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5 reasons why Everquest 2 is still a great alternative to WOW
CaptainSwag
Member Posts: 6
in Everquest II
Well, this was an interesting read. EQ2 was out of sight out of mind for so long, I was surprised that it was still running!
5 reasons why EQ 2 is still a great alternative to World of Warcraft
My personally feeling is that the game was never that bad, it just came out around WOW. Not to mention, by creating a sequel, SOE then ended up splitting the user base into 2, as many people stuck to EQ 1.
TheKartel.com be me home. Booty be my game.
Comments
The magic of EQ was missing in EQ2. I played for about 2 months and the game was just flat IMHO. They tried to be different at release then your standard clone of Wow that we have today which I thought was good. Then they changed a lot of things to be more like Wow after they saw their success. Think SWG. They should have stuck to their original vision and improved on that. But were talking Sony here and they are all about money and more money.
I stopped reading after this:
"The EQ2 community has been known to be extremely mature and more helpful than WoW players"
That is so BS. I have played on countless WoW servers back when I used to play WoW. I have played countless MMO's. Almost all big release since I started back in 2001. There is only 1 server that stands out amongst all those servers I have been into, and that is RK1 in Anarchy Online. People are exact the same, whether its LOTRO, WoW or WAR +++; selfish & elitistic.
END OF STORY!!
Make us care MORE about our faction & world pvp!
Does anybody know if they have released shader 3.0 yet?
Eq2 is definately not the flat game it was at release in 2004. Eq2 gets a lot of unfair criticism based on player experences from years ago much of which no longer apply to the current state of the game. Everquest II is very much improved with nice touches like polished guild halls, alternate character models, revamped armor, and appearance gear. Eq2 is worth a second look either if you have played it at release or never played at all.
I really enjoyed it when I played it. Think about going back to it every once in a while, but I'm too burned out of MMO's for at least another year.
EQ2 isn't that bad really. It has always been my themepark game of choice. I like the progress it's made, and really enjoyed the RP. Too bad the population on my pvp server went down to like less than 150 people online one time when I was playing causing me to rage quit. If FFXIV wasn't coming down the pipe I would probably be confident I would come back here one day. Oh well there is always EQ next.
I just hope SOE doesn't continue the trend of marketing and tailoring to non gamers and children. Every game they touch they bring in people who have no interest in the game they are making and ask them what they can do to get them to play and then do it thus alienating all of the gamers who were looking forward to it in the first place. I guarantee with EQ next there will be some kind of cash shop, tradeable card game, and extremely easy and dulled down gameplay. It is sad really that greed controls the companies with enough money to make a difference in the genre.
Perfect example is PoxNora, an amazing trading card online strategy game. They bought it. They brought in people who didn't play and asked them what would make it easier to play so they could bring in more new customers, and then ignored the entire player base when they screamed and ranted that what they were doing was going to ruin the game. In this game every single card you could get had experience and you could level it in a number of ways making it incredibly deep from a customization and strategy point of view. So what do they do? Remove this customization because it confuses new players even with a 90 page forum post with almost every community player screaming WTF WTF WTF. Great SOE... ruin another game for your current player base to bring in more revenue.
I just wish the game wasn't so poorly optimized. To get it to run and look decent you've gotta be ridiculously above minimum specs.
I've tried going back on trial spurts to see if they ever improved, and it always ends in frustration because of how crappy the game has to look in order to run decent.
I've played EQ2 early last year and I must say I liked it a lot more than WoW, but there were some issues that bugged me a lot...
With 1, 2 and 4 I can live, but 3 is something else. Because of it I swore NEVER to play ANY SOE game at all. I didn't even register an account at the Playstation Network for my 2 PSPs and PS2, that much I distrust Sony now >:(
The current problem with EQ2 is that it's too top heavy with a combination of too many expansions that its overwhelming for new players. Even smaller guilds require players to have maxed AA points and higher-end gear. The way they did expansions requires that you have all of them.
The community is openly hostile to new players who don't know ware things are or what gear to get. Because most of the community is at the cap, most lower level characters you see are going to be twinked alts who ether refuse to PUG or will only pug with other twinks. Grouping for small dungeons while leveling up is a mess as people will expect you to just know ware they are and how to get there.
Another problem with EQ2 is how crazy unbalanced classes are, about half the classes are well balanced for all content while the other half are only good for solo at best, many of which haven't received updates in years. To a new player this can be a huge shock when they get high enough to start grouping only to find out that groups would rather go with one less person then to bring your class
Yeah, that's my general sentiment as well. An MMO changes a lot over the course of many years. The latest expansion pack that we played honestly felt like a different game than when it launched.
Though I would agree with the other poster that the game could be made to be more user friendly if you are starting fresh today.
TheKartel.com be me home. Booty be my game.
My wife is still playing after nearly 4 yrs.
