EverQuest II

The Good
I could not wait for EQ2 to be released, and being a hardcore EQlive player it was going to take quite a bit to turn me away from EQ2. I upgraded my PC in every way possible. While I did not have the most powerful thing on the market, I was WELL above the recommended specifications.

First off, let's talk about graphics; they are simply amazing. You'd be hard pressed to find ANY game that can compare with the character models and textures presented in EQ2, mmo or otherwise. While I tend to look beyond the eye candy and focus on substance (I still play DOS games if this is any indication), the beauty of the world and the players simply could not be ignored.

Once you settle down and adjust to the graphics, you find that starting out basically involves getting your player established in his/her city. There are a few tasks you must accomplish and then receive a housing assignment. Your initial dwelling is sparse and dilapidated. Nevertheless, once you reach this point your are pretty much free to do what you like.

Guilds in EQ2 are interesting, and I have to say 'kudos' to the developers for implementing something not found in EQlive; the ability to grind and level up the guild. This is certainly an improvement over the predecessor, and as the guild gains levels the members are entitled to certain privileges. Discounts, mounts, better housing are among the options. This aspect of the game affords new and alternative goals for the dedicated player.

Trade skills were improved upon in a certain fashion. Rather than just putting items in a box and clicking combine, you are required to monitor the progress of your player made item. If something starts to go wrong, you must select the appropriate course of action to rectify the problem and allow for the continuation of item creation. In other words, working trade skills is much more interactive now.

Early in the game there is loads of content. There are many quests to complete, so you don't find yourself wondering around aimlessly trying to find something to do. There is certainly plenty of things that need to be done, so early on in your character's life you can stay pretty busy.

Another thing I liked about character advancement early on was the fact that at some point you could not increase in levels until your class matured into a higher class. In order to do this you are required to pass certain trials, usually where you are placed in an instance by yourself and must fight your way out. A nice touch to this is that the trials are geared towards your specific class. Wizards will have different challenges than SK's for example. A nice touch and lots of fun. For a person that is brand new to MMO gaming, EQ2 is a great place to start.

The Bad
Now we've got to talk about the bad, and ironically all of the positive aspects of the game each play a part in what a big disappointment this game is.

Graphics; only the meanest of the mean machines are capable of rendering acceptable quality graphics, and even then no matter how powerful your machine is, you can find a setting that will bog you down. Even with graphics set to minimum and a monster of a PC, if you go on a raid you cannot look directly at the raid party in the dungeon without having a several second delay every time you do. This gets really annoying, and quite confusing when fighting occurs. Having to turn spell effects off to allow the game to be at least playable creates another problem; you cannot tell who is casting a spell because the text messages for who is casting what will not display if you have the graphical effects turned off. This makes for a problem, especially when you have 2 or more people of the same class working together. Furthermore even with no characters around, whilst in the city the game is almost unplayable. Even when it is playable it is a miserable experience. If you decide to turn details all the way down this fixes the problem, but when you head out again you must adjust the details back up. Very tedious.

Guilds; leveling up a guild is extremely difficult, and not only that but it takes LOTS of people working towards the same goal. I was in a guild where about 20 of us were doing guild quests and grinding for guild xp day and night and we saw little progress. If you happen to max out your character first, then decide to work on guild progress, you are faced with quests for low levels that are horribly boring for your level 50 character. If you start mid way through your character's career, it's not as bad but you won't be earning xp for your character while you do. You must do the guild leveling early and most players aren't willing to do this. As a result of all of this, there are few guilds that reap the benefits of higher level status.

Tradeskilling is fun at first, but soon becomes ridiculous. For one it's horribly expensive, and the items created usually cannot be sold for even a break even price to another player. You'll spend hours on end creating items that give you no trade skill xp whatsoever just so you can make 5 or so items later that will give you a paltry amount of xp (the higher level items are built from lower level items that you must create as well). After spending countless hours and going broke, you just might advance enough to see your trade skill xp bar move to give you a glimmer of hope. Very soon this gets boring. What's worse is that if you max out your trade skill abilities to level 50, the items you can create aren't even as good as the random drops in level 30 zones, thereby making an outlet for your top end crafts non-existent. It becomes a complete waste of time.

End game; no content. Period. Leveling from level 46 or so to level 50 was horribly boring and exhausting. There was only one zone in the whole world to do this effectively; Permafrost. I was the second person on my server to reach level 50, so the game was young and maybe things have changed, but nevertheless the game should have never been released with the problems I faced. There was only one type of monster to fight, and to add to that the textures weren't even put on it. To add insult to injury the walls lacked texture as well! The end game was horribly unfinished, and you spent hours every day grinding against blank monsters in long hallways with blank walls that had no texture. Terrible. There is absolutely no excuse for this.

