I picked this up yesterday cuz I’m getting a little bored with WoW and figured I’d play something different til BC. If there’s anyone else playing, let me know, maybe we can quest together or something.
For those of you who haven’t checked out EQ2 for a while, they’ve really done a major overhaul to the game. PVP, crafting, the interface, have all seen good improvements.
At any rate, here’s hoping that I’m not the only one interested in this new expansion :)
Lorini
I picked this up yesterday also. Having a blast so far but experiencing content overload. I feel like in EQ2 in general there is much more content than I can possibly manage and now there is a whole boatload more. I didn’t have the DoF expansion before either and my main character is level 48 so perfect for all the DoF stuff. Been going back and forth between him and my new fae.
I’m on Blackburrow with a small guild of friends. There are only a few people but if you want to come and play there is always someone around it seems. If anyone wants to come join us send me a PM.
I wouldn’t mind taking another look at EQ2. Have they optimized the engine? One of my biggest gripes with the game was that it really chugged.
I’m enjoying the expansion quite a bit. Portals are nice. :)
The sheer amount of content in EQ2 is pretty staggering. EoF is the third major expansion and they have had a few downloadable content add-ons in there as well. This was all on top of the vast number of quests in the original game. Content is king with EQ2.
I know the tried to optimize the engine a bit at one point, and may have again since then. I had to stop playing after the first time because suddenly my Geforce 6600GT was artifacting like crazy every time I played. It’s never done that before or since in any other game, and SOE had no answer for why it did with EQ2, so I gave up in disgust. (And yes, I tried all sorts of driver versions, rollbacks, reinstalls and whatnot).
I have characters on Permafrost, haven’t picked up the new expansion yet, got sucked back into WoW.
The engine still chugs. I have many bells and whistles on with a 7900GT and it still dies in cities. I understand 2 gigs of ram might help this. I have heard rumors from the grapevine and whatnot that they wrote the engine in house and a lot of the stuff that should be done in the GPU is done by the CPU instead. I agree that it sure would be nice if they would do another pass at the core graphics like EQ did with Luclin. Perhaps they could also then put in the fabled method of making one armor set and having it scale to all races as it was supposed to be.
2 gigs of ram is the holy grail for EQ2 performance. Moreso than upgrading the video card.
Yes, if I had to sum up my experience of EQ2 played on a $400 graphics card with an extremely fast processor and not a lot of ram, the computer was a five year old me trying to sort through an oversized deck of Disney cards while playing crazy eights. Just a lot of sighing and shifting chunks of cards from hand to hand, flipping through them looking for the one I want, having to put the deck down, then sort through part of it, while my whole family waits.
The engine was optimized for this expansion, especially the UI. But it’s still slow.
If you use complex shaders and characters at max detail five players on screen can bring the FPS in single digit.
The engine is scalable. But obviously it looks terrible if you keep detail and shaders low.
EoF is a nice expansion; the new zones are quite attractive if a bitch to navigate sometimes. I’m on a PvP server though (Venekor), so my experiences are colored by the PvP changes. Essentially, my 70 Warlock is now a toon people actually run from. Before EoF, he was faction in a robe, a free kill, the guy everyone killed last. Now that my spells actually land and mitigation is changed so that people actually take damage from casters on a reliable basis, the cloth wearers are getting their revenge (until the inevitable over-correction, of course).
The drawbacks so far are that raiding is broken (epic mobs are shredding raid-equipped tanks with frightening and clearly unintended ease); deity powers are unbalanced (one minute root/stifles in PvP? Eeek.); scouts are anti-social (they would rather solo so they can guarantee getting the new PvP tokens that drop on lotto loot when you kill an enemy); and the new immunity timers are weird (no one can attack if they have immunity as well as if the other guy has immunity). But overall it’s neat.
Good stuff includes cloaks, extra earring slots, transmutation (like WoW enchanting), tinkering (erm, like WoW engineering), smoother engine, more stuff, new race (the Fae). Overall it’s nice, and we’re pushing our guild to 60 as fast as we can to get the new horsies.
It is speedier with EoF, but yes, 2GB > all. For raids, even x2 stuff (two groups of six, total of twelve players), I usually scale things down dramatically using an interface tweak that automagically pops between high performance and balanced settings. This is more important in PvP though; in PvE x2 raids you can often get away with higher settings. x4 raids though usually require the full monty, including turning off names, etc.