Two weeks now of EQ2 to catch up on. Apologies for the delay, but between the Barnett interview and then some general hilarity this past week, I’ve been focused elsewhere.

Wednesday the 16th and Wednesday the 23 saw the fabulous four of us doing what we’ve been focusing on since we got to the Enchanted Lands (and started ignoring Zek): working through the quest line to Rivervale. The week before this past week we completed quite a few pieces of the trail, all the way up to the infuriating “A Deputy’s Dog”. It’s an escort mission (which I’m normally not a big fan of), but not a terrible one in and of itself. You’re likely to get attacked by some bats on the way, but they’re pretty easy at the level we were at. With our strength as a group? Cake.

The problem is that escort missions are edge cases in EQ2. They don’t work the same way that a lot of the other ones do as regards updating your quest log. The result? We each, individually, had to do the stupid escort mission. This involved waiting for the dog to spawn, primarily, and then following it as it slowly made its way down the path to its destination. BAH. That took on the order of an hour just to complete the one quest. I really really they get that stuff fixed. We ended up doing some dueling to pass the time, and Brian reminded us why he’s the tank and we’re the backup singers. :)

Some general notes about questing in the Enchanted Lands: teh awesomez. I think we are all in agreement that so far this has been the most ‘purely fun’ zone to do our thing in. Except for the Heroic bears which aggro in threes and fours on us, TPKing us almost every time, TEL is a pretty calm place. There’s a lot of variety to the zone, allowing us the fun-ness of different places to hunt, and a ton of variety in what mobs we’re fighting. We’ve been starting to kill more goblins, and I never in a million years thought I’d be happy to be killing Runnyeyes again. Good times. Though they can be a bit frustrating, the quests that see us heading out to sea to confront the swordfish and the like are a nice change of pace from dry land.

An additional note to the EQ2 art team: We players are under the opinion that the lemur/scorpions call Lashers are some of the awesomest models we’ve seen in any game evar. We’re really looking forward to the expansion content, which I’m told has more inventive models yet. Nicely done.

This past time we pressed onward and upward, working for the museum society in ever stranger and more confusing ways. We called it a night while working on the Haflings of the Seamist Plains village for “I Hate the Hole in the Wall”. We’re just a few steps away from the three-part “Houndslayer” and “Last of the Tier’Dal” quests, which will have us in ye olde Rivervale proper, and me squeaking with glee. Getting to adventure in the revamped version of my favorite EQ character’s home city will be a blast.

Mostly over the last week I’ve been living vicariously through my wife. She’s played a ton of EQ2, enjoying the fun and fairyness of the Faydark. We have all standardized on Echoes of Faydwer, and so she’s been having a blast soloing with a winged Warden adventurer. She’s particularly tickled with the ‘One Room Acorn’ housing, and (despite only limited exposure to Crushbone back in the day) really enjoys taking down encroaching Crushbone orcs.

She’s leveling like a madwoman, proving out for me what a phenomenal job the designers are doing now that they’ve shifted the game’s focus. The comment I made in a post last week about it being sometimes obvious that the game wasn’t intended to be solo’d? Completely not the case in EoF. They know you’re going to be playing by yourself, and the designers be damned if you’re not having a good time.

We ended the game last week hovering somewhere in the range of 37. We might have the chance to play tonight and Wednesday as well, so we may well crack 39 before the end of the week. Good times continue in the world of Norrath, and come 40 we’re all really looking forward to striking out from the Old World for the content in DoF.

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