A Bit More On EverQuest II
798 words.
It seems like every time I mention EverQuest I or II, I inadvertently start a firestorm of blogging controversy. :)
Even before I read Bhagpuss’s post, I was thinking I should probably expand my thoughts on EverQuest II*. It’s one of the games I periodically try to get back into, and one that I wish I was caught up with. I can’t precisely explain why I wish that anymore, though; I suppose it always felt like one of the most “complete” fantasy MMORPG experiences, representative perhaps of the pinnacle of what the genre is capable of. Or perhaps it’s more of an archival representation of what the genre used to be, a trip to a very interesting museum, in a way.
But every time I try to play EverQuest II, I quickly remember why nobody makes a game like it anymore. It just doesn’t fit into my particular gaming lifestyle anymore. Said lifestyle being summarized in 2020 thusly: I often play games in 30-minute blocks of time, so I expect to be able to enjoy a measurable amount of progress in thirty minutes of gaming time, and/or feel that those thirty minutes were intrinsicly enjoyable even if there’s no progress. EQ2 is more of a “spend all day and night with it every single day” sort of a game.
The last character I tried to play in EQ2, a conjurer, seen here in Antonica. She is level 19 now.
My basic problem with EQ2 is that I usually can’t find where the fun part of the game is, and surprisingly enough, the game itself doesn’t help me find it. Which is a really strange thing for a game to do, especially after some 15 years of development. If you start from the very beginning at level 1, you can follow some breadcrumbs for a while, but it’s kind of a grind of old-school questing and I petered out around level 20 last time, and I petered out around level 45 the time before that.
Often I can overlook gameplay problems if I’m told even a mildly interesting story (see: Guild Wars 2), but I have yet to see any kind of story hook in the ten-odd years I’ve been trying to play EQ2. It’s a uniquely story-less MMORPG. There’s no overarching story, there’s no zone-wide stories, there’s no story anywhere ever. All I’ve ever seen are random people scattered across the world asking you to kill ten rats and/or fetch things. At least up through level 45.
Something else that can distract me from unfulfilling gameplay is interesting graphical scenery, and, well, you can probably guess where this is going: EverQuest II doesn’t have that. It gets somewhat better the higher you level, and the more recent the content, but again, it’s rather difficult to level, and my three attempts to skip ahead so far haven’t worked out very well. And I won’t even mention the font situation. Even Lord of the Rings Online, possibly the undisputed reigning champion of poor MMO UIs, now has a font size setting.
When they do give you a level boost up to level 95 or 100, where I have three free characters now, you’d think they would start you out with at least one breadcrumb or story hook to nudge you in the right direction. But as far as I could tell, no kings or queens send you mail saying you’re urgently needed to fight off the Super Evil Bad Guys in the Land of Level 100 Stuff. The game doesn’t even put zone level ranges in parenthesis on the big map, which is the absolute bare minimum that they might have done to point a player in the right direction, without leaning completely on players to make wikis for them.
Side note: EQ2 is not the only MMO that has these “nothing inside the game tells you how to enjoy the game” problems, by the way. It just happens to be the most frustrating one for me.
Anyway, as I ponder my video strategy for 2020, I thought this might make a fun subject. I happened to record some videos in 2016 and 2017 of my first sessions with level 95 and 100 characters. They are pretty funny as I mainly just stand around saying “how do I even get off this flying horse?” for 30 minutes. Perhaps I’ll see if the experience has changed any in 2020 with my level 100 Ogre Coercer who has been heroically standing next to a big gate and some cows for the last few years.
One lost Level 100 Ogre Coercer. (I have at least learned that this is The Commonlands just outside Freeport, FYI.)
- However I’m also trying to write shorter posts, so I can, you know, finish and publish some occasionally.
Archived Comments
Wilhelm Arcturus 2020-01-20T21:59:34Z
“There’s no overarching story, there’s no zone-wide stories, there’s no story anywhere ever.”
I am going to call BS on that. No doubt Bhagpuss will be here shortly, the firestorm duo we are, but I couldn’t leave this be. Story hasn’t always permeated the game, but there are main stories in many of the expansions. If you take one of your level 100 characters, go to one of the sets of spires that dot the various zones in the game (if you’re free to play I find taking the bell to the Enchanted lands is easy as the spires are just off to the east), and go to the Plane of Magic you will find three factions there each with their own parallel story. They lead you into the into another story line. And when you finish that up, a mail message arrives from the Tribunal that kicks off the story for the next expansion.
bhagpuss 2020-01-20T22:24:11Z
There’s actually an ongoing narrative involving the pantheon of gods and matters of existential import that meanders through the entire fifteen-year history of the game, although I have to say I didn’t really notice it until I was about ten years in. The thing is, I actively dislike overt “story” in MMORPGs. It’s not what I’m there for. The point, for me, is to lose myself in another world.
I’m all for the smaller narratives of the ordinary lives of the people who realy do live there, though - the NPCs. All those “kill 10” and “fetch” quests come with backstory, often from characters with plenty of personality. There are hundreds, probably thousands of those tales and lots of them are worth hearing.
