July 4, 2009
Exploring Medievia
by Belladain
The explore module was recently introduced into
Medievia. My first encounter with it was actually about a
month ago in Sceptrum Ishachi. A Goddess asked me about the
hermit and if people who came to Sceptrum stopped in his room.
I had no idea what she was talking about because I had only been in
that room once when the zone first opened by accident and have since
forgotten about him, until she reminded me.
Since the module
opened however I decided to get my feet wet by exploring the
graveyard. I must say my first experience opened my eyes to
how much you can truly miss in a game as large and detailed as
Medievia. The graveyard used to be the main place new players
would level up. In the old Medievia City you would kill a few
janitors before graduating to the graveyard and then maybe the
labyrinth and goblin castle. There should have been no part of
the graveyard I didn't know, which mostly held true, until I needed
to find a bottle of wine. I had never been into the kitchens
of the Church. I must assume they were there before after all
where else did Quasimodo get his lunch from? A little part of a
small zone and I had not ever stepped foot into it and I never would
have without the explore module.
I finished up the graveyard
fairly surprised. I found a new part of the zone and I was
reintroduced to parts I had forgotten about. Seeing the souls
of players recently deceased in a bottle is always interesting.
I decided to continue and take it easy by exploring the preserve.
Yet another zone I am familiar with and I was able to find most of
what I needed but I had never heard of the brownies before. It
did not take me long to find them and since then I have noticed the
most common question about the preserve is - "Does anyone know where
the brownies are in preserve"?
As of this writing I have
explored 15 zones which is almost half of what is available. In
almost every single zone from Enara to Vanlarra I found at least a
small part of the zone I had never seen before or a mob that I did
not know existed or a little quirk that I enjoyed and am glad to
have discovered.
There are no doubt issues that need to be
addressed with explore. The xp gains are not all in line with
the difficulty of exploring the zone. More importantly it is not
even possible to explore many of them due to item pops.
Crystal lake, Esacha, and Pirate Ship are zones that need items that
generally only load on reset and have caused more than one person
frustration when they complete all but 1 objective before realizing
it is impossible to finish the exploriation. This may not be a
problem for most of us since we are experienced players but I ask
you to imagine you are fairly new to Medievia and are xping/exploring
Esacha Fen. You manage to get all your objectives done and
then are asked to find out what happened to the cute and cuddly baby
robin? There is little reason you would realize it almost
never loads outside of a reset. Hopefully the new player would
chalk it up to experience and just complete it later but I know it
was frustrating for me when I realized the item in crystal lake was
reset only and I had taken time to kill all the mobs needed for all
the other objectives.
While there are of course kinks that
need to be worked out the overall reaction to exploration has been
positive. The minor issue of item loads is easily overcome
which I can attest to having completed so many zones already.
I am excited to go to zones I had not been to in years such as the
Pirate Ship or zones that my clannie Romsek helped me with since I
had never even been to it before; Evermist. This is opening up
parts of the game for me and hopefully everyone else.
The
Explore module has lived up to the hype and I can not wait for more
zones to be added.
Oh btw - you do need to know where the
hermit is in Sceptrum, just watch out for the king and queen on your
way there.
Belladain
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