*Click links throughout for picture goodness

So I had a little time to peruse the new free content which will be coming with GU 35 hopefully at the end of May. I liked what I saw, in fact I’ll go so far as to say I was pretty impressed by everything. The new content will be a new race - the Arasai, a new starting city - Neriak, and a new overland zone for levels 1-20 - Darklight Wood. You can see full details here. All of the new content is meant to be evil in nature, and really has a great evil and foreboding feel throughout.

The new Arasai are as to be expected very much like the Fae. They have the same basic model and size, but they do have different skin colors and some pretty badass wing selections. I had a good time looking through some of the new character select options and even the skin colors seemed to have more variety, it looks as though you will be able to have a green-skinned Arasai if you wish.

As far as starting out as a new character the new content seems to be the usual goodness, and very much in line with what they did with the EoF starting character content. You start in a little town with plenty of npc’s that have a bunch of easy adventure and harvesting quests for you to do. They were decently fun to do, and within 30 minutes I easily got my new Arasai up to level 6.

Next some exploration was in order, I set out to find the city of Neriak and to find out what other treasures (and horrors) this new zone contained. Darklight woods was a big zone, now mind you not as big as say…Nektukulos Forest, but definately in line with the size of Lesser Fay and there were plenty of sights to see. I found an evil gypsy camp, where I also found a guard atop what I can only imagine is an upgraded version of the warg mount. I found a huge haunted tree, which had a big door leading inside. Inside I found the tree seemed to contain multiple levels but some of these were blocked off, I can only imagine these will be opened up through a series of quests as we saw in the tower in Fallen Dynasty. I also found a very cool looking vampire tower which seemed to be the top level of content in the zone (mobs were all 19-20). All around the zone many of the usual mobs were seen hanging about - skeletons en masse, bats, drakes, werewolves, evil vulture birds, plenty of vampires, etc.

So back to my search for Neriak; it took me awhile to find it, probably because the entrance is nothing more than a big door into the mountain with 2 half-naked ladies on either side. Don’t let the small entrance fool you though, Neriak is pretty awesome inside. As I have referenced many times, Neriak is an evil city within an evil land and does of great job of fitting the part. Many of the buildings emit eerie auras, the guards are on scary versions of the Mistrunner mounts, the dogs look like hell hounds, and there are vampires walking around town. I won’t go into great detail of every building and everything within, but the art and music of this zone definately blew me away.

I’ve heard this new free content was designed by the Taiwan SOE studio, the same ones that brought us the Fallen Dynasty adventure pack. I thought the Fallen Dynasty add-on had a great design and am already very impressed by this free add-on which is still on the test server. I also love the little things that remind me of Fallen Dynasty, such as the haunted tree I mentioned above and just the overall feel of Darklight Wood and Neriak. I’m not sure who did the music for this but make sure and crank it up and give it a listen when you get a chance to explore these new zones. Nothing better than spooky zones with some spooky music to go along with it. Well done