EverQuest 2
Rating: T (Fantasy Violence, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol)
Realistic Rating: M (Everyone knows MMO players are potty-mouths.)
Made by: Sony Online Entertainment
Genre: Grindtastic MMORPG
As a foreword, I'd like to give a few disclaimers:
-This is written by a WoW veteran. I have a large bias.
-I played only a single class (Assassin) to level 30. This also means that I've only played the Evil side.
-I never played the original EverQuest, thus I might be missing out on some things that would be reminiscent of that game.
-I haven't played Legends of Norath, so I won't be covering that.
-I played mostly alone, so I might be missing out on some party-based goodness.
With that in mind, let's get to the actual review.
Story
The story of Everquest is a confusing one. I haven't had time to fully read up on the lore and such, but I have a basic feel for it, and I'll admit it's very interesting and I can see how WoW borrowed from it. Not having played enough to really understand if it might become a big deal later in the game, this portion of my review will be focusing on the ammount of story I did get to play through.
The story from EverQuest continues some 50 years later having a kind of awkward retcon. In the original game, the world was ended when players killed the Gods (or weakened them enough) guarding the Sleeper, who unleashed Armageddon upon awaking. EverQuest 2 takes place in an "alternate reality" in which this hasn't happened... yet.
Your character's starting area will be determined by your race and your alignment. Being a Iksar (lizard folk) Assassin, I started myself in Timmorous Deep, where I found myself surrounded by an outpost from Gorowyn, the nearby town settled by the nefarious Sarnak (a humanoid dragon race). There I went around completing quests in an effort to drive out the Hoerans, a race of bird-like people. From there, my quests would include learning the biology of man-eating plants, driving off pirates, and befriending a race of trolls.
From there, I advanced to the Butcherblock Mountains where I found myself doing more of the same: killing Hoerans, befriending Dwarves this time, and driving out Kobolds.
If you haven't guessed, the story that I played through was your usual bland MMO fodder. It's certainly no Westfall, but it has it's own way of saying "Go Here, Do This" that works well enough. I'm going to guess that the end-game raiding content will have a better story, but from what I was able to worm out of other players: it's not too much more exciting. No cinematics, no voice from characters... no NPC chatter either. The story was simply disappointing to me, but then again, this was based off pure-questing/grinding and no instance time or end-game content.
Gameplay
This is the main focus of the game, no doubt. EverQuest 2 focuses much more on PvE (Player vs Environment) rather than PvP (Player vs Player) as evidenced by only special servers having the ability to kill other players. For this to happen, it must be Good vs Evil, and Neutral is attackable by anyone, and it was described as "a giant gankfest."
PvE works fairly solidly, and players have a good way to determine if a monster will be able to kill them or not given the "Consider" system. Most classes that my friends and I played had no problem taking down something of equal level, and remaining above half-health at the end of the battle.
Most classes.
There are a few big flaws within the game including the fact that the game is set up around grouping with others. This is most potently showed when you play a healing-based class and you can't take down something two levels below you.
Furthermore, the game gets harder as you level up, as it should, but it doesn't scale with level properly. The game's fix for having it be too easy to take out a single target your level isn't "make the target stronger", but instead "group three or four of the buggers together". This causes a problem with classes like Assassin and even Barbarian who have almost no multi-target abilities, causing the multitude of people to join the battle to overwhelm the player. This is especially problematic for assassin because they rely on Stealth, which is broken upon taking damage.
The only way to really rectify this is to go to lower-level mobs and simply grind away until you feel ready to try again. Not very fun, if you ask me.
Quests
Quests are a big part of an MMO, and thus, I thought they'd deserve their own section.
EQ is known as the "granddaddy" of MMOs, having been around for a whopping 11 years now (starting in 1990). EQ2 came out in November of 2004, and it carries much of the original game's heart and spirit.
What do I mean by this? Simply: all the quests fall under three categories; "Talk to this person", "Kill x many of y", or "Gather x many of Y". The diversity never changes, and you can even do the "rep grind" for factions if you grab their "writs" which are always "Go here, kill this."
Character Advancement
Character advancement in EQ2 is the most choppy, awkward, terrible thing I've experienced in any MMO thus far. The system of "Alternate Advancement" is very similar to WoW's "Talent Trees" but it's different and complex enough to end up leaving me with a headache and a frustrated glare.
