Blast from the Past - EverQuest2

Before I start...

let me say that this is a post I made on my guild's forum, years ago when EverQuest2 was still in its early beta phase. (yes, I was a naughty naughty boy! I leaked beta information whilst I was under NDA... :( Of course, I never do things like that anymore, I just didnt know any better, back then!... honestly ;) )

So lets take a ride in my time machine!

We're warping back to early 2004!

Imagine that you're an ex-everquest1 player, eagerly awaiting news of a much anticipated sequel... *drumroll*

EverQuest2 - Early Beta

lets put it this way... My fondest memory of EverQuest 2 was while i was downloading the client... I was imagining how cool the game would be, super graphics and a totally revised crafting system! wow!

all that came crashing to the ground as i finally managed to log into the game... its a fucking lagfest, imagine Star Wars galaxies with stinking everquest pushed so far up its ass that you end up with npcs speaking like Yoda and reading their script like actors in a hong kong fu action flick...

The voice over gets on my friggin nerves, most of the time im done reading the text before the npc even starts speaking the second line... They try to talk real fantasy'ish, but it just ends up sounding like a retard who is unable to visualize the actual aims and goals of his character... Some of the npcs speak aristocratic english... unfortunately... their voice actors are american... and it sounds like shit :p

I happened upon a Kerra female and she was rolling so badly on her R's that i actually thought the computer had crashed in the middle of the word: Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrief and Perrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrfect

Sure, i can handle a 1 second rolling r... but 2+ seconds is just a fucking joke

ok, enough with the ridiculous voice acting, ill get on with my whine (pass the cheese please)

You regain hp and mana, if possible... SLOWER than EQ1... compared to other games out there, for some reason SoE believes that its good to rest between even con fights at lvl 3-4, it will provide you with those precious 1 minute breaks to contemplate your situation (Do i really wanna keep this shit up? I think not... ... well at least thats what i was thinking whenever i sat down to rest for mana)

The Quest system is quite ok though, in fact, its just like the system of World of Warcraft... Except you have no clue which npcs give you quests before you speak to them, and the quest doesnt show up before you actually accept it... meaning you need to read through a bunch of garbage (or worse yet, listen to a drama school reject trying to read the quest out loud for you with a voice that wouldnt even be accepted in the muppet show... ok, the gnomes own, they have cool voices and actually fit the world, kudos to SoE, 1 out of 16 races... way to go :p)

My point here is... we live in an internet society, why not make it easy for the players and let em know which npcs have quests etc, instead of making them go to the web and search the web for quests... In WoW you know the rewards before accepting the quest, in EQ2 you know the reward when you complete the quest and find out you dont have room for it :p (at least they have an OverFlow spot that holds item that couldnt fit in the inventory) I enjoyed the fact that i was able to play WoW without having to tab out constantly to read various tables and forms about crafting or skills or quests... its all in the game and its well written and it blends nicely with the ingame information... wow 1 - eq2 0... heck no... lets make it wow 1 - eq2 -1

You start with barely no inventory space and have to spend your first couple of silvers buying bags as most lowbie items sell for 1c, but should you be lucky to find an item that doesnt sell for 1c, then its either Lore or doesnt stack (and sells for 16c) ... once in a while you are lucky and the mobs drop a chest... inside it there can be special items, like weapons or armor...

In defense of this game... it was quite nice for the first 1-2 hours, then i decided to give crafting a try... The tutorial didnt really explain why odd icons started popping up on the screen as i was trying craft items... eventually i found out that i had to play some kind of Match-The-Icons game by finding the corrosponding item in my skill list and match it to the icon that popped up in the crafting window... (basically resulting in my entire screen being filled by a huge window of seemingly different crafting icons trying to match the icons together... Why? I have no clue... It seems to have something to do with Durability and Progress... i dunno, it wasnt very intuitive and as i tried to mis-match the icons, just to see if it did any noticable change... I died...

