Why do I love Everquest and why do I not want to go back?

Eventually, this will happen: me writing a proper article about Everquest. This article is basically me breaking and listing down what I loved about Everquest, compares it to other MMOs and RPGs, and sometimes regrettably stating why it cannot be done anymore at this present age.

A quick disclaimer: I started Everquest when I was 13. That's 12 years ago since this article was written. I started, I think around Luclin era so I did not actually experienced things like East Commonlands market except in Progression Servers. So do not go around saying 'Oh Everquest went downhill after Velious expansion, you know nothing'. I can speculate why it went downhill, but it is already ridiculous for me to start  play a first-generation pay-to-play MMO when I was 13 in Singapore (I cut my allowance $1 per day), let alone earlier.

But the point of this article is not wholly about comparison between MMOs, and me giving high praise to Everquest due to nostalgia. I am just trying to examine why Everquest is so revered, outside of taking my virgin online experience. Being a games designer 12 years later, this is important and interesting to me. It can't be just 'taking away my virgin online experience'. There must have been some things that Everquest did right. In fact, I feel that there are some things Everquest did right back than that feels wrong in current context, which explains why MMOs nowadays do not appeal to the old players of Everquest.

Huge World

The world of Everquest, or Norrath, is actually small compared to current generation MMOs like World Of Warcraft (of course I have to bring it up eventually). Yet when I played WoW, EQ2, TERA or City of Heroes, their worlds seemed smaller. Why is that?

The first immediate answer is the mechanic known as Fast Travel. You not only see that in MMOs, but also in single player RPGs. This comes in a variety of flavors: hearthstones, teleportation scrolls, portals, NPC dialog warps, flight paths, and blatant 'open-map-and-click-location'. The reason for its implementation is to provide convenience to players, because as designers, we want to remove as much negative emotion the player is experiencing as possible.  

When I joined Everquest, they already had these Nexus Scions, which are portals located throughout Norrath (I think there are like only 4-5 of them) that activate once every 15 min and takes you to Luclin, the moon. There it is like some mass transit interchange where you can board scions which will teleport you (again, another 15 minutes) to it designated continent. 

When I played Progression Server, it was so much worse. Travelling to Freeport to Qeynos feels like travelling to another country although they are in the same continent. Continent-to-continent travel is worse. The boat takes forever to arrive. You literally see people walking up to you at the docks asking if the boat left, in which you might reply, "Well, I was here when the sun set and when sun rose, so it should be coming soon". And when the boat arrives, there will be this fear that you might be taking the wrong boat. But all this creates a pretty unique experience that cannot be found if you have Quick Travel. 

I am going to go off in a tangent and mention that Ocean of Tears chat is so funny and unique sometimes. Ocean of Tears is a zone between the continents Faydwer and Antonica. Up to this date, I have no idea what are people doing in that zone other than waiting for boats, and reporting if a boat was recently seen going a certain direction. "Um, I think I saw a boat go westwards just now, or rather I think it is west".

Despite that, I find that it is difficult NOT to have Fast Travel implemented in today's games. People nowadays are 'busier' as compared to the past. 'Busy' as in that there are more distractions in their lives. Back then, social networks were either non-existent or at an infant stage where not many people are using it. Games and entertainment were mostly found either on home consoles or the PC.  The most we had were Instant Messengers like AIM and MSN, which were not exactly very exciting compared to the distractions we have nowadays like Facebook or Twitter.

The point I am trying to drive here is that in MMOs of the past, people can actually afford to spend most of their time idling and socializing in-game. Nowadays, there are things you might rather be doing if you are a typical consumer like checking out Facebook or Twitter, chatting on mobile apps that support group conversations, play those social games which requires your time once every 10 minutes or even watch shows that you purchased and downloaded. The internet is becoming faster and more robust which allows us to do access such distractions.

Exploration
Exploration in Everquest is really fun. This is because the game encourages exploration. No, I don't mean blatant 'Get XXX amount of experience points for visiting a new location for the first time'. What I meant is that the circumstances given to you and your characters implicitly forces you to look at your surroundings. This is a reason why the memories of people who play Everquest is very strong; because they actually remember places.

A lot of subtle factors come into play. The first factor is the lack of maps. The lack of maps in Everquest forces player to remember routes by recognizing points of interests. If you leveled in areas like the heavily forested Greater Faydark, the most fearful event that can happen is dying and losing your corpse at an area without a landmark you can identify so that you can find your corpse after you respawn. Getting lost in the middle of nowhere is a common occurrence in Everquest and players often find themselves navigating their way without the usage of maps.

Of course, I understand that it is a too overboard not to have any form of maps whatsoever. Losing your way and wandering for hours without the slightest clue where you can possibly lead to literally several hours of frustration. Having a map gives players more clues on where they could possibly be lost at and reduces the possible time spent being lost. However, games nowadays took it many steps further, usually implementing some insane level of a GPS system that tells you exactly where you are, where you need to go, where NPCs are and more, all on a map. I understand why these features are implemented (again, for convenience and prevent waste of time) but I feel that it is too much. It has a great risk of causing players to look at their maps more than their surroundings.

That being said, I concluded that any form of aid you provide to players for navigation will directly affect their awareness of the surroundings. I will bring up a notorious example which is Elder Scroll IV's Oblivion. My friends used to kid me by saying, "Oblivion? Just follow the red dot!". Oblivion has an implementation where it places a red dot on your character's compass, so that you will know where is the general direction you need to go. I have asked a few people around me, some of them Elder Scrolls fans, whether they could remember the some of the towns inside out, or even the Dark Brotherhood lair. None managed to answer with confidence. How is it that for a game which promotes immersion not allow players to remember the places they visit? If you asked people to navigate through Morrowind's confusing as hell city of Vivec, I bet there is a higher chance of them being able to.

