I’ll definately resub to EQ2 some of these days. Sounds like they have tweaked pretty much everything that was bugging me at launch.
I’m amazed at how much of the game they’ve rebuilt since launch. The upcoming complete rewrite of character class progression, for example.
SoE gets +1 for being very willing to fix design flaws. They get -1 for having so many to fix.
Blizzard gets -1 for being unwilling to let go of failed designs. (Meeting stones, anyone?) +1 for not having many that need fixing.
I’d be happy if they made a real renderer. I think the one they’re using now is something they ripped out of AutoCAD or something…
Blizzard also gets +1 for letting you play a cow.
Actually, maybe you can in EQ2 as well. I know you can play a cat…
I still play EQ1 (I will never ever call it EQLive) and consider it a better game than WOW or EQ2 in the little experience I had trying those out.
Sam
I’ve also found animal skins to be far superior to cotton for clothing myself.
Okay; that’s not fair and I know it; but are you sure that you aren’t viewing Everquest through some rose-colored glasses there? What does EQI do “right”, for you, that WoW and EQII fail to deliver?
Chris Woods
If I wanted to primarily raid, EQ1 is the clear and obvious choice for depth/breadth of content as well as the ability to be insanely more flexible than either of the other two games in terms of finding suitable raid targets for a wide variety and number of classes at any given time.
You still don’t get it. WoW quests were well well done for that exact reason. As you did them it constantly gave you a reason to go to new areas. As you leveled up you were given a nudge(a new quest) to go off to a new zone and start exploring while you were doing the quests.
Face it you just liked the harder more obtuse gaming of stuff like EQ. Like it gave more satisfaction because you got it done, leveled up anyways regardless of how difficult and a pain in the ass the developers made it.
I think you are pretty badly missing mouselock’s point, which is that WoW has less of a sense of true exploration, because saying you are exploring in WoW is somewhat like saying you are “exploring” at Disneyworld when you hop on the “Small World” ride. You may see pretty things, but it’s not through much of your own efforts, you’re riding in a cart on rails.
I’m not sure why you’re hostile about this issue.
slowly. poor.
It’s a typical MMO grouping game - fun to play with friends. Really unfun as a solo game, or if you’re a casual gamer, in my opinion. It may be one of the best MMOs currently available (although a distant drop from WoW), but it clearly represent why this genre stagnated between 1999-2004 and only appealed to a hardcore niche.
Thanks for the paraphrase, Sly. That’s exactly my point. (Though I’d probably have used a less… fervent… example given the already present hostility.)
It’s not like I’m saying WoW sucks. Hell, I play WoW and not EQ2, so it can’t be that bad, eh? But I sure felt like there was more cool stuff to actually discover in EQ2 than I do in WoW. I think the themepark analogy works at a base level. WoW is a (very entertaining!) MMO themepark, where you hit all the high points and there’s no trash on the ground anywhere. But occasionally I want to poke behind the animatronic figures and see what’s going on, and I can’t. EQ2 has plenty of room to poke behind the figures, but I get the garbage and the less manicured paths there. And EQ1 was great for looking at all the gears turn but sometimes the paths were actually interrupted by huge yawning pits that could kill you if you didn’t watch out for them. ;)
I think if you truly love the group related game and have a group of friends to play with it’s probably better than WoW. But it’s very all-or-nothing: Want to play, you need a reliable group to play with. You’re not going to do much of interest by yourself when your normal group is sick and can’t log in or is off at the Neil Diamond concert.
I disagree with this.
The problem with exploration in WoW has nothing to do with quests. Quests in EQ and EQ2 offer just as much guidance as those in WoW–it’s just that the guidance in them requires that you pop up a web browser. Which almost everyone does, so hey, why not just put the information in-game? It’s not as if “gnolls hang out in the south” is all that big a thing to tell someone.
No, the problem with exploration in WoW is that there isn’t much to explore. There aren’t many hidden nooks and crannies in the zones.
