Stuck in the Waterfall in Kunark

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.

Stormhold Dodges Third Strike, Votes to Unlock Kunark

The results are in! The community has voted and it looks like everyone is ready to assail Chardok and conquer Karnor’s Castle! The Rise of Kunark expansion will launch at noon PT on August 16th.

The final results for those of you interested were 66% of participants voted to unlock the next expansion.

RadarX, EQII Forums

As I noted earlier in the week, the Stormhold time locked expansion server was on the horns of a dilemma, stay put for a long stretch or move ahead to the next expansion.

That is Daybreak’s graphic for their retro server(s)

The vote to unlock the Rise of Kunark expansion was up for the third time.  If it failed to unlock yet again, the votes would be extended out to an every 90 day cycle, an idea that was causing much fuss on the forums.

However, it looks like the “yes” crowd got its act together.  As RadarX, the CCP Falcon of Daybreak, announced, 66% of the votes cast were to unlock, up from 46% last time around.

For me, Rise of Kunark represents the last expansion where I really know anything about the story or content.  It was, as with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion, a nod to the original EverQuest in design/content/lore.

The next expansion up for a vote is The Shadow Odyssey which, like every expansion after that, I couldn’t really tell you squat about.  Even over at Wikipedia expansions after Rise of Kunark get the briefest of summaries on the page listing out EverQuest II expansions.

Rise of Kunark Vote on Stormhold

Over on the EverQuest II nostalgia server, Stormhold, the march of expansion unlocks continues.  The unlock vote for the Rise of Kunark expansion… I keep typing Ruins of Kunark, because the original EverQuest expansion is much more meaningful to me… and the names are so similar… has been sent out to players.

Yes or No on Kunark

Of course, this brings us to one of those nostalgia server issues which I alluded to last week in that, even if a company decides to go down that path, it is tough to please all of those interested or to find a pace that doesn’t alienate some chunk of your audience.

In this case the Rise of Kunark expansion… the subject of perhaps the only spot-on prediction I have ever made on the blog… which, among its other features, raises the level cap to 80, doesn’t do a lot for me as I am still pottering about in the low 20s.

And I haven’t hit 23 yet

Now, this is mostly my problem.  Since the Stormhold server launched I haven’t played very much, and even when I have been playing the game has been in third place behind EVE Online and Minecraft. Which isn’t to say I haven’t played at all.  If I had rolled up a fresh character in WoW and put the same amount of time into him, he’d be into Mists of Pandaria by now.

I am not sure on which game that reflects the most poorly.

And the fact that I have been playing solo hasn’t helped.  Unlike the live servers, unnamed heroic mobs are not soloable on Stormhold, but a lot of the quests I have been running drive you straight into their arms.

So close to my goal…

Stormhold would have been an excellent opportunity to play with a small group.  Even a healer and a tank together would have owned.  But solo and playing a Shadow Knight, a brand new class for me, has made things a challenge and kept progress down.  I run into quests I cannot finish at level solo often enough, then I have to go find another path to level up on, so I can return later when I can overpower my way through the original.

On the other hand, putting expansion unlocks to a vote every 60 days seems like a fairly brisk pace.  Well, to me in any case.  And so far, only one expansion unlock has been voted down, a vote that led to the usual amount of acrimony in the forums.  No matter which way the vote goes, somebody is unhappy and wants to share.  The forever war between those who want a classic environment that sits static and unmoving and those who want to race to the top and unlock the next bit of content goes on.

Of course, I was happy enough to seen Echoes of Faydwer show up after the last vote.  That added some more 1-70 content, the emphasis for being on the late teens and early twenties, didn’t raise the level cap, and represented an important change in the history of the game.

Now though, with Rise of Kunark, we’re getting into content I didn’t even finish the first time around… even though it went live back in late 2007.

I may not be enthusiastic for the expansion to unlock, but it won’t change my play style at this point.  I am way too far behind the pack to catch up so I will continue to meander along at my own pace, dying to heroic mobs until I am at least a few levels above them.

A Shocking Debut

I had Blintz claim the Burynai Seeker that came with my pre-order of version of Rise of Kunark.

I named him Borzoi for no reason other than it seemed like something you would call a Burynai.

I placed him on the floor of Blintz’s ever-more-crowded acorn home and not two seconds later I saw this:

I only just managed to get a screen shot of it.  It appears that the Bladed Whirlygig, a pet from the Echoes of Faydwer expansion, was feeling jealous of the new addition to the house.  He zapped Borzoi, and good.

So there was Borzoi on the floor.  Fortunately, the shocking just put him into the “play dead” state. 

The tongue hanging out is a nice touch.

I woke him up and he wandered around the room.  I have noticed that since then both he and the Golden Monkey tend to sit on the opposite side of the room from the Bladed Whirlygig.  I wonder if he has been shocking the monkey as well?

Anyway, now I have to figure out how to feed Borzoi so he can cough me up some sparklies.   

Level 58 in Kunark

I was going to lay low on EverQuest II for a while.

