Every Picture Tells A Story - If You Know How To Read It

I was going to give posting a miss today, after I spent all morning filling out my stupid performance review form. You'd think I wouldn't need one with my retirement date less than a year away but no...

Anyway, as I was about to log in to EverQuest II I noticed they'd published a readable version of the roadmap on the forums. I'm not going to talk about that, either, or at least not right now, except to say it looks a lot more like a list of things that always happen than things we need to know about.

No, what moved me to come here and post after all was the big Year of Darkpaw picture you see at the top of the page. You can get it in poster form if you want although it's a pretty small poster by the way I reckon these things.

I think it would also be really weird to have hanging on your wall. Take a good look at those characters. Leave aside the peculiarly goofy poses - is that Dark Elf skipping? - and concentrate on the faces. 

I haven't seen it confirmed anywhere in the PR I've read but surely those are all the faces of actual people? Well, okay, not the Froglok, the Sarnak or the Vah Shir (Or is it a Kerran?) I'll give you that, but all the rest. I mean, that gnome is not any kind of gnome I ever saw in game. 

There's supposed to be an Easter Egg hidden in the picture. It can't be that those are all portraits of the devs, can it?

A picture I like a lot more is this splash screen from EverQuest's most recent expansion, Laurion's Song. I'm not saying I'd actually want it on my wall but I'd have it there a lot soooner than the other one.

I hadn't looked at it closely until I was logging in to EQ yesterday, when it was right there in front of me. As I studied it, one thing particularly jumped - that cat, sitting on the barrel.

Now, as I intimated above, I've never been all that clear on the precise, physical differences between Norrath's two, playable feline races, the Vah Shir and the Kerrans, but I can tell you that is neither.

I mean, I wish it was. Just look at it. That's a proper cat, by which I mean a house cat. It doesn't have the extended muzzle of the big cats we're used to seeing, walking on their hind legs, wearing armor and sitting on thrones in the game.

I would love to be able to make a character of whatever sub-species of Kerran or Vah Shir that's supposed to be. I'd buy a Race Pack in the store to get one.

Add that to the Roadmap, Darkpaw!

Buckle Up! (The One And Only Spacey Catgirl)

One of the things that supposedly got me all excited for the launch of EverQuest II's Reign of Shadows expansion late last year was the inclusion of the Vah Shir as a playable race. One of my most-played characters in the original EverQuest was a Vah Shir Beastlord and I have a huge fondness both for the race and the lore surrounding it.

I say "supposedly" because although I was eager enough to fork over the required thousand Daybreak Cash for an extra character slot months ago it turned out I wasn't keen enough to use it until today.

 Partly it's that I've had other things on my mind. First Disco Elysium, then Valheim. Serial game-buying isn't conducive to parallel game-playing, it would appear. Who'd have guessed?

Mostly, though, it was that I couldn't make up my mind what class to choose. I had it narrowed down to either a Magician or one of the Scouts, which wasn't really narrowing it down all that far. There are seven scouts.

As is usual with these dilemmas, really I knew what I wanted. I fancied playing a Mage. So a couple of hours ago I logged in and made a Swashbuckler.

It was a practical decision. I don't have any characters on Skyfire who wear chain armor. I keep getting the stuff and I can't do much with it other than transmute it for mats and I don't need any more mats right now. Selling it for a pittance to NPC vendors annoys me. I might want another cloth class but I need someone who wears chain.

For a given value of "need", that is. There's not much prospect of any new character I make getting played regularly, let alone seriously. I have six max level characters already and only one of them is up to scratch, even by my louche, casual standards.

Race and class decided, next came the rest of the panoply of choices: gender, appearance, alignment, starting city, server. And, of course, name. The tough one.

I looked at the male first. Geez... Remember the EQ Next Kerran? The one everyone hated? Looked a lot better than the male Vah Shir with his head shaped like an anvil - if the anvil was made out of dough. Hard nope.

