I’d say that I could start writing and stop only after a week. I have a text file filled with notes and already started to write some comments on Q23 forums. There’s so much to say, about multiple aspects and I don’t really want to start writing endless walls of text that noone would even attempt to read. So my first problem is how I can organize all this in something that makes sense and isn’t too long. I think it’s impossible, I don’t even know where to start.

In general I could say that the game is filled with sharp highs and lows, this is a constant throughout the game. I was constantly amazed and deluded and this didn’t help when it came to decide if I like or hate this game. I still wouldn’t be able to answer this question.

This is the first time I play the game. I only saw the screenshots till now and always dismissed the game for plenty of good reasons that I won’t explain now. The reason why I decided to buy the game is after the announce of the servers consolidation and the dedication that Scott Hartsman is showing toward the game. I already had a first (one-side, as always) confrontation with him where I was explaining some of my reasons to doubt about the overall scheme of the game. It’s the same theme we discussed during the Christmas holidays, about a model that seems more to damage and slowly kill these games instead of disclosing their potential. The decision to consolidate the servers, even if the game was gaining subscription, was quite surprising and, for me, a clear sign that things were going in a different direction. It was a really smart move that I didn’t expected from a company that just seem to make more and more glaring mistakes, also largely anticipated.

So I was intrigued and decided to follow the game a bit more closely to see where it could lead. Starting in a new mmorpg is always exciting and it’s probably the best moment in any game. If I had found the time to write this during the first day I think you would have read much more optimistic and positive impressions. Today I’m much more cautious and dubious.

As I launched the game and quickly adjusted the options I went “WHOA!”. At the first impact the game looks really, really pretty. I was surprised because I expected to hate the graphic style of EQ2 to the point that I was worried that I wouldn’t have suffered it at all. Instead the newbie island where you arrive after the character creation gave me a really good and positive impression. The environment comes to life. The colors are vibrant, there are butterflies flying around, some good environmental sounds with the birds chirping and a huge tower standing out at the center. The first impression is always very important and EQ2 outperformed my expectations.

I think I passed the first three real hours toying with the options and I’m not joking. You can really manipulate the game client the way you like and you can finetune everything. It takes a lot of time to experiment with the options and sliders and I was never completely satisfied with my choices. It’s actually quite hard to find a satisfying balance between the performance and quality since the game relies HEAVILY on its advanced features. You could turn off the specular lights, but that would remove the reflective effects that make the crabs on the beach look so amazing. You could move the quality of the particle effects from “high” to “medium” but that would completely remove most of the spell effects. And so on. These compromises are never easy because the biggest strength of the game is in the support of those advanced effects. All the surfaces in the game are bumpmapped and often reflective to the light. Removing these effects would be like dumbing down the whole thing since all the textures in the game were planned to look good with these effects activated and not so pretty without them.

The newbie island works like a tutorial and it’s not badly planned. There are a bunch of NPCs that will explain you all the different parts of the game, from the skills and spells to the death systemd, the Heroic Opportunities, the inventory and so on. What I didn’t like is the artificiality of the whole thing. As you enter the game the environment is truly immersive as I described, but then all the NPCs will start to speak directly about the keys you are supposed to press, the interface, the graphic marks on screen and so on. It’s all terribly functional and faked that it sharply brings you back to the reality of the “game”. The immersivity pretty much ends there and the rest of the game steers sharply toward a much more game-y direction.

The UI is quite good and offers an high degree of customization. I found it rather polished and it’s a solid point of the game. The ugliest aspect is about the icons of the spells and skills but overall it made a good impression on me. It doesn’t reach the quality and design in WoW but it is much more customizable out of the box. There are some default options that I really hate, like completely inappropriate huge blue arrows sticking on top of your targets, but you can turn off them and there’s an high degree of customization about the informations you decide the UI is going to show you. For example you can adjust the tooltips when you move the mouse over a spell to display exactly what you want. You can really spend hours in the game like I did just by toying with all the settings.

The dialogue system you use to talk with the NPCs and get quests is exactly the same of SWG (and there are many other systems that the two games share). You have a chat bubble on the left of the NPC with what he is saying and your dialogue options on the right. You click on the option you choose and the dialogue continues. This is actually quite refreshing when in WoW there isn’t any interaction whatsoever but then this feature is also not really fully used. Don’t expect rich, branching dialogues, most of the times you just have an option to continue and another to quit. The system is there though, and could be rather powerful if used correctly.