Alternate Advancement works on the system of doing things other than just grinding (doing quests, completing collections, killing named monsters for the first time) gives you points into this. This causes problems when you simply want to grind a character, but want to also make them progressively better other than just increasing base stats.
EQ2's answer to this is giving you the ability to transfer x% of your normal experience to "Alternate Advancement" experience, but this slider also causes problems because then you're gimping one leveling for another, and it just causes a big headache when you get behind on your normal leveling because you wanted Alternate Advancement levels.
The Alternate Advancement itself is confusing, also (at least for Assassins). Coupled with the lack of any guidance from high-level players or people running numbers to see efficiency, or even a simple "recommended for leveling" tree, this quickly gets frustrating as you're wondering what in the hell you should do with your points and how to play your class most effectively. The answers online say "L2P, noob." and "Change alignment to change class, it's better that way." instead of giving you an actual feel for leveling as your class.
Even simple things like getting gear for your increasing level becomes a chore of going to the auction house and buying new gear, because heaven forbid that quests give you enough to sustain the ever-increasing amount of enemies you'll face.
Leveling skills is a chore as well, as grind-tastic as it is in any other MMO, but this takes it a step further and makes makes the things you harvest only the overarching class of material, not the specifics. What I mean by this is instead of going to chop down a yew tree to get yew logs, you go chop at a "moldy log" and pray you're going to get the component you need. Clearly not well thought out.
Guilds
Another part that MMOs rely on quite a bit, which gives it another section.
EverQuest 2 has an interesting system for guilds; not just your usual "here's a bank and chat channel". EverQuest 2 goes a step further and gives you your own personal Guild housing, Guild salespersons, Guild crafting, a stockpile for crafting fodder that can be accessed through the crafting interface, and the best part: trophies. Upon killing tougher bosses, you get the head of that boss on a trophy to show off to anyone who enters, as well as the ability to teleport to the Guild's Hall at any time, working like the WoW equivalent of a Hearthstone.
The Guild interface is fairly clean and easy to use, and the guilds even have their own personal levels that can be increased by members doing the writs, selling reputation-based items, and completing world events. Members can gain "status" within their guild to show how much they, themselves, have contributed to the guild's advancement.
Grouping
Grouping is awkward in EQ2. Yes, it's the standard "click invite, and they're in", but they have an awkward way of distributing loot (it's not defaulted to "Need/Greed"). Furthermore, the awkwardness continues with things like the mentor system. Unlike other MMOs, if a higher-level character comes to help you with something that might seem like a daunting task, or even just to run you through an easy instance, you will not receive anything unless they "mentor" you. Mentoring involves them having their base stats adjusted to the person they're mentoring, but they retain all the other abilities, damage, and gear. To put it even more simply: the only thing that really changes is that they have significantly less health/mana than their full-level counterparts, but being able to dish out as much damage as they can full level; it doesn't tend to matter much.
The biggest concern of the mentoring system is this: the person doing the mentoring gains reduced experience, usually 90% less, unless they're considerably higher-leveled (40+), while the person mentored gains an extra 15% experience (5% for being in a group, 10% for being mentored). However, loopholes have come in like what my friend and I have found, in which you can exploit the easy kills that a mentor gets with things like double experience from vitality (which I still don't understand how that works), and the 200% increase from someone inviting you to the game. This comes out to the mentor gaining a whopping 220% experience for killing things that are significantly lower level, meaning it's easy leveling that goes quickly enough to be rewarding, but slow enough to keep you in check. This solves the case of "going to lower level mobs to grind until you're more powerful", but it tends to remain to be just as irksome due to not being able to mentor more than one person.
That's right, you can only mentor a single person per character, and that means if you want to go with a lower-level group of three, you've got to play favorites because you can't mentor both of them.
Playerbase
EQ2 has no where near as polarized of a userbase as World of Warcraft. While you won't find as many people causing drama in Trade channel over /b/tard-tastic issues, you won't find any guides to play your class, or helpful high-levels who just want to mess around in lowbie areas and help out those who are just starting out the game.
