On A Mission For Love: EQII

February sees the beginning of a flurry of holiday events in EverQuest II. We took a full month's break following the end of Frostfell in early January but this week saw the start of  Erollisi Day, Norrath's version of Valentine's Day.

When it comes to Norrathian holidays, a "Day" usually lasts at least a week. The Errolisi celebrations go on for twelve days. There's a short break and then very soon we'll all be seeing double during the equally misleadingly named Brewday, a two-week bender built around the earthly "holiday" of St. Patrick's Day (not really a thing where I come from). That runs directly into the Chronoportal event, for which our Earth can offer no equivalent.

No sooner (literally) than the Chronoportals vanish, Bristlebane, Norrath's Lord of Misrule appears. Trickster that he is, he somehow manages to persuade us all to celebrate his "Day" for a full two weeks around April 1st. The moment he disappears, out pop the Beasts for Beast'r, a relatively new and short holiday celebrating, yes, you guessed it, the Norathian version of Easter.

While all this is happening the regular, monthly City Festival and lunar-cycle Moonlight Enchantment events carry on as usual. It's a full calendar, to say the least. I'm sure we'll all be relieved to take May off before it all kicks off again in early June with the successive and lengthy elemental celebrations of Oceansfull and Scorched Sky.

All of these events are packed with quests, collections and achievements, some them looking fit to burst after fifteen years of stuffing. There was a time when I'd go all out on each holiday as it arrived, trying to do everything, often on several characters across different accounts but these days I'm a lot more selective.

There are still people who go all in on every holiday. You can occasionally hear their cries of distress on the forums as they bewail the unfairness of not being able to do everything on everyone. And each year it gets harder for completionists as the dev team strives to add something new to every festive occasion.

As Bart Simpson once said, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. Some people find the sheer volume of things to do stressful but any holiday that comes and goes with no new content at all is held up as evidence that the game is dying.

Not that many anniversaries pass by unchanged. There's always something new, even if it's just something small and unremarkable. For this year's Errolisi Day we get the usual extra achievement (Over the Moon) and a selection of new things to make and buy, but the centerpiece is something much more substantial, not to say original: a series of five quests for the new Overseer system.

That seems quite significant. Potentially, it's game-changing. Prior to this, it hadn't occured to me that the Overseer feature could be meaningfully integrated into the metagame but on the evidence presented here it most definitely can. Indeed, it has been.

To get the quest you have to visit an NPC called Sister Marinah Highgleam in New Halas. She's standing there with a feather over her head just like any other questgiver and when you speak to her she has a backstory like any other, too.

Some pirate kidnapped her, then released her on condition she help him win the love of "a tall troll woman known as Deadly Rhedd". It's the traditional set-up that would normally have you agreeing to run all over Norrath collecting objects and killing monsters, which is precisely what needs to be done, only not by you. The modern adventurer has people to do that kind of thing for her.

Taking the quest doesn't write anything in your Journal. Instead it adds a new Overseer Mission "Thralg's Bejeweled Cutlass" to your list. The mission takes just half an hour. When it finishes it's immediately replaced by another, "Thralg's Mad Grobb Grog", then "Thralg's Trained Monkey" and so on. Each has a little story. All Overseer missions do. The conceit that these are quests which really take place inside the game is dutifully maintained at all times.

I'm currently on the fourth of five, "Thralg's Blessed Cologne". I'm doing them as I write this post because "doing them" entails nothing more than tabbing back into the game after thirty minutes has passed, picking up my rewards and clicking on the next one.

It would all just be a bit of fun (and it is that, too) if it wasn't for the fact that the rewards are potentially comparable to, or even better than, anything I can get for going out and fighting things. My Shadowed crafting book, by far the most valuable drop I've had in the expansion so far, came from an Overseer Mission and every day I get a few items comparable to those I get from solo quest rewards. Granted, the quest rewards are usually better, but only by a slim margin. And I have had some upgrades.

Now we have proof of concept that quest chains with narrative can be handled via the Overseer interface. That subverts the core gameplay loop. We're in a brave new world where we, the players, talk to NPCs via our characters then send those characters out to adventure at the NPCs' behest - and our characters then delegate the work to their own sub-contractors! By the time anyone gets a sword upside the head there are several degrees of metaphysical separation between the sword-wielder and the aggrieved party.

The way this all affects gameplay goes even further than that. As I type this I have a character camped at one of the graveyards in The Commonlands, waiting for the Errollisi Day Public Quest to begin. I've done it once already in the middle of writing this post. It's the quest I wrote about in detail last year, when I did it on two characters so I could get the Carina Cuddleblaze familiar.

