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Everquest 2 NDA Lifted
According to the Everquest 2 Player Site, the NDA has been lifted on the upcoming Massively Multiplayer Game. If you've been looking forward to detailed information on the game, EQ2 Vault has a special feature on available in-game information. Tobold, of Grimwell Online, has commentary both on game mechanics and on his personal opinion.
The two that really stand out for me are ...
1) incomplete game and bugs
2) lots of really boring tedious tasks.
Personally I'm waiting for WOW. All the positive reviews I've heard about WOW really seem to be in sync with what I'm looking for in an online game.
In the meantime I'll keep playing Anarchy Online. It certainly has it's faults, but if you don't take it too seriously, there's lots of challenges, variety and interesting gameplay.
SWG supports player-built cities, and there are cases where groups of players have "colonized" otherwise hostile areas. This is one very neat feature of SWG.
Star Wars Galaxies goes a step further. You can place automated vendors in homes and guild halls - effectively creating a "mall". The difference between this and EQ2 is that you don't have to be logged in and sitting in Bazaar in order to sell stuff. I never understood the value of this, unless it's a gimmick for SOE to sell more player accounts.
If you like housing, try one of these:
Ultima Online, one of the first graphical (albeit 2d) MMORPG's, had player housing. Aside from the problems in that game, you could theoretically build a home in the untamed wilds just like you describe. Home ownership was a challenge when the game first came out, since you could lose your key/home in a myriad of ways.
Horizons also has housing, but I quit even before my 7 day trial was up so I could not experience it firsthand. A friend of mine says its system was robust and guilds would form entire towns built by its crafters. Not "built from scratch" of course, but out of pre-rendered pieces.
DAoC has a separate housing area apart from the regular game world. In order to enter a house you must have permission, or it must be set to allow just any old joe to enter. Houses are pretty expensive to purchase and have a maintenance cost but are not at any risk from other players.
AC/AC2 I cannot comment on as I never played them enough. Anarchy Online (AO) has player apartments but they are in separated instances, similar to FFXI except you could actually copy your key and invite someone to your apartment. The new Jobe apartments are huge and have a higher item limit, while the old RK apartments, while more fitting to the gritty Rubi-Ka feel, are rather small and bland. You can put furniture in your apartment up to a limit.
Shadowbane let you build entire cities from pre-rendered pieces, which were at risk from other players and guilds.
Sacré-bleu! Where is me mama?
I worked for SOE until late summer of this year, and I did some testing on EverQuest II (as did most of QA). Anyway, to put it bluntly, there's nothing innovative or interesting about EQ2. Actually, EQ2 is far inferior to the original EverQuest. EQ2 has more linear quests, more boring combat, less world to explore, less differentiation between classes and races, and less freedom to customize the way your characters look. It is like EQ-lite, but with an engine upgrade that is utter crap. SOE is going by the wayside. Give it 4 or 5 years, and you will all witness NCSoft utterly conquer and brutally rape SOE's bloody remains. The fact of the matter is that while there are a lot of extremely talented people working at that company, their vision is squelched by deadlines and a general unwillingness to try to do something new. SOE doesn't deserve your dollar.
If you're looking for EQ2 to be the same game as EQ you may be disappointed. The website FAQ answers a lot of these issues you seem to have in your post. An example: Reducing the number of starting cities follows the story. EQ2 is supposed to be a good/evil type game with two towns being the light/dark side of the world. There was a reason why they chose to do that. In the same vein, each town consists of many more zones than in the old EQ.
IMO, EQ2 is attempting to do some different and interesting things for the social aspect of MMORPG's. There are more dimensions (guilds, families, guild status points) to this than there were in previous games.
For more info, FAQ here.
I think it is hard for ANY MMORPG sequal to be successful. This is probably just ONE of the reasons UO 2 was cancelled, and why Ashron's Call 2 is not doing as good as its first incarnation. Why is it hard? Well, it is competing against itself, for one, which still has a huge player base and recently released expansions. WoW, on the other hand, is a whole new experience, sights and sounds. MMORPGs are all basically the same for the common PC gamer, and the common PC gamer wants new experiences, not over bloated repetition that will not run on their system.
IMO, one of the coolest, most innovative features of Everquest was introduced for no more than a few weeks, and then quickly removed.
This was called the infamous "Project M".
What it allowed you to do was log into the game and take over a random NPC in a low level zone.
This would really freak out players as the NPC behavior sometimes would become quite erratic and unusual. You couldn't chat while playing a monster, but you could move around and attack.
Unfortunately, guilds figured out how to defeat the random nature of where you were deployed and eventually there rose up, armies of player-controlled giant rats in newbie zones that would terrorize lower-level players.
It was hilarious and very creative. It's a shame they didn't try to tweak this feature and keep it online. It was the perfect short-term distraction for players who otherwise couldn't get grouped or wanted to try something different.
Whoever came up with project M was very creative and innovative. I don't see that kind of creativity in later versions of Everquest or its expansions. Things have become much more formulaic.