Velious, frozen waste. A new land, new monsters, new loot... or is it?Velious, frozen waste. A new land, new monsters, new loot... or is it?
I have now spent about 30 hours exploring the outer zones of Velious.
Velious is different in that you need to find 'keys' to each teleport point in order to port there (these are simply on the ground at the site of the teleport). These will bounce back onto your body if you die, so no worries there, but you will probably need another bag just to carry all these keys in. So far I have only found 2, I think there are a total of a half dozen ports. This is interesting in that you can't 'short cut' somewhere instantly, you actually have to travel there first by foot before you can port there.
The zones themselves are for the most part snow covered wastes, or carved ice caverns, huge in size, easily as big as at least 1 or 2 of the karanas put together. I think the theory went; if they spread things out more, players would run into other players less often, thereby reducing player generated lag. The polygon count seems for the most part about the same as Kunark in buildings and scenery, with the monsters having slightly higher, or the same, polygon count as Kunark. But, since Kunark I've upgraded to a GeForce 2 64 meg, so I can't really tell, heh.
Zones also are now constructed with camps (monster spawn points) better thought out. They are usually found in 2 types; one where they are a 'camp' which is fairly easily pullable, or in a chotic mess (aka 'wanderers'), which means if you pull your gonna get a lot if it resembles a camp, or it's a place with a lot of wanderers just wandering around you may get unwanted adds. Both denote forthought in their creation, and give plenty of room for the desired affect of the area. Most dungeon construction is based that things are spread out enough, and have spawn timers long enough you will probably need to keep moving, which keeps things interesting.
The monsters for the most part seem the 30 - 50 range. It's hard to tell when 98% of everything is a varrying shade of green. From what I've experienced and heard, they don't always hit harder, but almost always have more hp than other monsters. I have yet to see much shockingly new. I've seen some giants that are new, the Coldain dwarves of course (it would be a bad idea to get these guys on your bad side), a frozen bear type guy, ice orcs, snow bunnies, a gem creature, gnolls. From what I've seen, while they are not a huge improvement from before, they do show promise. More often your reacion will be 'neat' than 'woah' when you see a new creature.
There are new spells that drop in Velious, and everyone has a 'first one free' that you can buy. These are all between 0 and 50 th level (one place is a gnome pirate in Iceclad Ocean), so for us post 50s we have nothing really to gain by these spells, as for the most part there fairly useless at post 50.
Faction is arranged nicely, it seems they learned from their previous mistakes. You now have to kill a lot more than before to 'set' yourself into a faction, and factions seem to start out neutral for the most part. Note / warning: The dragons and giants are at war, when you get a hit for one, you will get an opposite hit for the other. Choose which side you want to be on before going. (Giants are also somewhat at war with Coldain Dwarves, so often these 2 factions are also opposit hits.)
The topper to it all is that there is new quest armor for everyone *cough*marketingploy*cough* that comes from quest people. It seems easy enough, you need piece x, and some y, for each part, then turn them in. It seems they adopted my plane solution on this one. Each class needs x piece and y, and y being gems can be traded amongst people. The hard part is they only drop on really high level creatures. I hear, like the Kunark spells, from 55 level and up. While this is not in itself hard to do, and I have seen someone with 4 or so pieces completed already, I personally have yet to find where anyone is hunting, so finding the players and the camps for me has been the hard part about this.
Summary / Solution / Truth
There are very few, if any, changes / improvements to Velious, and while they are only minor, they are more than the repeated delays the competition has been adding on to their products. While EQ is still not perfect, they are being given the time by other companies to change what problems they do have, and are showing the promice they may last the test of time.
I'm still sometimes amazed they've lasted this long. At this point EQ has outlasted some entire console systems shelf lives. It amazes me a game has been played as long as this has. EQ is definitely the start of a new era in gaming.