Post mortem seems a confusingly apt phrase to use when EverQuest II’s most recent expansion, The Shadow Odyssey, is far from dead. A couple of months on and naturally the servers boast as healthy a population as ever (well, the player population is anyway – the native amphibian residents of Ykesha are looking worse for wear since being dredged up from EQII’s predecessor). In fact, half of the Frogloks are walking dead parodies of their happy hopping cousins, which fits into the general undead theme of this EverQuest II expansion pack.

Access to the new area of Guk is via a Gnomishinspired balloon ride from the Sinking Sands, a pleasant but protracted journey that heralds from ye olde EverQuest days of chartering ships and waiting ten minutes while it circumvents several perilous zones to your destination. The novelty It sounded great in the press release, but it just doesn’t cut it. 3 Verdict has worn off in the two months since this Steampunk transport was introduced, but given Najena’s stronghold in Befallen and vampire antics in Somborne, among other new tourist attractions, there’s enough to get your teeth into to warrant the journey only on the odd occasion. You need to be a minimum of level 50 to access the new content in Everfrost, Lavastorm, The Commonlands and beyond – but with the EQII team giving the apprentice end of the player hierarchy a significant booster shot, low level players shouldn’t kill too much time working up to that threshold.

Where Rise Of Kunark brought solo play for high level characters, TSO is far more of a group experience. There are more than a 100 solo quests in the overland of Guk, but you’re nudged towards the 20 six-man group dungeon instances.

It’s worth playing these instances however, even if you lean towards EQII’s solo-play bias and shun the company of others. The new dungeons are heavily scripted and play out much more like an instance from Dungeons & Dragons Online than a typical EQII quest. They’re rife with devastating AoE traps, puzzles (including a trampoline fight!) and wave upon wave of enemies – AoE spell specialists in particular will come in handy here, as large mobs tend to be relatively weak. The new rules of these dungeons caught veterans out and initially they caused a stir among purists in the community, who are used to a traditional tanking approach to EQII raids and instances, though they’ve now become a more accepted part of the world.

It’s good to see an established developer of a veteran MMORPG experimenting a little, and if SOE keeps this momentum up for each of its yearly expansions, EQII has the potential for a long life ahead.