I stuck around in Blackburrow until I hit level 14. At that point I felt like it was time to move on. EverQuest Legends It wasn’t that the xp had run dry or that things had gotten too easy. I could have hung around for at least one more level… maybe as many as three… making decent progress in leveling up. But that assumes a world wherein leveling up is my primary goal. If we’re to be frank dear reader, my interest in levels or achievements or mastering my class combo is fairly low. There are discussions and strategies out there I could follow so that I could, as the kids used to say, “git good.” But I am not committed to that as an end goal. I am a tourist in Norrath, a veteran of battles now more than 25 years in the past for the most part, back to relive a bit of my relative youth. This is entirely a nostalgia driven venture. But so far EverQuest Legends has proven an admirable vehicle for this venture, as it was no doubt designed to be. Allowing me to multi-class, to get the benefits of a group in a single character along with speeding up the leveling curve substantially… and shaving off the penalties, so there are no corpse runs and no xp loss on death undoing an evening’s work… has combined to enable something of the experience I have agitated for these past years. Sure, I could go run around on live with a level 115 character and tour Blackburrow. I did that back at the 25th anniversary. This is allowing me to actually play through the old content, requiring a bit more effort and engagement and maybe even some thought… though I am studious in my attempts to not learn much about the mechanics of this version of EverQuest. Still, there is a limit. I wanted to move on from Blackburrow and had my eyes firmly fixed on Faydwer and the Estate of Unrest. That meant travel. I would need to travel east from Qeynos and vicinity and make my way to the far side of Antonica, to Freeport. All of which is a long walk that used to take most of what I had in me for a weekday evening back in 1999. This was the downside of every race having its own starter town and having friends that rolled elves and dwarves. So I wandered out of Blackburrow, cast Spirit of the Wolf on myself, and commenced my journey. First off I want to say that my memory of the effects of Spirit of the Wolf far exceed the reality on the ground here in EverQuest Legends. I feel like a bard might have been a better choice… though my memory of the movement speed song’s effects might be equally distorted by the passage of time. What are you going to do? I hit West Karana and started the long run to the far side of the zone. I did not, however, run in a straight line. Having sat around in Blackburrow for some levels, and being headed east with no planned time to return, I zig zagged about and visited a few old spots. I found the bandits up in the hills, once so fearsome, and did for the whole bunch in one fight. Returning the favor for many past deaths I cleared out a couple other bandit camps along the way then, as night had fallen, went past the ruins where the undead spawn. I had out leveled most everything there at level 14, but there was a ghoul yeoman who was good enough to spar with me. Bonking the ghoul with my mighty staff Then I crossed over into North Karana, where I found there were still quite a few yellow con mobs wandering around. So I stayed a spell and visited with some old friends. Ladies and gentlemen… the beetles! That went on long enough for me to gain level 15, so I went once more through the flurry of skill increases. Skilling up on a Griffawn Level 15 gained me block and double attack, so I saw skill updates for that pair for quite a while as they caught up. Level 15 also got me the first druid travel spell, Ring of Surefall Glade. That means I can get back to Qeynos… or its vicinity… whenever I like. That also means I can use Bind Affinity at any nearby town when I am out adventuring. That isn’t as important as it was back in the day because you don’t respawn at your bind point when you die anymore. You just get tossed to a safe point in the zone you’re in, with all your gear on you. But it does mean that I can gate to wherever I set my bind point… so I’ve got that going for me. After farting around in North Karana for a bit longer, I moved on to East Karana. Once again, I wrote a whole post about East Karana back at the 25th anniversary if you want my reflections on it as a zone and its significance in my personal history with the game. Also, that is where the memorial to Brad McQuaid is located. Mostly though, it is on the main route to Freeport, which was where I was heading. I popped a few likely mobs down in the plains, then ran into a gnoll reaver on the long climb to Highpass Hold. You run into all sorts of things in East Karana Mostly, however, it was just the same long run up the mountain path that it has always been. It is one of those things that makes it feel like as long of a run as, say, the run across West Karana… only it is just a narrow path. This map knows what is going on – East Karana, and the mountain path The run does not last forever and soon I zoned into Highpass Hold, which I was delighted to find was in its old, pre-2007 update state, with gnolls hanging around waiting to fight you. Welcome to Highpass Hold, I will try to kill you now This was quite a joy to see. I had assumed that we would be getting the old school graphics for places that had been