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Why does EQ2 not get better press?
Elreic
Member Posts: 79
Why does EQ2 not get better press?
Granted, with my Station access I have been playing for only about a month...
But here are some definate cool things--
1. Quests! They call it Everquest for a reason, man there are so many and some are pretty interesting
2. Lots of Character and racial types
3. Open PvP, a thing that many pine for
4. Very customizable character tree options, far more than other games
5. Crafting makes a big difference
6. The AA thing, is pretty cool
7. Complexity, this is a much more involved game than WoW
8. Committed Dev, keep adding xpaks etc
9. Many players online all the time
Downsides, that I can see:
1. Graphics are so-so
2. Performance is so-so
3. Balance issues, like every other game
4. Overcoming early bias against the game??
What do you all think and have you tried it? I am pretty impressed so far.
Comments
I played it for a month, it just seemed like a second rate WoW to me. Much better community in EQ2 though.
Maybe because its shit?
Lack of fun in EQ2 leads to lack of players which leads to a lack of publicity, imo.
The community sucks in EQ2 now because everyone is in 1-9 chat, 1-9 chat making WoW's barrens chat look like World News on BBC. Chat used to be separated by level in EQ2 so you were insulated from the jerks but the pop was so low the game looked abandoned.
Well shave my back and call me an elf! -- Oghren
Keep in mind EQ2 came out in 2004. Its old. It is a solid game and got plenty of good press over the years. Its release wasnt the best but it made up for it over the years and turned into a great game. And then it got old and changed a lot thanks to WoWs success. Some say the changes were for the best, some for the worst. In the end its a good MMO that had a solid run but is certainly running its course.
So so graphics? Are you serious? One thing about that game is the graphics were AMAZING, and still are to most of todays MMO standards. Maybe your rig just cant run them full spec? I know graphics are subjective to the person playing but come on. Stuffs great! haha.
Originally posted by Scagweed22
is it the graphics? the repetativenesses? i mean what is the point? you could be so much more productive in real life
Real life brings repetition and pointlessness too. The only thing real life offers is Great graphics. Its kinda expensive too and way to dependent on the cash shop. Totally pay to win as well. No thank you. Ill stick to my games.
I enjoy a game with a more open world feel to them. EQ2 has a lot of load screens. I have heard once you get deeper into the game, the world really opens up, and that is fine if you are willing to spend a lot of time and energy getting there all by yourself. Two other things I had an extreme dislike for was the crafting system and the auction house. So right there because I didn't like those systems that killed 50 % of the game for me.
But I've tried to go back a couple times. I think the game definitely has some good qualities but if you are starting a new toon and without a guild it can be a very lonely experience. My latest play through I did manage to get to level 20 something before I quit. I think old mmo's need to rethink their strategy and maybe start front loading some of the cool stuff in the early part of the game to keep new players energized, because grinding your way to max level from the bottom in a game that is years old is aweful and you really need some incentive to keep going. There is low level things that they could add to make it fun, but then they are probably more worried about pleasing their established player base and adding content for those at end game.
And then there is the fact that it is owned by SOE. They have a bad reputation for blindsiding their customers and implementing things no one wanted and everyone hated, and then refusing to change it back. Plus they have lied many times and I think once you go down the road of out and out lying to your customers, you have gone to a place that is very hard to come back from in terms of reputation.
After playing it for 4 years it kept on doing a wow creep, changing things that seemed to be a bad copy of wow which in the end lost a bunch of us who didnt want to play a wow clone.
Our guild lost a lot of players when Kurnak came out - all the quests were chained and really there was no group play for 2-3 levels into the expansion, so you went from running instances as a team to being solo and that wasnt what our guildies wanted in a game.
IMHO the dev's never found their own identity - instead they reacted to changes on wow and tried to copy them into everquest2 even if they made no sense, Then they started chasing the quick bucks and when they introduced cash shops we closed up on EQ2.
On release the game had some serious bugs but it still had its own charm, hey who doesnt like rats! (ok about half my guildies didnt but the rest of us loved them!)
the game was sold as a spiritual successor to Everquest 1 - a group based, raid end game construct. they also touted how important crafting would be, after several massive nerfs they removed much of the crafters roles from the game - it took them several expansions to get back to somewhere near where they were.
They also admitted that they had no idea of the balance between the teirs of gear which required them to do a mass gear fix later on which people got pissed about, then they realised that they had underestimated the defensive cap a tank could get in raids, meaning they could be nearly unkillable - so they nerfed that character into dust.