The female didn't look a lot better until I hit randomize and a perfectly palatable cat-person appeared. She even had cheekbones. I spent a while going through the options. There didn't seem to be nearly as many as some other races get. Only five hairstyles? Six, if you count "Bald". Which I definitely don't. And Vah Shir have to make do with Kerran voices? Shabby.

Doesn't really matter how many or how few the options are, so long as you can get something you're happy with, I guess. I was pleased with my new look. Very different from anything else I play these days. 

Alignment was a given: Vah Shir have to be good. That means starting in one of three places: Qeynos, New Halas or Kelethin. Of the three I only really like Qeynos. Kelethin is just impossible. All those platforms. And elves. New Halas I find bleak and depressing. It makes me feel cold just looking at it. Can't they at least put doors on their shacks?

What I really wanted was a new starting area just for Vah Shir, of course. When I saw in the promotional material for Reign of Shadows that we'd be getting both the city of Shar Vahl and the zone outside it, Shadeweaver's Thicket, I naively imagined Vah Shir player-characters would get to start there, just like they did in EverQuest. 

No such luck. Everything in RoS is determinedly designed for level 120s only. As I discovered later, you even have to be max level to start the Vah Shir racial questline. 

I do get why Daybreak wouldn't want to add yet another starting area, even if they had the resources to develop one. We already have a choice of six and that's not even counting Qeynos and Freeport, which still retain almost all of the original starting content for anyone who knows where to go. Still, it's hard to call yourself a true mooncat if you have to grow up on earth. On Norrath. Oh, you know what I mean... 

Smell that sea air!

 

In the end it was a purely nominal decision. I picked Qeynos but I was only there for a few minutes. Taking Qeynos as your starting option doesn't mean you start in in Qeynos, anyway. Oh, no. That would be far too straightforward.

Logging in for the first time, I found myself once again on the good ship Far Journey. The days when that spurred a fizzling burst of nostalgia are long gone. I've done the trip to the Isles of Refuge to death in recent years. Fortunately, as a member, there's always the option of instant travel. 

Without moving from my spawn-in spot on deck I popped up the map and clicked on Qeynos. See that, Captain Varlos? No one needs you!

I'd already decided I was going to use a level boost. I have a fury in the nineties on Skyfire and a dirge in her twenties on Kaladim, both of whom I'm actively, if sporadically, levelling the old-fashioned way. I don't need to start over again just now. 

The question was, which level boost?

Now I want to go see if the Proving Grounds still exist...

Looking through my banks and /claim, I found half a dozen to choose from: two Level 100 boosts, three 110s and a 120. After the recent discussion on experience vials (two more sold overnight, by the way, but again to the same guy, who put them straight up for sale, so I'm still none the wiser) I thought I'd go for the 100 option and maybe experiment a little.

The boost I picked was one I'd picked up in some Proving Grounds promotion. Remember the Proving Grounds? No, I don't imagine anyone else does, either. Another flower gone to seed.

I applied the boost, dinged 100 and received a care package. I spent a few minutes unpacking it all, getting dressed and sorting out my new set of 24-slot bags. Then I opened my Knowledge Book and spent a lot longer reading every new combat art and slotting them all onto my hot bars (which I'd copied from my Berserker, as I always do, even though it means starting with a lot more slots than I'm going to need right away).

Next I opened the Claim window and claimed one of every "per character" item in there, except for the Veteran packs, half of which I know from experience will end up filling my bags with stuff I won't ever get round to using. 

For some incomprehensible reason the Proving Grounds boost comes with one of the most irritating mounts, a giant wiggly worm that gets in everyones' way at the bank and has an undulating motion that makes me nauseous. And I don't even suffer from motion sickness. Fortunately I have other mounts I can claim so it was off to the imaginary stables for Faerelith, The Obedient One.

Seriously? That's the mount you went with? It couldn't have been a horse?

It was all going nicely. I was about ready to go try out my new skills. And then it occurred to me. I was heading to Plane of Magic, the obvious, indeed possibly the only, choice at 100. And what would be waiting for me at the zone-in?

Tishan's Lockbox, of course. And inside it, a full set of gear and weapons that would make everything I'd just equipped obsolete. 

