Scars of Velious: First Impressions

Sony Online Entertainment held its EverQuest: Scars of Velious launch party for the press on November 6 and 7 in Las Vegas. After a multimedia presentation on the second official expansion for EverQuest and a short discussion on massively multiplayer gaming, Verant employees invited us to sit down at a computer to enter the new frozen continent of Velious for the first time. Scheduled for release in December, Scars of Velious is intended for players with mid- and high-level characters that can brave the challenges of new monsters, gods, and frightening dragons.

Players can get to Velious in two ways. They can be ported by either a druid or wizard - both classes will be able to scribe a teleport spell at around level 30 - or they can take a boat. The boat is unlike any boat you've seen in EverQuest. Built by gnomes, who are the master tinkerers and builders of mechanical devices in Norrath, the Gnomish Icebreaker is the first vessel to penetrate Velious at its outermost tip, a series of islands called the Icy Fingers. In keeping with the gnomes' tinkering background, the Icebreaker has a giant gearlike mechanism instead of sails. Taking the boat would've prolonged our trip, so a game master on hand at the demo summoned our preconfigured level-35 characters from other continents to the first zone in Velious, the Iceclad Ocean. Here we saw the boat, the small dock, and the first NPCs, two of which were gnomes (if you count a Vendomatic clockwork gnome). You can expect to see a lot of gnomes here, as they've established a sort of stronghold at the gateway to the rest of the continent.

The first thing we noticed in Iceclad Ocean was that there is plenty of snow - snow is everywhere. It covers the land and trees, and even the fauna such as snow cougars, snow gnolls, and dire wolves are snowy white. We wandered around this first zone for a while and came across the first building, the Tower of Frozen Shadow. There were plenty of animals wandering around, as well as shadow guardians, a new type of monster that resembled a whirlwind of bones. We were immediately attacked by these, but they were pretty easy to kill. However, frost giants, which looked truly impressive, were not that easy to kill. Giants populate other zones in EverQuest, but the artists have given Velious' frost giants more intricate textures and a more detailed appearance.

Later, we were summoned to Kael Drakkal, the home of these frost giants. By that time, the game master had increased our hit points to around 30,000 so that we could enter the frost giant city and fight them without dying an instant death. The frost giants are pretty impressive because of their size, and the city itself is very tall to accommodate these creatures. Wandering around their fortress, we saw extremely tall and large tables and doors - so large that we felt like a party of mice. At one point, one of the bold adventurers in our party began attacking the Protector of Zek near the Temple of Rallos Zek, and somehow the god of war, Rallos Zek, decided to make an appearance. Rallos Zek was clad almost entirely in shiny gold armor, and he was even bigger and taller than the frost giants. He slashed us for almost 200 points of damage in a round, and if it weren't for our increased hit points, we wouldn't even have had time to get a good look at the god of war before he killed us.

While running for the zone adjacent to Kael Drakkal, we entered the Eastern Wastes. While the frozen landscape hadn't changed, we saw a few wurms that weren't present in the first zone. Unfortunately, we weren't able to gain access to the zones populated with dragons - these zones were still restricted at the time of the demo. However, if you like dragons, you'll be happy to know that Velious will feature areas filled with dragons, great and small. One of the planned zones contains a dragon necropolis. In addition, the Western Wastes, holy lands to followers of the dragon Veeshan, is a zone for adventurers who have reached or surpassed level 50.

At the time of the demo, other changes were noticeable. For example, the hot key window in full-screen mode now accommodates ten hot keys per page instead of the current configuration of six. However, the new chat window system was not shown. In terms of gameplay, it would seem that rogues will be able to use the "sense traps" skill and disarm dangerous traps that would impede group from going deeper into a dungeon. Apparently, Verant will slowly incorporate traps in other zones in Norrath, which will likely change a group's strategy while dungeon crawling.

Although much of the content and many of the interface changes weren't demonstrated at the event, the good news is that with our playable betas in hand, we'll be able to keep tabs on upcoming changes as they occur on the test server. In all, Scars of Velious seems to provide a lot of challenges for parties of dragon slayers and individual player characters above level 30.