The expansion for EverQuest is likely to be sold as a complete package, which includes the original EverQuest, in order to draw in new customers. Existing customers will be able to order the expansion direct from Sony/Verant/989.

This editorial talks about what that new player is likely to see and do, and will talk about a few pitfalls that will cause difficulty, and maybe a lack of enjoyment.

First the good.

The player that opens up the game in March 2000 (aimed release date as far as I know and is the one year anniversary of EverQuest) will get to play one of the most addictive games out there right now. The game will also have a large number of websites and guides devoted to it. Thus the new player will not have to struggle through the mire of the unknown.

Now not all people will consider this good. Fair enough. However the player that wants to wade through the mire will be able to. They don't have to find spoilers on the internet and they don't have to ask for spoilers from players within the game either.

They will also have far fewer bugs and problems to deal with. This is debatable, but they will also be playing with a more balanced set of classes than the early adopters of EverQuest.

They will most certainly have that feeling of awe as you first approach Kelethin, Kaladim or as you first enter Neriak. They will also see the tapering spires of wizard teleports for the first time and will cross the wood link bridge to the Eastern Plains of Karana. They will get lost in Highpass Hold and they will marvel at the scale of EverQuest.

They will also die, which is to be expected in this game, and die horribly, which is not necessarily to be expected.

That is the bad. Verant, in their attempts to fine tune the game for the mid to high level players, have made the game far harder for the new players. Travel has always been hard thanks to the mobs that frequent the Karanas (the griffon family), Highpass Hold (the Orcs and the Gnolls). However now that Paw is to be upgraded to a mid to high level dungeon, it's very likely that there will be a few higher level gnolls wandering around the Southern Karanas. There's also Kithicor Forest and it is cursed.

No one is safe in Kithicor. Invisibility vs. Undead gives you a greater chance of survival, as does Spirit of the Wolf, however should an enraged dread wolf catch your scent, you are, very likely, dead.

However, there are three routes between Qeynos and Freeport aren't there?

Route one (and the most commonly known route):

North Qeynos - Qeynos Hills - West Karana - North Karana - East Karana - Highpass Hold - Kithicor Forest - West Commonlands - East Commonlands - West Freeport

Route two :

North Qeynos - Qeynos Hills - West Karana - North Karana - East Karana - Gorge of King Xorbb - Runnyeye Citadel - Misty Thicket - Rivervale - Kithicor Forest - West Commonlands - East Commonlands - West Freeport

Route three :

North Qeynos - Qeynos Hills - West Karana - North Karana - South Karana - Lake Rathetear - Rathe Mountains - Feerott - Innothule Swamp - South Ro - Oasis of Marr - North Ro - East Freeport

Routes one and two contain Kithicor Forest and it is very likely that you will die if you stick to the path. Whether it is daytime or nighttime, the path will very often get you killed. As I said earlier, should you see an enraged dread wolf, you are very likely dead.

Route three contains Lake Rathetear and the entrance from South Karana into the Lake takes you through a pack of gnolls. There are some level 18 gnolls here and they will attack on sight. Come night, this little area is populated with undead including level 20+ drybone skeletons and exhumed gnolls. Drybone skeletons cast spells and are dangerous adversaries.

Route two takes you through some predominantly good areas. Evil races will find it hard to go through Misty Thicket and Rivervale. The deputies are numerous.

Route three takes you through some predominantly evil areas. Feerott and Innothule are hunting grounds for Ogres and Trolls. Bouncer Hurd will turn you into paste if you are a low level traveller.

Contrary to common sense, the undead (and the particularly nasty wolves) in Kithicor do not 32K themselves (for those that do not know, when a mob has a forced despawn it slashes itself for 32000 hit points, similar to a pet that is faced with an invisible master).

Travel should be hard seeing as you are crossing a continent. Travel solo should be quite dangerous. Travel in a group should be relatively safe (assuming it isn't a group of level ones) with some element of danger. At no point in a computer game should travel be another term for suicide. For a new player who would (as you would expect) take the path through unknown zones to be penalised for doing this (as in the Kithicor case) is not acceptable and, quite frankly, does not make for a rewarding experience. Someone who has finally reached Freeport from Qeynos (okay lets be realistic here, someone who has finally reached the West Commons zone border from the Highpass Hold zone border in Kithicor) is not going to feel elated, they are going to be cursing and spitting at Verant for making Kithicor such a hellhole. How can they call EverQuest a game of exploration and have this insane difficulty placed on travel?

Even my level 20 warrior groans when he know he will have to cross Antonica and my first thought is to find a wizard or a druid friend that can teleport me. You have to have a network of friends to be able to have this solution.

The new player to EverQuest will also hear legends about the Plane of Fear, the Plane of Hate and possibly the Plane of Sky (which from all intents and purposes is a wasted zone - home to the GMs and Guides. This is a chance for Verant to create a Plane that is quest driven, and a change from the norm of planes). They will also hear of Lord Nagafen, Dracoliche and the elegant Lady Vox. There may be even bigger, and badder, dragons on Kunark (which seems to be the case from the rumours heard about the new continent). However that player will have next to no chance of ever reaching those places or besting a dragon. Why? Well, it seems that Verant have consciously decided to cater to the high level populace over the low to mid level populace. You can argue that the people who started in March 1999 are now higher level and are running out of places to go to due to a lack of proper high level play testing by Verant. While that is true, there is also the problem of a never ending journey to a goal.

What I am talking about is that Verant are continually bumping up the higher level mobs to keep them to the standard of the high level players (of the higher level guilds, to be honest) and disregarding the rest of the playing population. Dragons have been made far more powerful than they were when Fires of Heaven bested their first dragon. The Planes have been made far harder than they were when they were first taken over. The gods have been made harder.

