Lethar: A New EverQuest Adventure Begins

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Inside Crescent Reach
There is something rather exciting about starting a new EverQuest server.

I've played EverQuest for a very long time, and I've been through more than a few new servers and progression starts over the years. But Lethar feels different from the traditional progression server experience, and that is what has caught my attention.

For a start, we're not going back to 1999.

Lethar launches with The Serpent's Spine, which means that a brand-new character is effectively starting in the modern EverQuest experience. This is particularly interesting to me because today's EverQuest has a very different approach to introducing new players than the game I first knew all those years ago.

Rather than simply being dropped into Norrath and left to work everything out for ourselves, there is now a much more structured journey available.

And that is exactly what I'm going to do.

Doing it all again

My intention on Lethar is to follow the Hero's Journey.

There is a certain absurdity to this because I've done many of these quests countless times before. I know the zones, I know the quests, and I know where many of the creatures I'm going to be asked to kill can be found.

But this time there is a difference.

I'm doing it on launch day.

A quest that I've completed dozens of times before might normally be a fairly routine affair. Find the NPC, travel to the zone, kill the required creature, collect the item and move on.

On a brand-new server, however, that same quest could be an entirely different experience.

What happens when everyone else is trying to kill the same creature?

Will there be a queue of groups waiting for the spawn?

Will people work together?

Will the new Personal Loot system encourage players who need the same quest to group up rather than compete for the same mobs?

Those are things I want to find out rather than simply read about.

Six players

I'm also going to try to experience as much of this journey as possible with a full group of six players.

That is partly because playing EverQuest with a group is how I enjoy the game most, but Lethar gives us another reason to do it.

The new Personal Loot system rewards full groups with additional loot rolls. A six-player group can receive three Personal Loot items per eligible kill for each player, alongside the normal loot generated by the NPC.

So if we're going to test what Lethar is about, we might as well embrace one of its most significant new features.

It will also be interesting to see whether this actually changes the way people interact with one another.

Lethar isn't a Truebox server, which is something I'm slightly disappointed about. With mercenaries available from the beginning as well, there is clearly going to be plenty of opportunity for people to build their own groups rather than relying entirely on other players.

I'm going to take the opposite approach.

I want six people.

I want to follow the journey together.

And I want to see what happens.

We don't know what Lethar will be yet

There are plenty of other changes coming with Lethar.

There are unusual equipment rules, Legacy Characters, Heirloom items, changes to how equipment levels work and a whole host of other differences from a conventional EverQuest progression server.

But I'm deliberately not going to turn this first article into a list of rules.

I've read about them.

Now I want to play with them.

Some of these systems may turn out to be brilliant. Others may be less interesting than they sound on paper. Some things may work very differently once several thousand players are all trying to do the same thing at the same time.

We'll discover that as we go.

And that's really the point of this series.

I'm not setting out to write a guide to Lethar before I've played it. I'm setting out to document what happens when I take a journey through EverQuest that I have travelled many times before, but this time on the first day of a brand-new server.

So, for now, there isn't much more to say.

The character is waiting.

The quests are waiting.

Norrath is waiting.

Now I just want the server to open.

Location: St Clement, Jersey

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