Yes... I died

For some reason i must have continually put my fingers into the Spinning Loom or maybe tried to stop the wheel of the loom with my tongue... im not sure, in any case i lost hitpoints because i wasnt properly keeping up with the icons of the crafting (you must obey the icons! :p )

Thats the first time i died in the game... I then got an option of reviving somewhere on the island, and i was then promptly told that Death had consequences and i though, ah well... how bad can it be? and then i remembered, oh no! this is EverQuest2... and the only mmorpg the creators have ever played were probably EverQuest1 and Tanarus...tartarus...something with a T...

Well, when you die you get an XP debt... meaning you dont loose xp... or at least thats what i thought it meant... the xp bar becomes marked with a red area that signifies debt... (having played CoH i assumed this meant that i now had to xp where 50% of my xp would go to pay my debt, and the other 50% would go to pay for my advancing xp bar...)

but i was wrong At least i think i was wrong, i didnt really understand what the hell happened after i died, my head must obviously still have been spinning from sticking my tongue in the loom?!

Anyways... you die, and you are instructed to run back to your corpse and pick up your soulshard... i pick it up, and the debt partially disappeared... YAY! until... i noticed that my xp had disappeared as well... smooth

so what does this mean? i THINK it means that you loose xp no matter what when you die... but you have the chance to run back to your corpse and redeem some of the debt, so you wont have to xp with debt later on?

to be honest i dont understand the system, and will have to stick my head in the loom some more so i can understand the death system, and perhaps also learn something about crafting... In the meantime i can train my girlfriends hamster to match the icons in the incredibly exciting new crafting system...

Ah yes, one more thing about the crafting system... you can make TONS of items... there are so many interesting things to make!! You can make little thingiedoodles and pieces of wood and leather, and flasks of water... etc etc... However I have yet to find a real use for these things... Most, if not ALL crafting has to be done near a station, and naturally (this being everquest) you have to zone in and out of the station areas... combine this with a ridiculously low inventory...a crafting session for newbies could look like this (assuming you dont stick your head in a Forge/Loom/Chemistry Table):

Zone in (wait 15-60 seconds)

target crafting station and look at your recipe... ok, i want to make leather, the recipe says leather scraps + liquid + fuel ... okay! good to go...

Oops... oh well, create Water, combine 3 different things, and a bazzilion icons later... yes it takes about 15-30 seconds for a lowbie to create a friggin flask of water, thats ONE THIRD of the components for making a fucking piece of leather that will then later be used to create a piece of armor!!

oh well... by the time you actually manage to make all the components needed to make leather, you run out of inventory space, have to zone out of the workshop (another 15-60 second waiting time)

Im sorry, but i cant describe the crafting system more thorough, I am afterall just a human... and eventually i broke down and sold all the crafting shit i had gathered, to the merchant and decided to try to level up my adventure level instead of my crafting levels... (seeing as i lost adventure xp when i died crafting, i was starting to feel a little behind... :p )

The map is quite nice (I use the word nice, but i actually mean: above average compared to the other crap in this game...) when you move around and explore areas you gain xp (just like World of Warcraft, except in this game they dont tell you the exact number of xp you gain... :p )

Also the map has little marks and icons on it so you can find your way around... and your characters location is marked by a red cross so big it actually looks like you're larger than a city... )

In combat the game seems to use some kind of Renkei-Ripoff system (in Final Fantasy XI Online there is a system called Renkei, japanese for chain style i believe, and basically it means you can perform special moves if you use certain styles and attacks in a row...)

For instance, my rogue had this really great combo move... I mean, really impressive! ... not :p

First i had to open up with my Quick Strike (im not sure why its called quick strike, it takes longer to execute than a regular hit and it does more damage... oh well)

then a wierd thingy appears in the bottom right corner showing some icons around it, and one of them was glowing... being a clever rogue (low levels are called scouts...) I immediately look at my hotbar and see that my Runspeed buff is glowing...