Because of the way they coded the gear it was very hard to introduce new graphics so they recycled all their art work so much that everyone looked the same which people of course hated.
After doing all that (or before hand - memory is a bit blurry) they started with nightly reboots during Aust/Nz play time when they had a fairly healthy southern hemi population - by the end of the nightly reboots they lost 2/3rds of that population.
Once all the nerfs had settled and the population half what it started as, they began to remove group content from overland areas to make it easier to solo, forgetting for the most part the game was sold as a group based one and the people remaining were keen on grouping for the most part, the solo people had already abandoned it and gone to wow (for the most part).
So instead of making the game better for those that were already subscribed they tended to piss off their subscribers in a random hunt for new players.
Lastly was the performance for us, with a new SLI laptop and heaps of ram the game ran like a dog because they were using the cpu to do their shading, they had no sli support and no dual chip support - not surprising because of when the game was released but their code did not allow for it without mass changes which they could not afford to do (Last time I looked they had started working/supporting some of the more advanced graphics features but it was a little too late for a lot of us.)
so after 4 years or so we all abandoned, slowly dropping out as the fun left and the pain of dealing with SoE got too much.
That for us is why EQ2 does not get better press - it really doesnt deserve it.
I think the graphics are pretty good and in some places great, but the art direction was really lack luster in terms of avatars and armor. This is kind of a subjective thing though.
Well compared to WoW the graphics are sick, I am comparing it to LOTRO, Conan and DDO, or even Aion.
I agree the loading zones are not so immersive, however, the sheer mass of content is. And contrary to the post about no one in newb lands, thats absolutely not the case of Nafalgen (sp?). The newb zones are loaded with PvE and PvPers. Granted this is one of the more robustly populated servers.
This is reason I don't play Sony games anymore and avoid buying any of their products as well. I can't stand Sony anymore, thank god I left EQ2 when I did lol
"I play Tera for the gameplay"
IMO the biggest thing to dull the flame for EQ2 right off the bat was the fact that it was released so closely to WoW.
The straw that broke the camels back IMO was the whole Station Exchange fiasco. The game never really seem to recover or be the same after all of that. Of course losing nearly 1/3 of your playerbase almost instantly will do that to a game.
Of course, there is the whole SoE thing as well. They have a reputation for treating players like atm's, and not really caring about their players.....once again refer to Station Exchange, Star Wars Galaxies and the NGE/CU for a short list.
I played EQ2 from launch right up until the SE was announced. That was the biggest reason I left. Some classes were broken beyond belief and SoE had no intentions of fixing them(Shaman anyone?) The game was good at release, aside from the usual minor bugs, but from that point it went downhill with all the changes. Mostly trying to cater to the more solo oriented WoW crowd type changes that started to occur after SoE saw how well WoW was doing.
Einherjar_LC says: WTB the true successor to UO or Asheron's Call pst!
I played Eq2 since launch, and I played it for 5 years since then. But I just had to quit it, basically because I had seen it all, and what was new wasn't really new enough. So yes, EQ2 is probably one of the better MMOs out there. But on the other hand it places quite some obstacles into your way. You need an organized guild and you need to be very active in regular gameplay and scheduling your quests because most quests need people, and without a guild where you are active you gonna attain nada. That was essentially what caused much frustration for me in the last year I played it. I had lost my old contacts and LFG just didn't work. So I stood there endlessly alone, yelling for groups while doing some boring solo stuff.
Essentially EQ2 is an old game, and it shows, I mean gameplay wise. When you are new to MMOs it may be something for you, and it is by no means a bad game, really, but it has a cumbersome pacing and the quest lines are so interwoven and complicated, it really keeps away casual players. Why SOE never made more of it though is quite beyond me. It really could have fared better.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
As someone who played EQ2 similarly long I read this very thoroughly and I have to agree. Also for me Kunark was the breaking point and for the same reasons you sum up.
It still strikes me how bad the technical performance of this age old game is, but I really don't want to bash it. I had some good years with it, and I miss it, but never will I return.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
SoE went onto other games, a good example being their Sandbox game Free Realms.
My personal reasons are because I got it at release and:
Mobs were locked when attacked, but resource nodes were not... which led to a lot of resource ganking.
When you obtained aggro, you could not outrun them. I believe this was for an anti-kiting mechanism... but I don't see how gaining aggro should make you run "slower".