I could start to talk about the graphic and animations and never stop. At the highest setting possible the technical features of the game make it look rather pleasing, but then don’t expect it to move more than two characters at the same time. The animations have the same problems of SWG. It seems that they are made with motion capture and they feel rather generic and uninspired. Not really appropriate when they are supposed to characterize fantasy races like huge ogres. So the result is disappointing. There are actually two problems, one about the animations themselves and another about the movement of other characters and mobs around you. The fact is that both the mobs and other players move jerkily around and this reminds me again SWG. It’s not odd to see a mob spinning awkwardly while chasing you and you can forget the polish and fluidity of WoW’s animations. In EQ2 everything is much more approximate and imprecise.

These two problems (generic animations and jerky movements) make the game not so pleasing and in fact you can find them criticized even by other players but what I hate the most is a lack of polish that could have been easily avoided. For example my ogre uses a lance, when the combat is over he tucks the lance on his side, only to see the lance “warp” quikcly on its back, since it isn’t supposed to be on the side. The point is that the game has also another animation that would put the lance properly on the back, but that weapon was flagged uncorrectly and this is a trend you find often in the game, with animations that look imprecise and rough or play at the wrong time.

The newbie island feels much like Guild Wars. The spaces are small and the layout retains some of the “labyrinthine” feel of GW. This is also an impression that doesn’t go completely away as you leave the island. EQ2 is divided into smaller zones and it’s not rare to bump against invisible barriers that limit where you can go. The restrictions aren’t as bad as in GW, but the lack of maps in many zones and the impossibility to rationalize the exploration and geography make the travel rather hard. You finish to move from zone to zone without really knowing from where you arrived and toward where you are going. What upset me even more were the respawn timers. I couldn’t fight something without something else popping up on top of me midfight. I reached a point where I could stand easily long battles with mobs one or two levels below me and it wasn’t rare to start the fight against one mob and finish it against five other mobs that walked in or spawned on top of me. This is particularly bad because you don’t have the mobs “fading in” as in WoW. They just pop-up and aggro right away and as they die they also disappear without any kind of decent effect, leaving in the place huge and inappropriate loot chests. It was also not rare for the death animations to break and the bodies freezed standing still in front of me. This happened to me constantly on the newbie island and I’m not sure if the respawn timers are variable and different in the other zones, but my impression is that not much changed.

Another part that I really hate is about the spell effects. As with the rest of the art the quality has sharp highs and lows. Some spells look amazing, some are horrible glowing randomness. In general they are all way too much bloated and inflated. There’s an insane amount of particle effects and I really developed an intolerance toward it. It just goes beyond every measure. Even the weaker spell has all these shiny particles that explode everywhere like fireworks without any sense. It’s again like they had the effect supported and started to use heavily everywhere without any discretion. What pissed me off the most is that the game is totally unrealistic and faked. You’ll have bears that stuns you. Okay, stunning sounds like a reasonable skill for a bear, but in EQ2 the stun is a fancyful yellow particle effects that spins around you. Come on. Even the frigging BEARS have shiny particle effects attacks. All the spells, skills and effects look completely inconsistent like that example and melee classes that are supposed to rely on the iron of their swords are hardly discernable from spell caster. There are particle effects everywhere and even fighting a rat turns into christmas tree. Some people may find this pretty and cool, for me it was more like an indigestion. Too exaggerated and unjustified. I wonder how the game could look later on because you can only add so many particle effects without making the combat look totally stupid. I guess EQ2 may cross that limit around level 10…

Beside these negative comments I had a fair amount of fun. The quest system is richer compared to WoW and you often have to interact of objects in your inventory, like joining together parts of letters to find hints and unblock the next step for a quest. In general the quests have many multiple steps before you get the reward and every little detail is clearly explained in the quest log. You’ll never feel lost and this is one aspect where EQ2 outperforms WoW. The quest system is more flexible, detailed and satisfying to play. There are still simple quests like fetching letters or kill things, but these steps are usually part of a bigger purpose and all tied together instead of totally undependent excuses to go out and kill stuff. The quests on the newbie islands also do a very good work to keep you interested and intrigued since there are some mysteries that you have to figure out as you follow the quests. So you aren’t moving forward just for the reward, but also because you start to get absorbed in the story and really want to know “what’s next”. In WoW this NEVER happened to me. The stories in the quests could have been funny and humorous, but were never a driving purpose for me beside the “carrot”.

At level 5 I disabled the “combat experience” (great feature) because I was levelling too fast. Currently I’m level 8 and I never reactivated the exp. This because I just enjoy following the quests and I already get enough experience from them.

I think I’m going to break these comments and continue this last part elsewhere, since I explained it better when I wrote about it on QT3. I think it works better to draw my conclusions about the game.