The last point, in my opinion, is having fear and excitement while exploring. Nothing beats the feeling of expecting the unknown. There are lots of places like this in Everquest where players hear stories of death from them. There are many reasons why. Firstly, death penalty is harsh, involving corpse runs and experience loss. Secondly, it is a common fact that you cannot fight any mobs straight up after a certain level. Thirdly, what if you cannot find your corpse? Exploration is that dangerous, and because of this particular deterrence, it makes the world feel big. And it makes exploring exciting.

That sounds contradicting. If there is deterrence  how can players be encouraged to explore? So let me put it into perspective. We know that this is true: the more emotions a player experiences, the more memorable the experience. In World Of Warcraft, there was not much excitement in exploration. I can do anywhere I want, and if I encounter the 'unknown', at the very worst I lose some cash. I practically saw almost everything in vanilla WoW as a Horde, including Alliance areas like Darkshore, Stormwind and Ironforge. Heck I'm not even a rogue who can sneak around without anyone noticing. I can go to so many places with so little risk, it's not memorable at all.

Sure I have gone to Ironforge and other Alliance areas as a Horde in WoW, but that is nothing compared to walking through Maiden's Eye in Everquest with a beating heart filled with fear of encountering some shadowknight mob that can root me and harm touch me to death. Walking around the Plane of Fear is much worse; the entrance is not even the exit!

Nowadays though, I doubt people have the patience or time to do corpse runs any more, or deal with experience loss. Because of this, to make a world fun to explore these days, it would take a combination of great aesthetics, achievement design, level design, quest design and good core gameplay mechanics. I feel like I'm stating the obvious, but it is not easy for all those things to come together.


No Instancing
Until the Legacy of Ykesha expansion, Everquest did not have instancing of any sort. This means that whatever you do will the impacted on the persistent world, small or big. If your group is camping the Orc Hill in Clan Crushbone, it means that everyone in the zone will need to deal with you if they want to kill a certain mob on Orc Hill.

Persistent worlds let players the feel that they exist in the world. If you guild destroyed a raid monster, it's not going to spawn for a couple of days and other guild can 'feel' your guild's presence. In my opinion, it is a very key factor for players to feel immersed in the world. This is why I loved existing in Everquest.

Unfortunately, no instancing has tons of cons. In the end, as a designer, you are hoping that players establish some sort of soft rules amongst themselves so that they do not screw each other over, upheld by every player's integrity. Even worse, these players usually have no way of stopping people who do not follow said rules outside of attempting to outcast them by word of mouth. Not very effective. Old Everquest veterans have seen how ugly this can become and trust me, it's not very fun.

In the end, I feel that instancing is a necessary evil in MMOs, but it should be used sparingly like in high end dungeons. Honestly, I think having a relatively fast spawn rate on pre-maximum level content would suffice for players, if the world is vast enough to spread their density thin. This is because the numbers of such players will increase as they enter the region, and decrease as they out-level the region.

High end content is different though. This is because the higher end content will be saturated with players at maximum level whose numbers will only get larger over time, as such it is safer to provide them with unlimited  access to content and there is currently only one known way to do it: Instancing.

These are the 3 main points why I loved Everquest when I was 13 or 14. It felt like a truly open and huge world that I enjoyed exploring and just plain existing and chatting with random strangers around me. Too bad that now that I am busier (or rather, we), I do not see how any of these will work for me and for the current generation of gamers. Fortunately, there are so many MMOs nowadays that most of us can simply pick whichever feels like the right one and play.

Icewind Dale 2 - Revisited (Part 5 - Underdark and lots of monks)

Chapter 4 starts off pretty grandiosely with some epic music outside of the large Black Raven Monastery. It created a sort of excitement within me that caused me to foolishly cause some of my party member to drop to 1 hp for crossing a flimsy bridge (the designers were apparently nice enough not to cause my guys to die). Content within the Monastery though is slightly disappointing.

It started off with a small complication of course. Apparently outsiders are not allowed to enter the Underdark caverns below the Monastery. The first NPC who greeted my entrance, Salisam, told me that. He offers me, however, a deal to be initiated into the Black Raven Order if I were to remove the deputy leader from power, Aruma (considering that the real leader is supposedly gone to the main bad guy's lair for negotiations). If I were to do that, power will fall onto Salisam and he promised to grant me my wish. Well, monks are lawful people, so I obviously accept.

So I met Aruma, and there was this weird half-fiend (incubus if I remember) named Dolon, who seemed very fond of Aruma and vice versa. I sent my scout to conveniently enter Dolon's guest chamber and found her dairy (which are the bane of all scheming bastards as usual) who showed that she was specifically sent by the bad guys to seduce Aruma. Of course, being a nice guy, I showed it to Aruma. Aruma got angry of course, but Dolon begged and pleaded and swore that his love for her is true. Wow, that certainly got...awkward? No awkward is not the word. Happy? I'm not sure. Anyways, since monks cannot get into love and all that, Dolon suggested that they both run far away from everything. Aruma agreed, leadership was given to Salisam and I get to go through the initiation test: The Eight Chambers.

The Eight Chambers...were...underwhelming. It is basically 8 Chambers (duh) and I can only send 1 naked character to complete each one. I get to rest him between every chamber, so of course I sent my best candidate for all of them - my tank.  Seriously, I think clerics do really well in these chambers. Wizards or sorcerers might do pretty decently too. This is because not only do I have to fight naked (only with a single normal weapon found in the chambers themselves), I cannot cast any buffs on myself before entering. 