Fine! I'll just go swap it all out, then. It won't take a minute. So I did that. Only none of the gear comes with adornments. I have bags and bags full of those. I just have to remember who's got them. Or I could make some new ones. It's not like I don't have the mats.

But hang on... I'm going to need the Panda quest adorns, too. Good thing I have instant travel.

It's a big upgrade but the sad thing is
I had a load of even better Level 100 gear in the bank
until I melted it all down for parts.

I won't go on. I'm sure you get the drift. It took me the best part of an hour and a half to get my new Vah Shir Swashbuckler to the point where I felt ready to take her adventuring, by which time lunch was ready, so I had to log out. And then I came here to write this. 

Will I ever get to play her? Yes, I expect so. Eventually. I want to do the Vah Shir racial questline for one thing. Unfortunately, it starts in Shar Vahl and you need to be 120 before Animist Sanura will even speak to you. So I have some work to do.

In a way it makes me wonder how new and returning players manage but then they probably won't have anything like as many confusing, overlapping and conflicting choices as someone like me, who's been playing forever and still has nearly all the freebies ever handed out just sitting around, waiting to be used. If you were a real newbie you'd probably either begin at level one and play properly or you'd buy the latest expansion, use the max-level boost that comes with it and just accept what it gives you.

My way's more fun, though. No, it is. Really. I'm telling you...

Cat Class

EverQuest II has a lot of classes. Twenty-six to be precise. They break down into four archetypes (Fighter, Priest, Mage, Scout) which reflects the early days of the game, when you didn't get to play as your final class choice until level twenty. And there were only fifty levels.

You had to jump a bunch of in-game hurdles, too, before you finally ended up with the character you wanted. It was never a very popular system, although I guarantee you'll still find veterans who claim it was the bixie's kneecaps. There's always someone who'll claim to like anything. Maybe some of them even mean it.

Along with most of the original systems and mechanics, the class system was changed long ago to allow players to begin as they meant to go on. About the only holdover from the archetype system is the allocation of a single, primary statistic from which each draws all their power, something which was only ratified relatively recently. 

It won't surprise anyone to learn that Fighters rely on strength, Priests on wisdom. Mages on Intelligence and Scouts on agility. And all classes draw on stamina for their health pool. For legacy reasons everyone gets everyone else's stats (officially known as Attributes in the game, a term I have never heard anyone use in sixteen years of playing) but only two of the five actually do anything.

When it comes to armor, things loosen up just a little. The cleanest archetypes are Mages, who all wear cloth, and Scouts, who all wear chain. Most fighters wear plate although monks and bruisers wear leather. That used to be tied in with their reliance on agility to avoid getting hit but of course these days they rely on strength so it no longer makes much sense from a lore perspective. 

Priests are a hotch-potch. Some of them wear plate, some leather and some chain. Their heals also don't always stack well with others of the same class or even wearing the same armor (obviously not because of the armor), which is why you regularly hear lfg calls not just for healers but asking for specific classes or armor-types.

When picking a class at character creation there's also alignment and race to consider. For most practical purposes the original Good/Evil split between Freeport and Qeynos doesn't make much impact on gameplay any more. Anyone can group with anyone else and talk and trade with them freely, almost all quests are neutral and so is just about every city introduced since the first expansion. 

Over the years some of the restrictions that once existed have been relaxed. Ratongas, once pure evil, can now be good or neutral and goodies can become cool Inquisitors instead of boring Templars. If you want to be a Shadowknight or a Necromancer, though, you still won't be able to start in Qeynos or
Kelethin.

It's all very complicated and frankly not all that interesting or important - until you come to make a character. Which is why I'm talking about it now. 

The servers are down for the bi-weekly patch so I thought I'd finally get on with making my Vah Shir, the new race added with Reign of Shadows. I'd already bought another character slot to make space so it seemed about time.

Only I ran into the same problem I always run into when making a new character in EQII (and in pretty much any other game for that matter). I know what I like. 

Doesn't sound like much of a problem, does it? Well, it is.

