After 16 hours of this run, and 40 in total, the story on Solomon Island has come to an end.
I was slightly aprehensive going into Blue Mountain. It's a zone I've sometimes seen mentioned in best/worst zone discussions of TSW/SWL, and not in a good way. I can think of a couple of reasons why it might be seen as such.
As I've mentioned before the mob density is very high in places, which makes for a more combat heavy experience than the prior zones. It's also, in comparison to Kingsmouth and Savage Coast, quite thin on story content. I left several mission chains untouched in Savage Coast, but in Blue Mountain I had to scrabble around for just about every mission and side mission to make up the XP required to continue the main story.
Which is probably where Blue Mountain suffers most. Throughout the zone the main story is very poorly paced - on two separate occasions I was sent to speak to someone only to be told when I got there that I needed to gain another 2 or 3 levels before I could actually talk to them. I suppose it's one way to get the player from one hub to the next, but it's still clumsy and does the pace of the story no favours.
The final confrontation with the big bad of the zone is also very disappointing. Beaumont had a couple of excellent scenes back in Savage Coast and earlier on in Blue Mountain, but upon returning for the final confrontation I find him standing there waiting for the fight to start without a word to say. It rather gives the impression that he's been doing nothing at all since his prior appearance, which is uncharacteristically lacking in agency.
All that said I didn't dislike Blue Mountain. It's not as good as Kingsmouth* but the best of it is at least as good as Savage Coast, and the scenery is better. Again, going back to something I've said before, the terrain can be difficult to traverse, but it feels natural rather than contrived.
*I should probably lay off the comparisons to Kingsmouth, in the interest of fairness and to avoid becoming very repetitive. That zone is an exceptional opening to the game, and one of the best I've experienced in this or any other MMO, so it's not really a useful observation to say that subsequent zones don't clear the very high bar it set.
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