I did actually resist for a bit.  I stayed away for the first few days after Rise of Kunark came out.  I did not want to go through the same routine as last year, when Echoes of Faydwer came out, of waiting for patches and updates on that first night.

I certainly would never take time off work for the first day of a release. (*cough* Kendricke *cough*)  I learned that lesson back when Gemstone went live on GEnie back in 1988.

I also have a new computer on order and figured I would be doing a whole bunch of re-installs anyway, so why download stuff twice, right?

But then I started playing around with the new SOE Station Launcher on Thursday after work.  I downloaded the beta, got it up and running, and started chatting with Gaff while he was in-game.

He told me where to catch the boat to Kunark (at docks in Antonica or the Commonlands) and said he was running around in game exploring.

I let the beta Station Launcher patch me while I was having dinner and came back to it to find EQ2 all patched and Rise of Kunark installed.  (There were still no copies of either Rise of Kunark or Secrets of Faydwer on the shelf at Fry’s on Friday morning, but I did the digital pre-order for RoK this time around, so I was set.)

The beta Station Launcher wouldn’t launch EQ2 however, so I had to start the old launcher, patch it, and launch via that. (The new Station Launcher has not had that problem since.  I don’t know if it was a “doesn’t work the first time” bug, or if patching the old launcher changed anything, but it seems fine now.)

I logged on with Blintz, saw that he was closer to level 58 than I thought, and started him on a trip from Kelethin to Antonica to catch the boat to Kunark.

I thought they might have used the dock to nowhere at the Northwest corner of Antonica, but they did not.  The ship for Kunark pull up at the dock with the bell used for travel in Qeynos. (And the same is true in the Commonlands, the dock with the bell for travel in Freeport is the spot.)

There were a lot of people hanging around the dock when the boat arrived, and there were six instances of the initial Kunark zone, Kylong Plains, when I got there.  A busy place!

No new ship model though.  We are stuck with the same ship they always use.  However, if I were going to list out priorities for the game, a new ship model would be pretty low down the list.

They did spruce it up with new sails.

Here is Blintz on the Freeport boat in Kunark.

The boat to the Commonlands

And Blintz on the Freeport bound ship looking at the Qeynos ship pulling out of the docks at Kunark.

The boat to Antonica

I took Blintz around and hit some discovery experience near the docks, getting to my goal pretty quickly.

But then I took the boat back to Antonica, headed to Qeynos Harbor, and then road the carpet out to the Desert of Flames to work on a quest or two out there.

Unfortunately, there is nothing in Kunark for Blintz yet.  The smallest mob I saw was 10 levels above him.  So if I want to do much with this new expansion, I either have to create another alt or level one of my characters up to level 70.

No Rise of Kunark at Fry’s Today

Rise of Kunark… and Secrets of Faydwer, for that matter… are live and potentially available today. 

There is an SOE press release and everything.

However, the Fry’s ad yesterday said that neither box would be on the shelf before Thursday.

So we’re hardly getting off to a Burning Crusade-like start here for the latest expansions of the two main EverQuest franchises.

Still, both expansions were actually IN the Fry’s ad this time around.  Go team! At least in that regard.

Last year’s expansion, Echoes of Faydwer, which also wasn’t on the shelf at Fry’s on release day, as I posted back then, did not make the Fry’s ad until a few weeks after its release. 

And The Serpent’s Spine, the EverQuest expansion last November, was digital download only.  It went pretty well unnoticed outside of the EverQuest community.

So while the release of these two expansions are not exactly an event, at least there was acknowledgement of their pending availability.

The Official SOE Podcast #25

Alan “Brenlo” Crosby and Aimee “Ashlanne” Rekoske host this of the SOE Podcast, with Jason “Pex” Ryan reading the news.

Topics:

• News
• Southern California Fires
• Welcome Jennifer “Minerva” Wilcox to the SOE Denver team
• Paul “Virrago” Williams moving to the Matrix Online team
• Interview with Clint Worley, EverQuest Producer
• Meet and Greet at the Standard – E for All
• Meet Hank the server Hamster
• Vanguard Producer’s Letter
• Interview with Scott Hartsman, EverQuest II Producer
• Listener Email
• Legends of Norrath Expansion
• Star Wars Galaxies Chapter 7
• Collection Server Firsts
• Inside SOE – Stories from the GM Pit
• TV and Movies
• What are you playing?
• Interviews from our Meet and Greet at the Standard
• Out Takes

The show is available on iTunes as well as from the official SOE podcast site.

The show was recorded on November 5th and runs just under over hour and twenty eight minutes. The show notes feature cast pictures and links.

I See Dragon People

Dragon people is what my daughter calls the Sarnak.  She came into my office and was looking over my shoulder at the Rise of Kunark beta (she is getting tall!) and declared immediately that she wanted to make a dragon person.

A pink dragon person, if at all possible.

So here she is, my daughter’s Sarnak.

Yes, the NDA has been lifted for the Rise of Kunark beta.  I am sure we will be seeing a lot of interesting screen shots very soon!