EQ2 just dropped on my desk. I forgot I had pre-ordered it. Outside of the e3 demo I saw I really know jack about it.
Anyone else playing it or into it? How is it different from EQ? Why should I switch from CoH?
So far it looks like an upgrade of EQ with little to no gameplay changes…
I am having fun with it so far (and I despise the original EQ) although I would say that WoW is a better overall game (as far as execution goes) and nothing beats City of Heroes for combat. What EQ2 can provide (if you are looking for it) is more of a sense that there is stuff out there to discover and places to explore. In large part this is due to EQ2 not giving as much away with its interface as something like WoW. When you walk into a city in WoW you will quickly find yourself looking for the gold exclamation points and hurrying to get the quests, the quests are also so well construed by the WoW interface that you can complete them without paying much attention to the actual content of the quest. In EQ2 you will have to work a little harder to both find quests and complete them which some will find rewarding and others annoying.
Don’t ya get a free month with purchase? Since you got it I’d check it out… if you don’t like it well you’ve got CoH :D
Yep got a free month. And I will check it out. I played EQ for 2.5 years. So EQ2 has a lot of nostalga attached to it. The things that I eventually got sick of in EQ was that the game turned into work.
Camping.
Looong time to level 55+
Camping.
Raids that take 14+ hours that result in nothing.
De-leveling due to death.
etc…
Have these things been remedied or fixed?
I’ve several times seen them promise that those icky raids would be gone.
High-end content is supposedly targetted at groups (six people). If that
is true, my main problem with the old EQ is gone. I hear the framerate
is awful, though :/
remembers he’s supposed to catch a bus and buy an Athlon 64
I have played it some. I have a level 10 Enchanter right now. After years of EQ and dealing with SOE’s QA, I swore I would never play another SOE game…but here I am. I had been disappointed with WoW and so I decided to try it out.
It supposed to be less EQ-like, and I guess in some ways it is. Everyone can solo, and there is less of the obnoxious sit doing nothing downtime that pervaded early EQ. Much like WoW, there are a lot of quests to hide the monotony, tons, that can actually get you xp worth mentioning, unlike the first one. Getting them is a problem though, unlike WoW where you can see if an NPC has a quest for you, you have to hail NPCs for quests. It doesnt sound bad, but in practice it gets old. There seem to be just two cities, but they are huge, split into a bunch of zones.
Its not anything groundbreaking, and I think its actually slower to level up in than EQ is right now (super cheap, good twink gear and crazy xp from recent expansions have made leveling in EQ a HELL of a lot easier than the original game+Kunark was). Its slower leveling than WoW too, if you have played that.
The crafting system is very deep, but seems more tedious than anything. There are a bazillion recipes and if you want to make high quality goods you have to craft most of the component pieces yourself, from player gathered resources. The actual combine process is sort of mini game like, negative events occur during the process and you use skills to counter them. I cant say that I have gotten very far, but early on its quite tedious trying to figure out what you want to make, get the recipe or skill/level to do so and then get your hands on all the stuff you need to make what your item.
My biggest complaint is the performance. Its absolute dogshit for me, on an XP 2800+/1gig/X800 Pro. Some people say it plays fine for them, but there are dozens of threads on the official boards complaining about performance from people with all kinds of rigs. SOE is giving their usual stellar support, basically saying nothing publicly about any of the complaints. The servers have been coming down at least two hours a day also, along with assorted shorter, unplanned outages.
olaf
Slower than EQ2. Argh.
I did the tutorial with everything on max and it was laggy as hell. I’ll switch everything back to normal and check it out after the downtime.
What the hell are they thinking having 4 hour downtime everyday. Which is smack bang in the middle of primetime in the Pacific time zone and affects Europe? Thats a serious black mark. Even if they stop doing it during my free month its another one of those SOE will screw all non-US players attitudes I detest.
