So it's time to continue yesterday's train-of-thought in a new post, because if i talked about this in yesterday's post it would've been a total derail! First time I went through the game, I simply assumed that if quests weren't found in hubs or on the main road, then surely, SURELY, I was done with the zone. "Exploration" was not my strongest side, to put it that way.
That resulted in me being stuck at level 50 and level 60 wondering "where by Arallu, are the quests!?". I was one of the lucky few you who had a bunch of friends power-level me but many were not so lucky. My second time around was way different, I had just come home from a long holiday and i had both the time and the patience to explore way more of Hyboria with my newly made Barbarian. Additionally, i already had a level 80 character so there was no rush either.
Already at Tortage I saw quests I didn't know about. For example the little bottle i talked about at White Sands Isle and the several quest chains that I skipped the first time! Right there i realised, that in Hyboria, you always have to look out for quest-chains and quests given by non-npc objects!
20-50 wasn't a big deal because that was the usual "here's the hub with all the quests, enjoy!" and if there were camps scattered around, they were marked on zhe map so you couldn't possibly miss them.
THEN! The eiglophians hit me, and that's where it got rough, already one of the first quests, Keeping the Village Safe I got was part of a quest-line but the first part was a pain in the *** for me the first time around, so i skipped it, and i continued skipping whatever quests got me killed more than 2 times.
Of course you could say that's complete BS because a game should have so many generic quests that it doesn't matter if you skip them or not, but a lot of western mmo pre TBC & WOTLK expansions was built around the same philosophy as AoC.
The greatest example of this "explore & persevere" questing philosophy would be Atzel's Approach! All the quest givers are scattered all over the playfield, so you HAVE to actually look for them. The only clue Funcom's willing to give is "follow the quests" because when you're done with the "hub" quests close to the camp, you're given quests that take you further out and about.
Then you might encounter the nemedian who'll both give you levelling quests, and a raid quest strangely enough but he has at least 5-6 normal quests. Then you'll eventually find the wounded boy and the patrolling lady who actually doesn't give a **** about the child haha, that's 4+ quests right there. It'll take you to another Atzel camp where you'll fight, and most likely die a few times before you manage to get to the last area close to Atzel's Fortress. Believe it or not, there's a quest giver behind the fortress and he gives you some quests if you're the right level, and there's a merchant behind him that actually sells + climbing gear and an inventory bag!
If you go to the right of the fortress close to the other dungeon, there's a guy hiding who'll give you I don't know HOW many quests, and to the right of him, close to where the mammoths are there's ANOTHER quest giver who'll give you quests.
I didn't know about any of this when I was playing on my first character! in fact I don't think I did any quests there at all first time around.
That's how the game works though, especially later on. It's supposed to be a challenging game, but if you're not into that at all, there's actually several nice "easy" ways to get yourself to level 80, some requires to group up, some don't! I'm not talking about senseless grinding either. Just "easy" quests if Atzel's driving you insane!
I'll elaborate on that in future posts, right now though, it's time to start packing as I'm going home to the hustle & bustle for a couple of days!
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