I like pet classes, I like fighters with massive AEs and I like highly mobile, ranged classes. I also like classes that have fast movement speed and ones who can feign death because I like to be able to get free of combat when things aren't going my way. Back when I used to group more, what I really liked best of all was healers, preferably those with direct heals, but there's not much point playing a healer when you solo all the time, especially in a game with healer mercenaries.

On my subbed account I already have at least one of all the classes in EQII that I really like - Berserker, Necromancer, Bruiser, Shadowknight. I also have most of the ones I quite like - Wizard, Inquisitor, Warlock, Fury. I even have some I really don't get on with very well that were added late to the game and which I felt duty-bound to try - Channeler, Beastlord.

Of those that remain, there are a lot of chain-wearing scouts, about whom I know really not very much. And I could use a chain-wearer if only because it would give me something to do with all the chain armor I get from quests and Overseer missions and as drops. I used to stuff it all in the bank but eventually I transmuted most of it because it obviously wasn't going to get used. 

Unfortunately, chain-wearers in EQII don't really suit me very well. There's the Ranger, who you'd think I might enjoy, seeing as how I have no fewer than three Hunters in WoW and three Rangers in Guild Wars 2. Only I played an EQII ranger once and it didn't go at all well. Can't remember why. I just know it didn't.

Anyone who has to position themselves to attack can forget it. I can't be doing with all that fiddliness. That used to rule out all the stealth types, the Troubadors and Brigands and their like. Only I have a vague suspicion that over the years many of the positional restrictions have been watered down or removed altogether. Except, since I always skip anything about classes I don't play when it comes up in patch notes, I can't be sure.

There are several chain healers. I played one, a Defiler, for quite a while. He was my main character for maybe a year or two back in the dawn of time. I enjoyed him a lot in a duo with Mrs Bhagpuss but he was excruciating to solo. I hear that's better now but I'm not willing to take the risk.

I've been thinking about it a fair bit and I still haven't made up my mind. Perhaps the obvious pick would be a Conjuror. It's a powerful pet class and while I have one in the nineties already, he's on a different account and anyway I never really got on with him very well - not as a class but as a character.

For some reason that entirely escapes me I chose to make him a human male with a handlebar mustache, which is not someone I can imagine ever wanting to play now. Then to compound the problem I named him after a writer I like, only to realize too late that I'd remembered his name wrong.

None of that relates to the class, which I seem to recall I enjoyed playing. They do have very ugly pets but that's what petamorph wands are for. (Note to self: remember that post on petamorph wands you keep meaning to write? Well, get on and write it, why don't you?).

The other option is one of those aforementioned scouts. Maybe I should do some research and find out just how they play. I do have a Dirge in her low thirties on Kaladim, the Time Limited Expansion server and she's fun but I'm not sure how that retro-fitted gameplay reflects the way the class plays at the upper levels of the current game.

Last but definitely not least would be another Shadowknight. Again, I have one in the 90s but he's on the wrong server. I really enjoy SK gameplay but it's perhaps too similar to the Berserker, minus those fantastic AEs. Being able to feign is a huge attraction but I fear any plate fighter is going to seem like a younger, weaker sibling compared to my berserker, who is by some margin my best-geared and most fully-upgraded character.

I was hoping putting all this down in white and blue might clarify matters but I can't say it's helped all that much. I do think I should go research the scouts, though. I know Mrs Bhagpuss used to play both a Swashbuckler and a Troubador to great effect. I'd ask her for advice but the game has changed so much in the eight years since she stopped playing I'm not sure her experiences would be all that relevant today.

I could log her account on and play them for myself, though. Now there's an idea...

Dark Side Of The Moon

I was just about to power down the P.C. for the night when I spotted something new on Feedly. It was Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob flagging up something I'd been waiting for, the official announcement of this year's EverQuest II expansion.

The EverQuest xpack, Claws of Veeshan, was announced a couple of weeks ago. I wonder if Darkpaw deliberately stagger the reveals so as to give each game a shot at maximum publicity? I guess that would make sense, although you have to wonder who might be interested other than people already playing, most of whom would presumably like to know the details as soon as possible. Maybe the EQII team is just further behind in the development race.