Some of the chambers are boring design-wise. A couple was so bad that I actually remembered them, like the first chamber: The Chamber of Stone. In that chamber, I have to pull 4 levers in order. Each lever will spawn different amounts of annoying stone monks that will attack me. If I screw up the sequence of levers to pull, it will reset. There is no clue whatsoever to what the sequence should be so it's basically trial and error, and every lever you pull is just watching your singular character trying to beat up multiple enemies. 

On the bright side, some chambers are interesting to me, like the Chamber of Battle where I have to fight regenerating monks and defeat them at certain positions of the chamber in order to complete it. Amongst the 8 chambers, around 5 of them were bad or unmemorable but at least the rest were decent so I did not really have much to complain about. 

Completing the chamber leads me to the Raven Tomb under the Monastery, where my party encountered 4 very well animated golems surrounding a very bright platform with a treasure chest on it, obviously a trap. I, of course, triggered it in my cockiness since I'm half-buffed (this took care of all my fight so far) but holy crap these golems are tough as hell. Stoneskin wore off much faster than I expected against these guy. So I reloaded and tried again, this time with so many buffs on my 2 clerics it filled the entire character portrait. Thankfully, I managed to defeat them with ease and got my reward which is a bunch of really good but alas, useless magical objects. 

Aside from that, we encountered an army of gray dwaves trying to raid the Monastery (the ones we met at the previous chapter). We took them to screw off, they didn't listen and now they are dead. So off I go to the Underdark passages.

The very first thing that happened was a greeting by Malavon, a Master Of Sorcere (basically a really powerful male wizard in a drow society, go metagame knowledge check!) who asks for help. He states that there are driders breeding in the east blocking my path and I need to get rid of them. Metagame knowledge tells me that driders are half-drow half-spider that can only be created if some powerful servant of Lolth is involved. For those you get that good, the rest can ignore my previous statement. The fact of the matter is that you cannot 'breed' driders so I found it quite interesting to check it out. Malavon also asks to persuade his sister (who is the leader of the driders) to return to his camp. What?! Drow males asking a favor from outsider to 'save' his sister? Totally unheard of.  

The creatures in this area can be rather annoying. There were mushrooms creatures that can fear you during combat, which surprised me since my characters have good saves, but there must have been so many of them that eventually a couple of my characters would crack. Thankfully, clerics have a level 1 spell called Remove Fear that also prevents fear effects, so it wasn't much trouble. In the driders' lair, I came across the Red Wizard responsible for the breeding process.  Ah Red Wizards of Thay, of course they are involved. The process is pretty disgusting. It feels like some screwed up human experimentation thing. So I killed him and killed all the driders except Malavon's sister whom we managed to persuade to return to Malavon. Yay! Happy ending!

This is when the game gets confusing. See, beside the drider cave, there was this particular building I couldn't enter for no apparent reason until I defeat the driders, and it happens to be the building I need to enter to get to where I need to go. I might have missed something, but without the information as to why can't I enter it, it seems utterly silly. Anyway, that building is a home of mind flayers. Well, thankfully, all my characters have really good Will saves (2 clerics, 1 bard/druid, 1 sorc/paladin) so I wasn't that afraid.

Immediately I was attacked upon entering. The first went down really quick because my characters happened to be buffed beforehand (naturally). After defeating them, I began to explore the dungeon. At first, I thought it would be a dungeon. I mean, it IS a dungeon, but what I saw was not your typical dungeon but a maze. A circular one. It annoyed the hell out of me. I hate exploring mazes, or things that look like mazes, so I rested, rebuffed to the brim and started bulldozing the entire place. 

It happens that the Elder Brain in the middle of the dungeon will summon every creature it can in the dungeon to defend it. Well, thankfully none of them were as strong as the crazy golems I fought that were guarding the treasure chest at the Raven Tomb, so the fight cleared easily. It looked like a crazy fight though; fighters, mages, mind flayers, golems were squeezing their way to my party. The arcane spell Chaos helped a whole lot in this fight (as it did with all fights that look like they can get out of hand).

Finally we emerged from the dungeon into the open. Oh look, it's Oswald! And some forgettable bad guys as a chapter closing boss fight! Well, unfortunately it is less exciting than the Elder Brain fight so I shan't describe so much here. After the fight, we board the ship to Kuldahur, because the gnome suggests that it's a good place to go next. 

Just a quick PS, throughout the game, I probably left out a few encounters. There was one outside the mind flayer dungeon and the first encounter IN that dungeon has against a named mind flayer, for example. However, they are uninteresting and I just didn't feel like boring the text with more 'and I streamrolled them, again with my fully buffed clerics of destruction'. The fights are becoming more and more trivial as my characters get stronger.

Icewind Dale 2 - Revisited (Part 4 - Trolls and be trolled)

After getting past the really boring chapter, Black Isle decides to throw me into disarray. Chapter 3 is mindblowing in terms of logic. You'll see what I mean.

Leaving the Ice Temple, the party chanced upon a 'wandering village'. In the village, we met a drow. Well, I guess it's about time we came across one, especially since we are adventuring near the Sword Coast North. The drow is actually a merchant with an extremely polite voice-over...the kind of voice that makes you think that he is going to betray you. Oh well, he DOES have some pretty nice items for sale so I let him be. He also tells me that to get to the Eastern Pass, we will need to travel through the Underdark underneath a certain Black Raven Monastery. Yay, Monks got love in this game! Wait...Underdark? That does not sound very fun (I particularly hate dungeons which are caves full of mindless monsters).

