Grimwell took myself and a bunch of other MMOG-interested writers on a walking tour of Kunark earlier this week. I went to Kunark and all I got were these lousy screenshots.

Below is a rundown on the half dozen zones we got a look at, with some images to boot. I also run down some critiques of the expansion (I don’t do total fluff pieces), and offer up my hopes for the future of EQ2. Read on for the beauty of the Rising of Kunark.

We started in Timorous Deep, the starting zone for the Sarnak. The tour itself didn’t really cover that area, but it’s really easy to run through with a newbie character. I can tell you right now that it’s gorgeous. The surf alone! The starting area is right near the coast, and the surf pounds up against this rocky shore - complete with spray and sound. It’s a far cry from the weak-ass beaches in the Enchanted Lands. One other thing I first noted in this zone is the unusual movement of the Sarnak. They look great, of course: every customization you’d ever want in a wannabe dragon. I particularly think the blues look good, and the horns are fantastic. But I digress, the movement: they float. Kinda. When they jump, there’s a definite sense of lightness to the Sarnak. It’s like the Fae’s floatyness, but even more so. Just jumping straight up as a Sarnak, I had enough lateral movement to move quite a ways. No guarantees this will be the way of things in the released product, or even that there will be special Sarnak movements at all - but it’s still interesting. Timorous and associated islands are about twenty levels of awesome. Players then break away from Kunark before coming back at around 65 or so. Some interesting tidbits about Timorous as a newbie zone include its size (it’s pretty biggish), and the idea of Griffons. Griffon rides are something you encounter around 8th or 9th level in Timorous, whereas older zones usually ‘gate’ that concept to 20 or higher. Easy riding is always appreciated.

Once our large party was assembled, we headed to the actual starter zone for the new content: the Kylong Plains. The zone starts as a wide open area with every convenience a character could ask for, and was a great example of the ’seamless zone’ concept they’re using for the first time in EverQuest II. According to some media I recieved: “Kylong is a land divided into four territories: the temperate valley of the Dreadlands, the frozen heights of the Ryjesium Peaks, the crater forest of Stonewood, and the lightly forested beach of Kunzar Bay.” Each of these areas is essentially a zone unto itself. As you head up the paths from the Dreadlands into the Peaks, the appearance of snow indicates you’ve moved to another zone … but no pesky loading screen. It’s obviously not a new concept in Massive games, but it’s not a convenience that an EverQuest title has ever had before. A question tossed up queried whether that would lead to more lag when the overland area is full of players; Grimwell noted that they actually have someone who works specifically on world lag and they don’t anticipate a lot of problems on that front.

From the Plains, we ran to Karnor’s Castle. It was another good example of the area blending technology; the visual cue that you’ve entered a new area is rain. It’s always raining at Karnor’s Castle. Karnor’s is a ‘contested dungeon’. IE: It’s not instanced. Grimwell noted that veterans of the first EverQuest would find that in some parts of Kunark dungeons would be almost identical in layout to what you’d seen back in the day. In others, the hundreds of years of story between the first and second games had made their mark. Though there are some changes to Karnor’s, it’s still going to be really really familiar to old players. The Sarnak floating power came in mighty handing traversing waterways in the castle. Despite the best efforts of the tour, we managed to train a group of high levels that were legitimately working the front area of the castle. Sorry about that! The mobs were most interesting; despite the familiar surroundings the mobs were very different. Sathir is out, and the Drolvarg are in - looking very different from the Drolvarg of old.

The Kunzar Jungles was our next stop, and it’s a place held completely by the Iksar. Not the Iksar from old world EQ2, of course, but a brand new bunch with a really bad attitude. They’ve essentially enslaved everything in the zone, and there are great numbers of the little villages spread all the hell and gone across the green hell. It’s an EverQuest product, so there are new factions to ally with. Some waystations in the Kunzar have faction requirements before you can quest with them. Killing the guards is not the best idea. Kunark factions are essentially self-contained from the Faydwer/Freeport/Qeynos factions, and thus there are a lot of them. We swung past (but not through) the City of Mist, and got a good sense of the sheer size of the Jungles. Some notes from Grimwell include the fact that the ‘Monk Shackle’ quests are in this zone, and that though the faction requirements are there many players are going to have no problem reaching them organically. Don’t expect to have to do a lot of grinding to make use of questgivers.

Sebilis was our next stop on the tour, another contested area that thankfully was free of innocent players. The Frogloks of old have been replaced by Iksar, restored to their rightful place as rulers in the seat of the Iksar empire. There are still Frogloks there, of course … they’re just a bit undead. They’ve rebuilt the city for their own ends, and many of the elements that players saw in old Sebilis will be very familiar here. We had just a moment to pop through the area before we went on to the Jarsath Wastes, the overland area near the big badness: Veeshan’s Peak.

The Wastes are … pretty wasted. It’s been stripped dry by years and years of battle, lightning from the sky, and other completely unpleasant elements. The place is filled with NPC on NPC conflicts - conflicts that you can choose to participate in if you so choose. More factiony goodness. There’s also a ton of dragons in the area, as you’d expect. The only one we saw up close was a dead dragon outside of the enormous battle wall. The Skyfires are also here, and individual areas are equally dire - the Goblin Straights, and the tomb city of Charasis, resting place of Drusella!