Anyway, we know now. Or we know about as much as we ever do before the beta begins. Because every expansion from every company has to have a beta these days. The era of exclusive in-house testing is long gone, if it ever existed. In fact, if I think about it, I seem to remember beta-testing the third EQII expansion, Echoes of Faydwer, back in 2006. Maybe expansions always had betas...

The beta for the latest, which we now know will be called Reign of Shadows, will begin sometime after the tenth of November, that being the date pre-orders open. I'll be placing my pre-order at the earliest opportunity, guaranteeing me a spot, which I have absolutely no intention of taking up. 

I don't want to spoil my own fun. I'm expecting to play the heck out of Reign of Shadows when it arrives. I've gotten good mileage out of every EQII expansion to date but last year's, Blood of Luclin, I found particularly enjoyable. I took one character all the way through the adventure signature questline, two to the end of the tradeskill questline and four more to somewhere around the mid-point of one, the other or both, by which time they'd reached the new level cap of one hundred and twenty.

After that I played through a good deal of the repeatable content well into the summer before I finally drifted away to other games. Even now I'm logging in every day to do something or other on the moon. 

It helped that I have a strong fund of nostalgia for Luclin, nostalgia which I'd never had a chance to indulge until now. More importantly, despite the expansion clearly feeling somewhat rushed and rough around the edges, I found the gameplay to be some of the most enjoyable for years.

My first and oldest Kerran. Born Dec 5th 2004. Original guild leader. Last seen in action 2005.

 

Nostalgia might be in short supply this time around. The sequel takes place on Luclin's dark side, a setting I've always had reservations about. Most of the original zones are dark, claustrophobic and visually unappealing. Also very dangerous. I remember travel being fraught with problems, not least because I could scarcely ever see where I was going. 

EverQuest II, I'm very pleased to say, doesn't really do dark, dingy, hard-to-see-your-axe-in-front-of-your-face zones. I'm very curious to see what the art team make of the five we know we're going to be getting, Echo Caverns, Shadeweaver's Thicket, Grimling Forest, Shar Vhal, and Vex Thal.

Echo Caverns I remember as being a fairly small cave with some trilobite-like creatures and a bunch of outlaws. Shadeweaver's Thicket was the Vah Shir (of whom more later) starting zone. I spent a  lot of time there but I can't remember it being much more than some crepuscular scrubland. I think it was too dark to see much in the way of detail.

Grimling Forest I remember all too clearly as a dark, confusing, deadly place filled with repulsive hyper-agressive, gibbering grimlings. I never had much fun there and even if I had been having any I wouldn't have been able to see what it was. 

Vex Thal was a raid zone. I honestly can't remember for sure if I've ever been there. As my characters in EverQuest have become godlike in comparison to old raid bosses (even the actual gods) I've visited most of the old raid zones just to explore but Vex Thal brings nothing to mind at all. Maybe I'll take my magician over to have a look sometime before RoS arrives, to see if I can refresh my memory.

Shar Vhal is the home city of the aforementioned Vah Shir. I'd like to say I know it well. I've certainly spent many hours there. Most of them I spent hopelessly lost. It's one of the most confusing fictional cities I've ever attempted to navigate. I sincerely hope the new version has fewer ramps and stairs and maybe about a tenth as many rooms.

The reason I spent so much time there is that for several years the character I played most often in EQ was a Vah Shir beastlord. Prior to the invention of the Heroic Character (aka boost to 85) she was my highest level, eventually making eighty-four the hard way.

My highest-level Kerran (at 36). Spent the last eight years posing as a ratonga at the New Halas bank.

The Vah Shir are one of two related races of cat people in the Everquest mythos, the other being the Kerrans. To cut a very long story short, the Vah Shir are Kerrans who got blown off-planet by the Erudites and crash-landed on the moon. 

Kerrans were in the original game from launch in 1999 in the form of an NPC race but when the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, appeared less than three years later it brought with it the Vah Shir as a playable race. That choice then got flipped on its head with EQII in 2004, when Kerrans got the nod as the sequel's playable catfolk. 

