SOE Becomes Daybreak / Russian shutdown

48 gigabytes of voice acting.

EQII's innovation was that it allowed everyone to be anything they wanted. Sure snowflake you can be a Troll Wizard, or a Dark Elf Ranger, we're all so special. Oh yeah, lets not forget awesome housing items dropping from Boss mobs, because interior decorating is so important. Also all those solo instances so you can play and not be triggered by other players.

EQII started off pretty cool, but it became a safe haven for the "quality of life" people, (read as dumbing down), and now seems to be primarily played by blue haired SJW cat ladies, and Tranny's. When I think of EQII's current player base, I think about the average Massively(OP) poster.

Thats just me though, and I am admittedly bitter over just how quickly a decent game went to shit.

Sylas said:

Huh voice acting. Guess that's an innovation. I would ask how that hindered them, but since I played that shit for a month at release and don't remember a goddamn bit of voice acting you can argue it was a massive waste of resources that could of been used on making the game decent instead of shit.

Honestly don't remember eq2 having voice acting. Swtor, sure, that's memorable.

Mur, theres not one innovation on your entire list. Also eq2 was never good

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They not only wasted time and resources, but shelled out big bucks to get people like Heather Graham to do it. It was a massive amount of voice acting, which later either got pulled or they never implemented it anymore. I was joking about it being a real innovation though.

EQ2's Innovation was obsessively trying to force the players to play the way the devs' intended.

dp

Sylas said:

Mur, theres not one innovation on your entire list. Also eq2 was never good

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I thought EQ2 voice acting was ground breaking for the time. Gone were the days of reading walls of NPC quest text and guessing key phrases. Some of the voice acting was done quite well. As mentioned, Heather Graham did Antonia Bayle of Qeynos and Christopher Lee (Saruman from LOTR) voiced Lucan D'Lere of Freeport. The original content was almost entirely voice acting, but come the first xpac DoF it was very sparse and rarer yet with subsequent xpacs. Either it was typical SOE half-assing their projects or it didn't have the success / revenue they expected and cut back.. or a bit of both.

I, for one, liked the voice acting.

There's a shitload of credited voice actors on the project:
EverQuest II (Video Game 2004) - Full Cast & Crew - IMDb

*Edit* Pouring through the list.. looks like they had old Winnie Cooper (Danica McKellar) in there too. Also Wil Wheaton.. still digging through the list...

I like EQ2 Voice Acting as well and honestly the graphics sold me over WoW at first as I just couldn't stomach the more animated art style. However, EQ2's graphics did not work out as advertised. Some of the world looked solid but it really taxed your machine and honestly it was very bland. The soundtrack was incredible for an EQ fan though. I had a lot of fun, probably as much as any other MMO, but it was very poorly executed.

I think they would have been better off instead of building Landmarks and keeping EQ2 alive to have just made a spinoff game where you just had access to EQ2 housing and trade skills. Housing is about the only "game" left in EQ2.

EQ2 is a game that never addressed it's core issues and they still exists to this very day.

Muligan said:

I like EQ2 Voice Acting as well and honestly the graphics sold me over WoW at first as I just couldn't stomach the more animated art style. However, EQ2's graphics did not work out as advertised. Some of the world looked solid but it really taxed your machine and honestly it was very bland. ...

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Keep in mind, the graphics were advertised to be hugely scale-able so when newer tech came out, the game would look better and better. Unfortunately, during the development years, PC tech was simply amping up processor power in raw speed on single cores. EQ2's design was assuming we would see ever increasing CPU speeds. As well all know, it went very differently and we ended up with multi-core processors soon after. The game was built single threaded and heavily CPU bound if you tried cranking up graphics. They took a gamble, but unfortunately it bit them in the ass. Their engine was flawed from there on out.

Ravishing said:

That's the problem. They keep focusing on graphics and keep failing. EQ1 was hailed as revolutionary but the main hook was the gameplay & lore.

No other game had such a community driven game as EQ1... primarily out of necessity, no matter how much we all bitched about it.

Still, the original world & lore get me giddy.

EQ2 was all about "realism! voice acting! instancing! housing! anti-griefing!".
Remember how bad the anti-grief mechanic was at first? holy shit was that a train wreck.