Truth be told, you won't find much of anyone, in my experience. Although my server was marked as "high population", I would run into maybe 3 other players in the course of playing for 6 hours+. The majority of the life of the game congregates in cities, but even this doesn't give you many other people to interact with.
Crafting
Crafting in EQ2 is as interesting and innovative as it is dull and annoying. While the first time you see the screen and are forced to counteract different slip ups that would be present in a real crafting process, and face the very real threat of having wasted your time and materials to fail at crafting your product, it quickly wears on the player as you try to juggle the ever annoying ebb and flow of success. However, once you've got the basic pattern down, you begin to long for the ability to just hit "craft all" and go grab yourself some food while your character twiddles his fingers for 20 minutes. If more realistic is what they were aiming for, they accomplished it, however, this doesn't mean it's more fun.
Leveling the crafting itself is a pain, also. Whereas in WoW you have things that are guaranteed to give you a new level in crafting, you have to rely on the system of normal leveling with EQ2. This means crafting three or four of the highest level things you possibly can to get a single level, and with the exponential need for materials it quickly will leave you in the infamous "mat grind" which has never been fun.
Wrap Up
Although I haven't fully explored the game, and I'll admit that I've only scratched the surface of the entirety, from what I've seen I've disliked. EverQuest 2 has complexity, yes, but that's it's fatal flaw, in my opinion; it's far too complex for it's own good, leaving those who don't dedicate themselves to learning every nook and cranny of the game alienated and confused. The playerbase suffers from being both too small and too passive; not offering much advice nor criticism for newer players to go off on, and thus becomes a cesspool of boredom.
The general feel of EQ2 is that it's outdated. All the things that newer MMOs are doing are tossed aside like an elderly person claiming that they don't need no damned technology because back in the day...
I'll say this, however. If you have the patience and endurance to last through the grueling grind of the game, it will probably be well worth your efforts and I'm sure that in the higher-ascension of the game there is a lot more to do and care about, but within the short span that I was able to suffer through, this game is simply not my thing.
~Sui
Coming Soon: Aion Review
Comments, criticisms, and congrats are always welcome, and I apologize for the lack of pictures; I wasn't able to find many that I thought would be able to suit this review.
Rating: T (Fantasy Violence, Suggestive Themes, Use of Alcohol)
Realistic Rating: M (Everyone knows MMO players are potty-mouths.)
Made by: Sony Online Entertainment
Genre: Grindtastic MMORPG
As a foreword, I'd like to give a few disclaimers:
-This is written by a WoW veteran. I have a large bias.
-I played only a single class (Assassin) to level 30. This also means that I've only played the Evil side.
-I never played the original EverQuest, thus I might be missing out on some things that would be reminiscent of that game.
-I haven't played Legends of Norath, so I won't be covering that.
-I played mostly alone, so I might be missing out on some party-based goodness.
With that in mind, let's get to the actual review.
Story
The story of Everquest is a confusing one. I haven't had time to fully read up on the lore and such, but I have a basic feel for it, and I'll admit it's very interesting and I can see how WoW borrowed from it. Not having played enough to really understand if it might become a big deal later in the game, this portion of my review will be focusing on the ammount of story I did get to play through.
The story from EverQuest continues some 50 years later having a kind of awkward retcon. In the original game, the world was ended when players killed the Gods (or weakened them enough) guarding the Sleeper, who unleashed Armageddon upon awaking. EverQuest 2 takes place in an "alternate reality" in which this hasn't happened... yet.
Your character's starting area will be determined by your race and your alignment. Being a Iksar (lizard folk) Assassin, I started myself in Timmorous Deep, where I found myself surrounded by an outpost from Gorowyn, the nearby town settled by the nefarious Sarnak (a humanoid dragon race). There I went around completing quests in an effort to drive out the Hoerans, a race of bird-like people. From there, my quests would include learning the biology of man-eating plants, driving off pirates, and befriending a race of trolls.
From there, I advanced to the Butcherblock Mountains where I found myself doing more of the same: killing Hoerans, befriending Dwarves this time, and driving out Kobolds.
If you haven't guessed, the story that I played through was your usual bland MMO fodder. It's certainly no Westfall, but it has it's own way of saying "Go Here, Do This" that works well enough. I'm going to guess that the end-game raiding content will have a better story, but from what I was able to worm out of other players: it's not too much more exciting. No cinematics, no voice from characters... no NPC chatter either. The story was simply disappointing to me, but then again, this was based off pure-questing/grinding and no instance time or end-game content.
