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The first 60 hours of Everquest II. A Tale By Me.
Kiamde
Member CommonPosts: 5,820
I sit in my chair while the phone rings. I know it is my girlfriend. She has called 3 times in the past hour. I ignore the ringing again. I know she will be furious, but I dont care. I nibble on leftover On the Border appetizers. I leave the salsa. I hate salsa. I pour myself another cup of coffee. It is my 5th cup of the hour and I need the facilities. I type AFK BIO on my screen. Even after the words are said, it takes me 3 minutes to tear myself away. I look at my feet. Where are my shoes. I go to my bathroom. There is a mirror. I close my eyes to avoid seeing myself. My aching back and shoulders, I think, as I enter. I open a drawer and put out a bottle of aspirin. I put two in my hand. Bottoms up. I fling the aspirin into my mouth. I miss my mouth. They fall to the ground, quite dramatically, like two doves in slow motion only they are not doves-they are government officials in disguise. I pitch the traitors. They will never help me. I sit down on the toilet, forgetting why I came there in the first place. I miss the seat and I hit the floor. While on the floor, in a sleep-deprived stage, I look at the ceiling. I stare at it for 10 minutes. Not thinking. Not blinking. Just staring. The phone is ringing again.
This is myself after my first 60 hours of playing Everquest II. A zombie, resembling the Phantom of the Opera. Quite a fun time it has been. Quite
fabulous?
Ok, back to the review.
Before its release, Everquest II was stated as being a mediocre game, constantly being under the shadow of World Of Warcraft in daily Which is better? threads. In beta, it was described as a buggy, laggy, and vanilla EQ clone. EQ clone? Wait? Never mind. This is my review of my first 60 hours of gameplay.
As an evil player, I am reviewing my experience on the evil island.
~The Good~
Graphics-
The Graphics, oh the graphics. What is not to like? Lighting, textures, aliasing, and colors are all laid out so well that you will often see yourself looking at the landscape while your party is being attacked, screaming for help, screaming for THE AMERICAN ARMY. The engine is truly a landmark. The races are all unique looking and are beautifully designed. Water effects will make your mouth water and the night sky, which is different every night your look at it, will have your eyes cry with tears of joy.
The Guilds-
Desolation rocks. Hands down. They are the first guild on Befallen to get guild titles ever and they are second only to a guild with 5 times their numbers. You cant get a better guild with better people. It makes the game a ton more fun. Getting Ventrillo and talking and guiding each other while joking around makes the game all the more fun.
Game play-
The game play is original and quite unique. Quests are very worthwhile and they are everywhere. Some 25% of all NPCs have a quest or two for you. The learning curve is teeter-totter. Once you learn the basics, it is a breeze to learn the more advanced points. When a person on the gamefaqs boards asked me how the newbie islands were, I was shocked. I could not remember myself playing the newbie islands. Not one point. I thought about blaming my lack of sleep and nutrition, but then I realized that the newbie island tutorial was so quick and easy, you did not need to remember what you did there. All the classes have skills that are laid out as you level so you cannot mess up your template at your early levels. You cant take a bad spell, cant take a bad stance, and cant take a bad attack. It is planned fool proof. The classes are all fun looking. I cant judge on how they all play, since I have only experienced the fighter, though. Each one plays an important role in the group. The death system is spectacular. When you die, you dont lose experience, you have debt, much like City of Heroes. Group debt that everyone gets when a person in their group dies keeps the whole group on their toes to help their teammates to avoid the nasty debt they may receive.
Audio-
The audio and sound effects will own your badgers. Each NPC has its unique voice and funny dialogue. Sony really went out of the way to do this for us.
The World-
The world of Norrath is very industrialized and busy. The layout of the land is ingenious. Instead of one huge capital city Freeport, there are different zones that you go into. The cities are also massive. Luckily, SOE was smart enough to include ways to navigate easily with docks a sort of bind spell that everyone receives.
~The Bad~
Community-
I will say it upright. The community is bad. When it is not bad, it is dumb. During my experiences on Norrath, I encountered many fools and jerks. People who join your group, only to boss everyone around, people who do not help you when you are about to die and are screaming for help while running from an aggro, and people who do not assist you when you are grouping and need to kill an enemy. Assisting is a feature that allows the person to quickly attack the enemy you are attacking. Many fools do not do this and attack their own enemy if it is a multiple pull, thus, getting things done twice as slow. There are braggers, PEOPLE WHO TALK LIKE THIS, and people who try to role-play with you when you really, really, hate people saying, Come young warriors, unite in our fellowship! We must toss our heavy fighters to the front gates to save our people from the evils of the sewer monsters that feed on the souls of the living! It is not pretty. I expect it to get better once the players get a better feel for the game.
