Getting Nostalgic

Posted by Stropp on July 11, 2008

 

After an absence of a couple of months, with most of that time spent in Hyboria and a touch in Azeroth, I reentered the world of Norrath this week.

When I was last there, my Sarnak Shadowknight, SSirius, was a little way into level 26 and hanging around the Butcherblock Mountains. I remembered that I was starting to get a little bored with the Butcherblocks the last time I was there after I logged in and found myself wandering around looking for some critter and not being able to find it. A change of scenery was in order…

One of the things I’ve found — in my experience — when playing MMO games, is that the social experience of the game enhances the game itself. Even though I’m generally a solo player, I enjoy the interaction and dare I say it, the camaraderie of being in a guild. For me, being in a guild also adds to the personal longevity of the game. So as I was contemplating getting back into EQ2, getting into a guild was high on my list of priorities.

I’ve been following the efforts of the Nostalgia project over on Tipa’s blog West Karana and Stargrace’s MmoQuests.com. The Nostagia guild originally started to gather together current and ex Everquest players so that they could revisit some of the great areas of the original Everquest. Nostalgia the Guild didn’t take very long to become quite successful. You can read about their adventures on both Tipa’s and Stargrace’s blog.

At the time I gave a few moments consideration to loading up my old Everquest install, getting it up to date and joining in the fun. Unfortunately, I was already playing WoW, EQ2, and waiting on Age of Conan — not to mention about to go away for a couple weeks holiday. It really is true — too many games, not enough time.

It didn’t take long before Stargrace hatched the idea to start up an offshoot of Nostalgia for Everquest 2. She got a number of the EQ Nostalgia members together and created Nostalgia on the Najena server.

So the other day, after transferring SSirius over to the Najena server, I contacted Stargrace in the game and joined up with Nostalgia.

Once I was joined up, it was time to get to work. I set up my chat client to set up a guild tab, something I always do when I’m in a guild, it makes tracking conversations much easier when the general chat spam doesn’t mess it all up.

I also decided that I’d had enough of the Butcherblock Mountains for the time being, so I headed over to Nektulos Forest. The beach area there has a few level 20+ quests, so I added those to my quest log and started working on them. After about an hour I dinged 27, and then decided to go exploring the forest. I found the camp at the Commonlands entrance, picked up all the quests there, did a couple and continued exploring.

By the end of the evening, I’d trudged most of the paths of the dreary rainy forest, completed the gryphon egg quest that opens up the gryphon flight paths, died by sticking my nose into an area I probably shouldn’t have, and opened up most of the map. At least opened the map areas I was able to get to. I also added a level of achievement experience and nearly half a level of adventure experience.

The next step is to go back and complete all the quests in my quest log for the forest. That should get me to level 30. At that point, I either go back to the Butcherblock Mountains, or head to one of the other 30+ areas; the Enchanted Lands or Zek, or maybe all of the above.

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