BIG FOULUP; loot table. Ok whoever designed looting made a horrible, horrible mistake that affected the entire game world. I'll break this down as much as possible; just about all loot items required a certain level to be used. No matter where you hunted, the good items that dropped were usable by higher level players. For example if you're around level 20 hunting in a level 20 zone, level 30 loot would drop. If you're level 30 hunting in a 30 zone, level 40 loot would drop... and so forth. Here's where it gets to be a big problem; loot only drops for players that can be challenged by the monster. In other words, if you take your level 40 character to a level 30 zone in hopes of getting level 40 loot, you are too powerful and therefore when you kill the level 30 mob you will not receive xp or loot! So, the only alternative was to either A. hold onto loot for a long time until you could use it or, B. buy it from a lower level player. Most lower level players held onto their loot though, so if you didn't get your level 40 drops when you were level 30, chances are you'll be level 40 with level 30 gear. Believe it or not, it gets worse! When you're in the upper 40s-50, the loot that drops is usually sufficient for a level 10 character! No joke. We killed a raid mob in Permafrost and it dropped some legs that had lower stats than the pants I had at level 10! Aside from loot tables, the variety of items is pathetic. I started to notice something around level 30; all items had the same type of stats. For example a chest piece had intelligence as the biggest stat. Let's say you have a level 10 chest piece, and it is for a warrior, the highest stat on the piece will be intelligence. At level 50 if you have a higher chest piece the same thing is true regardless of class; the highest attribute is intelligence! Bracers were good for resistances, etc. Another way to describe this is that out of your resistances, magic is always the highest... for every player. There is no way to customize your stats or resists like you could in EQlive (i.e. maxing out fire resist or having an alternative set for cold resist if you needed it) as stats were based on item type (chest, legs, bracer, ring). Truly awful design.

"Is it lag, or just a memory leak?". Early on we found that the game had a horrible memory leak. The longer you played the slower and slower the game would run. OR if you zoned several times, the game would slow down in a hurry. Moving to a less populated area did not fix the problem. This was not just on my machine or server, it was world wide! It was common practice to zone into the area with your party or raid group and then let everyone reboot before continuing on to ensure that the game was playable for all. Rebooting was the ONLY way to correct the problem. Relogging would not fix it, a reboot was required. Everyone was rebooting all of the time. To my knowledge this problem still exists today as Sony insists that the problem is on the user's end even though the entirety of the EQ2 community was constantly rebooting before adventuring. This was a real drag.

No pvp; while I knew this going into the game (and I came from a pvp server in EQlive), I figured that all of the expected content and immersion would make up for the absence of pvp. The problem is, even though I accepted that there would be no pvp (not even duels), I became resentful at its absence when I found that almost the entire rest of the game was lacking.

Spell casting; absolutely ridiculous! For one, you can only 'buff' (cast a beneficial spell) to someone in your party, and even then if they get too far away from you the buff will vanish. Second, the duration of buffs were ridiculous. For example, I played an enchanter, and of course everyone wanted 'Clarity' which increased mana regeneration. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it would go something like this; 'Clarity' was single target only. The spell lasted for 1 minute 30 seconds. The recast time on 'Clarity' was 15 seconds. Say there is a total of 5 people including myself that need to be buffed. Cast on the first person and wait 15 seconds. The first person has 1 minute 15 seconds left. Cast on the second person wait 15 seconds, the first person has 1 minute left on clarity... and so forth. By the time you cast on the last person and wait 15 seconds, the first person has already had the buff disappear. If you were to dedicate all of your time and performed perfectly to keeping your party buffed with this one spell, you could almost (but not quite) keep everyone buffed at the same time. I hear they changed this later on but at the time I played all beneficial spells operated in this manner. Detrimental spells were similar. Mesmerize only lasted 30 seconds and had a long recast, making it almost nearly impossible to keep more than 2 mobs on ice. Furthermore, if you stacked disabling spells one on mob, when the first spell wore off the second one would be ineffective. To make matters worse, the mob would still have the icon that it's on ice, all the while tearing you to shreds. Only by manually unclicking the spell and casting a new one in this circumstance could you restore order.

Classes not balanced; the class balancing was absolutely terrible. Any use of a third party damage meter revealed this. For example, I had a good buddy that I always grouped with and we tried a few things out. Here is what we discovered; Shadowknights had the highest dps (damage per second), Enchanters (a utility class) ranked second! Wizards, which were based solely on direct damage output, had the least of all classes! What's worse, Clerics were among the worst at keeping the party alive. We could defeat end game mobs with one group by having nothing more than a Defiler who would cast rune on us to block enemy damage. The Defiler class, which was supposed to be the worst at keeping the party alive, turned out to be the absolute best! Furthermore, a balanced group is not needed. There is little to no ability to solo through the game, and this was Sony's intention. As a result they created all of the monsters with a ridiculous amount of HP (hit points). The name of the game here is damage output. As long as you have some heavy hitters in your group, you don't need a balanced party. With area affect taunt and one attentive healer, this also eliminates the need for classes that are good at crowd control (i.e. Enchanters).

While the voice acting is decent, people don't tend to leave you alone. From the time I completed a quest around level 6 where an NPC stated after it was done that he "no longer needed your services", every time I walked by him he'd say the same thing. Even at level 50 whenever I walked by this guy he would continue to tell me he no longer needed my services. Get involved with many NPC's, and walking through town becomes a maddening sea of repitition, the same statements constantly being repeated to you throughout your entire life. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but trust me it is very annoying.

The Bottom Line
EQ2 might be good for a person who has never set foot in an RPG or an MMO before (at least at the beginning), but everyone else should avoid this one like the plague. I understand that there are expansion packs available now, and perhaps with time some improvement has been made, but it just seems to me that the game would need a complete overhaul just to be adequate at very best.