Mark's Comments, con't.: More foot-tapping
as I wait. Finally, the icebreaker ship comes (see above to the
left). The voyage to Velious takes a few minutes, but we don't
have to zone at least. Hopping off the ship I meet more gnome
pirates — there's an army of these guys! The two in the center
screenshot above probably have a quest you can perform. When I
chatted them up one kept sneezing and saying he needed the bottle
of ale that the other lost or drank or injected — I can't
remember exactly. I've never been big on the quests in EverQuest
because the reward's often too chintzy or they're just too complicated
to perform.
Now I'm ready to see the bright lights of Velious!
Everything's "red" to me. Red in this case means that
I get feedback from the game telling me that my chances of killing
a creature are slim and none, and slim caught the boat back to
Ro an hour ago. If you've never played EverQuest, you can click
on a creature and then type "c", which means that you
are "considering" it. The game sends a color-coded message
back. Green text means you can easily kill the creature but will
likely get no experience points for the kill. Red rhymes with
dead which is what you'll be if you try to attack a red creature
by yourself. There are also shades of color inbetween these extremes
that rate your chances.
With everything red to me, I'm essentially reduced
to being a sightseer in Velious. If you go up the ranks honestly,
getting to level 25 is not trivial. You will spend weeks if not
months to get that far, so my being a weak girly man in Velious
irritates me. I wish there was something I could fight besides
a little bunny rabbit that would probably rip my throat out. It's
really a weakness of the Velious expansion that it only is aimed
at level 30+ players. The box is a bit cagey about that too. Nowhere
does it explicitly warn a potential buyer that the new lands are
essentially unplayable if you don't have a high level character.
It mumbles something about dozens of level 35+ quests, but that's
it. Sony should have made that more explicit.
At least as a druid I have a couple of nifty spells
that will aid me in my sightseeing: Spirit of Wolf and Camouflage.
Spirit of Wolf, or SOW as it's commonly called, lets me run faster
than just about anything. It's great for timid little halflings
like me. Camouflage makes me invisible. Also great.
So I'm off to explore. I go to the end of the dock
and hang a louie and hug the shore as I run. Just around a hill
or two I find more pirates (see the screenshot above to the right).
They're apparently as abundant as cockroaches in Velious. I did
like the skull on their little igloo though. (Con't.)
December 20, 2000