Veeshan’s Peak was the close of our tour, the ‘marquee’ location in the expansion. As Grimwell pointed out, as a pen and paper gamer “you come into this area and look around, you know it’s time to bring your A game.” It’s very much an instanced area, because the challenge level is very very high. There are three separate wings to the dungeon, and the instance saving technology will allow guilds to tackle a wing on each night instead of having to go straight for twelve hours. They specifically didn’t want us to say a lot about this area to save some of the super awesomeness for the first-blush raiders, but … it really looks amazing. These critters in that zone hit hard, hit fast, and mean it. We actually got the chance to see a boss fight that wasn’t technically on the tour and … let me put it this way: the first folks to fight him will be in for surprising time.

We were a bit rushed at the end, but that was essentially it. We popped back to Kylong and said our farewells. It left me with a lot of questions (Why the heck didn’t I get to see Lake of Ill Omen?), a few honest critiques, and a lot of generally positive reactions.

Here they are, in no particular order:

1. If Faydwer was a valentine to EQLive players, Kunark is a mash note. This is hard-core old-school in-your-face EverQuest, and this expansion may do wonders to convince the folks still on the other side of the EQ/EQ2 fence that it’s time to come over. I also think it’s going to turn the heads of a lot of oldsters who never made the jump and have been playing some other games. “Veeshans? Really?”
2. The ‘MMOG Expansion Tour’ concept is kind of weird. It’s no slight to Grimwell at all, but I’m not sure that it was really all that helpful a format to see content in. If there was some way to set up a weekly or bi-weekly content delve with a bunch of writers and some raiders, that would be the ideal. But, of course, that relies on writers knowing how to run an EQ2 character effectively. While I definitely feel like I got a good taste of the expansion (wouldn’t have written this otherwise), it was sort of a fun-sized serving. Me, I’m all about the kids and up.
3. Under load I hope it holds up, but as of right now it’s fantastic to see seamless zoning in EQ2. It seems to me like a lot of other, older, zones (Faydwer zones pop to mind specifically) could make use of this as welll. I enthusiastically hope the dev team has some time to go back and add it in.
4. To me it seems like there’s a downside to having so many factions in the expansion. When I get up there with a faction, I want it to have a bit of meaning you know? That’s a criticism leveled against Blizzard quite often for the Burning Crusade content - and rightly so. Dinging Exalted with some factions just doesn’t mean that much. (Can you say Darkmoon Faire or Ravenholdt?) In Kunark, gaining faction with all these piddly Iksar villages and such sounds cool … but where’s my awesome Iksar village title? Or my Iskar village tabard? Or my novelty “Frogloks suck” foam finger?
5. Veeshan’s Peak is freaking gorgeous-awesome-fantastic … and there is an incredibly small percentage of players that will ever enter that zone and see those amazing models. Just like the 3% of all guilds that have beaten some element of Black Temple, it seems to me that the kind of effort put into the super high-end zones doesn’t have a lot of payoff. Here’s my two cent, off the cuff suggestion: It’s instanced, right? Why not do a small group ‘tourist quest’ that goes into Veeshans? NPCs need some sort of crazy thing from a side passage in the instance. She provides cunning disguises to the players that will allow them to move about the temple unhindered. In this case, turning them into drakes would be awesome, but maybe just a ‘Ring of Scale robe’ would suffice. The PCs head in, and are non-aggro to all the critters in there … accept the (small-group tuned) guards that jump them when they try to steal the thing, and the additional groups that spawn on their way out of the instance. Players get to feel like mice in a lion’s den (emotional experiences are good), get some cool loot, and all that high-end content isn’t only seen by the best of the best.
6. Timorous is an amazing starting zone. It makes Freeport and Qeynos look like garbage cans, out of which the crappiest of all PCs must crawl. It’s about on par with the awesomeness of the Fae and Arasai experiences … but I like the Sarnak better. Dragons > Fairies.

Given what I’ve seen here, it’s hard not to be engaged by EverQuest II’s future. The dev team really showed it knew what it was doing with Faydwer, and now they’re coming out of the gate swinging with a full year of experience on top of that work. They’ve even been getting some advertising love, with the recent emails hitting past subscribers. One would hope when the new expansion drops they’ll offer up some additional freebie time to lapsed customers.

Here, then, are my hopes for the unknowable upcoming world of EQ2:

• In many ways, I hope the devs just keep doing what they’re doing. Who would have thought a year ago they’d be patching in a whole new race and starting experience? For free? That kind of thing is obviously the exception, but the EQ2 folks obviously know what the hell they’re doing.
• That said, the game still needs some attention in certain areas. The great strides forward in tradeskilling are a start, but that part of the game still needs a lot of work. I’m sure Niami Denmother agrees. :)
• Differentiation from WoW is going to get even easier now that the vast quantities of lore and past gaming experiences from EverQuest are really starting to be tapped in earnest. Keep that up. WoW’s biggest weakness in the content area is emotional. No one is nostalgic for Black Temple. But … how many people over the years have downed Nagafen? How many have adventured in the Lake of Ill Omen zone? Pull on those threads with tact and taste … but do pull on them.
• As you are probably already aware, I’m a big fan of content recycling. I mentioned it above quickly, but it’s worth saying again: compared to the rest of the game Freeport and Qeynos are hair-pulling experiences. Given that they’re the ’standard’ entrance points for most of the races, it would be awesome if they could get some retooling/loving.
• Above I mentioned a way to expose high-end content to lower-level/more casual characters. Why not take that same kind of approach to older raid content? Instead of letting it go stale, why not retune encounters like Nagafen to be doable by a single max level group? Moreover: have it actually mean something. Remember, players don’t need giant glowing weapons with massive stats to feel like they’ve accomplished something. What if killing Nagafen in a single level 80 group meant you got a neat tabard, or title, or (the first time) just a nice stack of money?

My group right now is about level 45, and so it’ll be some time before I see the likes of Ill Omen. This experience, though? Makes me want to go the distance.