Letting the drow be, we had one more problem: The Fell Wood blocks our path to the Black Raven Monastery. The village elder tells us that only she alone knows the way and would like to trade that knowledge with errands. Fair enough, except that this knowledge of hers is only known to her because 'the villagers don't need to know'. Crap, she's definitely one manipulating b****. Anyway, I'm probably going to rant a bit on ever errand she gives. Here goes.

So the first errand is to find out why there are missing children. A 4 hour stroll towards the Fell Wood entrance revealed an extremely suspicious looking circus tent, with an extremely suspicious lady who has an extremely suspicious voice over surrounded by suspicious looking cauldrons and bottles. Gee, I doubt she's the one who kidnapped the children, so we proceeded into the Fell Wood where we met a dryad. The dryad said that the lady in the tent was bringing children in it! Wow. Thanks. So what, we are going to confront her based on some dryad's words? Apparently we are. Obviously the lady denied everything, until a random child popped out from some hole at the corner of her tent. Why couldn't he done that earlier? I wouldn't need to waste my trip into the Fell Wood! Without any room for excuses, the lady blabbed about being freaking powerful and started doing summons into Dimension Doors. She did that a few more times until I give up and threw like Chromatric Orbs and Hold Persons at her direction, which she (hurhur) is apparently not powerful enough to make the save and eventually died.

On to the second errand, which is to appease some wight who apparently got some of his stuff stolen and is haunting the hunting grounds. Expecting a fight (he is haunting after all), we approached the wight. He turns out to be pretty reasonable enough to talk things out, despite his temper. You mean the hunters didn't bother talking to him? Well, I guess, since he's a wight, so I let that slide. The wight then mentioned that his stuff is stolen and wants it back. Since I can only go to 3 places, the thief must've gone into the Fell Wood. We found the corpse and found that the wight's stuff is actually a useless golden cup. Meh, I was hoping for some good stuff and an excuse to kill the wight. We returned the cup to the wight, and he was happy. 

The third errand takes the bite. It's probably the most trolling errand ever. The village elder told me to investigate someone's death like we are in some CSI show. Again, we ventured into the Fell Wood and confronted the useless ghost at the entrance (I didn't mention him before because he was useless until now). My party asked "Have you know XXX?" He replied, "Maybe, but you will have to kill Will o' Wisps who are trapping all the spirits of those who died in the Fell Wood from leaving." Gah, okay another guy taking advantage of me. We went ahead, killed the Will o' Wisps (which were annoying as hell due to their spell resistance) and returned to the ghost. We asked again "Have you know XXX?" in which he has the cheek to reply "Nope! Try the gravestone outside!". At this point I'm not sure if the designer for this quest is trolling me or just plain lazy to rectify the nonsense. Sure enough, the gravestone outside the Fell Woods stood the ghost of XXX (I seriously can't remember his name), who was happy to tell us how he got murdered and gave us a worthless spear in thanks (who uses spears in this game?).

The rest of the adventure wasn't as eventful. The village elder told us how to get past the Fell Woods, which resulted in encountering a few treants and an army of trolls. We also encountered a few Wyrms and Dragons which, to be honest, wasn't that hard to fight thanks to how broken Stoneskin is. We went underground a bit afterwards and encountered some nice dark dwarves who want us to kill EVERYTHING in the cave and also the monks in the Monastery. In the cave were hook horrors and umber hulks, but Stoneskin is so powerful, my clerics just wipe them off the face the Faerun.

Of course, how can a chapter end without a boss fight. Well, this one wasn't exactly memorable. I cannot remember the name of the boss but he came with an army of rangers, bears and panthers. Thanks to the godlike Chaos spell, Stoneskin and a bunch of Chromatic Orbs, they were quickly thrown into disarray and my clerics slowly picked them one by one. 

Finally, we exited the cave and arrived at Chapter 4. To be honest, the sight of the Monastery makes me a little excited. 

Next

Just a rant about my education.

I think this is a rant about my education. It's just a few thoughts on my head that I feel it's worth my time to type about. Of course, seeing that my education is in Singapore, it is related to our country's education system. I'm writing this because I am finally going to be entering the workforce and I took a look back at the past 25 years, decided to rant it. I'm not particularly angry or frustrated, just a mixed feeling of being jaded and satisfied.

Where do I start? Chronologically? Listing down the factors and influences involved? There are a ton of factors that came into play. One is, of course, is my parents. My parents are great, seriously, even though I never show it to them (because I'm bad at those stuff). I would consider that I came from a rather well-to-do family by Singaporean standards, and that is because my parents are both hard-working, thrifty, really good with money and of course, a bit lucky. Because of that, money for education is never an issue, even for my sister. Of course, this means they treat me as an investment sometimes, which I can't blame them for because from my perspective, I would think I AM an investment too, and this partly fuels my desire to 'repay them of all they have done to me'.  I mean, it does feel really bad when you are leeching off your parents for 25 years in the name of education.  

My mother is your typical Singaporean Generation X mother when it comes to education, comparing schools, results and grades with her friends', neighbours, neighbours' friends, relatives...you get the gist. Most Singaporean children should know what it is like. Anyway, let's start chronologically. Primary school felt easy for me, to the point where I started slacking and be satisfied with As and Bs. I was not in the top class, neither was I at the bottom, which is enough to appease my parents. Obviously, this is not enough for me to get into a 'good' secondary school. 'Good' meaning places where top students go. My definition of good is very different at this point.

