Since the Everquest 2 Fallen Gate has launched I haven’t had as much time to sit down and play as  I would have liked. But I did get to play a little over the past couple days. I chose to make a froglok coercer and go around the Isle of Refuge enslaving every mob I saw.

It all started on a boat, as all good tales do, with a thinly veiled tutorial on how to do MMO things. Like opening chests, buying and selling to merchants, and of course, killing rats. My biggest surprise right off the bat was that I had 4 inventory slots, just 4, and it stayed that way until level 3 when i picked up another 4 slot bag. It looked like I was either going to be going back and forth from the merchant to sell things often or just not pick up every piece of junk that dropped. I chose the latter.

Combat is harsh, I can barely take on 2 mobs at the same time even with a charmed creature fighting with me. It’s gotten to be a fun little dance of mesmerizing and rooting targets when I aggro one too many. But at the same time it takes a long time to down each one. Not excruciatingly long but long enough that it’s noticeable. I’m sure re once I have a few more skills to press it won’t be as noticeable.

I made it to level 5 and completed  all of the isle of refuge and set off for the Frostfang Sea. Mostly because it sounded cool. Maybe that wasn’t the greatest choice as my boat was attacked by orcs and I seem to be on another tutorial island. It even told me how to gather and fight things again. But I quickly moved past all the level 1-4 quests and am on my way to a new area of New Halas.

So far the leveling hasn’t been too much of a turn off. I knew it would be slower than the live character I made but right now it doesn’t seem too bad. The chat is lively with people looking for groups, guilds recruiting, and the general chat making the same jokes about some new game called World of Warcraft. It was also nice to see people in the isle of refuge instead of walking round a ghost town on the live server.

I’m enjoying myself so far. I’ll definitely be playing a little more over the weekend to get a better feel for the game. One thing I really like is that the quests are in chat bubbles instead of a separate page to read all at once. It feels more like a conversation between the NPC and your character as opposed to the NPC just ordering  your character around.