For Gamers who enjoy questing, the Quest system in EverQuestII is robust, the type of quests available myriad and plentiful. You have to seek some out, but Quest givers may seek you out as well, calling out to you as you walk by, if you are a likely looking fellow – and just what does this mean? Well, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) in EverQuestII is quite remarkable. As your character moves to within a certain proximity of a Quest giver, it may check your level, profession and faction or standing. If they all check out, the Quest giver may call out to you, asking you to do a favor for him. From then on, it is up to you. Take on or refuse the quest as you will.

Quests may be long and involved, or simple tasks, and all are tracked in your Quest Journal. A quest help window can also be toggled to display the quest you are currently working on, although all will be stored, showing your completed quest history as well as the quests you have accepted and the steps you have yet to complete.

The first tasks you perform are on the Far Journey – the ship which also serves as an instanced tutorial when you first create your character and enter the game. There, you are asked to do several things. Hail NPCs, find and retrieve a lucky hat, purchase an item for another, as well as kill rats and goblins. All for fun, experience and learning to use the game interface.

Quest lovers will find that even in the starting zone, the Isle of Refuge, there are many quests available to you. Some are straight forward “task” type quests: Kill so many goblins / skeletons, bring back their ears / beads / totems as proof. Some are designed to teach you specific aspects of the game, such as Crafting, and yet others; collection type quests. What is that on the ground that’s all bright and shiny? You pick it up and examine it. Voilà! If you choose to put it in your collection, you’ve started another quest.

The Quest Interface automatically recognizes when you have completed a task and checks that off for you, bringing up the next step in the quest. For example, a simple quest may be to kill goblins and return 4 goblin warbeads as a bounty to the local sheriff. The Quest Interface recognizes each goblin you kill that drops warbeads (not every one of them may), and when you are done, it lets you know that the quest is complete and that you have to return to and speak to the sheriff. One convenient aspect of this system is that there is no need to actually loot those warbeads or give them to the sheriff. The Quest interface records that. You only need to speak to the sheriff again when you have attained the 4 warbeads to end the quest and collect your reward.

Completing all your Archtype quests on the Isle will net you all your starting armor. Weapons and other armor pieces also drop off various mobs on the island. You are even encouraged to group for the higher “newbie” level quests as the mobs are dangerous for a young adventurer such as yourself.

As you advance in the game, quests you can undertake become more complex. Some may have sub-quests, yielding usable intermediate rewards; some may require learning different skills in order to complete or further them along. Types of quests that have been mentioned include the following:

• Access Quests are those that will yield a key to special zones, some of which may be instanced.
• Exploration Quests are those that send you into new zones and areas.
• Epic Quests have many steps resulting in intermediate rewards and culminates in a coveted high-end item of epic proportions. Some steps may be done solo, some will require help from your friends and some steps will require a full raid to accomplish.
• Heritage quests are also planned: These quests allow you to reclaim part of your “heritage” and will yield coveted items from the original EverQuest. These are also planned to be highly involved and complicated. Indeed, a quest developer has termed them “extensive”. An item that might be the reward from such a quest is a Mana Stone, an artifact that allows you to exchange hitpoints for mana.

Quests are not only for the Adventurer. There will be those for the social, for example, the so called ”FedEx” or delivery quests – designed to teach you the layout of a town; the tradeskill quests where NPCs request that you craft them items or perhaps seek out or harvest materials for a recipe; the language activated quests that require you to learn a language as some NPCs will not provide you a quest if you cannot speak their language… indeed, EverQuest2 promises to be the ultimate Quest.

Author: Carolyn "Sylvene" Koh