The customizability-
While I enjoy it, others may not. The fact that you cant customize your characters skills other than picking resistances and a few attacks may tick off the template masters. The armor choices in the first 20 levels are also not very huge so everyone can look alike in ways. Not too bad to me.
Enemy AI-
Enemies are vanilla. They agro when you get near and Bring-A-Friend sometimes, but in the end, there is no Horizons or City of Heroes style AI here at all. Could be better.
Grind and such-
It takes 100+ hours to get from level 1 to 20. 20 is the level you get a subclass, where the customizability starts and it takes a long time to get there. Sometimes levels can go on for hours and hours and soloing is really not too fun.
~The Ugly~
System specs and lag-
I play on a 9800 pro/512 RAM machine and I noticed much memory loss and lag. Spots where there are many people, NPCs and players alike have much choppiness. I used the guide on
http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=grph&message.id=225&no_redir=true
to tweak my settings to make the game look as beautiful with the least amount of lag but I still lag like you-know-what in cities. I will need to update my RAM very soon. Good thing the game comes with a 43% off coupon of Kingston RAM.
Bugs, Bugs, Bugs
The bugs, well pardon the pun, bug me. They are everywhere in every shape in form. From enemies getting stuck in walls and boxes and doors, to ranged weapons like Yetis bow not firing half the time. Sometimes a pulled group of mobs will suddenly disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again. Everquest II should have been released a month later to correct these bugs but they are bearable.
My review ends. I sit in my chair. Content. Happy. I remember that I have work tomorrow. I am not happy. I want to play Everquest II all week, 24/7. I want to smell the odor of coffee all weeknight. I want to ignore my girlfriend some more, because I like to make her cry for eating my candy. I want to finish this review. I want to play more. The phone is ringing. I snicker. I snicker louder. I open my mouth and cackle. HA HA HA! I say. The phone stops ringing. I smile.
These Are Pics of A Large 18 Person Raid We Had Earlier That Are Here To Show Why Desolation Frankly, Owns Befallen.
http://www.coldnetwork.net/content/uploaded/EQ2_000002.jpg
http://www.coldnetwork.net/content/uploaded/EQ2_000004.jpg
http://www.coldnetwork.net/content/uploaded/EQ2_000000.jpg
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Comedy and propriety...going together like Peanut Butter and Turpentine
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind..-'Jim Morrison"
"When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out." ~Abbie Hoffman
Comments
Great review my friend. Although I am buying WoW, I still would like to play this game (on my dad's computer cuz mine sucks) to see if i like it.
Can you get/do you have a screenshot of this. It sounds pretty funny and I want to see it for myself.
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
|
RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
Good review except I have to dsagree or call BS on a lot of what you call the bad.
Community- Which server are you on? I know of one server where the biggest jerk guild from EQI has called home. Avoid it like the plague. On Antonica so far most I have met are decent people, a few are not, but considering the numbers of people in the game it is a very small percentage in my opinion.
Also you can start customizing your character at lvl 7. Then every couple of lvls after that. I see many many unique armors also. I am not sure where you are getting this from. Low lvls below 10 there is a great deal of simularity but then things really start to bloom.
Grpahic lag? You maybe need to take a strong look at your machine. I have played on 2 machines and just have to tweak the settings a bit. Low end machine is P4 1.7, 512 2700 DDR, and a TI4200/128 and I can get around 25-35 FPS on low settings. Not doubting you, because a guildie is having a heck of a time tweaking his machine in. However I suspect bad memory or driver problems in his case.
As far as bugs go so far I have not encountered a single one, not that I have been playing 12 or 15 hours a day, but if they are there they are definitly above lvl 15. A few server problems is the worst thing I have encountered so far, and they have dropped to the lvl of annoyance, rather than cursing SOE. The graphics anomalies you are citing could very well be on your side. Combine that with complaints about lag that you have and I would almost bet they are. Time to go drop a few hundred on a new card if I were you.
Anyway the game is blast isn't it. SOE took the best features out of almost every MMORP out there and combined them into a winner. I for one never thought they could untill I betaed the game ifigured it was everything bad that you described. I have a feeling a lot of WoW fans who give it a try will be cancelling their preorders. I know a few that have already.
