The following takes place between 12:00 AM and 5:00 PM, the day Everquest II review article must be finished. Events occur in real-time.
12:02 AM - 4 Hours 58 Minutes Until Deadline
Everquest II was a good game. You may notice the past tense I am using. This by no means signifies that the game is bad now. What this really means is that it was much better in November 2004, when the game was initially launched. A lot of time has passed since then, and of course the competition has caught up eventually with poor Everquest II.
I've been twisting and turning around this room for some time now, without knowing where to start. I think I'll start with some history.
12:42 AM - 4 Hours 12 Minutes Until Deadline
As I've said, Everquest II was something of a phenomenon back in the days. Following the footsteps of the well popular Everquest, players found themselves in a world full of challenges and possibilities, and opened for almost anything you might of dreamed off, but you were unable to do it in real life. And isn't that what a good MMO game should do? Create it's own world?
But why do I say that it was better in the beginning? Well, there is of course the technical aspect (graphics, sound, loading speed, etc.), but that can be overpassed easily by a person who really wants to give this game a chance. The biggest problem is the fact that not many new people are starting this game nowadays.
Once one of the most addictive games that ever existed, even nicknamed "EverCrack" as some of you may already know, Everquest II seems really barren and empty of players, at least in the starting areas. If you have a friend that already plays the game, or just a friend who also bought the game and you're starting together, this game can be great fun. But if you are like me, all alone with no one, not even a soul in this cruel MMO world who cares for little me (don't cry), then you will have a hard time, or possibly get bored really fast.
13:14 AM - 3 Hours 46 Minutes Until Deadline
From the beginning now: The game manual isn't really helpful at anything, it's just 3 pages, and it tells you how to install the game and login. No tips on anything, no information on how to create your character, what classes or what they do. So you will probably go with "I'll pick this one, it has a nice ring to it". The install is long, and if you got the full pack (including all the expansion to date) the game comes on 2 DVDs (standard ones) and takes somewhere around 7.7GB installed. Then there's the whole patching thing, that took me somewhere around 5 hours to download and apply.
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Once you do get passed all that, you can finally log in and start creating your character. Player versus Player (PvP) servers were added in Everquest II sometime in February 2006, along with a PvP system. There are a couple of these servers. The rest are Player versus Environment (PvE) servers. I chose to create my character on a PvP server, but I really don't recommend this if you are a newcomer to the game.
Character creation offers complex options for your avatar's looks. Stature can be customized, as well as a lot of facial features. A lot more than you need, to be honest. But hey, a RPG should have a good character creation option. One remark I could make though is that, similar to Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, even if you customize every aspect of your character in detail, you can't help but feel it still looks the same with every other character from it's class. It's puzzling, I know, you have to check it out to see it.
There are 28 races available (17 aligned good, 11 evil), 24 classes and 11 professions, so there is a really wide variety to pick from. You cannot complain. Furthermore, all are decently balanced and make a viable option.
Good aligned races (starting in the city of Qeynos)
Barbarian
Dwarf
Erudite
Froglok
Gnome
Half Elf
Halfling
High Elf
Human
Kerra
Wood Elf
Neutral aligned races (starting in the city of Kelethin)
Dwarf
Fae
Gnome
Half Elf
High Elf
Wood Elf
Evil aligned races (starting in the city of Freeport)
Barbarian
Dark Elf
Erudite
Gnome
Half Elf
Human
Iksar
Kerra
Ogre
Ratonga
Troll
There were originally four classes ("archetypes") in the game. Fighter, Scout, Priest and Mage. You could go into subclasses at level 10, and then again further down the tree at level 20. This system was removed in an update in January 2006. You have to pick the exact class you want now from the beginning.
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15:07 AM - 1 Hour 53 Minutes Until Deadline
I am really sorry that they gave up the /pizza contract! If you haven't heard about Everquest by now for it's gameplay or it's addictiveness, you may have hear it from pizza advertisements. Yes, that's right, Sony had a contract with Pizza Hut for Everquest II. The player could simply type /pizza in the chat area, and he would get an available menu and a possibility to get pizza delivered right at his door. Like all good things in life... it's gone now. /pizza /PIZZA! I want /pizza NOW NOW NOW!
The combat system is really well thought, and it gives the battle a unique dynamism. You have to combine various spells and skills, and it's a challenging experience. There are even "special moves", some sort of combos - you have to cast certain spells / use certain skills in a particular order.