I just wanted an EQ with an updated feel and some new mechanics/better engine. The city designs were massive and pretty nice but outside that the game was shit.

Also remember newbie-island? Lol... so many failed concepts.

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You know looking at the last several posts on this thread actually make me feel less upset about how the game began. It looks like they tried something different and did attempt to launch several new ideas that were just misses. Sure, they don't necessarily make sense or even seem like have any chance at success but honestly, as we describe these points, this is very much a different SoE/Daybreak than we know today. Instead of seeing how far they can monetize a pile of crap, it looks like they attempt to find the "next step" but were either blind or out of touch with several decisions.

Now that I look back, I would have liked to have seen some of this succeed instead of abandoned. I liked the newbie island, the suburbs/communities outside the main cities, and several other concepts that were removed. It's a shame they missed the boat on the mutli-core technologies. I remember this being a big topic. It just seems like they've invested a lot of time and money building on a cracked foundation instead of filling the cracks.

EQ2 is one game I wish they could go back and get right as there are still elements that I love(d) about the game and feel they did better than everyone. It's just hard to smell the 2-3 roses they had in a field full of manure.

I liked the newbie island concept as well. I thought it was a great idea for new people to the game. In EQ1, you fired up and had to make Class / Race decisions before stepping foot in the world and knew fuck all what those choices really meant until weeks, if not months worth of levels down the road to get a feel for the class. EQ2 had the idea that you were all noobies stuck on The Island of Refuge. You were not good, nor evil and had general abilities from each base archetype. Soon, you selected which archetype you wanted to play (Fighter, Priest, Scout, Caster). By the time you were ready to leave the island, you were given a chance to speak with 2 difference NPCs, each vying for you to follow their good (Qeynos) or evil (Freeport) paths.

From there, you were put into your distinct racial district of each city and given further work to progress on your archetype. For the sake of this discussion, we will assume you picked a Fighter class. You are sent to do tasks that use the skills of different Fighter classes, ie: Warrior / Monk as well as exploring the city noob xp zones and gaining a few levels. After you got a feel for those, you were made to choose your Class. Lets say we pick Warrior.

The final part of the task was fleshing out which final Warrior class you liked. Your tasks involved Guardian and Berserker skills and gaining final city tasks / levels. By level 20 you were made to pick your final Sub-Class choice, at which you would pick between Guardian or Berserker and be set free outside the city gates into Norrath.

Same was the case for all the classes. Base > Archteype > Class > Sub-Class, all along the way giving you a feel for each. For whatever reason they scrapped this whole system and made it so you pick your class at level 1 and dumped the island altogether.

I actually really liked that system. I think most people complained about it because they leveled up all the way to 20, chose the gimped class of the 2 and cried on the official forums. Most of the sets weren't very balanced, so there was a chance you gimped yourself by making the wrong choice after investing 20 levels. I believe they changed this later on so that you could actually change your class to the other? I remember you played a whole lot more than I did, so I'm sure you remember better.

daly said:

I actually really liked that system. I think most people complained about it because they leveled up all the way to 20, chose the gimped class of the 2 and cried on the official forums. Most of the sets weren't very balanced, so there was a chance you gimped yourself by making the wrong choice after investing 20 levels. I believe they changed this later on so that you could actually change your class to the other? I remember you played a whole lot more than I did, so I'm sure you remember better.

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I am pretty sure they had the betrayal quest in from the beginning. Some classes were neutral, others were distinctly either good or evil. You could change your sub-class by betraying your home city for the other. I actually did this in the early days from Qeynos to Freeport. There was a pretty involved quest where you betrayed your home city to the point you were sent to the Queen herself (all voiced by Heather Graham) and she banished you from the city. You still weren't allowed in Freeport either until you completed loyalty quests. This was why that Exile city existed.

At the end of the betrayal series you will be prompted to see a subclass trainer, making it possible to change your subclass. You will need to see the trainer regardless of whether you are changing subclasses.

There are restrictions: you must stay within your class and the subclass must be available to your chosen city's alignment. If a Guardian wanted to change to a Berserker, they could do so from either good or evil alignment. However, if a Conjuror wanted to change to a Necromancer, they must switch from good to evil alignment.

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