At the time I was happy just to get a cute little dragon that would follow me about. This year I'm doing it because Carina Cuddleblaze is a Fabled quality familiar, which means she's extremely useful for reducing the Mishap chance on Overseer missions.

I'm also doing the "Familiars Wild" daily quest on the only three characters that can get it (my account is bugged, as I suspected, although my Berserker has inexplicably unbugged himself somehow so I remain hopeful for the rest). That's so I can build up a stable of familiars purely for Overseer purposes.

Next on my list of things to do is to hunt down or buy better Mercenaries and pay for them to be hireable anywhere, once again so I can use them to increase my chances of a bonus chest on Overseer Missions. There are changes to the system already up on the Test server which will give players access to all of the Missions they have unlocked, rather than having to take whatever the server gives them, and that will make the system even more central to gameplay.

I'm finding all this quite strange. It doesn't just add a resource management mini-game to EQII, as I imagined it would. It opens up a whole new channel for character progression and now the dev team has thrown narrative possibilities into the mix.

Perhaps the oddest thing is how much I like it. It seems to run counter to the kind of things I say I want in my MMORPGS but then we all know how that goes. MMORPG players rarely play the way they say they wish they could, even when the opportunity arises. All too often they do the exact opposite, then complain bout it. 

In this case, I can see why I'm becoming increasingly drawn into using the Overseer system. For many years, solo endgame play in EQII has meant running instances repeatedly for the daily and weekly rewards. That takes too long and becomes too repetitive for my tastes. It's too much like hard work. The Overseer system is turning into a way to get much the same result, only with the tedium removed (or at least shunted offline, which is much the same thing).

At the moment the rewards aren't generally as good or as reliable as you'd get from instances but as my portfolio of Missions and Agents builds and I get full control over which missions I run each day, that could easily change.

I've just started the final Mission in Sister Marinah's questline. It will reward me with a pirate illusion and a title as well as a standard Overseer Mission crate. I've already received a new Agent, a plushie for my house, a vanity pet and four crates.

If Overseer Mission Questlines like this were to become a standard addition to holiday events I'd be very happy indeed. You wouldn't hear me complaining even if we started to get them outside of the holidays as general content updates, although I'm pretty sure that would cause some stirs of dissent.

There will always be those who rail against change but that's why we have Kaladim. It's not as though we don't have a choice. Somewhat to my own surprise, I come down heavily on the Retail side of the argument, to put things in terms a WoW fan would understand.

Oh, god. I've been corrupted, haven't I? Where did I put my principles? I'm sure I saw them a while ago...

Nobody's Perfect: EQ2

When SW:ToR finally hopped off the fence and set a date for what they refer to as "same-gender romance", a phrase that manages to be both clinical and coy at the same time, the long-awaited move attracted a lot of attention. Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away this kind of thing has been going on for years.

Over in Norrath, Erollisi Day is back once again. Naimi Denmother has her usual, impeccable overview of what's new this time around and Zam has comprehensive and clear details for the entire event. There are no new quests this year but there are extra rewards for some existing ones plus a new crafting book, so I took the opportunity of this morning's GW2 server maintenance to take a stroll round Freeport and smell the roses.

Dalron Pinot has been setting up his Love Clinic on the East Freeport docks for six years now, offering classes on How To Pick Up Anyone Regardless Of Gender, Race, Species or Interest. He really doesn't care who he hits on and as you follow his lead it soon becomes apparent that he has a point - in Norrath anything goes! 


I've done this quest many times but every year it swings its fat, wet fish of gobsmackery full into my unsuspecting face yet again. Armed only with a selection of pick-up lines that would get you bodily ejected from any self-respecting singles bar, and with a persistence that could only end with a court order, Dalron sends you out to walk the streets of Norrath's most unforgiving, corrupt, neo-fascist militarized seaport looking for love.

Your mission, should you be suicidal enough to accept it, is to approach complete strangers and with no pre-amble of any kind launch into a hamfisted attempt to inveigle them into some kind of "romantic" tryst. Never mind if you happen to be a meter-high talking rat. Or, for that matter, a six-inch tall pixie. Don't worry about your own sexual orientation or that of your intended paramour. Don't worry if  any kind of physical relationship between you would even be physically possible, let alone welcome. Just get in there and start flirting!

Amazingly, rather than leading to armed combat, which would hardly be an unusual outcome for a quest or indeed any chance meeting in the streets and bars of Freeport, all your victims are either flattered, amused or take pity on you. No matter whether you're trying your weary lines on a muscular male dwarf in a vest, a bouffant-coiffed gnome with mental health issues or a Priestess in a Celibate order, everyone takes it all in good part.

