Last night I got into EverQuest II and, following Bhagpuss’ suggestion on yesterday’s post, I went off to find Yun Zi and the Days of Summer quest line. Or lines. there is the 2017 quest line and the 2018. They are literal nostalgia tours, which is somewhat amusing since I used to refer to the annual autumnal return to the game as a nostalgia tour.
Anyway, uncertain how long the Days of Summer quests would be active, the autumnal equinox having passed already, I got right on with it, taking a tour through the Desert of Flames, Kingdom of Sky and Echoes of Faydwer expansions, areas that did bring some nostalgia.
Next on the list was Rise of Kunark, which honestly starts to get into the edge of nostalgia for me. That was probably the last expansion I was at level… or close to level… and able to get into as it launched.
I took the spires to get there… the spires transport system is the one that I never think about because it wasn’t active until Kingdom of Sky… which put me in the mountains at the north of the Kylong Plains. I had to get down to the docks for the first check-in point. Fortunately I have a flying mount so that wasn’t too tough.
But as I flew out of the snowy mountains I espied a long waterfall dropping from the mountain down into a pool far below, which itself was the head of a small river that flowed to a small lake.
Coming out of the mountains I see the waterfall
Trust me, that geometric, translucent aqua blue area is water. This is 2008 level graphics.
As a lark I decided to fly through the waterfall on my way down. And there I got stuck.
In the water and drowning
I was trapped in the column of water, unable to move in any direction. The game flagged me as being under water and the breath bar started counting down and rather more quickly than it does in WoW.
I found that if I tried to move around that I could regain my breath. I didn’t seem to be moving at all, but apparently I was breaking the surface sufficiently get breath, so the bar would refill and go away, only to return and begin to count down if I stopped.
I was in quite a spot as, along with drowning, I was way up in the air in a game where a fall can kill you. There was water down below, but given how the water up here was behaving I wasn’t keen to trust it. But after a while of trying various things I figured I had to go one way or another, so I dismounted.
That apparently was enough and I fell down the waterfall into the pool below unscathed, bobbing along with the current.
Headed down some sort of water hill
This was an attempt at getting flowing water to act on players to they would be pushed down stream, something I expect did not interact well with a flying mount, something that came along later in the history of the game.
So I was saved from peril of the waterfall. But it made me a bit wary later in the evening when, while touring the Destiny of Velious expansion, I had to fly through another waterfall.
Later in Velious
However, Destiny of Velious is when they introduced flying mounts, so the falling water was more forgiving.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Always remember to pack some Totems of the Otter! Although you can’t use them while flying so that wouldn’t have helped much…
On the graphics and how they’ve aged, one treat you do have in store if you stick with it is the huge visual improvement in higher level zones. Kunark looks like a different game when compared with pretty much anything from Chains of Eternity (2012) onwards. Some of the later stuff is genuinely beautiful, not something even the stanchest EQ2 loyalist could honestly say about the first half-decade.
I quite like water with physics in MMOs. Vanguard had quite a strong flow in rivers, enough to make crossing them awkward. Oddly, it didn’t seem to affect the ships. And speaking of ships, I read that EQ2 article in the old CGW you linked and was amazed to find that we were all supposed to get personal vehicles, including boats, in EQ2 at launch. Never got mine!
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@Bhagpuss – My paladin is a woodworker and used to keep a bunch of totems to hand. They are/were one of the undervalued items in the game.
I seem to recall some water back in old Freeport in EQ having the ability to push you along.
I am a bit sorry I missed the EQII beta. As I noted in a comment on the CGW post, that was during a quiet time in my gaming. But I have heard many tales since then, like how crafting was to be a form of adventuring class at one point. And now boats. I want a boat. Hell, we had functioning rowboats in EQ at launch. Where is my damn post-cataclysm rowboat? Did Norrath lose their small boating know-how since then?
And why haven’t we had a boating/pirate themed expansion for EQII? EQ has had at least two of those. I will have something to say about the graphics though. I was in some location… Cobalt Scar maybe… that really looked good.
I am not sure Daybreak will be happy with me back as a customer. I am already bringing up old tales and complaints.
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Couple of things I meant to mention…
Daybreak finally got fed up with everyone choosing to level up by grinding Heroic dungeons from earlier expansions rather than playing through the nice, shiny new content, so for Planes of Prophecy they upped the xp required per level from 100-110 by orders of magnitude, then attached absolutely huge xp rewards to all the quests in that expansion. The upshot is that, even though there’s plenty of content from Altar of Malice onwards that gives xp all the way up to 110, the amount of xp it gives is trivial in terms of actually making any progress.
I’m not sure if it applies to level 100 itself – probably not – but as soon as you ding 101 you pretty much have to do the PoP content to keep leveling up. PoP itself is a three-way faction expansion with some hefty benefits for eventually maxing all three factions (I have yet to finish that). Each faction reduces the others as you raise it but there’s a floor to them all that prevents you dropping too far. It’s all explained on the wiki, I think.
The other thing I meant to say is that although I play EQ2 pretty consistently, I effectively play it as though it was a single-player RPG. It’s very good for that – the stories are pretty strong in most expansions and updates (Cobalt Scar, which is indeed very pretty, has a good story, by the way). Generally they don’t veer off into Group of Raid climaxes (there’s one that does, I forget which, but it isn’t any of the last three). The problem of power creep is now so off-the-scale, though, that once you’re in Yun Zi’s gear and/or the PoP free starting stuff, there will be virtually nothing in any previous zones that will give you any kind of challenge or much in the way of upgrades – plus each expansion uses different systems for gear, which is extremely confusing.
My point here, if I can try to remember what it was, is that I remember you commenting before that you tended to lose interest after a while when the only option was soloing. There is a very lively group scene at max level, as you can see from chat in game, but I have no experience of it. Everyone seems to have been doing “coin runs” for Etehereal coins all summer – they do every summer – but I have no clear idea what that is. A year or two back there was a lively “level agnostic” dungeon scene but I think that has dried up now.
Maybe someone else reading this can shed some light on how grouping is these days…
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