Rise of Kunark NDA is Finally Lifted – First Impressions…

It was announced this evening that the RoK NDA is finally over, and of course this will be one of many posts I make about the new expansion and my impressions of it. I won’t talk too much about it tonight, since my thoughts are all in a jumble, but I have got to say, wow. The screen shot above is Arysh riding her rhino mount (which she of course quickly named “Bessy”, prone to stomping on shinies rather then harvesting them and leaving giants trails of.. rhino gunk, behind her) in the Fens of Nathsar, just one of many beautiful zones coming on the 13th.

I had a blast partaking in the beta. Even though by the end of it I was getting slowly worn down by the constant “How can we get buffed to 80 with all our uberz stuffz” questions and comments. Didn’t they realize that all content had to be tested, with all levels of gear. Not just level 80 raid geared folks. Ah well. Turning off channels fixed that. I had added my character to beta before I even got in, in preparation. You can /beta add at any time, and I didn’t want to be waiting around while my “real” characters go there. I quickly found the way to Kylong Plains from the Antonia docks (or you can also take the docks in Commonlands, and a Griffin located on the beach in Butcherblock) and just stood in awe. Not only because of the shear number of folks who cluttered the docks and the incredible amount of lag that came with it, but just because of the volume of land that stretched out before me.

Kunark is huge.

You’ll hear it over and over again. It’s giant. The lands are some of the biggest any Norrathian traveler has ever seen. The first thing any person is going to want to do, is to grab the quest from the halflings on the dock, and attempt to get their Sokokar. Which I’ll talk about more another time. As a brief over view though, Sokokar work like portable (to an extent) griffins and more so like the horses you can find in Greater Faydark and Lesser Faydark. You find a hitching post, examin it and learn the “rout” to that hitching post, and then on your travels you find more hitching posts, thus being able to travel from one to another, or from one to multiple choices. The sokokar doubles as a little pet that can follow you around. You do fly on it when you reach a hitching post, but it’s by no means a flying mount for EQ2.

It seems like this was a huge eventful Friday for those involved in EQ2, not only with the NDA of RoK released, but with the games third birthday, and a few more veteran rewards hitting the game. Those are up in the next post!