I briefly played EQ2 before ditching it and picking up WoW. (My friends all play WoW, and I’d rather hang out with them, so…) A tiny newbie zone in EQ2 has more hidden stuff and obscure secrets than the largest zone in WoW. That’s the difference, not pointlessly obscure quests.
You don’t have to quest in WoW. You can explore if you want to. All the zones are there waiting for you. I don’t really see any fundamental difference other than that if you do quest, WoW does a good job of revealing the game world to you in an orderly fashion.
I would not agree with this, but then, different strokes, etc. Many of the people I play with, casually, solo extensively, and it’s generally ok to solo in until your 30s or so, for most classes. Pure tank or pure healing classes, as usual, have trouble, but most others are ok. After 30-35, yeah, it gets tough to solo, but again, if you choose your class right you can solo a good long way.
Like any MMO, there comes a time when you have to group, and that’s not a drawback. Hell, you gotta group in WoW too. And to say that EQ2 represents why the genre stagnated is, IMO, simply wrong. As launched, yes. As it stands now? Hell no. The SOE people have completely–and I mean COMPLETELY–revamped pretty much everything about the game that sucked at launch. Advancement is not slow, it’s actually pretty swift. Drops are far more lucrative and prevalent than they were initially, and if they’re not perhaps at WoW levels of frequency and “shiny” effect, they are often more directly useful to your character. Combat mechanics are now very good, I think, and the class differentiation is very good.
It’s also a matter of taste, of course–all these games appeal to different types of gamers. EQ2 though lets me have fun in two hours doing “stuff,” even if I don’t gain much. In WoW, if I didn’t gain something very tangible, I felt like I was wasting my time usually. I don’t feel that way in EQ2, but then again, hardly a session goes by without something tangible dropping my way.
The point they’re making, Mark, is I think that WoW has less to explore than EQ2, a statement I would agree with, though it is I think subjective. I had a blast early on in WoW, exploring all the Alliance (in Beta) and Horde (in release) lands, and then moving on to the contested zones, but I’d also agree that the smallest EQ2 areas have more hidden, obscure, off the beaten path, interesting sights and locations than most WoW zones. Again, highly subjective, and there are things in WoW that were breathtaking as well–seeing Rag for the first time, getting wafflestomped by Onyxia, that sort of thing for sure.
What?! Are you on crack? I played EQ2 for 2 months, and made 4 characters (and hence went throught he newbie zone 4 times).
What hidden stuff? There was no cool exploration stuff in the newbie zone unless you count swimming around the bay to find a gear.
I got one character to level 19 and one to 22. Neither one of them ever found much in the way of exploration, except maybe the sewers on qeynos.
In WoW, on the other hand, I have found tuns of hidden stuff. Ever been on top of the waterfall above stormwind where the hidden cottage with the defias is? How about the hidden yetti quest npc in loch modain? Or the speical vendor hidden in the mountains between duskwood and lakeshire? Or found a way to the runways near Ironforge?
The real problem with all these games is that the mystery is taken away when you are with a group who knows where everything is and/or go to place like thottbot which tell you where everything is.
Maybe all the cool discovery stuff in EQ2 is post level 20, but for me, I never found anything like that.
Deep, there’s tons of tiny little things to click on that start quests. The books sort of count as exploration. I dunno, the neophyte sewer zones are pretty cool, and in EQII there are more wrong turns to make, whereas in WoW when paths branch, there’s something at the end of each. EQII people like to cut themselves to let the dirty bad feelings out.
A game gives you some basic hints to help you along and people call it riding on rails is stupid. You want to make it seem like there was a glowing line on the ground telling you were to go. My “hositlity” is the lame statements made that since WoW didn’t make you devote your life to figuring out stuff that its some sort of MMO for dummies, and something like EQ gives a “true” experience or whatever thats supposed to mean. WoW used the quest system to give people a reason to explore besides just doing it for the sake of it. Its called good game design.
Indeed, the glowing lines telling you where to go are in EQ2, not WoW. :>