This means i must now use my runspeed buff (it has a 5-6 second cast time) to proceed to the next step of the Renkei (ill call em renkeis, thats where i saw em first :p ), having spent 5-6 seconds in combat while casting a spell that does absolutely NOTHING for me in combat... i then get a new window that does a countdown timer telling me to use my Quick Strike again to complete the effect (quick strike has a 10-15 second recast... so i had to wait a little before i could use it to complete the renkei... the mob usually dies before i can even finish the renkei because it takes so much time :p)

but anyways! lets assume i actually finished it... it then has a random chance of doing (i think its random... either that, or its based on how fast you execute the renkei) an effect on either me or the mob... sometimes i would get a buff that made my special moves hit harder... other times it would make a lightning come from the skies and hit my opponent (who was now at about 3% hp, so it didnt really matter...)

All in all a very nice system (again i use the word nice, although i dont really mean it... ) Im sure it will turn out great at higher levels where players can combine their attacks and create storm clouds and little pink midgets that belly dance...

what else can i think of that made my stomach turn and crave World of Warcraft even more? ... Ah yes! I zoned into freeport and noticed that all the npcs really have their own lives and go about their own business, JUST like SoE said in their trailers!

Freeport is full of npcs that act so lifelike! for instance, they more or less all run instead of walk, they will follow the exact same pattern 9/10 times and have 2, max 3 different lines of text (thank god they dont have voice over ) sometimes during the day they will return to their houses (basically a door in the wall, open the door, inside is a room with some crap on the ground and the npc just stands there... and said the exact same thing as she said when i met her outside her house... room... hole... :p )

Having meet all the interesting ppl of the suburbs of freeport i decided it was time to try crafting again, I foolishly thought that perhaps it would be different... You see the first crafting area i was in, in the newbie area, was an Instance, meaning there were no other players in the area, so it was somewhat boring...

I went to the crafting area of freeport suburbs, it was called Circle of Vaniki... and to be honest, i didnt zone in to craft... i was just curious about the name of the door... but anyway... now im inside and ready to craft... i then open the merchants list and there is this huuuuuuuuge list of items, with no filter possible at all... so i had to wade through page after page of crap i couldnt use, no, the items werent marked red unless i hovered the mouse over them to get a tooltip... a very tedious process... anyways, i then realise its an instance and im alone in the zone... so i decide to leave...

I turn around and... *qeue suspense music* ... The stair leading up to the exit is graphically vanished... it just a black hole leading to the outside of the zone... so i move into it... and i fall out of the zone and i get teleported (but not after having to RELOAD THE ZONE... yay for loading) badabing! im back at the merchant, inside the instance... in front of the stair... that isnt... there... (Word up for me on freestyle rapping... I can do that when im pissed and/or frustrated :p )

I then logged out... and wrote this post :p

Seriously, I might have been baffled by this game if i had not tried World of Warcraft... but now? Hell now... EverQuest2 is clumsy, its laggy, much too time consuming, the user interface is annoying as hell, the music is MUCH too dramatic... I do not like having to listen to Beethoven's 5th just because i accidentally clicked my attack button...

It seems like a shell of extremely well produced graphics and enviroment, beautiful textures and the water effects under water and the visual effects of Sonic vision is very well done... But as we all know, graphics mean shit if the game isnt smooth... World of Warcraft is smoother than a babies butt, EverQuest 2 seems to be about as smooth as an ogre's ass...

I think EverQuest2 can become a great game after maybe 6-12 months of continual beta testing, but i doubt its going to be beta tested for this long...

I spoke to some testers and they told me that the game would run much smoother if i "just" got another 1-2 sticks of 512mb ram... And i thought to myself... Wouldnt it be easier if they programmed a better engine?

Ill keep you posted once i muster up enough courage to log into this pile of donkey feces they call EQ2 ... again... :p

So there ya have it ;)

My first blog post... and with the endless stream of theoretically great games... but sadly NOT so great games... I am sure this wont be my last blog post :)

Be aware that MOST of the stuff mentioned about EQ2 in this post has been fixed or changed.

I actually consider EQ2 to be one of the better mmorpgs for a semi-casual western mmorpg player that isnt looking for a game that looks like wow, plays like wow, has a rogue in it, but isnt wow, cause they are bored of wow!