Secondary school life starts at 12 to 16. At this point, I remembered that I was overwhelmed by the sheer amount of subjects. I scored badly for 2 years, that is when for some whatever crazy reason, the school allowed me to take what-seems-to-be easier topics (combined sciences, and accounting) which scoring well for them is equivalent to scoring well for obviously much difficult papers like Additional Maths or the pure sciences. Completely retarded, but it worked in my favor so I did not complain and started topping my classes. 

Let's sidetrack a bit. Education in Singapore is quite stressful. Getting shit grades results in angry parents and probably angry teachers, which results in angry self, which results in being demotivated and everything can theoretically just go to hell. Happy grades leads to the opposite, which is a good life and at best, fame. Fame! I cannot emphasize this enough. How many times have I seen newspaper front page reports of a certain group of students who scored incredible points for 'O' levels (the final paper for secondary schools) from a certain 'good' school. How many times have I heard of incredible primary school students who topped their PSLE results? I have once walked past an award ceremony at a void deck for top scoring students from a certain school. THAT is how important scoring good grades felt. When I was 14, I saw how everything can go to shit if I don't do anything about it soon. So I did. On easier topics. That is, I have an edge in getting better results than anyone. 

Then it came to a decision. The decision that most Express or Normal-stream secondary students make: Junior College or Polytechnic (sorry ITE dudes, no hard feelings but you understand). I was really a typical student when I decided on Polytechnic. The thought of entering a specialized course that teaches what you want, no uniforms, classes are not 8am-2pm and no regimentation feels like heaven. Even better, only the results of 5 subjects (including English) is taken into account (Junior College need 6 including English).

Polytechnic lasted 3 years. I entered the new Digital Entertainment Technology course, which is basically Games Programming (or Technical Direction, depending on your specialization). It was gruesome as hell, nothing like the good life I imagined, BUT I was learning a hell lot of stuff which I enjoyed. Unforunately, even though I worked my ass off the bigger projects in my school, a project is still only a module. Doing badly for classes which had no relevance to my interests just killed my results (classes with exams like memorizing how to create a fire using photoshop). Also, a quick flashback - remember that I said that I chose polytechnic because I was thinking like a typical Singaporean student who wants a good life. There are a bunch of people like that in my course and it doesn't help that when I team with them, I ended up doing almost everything. I remember I kept telling myself that it's all going to be worth it because I am the one learning stuff. 

In the end, my GPA was bad. It wasn't really super bad. It's like 3 out of 4.  The fact that Singapore local universities are bitches at accepting polytechnic students started to hit me really hard at this point. It was general knowledge that getting into a local university requires 3.5 or more, unless you have a really really kickass portfolio. I had neither. I have a good portfolio, not a kickass one. After getting out of polytechnic, with nearly zero hope of entering a good university, I was really jaded. Then NS happened. 

National Service lasted 2 years. I came out 23. Normally, I would complain that NS stole 2 years of my life and also gave me a back problem that's potentially going to be troublesome when I get older, but it gave me time to think about what I want to do. Local universities rejected me, Digipen (my dream school at that point) was incredibly expensive and I do not want my parents to spend that much on me anymore. On top of that, it was a 4-year course, which means I would be 27-28 by the time I'm done. Twenty-freaking-eight. That's 2 years away from being considered middle aged. It's nuts from my point of view.

Then a miracle by the name of Singapore Institute of Technology appeared. The rest the pretty much smooth sailing. They subsidized my enrollment to Digipen and turned it into a hellish 2.5 year course from 4 years. It was a win-win situation from my perspective. And after going through all that crap in polytechnic, I felt Digipen shouldn't be any hard. Thankfully it wasn't in my opinion. I had good sleeps before presentations thanks to my hardworking teammates (even when we crunched and I had 3-4 hours of sleep), compared to polytechnic which I literally had none for like 90% of my projects, so it's much more bearable. Even better, most of the modules and projects I find were relevant, interesting, and worth doing. Probably the best 2.5 years of my life thus far. 

And here ends my rant. I'm not really angry about what happened so far. I am just glad it's finally all over and I'm going to work the work of my dreams, which is a really happy ending to a really long 25 year chapter. I can rant a hell lot more and make a long article out of it, but for now this is good enough.

 

 

Icewind Dale 2 - Revisited (Part 3 - Temple of Gimmicks)

When you are travelling in an RPG, I feel that there is some sort of gauge that can tell you if something is going to happen or not. Like the more foreign the technology your characters are travelling on, the higher chances of accidents happen. So the party crash landed into some random mountain because some Auril guys thought it was a good idea to bring the airship down. My metagaming instincts tells me to prepare for constructs because, well, Auril is some angry snow goddess and this means frost the possibility of frost golems (at the worst case).

So here we are, out to complete an annoying errand for a crazy gnome. The crash site was pretty unspectacular as my party waded through a bunch of yetis, beetles and spiders. I ran into this Illium guy who is apparently related to the guys who took down my airship. He's this ranger guy that screams "YOU SHALL NOT PASS" so I took my diplomat to talk to him. Luckily my intimidate is good enough to scare him into opening the gates (thanks to our amazing and ridiculous feat of wiping an entire horde), but the half-dragon Sherincal swoops down, scolds Illium, kills his pet cougar and knocked my diplomat off the cliff. Poor Illium.

It so happened that it was night time and I fell into a bunch of what seems to be werewolves. Huh. My party met up with my diplomat and kills them. That's when I ran into Beodaewyn, who seems to be this suspicious merchant in the front of a wolves' den. It is pretty obvious to me who he really is so I attacked him and killed him since I'm feeling selfish and I don't like werewolves in general. I returned to Illium and surprisingly he didn't stop me after what I did to his poor pet. That's nice, I did not feel like killing an army of villagers who simply want nothing more than peace of quiet from slaughters like my guys.