It's hard to imagine anyone much cares by now (although I'm willing to bet someone does and they're going to let us all know how much on the forums) but at the time which cats were going to make it to the new game was quite a hot topic. A lot of people were emotionally invested in their Vah Shir characters so hearing the entire race had been wiped out in the destruction of Luclin didn't go down all that well. 

I recall many impassioned arguments being made along the lines of there having to have been at least some Vah Shir caught out on Norrath when the moon blew up but no, apparently they'd all gone home for the holidays or something. I don't believe any lore explanation for their complete disappearance was ever forthcoming.

Whatever, they're back now, or they will be when the expansion arrives. (No firm date for that yet, but there never is at this stage). Vah Shir become the twenty-second playable race and the first new addition to the roster for five years. In fact, I believe they're the first new race to become automatically available simply by owning the latest expansion since the Sarnak in 2007's Rise of Kunark. The Aerykin, who appared at the same time as 2014's Altar of Malice, had to be purchased separately in the cash shop. At least, that's how I remember it. Information available after the fact is conflicted.

As well as the new zones and a new race there's all the usual, expected stuff. What you'd call the content, I guess, including the adventure and tradeskill signature questlines and a bunch of solo, heroic and raid instances.

My third Kerran. Awake for a grand total of fifteen hours in fifteen years.

 

That would be plenty but rolled in with the expansion comes a major revamp of the Alternative Advancement (aka AA) system. Like World of Warcraft's recent level squish and associated levelling changes, the AA revamp is something all EQII players are going to get regardless of whether they buy the expansion or indeed subscribe. In that sense I wouldn't necessarily call it an expansion feature but that's splitting hair-balls.

AAs have lain fallow (some might say moribund) for a few years now, something about which there have been growing rumbles of discontent, since it was always a popular mechanic. When it was revealed, allegedly unitentionally, in one of this summer's Kander's Candor podcasts, the idea of a revamp was cautiously welcomed. I'd say most players would like one but everyone's anxious about how it might go.

Finally, slipping by almost unnoticed, there'a another revamp of sorts, this time to the guild structure, which now goes to 350 and receives an "all new content-driven guild leveling mechanism". I couldn't actually tell you what the current cap is. My guild is in the eighties somewhere. 

Since the beginning of the game guilds have levelled by means of Status, which has become a major currency over time. The proposed change to "content-driven" levelling reminds me very uncomfortably of the changes ArenaNet made to Guild Wars 2 guild progression, changes which comprehensively destroyed almost all the small guilds in the game.

I can easily imagine the guild changes turning out to be the PR disaster of this expansion. Let's hope they've thought it through. Fortunately I barely use any guild facilities or services these days so I should be safe to sit on the sidelines munching popcorn.

Other than that it all looks pretty good to me. I'm very much looking forward to visiting the dark side. And I'll definitely be making a Vah Shir. The only question being, which class?

Off To The Races

When I checked my Feedly this morning the first thing I saw was this question from Keen:


What’s Your Favorite MMORPG Race and Why?


I immediately thought of the Lunar New Year's race through Divinity's Reach in GW2. I did that over and over and really enjoyed it. Did I enjoy it more than the aerial races organized by EQ2's gnomes for every City Festival, though? Or the many races around Metropolis and Gotham in DCUO? And what about that all-time classic, EverQuest's Naked Gnome Race from Ak'Anon to Freeport?

Then I read Keen's post and realized he didn't mean that kind of race at all. He meant the kind of race you choose at Character Creation. The one that decides whether you're short or tall, hated or admired, a genius or a dimwit. Whether you're covered in fur or scales, have a tail or wings. All that good stuff.

The term "Race", of course, is a bit of a misnomer as it's generally applied in MMORPGs. Sometimes it can be an accurate description, as in Vanguard, which has four "races" with the subtitle "Human", but usually it means Species. Then again, the species boundary gets very blurry in fantasy.

