Everquest 2 NDA Lifted

Two questions by Anonymous Coward · 2004-10-16 06:48 · Score: 3, Insightful

For someone who has played MMORPGs before, but not Everquest - will EQ2 be pretty much impossible for anyone who hasn't spent the last six years playing? Or will ir be pretty even keeled for all who want to get into it?

And second, is there any new gameplay involved or is it the exactly same "make character, buy stuff, kill stuff, buy bigger stuff, kill bigger stuff, buy even bigger stuff, kill even bigger stuff" game like every other piece of crap MMORPG out there? (like Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, etc, etc, etc).

Thoughts by mabu · 2004-10-16 07:53 · Score: 4, Informative

As an existing EQ player since the beginning, but without any direct experience with EQ2 yet, I can't say I find much of the information about EQ2 compelling.

As I understand it, they've shrunk the world, reduced the number of starting cities, homogenized the race/class arrangement, and added a few extra hamster wheels for crafting and acquiring spell/skills. Nothing exciting IMO. They didn't even get rid of zones.

By their own admission, SOE says that hardware *does not yet exist* which is capable of running the game with max video settings.

The eye-candy aspect may be appealing, but that's something that wears thin after the first half-hour. It seems to me the visual appeal of the game is one of the more substantive characteristics, but really has nothing to do with game play.

The most notable addition seems to be player housing -- that's intriguing. The notion of player and guild cities would seem cool, but it's not enough to encourage me to play.

Re:Thoughts by Lehk228 · 2004-10-16 07:58 · Score: 3, Funny

oh you misunderstood them, the needed hardware "does not yet exist" yet to handle their terrible graphics engine in a graceful manner, and they STILL will probably not thread the interface seperately from rendering, so controls will still get jsrky while in a render intensive situation, like the EQ bazaar or on a Raid.

--
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Re:Thoughts by _xeno_ · 2004-10-16 08:45 · Score: 4, Insightful

The most notable addition seems to be player housing -- that's intriguing. The notion of player and guild cities would seem cool, but it's not enough to encourage me to play.
It sounds, although there wasn't enough detail for me to confirm this 100%, that the "housing" will be like the "housing" in Final Fantasy XI: you get a room in some amorphous "residential area" all to your own, that no one else can ever enter.
So there are no "player-built" cities, just some zone that instead of taking you to another area instead takes you to your "house." It sounds like it's exactly like Final Fantasy XI's "Mog-House," in that you can do things like check your mail for items people have sent you, place and arrange furniture, and store items from your inventory into a safe.
I'd love to see an MMORPG that allowed players to tame wilderness areas and build towns - it sounds intriguing. I don't know if computers and network connections have yet come to the point where they can do that, though. Modem connections probably make that infeasible for the near future.

--
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Re:Thoughts by mabu · 2004-10-16 08:55 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.
Re:Thoughts by Elsebet · 2004-10-16 12:32 · Score: 3, Interesting

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?
Re:Thoughts by tprox · 2004-10-16 13:35 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Parallels with SWG by chaotic_synergy · 2004-10-16 08:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

Interesting how the negatives of EQ2 (in the opinion linked to above) so strongly parallel the negatives that I experienced with SWG.

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.

Differences between EQ2 and EQ by mabu · 2004-10-16 10:11 · Score: 4, Informative

I've been doing a bit of reading on EQ2 and it seems that many of the characteristics of EQ2 are direct attempts to "nerf" features in EQ that have become core components of the gameplay.

* Complete heal is gone

* Shaman slows are apparently gone or no longer as potent

* Mobs that have helpers/range aggro are now "grouped" and cannot be single-pulled by FD'ing classes

What's disappointing is that both these "features" of the game spawned extensive gameplay strategies and talent. It's sad to see them go... clerics using cooperative ch rots or anticipating cast timing, or pullers with amazing abilities to extract single mobs in very hostile zones.

* When you die, you don't lose your corpse, but you incurr some "debt" that you have to pay off before you can continue to get max experience from kills. Instead of a corpse, you have a spirit shard that needs to be recovered in order to avoid great debt and stat loss. Also these shards get automatically absorbed into your char after 72 hours. Furthermore if someone dies in a group, the entire group shares debt... an interesting approach towards balancing the risk/reward of classes that may end up dying more often.

This seems to be a big improvement over EQ.

