught up on my news feed, tabbing back between articles to see if it was over yet.

This is not what fun game play looks like anymore for me. At one time it was, but more so it was because it was the only thing that gave us online character development and progression. The game holds up on many levels, but the slow pace of the game and the absolute passivity of combat guarantees that it will never be more than a passing novelty for me again. Sure I got the tingles of nostalgia as I heard the opening theme again, but I have the same nostalgia playing Everquest II, which for me at least is a much better game in every possible way.

I feel like I have always looked at my time playing Everquest through rose colored lenses… but after playing it again for a short period of time… I started to think about all the things I didn’t remember. All of the hours spent standing around doing nothing, while other players drug mobs back to the party and killed them… somehow never taking enough damage to make it worth casting a heal. Quite honestly the game involved way more waiting around than I would like to remember. Waiting to break fear, waiting for everyone to log in and show up for an event, waiting to get enough faction to turn in a specific quest item, waiting for that one magical super rare monster to spawn needed for someone’s epic. I simply don’t have the patience for that much waiting, or at least I have come to value my time a bit more and I am simply not willing to squander it.

Wrapping Up

Overall I was surprised at just how well Everquest had updated itself to compete with modern games. However after playing for a very short period of time… I remembered all the bad things about the game and they pretty much toppled the nostalgic good things. I am going to file the game in the “not for me anymore” category. I might visit occasionally since it is free for me to do so, out of sheer nostalgia, but it isn’t something I could ever really get into again. The gameplay overall is just not what I am looking for out of an MMO.

Since this is the big holiday weekend in the United States, I wish all my fellow Americans a happy Independence Day. For my dear friends in the rest of the world… I apologize… because for the next 24 hours you will hear about nothing but our Fourth of July celebrations. I still hope you all have a great weekend. We have a bunch of stuff to do to prepare for our vacation and a bunch of cleaning to do for our house sitter. Guess I need to get up and be productive.