I miss DAoC
Hey Kiamde its me tekvenge from desolation.... I wouldnt consider the community bad, I would say its because most people are newbies who dont know what they are really doing yet. give it some time, I only really group with guildes so Im always good
also i have a radeon 9800 and a gig of ram and i NEVER have lag even on balanced settings....
my 2 cp
Good review.
----------------------------------
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."
-- Ken Olson, chairman of Digital Equipment Corp, 1977
Ah yes, I hate this little bug. We were in the Wailing Caverns, fighting a group of 3 or 4 orcs and after we killed 2, we couldn't see the others. It still showed us in combat, but there was nothing around. We began to move around until one of us saw an orc appear. It wasn't a respawn or anything, it showed we were in combat with it, but it just stood there staring at us. Finally we attacked it and it woke up and appeared. (and no it wasn't an invisible mob, I cast that spell on me to see if thats what happened but that didn't work) Luckily this happens pretty rarely (actually the only times I've had it happen is in dungeons such as the Caverns) and isn't that big a deal; you could always just walk away and leave them be.
---------------------------- Desolation Guild Website ---------------------------
Currently:
Beta: WOW
Playing: EQII
(yeah, both... deal with it)
Currently:
Playing: WOW & GW
[quote]Originally posted by Kiamde
~The Bad~
Community-
I will say it upright. The community is bad. When it is not bad, it is dumb. During my experiences on Norrath, I encountered many fools and jerks. People who join your group, only to boss everyone around, people who do not help you when you are about to die and are screaming for help while running from an aggro, and people who do not assist you when you are grouping and need to kill an enemy. Assisting is a feature that allows the person to quickly attack the enemy you are attacking. Many fools do not do this and attack their own enemy if it is a multiple pull, thus, getting things done twice as slow. There are braggers, PEOPLE WHO TALK LIKE THIS, and people who try to role-play with you when you really, really, hate people saying, �Come young warriors, unite in our fellowship! We must toss our heavy fighters to the front gates to save our people from the evils of the sewer monsters that feed on the souls of the living!� It is not pretty. I expect it to get better once the players get a better feel for the game.
This is true of all MMORPGs, morons are abundant. I have met some great people in EQ2 and some idiots as well, I truthfully can't recall a MMORPG that wasn't full of morons. And, not to bash WoW, but the type of people who play Blizzard games (well, the worst type, not the only, maybe the majority though..) are immature morons. Maybe the fact that WoW is a pay to play game has thinned out the morons, I couldn't comment.
The customizability-
While I enjoy it, others may not. The fact that you can�t customize your character�s skills other than picking resistances and a few attacks may tick off the template masters. The armor choices in the first 20 levels are also not very huge so everyone can look alike in ways. Not too bad to me.
I agree, I am sort of a template whore. I still enjoy the class system though; very balanced in my opinion, it still retains strategy as well, some healers are better paired with some tanks, etc.
~The Ugly~
System specs and lag-
I play on a 9800 pro/512 RAM machine and I noticed much memory loss and lag. Spots where there are many people, NPCs and players alike have much choppiness. I used the guide on
http://eqiiforums.station.sony.com/eq2/board/message?board.id=grph&message.id=225&no_redir=true
to tweak my settings to make the game look as beautiful with the least amount of lag but I still lag like you-know-what in cities. I will need to update my RAM very soon. Good thing the game comes with a 43% off coupon of Kingston RAM.
What can I say, its not a big deal really, all newer games that want to stand any chane of large sucsess will hav high end graphics/cpu requirments. I will say this: the 512ram recomendation is ridiculous. 1 GB is the minimum unless you enjoy subpar graphics and 5-10 fps.
Bugs, Bugs, Bugs
The bugs, well pardon the pun, bug me. They are everywhere in every shape in form. From enemies getting stuck in walls and boxes and doors, to ranged weapons like Yeti�s bow not firing half the time. Sometimes a pulled group of mobs will suddenly disappear into a black hole, never to be seen again. Everquest II should have been released a month later to correct these bugs but they are bearable.
I havn't found any of these bugs, as a matter of fact, most bugs i saw in beta are gone. Not that they don't exist, I just can't speak either way on this subject.
[/b][/quote]
Good review all in all.
What server are you on?
Mistmoore here.
Welcome to the forums, Gray. Thank you all for the input.
I am on Befallen server. I know it is a full server and that may account for some lag, which I forgot to mention. I know that most of the community issues are because Everquest II is a new experience for many, but I play with an organized guild so my expectations may be a bit high.