Sounds like I’ll be sticking to CoH. I should hit level 50 just as the Kheldian Epic AT comes out. That will make restarting interesting. My only issue with COH is it requires ALOT of button mashing which hurts my arms after a few hours of game play…
My wife and I are playing it. I’m on a 2.8 with 512 ram and 9800pro 128. She’s on an 1800xp with same ram and vid card. No matter what we do with the settings, the game caches so much on the hard drive that we lag about every 10 feet for a few seconds in the city.
I’m really hoping things get better in the wilderness - on the newbie island it was just dandy at one notch above default graphics. In town, I can drop it all the way to extreme performance and still have huge disk thrashing.
So I priced out ram for our boxes last night, $320 to take them both to 1 gig. I’m just wondering if it’ll make as much difference as I’m hoping it would, given the comments above from a 1 gig of ram player.
I have Barton 2500, 1.5 gigs of ram (the ram problably helps a lot as I have very little paging), and a 9800 pro running at 1280 x 1024 on the balanced setting. Overall runs very smooth, with just a little occasional lag and hitch in the populated parts of the city.
I am really loving the game. IMMERSION. Ever since moving to Freeport, obtaining my tavern room and obtaining and finishing the citizenship quest, I haven’t even looked at the experience bar. I feel that caught up in the game. <very minor spoilers, well not really, follow >
Now that I am a citizen and am visiting the various parts of the city, as per the Overlord’s Book I obtained, I have been so drawn in, I can’t adequately describe it. The first time I entered East Freeport from the dark and bland Shadowhaven Alley my Jaw almost dropped and a “gaming grin” slowing crept over my face from ear to ear.
The lore is incredible if you take the time to listen. The fall of Neriak, the disgruntled and displaced Dark Elf nobles. The fanatical guards, the commoner who was glad his family died in the Luclan incident because he inherited their wealth at their passing (Freeport is the evil city).
Some of the humour in the game is quite priceless. Quests are interesting and meaningul. Even the “Foozle quests” fit.
As I mentioned above, I haven’t even looked at the experience bar. I want to explore and learn about my new surroundings.
If you like any of Bethesda’s products you will love EQ2
After years of playing MMORPGs I think I have found one that “fits” One that gives you that “raison d’etre”.
Myth, I am curious have you played EQ1 and COH? If so how do they compare. I just finished the tutorial area (level 6 DE Warrior :) and it wasnt as bad as I thought it would be. The voice acting adds a lot I think (and the lip sync to boot).
solomani,
Yes I have played both, and pretty much every MMORPG since Meridian 59 :shock:
I played COH until the end of the 1st free month, and I found the core gameplay to be very enjoyable, however I can’t really explain it, but I found after time I really had no attachment to my character.
I identified with my character as much as I would the marine in the doom series, or Mario in the Nitendo games. Initial character creating was a hoot, but advancing your character with the little ability “pills” just didn’t do it for me. COH seemed to me just like a regular console game that you play now and then for the sheer fun of it. For me, I never “felt” like a hero inhabiting a world. For many that is not a problem, but I like RPG’s that make me feel that I am someone else, somewhere else.
I recently stopped playing Everquest, and I played that game off and on since the beginning, but I never got anywhere near the “end game”. Everquest had a great deal of history and lore, but it really wasn’t attached to the gameplay. You could find it if you wanted. My impression of Everquest was that you created a character, and then immediately started whacking rats and bats outside Freeport…then moved on to the commonlands…then Kurn’s Tower…and so on and so on. For me there was never any satisfaction to be had at your current level. You were ALWAYS looking at the experience bar creep up slower and slower as you develped your character.
I think EQ2 is so immersive because it:
Gives you reason to be there.
Gives you , a meaningful starting base of operations
Breeds loyallty to your home city and makes you feel good to be Evil :twisted: (For Freeport anyway).
Once citizen ship is established gives you some guidelines as how to proceed, but gives you the freedom to choose how you do so.
It does all these very sublty, and draws you in resulting in that “gaming smile” where you suddenly realize that your hooked. Freaking Brilliant.