----

Somehow, I'm in the exterior of some Ice Temple. I don't really know why do I need to be here other than that there is nowhere else to proceed and I really need to find diamonds and some extract from some creature.  Evil temple means two things, clerics and weird shit, and where there's clerics, there should be diamonds (normally Resurrection spell costs diamonds). 

The Ice Temple content seems pretty okay that this point. Here I encountered Ice Golems as expected and there was this weird creature (Remorhaz) which I didn't trust to the point that I fully buff my tank character to a whooping 33+ AC with my sorcerer's newly acquired Ghost Armor spell. With this spell, really nothing can hit my tank, especially when he has Mirror Image up.  The fights were annoying at best, except for Sherincal's.

Sherincal's fight is really annoying. She stands at the top of some flight of 'flat' stairs, calls limited number of annoying creatures (including a Ice Golem, god why is that piece of junk immune to most of my spells), foolishly casts Chromatic Orbs at my Mirror Imaged tank and randomly shoots Lightning Bolt hoping to catch more than one character. The flat stairs 'pushes' my characters to the bottom every time I tried to get up, so getting to her caused me some trouble. Supposedly I need to exert enough force at the levers on top of the stairs to activate the stairs back to normal, meaning I supposedly need ranged attacks. However, it seems that Fireball does the trick just as well. 

After ridding of all the clerics, necromancers, Golems and maybe some other stuff, all there's left is the half dragon herself. She has lots of difficulty hitting my tank even without mirror image but boy does she hurt when she hits. I was nearly out of healing resources and my frontliners aren't exactly in good condition (after getting hit by random Unholy Blights, Lightning Bolts, lucky hits), I just threw everything my sorcerer has left at her (my Magic Missiles were 4d4+4), which took her down pretty fast. Huh, I really should've Magic Missiled her to death from the start I think. She does not seem to resist them that much. Oh right, being half dragon, she has a fear aura I think, which caused my Stormlord cleric to flee every now and then. Thank goodness for the item that prevents my tank from being panicked or feared. 

Before I entered the temple, I realized that I already have all the required ingredients for Oswald's repairs, so I headed back, though it feels strange since I have not entered the Ice Temple. Oswald was happy to see the ingredients and casted the incantation...and...nothing happened. Oswald started saying that it's gonna take a long time and asked my party to 'go ahead and find another way, I'll catch up'. What. So I got all the ingredients for nothing? Gah, stupid gnome wasted my time and money.

Off to the Ice Temple, then.

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Finally, a dungeon. Honestly though, the Ice Temple felt more like a playground of gimmicks more than an actual temple. There are some weird contraptions around the room like the Mirror of Life Tapping, an Arena game which somehow combined with tic-tac-toe mechanics (with its level of difficulty decided by levers), some machine that shoots lightning that open doors...they all just don't seem to fit that much.

Fighting clerics is rather relaxing since you simply have to be more buffed up than they are, which my team obviously is. I don't have to worry about annoying to heartbreaking spells like Fireball or lucky Chromatic Orbs throughout the 2 levels of the temple.

Notable encounters are the NPCs themselves. The rooms and strange devices are weird and all but they seem to be more gimmicky than interesting, like the whole temple could do without those stuff. My party ran into the 3 sisters: Lysara, Cathin and Oria. They weren't particularly hard fights since they are...well...clerics. I do like the scripts given to them and their voice acting though. Oria pulled an interesting stunt where she broke her staff of power that does maybe 1 damage, died and reappeared as a ghost to kill us, in which my party have to pull some lever in the Arena room that switches the whole damn level between Material and Ethereal Plane. Incredibly gimmicky.

The other thing I found interesting was Caged Fury, some spirit of a tempest which is pretending to be Auril. At this point, I don't really understand the relationship between Caged Fury, the 3 sisters and the temple. It seemed that Caged Fury is behind all the ice wall that is obstructing my path towards Neverwinter. How he got there...I'm not sure, I hope one of the sister's diary state why. I'm assuming someone summoned it to erect the ice wall. How nice, I spent a paragraph ranting about something I'm not even sure about.

Then we met Nickademus, the idiot behind all the contraption. I don't think it's fair to create all these content that has nothing to do with an 'Ice Temple' and slap a very experienced wizard who doesn't care about his lover's death into the whole scene. Feels like a really bad excuse to me.

I might as well talk a bit about the arena. It basically works like this: choose a character, and he will solo monsters that will come out of one of the square of a 3x3 grid he choose. Picking a square will spawn a monster. Winning will net you a cross on the square, losing will net a 'shield' or in tic-tac-toe terms, a circle. Match 3 crosses diagonally, vertically or horizontally to win, vice versa to lose.

I didn't get very far unfortunately because there is a time limit involved in each fight. Most of the harder enemies' Damage Reduction so retarded I don't know how is it possible to even deal damage with the weapons I have so far AND STILL survive their hits.  Maybe I can return later?

With the ice path out of the way, I wonder what's next?

Next

Icewind Dale 2 - Revisited (Part 2 - The Beginning)

Quick reference:
Tank = Deep Gnome 28 Dreadmaster/1 Rogue/1 Monk
Talos cleric = Drow 17 Stormlord/4 Barbarian/4Fighter/5Sorcerer
Diplomat = Tiefling 2 Rogue/14 Druid/14 Bard
Sorcerer = Aasimar 1 Paladin/29 Sorcerer

First Steps
Ah low level and gold woes! Of course, I didn't expect my team to start even with a simple full plate armor readily available to me. Anyhow, Studded Leather is good enough for my tank due to his high DEX. At this point he seems pretty ridiculous: 22AC at level 1 without shields and buffs, and is able to cast Mirror Image and Blur. My Talos cleric seem to suffer a bit though. Her low DEX means that she will have to live with crappy Chainmail armor. Since she will still be at the front row, I gave her the shield you can 'steal' at the Palisade, leaving her with a very average 18AC. Hey I'm poor! It didn't take me long after her first level up that I should've really given her 1 Fighter level so that she can be proficient with axes.

