Mark's Comments: Think of this as a travelogue
— that's how I like to remember it. That helps to block the
pain a bit.
I took my highest level character, a level 25 halfling
druid, and started to explore the new continent of Velious. And
explore is about all I could do there, because my character is
too low to kill anything, which is 90% of what EverQuest is about.
The only creature I saw that I could successfully attack was a
cute little snow bunny. I was about to grab it and make rabbit
stew, and then I remembered the rabbit in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail, and thought better of it. I'm all out of Holy Hand-Grenades.
To start my misadventures, I began at the new dock
in the Desert of Ro (see the first screenshot above and to the
left). There I met a non-player-character (NPC) gnome named Frankel
the Pirate. I'm not saying he's dishonest, but when he rolled
up his sleeve he had a bunch of fake Rolexes on his arm. After
a bit of "avast ye swabs" talk, he told me to wait at
the end of the dock. NPCs in EverQuest like to belabor the obvious.
<tap tap tap> — That's the sound of my
shoe tapping on the end of the dock. It's a familar sound in Norrath,
where players spend an inordinate amount of time waiting, which
is about as exciting as staring at the clock and waiting for work
to be done or a class to be over. Eventually a raft comes (see
center above). There are no captains of these vessels in EverQuest,
and I'm not sure why. If we get a useless Frankel the Pirate,
why can't we have an equally useless Kirk the Captain to guide
us on our way?
After a short trip we zone into the Iceclad Ocean
and then come to an island (above right). More gnome pirates,
which makes sense according to the Velious backstory, which has
the newly discovered continent opened up tpo travel by the gnome's
icebreaking vessles. So I chat with an NPC pirate who does a bad
imitation of Long John Silver, and he tells me to go to the other
side of the island and...you guessed it, wait. (Con't.)
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Publisher: Sony Online
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Developer: Verant Interactive
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Genre: MMORPG
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Requirements: EverQuest, P-200, 64 megs of ram, 3D card
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December 20, 2000