* Automatic zone instancing... apparently if some zones get too crowded, the system may create another instance of the zone and people zoning in can select which instance of the zone they want to enter.

I can see the value of instanced zones for isolated adventures and expeditions, but splitting real in-game areas into multiple zones seems a bit freaky and unrealistic.

How do you maintain the immersive nature of the game when, upon entering a dungeon, you're prompted with a menu to choose which alternate reality you want to enter?

* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.

Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.

And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?

* Less class specialization - I'm under the impression that in EQ2 there is less distinction beteen classes. All the tank hybrids seem to be more comparable in terms of tanking; all the healing classes also have the ability to ressurrect players, etc.

I am not sure what purpose this homogenization of classes and races serves, other than seeming to turn race and class into more an issue of vanity than functionality.

Again, we have core components of the game, not necessarily designed to make a better game, but to address frustrations such as certain classes not being as desireable in groups. This could be a blessing to those who in the past felt in retrospect they chose the wrong class, but it also dulls the unique nature of classes and races.

Re:Differences between EQ2 and EQ by _xeno_ · 2004-10-16 11:44 · Score: 2, Insightful

* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.

Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.

And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?

Final Fantasy XI does this, and it isn't that bad for the most part. You can "call for help" on a mob in FFXI, allowing anyone to attack it. However, mobs killed in this way never drop anything and offer no XP.

Yeah, it flies in the face of realism, but, it's a game. Realism is just a tool. If realism gets in the way of having fun, then it should be ignored. Do your characters have to eat and use the lavatory? Do they have to sleep?

There are several issues with the way the system works in Final Fantasy XI. Yes, casters and players with ranged attacks and abilties can "steal" monsters from other players, claiming them with ranged abilities before another player can. (It should be noted that in FFXI, at least, every class has some form of ranged ability, even if it is just a ranged weapon.) Generally speaking, though, if someone is going to try and do that, they probably would have stolen the kill anyway, since such a thing is, not surprisingly, looked down on.

Far more annoyingly, a player can run past a group which has aggroed another mob but not "claimed" it, and use some ability that doesn't damage it much to "claim" the monster, but the monster will continue to attack the group it has hate against.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't really hurt much (although it turns camping various NMs into a "who-can-claim-it-first" battle over lag), and helps quite a bit. I like the feature, honestly. It works well.

--
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Re:Differences between EQ2 and EQ by realdpk · 2004-10-17 05:56 · Score: 2, Interesting

"Furthermore if someone dies in a group, the entire group shares debt... an interesting approach towards balancing the risk/reward of classes that may end up dying more often."

Also an interesting way to keep groups from including people they don't already know. Good for guilds, I suppose. Not so good for the casual player, which Everquest was already very unfriendly to (... I'm remembering days of /ooc's of LFG for half an hour before giving up and soloing...)

"* Automatic zone instancing... apparently if some zones get too crowded, the system may create another instance of the zone and people zoning in can select which instance of the zone they want to enter."

Too bad they didn't do what most other games do, have one giant zone, broken up into smaller pieces, which your computer pre-loads as you move through the landscape.

What they're talking about here is not revolutionary. In fact they talked about it years ago for EQ1.

"Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it."

Agreed. Personally, I've thought the systems that rewarded each distinct action were better for this sort of thing. Someone could take it further and offer the XP only upon the monster's death, offer additional XP for "initiating" the attack (so KSers don't get that bonus), etc. That could be something revolutionary. This, what they're doing, isn't.

As someone who tested this game... by dhakbar · 2004-10-16 13:19 · Score: 5, Interesting

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.

Another opinion by THX-1139 · 2004-10-16 16:47 · Score: 2, Interesting

I'm in both the WoW and EQ2 betas and had quite the opposite impression. I found EQ2 to be so tedious as to be practically unplayable. WoW on the other hand is quite polished and fun, although not quite what I am looking for in a MMORPG.

Neither is really revolutionary, unless you consider adding voice features (annoying and pervasive in EQ2, minimal and cute in WoW). Both follow the trend of decreasing the degrees of freedom available to the player, resulting in more of a disneyland ride experience than that of a virtual world.

I've got my hopes set on Vanguard to be the next MMORPG of worth. I might play WoW on live, but really more to hang with my guild than anything else.

MMOPRG sequel... by Taulin · 2004-10-16 19:46 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

Best EQ feature was discontinued a long time ago by mabu · 2004-10-17 10:19 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

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