Nah that's not really fair or true. It did a lot of things really well. It was the huge list of bugs and the performance problems that really ruined its chances. Like I said, there were things with the design I just didn't like, but that's just me personally. I think for the most part the design was sound and even technically, the game was pretty close to being great. It just needed more time in the oven, tidy up all the bugs, optimize the engine, get it ready for show time. But SOE drop kicked it out the door in several months early.
Everquest II
- Thread starter Saban_sl
- Start date
They are really good, the healing classes especially. But even the tanks and DPS classes, they were good too. I would also risk saying that it probably has the best dungeons ever made in an MMO. They were ruined by being full of weak mobs and lame ground spawn quests, but the layouts and stuff, places like Khegor's End - they are massive and so well designed and so interesting. It also has some amazing art work. It's let down by poor lighting and issues with anti aliasing and stuff, but it's still very pretty. And the quests for the most part were ok, on a par with other games.
Just needed some more time.
Kreugen
Vyemm Raider
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EQ2 at release was a WoW clone because.. uh, it had quests in it, I guess? What the fuck game did you play?
Forced grouping, open dungeons, group-required cockblock quests just to open the next leveling zone, harsh death penalties, and quests whose highest difficulty factor was finding the fucking person who gave you the quest so you can turn it in for the reward. Yeah, that sounds just like WoW.
You people seriously need to give this "Every game sucks because WOW!" shit a rest. Holy fuck.
Forced grouping, open dungeons, group-required cockblock quests just to open the next leveling zone, harsh death penalties, and quests whose highest difficulty factor was finding the fucking person who gave you the quest so you can turn it in for the reward. Yeah, that sounds just like WoW.
You people seriously need to give this "Every game sucks because WOW!" shit a rest. Holy fuck.
Louis
Trakanon Raider
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Gotta agree with this. Beta + first 2 or so years of the game were about as far off from a WoW clone as possible. They gradually made it more solo friendly, made quest hubs, easier travel, made zones a lot more accessible, and adjusted the class system. Like Kreguan said, you were locked out of most zones past 25+ unless you had a group. Not sure if memory serves me right but I'm pretty sure you needed a group to advance past 19 for your final class choice.
Randin
Trakanon Raider
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Yep, at release EQ2 was every bit as forced-groupy as EQ1 was. Perhaps even more explicitly so, since EQ2 had the whole ^^^=group mob thing, so once you got past level 20 or so, you knew perfectly well that your solo options were to go kill beetles and snakes by the zone line for a few hours, or do nothing.
Now, by about the second major patch, they did basically revamp the entire game to the "outdoors=solo, dungeons=group" setup which now the standard, as well as add a shit-ton of quests, but it definitely didn't launch like that.
EQ2 came out before WOW last I recall. Something that comes out first cant be a clone of something that came out later.
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Beta and stuff. Also it came out like what, 2weeks before? But yeah EQ2 wasn't a wow clone at release, it's only after they got pounded into the ground by wow's numbers that they started copying aspects of wow.
sakkath
Trakanon Raider
- 1,673
- 1,056
EQ2 started copying aspects of wow well before being pounded into the ground. As an example they saw the transport system in wow and then added the griffin towers to antonica/commonlands very late into the EQ2 beta cycle.
But I liked early EQ2. I liked the forced grouping. I found group xp debt funny (even though it was always XP debt being inflicted on me) as I didn't feel like I was in a rush to get to max level anyway. I liked being smashed by flying piranahs in Nektulos. I liked the fact that if you stepped off the path solo you were as good as dead (and even on the path sometimes). I liked the fact that all of the zones were gated by access quests. It made you feel special, like you had achieved something to just be in those zones.
It had many issues of course and for most players I guess it was a bit 'hardcore' but I had a lot of fun with EQ2 at launch. I still remember trying to convince the devs that the adept book for the main inquisitor heal (bestowal of vitae) didn't exist.. I remember all of the whinging about the fact paladins/SK got a mount for free. I remember all of the people trying to get groups together to complete the Enchanted Lands access quests.
