I’m awake, I’m awake! A rather low-key, but quite pleasant seasonal period, which I spend in my traditional manner – obsessively playing MMORPGs and gradually going insane, feral and nocturnal, in various order. This year it was mostly the turn of Everquest II to play host, with a smattering of Second Life and the odd day out in Guild Wars.

All very agreeable, but EQ2 really does deserve special mention for it's Christmas..er..."Frostfell"...offering. You sort of get used to the Typical MMO Seasonal Event after a while - Valentine, Halloween, Christmas - a chance for an MMO to do something a little different - a bit of bunting, an extra quest or two and so on. Usually the emphasis is on 'little' however, and the most one can reasonably expect is a few festive decorations at the bank, some novelty food and drink items and a limited edition quest, resulting in, if you're lucky, a suitably themed, but essentially useless, toy, that will end up taking up much needed bank space, and never be seen again past the day you got it, to ultimately end up being destroyed to make room for another stack of Generic Tradeskill Farmed Resource #5. A shame.

Certainly I appreciate it, but it's never that much of a fuss, usually a perfunctory nod in the direction of seasonal cheer from an already overworked and probably quite beleaguered development or live content team. Interesting, but very much a case of 'You know the drill...'

(Indeed, by all counts, WoW's Christmas thing was apparently identical to the previous year's one, probably a toggle in the server code somewhere. Still, what with that expansion thing, they're probably all a bit busy at Blizzard Towers this year.)

All of the above makes me wonder if the current EQ2 Live team actually have enough proper work to be getting on with these days, because the Super Bonus Frostfell Extravaganza I skidded into the other night, while busy on my way from somewhere to somewhere else, somewhat beggared belief.

As well as the more expected Christmas decorations draped pretty much everywhere - bows, lights, snow, trees, candy canes and so on - the centre-piece turned out to be a Magic Wardrobe leading to an entire new zone, complete with snow, lamppost and the entirety of Dickens' 'A Christmas Carol', (largely played by a supporting cast of Gnomes and Goblins) available to work through as a solo-instanced quest chain.

The rest of the landscape was spawning harvestable ground-spawn resource nodes, 'Presents', which could be ransacked for raw materials to build literally dozens of Christmassey house items and clothes, challenging the inventory management of even the most anally-retentive, such as myself. The winner for me here was the craftable fireplaces - quite elaborate items to brighten up the player housing, complete with selectable flame effects. The spawning of these presents was even fast enough to keep up with demand, as the entire population of the server descended on the them like locusts, leading to many comical scenes of panickey dashing about the snowy islands, grabbing as many bits and pieces as possible, for fear of the whole place going away again overnight. Was a lot like last minute food-shopping IRL, I thought, but they needn't have worried too much - as I write, the whole Christmas showcase is still available today, so plenty of time to complete the set of furniture.

Other quests were also to be found in world, giving out Chistmas trees, door wreaths, etc, there was some kind of big Christmas game of tag I found but didn't managed to try out, a chap in Christmas Land ...er...the Frostfell Winter Village... who was just giving out presents once every 24 hours, the most notable of which were a series of musical snowglobes I became quite addicted to (gotta catch 'em all) and of course the pseudo-PvP buckets of Snowballs, a perennial favourite, were available on most street corners, and those only got really irritating once, with most using them responsibly and in the spirit they were meant.

EQ2 really does well with this kind of thing, mostly because of it's instanced player housing, and placeable furniture options. Having a swanky Inn Room doesn't do anything particular to increase your character's power, and so it becomes possible to devise and give out all manner of cool-but-useless toys to mark all these Real World holidays. For my part, I love 'em. They aren't particularly special, and most of the items in my current house would be the work of minutes to recreate in Second Life, but I don't - they wouldn't mean as much I suppose, not having worked or quested to obtain them. After the Frostfell stuff, I had to move to a larger in-game house, just to fit it all in, along with my Altar of Brell, my Hungry Houseplant, my Clockwork Chopper, various other pets, books, wall-trophy weapons and assorted other items of bric-a-brac, and I must admit, I feel a little bit proud of it. Very little of it has any kind of real effect on gameplay, but I can still look at it all and think 'I did that'.

I decided enough was enough when I finished harvesting and building a cosy fireplace for my house's back garden, and now I'm just farming for the full set of snowglobes until it all goes away again, and we wait for the Valentine Thing - Festival of Elrossi or whatever they disguise it as.

All in all, I've quite enjoyed it. and again, it's more evidence of EQ2's seemingly relentless improvement form the frankly painful offering at it's release. More on that later, but it can be summed up quite succinctly and visually by looking in the far corner of my EQ2 'Bedroom'...see that feeble row of candles? That was the EQ2 2004 Christmas Offering, in it's entirety. I still keep them lit to remind me how bad it once was, but isn't any more...