Nowadays it is mostly to raid with her guild 2 nights a week. Although there was a time she used to put in mega hrs soloing/harvesting/tradeskilling.
Considering she has put in 4 yrs of pretty dedicated play, I would have to say there is entertainment value to be had if you find the game's playstyle to your liking.
IMO though the quality/"hype" went down when Scott Hartsman left. After the launch fiasco, he did a heck of a job whiping that game into shape.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
One reason it's not:
The Station Exchange debacle.
They lost my business over that fiasco and I never looked back.
A shame too as it really wasn't a bad game and I rather enjoyed it until they went all solo friendly trying to capture some of the WoW crowd.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
I've got a pretty good PC and EQ2 lags like a barge. EQ2 does crazy stuff to reduce lag like having multiple instance of the same zone, usually a city. Sometimes you want to meet someone to buy something and you can't find them: 'what instance you in? 3? Okay, i'm headed to instance 3 now.'
Can you imagine how bad it was 5 years ago with the PCs back then?
Lag.
And the EQ2 combat system is pretty lame.
All that aside, I've played it for a month or two once.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
EQ2 is a good game, but it has a lot of problems, the least of which are the plethora of performance issues. This new expansion has me seriously contemplating giving the game a second look, but I don't have my epic weapon, and I don't have the time to work on it until the summer. If the equipment on the way to level 90 nullifies the ungodly advantage players with epic weapons currently have over players without their epics, I may consider coming back, but as it stands, the expansion seems to be rather small to justify my returning to the game.
It's an interesting game that really looks great now because of the gradual improvement of PC specs. So much better than WoW in that department.
What kind of "pretty good PC" do you have? (Specs)
Reason not to.
Soe + StationCash
/thread
^^
EQ1-AC1-DAOC-FFXI-L2-EQ2-WoW-DDO-GW-LoTR-VG-WAR-GW2-ESO
It bottlenecks at certain points. It is how the game was built and how the performance was designed with the character models and all the spells hitting at once. You can turn down the settings to where it is fine for me, but for weaker systems, I'm sure it just makes the game look weird. I know why they did this and it was smart to plan ahead for better hardware in the future so the game will last longer as far as the graphics, but it is the economy and the people that changed and they aren't the same type of people playing anymore, most kids today play on the console and it isn't MMO. On top of that the combat mechanics are not fun, they are just a mindless grind that doesn't require any brains or strategy to do. Everybody for the most part just hits all the buttons for the melee classes and for the spell casters, they just go down 1 rotation of spells and wait for other cool downs. It is mindless and boring!
It doesn't matter who plays that game, people will get bored after a while and quit! The only people playing right now are the people that aren't tired of it yet and happen to be playing at the same time as the other people that happen to be playing that aren't tired of it yet.
No thanks!
Did you try the new alternate character models? They look and run better than the defualt models.
I just looked at some videos on youtube, and I must say that the world looks utter garbage! Where is the vegetation? Anyone who says this looks "good" really need their head checked. The first thing that hit me when I started looking at this game on youtube, was that it looks no better than Anarchy Online, quite similar actually.
This game just look awful & terrible. Well, maybejust as well, cause SOE does not deserve a penny for their games.
Make us care MORE about our faction & world pvp!
Even with Vanguards lack of population i still think it's a better game,yeah it had bad problems when it release but so did EQ2. Vanguard is not the same buggy game it was 3 years ago,it just needs promoting by SOE.
Furious Fighters
http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/13trindx.htm
I have had many breaks in wow where I just raid and play other games.
Both Vanguard and EQ2 have been good to me, but Vanguard is the better choice as It felt EQ2 was a little..clunky..
I enjoyed both but yep, EQ2 is a good alternative to wow, in fact more to it over all.
"Not that bad" seems to be a recurring statement people make about EQ2 and I think it fits.
The game isn't "that bad", but at the same time it isn't really great either. There is a lot of potential in the game and it has some nice features, but even the good aspects of the game seem to be followed by some "but" that leads into some problem that needs to be overlooked.
When people have to recommend avoiding certain classes, servers and starting zones then I wouldn't call it a "great" alternative to a game that is praised for its polish. Even the starting advice is how to fix the poor ui and bad default graphics of the game to get it to a decent level of acceptance.
The game could be so much better, but it just hasn't reached that level for a number of reason, which is why it routinely gets endorsed as "not that bad". It should be a great alternative to wow, but the problems with the game really keep it from achieving that position with so many players desperately looking for a new game to play.
I played EQ2 for about 2 weeks from launch. I thought it was pretty, but it had faults. The core problem I had with this game was the combat mechanics. In order to achieve the best damage, you had to press hotkeys when they associated move glowed or lit-up. It felt like playing Simon Says and I wasn't able to do what I wanted or the damage was weak. I think they called it a Heroic Opportunity, or some such nonsense.
Is the combat system still the same?