Well I’ve been running around Loping Planes for a couple of weeks and been doing the quests there lately so I thought I’d throw out my little review on this last main zone of EoF. My Warlock is only level 64 so I haven’t actually been able to see a lot of it due to the fact that it is a level 70 zone. However, I have been able to get the basic gist.
The zone is actually rather bland. It is EoF’s “dark” zone. There seems to be at least one “dark” zone in every expansion. At launch it was Nek Forest and Lavastorm, DoF was Pillars of Flame (which was actually not bad), and KoS saw Bonemire (still like the glowy rivers). Now what I mean by dark zone is that these zones seem to be in perpetual nighttime. It is really hard to see in these zones and there is no real reason for it as they are all above ground in the open, and often without trees. This zone in particular seems very much like Nek Forest in the mountains (not surprising because EOF’s theme is in the mountains).
Actually the zone is extremely weird comparitively. The other zones are all very beautiful, often forested. This zone is very drab, very ugly, very blah. I think when looking around at what creatures they hadn’t used much in the previous game they came up with Vampires (which had only really been featured in their crappy first adventure pack). They then decided to make this zone a “horror” themed zone, which like I said seems out of place for this expansion. I suppose it is nice to have variety in the expansion but it doesn’t work for me (maybe I am biased, I hate dark zones).
They filled this zone with wolves, stirges, vampires, bears, spiders, werewolves, gremlins, and ghouls (which apparantly are not undead). The zone has a somewhat decent town. It actually has the most mideval feel to it than any town previously. Everything is made out of grey rock and has a very lived in feel. I actually like the town, but the rest of the zone I could do without.
Not surprisingly, there seem to be a lot of heroic quests in this zone. It is a 70 zone after all and they want to make it more difficult to get there, however there are a few nice little solo quests, but nothing as good as say Steamfont which remains the best questing zone in EoF.
Not much else to say, this actually is the only thumbs down EoF zone of mine, which is too bad that they chose it for the high level one that people will generally have to sit and play quite alot in.