One might ask why I got up Saturday morning, launched EverQuest, and ordered The Serpent’s Spine expansion before even considering breakfast. But if one did ask, one should not expect a good answer.
The answer is, I dreamt about EverQuest.
That’s it. I woke up Saturday morning having had a night of EverQuest dreams and decided I wanted to see The Serpent’s Spine expansion.
I do not often dream of computer games. At least I do not think I do. I generally do not remember my dreams when I wake up in the morning, which is probably for the best. If you have ever known anybody who remembers their dreams you know they have a tendency to want to share them with you, and there are few things as tedious as listening to somebody else talk about what they dreamed about last night.
So, yes, I am a goofball. I went and spent $30 based on a dream.
I was, of course, somewhat predisposed to the purchase. After having seen the updated Freeport I did want to see what this new set of zones looked like. I was interested to see how far they could push the graphics envelope with the EverQuest engine.
I logged in, ordered the expansion, then immediately created a Drakkin character.
The updated character creation tool is an improvement. It is nice to have everything in one screen. The Drakkin characters look good and their feature choices remind you more of EverQuest II than EverQuest.
After rolling him up I ran right out into the tutorial. I wasn’t thinking and this is what I had done with my previous characters on this account. After I hit level 4 in the tutorial I suddenly remembered that the new zones are suppose to accommodate levels 1-75. So I tried to get out of the tutorial.
And failed.
I’ve been stuck in the tutorial before. I knew now to go to the tunnel at the back of the main room of the tutorial, but while it asked if I wanted to leave, when I clicked yes, nothing happened. Of course, I had also bound myself in the tutorial as part of one of the first tutorial quests, so I could not just log out and choose the “enter world” option.
I asked on OCC if anybody knew what to do. One card suggested I use the /exit command. Not recalling that one, I tried it. It exits you from the game immediately. Nice to know if you’re playing at work and the boss shows up, but it did not really help my situation.
After a while I tired of trying and logged out. Thinking on it some time later, I realized I had not actually downloaded The Serpent’s Spine expansion. Doh! So I went back and launch EQ, went to advanced, and set it to download The Serpent’s Spine along with the three expansions I do not have, Dragons of Norrath, Omens of War, and Prophecy of Ro. (I said something different in an earlier post, but this is the correct count.)
An hour later I was set. I went back into the tutorial, exited through the back cave, and was sent to the Drakkin starting city, Crescent Reach.
Here is a screen shot of the first bit I saw after cresting the hill from the zone-in point. It looks like a bright and leafy Kelethin… with guard rails.
This shot was an attempt to duplicate one of the gallery shots from The Serpent’s Spine web site. Mine actually shows two of the six dragons that live in the tree tops.
Here is a tip: Do not take a screen shot while riding the elevator up. The delay stops you from going up while the platform continues to rise and you will fall to your death as I did.
There is a building full of NPCs that cover all of the guild masters, scroll sellers, and what not for all of the Drakkin classes in the starting zone. That room was the first thing to slow down my frame rate in game.
My daughter had joined me by this point, so we had to chase grove hares and butterflies for a while, then we put on some Halloween costumes.
Here I am as an evil eye. Awesome costume. I like how it still showed my sword and shield. It scared my daughter after bit though.
So here I am in the kitty costume. I let my daughter run around the zone in “kitty” form for a while, then we quit the game we headed to the park to run around ourselves.
I will have to see how well one can go from levels 1 to 75 in the new content. I am interested to see if they have bitten on the World of Warcraft idea of letting people solo to high level to get them interested in the multiplayer content. This means I will be trying to play 4 MMOs at once. I might have to cancel EVE-Online for a few months while I play some EQ.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 