Now, all mobs should not be simple and easy to beat. A god is a god and should be able to kill a player just by looking at him. Likewise with a dragon to a lesser extent. What should not happen is what is happening with the dragons now.

In order for Fires of Heaven, a high level Veeshan guild by the way, (who I believe bested the first dragon) to have beaten a dragon, they had a period where they tried different methods, failed, collected their bodies and tried again.

That is no longer possible.

Should you wish to take down your first dragon, you must group with people who have done it before, you must play your role in the hunt to perfection, and you must not make mistakes. If you die, prepare for a lengthy and perilous and level losing experience getting your corpse back. Dragons can now see invisible (not so much a problem), their minions can now summon you before them (this is a problem), they are much more resistant to magic and much stronger than they used to be.

In short, dragons are now tailored to the dragon slayers and not the people who want to be dragon slayers.

Expect, when the expansion comes out, the dragons to be boosted in strength. It may not be a visible boost (ie /con reflected change) but may end up so that the dragons undercon badly. The end result will still be the same: the dragons will be extremely hard for those that have not done it before. This is bad news for the new servers that recently popped up, and will pop up as time goes on.

The Planes are hard, and will get harder. Verant does this to cater to the guilds that routinely hold a Plane. However, when a new server attempts it, they will most likely fail miserably (unless they have already attempted it on a different server, or have been forewarned and carried out research - which does not make sense from a role-playing perspective).

With Verant's new GM policies, in that they will not help with corpse recovery from dangerous places such as dragon lairs and the Planes, it is looking like, official or no, they have a mandate of "player character death is good, more money for us!" This probably isn't a fair assumption, but with all the changes that have been made, many of them undocumented in the patch messages (which in turn result in a player character death due to something being changed), this is the one of two conclusions we can draw. The other, that Verant is inept, is not an acceptable conclusion. Now I'm not going to taint all GMs with the same brush. I have personally been helped by GMs who did not have to help me and I will always be grateful for those people. They have commonsense, which is the best compliment you can pay a GM.

Fair enough, Verant is in this business to make money as well as provide a game that they have put their hearts into. This is clear and is the only way a company will succeed in this industry, but it is foolish to increase revenue by making the players frustrated. Once in a blue moon camps are not a good thing, in fact they are a very bad thing. So what if every level 50 character gets a fishbone earring because Hadden spawns once every 3 game hours. So what if Dvinn drops his dagger every time he spawns. That brings back the fun element that is missing for many people and causing them to quit. It would also remove the immense frustration someone feels after waiting for a named mob for 10+ hours only to have a higher level player enter the zone minutes before it spawns and proceed to take it. Having a GM tell the player off does not compensate for 10+ wasted hours.

Now after complaining (pretty much) for 3 pages, it would not be right for me to leave it without proposing a solution to the problems. Sure, there may be various reasons why the solution is not feasible but I have to try.

Problem one: travel from Qeynos to Freeport.

Have all the Kithicor night spawn 32K themselves come 9AM and stop spawning at 6AM. This will give the people who are hunting the stragglers time to finish off the fight. One relatively safe route out of three will be an acceptable solution.

Problem two: continual goal creep.

This is a much harder problem to solve. Dragons must not be soloable by a player character that has reached the maximum expansion level. The Planes must not be takeable by a tiny group. However, having a zone that is buggy and results in corpse retrieval exercises that are doomed to failure due to ridiculous aggro ranges is not acceptable. Fix the bugs in the Planes, fix the pathing of mobs. Do not make the player pay for poor pathing algorithms by allowing mobs to summon players before them. This is cheating and would get a player banned.

Problem three: quest frustration.

This is another easy solution. Make things pop more often. The "faulty" Meldrath spawn was how all the quest spawns should be. Quick, consistent popping. The Wiltin spawn in Ocean of Tears is how it should not be. This is one of the most frustrating quests there is (in that the arrows are fairly good fun to get and then the quiver is frustrating as anything) and it simply doesn't have to be. The cleric armour quests are most certainly not how the quests should be. Sitting around, waiting for an object to appear on the ground and then race to be the first to click on it is an exercise in tedium.

The main feature of EverQuest has always been the social side, and this will still be there (more so in fact) if there was no constant infighting over every single spawn. Sure, have a few quests be extremely hard if you must, but the quest armour and minor to midrange camps should be accessible to all, including the player that can only play for 1 to 2 hours a night. No rent items in a quest that lasts hours on end is also a big way to frustrate the casual player.

That's my three step plan for making Norrath just as fun for the new players in March, 2000 as it was for the players in March, 1999. If you want to give the level 45+ players a challenge, create new mobs, don't take the lazy option and bump up the existing mobs. Don't push away the fact that the Planes (and Mistmoore, Unrest etc) are bugged zoned by stating that "Zone suchandsuch is dangerous. Approach at your own risk". In other words, the mobs in the bugged zone exploit the bugs to get at the players. That is the equivalent of a player exploiting the bugs in the sand giant's pathing to dispatch it with ease. The player would get banned in this case. Why not fix the zone and make everyone happy?

Happy. That's the keyword for this editorial.

Make the players happy, Verant. There are a lot of happy players, but there could be a lot more. There is nothing better than EverQuest out there right now, but that does not mean that EverQuest is as good as it can be. There are problems.

Well, I welcome all responses, be they flames or no, and will answer them, either directly or via a forum of some sort. This is my opinion and as such, I am entitled to it.

Jon Ballinger ,
Turelius Deisuare, Warrior, Bristlebane.