But I liked early EQ2. I liked the forced grouping. I found group xp debt funny (even though it was always XP debt being inflicted on me) as I didn't feel like I was in a rush to get to max level anyway. I liked being smashed by flying piranahs in Nektulos. I liked the fact that if you stepped off the path solo you were as good as dead (and even on the path sometimes). I liked the fact that all of the zones were gated by access quests. It made you feel special, like you had achieved something to just be in those zones.
It had many issues of course and for most players I guess it was a bit 'hardcore' but I had a lot of fun with EQ2 at launch. I still remember trying to convince the devs that the adept book for the main inquisitor heal (bestowal of vitae) didn't exist.. I remember all of the whinging about the fact paladins/SK got a mount for free. I remember all of the people trying to get groups together to complete the Enchanted Lands access quests.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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The thing I actually liked that got a lot of criticism (and eventually removed) was the class system. You start the game as nothing on that island with the newbie quests. It gave you a brief introduction as you familiarized yourself with the controls and UI. In the end, you needed to choose good or evil to get off the island. Once you reported back to the city, you were then directed to trainers and you had to pick a generic class figher, scout, priest, or caster. If, for instance, you picked a fighter you would complete some quests that involved you doing a little bit of everything (monk, hybrid, warrior stuff) from there you would pick your subclass. For instance, you pick warrior, then in your teens you would work on other quests that mixed Guardian and Berserker abilities. Finally (I believe at lvl20) you would pick your final class.
I think it was a great tool for new players to get a basic feel for classes without picking and choosing and forced to reroll early in the game. For whatever reason people bitched and whined and it was removed to where you pick your class from lvl1 and go. I never got the hatred for it. The quests were done well and gave a glimpse into each archetype before forcing a choice between 24 classes. It was a great idea for new players, especially to the MMO / fantasy genre.
I think it was a great tool for new players to get a basic feel for classes without picking and choosing and forced to reroll early in the game. For whatever reason people bitched and whined and it was removed to where you pick your class from lvl1 and go. I never got the hatred for it. The quests were done well and gave a glimpse into each archetype before forcing a choice between 24 classes. It was a great idea for new players, especially to the MMO / fantasy genre.
Flipmode
EQOA Refugee
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I liked when everything was heroic. I hated the enchanter class. We got nerfed for like 18 updates straight and couldn't do any DPS. We also had to recast our buffs every 15 mins on every character. Was asinine. But our utility was actually useful in raids. Oh yeah I hated breeze aggro on the darathar raid. I died so much.
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Exactly. This is one of the many things they began copying from WoW's beta. another obvious one was "Oh WoW has ! quest givers?, ok, have our guys /wave at them to let them know they have a quest! yeah that's +1 betterer". Along with RNG/meme-generator'd quests to catch up to the thousand+ that WoW was shipping with and switching focus to quest based on advancement rather than grind based.
EQ2 skipping half their beta to beat WoW out the gates by all of 2 weeks is meaningless as WoW was much further along with content/polish/play testing than EQ2 was. WoW launched when it was ready, EQ2 launched 4 months early to try and grab an early lead. Didn't work out for them, and it took years and scott hartsman to fix the damage they caused by rushing their shit out the door. But all in all the combat mechanics were too terrible for me to go back to bother and see if it had been made worthwhile.
So yeah, EQ2 earned it's badge as "First WoW Clone" by copying shit for no reason when it was clear that earlier in the development/alpha stages the game was intended on going a totally different direction.
Agraza
Registered Hutt
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A totally bad direction. Griffins were a good thing regardless of their source. They weren't listening during beta, and only a failure in the market was going to actually make them re-examine their choices. Their first two expansions were still pretty lackluster. It wasn't until Faydwer and Kunark that the game got better.
The performance at launch, and the first year was the true killer.
Everything COULD look fantastic, but as soon as you had a fight going, frame rates tanked HARD.
My pc at the time was the really top of the line, and I had to turn graphics down so much it sucked.
They claimed it was optimized for future pc's, and I'm sure in 10 years or so there will be a PC that can run the original client with high/extreeme settings. I severely doubt any current pc can.
Later they claimed they believed pc's would have doubled the MHz atleast once during the development cycle, which they didn't, so we would have had 6GHz single core PCs at the point.