updated, but I have also learned that life doesn’t care about my assumptions. While you can argue the merits and the art style choice of the 2006/2007 zone revamps that SOE did with Freeport, The Commonlands, and the Desert of Ro, Highpass Hold was just comically bad. Like, what was this texture even about? Running into Highhold Pass back in 2011 or so I’ll grant you that the low polygon count of the zone was not its best feature, but the texture chosen… which ebbs into a pinkish tone in places… wasn’t the right answer. Checking out the Highpass Guards One of the killers for me is that SOE took the time to update the zone textures, but then didn’t bother to use the new orc models that they had come up with for Freeport and The Commonlands. Like, who are these guys and what is that electric blue color of the ground? Just for reference, this is what the revised orcs looked like. The new orc model out in front of the new Freeport Anyway, I passed through and into Kithicor forest… once again, I have a post from the 25th anniversary exploring these two zones and their meaning to me… as I made my way onward. Now onto Kithicor I hit Kithicor in broad daylight, so the possible problems with roaming undead were pretty limited… though at level 15 in EQL I am not sure I need have worried even if it was night time. My memories of running through in the dark in terror all involve me being something like level 8 or so. Still, the run felt pretty mundane even accounting for past trauma. From there it was out and into The Commonlands. The West Commonlands Excuse me, The WEST Commonlands, because this is the old school zone that was replaced back in December of 2006. I have a post from back when they did the change where I praise the art style which, at the time, felt like an improvement. Now, 20 years later, I was happy to see the old version of the zone. I know, I am getting into some “Nostalgia!! Wooo!” territory here. Nostalgia on Wayne! But, somewhat selfishly I suppose, there is nothing about the redone zone for which I have any affinity. It is a graphical improvement undoubtedly, but it doesn’t have a hold on my the way the original version did… despite the fact that it has been The Commonlands for almost 20 years now. I ran through and admired the old look of the zone. The old building style I even dropped by the tunnel where players once congregated for a giant ongoing swap meet. That is a real sharp slice out of the hill But mostly I wanted to keep going to see Freeport… and soon enough I was there. Freeport of Old One again, I wrote about how SOE had updated the zone back in November 2006. At the time I was pretty positive about the changes. I sound like quite the idiot fan boy in some ways in that post, though that is 2026 me with a couple decades of blogging and a history of betrayal by studios guiding my outlook. I even went back and restored all the images in those posts (and a few others from late 2006) which I had hosted on Image Shack back then because I was worried about using up my allowed storage on WP.com, which I am pretty sure wasn’t even a gigabyte back then. So you can compare the art style. Welcome to Freeport – Front Gate – 2006 updated version There was a period in time where they had updates Freeport but had not yet done The Commonlands so you would stand in one and see a version of the other that either did not exist yet or no longer existed. I explored the city a bit, expecting to be… I don’t know… amazed? In awe? Really though, it just felt normal, natural, like it was the way it should be, and whatever was there for the last two decades was just some sort of temporary aberration. Despite my initial enthusiasm I have been a down on the update to the city for most of the life of the blog. It felt like wasted time and effort on the part of SOE. I am still not sure what they were trying to accomplish. What was the expected payoff of updating Freeport and the other few zones? By late 2006 Freeport was as much a backwater as Qeynos. The Plane of Knowledge had become the new staging point for players and anybody you ran into in Antonica or Faydwer was likely there by mistake, on a very specific quest, or were just exploring. Nobody was hanging out there, so spending dev and art staff time to redo it speaks to the level of unreality that SOE could often exhibit. What if you rebuilt a city and then nobody showed up? All it would do was… what is the MMORPG version of “you destroyed my childhood” these days? Whatever that is, that would infect in some way all the time locked progression servers because, while you could go back and pretend it was the good old days, the fact that Freeport So hurrah for EverQuest Legends! (And Project 99, though I have never gotten up the head of steam required to dive into that.) I poked around a bit, feeling the familiarity of the place, then headed towards East Freeport. It is that away! There I found my way to the docks where we once waited for the boat. On the docks in Freeport Again, this is the original look compared to the update from 2006. The updated Freeport docks – 2011 screen shot from the Fippy Darkpaw server I guess 2006 also introduced taller ships? Or were the docks that much lower? I don’t know. But this was all in an effort to get me to the boat so I could travel to Butcherblock on the far side of the Sea of Tears. [Also, this weekend features a 25% xp bonus in case leveling wasn’t fast enough already.]