The initial Targos was pretty uneventful, if not irritating because there are some locks I cannot pick at the start. Having a dedicated diplomat starts to pay off a bit; I managed to avoid the fight against the Iron Collar dudes in the tavern and jacked up the price of some barters, which is really important this early in the game. The innkeeper is really stingy though, only 50gp for getting rid of a noisy ghost in his inn. At least the nice elf lady (Ulbrec's wife) is a bit more generous. Otherwise it's all fine and dandy.

Battle at the Palisade
I made sure to wipe out Phaen of the Rags before the battle. My party's resources are limited so less enemies is better for me.

The battle itself was kind of hard. My tank was still level 1 with 10HP. Even though he wasn't getting hit that often, a couple of lucky criticals can still kill him. Because of that, focusing on smaller minions before the bigger ones seem to work like a charm. I also realized that I should have taken Burning Hands for my sorcerer. I had completely forgotten how useless Magic Missile + Chromatic Orbs were at level 1, and I took them because they were awesome at later levels. Because of that I had to use all 3 charges of the Wolf Charm from the drinking game at the docks, so that the goblin sorcerer would stupidly magic missile them instead of my party.

And my tank STILL hadn't leveled after the fight. I'm starting to worry about the 20% experience penalty should I ever find the need to take the monk levels. Hopefully it's not anytime soon. It shouldn't be.

Shaengarne Bridge
Ulbrec is mad, asking up to 6 level 1-2 adventurers to overtake a critical bridge that is obviously going to be held by a battalion.

God the entrance is hard. There is like a gazillion guys trying to hit 1 gnome. After dying a few times, I finally managed to defeat them, causing my guys to level up. Here I manage to grab the Bard level for my diplomat, the Fighter level for my Talos cleric and finally one more level for my tank, effectively doubling his HP. The rest of the area is much easier after the level up. I made sure to cast Command everytime I see an orc shaman cast spells and beat the crap out of him.

It is around here the first sneaking mission came about, which is easily solved with the deep gnome once per day ability of turning himself invisible. At this point I realized what a ridiculous scout he is. High AC, invisibility, cleric spells, mirror image, good damage, blur...now I'm sending him to scout fog of wars before I engage my enemies. My diplomat is having problems now trying to stand  near the fighters and granting them bard songs and doing nothing else though. Too bad you cannot hide while you sing.

The troll fight is pretty hard. He hits more frequently and harder than I would've liked. I don't have a rogue who can steal the blade from him without him noticing so I have to fight. I realized how much I needed entangle at this point and how useless Summon Nature's Ally I is. Also, Ray of Enfeeblement could really help in this case; it's flat -15 STR in this game for whatever reason.

I had a pretty big level up at the Harpy/Boar area. My sorcerer have one extra spell (I took Ray of Enfeeblement), my two clerics hit level 3, opening the door to level 2 spells which are immensely useful. The Talos cleric is becoming a beast with her new Returning Throwing Axe, Bull Strength and Destructive Blow. The High Priests who immediately cast Beast Claw, Summon spells and Cures are pretty trivial, casting the almost instant Command spell whenever they start casting crap. Yes I memorized Command to the max. The newly acquired Hold Person and Horror spells helped too.

The actual battle of the bridge was pretty easy with the new levels, except for one bitch that suddenly cast fireball in my face, wiping half my party. I did not manage to save the bridge though, since I neglected to buy potions in case of critical hits so I 'cheated' by resting in the middle of the battlefield (which makes no sense).

Goblin Fortress
The outside of the fortress wasn't particularly hard, considering that there is a free place for you to rest every time you are low on resources. The mini-boss fight at the top right hand of the map is tough though, with a couple of ice trolls, ogres, an orc shaman and a bunch of archers and wolf-riders. As if that wasn't bad enough, they would randomly orbital strike wolf-riders in the middle of the battlefield (screwing up my positioning) as long as there is an orc shaman beside the War Drum. Fortunately, that particular War Drum is snipe-able from across the bridge without attracting attention, so most of the problem is taken care of.

The warrens of the fortress (the Goblin Warrens) isn't that bad. 2 levels of things to kill, none of them particularly difficult. Scouting with my gnome proved so invaluable that it becomes the norm. As I level up and gain access to Barkskin, more powerful Chromatic Orbs, Fireball and Animate Dead, fights can become trivial at best, with annoying AI aggro management possibly screwing my plans. This dungeon is quite funny because the fights get easier as you progress, so level design-wise it seems strange. I remembered that the very first fight when you enter the dungeon can be pretty tough. The rest, not so much.

The exterior and interior fights after making out of the warrens can get a little overwhelming. Thanks to scouting and the awesome Entangle + Fireball spam combo, huge fights can whittle down to small brawls when done correctly. Deep Gnomes and Drows as frontlines are truly awesome, as they have spell resistance in case you misfire your fireball. If I didn't like them being in the front, I could always cast a couple of Animate Dead (really dumb spell in many ways) and let them draw aggro before letting lose my combo.

