I’ve tried a few times to get back into my habit of writing about our ongoing adventures in EverQuest 2, but something has always gotten in the way. Last week we had a defining moment in the game, and it’s prompted me to try to get back into the swing of things.

Myself, my wife, our longtime friend Brian, and his friend John have been playing EverQuest 2 for many months now. We start back in 2006, after Brian moved across the country to California. He, Katie, and I have been gaming together for years now, and it seemed only natural to continue that weekly tradition via a Massively Multiplayer game.

The last time I wrote about our adventures, back in December, we were just finishing up Wailing Caves and the Commonlands, and were moving our roving whack-a-mole party to the Nektulos forest. We’ve been there for three months.. Now, admittedly, we’re only playing about four or five hours once a week. Given that, I actually think we’re leveling fairly briskly. The problem is that for ten solid levels it was nothing but gloom, bats, skeletons, and darkness. Nothing but darkness as far as the eye could see. It got really, really old.

But I’m getting ahead of myself …

Our early 20s saw us having a lot of fun in the new zone. There’s something to be said for everything being deadly again; One particularly embarrassing run-in with a named giant beaver will now forever be lodged in my gaming memory. As we moved more fully into Nek, we discovered that quests have become … somewhat superfluous. I didn’t go through WoW with a standard group, so I can’t say for certain if this is a now-common problem with modern MMOGs … we’ve been earning so much experience fighting as a group that quests are rapidly racing to grey in our logs. A standard hunting night would see us settling on a few quests and knocking them out of the park; the problem is that often a quest that was white or blue when we started the night would be green by the time we turned it in because of a ding or two.

As we go up in levels this will be less and less of a problem, but I have found it to be a bit annoying. I love questing in modern MMOGs, and the fact that they’ve become sideshow exhibitions to the “blood makes the grass grow, kill, kill, kill” chant really wears on me. If anything (and I can’t really believe I’m saying this), I wish that we could drop into like a ‘regular group mode’, that levels us slower. In exchange for a slower leveling time, the group mode would offer a more focused play experience. Quest sharing, good directions to quest goals; perhaps a sort of auto-quest-picker than figures out what the best quest for the group to do on a given night might be. I certainly wouldn’t have minded stopping to smell the quest-related flowers a bit more in the early 20s.

By the time we’d cracked 25, though, I was already sick to death of the Nek. The interminable fog and the (to my mind) strangely unrelated quest lines dragged as we dinged our way from 26 to 29.

During the worst of these levels, Katie turned full-force to the crafting game and found that she really really liked playing that way. She outleveled herself (and the rest of us, of course) by jumping her Crafter level all the way up to 30; at the time we were only Adventurer level 27 or so. She’s a Jeweler, and has been making some extraordinarily useful trinkets for the rest of us. I particularly like the ring that procs the Wisdom enhancement every once in a while. Genius.

What I took away from the mid-20s, though, was a real sense of frustration. While I knew that we were having fun, and getting to be with friends was a blast, I knew we could be having more fun. Thinking back to what it’s like playing through WoW with a regular group at the higher levels, I was atwitter at the thought of 1-60 play in the same manner. Comparing the two in my head, I knew that we were quagmired compared to what we would have been achieving in World of Warcraft.

I should have kept my big mouth shut, of course, but I bummed out my friends by blabbering about other titles that we could have been playing. Katie and Brian, though, have never had the experience of going ‘all the way to the top’ with a Massive character. They were adamant about wanting to stick with it, now that we were almost 30 levels into the game. And well that we were, because they were absolutely right. Hoping for the fun you might be having is a losing proposition; it was plenty enjoyable hanging out as gnomes in the Nektulos Forest. I couldn’t help it though; I’m a jaded old Massive cynic, and it’s hard for me to have perspective sometimes.

Things came to a head for me at the end of our Nektulos experience. We were wrapping up a quest line that had tossed us all over the zone, by jumping into an instance out at Sea. The ship the Maid of the Mists needed protection against the sea beasts threatening her on a regular basis, and we agreed to sign on. The first few waves of mobs were easily managed by our level 30 characters. The problem came at the end of the instance, with a boss-demon critter. Our first experience with knockback in the game proved extremely frustrating, with us hitting the instance over and over again before determining that we just weren’t going to take him out. The core problem: no matter how Brian positions his Shadowknight tank, he’s always thrown to a different part of the ship. In doing so, he’s tossed beyond the range of my Inquisitor’s healing spells and is (relatively quickly) fed to the fishes as a result. We consulted online guides and talked at length about this encounter, all to no avail.

The bottom line, for me, is that games should be about learning. After the first or second time in the instance, we should have figured out how to defeat the demon. We’re a group of smart, college educated young people, and it really rankled that this brute was getting the better of us. I don’t mind losing once or twice, if we gain something in the effort. By fruitlessly beating our heads against this critter, it was driving me freaking nuts.

Thinking back (again) to my experiences with World of Warcraft, and even Dungeons and Dragons Online, there was a clear learning curve. Instance dungeons required one, maybe two run-throughs before you figured out the catch and could successfully complete them. (I’m not referring to high-end raiding dungeons, of course.) This piddly little instance, just a boat and a couple of mobs, was thwarting us at every turn. It was infuriating. We even turned to outside resources, but for whatever reason we just couldn’t nail that demon-headed bastich.

Thankfully, one of the little bells on the docks in Nektulos Port reminded me that not all was lost. I’d been through Thundering Steppes once, after a “Hmm, what does this do?” accident with the Kingdom of Sky teleportation circles. I noticed when I was there that it was pretty much the same level as Nek, but I’d never prompted my cohorts into trying it out.

That was obviously, in retrospect, a mistake. A different set of scenery would have done wonders for us, and would have partially helped with my feeling of frustration. For the last two sessions we’ve been playing whack the gnome/giant in the southern part of the zone, and it’s been doing wonders for our moods and our experience bars.

I’ve been doing more research on Nek and Thundering Steppes, and I’m filled with a sense of annoyance at everything we missed out on. Heritage quests, instance access quests, etc, etc … I’m coming to realize that it’s not really our fault that our play has been so disorganized (hence my comments above). There are just too darn many quests in EQ2. They’re spread around and thick on the ground, and it’s impossible to know what is important simply by virtue of the quest description in-game.

With upcoming zones I’m going to be more diligent about planning out what we should do and where we should go. I want Katie and Brian to get a great experience out of this game, because it’s where the group has decided to stay. If that requires effort outside of the game to bring to fruition, then so be it.

Next week we’re going to be finishing up TS … and I plan to be ready with an answer to the question “What’s next?”. I also hope to update more promptly again with these so that you can follow along with us as we make future, even more embarrassing mistakes. :)

I’ve gotten some great feedback in previous EQ2 posts, so I’ll just throw this out there: We’re all about 32-33. What should we do next? What stuff is there in TS and Nek that we really shouldn’t have missed? (I guarantee we’ve missed it.) What zone should we hit next, and what should we make sure to do when we get there? Let me know … for playing the part of johnny leader sometimes in-game, I certainly don’t have a clue.