And it isn't really all that surprising. Norrath is and always has been a wonderfully tolerant place (if you overlook the rabid and intense racial hatreds, and the predilections of some sentient species to use others as a food source). Once Erollisi day passes we'll soon be onto Brew Day, when a drunken dwarf will send us around his many old haunts to review the mismatched collection of drunken one-night stands he vaguely remembers so you can report back to him on whether any of them is good-looking enough for another try. Oh and incidentally, while you're at it, what species were they? Then, on a more positive note, there's the charming Commonlands inter-species romance between a young Ratongan Romeo and his Kerran Juliet. That's bound to end well...

I love it. It's wonderful and bonkers at the same time, which just about sums Norrath up. Long may Everquest continue its admirable tradition of tolerance, open-mindedness and complete disregard of logic or sanity. It better still be like this in EQNext, that's all I'm saying.

Events, Dear Boy... : EQ2

When exactly did it start? There must have been a time once, when you could wake up fresh, in that room you favored upstairs along the corridor away from the bar perhaps or maybe out among the pines, rolled in your dew-drenched cloak beside the cooling embers of your campfire, looking forward to a day filled with adventure. Another day of magic and mayhem just waiting to be seized.

It is Soulday, Grayeven 3 of the year 3881 and I have otters to train. It's been a busy week. A busy month. A busy year. Even before the Frostfell Village wardrobe had folded itself through four dimensions and packed itself flat back under the bed, the ever-traveling fair came rolling into Gorowyn, half-elven barkers hanging bunting from any Sarnak that couldn't scuttle away fast enough. They'd barely packed away their tents before full moon signaled a frenzy of mushrooming and root-beer in fairy grottoes across Norrath.
 

A Dungeon? Might be able to fit one in on the 17th

Then there are the Holy Days. The gods made a poor job of being dead, or gone or whatever it is that gods do when they lose patience with being farmed twice a day and five times on Sundays. Errolisi Marr still finds time to sponsor a whole raft of dubious romantic rituals for the day held in her honor. Day? Hah! It lasts two love-sodden weeks by when we're all heartily glad to see the back of her. Don't say anything though because here comes her god-buddy Brell, twenty feet tall with a tankard like a bucket, god of fatty liver disease and drunken one-night stands and another one who thinks there are fourteen nights in a Day.

The hangovers have scarcely had time to fade before Bristlebane arrives and we all know what fun he is. Oh come on. Some people have no sense of humor. At least he can count.

I think it's some Elven thing?

Oh but wait, that's not all. Those are just the events that get on the Calendar. At least that gives them a veneer of internal consistency, unlike meta-events, viz and to wit Everquest's  Anniversary, currently being celebrated in EQ1 by the appearance of loot-laden Fabled versions of everyone from Fippy to Venril Sathir and in EQ2 through the medium of modern dance Chronoportals.

I only pick on Norrath because that's where I spend a lot of my time. I could throw a dart at my monitor and come up with a similar list from any icon on my desktop. (I wouldn't do that. Obviously.) I was barely in Azeroth for three months and I think I saw four major Holidays. Rift is pretty much all either event or holiday, with the current one being a post-modern masterpiece of self-congratulatory backslapping. Someone at Trion has the irony meter turned up to 11, that's for sure.

Excuse me, weren't we at war?

Is it too much? We've done dailies (How we've done dailies...) but dailies at least have the "merit" of always being there. Events bring a pressure if not to complete then at least to take part. They're fun, especially first time through, but they come back year after year and they bloat. All last year's rides return and there are mutterings if anything's missing and if there's nothing new. When does a good thing turn into too much of a good thing?

I'm a big take it or leave it-er. In the words of Richard Hell, I can take it or leave it each time. Even so, I get pulled in. I know people who trudge through each Imaginary Holiday with the grim, set smile of an ex at a wedding. I've even known people stop logging in altogether, overwhelmed, unable to keep up.

I'm not against fun. I used to get as excited as anyone when Santug Klaug popped up in Plane of Knowledge and started yelling or when someone started jabbering hysterically over guild chat about giant skeletons taking over Qeynos Hills. But those were surprises. They were adventures. We didn't know they were coming. Not to put too fine a point on it, we didn't have a Calendar!

When you find yourself wishing it would just be over already, it's not fun any more. I like events but if we could just snap them along a bit? Maybe the "Days" could last for a weekend, not a fortnight? That'd be a start.