The Guthma fight is incredibly underwhelming. He failed my Chromatic Orb saving throw and was stunned for 3 rounds. With my drow's retarded Attack Bonuses (fully buffed with Bull Strength, Destructive Blow, Strength of One, Bard Song) and Faerie Fire cast on him, he went down so fast I mistook him for another bugbear. With my sorcerer free to do anything at this point, she simply fireball-ed the mirror imaged orc and goblin shamans continuously until they are dead. So much for mirror image!

Conculsion
This party really went through a lot. At the start I felt worried that this party might not make it, but towards the end, it really got a lot simpler as I gain access to better items and spells.

I think it is safe to say that having all the monsters attacking a Deep Gnome with 28 AC fully buffed with mirror image is perfectly okay. I also equipped him with Witherbranch Boots (immune to Entangle) and Houndstooth Collar (immune to Panic and Fear) so he can walk in and out of my druid's Entangle spell and silly spells like Horror don't affect him.

The rest of my party is running on 16 AC or less, with my Sorcerer running on a whooping 9 AC. If you are reading this and wants to build the same sorcerer for tabletop, don't be an idiot and stop right there. 9 AC will have you begging the DM for dear life at level 1. However, this is a computer game where AI can be abused a little, so 9 AC is fine as long as I am careful. Plus, the overpowered instant-cast Chromatic Orb helps a lot, as well as both my cleric's instant Command spell.

Now that Targos is safe, apparently my party thinks it's a good idea to fly in an airship in medieval-fantasy setting piloted by a half-delusional absent-minded gnome. I wasn't surprised we crash landed.

Next

Icewind Dale 2 - Revisited (Part 1 - Party Creation)

Back to IWD2!

I realized that even after playing Icewind Dale 2 to death, I have never completed it fully. There might be reasons for that; I might be busy, the party I created was not fun at a certain point, certain characters felt useless at a certain point that I want to recreate a new party...etc.

With the help of the awesome JUPP guide, I'm attempting to return back to IWD2, and possibly even clear the infamous Heart of Fury mode. The goal of the party is simple: it must be able to clear HoF (requires min-maxing), leveling from 1-30 must be reasonable and lastly I must be fun playing the party. I will be running a 4-man party, because I realized that 6 people can get difficult to control and is quite overkill sometimes to the point that it gets boring. Leveling 6 specialized characters is also really boring. I played enough PnP DnD to the point that so I really want each character to be 'self-sufficient'.

JUPP helped a lot in that process. Most of the characters suggested in the guide are min-maxed to the max, are really versatile and theoretically fun to play from 1-30. After thinking for a long time, it really seems that no matter how much I try to deviate, my characters will eventually 'become' one of his characters. In the end, my party composition is the only thing different; the characters in the party ended up being one of those in the guide. It makes sense; the game has only so many viable classes for certain roles as well as races. If I were to make a tank with 70+AC, there's only so many ways I can do it, so I simply choose the way I think I would enjoy.

Here is the party I'm planning out:
1) Deep Gnome 1 Rogue/1 Monk/28 Dreadmaster of Bane
This is the tank of the party and also the 1st character in the melee party of the JUPP guide.  Pretty straightforward. I love clerics a lot so from the start I had a 30 cleric planned out for tanker. 1 Monk is to convert WIS to AC and 1 Rogue is to get the crazy headband that gives generic AC. JUPP only finished the build when it educated me that Dreadmasters get quests that increase WIS. Cool, I always wanted to play an evil cleric.

Problem with this character is that it has 3 classes and none of them are favored classes of the Deep Gnome race. Dipping 1 level into monk will incur the 20% experience penalty. However, it shouldn't happen until I reach HoF since clerics can wear heavy armor and I don't think my WIS will be that much higher than the best heavy armor in normal mode at that point of time.

2) Tiefling 2 Rogue/14 Druid/14 Bard
This looks like a really fun build. It's purpose is to do EVERYTHING out of combat. I am not sure if I can build this character as a scout; it does have druid levels as well as bard levels so it has a wide range of spells to it's disposal. I have to wait and see how that turns out. For now, it's there just to provide Barkskin and cover bard songs. I might even level Use Magic Device so that I can use more objects with this character.

I am wondering if early levels are going to be hard though. This character is running on really low STR and DEX stats so lockpicking is going to be difficult unless the Druid part gets Shapeshifting. Even then, I would need to level Druid up together with Bard because it will incur the 20% experience penalty, so shapeshifting will not be in the equation until character level 10 or so.

3) Assimar 1 Paladin/29 Sorc
Main arcane spellcaster. Really straightforward and effective build. However, it has to cover some utility spells since it is the MAIN arcane spellcaster after all. Thankfully, I have 29 levels for that, so I will have more spells learnt eventually, just need to pick the right one. Assimar is just there to prevent experience penalty.

4) Drow Stormlord of Talos 17/4 Fighter/4 Barbarian/5 Sorcerer
Main damage dealer of the party. This is also another character from JUPP, which I really like because of how versatile she is. She's the substitute cleric, offloading work from the 1st character, and also the main healer, as her alignment is Lawful neutral so she can spontaneously cast cure spells if needed. She can nuke from her Talos specialization, and with 18 STR + Draw Upon Holy Might + Rage and other cleric buffs, she's gonna do tons of damage.

Afterthoughts
Currently I'm not thinking about adding a fifth member. This party looks theoretically strong and fun to play from level 1-30 as it is. I'll keep posting how I do in each chapter and arcs with this party as I find time to keep playing. Once everything is over, I'll plan to eventually post this as a guide along with all the other posts for others to read.

Hopefully this party is good enough for me to enjoy throughout the game till HoF =)


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