Gameplay
This is the main focus of the game, no doubt. EverQuest 2 focuses much more on PvE (Player vs Environment) rather than PvP (Player vs Player) as evidenced by only special servers having the ability to kill other players. For this to happen, it must be Good vs Evil, and Neutral is attackable by anyone, and it was described as "a giant gankfest."
PvE works fairly solidly, and players have a good way to determine if a monster will be able to kill them or not given the "Consider" system. Most classes that my friends and I played had no problem taking down something of equal level, and remaining above half-health at the end of the battle.
Most classes.
There are a few big flaws within the game including the fact that the game is set up around grouping with others. This is most potently showed when you play a healing-based class and you can't take down something two levels below you.
Furthermore, the game gets harder as you level up, as it should, but it doesn't scale with level properly. The game's fix for having it be too easy to take out a single target your level isn't "make the target stronger", but instead "group three or four of the buggers together". This causes a problem with classes like Assassin and even Barbarian who have almost no multi-target abilities, causing the multitude of people to join the battle to overwhelm the player. This is especially problematic for assassin because they rely on Stealth, which is broken upon taking damage.
The only way to really rectify this is to go to lower-level mobs and simply grind away until you feel ready to try again. Not very fun, if you ask me.
Quests
Quests are a big part of an MMO, and thus, I thought they'd deserve their own section.
EQ is known as the "granddaddy" of MMOs, having been around for a whopping 11 years now (starting in 1990). EQ2 came out in November of 2004, and it carries much of the original game's heart and spirit.
What do I mean by this? Simply: all the quests fall under three categories; "Talk to this person", "Kill x many of y", or "Gather x many of Y". The diversity never changes, and you can even do the "rep grind" for factions if you grab their "writs" which are always "Go here, kill this."
Character Advancement
Character advancement in EQ2 is the most choppy, awkward, terrible thing I've experienced in any MMO thus far. The system of "Alternate Advancement" is very similar to WoW's "Talent Trees" but it's different and complex enough to end up leaving me with a headache and a frustrated glare.
Alternate Advancement works on the system of doing things other than just grinding (doing quests, completing collections, killing named monsters for the first time) gives you points into this. This causes problems when you simply want to grind a character, but want to also make them progressively better other than just increasing base stats.
EQ2's answer to this is giving you the ability to transfer x% of your normal experience to "Alternate Advancement" experience, but this slider also causes problems because then you're gimping one leveling for another, and it just causes a big headache when you get behind on your normal leveling because you wanted Alternate Advancement levels.
The Alternate Advancement itself is confusing, also (at least for Assassins). Coupled with the lack of any guidance from high-level players or people running numbers to see efficiency, or even a simple "recommended for leveling" tree, this quickly gets frustrating as you're wondering what in the hell you should do with your points and how to play your class most effectively. The answers online say "L2P, noob." and "Change alignment to change class, it's better that way." instead of giving you an actual feel for leveling as your class.
Even simple things like getting gear for your increasing level becomes a chore of going to the auction house and buying new gear, because heaven forbid that quests give you enough to sustain the ever-increasing amount of enemies you'll face.
Leveling skills is a chore as well, as grind-tastic as it is in any other MMO, but this takes it a step further and makes makes the things you harvest only the overarching class of material, not the specifics. What I mean by this is instead of going to chop down a yew tree to get yew logs, you go chop at a "moldy log" and pray you're going to get the component you need. Clearly not well thought out.
Guilds
Another part that MMOs rely on quite a bit, which gives it another section.
EverQuest 2 has an interesting system for guilds; not just your usual "here's a bank and chat channel". EverQuest 2 goes a step further and gives you your own personal Guild housing, Guild salespersons, Guild crafting, a stockpile for crafting fodder that can be accessed through the crafting interface, and the best part: trophies. Upon killing tougher bosses, you get the head of that boss on a trophy to show off to anyone who enters, as well as the ability to teleport to the Guild's Hall at any time, working like the WoW equivalent of a Hearthstone.
