Homesickness.

So it’s been a hell of a week; it’s nearly four AM, and I find myself stricken with a horrible triple-play: insomnia, nostalgia and homesickness.

Homesickness.

For Neriak, FFS.

I am acutely aware that the true glory of EverQuest is gone forevermore. It was gone shortly after Shadows of Luclin was released, even. Oh, the crappy graphics of a long dead age. The music with tinges of MIDI, that was so horrible yet so right. The clunky interface. The ridiculous difficulty. The fact that you could experience a graphical virtual world on the Internets, with thousands of other players, in a day and age when dialup was king.

Such a thing will never come again. That age of innocence, awesomeness and novelty cannot happen ever again – the marches of technology and time have seen to that.

I will never again experience the sense of scope and beauty that, after running through the commonlands, skulking my way through Kithicor – at night, sneaking through Highhold… I viewed as I slowly made my way down that massive ramp-like trail through the Karanas, at dawn. And with games focused on instant travel (not that instant travel is a bad thing), I doubt I shall ever again end up with a cloud of wood elves and halflings eying me suspiciously, wondering what, exactly, the hell a Dark Elf is doing in Queynos.

I reactivated my EQ II account. The Internet tells me that nostalgia is a contagious epidemic. Before reactivating, I did some research – am I rejoining yet another dying game? I have a habit of doing that. DAOC, EQ, PSU, et cetera. Apparently, though, the EQ II population has been continuing to increase. Say it with me now – WTF?

Well.

I’m not that surprised. World of Snorecraft was never a rightful or even equal challenger to EverQuest. That honor went to Dark Age of Camelot which, still, didn’t directly challenge Norrath. Only by virtue of diametrically opposed gameplay did Mythic throw down the gauntlet. To put it simply, nothing has managed to compare to EverQuest. Not even EverQuest II. But whatever. Home is home. Home is Neriak.

Population on my apparent chosen server of Blackburrow is… curious. The areas aren’t swamped with people, but I’ve yet to run through anywhere – and I’m going through low-level areas here – where I haven’t seen other players. A far cry from the deathbeds of Dark Age of Camelot, where you could walk through Albion without seeing another living soul. Crafters are happily crafting in Neriak, despite there being other starting cities and such – I’m sure with all the expansions, the hub of activity has moved elsewhere.

…So apparently, Sony had the bright idea of Asianing up EverQuest II. There are some fairly hideous ‘alternate models’ now. Some of them are improvements, I admit, but take the human female – the human female has gone from human female to human female smacked repeatedly in the face with a frying pan. And the Tier’Dal female…

Yeah, I’ve gone through the alternate appearance setup, then blew a veteran reward mirror on doing it again because it borked up my hair color. And now…

My poor, innocent Inquisitor of Hate is angry. Very angry. And looks like every other Tier’Dal in Neriak. Seriously. I walk around, and everyone has my face. My scowling, angry face. This disturbs me, because my Inquisitor is supposed to be pleasantly amused at piles of corpses and puddles of gore.

Honestly, I know what Sony was thinking – if I understand correctly, they killed the Asian servers and shoved folks from the greater Asia area onto standard servers. Which meant those fine, paying customers would want to keep their special models. The problem is, now how your character is seen is entirely in the hands of other players. This doesn’t sound like a big deal – but really? It is. One of the standard features of an MMOG is that you get to control how others see your character. To put it simply – there’s a reason people want l33t, hard-to-get gear, and it isn’t for the stats – it’s so people can see how awesome you are. You’re in a virtual world, almost certainly using an alias – how your character looks is vital to personal identity.

Note that this problem also occurred with the original EverQuest! Shadows of Luclin took an aging, ancient graphics system and kicked it into next Tuesday – bringing a slew of new character models along the way. There’s a key difference, though – Luclin was a massive upgrade in quality. You knew that the vast majority of the playerbase would be using the new models as soon as they possibly could – they were just that much better. These EQ2 alternate models, on the other hand, clearly aren’t upgrades. Honestly, some of them do look better than the original models, but others definitely look worse – and instead of a clear, obvious case of ‘these graphics are much better!’ you have a situation where it all comes down to player aesthetics.

In short, you have no idea which models a player is going to be using, and thus, your character can be viewed in more than one way. Which means you have to get both models reflecting the way you want your character to look. Which, with these alternate models, is clearly impossible for some races. I seriously mean it when I say all Tier’dal females look exactly the same, save for skin color and head size. The potential for facial structure differences, especially with regard to the mouth and nose – are fairly imperceptible.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this – but my character goes from awesome to ugly with nothing more than two mouse clicks. That infuriates me.

Meh. Maybe I’ll get over it. I miss my dark elf. Then again, I’m kind of enjoying my new Arasai…