LESSON: Make games that can run on top of the line PC's today, that way it will run on average PC's when it is released.
Everything COULD look fantastic, but as soon as you had a fight going, frame rates tanked HARD.
My pc at the time was the really top of the line, and I had to turn graphics down so much it sucked.
They claimed it was optimized for future pc's, and I'm sure in 10 years or so there will be a PC that can run the original client with high/extreeme settings. I severely doubt any current pc can.
Later they claimed they believed pc's would have doubled the MHz atleast once during the development cycle, which they didn't, so we would have had 6GHz single core PCs at the point.
LESSON: Make games that can run on top of the line PC's today, that way it will run on average PC's when it is released.
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uh yeah no. Could turn the game up to max settings at launch, couldn't play anything beyond slide show but there was no point as the graphics weren't really good at all, everything looked like plastic with poor animation. The problems weren't graphic resources, it was unoptimized/untested code combined with shit graphics that got even shittier when you turned all your settings down to deal with aforementioned unoptimized/untested code. If you still can't play EQ2 on modern graphics cards or even cards released a year after that game came out then it only means they never bothered to fix the code. That game was no where near the uncanny valley so that's really no excuse.
VG had better graphics/animations/art/etc and higher requirements but it was entirely playable with cards out when it launched. I know, I had built a dual 8800 GTX SLI'd machine to run the game (back when SLI was new and ~900 bucks in video cards was a big deal)
VG had better graphics/animations/art/etc and higher requirements but it was entirely playable with cards out when it launched. I know, I had built a dual 8800 GTX SLI'd machine to run the game (back when SLI was new and ~900 bucks in video cards was a big deal)
I need to find my old screenshots of playing with faceless bluish and orangeish blob-men, in a group where we pulled ogres? or golems in some dunceon.
I think it was set to actually show about 6-7 characters, the rest was the basic plastic-ish framework the character should have been drawn on.
The real problem was that there was another group nearby - oh noes, and the silly bastards kept casting spells with too much graphics. Open dungeons when frame rates could tank during one pull with one group was a pain. I did end up playing 2 chars to 45+ at launch, and they kept promising to make it better. We are still making jokes of "optimized for nvidia" and so on when mentioning eq2.
Enchanters had to recast a 3 minutes duration 20s cooldown clarity on the entire party all the time, which was also so much fun and entertaining gameplay. whack-a-mole where you had to wait a bit between each whack. The designer of that should be forced to play that way forever.
Alot of things were bad, but it wasnt till they made everything solo-friendly i quit.
I think it was set to actually show about 6-7 characters, the rest was the basic plastic-ish framework the character should have been drawn on.
The real problem was that there was another group nearby - oh noes, and the silly bastards kept casting spells with too much graphics. Open dungeons when frame rates could tank during one pull with one group was a pain. I did end up playing 2 chars to 45+ at launch, and they kept promising to make it better. We are still making jokes of "optimized for nvidia" and so on when mentioning eq2.
Enchanters had to recast a 3 minutes duration 20s cooldown clarity on the entire party all the time, which was also so much fun and entertaining gameplay. whack-a-mole where you had to wait a bit between each whack. The designer of that should be forced to play that way forever.
Alot of things were bad, but it wasnt till they made everything solo-friendly i quit.
McCheese
SW: Sean, CW: Crone, GW: Wizardhawk
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This was fun at first but it got really old really quickly. Rerolling and going through the exact same boring quests and playing watered down, boring classes for 5, 10, 19 levels wasn't fun after the first one or two times.
Jysin
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
- 6,278
- 4,034
THE biggest single framerate killer was enabling shadows. It would basically end up drawing twice. I had a pretty high end PC at the time and you could max most settings for group play with shadows disabled. Raids were an entirely different story. Hell, even my last play through a couple years back I would still have two graphics settings quick saved. One for Solo and Group play and another for raids. I've always built myself high end gaming systems as well. (4GHz+ quad core, SLI graphics, 8 Gig+ of memory, etc. at the time). The engine simply always ran like shit, despite 6 years' worth of hardware later.