Back to School!

by: Kiara

Spending my vacation in the summer sun... Oops! Didn't realize you were
there... No, I wasn't singing a song from Grease 2. * shifty * Cause that would
make me really totally beyond acceptably geeky.

* embarassed silence *

Anyway!! It's about that time of year when the kids go back to school. Yay,
for more grown up time. Boo, for more traffic in the morning. School buses are
slow! But, as we all know, school is a very necessary thing. Learning is
important and something we do through our whole lives.

Especially in MMOs. Most games nowadays have quite a little learning curve
when you first start playing. Some take care of this with tutorials, either on
or offline. Everquest 2 is such a game. The help is much appreciated, I assure
you.

The tutorial used to be separate and had you on the boat. You'd complete a
few quests that gave you an idea of how the game worked and what to do. It also
gave you a little money to start with and life was good. They also fixed it so
that you could skip the tutorial if you made another character, because by then,
of course, you'd already know how to play. Well, in most cases. I hope...

With the changes and additions to the high end game, SOE decided to do a
major overhaul and revamp of the pre-20 game as well. A lot of the cumbersome,
tedious quests were removed, and new quests put in their places. Additionally, a
more cohesive story line and some fun lore were also added.

Instead of just randomly running about your starting city picking up quests,
there are now racial mentors in each of the starting villages. There is a line
of racial specific quests which take the place of the previous citizenship
quests. And good riddance. Those were just severely unfun. This new line, geared
just for your race, is a lot more fun. You get some nice lore about your chosen
race, some money, and some nice little items. You also get a feel for your
starting village.

If you went through and did all the quests from the Island of Refuge, which I
highly recommend, you should have a nice suit of armour. It won't have every one
of your equipment slots filled, but darn near. Incidently, the Isle itself is
now the tutorial (broken up by href="http://eq2.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=761">Qeynos
or href="http://eq2.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=775">Freeport
alignment) and much more organic in feel than the original boat ride.

There are still a lot of great quests to be had by running around the
starting zones and simply picking up quests. And this is still a strongly
advised course of action. I suggest making sure that you run through and do the
racial quests first, though.

For example, the href="http://eq2.tentonhammer.com/index.php?module=ContentExpress&func=display&ceid=853">Dark
Elf racial quest takes you on a tour of Longshadow Alley, showing you where
all the exits are, as well as having you learn how to interact with your
enviornment. All the beginning quests give this nifty little run through. It
isn't always about fighting either. Which is a BIG step up and a lot more fun
than simply go forth and kill X amount of Y mobs. There's more flow and
continuity, which I think gives a much better feel for the game.

There are, of course, some things you can only learn through experience and
from talking to other players or even from searching on the web. After all, it's
hard to have a quest to teach you how to make a macro and have it fit in. But in
the end, EverQuest 2 seems to have found a way to give you the most help getting
a feel for the game in the least immersion breaking way that I've yet
experienced in a MMO. It isn't perfect, of course, but it goes a long way from
the days of EverQuest 1 and just dumping you in the middle of SureFall Glade and
letting you drown. Or get eaten by a bear. Or go to talk to an NPC and
accidently attack it... You get the idea.

Right now, we're currently working on getting guides and walkthroughs all
pretty and operational for use. There are several guides for the racial quests
up and running. When you get big and strong and are ready for even more fun and
games, you can venture out of your starting city and out into the big bad worlds
of Antonica and the Commonlands. By this time, you will be very familiar with
how the game works, and if you aren't yet... Well, you'll be dying a lot. In all
seriousness (yes, I know it's rare) the SOE team has done a great job of
integrating a learning mechanism into the game that you can still do even after
two years and then some of playing. I've done most of the lower level quests and
am still not bored when I go through to do them again. They are well worth the
time to do, whether you're just starting out or starting out for the tenth or so
time. Not that I'm an altaholic or anything... I can stop anyti... OH SHINIE!!!