The Guild interface is fairly clean and easy to use, and the guilds even have their own personal levels that can be increased by members doing the writs, selling reputation-based items, and completing world events. Members can gain "status" within their guild to show how much they, themselves, have contributed to the guild's advancement.
Grouping
Grouping is awkward in EQ2. Yes, it's the standard "click invite, and they're in", but they have an awkward way of distributing loot (it's not defaulted to "Need/Greed"). Furthermore, the awkwardness continues with things like the mentor system. Unlike other MMOs, if a higher-level character comes to help you with something that might seem like a daunting task, or even just to run you through an easy instance, you will not receive anything unless they "mentor" you. Mentoring involves them having their base stats adjusted to the person they're mentoring, but they retain all the other abilities, damage, and gear. To put it even more simply: the only thing that really changes is that they have significantly less health/mana than their full-level counterparts, but being able to dish out as much damage as they can full level; it doesn't tend to matter much.
The biggest concern of the mentoring system is this: the person doing the mentoring gains reduced experience, usually 90% less, unless they're considerably higher-leveled (40+), while the person mentored gains an extra 15% experience (5% for being in a group, 10% for being mentored). However, loopholes have come in like what my friend and I have found, in which you can exploit the easy kills that a mentor gets with things like double experience from vitality (which I still don't understand how that works), and the 200% increase from someone inviting you to the game. This comes out to the mentor gaining a whopping 220% experience for killing things that are significantly lower level, meaning it's easy leveling that goes quickly enough to be rewarding, but slow enough to keep you in check. This solves the case of "going to lower level mobs to grind until you're more powerful", but it tends to remain to be just as irksome due to not being able to mentor more than one person.
That's right, you can only mentor a single person per character, and that means if you want to go with a lower-level group of three, you've got to play favorites because you can't mentor both of them.
Playerbase
EQ2 has no where near as polarized of a userbase as World of Warcraft. While you won't find as many people causing drama in Trade channel over /b/tard-tastic issues, you won't find any guides to play your class, or helpful high-levels who just want to mess around in lowbie areas and help out those who are just starting out the game.
Truth be told, you won't find much of anyone, in my experience. Although my server was marked as "high population", I would run into maybe 3 other players in the course of playing for 6 hours+. The majority of the life of the game congregates in cities, but even this doesn't give you many other people to interact with.
Crafting
Crafting in EQ2 is as interesting and innovative as it is dull and annoying. While the first time you see the screen and are forced to counteract different slip ups that would be present in a real crafting process, and face the very real threat of having wasted your time and materials to fail at crafting your product, it quickly wears on the player as you try to juggle the ever annoying ebb and flow of success. However, once you've got the basic pattern down, you begin to long for the ability to just hit "craft all" and go grab yourself some food while your character twiddles his fingers for 20 minutes. If more realistic is what they were aiming for, they accomplished it, however, this doesn't mean it's more fun.
Leveling the crafting itself is a pain, also. Whereas in WoW you have things that are guaranteed to give you a new level in crafting, you have to rely on the system of normal leveling with EQ2. This means crafting three or four of the highest level things you possibly can to get a single level, and with the exponential need for materials it quickly will leave you in the infamous "mat grind" which has never been fun.
Wrap Up
Although I haven't fully explored the game, and I'll admit that I've only scratched the surface of the entirety, from what I've seen I've disliked. EverQuest 2 has complexity, yes, but that's it's fatal flaw, in my opinion; it's far too complex for it's own good, leaving those who don't dedicate themselves to learning every nook and cranny of the game alienated and confused. The playerbase suffers from being both too small and too passive; not offering much advice nor criticism for newer players to go off on, and thus becomes a cesspool of boredom.
The general feel of EQ2 is that it's outdated. All the things that newer MMOs are doing are tossed aside like an elderly person claiming that they don't need no damned technology because back in the day...
I'll say this, however. If you have the patience and endurance to last through the grueling grind of the game, it will probably be well worth your efforts and I'm sure that in the higher-ascension of the game there is a lot more to do and care about, but within the short span that I was able to suffer through, this game is simply not my thing.
~Sui
Coming Soon: Aion Review
Comments, criticisms, and congrats are always welcome, and I apologize for the lack of pictures; I wasn't able to find many that I thought would be able to suit this review.