Revisting EQ2

I decided to take advantage of the Living Legends campaign for players (both full subscriptions and trial accounts) who had been members but left EQ2. It turns out I had completely uninstalled the game so I needed to reinstall from my disks. Once that was taken care of, I signed in and got all the updates I had been missing (it took roughly two hours).

I have since been playing around with my different characters. Per Van Hemlock's post, I promptly logged on to my Gnome Necromancer and proceeded to fly around in the new clockwork illusion form. Gotta love it! And a neat feature is that, when sitting, the little propeller stops spinning and you actually deploy landing gear. Too much fun. After zipping around on my Gnome for a bit, I went back to character creation and found I could roll a Fae. The Fae starting zone was a new one to me, so I got a Fae swashbuckler set up. After running around on him for a bit, I noticed that the Fae zone felt a lot less boxed in than the starting zones for my Gnome or other "good" races. They expanded the map area a bit more and successfully concealed some of its edges with terrain features. Rather than questing in a tunnel, I felt more like I was free to roam a bit more.

Another thing about the Fae is their free-fall ability. Falling safely from any height combined with my swashbuckler stealth had me leaping from every tree fort and outpost I could climb into without caring a whole lot about the level of the mobs below me. As long as I didn't land directly on anything that could kill me, I'd be safe.

Note to developers: Anytime you can put in an ability to cater to the easily-amused crowd (turning into a clock-work helicopter, enabling characters to leap from heights without damage, etc.) you should do so. The abilities add almost nothing to the character or the game but provide countless hours of play as we, the easily amused, activate those abilities to the fullest extend of silliness possible.

One of my gripes the first go-around with EQ2 is that I couldn't sample the housing areas with a trial account. Well, they modified that a bit and as a returning player, I can now get a cheap house. I got all set up with a one-room apartment on a couple of my alts and got the housing quest items (a chandelier, a table and a mirror) along with some other housing-related goodies (a couple of books and a /claim item of a bonsai tree). Compared to LotRO's housing system of furniture placement hooks, I like EQ2's system of furniture placement a lot better. I could place items anywhere they would reasonably go. I couldn't stick my chandelier on a wall or the floor, but it would go anywhere I wanted it on the ceiling. Another neat feature is the ability to put items on other items. My halfling wizard has a little apartment and I put my table in a corner and put two books and a little vase on top of it.

I would love to see LotRO adopt such a system. I'd like to be able to put chairs next to my tables and actually place items on top of them (plates, mugs, etc.). I would also like to see books in the game. It would be awesome to have, say, a readable in-game book of all the riddles from the Hobbit or books of elvish lore to keep in my smial. Oblivion also had books you could pick up, read and keep in your residence. In Oblivion you could steal books too ... not that I would ever do such a thing. *shifty eyes*

Anyway, that's what's going on in my Everquest two adventures thus far.