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Everquest II Details Discussed
Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to EQII Stratics' in-depth interview with the Everquest II development team. This keenly-anticipated PC MMORPG follow-up is due later in 2003, and questions answered include the increased use of teleportation in the sequel, to help ease down on travel time ("travel has always been a tricky thing... too much and it feels tedious, too little and the world feels extremely small."), and interesting changes when the player dies - you can either "..sacrifice an appropriate item.. and return to an appropriate bind point with all other items intact and equipped or.. remain in your corpse until another player or event resurrects you."
they don't say anything about whether the chick on the cover of EQ2 will be hotter than the chick on the cover of EQ? Clearly this is a relevant issue.
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
Gamespot.com has some nice EQ II movies. It looks looks amazing, with Half Life 2 type graphics/anim. Hopefully the whole package is more than a simple eye candy upgrade. Dragons as I've seen them look incredibly "realistic", my jaw dropped to the floor when I first saw the animation. Many prescripted action sequences like ground shaking effects and whatever else have been added. Release date Nov 03. Horizons, another promising RPG shipping Sep 03
My immediate interest is drawn to the description of trades people. I once and ocassionaly play a mud where merchants serve effectively the same role, building castles and doing all sorts of things like that, while not being very good at most forms of combat.
The immediate problem with this is that the vast majority of people don't want to play a 'tradesperson' full time. I would be suprized if there were more than twenty or thirty out of every ten thousand people who wanted to be a full-time tradesperson. Unfortunately for them, people wont go to a 'well known' tradesperson to buy whatever, they'll go to one of their friends alternate characters, which basically just means that in EQ Live having more than 1 character will be essentially required.
As far as PVP goes, I think games should have risk involved, and PVP poses the greatest risk. If you're wandering around at the bottom of some deep dank dungeon and some sketchy looking people show up, you should be worried. I'm not really at all interested in PvE at this time because I don't believe there is currently a development team in existence with the stamina and creativity to maintain a PvE experience for longer than a few months.