The Scars of Velious, part 1

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.)

 

Publisher: Sony Online

Developer: Verant Interactive

Genre: MMORPG

Requirements: EverQuest, P-200, 64 megs of ram, 3D card

December 20, 2000