The Scars of Velious, part 1 (con't.)

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