Not literally a "black hole", but the mobs disapear into thin air. With no warnings at all. Where they go, nobody knows.
-----------------
Comedy and propriety...going together like Peanut Butter and Turpentine
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind..-'Jim Morrison"
"When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out." ~Abbie Hoffman
I know i hate the Gui aswell
Kiamde do me a favor
You have 512 ram, I have 512, you have EQ2, I want to play EQ2
You say EQ2 runs horrible with 512....but you are playing on Befallen
, which is very popular.
Can you create new chars on Blackburrow and Nektulos? I think you wont have problems playing there. Go play there and tell me if you still suffer lag.
Do it, plz
im begging you, just look at me
Pleeeeeeeeeease?
Help me
, I really want to play it.
Whats to hate? You can customize it pretty much the way you want. I have 4 skills tables set up one on each side, and can add others if I want or as few as I want. 3 chat windows, each for different chat functions, all of which fade out if not in use. Probably the most flexible GUI I have ever ran across. Edit- the only thing the GUI does not have that I would like to see is tabbed chat.
Call me a fanbois if you want these are just facts dude.
I miss DAoC
I never stated that it ran horrible. It just runs choppy in cities and I could not get the graphics that I knew I could run with a few hundred more megs of RAM.
-----------------
Stealing sub-woofers everywhere!
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind..-'Jim Morrison"
"When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out." ~Abbie Hoffman
Can you do it?
You know.........make a char in Blackburrow and Nektulos just for testing
-In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08-
|
RISING DRAGOON ~AION US ONLINE LEGION for Elyos
Strange, every single group I've joined was doing pretty well. Out of the 20+ random groups with random people I've joined so far... I can only remember 2 incidents where I joined @sses that after their had finished their quest, they just disbanded and didn't even say bye.
And sure, when you have a large group, there may be 1 or 2 members that suck and do whatever they want. But as long as the clerics do their jobs, then it's not all that bad.
I mean in all MMORPGs it's gonna be the same. I've joined groups in Star Wars Galaxies, City of Heroes and Dark Age of Camelot where the group hunts sometimes sucked. But EQ2 does not have more, it has as many as those other games.
If I must complain about 1 thing in EQ2, it's the fact that SOE really should of thought it over when creating their quests. Sure it offers players a challenge to seek out in an unknown world, a place to visit or an NPC to talk to. But for crying out loud, that doesn't do jack sh1t... most people just end up asking in /ooc : "Where is (insert NPC name) in the town?" or "Where can I find (insert name of location) in Antonica?" ... from what I've seen, 1 out of 10 people do not get an answer, while the other 9 do get answers and are helped. Which is a good number, but that pretty much makes such hard challenges useless. And in the long run, it just causes more spam than anything else. SOE should of done something like in Dark Age of Camelot where the NPCs that give the quests are more detailed on where to go or where to find the specific NPC. But no... they let us gamers find out, but we end up spamming instead to find out what to do.
I hope SOE will change this someday OR there will be a full FAQ to each quest and how to solve them to stop the spam.
____ _ ____________ _ ____
Everquest 2 female elves are HAWT! World of Warcraft nightelves are NAWT! I'm not an EQ2 fanboy, I'm an elf fanboy. (^_^)
I'll go for blond hair, white skin elves anyday!!!
____ _ ____________ _ ____
___________ ___ __ _ _ _
Stealth - Ambush - Hemorrhage - Sinister Strike x2 - Cold Blood - Eviscerate - Vanish - Preparation - Cold Blood - Ambush - ... you're dead! :P
I'll wait for the game to be free and monthly fee to be $12 or less. Oh wait, it never will so I guess I'll never play. I'll wait for DnD online.
Thanks for your review. I've never played EQ and it looks like I will not start now.
No, I will not be trying out World of Warcraft either.
I think that the free first month package is very nice. You get all the extras that cost more for a full month, like your EQII website and guild page ect for free when that would cost 20 bucks if it was not a free month. The game also comes with a "up to 43% off" deal for Kingston RAM. Nice to me.
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Stealing sub-woofers everywhere!
"Whoever controls the media controls the mind..-'Jim Morrison"
"When decorum is repression, the only dignity free men have is to speak out." ~Abbie Hoffman
Was a nice review, thanks for a good job
I would say the community will change with guys coming from the old good EQLive to try out EQ2 (at least i hope so).
yea I missed that raid
hopefully it's the only one I missed with the guild, I didn't do the kei quest today!
http://www.facebook.com/murtb