We tend to think of Humans, Elves and Orcs as genuinely disparate, separate species but that can hardly be the case when they can interbreed to give us Half-Orcs and Half Elves. Not to mention Half-Giants. The line fades to the point of invisibility when magic comes into the picture with races like EverQuest's Drakkin, "a human race" with "a touch of dragon blood...scaly skin, marking, hair and sometimes horns that mirror the dragon that gifted them their heritage".

Exactly how a dragon  "gifts" such a heritage is - probably wisely - left to the imagination. The more you ponder on all this, the less sense it seems to make. Why are there so many half elves but no "half-humans"? Is that just a naming convention or are the Elven parent's genes always dominant? If Elves and Humans can interbreed successfully, why not Gnomes and Dwarves? Or can they, but they just don't, for cultural reasons?

At first blush MMORPGs - particularly those with a fantasy setting - appear to offer a multiplicity of racial options but they tend to narrow down to a handful once you look at them closely. For a start, almost every Player Race in every MMO is bipedal. Istaria famously lets you play as a (four-legged) dragon, which was the game's primary USP back when it launched as Horizons. Project: Gorgon's Cows are another notable exception, although even there you can't actually roll a cow (!) at character creation. You have to become one by magic in game.

GW2's Charr are highly unusual in that, while bipedal in combat, they drop to all fours when running. It's one of the features that make them so appealing as a racial choice for me even though they are definitely on the larger end of the scale. I do cleave to the smaller races as a rule.

Many Western MMOs have a handful of options that at least attempt to add some variation to the "Short human", "tall human", "human with horns", "human with tail", "human with wings" palette seen in so many imports from the East. WoW has Bulls, Wolves, Goats, Pandas and Undead, all of which walk upright on two legs and look like humans dressed up for Mardi Gras.  

Allods, which modelled a deal of its visual appearance on WoW, took things a stage further with Gibberlings, who come in packs of three and are a lot closer to "animals dressed up as humans" than the other way round. Indeed, Gibberlings probably rest at the cusp of Fantasy and Anime, or Fantasy and Cartoon if you want to be Western about it, which is where the real non-human races come into their own.

There was that one MMO where I played as a rabbit. What was that one called? Eden Eternal, that's it! It's still running, too. There was also the similarly-named and much-missed Earth Eternal, an all-animal MMO I played in beta with some degree of enjoyment. Those animals still stood upright, though, unlike the deer in Endless Forest, a bizarre affair which has, astonishingly, spawned some kind of sub-genre that incudes Meadow and Wolfquest.

Plenty of choice if you cast your MMO net far enough. Closer to home, in the handful of MMOs we all talk about as though they represented the genre, not so much. Which brings me back to Keen's original question. So, what is my favorite MORPG race?

Just for once I can answer that question! In fact, I can list my top ten in order without having to think too hard about it.

1. Raki - Vanguard - Stocky foxes with a great backstory, characterful animations and the happiest faces.

2. Ratonga - EQ2 - Cute rats with another excellent backstory and the most endearing verbal tic in gaming.

3. Gnome - EverQuest - Short, smart, every one kinda likes them and they have the tickingest city in Norrath.

4. Charr - GW2 - Big cats that don't do the "catgirl/catman" thing, run on all fours and have the city Ak'Anon would be if it was a military-industrial complex.

5. Asura - GW2 - They're rats but they won't admit it. Why do you think they're so obsessed with the Skritt (who would totally be on this list if you could play them). Best animations and great voicework, too.

6. Gibberlings - Allods - Three demented gerbils for the price of one. What's not to love?

7. Vah'Shir - EverQuest - Another non-cute cat race. I never really took to the EQ2 version but I played a Vah'Shir Beastlord in EQ for many years and the combination of a tiger-person with a tiger pet is hard to top.

8. Goblin - Warhammer Online - Cowardly, obsequious, disgusting and only they can be the second-best class in any MMO, the Squig-Herder.

9. Dwarf - EverQuest - Just a classic. So solid, so reliable, so predictably gruff. Everything you want a dwarf to be and everything you don't.

