Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
New Player trying to get into Everquest II and completely overwhelmed Please help! (I am an ultra no
Blazzerm
Member Posts: 2
Hi,
I've decided to buy Everquest II as the next mmorpg that i'm going to try. Hopefully this is a good choice?
I went to www.amazon.co.uk to buy it. However there were about 6 versions of the game. I assume all expansions and etc. Which copy do i want to buy as my starting disk set. I don't think i'm going to be interested in expansions at this stage of my Everquest career because i'm not at that stage of the game yet. (I am however assuming that expansions are not necessary to play the original online game, much like World of Warcrap?) 
Could someone please point me out to which game i want to buy first. If you are feeling especially generous could you please give me a link?
Also i saw something about a free trial on the Everquest II site. Could someone please quickly explain to me if this is worth it?
One more question. My PC has 1g RAM a decent processor but my Graphics card is ye olde now nvidia gforce 5200 or something (shock horror). Will this run the game efficiently enough?
Thanks lads / girls (if any play mmorpgs!) 
Comments
all you need is echoes of fawyder..... it has the original , and all expansions in one box!
to add also 5200 can run it but you really need a new card go for a 7900 series
Yes. Echoes of Faydwer is the one you need to buy; it will include every expansion in the game. If you obtain the station pass, you also receive the "adventure packs" for free, which are dungeon add-ons. However, you can also buy these separately, and they are entirely optional to buy. I have them all because I have the station pass.
I think it is an awesome game, and I hope you have fun with it!
-----
WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
Thanks guys.
How do i buy the station pack with the game that you suggested to buy?
How do i get my free week advertised on the main site?
One more question for the guy who suggested about another graphics card (or anyone else who can help!). I'm not sure what cards my motherboard can support. Any ideas how i find this out and is installing graphics cards simple as abc or something i need to pay a shop to do?
I and a friend of mine had a problem with signing-up for station pass; we both had to call SOE to sign up. However, we both had old accounts that were active with EQ 1, Vanguard, etc.
Here is the link, especially if you are making a new account: station-access.station.sony.com/
This is what my friend had to do, and I actually had to do it for him: I canceled his EQ 1 account, and then in edit subscription I added Vanguard to the Station pass. It worked for him. I am not sure if it will work for you. For my account, I simply called SOE using their number, which is somewhere but hard to find on the web page, and spoke with some one and explained that I want to have the Station Pass and he did it for me on the phone.
I hope some one responds to this that knows how to sign-up for the station pass easier than I do, because I had problems with signing up but no problems since.
-----
WoW and fast food = commercial successes.
I neither play WoW nor eat fast food.
It is true that you dont need all expansions but if you buy eq2 retail box or desert of flames you can easily get to 1 level to 60 but u will not gain any aa and you will pass a lot of areas that u can see in same level both to original eq2 content and feydwer ,you might make any friends and you will not be able to follow them not to mention you might be guild member unless if you want to solo from 1-50 .
Also you can play fae race if you have feydwer .As for your card it might be a litle laggy when there will be a lot of people around not mention raid .
I have 2 gb ram and same card and i am planning to upgrade my hall computer in a few days .
the graphics definantly have to be upgraded if you want lag free gaming. may i suggest, if you have the money, the new Geforce 8800GTX (i have the 8800GTS and the GTX is slighty better) or, for about 30 bucks more, you can go for the new ATI Radeon HD 2900 XT card which provides a little boost in fps (frames per second) in games compared to the 8800.
I'll try to consolidate all the necessary information here.
1) What box to buy: The Echoes of Faydwehr contains the original game and all expansions.
2) Adventure packs are NOT expansions. You can purchase them separately as digital downloads, or if you subscribe to an Station Access account, you'll get them for free as long as you maintain the Station Access Account.
3) Graphics: When I first began playing EQ2, I had a single core 2gb processor, 512mb ram, gforce 5200. The game ran okay in the small towns and wide open areas but in the cities, I could barely move. My poor machine chug-chugged along like the little engine that almost could. Zoning was a nightmare that took forever. Someone had a great article on tweaking the settings to get better performance and it helped the framerate somewhat but I still avoided the major cities at all costs. I'm mostly a soloer, so I managed to enjoy the game even with the limitations.
Today I have a dual core processor, 2gb ram and an nvidia 7300 and the game runs beautifully. It's a pleasure to travel through the cities. I'm not running it with all the bells and whistles on, but I'm running it with the ones I care about and that's all that matters. I could care less about shadows, let alone the shadows from the closest 10 avatars too.
I'm sure EQ2 has optimized graphics over the past couple years so with your 1gb ram, you may run the game in a playable fashion for the most part, but for true enjoyability, or if graphics is super important, you should get up into the nvidia 7000+ range (at least) and 2gb ram. The only way you'd maybe need more is in raid situations where you'd have 50+ players on screen at one time.