Player gains spells as he levels up, and they are added automatically to the spell bar. You can however buy scrolls to further "perfect" them.
Questing is rather dull, especially at the beginning. They even have a summary, so you can just extract the "to do" list, and not read them if they don't seem important for the story. Some quests have really strange objectives that are hard to find, and you get most experience by killing monsters anyway. You get talent points for completing quests after level 10 however, so...
Although there is a wide variety of monsters, they seem to share the same features, not many of them really do a special attack or something, they just look different. And I hate (personal opinion) those creepy crawler things. You know, the 1000 legs worms, they make my skin itchy. I feel awful when I have to kill those.
15:49 AM - 1 Hour 11 Minutes Until Deadline
What's really remarkable is that the game has voice acting on quite a few quests. Some well known actors are doing the voice overlays, and that really hits the spot - it helps create a certain game atmosphere.
On to a different matter: graphics. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't improve the visual quality of the game. It has certain presets, like Low, Balanced, High, Very High, as well as individual settings. But there is virtually no difference between Very High and Balanced mode, except a big performance drop. In fact, even if Everquest II was tested on a really high end system, I couldn't play it with settings higher than average. There was no way I could set an Anti-Aliasing mode at all, no matter how hard I tried.
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16:37 AM - 23 Minutes Until Deadline
Everquest II features a Guild system, and an instance system that was introduced in a later patch as well. The current player community seems to be very devoted and will not quit playing the game soon. The game may lack newcomers, but the base players still remain for the moment.
To make the player feel more "at home", the game allows you to buy one. Yes, your own home, that you can decorate however you want, buy all sorts of furniture and so on, and so forth. It's another good idea, to make the "world" aspect more real.
Of course, as in most MMORPGs you get mounts to allow you to move faster in the world. Ummm, what else would be there to say?... Oh yes, the death thing. When you die, you loose some durability and you have to repair your items. You get death sickness, that reduces everything 75%, and you get resurrected at the closest available point (usually the start of the area). You get some (not much) experience debt as well, that you have to regain to be able to go on with leveling. It's an ok system, not that annoying, the bad thing would be if you're on a PvP server and talking to some traider you can get killed without even knowing what hit you. Also the color coding on the monsters is a bit confusing sometimes, and you can kill thousands of mobs and then get killed by one that didn't look any different than the previous ones.
16:53 AM - 7 Minutes Until Deadline
The interface is well conceived, and it has all the elements it needs. However, a new player is really thrown into it and into the game without much explanation. It's really confusing and hard to master with so many things. You get sometimes so many things you just want to scream! It's not a secret that Everquest II has inspired in many ways the MMORPG genre, including interface elements, but it could use a better design at being beginner friendly.
16:57 AM - 3 Minutes Until Deadline
If you plan to start playing this game with a friend or if you already have friends playing and you want to join them, and don't mind graphics and interface that are a bit outdated (and I may add you have a lot of patience and free time), then Everquest II is certainly for you. But if you are just looking to start playing an online game, especially for the first time, I really can't recommend this game. It has the right ingredients: story, fanbase... but it is old, and getting older. Maybe wait for Everquest III?
16:59 AM - 1 Minute Until Deadline
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Gameplay: 73
Some nice ideas, but the game is out of date, and it certainly shows that. Really hard to get into, especially if you don't have any friends already playing. The game has quite a few core players, and it will certainly last, but it's really not appealing to newcomers at all. There are quite a few better MMORPGs out there today.
Graphics: 69
Once a thing to be proud of, EQII has now average graphics, but it doesn't feel optimized at all. Spell effects look good, characters look average, and some animations are really... bad. Anti-aliasing doesn't work at all, no matter how hard you try to enable it.
Multiplayer: 68
It still feels like singleplayer until you get to the actual populated zones (and higher levels).
Sound: 68
Although some praise the sounds from this game, I don't find anything remarkable about it. Some voice overlays are really good, and the music is decent. Ambient sound and some sound effects can be really stressy.
Hardware: 62
With (at least) 2 year old graphics and animations, with no anti-aliasing available, this game should run like butter. But any setting higher than average brings the most powerful computers down to their knees. Really bad stuttering and low framerates, combined with long loading times and a lot of patches and updates needed at the beginning. Really nothing to see here, move along...
The clock is ticking... tick... tock...
