EverQuest II: EverQuest II Content Galore!

Since the release of Everquest 2 in November 2004, Sony Online Entertainment has experienced tremendous success and laid claim to its 2nd established MMO. So what is Sony’s secret to success? Let’s take a look at what has been added since release, just a short 6 months ago.

The Bloodlines Chronicles consist of 5 dungeons each with progression in a gothic style complete with new beasts to combat, like the vampires and hellhounds. The Dungeons for the most part are fun; the new breakable walls add even more depth and atmosphere to the zones. If you are a level 40+ player the first 3 or 4 quests that enable further progression may seem a little mundane and easy, but it gets more challenging the deeper you go. Some of the spell effects on the new monsters are very impressive, for example, one particular female vampire, casts spells that summons a swarm of bats around her, again this just adds to the theme of the adventure pack complimenting the overall atmosphere. You have your normal undead mobs, ghosts, skeletons etc, but the mix of new mobs is nicely done. The hellhounds are pretty scary looking!

Some of the boss’s in quests are well thought out and follow storyline and theme very well. For example you have to kill a boss of a dungeon, who is drawing power from an unidentified source; this power must be eliminated before killing the boss. Unaware of this fact, the group I was in spent a good 4 or 5 tries attempting to kill a rather unhappy Vampire, who just kept fully healing at 10% health each time. It wasn’t until we removed his power source; we were able to kill him with little difficulty.

Most of the items in Bloodlines require faction points. Once you finish quests you are awarded faction points, which increase the amount of items you can purchase from the special Bloodlines vendor. If you are an ex-Everquest player, this probably sounds a lot like Lost Dungeons of Norrath, which it sort of is. You do need to complete missions within the Bloodlines storyline to be able to “Unlock” more items, but those items will need to be purchased with cash, not points. Once unlocked, they will remain permanently unlocked. One particular item you can get from the vendor is very shiny silver plate mail armor. Other people can see their own reflections in it!

Players that pre-ordered Bloodlines or were just Sony All Access Subscribers were able to play the first part of the expansion several weeks before its release on March 21st 2005. There was also a competitive aspect to the pack, with 1 artifact item dropping on each server and the prestige of being the first guild to kill the boss of the zone being announced server wide.

The latest Dungeon to be added was return to Nektropos, where players can once again visit Nektropos Castle, one of the most popular and well designed Dungeons in the game. This time, with Lord Everling dead, you can now enter into deeper and more dangerous parts of the castle. This dungeon was also designed for the higher level community and brings some of the best treasure the game has seen to date.

Also added to the game were thousands of new quests, even some more heritage quests, like the Golden Efreeti Boots. When you play Everquest 2, the sheer volume of detailed quests is a testament to the amount of content in the game, it truly is staggering.

Lots of new content for solo and small group players were added after the initial release. A lot balancing and tweaking was done, to make solo players and groups of 2 or 3 players feel more rewarded for the effort that was made.

Sony added several dungeons to help solo players and smaller groups level up. In my opinion these dungeons lacked attention, detail and were just flat out boring. I guess if you had the patience you could grind in them. Overall this feature was lackluster.

One final mention about content was the addition of special “Uncommon” materials which can be harvested like normal materials. These items can be refined by Alchemists and then shaped and molded into items that can either be imbued into armor and weapons to allow power ups such as reactive heals to armor and damage procs to weapons. The other option is to take the refined material and create a new item type, “Hex Dolls”, which can be added to your useable slot and activated to increase such stats as agility or stamina and even add bonus to attack speed.

This new mail system was a great implementation. My guild uses it extensively to send new combat arts, spells etc to each other. Although, I have to admit, the ability to send multiple items would be a very nice upgrade, only being able to send 1 item is very restricting. We can also take donations towards guild housing in the form of mail. Not having to wait for someone you need to trade with to be online is a feature that everybody will use.