 10. Riven - City of Steam - The race I wish I'd played more before the game closed down. Cool, stylish, mysterious, the Riven could have been so much more if only City of Steam had followed its original plan.

Well, that's the top ten today. Ask me tomorrow and it may have changed. Raki is always going to be number one, though. In my heart, anyway.

Never Coming Back: Beastlords in EQ2

I know the Very Thing to go here. And no, they're never coming back.

According to Smokejumper's somewhat garbled interview, helpfully summarized by Feldon at EQ2Wire, both the expansion that brings back Beastlords and the Game Update that ruins revamps Freeport will go to closed Beta (from Friends and Family Beta presumably) on Tuesday November 8th. I'm as excited about one as I'm nervous about the other.

I have an affinity for pet classes that long pre-dates MMOs. The first time I ran into the idea was back in the very early '80s in a tabletop RPG called Dragonquest, a quirky ruleset that offered an unusual choice of career paths. I didn't much fancy Military Scientist, Astrologer or Courtesan but I liked the sound of Beast Master. It reminded me of Daniel P Mannix with attitude (if Mannix didn't already have more than enough attitude to be going on with).

Oh sorry! Was he yours?

I loved the catching and taming part but almost immediately I ran into a fundamental design flaw. Should have spotted it earlier, really, given that it was quite literally part of the Beast Master's job description: "A Beast Master will, in almost all cases, become very fond of animals". All too true as I found out when I was repeatedly required to bury the dead after ordering my furry friends to fight monsters much bigger and tougher than they were.


Several dead pets into our group's campaign it became apparent that a Beast Master who was a) rapidly running out of beasts that took months to train and b) increasingly reluctant to allow any of the few he had left to take any risks whatsoever in case "something bad" happened to them, was going to be of limited use outside of a petting zoo. I re-rolled as something less emo and that was about the last I thought of pet classes until I stepped into Norrath some fifteen years later.

We don't do "cute"

For a good while "pet class" in Everquest meant someone who raised the dead or animated rocks. This had two big advantages over the Beast Master, namely that skeletons and earth elementals cannot strictly be called "cuddly" and that if they "die" you just raise or animate a new one. Nothing to bury, nothing to mourn.


Shamans did have a pet that looked like a wolf, but it turned out to be a spirit. It looked cuddly but your hand would just go right through. You couldn't rest a pint on his back like I used to do with the landlord's labrador in a pub where I used to drink. We were close, but we weren't quite there. We'd dealt with the downside but something was still missing. Then came the beastlord.

I arrived late on Luclin, Norrath's doomed moon. We were off playing something else at the time, Dark Age of Camelot probably, so I missed the birth of the Beastlord. When we returned, though, I made a Vah Shir Beastlord immediately. A tiger-girl with a tiger pet? Come on!

I took to the class right away. It had all the things I'd always wanted in a pet class: a really powerful pet that would fight beside me, not a weak creature I'd need to protect nor a living wall I'd hide behind. My warder and I stood hip to shoulder as we fought, falling back or surging forward to support and sustain each other as Shissars hissed or Akhevans made that weird chittering noise they make before they fell to our claws.

What have I told you about claws in town?

My beastlord ended up being the Everquest character I played most over the years. She's my highest level still, beached at 84th. I could understand, though, why Beastlords were lost when Luclin exploded. In many ways they were too powerful, too versatile. Just too damn good. Once you've played a beastlord it's hard to settle for less. The balancing issues that beastlords brought had ripped through Everquest for years and since EQ2 seemed to have "avoiding anything that gave us trouble in EQ1" as its core design brief it must have been an opportunity too tempting to resist. Although Blizzard seemed willing to take the risk when they added the Hunter class to WoW. Wonder how that worked out for them...

For many years Beastlord became the class that dare not say its name. They all died on Luclin. Every last one. They're never coming back. Except they are. Next Tuesday in beta and, with luck and a following wind, by the end of the month for the rest of us. There'll probably be five thousand new beastlords in Freeport on the first day and I'll be one of them. And I'll be keeping a diary.