It’s probably true that older MMORPGs don’t suit a thirty-minute play window but they aren’t meant to. It would, like going for a thirty-minute ten mile ramble, be an impossible ask. Once you’ve established yourself then, yes, it’s very possible to pop on for half an hour and get something meaningful done, but it will be something very specific.
I don’t play in 30 minute bursts, though. A short session for me would be a couple of hours. Most days, if I’m not working, I’d look to play a couple of sessions on my current MMORPG, each lasting two to three hours. Even these days, when my gaming time has drifted down a lot, I probably still manage 20-25 hours a week.
The graphics are another difficult problem because you’re right that the lower leverls are the older parts of the game and the graphics look the full fifteen years old in some of the original zones. Not all of them, though. Weirdly, the sewers under Freeport and the tombs under Qeynos are significantly more aesthetically appealing than the outdoor areas.
Later zones in expansions from the last five years or so are very noticeably more attractive visually. The dev team got new design tools around then and it really shows. Even so, clearly the game is never going to match the standards of contemporary graphics. That said, much comes down to personal taste. I find a lot of the game gorgeous to look at, particularly in the color palette and lighting effects.
UltrViolet 2020-01-20T23:30:44Z
Ha I was going to pop in here and add an update that I made some progress with my level 100 guy but I see I’m already too late. :) When I first made this Ogre Coercer I took some screenshots and those screenshots told me that I had started in the Plane of Magic (it was part of a Seeds of Vengeance giveaway?). I then managed to somehow teleport myself to Freeport before I picked up a single quest, and that’s where he’s been stuck for the last couple years. So that’s my starting point with this guy.
Just now I managed to find a “Voyage Through Norrath” gizmo in Freeport that took me to a place called Cobalt Scar which was one of the 95-100 zones, the highest level ones I could find on the map.
(I was wrong… it actually does tell you the level ranges of the zones in the “Voyage Through Norrath” map but you have to hover over each one to see them in a tool tip.)
Anyway in Cobalt Scar, after flying around aimlessly for a while, I found this camp where there’s a guy that started talking to me and asking if I was the hero they’d been waiting for to fix all the bad things, which was exactly the sort of thing I’d been looking for. Then I talked to a meditating otter and went out to find his friends. It’s just that it’s a level 95-ish quest line. But I can at least figure out how to use a Coercer for a little while (except everything dies in a single hit) before I go back to tracking down the Plane of Magic.
UltrViolet 2020-01-21T02:11:06Z UPDATE: So I helped out the otters fighting the walrusmen in Cobalt Scar for a bit and decided to go back to find the Plane of Magic. The teleport thingy at the Scarstone fort–where I’m pretty sure the game put me when I teleported to this place–the guard there tells me I’m not authorized to use the teleport. Sooooo the game let me teleport to this place, but it won’t let me teleport back until, apparently, according to Google, I finish all the quests in the zone, or something like that. This is a pretty good example of the kind of thing that I consider actively hostile to players. :) As far as I can tell, my character is now stuck here forever and ever until I power through this whole zone.
UltrViolet 2020-01-21T02:51:50Z UPDATE 2: I found the Home skill that teleports me back to Freeport from anywhere, so I’m not stuck in the Cobalt Scar anymore. :) Then I talked to The Duality who actually had some enjoyable plot development for a couple minutes, and sent me to find a dead dragon in Ethernere. I’m supposed to “use the Draconic Sigil at the druid rings in Obol Plains.” Of course I can’t get to the Obol Plains from the Norrath teleport thing. So I’m stuck again. This game is pretty much just straight up trolling me at every turn.
Telwyn 2020-01-21T08:23:09Z It’s “horses for courses” I guess. EQ2 does not hand hold at all, especially where story is concerned. It reminds me of Classic (an ironic statement given it’s older than Vanilla WoW), in so far as without a Wiki Classic is pretty difficult to quest through unless you have muscle memories of all those quests - the quest directions in Classic WoW are obscure and incomplete, and you have to travel a lot to do stuff. EQ2’s quests, even today, have directions that will catch out anyone who doesn’t bother to learn the sights around them. NPCs will places you’ve been in a zone, or even places you haven’t yet. Having a good wiki open can be essential unless you want a “no spoilers” first play-through of a zone. I use the wiki but try to work stuff out first myself, it makes for much more engaging questing than “follow next map highlight”, for me at least.
UltrViolet 2020-01-21T22:37:09Z UPDATE 3: Ah ha! I think I’ve pieced together what happened with this Level 100 Ogre Coercer and how I inexplicably ended up outside the gates of Freeport with no way back to The Level 100 Stuff. https://www.everquest2.com/news/eq2-level-100-heroic-character-promo-may-2018 Apparently I only had access to the Level 100 Stuff with my free character for a few days, and then the next time I logged in, it booted me out of the expansion zones and moved me back to Freeport, waiting for me to actually buy the expansion.
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