A gap of a month or so between posts usually means that I’ve gotten back into MMORPGs, and this one is no exception.  I’ve been sucked back into Everquest 2 with the release of the latest expansion, Destiny of Velious, which is basically a massive nostalgia fest for all of us poor bastards who were playing EQ1 back in the 2001 time frame.

Good gods, that’s been ten years.

Anyway, Destiny of Velious is only a half-expansion so far (they’re releasing the other half in a few months) but what they did get out the gate has been a lot of fun, even if I had to do a lot of leveling to catch up to the content.  It’s a complete gear reset sort of expansion – within about an hour of entering the first Velious zone, I’d replaced almost everything my character was wearing – which gives the developers a lot of freedom; they have established a sort of baseline of “this is what your character should have” which allows them to develop content accordingly.

Oh, and they added flying mounts, which is a massive game-changer for going back and doing any earlier content that wasn’t designed for players to have control over their Z-axis.

On the other hand, it’s designed exclusively for characters who are at least level 85, and even at that level you’re going to have significant problems until you reach the level cap of 90, so it’s not really a “bring people into the game” expansion.  By way of contrast, while the EQ1 Velious was a “high level” expansion, “high level” at the time meant that it was designed for people who were at least level 40 (with a cap of 60)

Oh, and I graduated from college.  That happened too.  And I got hugely sick twice, which wasn’t a lot of fun; my finals week consisted of me going into my Japanese final while running a massive fever and cough while sleep-deprived from too much EQ2.

Needless to say, I pretty much bombed the final (74% or so) and my term grade was a fairly pathetic B+

Still, it’s over and done with and now all I need to do is find a job.  I’ve applied for several technical positions at the local university and not had a great deal of luck, which is a pity – they’re pretty much the whole of the local economy – but the process has given me the motivation I needed to get my resume up to slightly higher standards and to take a hard look at the way I write cover letters, so I guess you can say that it’s been a positive experience.