Trade skills could one shot kill you. If you're making a bow, it should not have the same risks as making TNT.
Most of all was that one dev. in EQ2 constantly shouting "THAT IS BY DESIGN" and telling everyone to basically shut up and enjoy their game or gtfo. So I happily did before my first month was up, along with many others, and I can't say I ever had a desire to look back and wonder "Wow... what am I missing?"
Hopefully the game has evolved as well as the team that develops it so people can enjoy it... but it was a pretty negative experience for me and even if it was shouted from the heavens that it was the best MMO ever it'd probably fall on many deaf ears.
"There is only one thing of which I am certain, and that's nothing is certain."
Well, for anyone interested in giving EQ2 a shot, I suggest you try it. The game is only as dead as you make it since there's around 10 servers, and players have the ability to see the servers' population level before they finish character creation. Servers like Nagafen, Lucan D'Lere, Antonia Bayle are packed full of players, and servers such as Mistmoore (I should know because I played on it for 4 years) and Befallen have a nice medium sized population. Sure, there are dead servers, just as there are dead servers in just about any MMORPG other than World of Warcraft.
The game has been through a lot of changes since release and doesn't really resemble the EQ2 of 2004 in any way other than graphically (not even that for those of us who've purchased a new PC since then), but for at least a couple of years now, the game has had a solid amount of direction behind it, and SOE is still pumping out updates and adding new content on a regular basis. Sure, it may be a WoW clone, but think about it for a moment. What AAA modern P2P MMORPG isn't a WoW clone these days? Sure, EQ2 doesn't innovate in ways like Darkfall and Mortal Online look to, but it is every bit as solid (or IMO, more so) as any other WoW-based MMORPG on the market, including LoTRO, WAR, and even Aion.
Though the population may lag behind industry leaders like LoTRO and Aion, it's nowhere near as dead as some here would have you believe. Simply join a populated server and see for yourself how much activity takes place within the game world. 1-9 chat, for all it's annoyances, actually breathes life into the game world as there's some form of chatter going on at all times, and due to the gameworld not being quite as enormous as WoW, I've found that I actually saw more players running around the various zones than I ever saw in WoW, sans the capital cities. Sadly, the major cities in EQ2 are all but dead areas as players usually socialize in the global 1-9 chat and take care of their business via their guild hall.
Yes, the game seems to be highly guild centric. Joining a guild will not only give you access to a like minded group of players, but it will also give you access to that guild's hall which, for all intents and purposes, will serve as what could pretty much be considered as your base of actions. Guild halls can theoretically have portals to almost every major zone in the game, mender NPCs to repair broken armor, broker NPCs for the guild's own personal auction house vendor, and various other functions.
That may not appeal to everyone, and quite frankly, the game isn't for everyone IMO. Those that enjoy wide open worlds with little loading screens may wish to look elsewhere as the entire EQ2 world feels very segregated, especially the original areas which devolve into "forest island," "desert island," "mountain island," "jungle island," "ice island," then "lava island." The good news though, is there's tons of stuff to do in each area and getting to and from different locations is never the chore it can be in other MMORPGs. Also, I've found that EQ2 was a bit more of a social experience than WoW. Literally, from 1 - 70, I was rarely ever without a group. True, the grouping does seem to die a bit from about 71-77 due to the nature of the content released with the expansion that raised the level cap. The last expansion, however, is entirely made up of challenging group-based dungeons, sans one large solo friendly overland area.
All in all, the only one that can decide whether or not the like a game is the player. Speaking from experience, I have enjoyed several MMORPGs that this community and others would lead me to believe I would hate such as NGE SWG, Warhammer, Rohan Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea, and countless other MMORPGs both F2P and P2P which often get a bad rap from the general MMO community.
its a good game, realy .. try it.
Tons of fun and one of the best dungeon crawl games ever.
Just dont go to the forums.
____________________
It`s alright
AC2,AO,D&L,Lotro,VsoH,SWG,Uo,HGL,Drunners,CoH,GW,Potbs,PWI
Eq2,Dofus,WoW,WWIIO,Ryzom,Planetside,EvE,TR,DDO,RFonline,FOM,VC,..etc blabla
also hobbies....staring at loadingbars
I hear you, so many cool people in game, the forums are less than positive.
i just tried to be honest, its all IMHO of course, well most of it other bits are what did occur to us.
i still have a soft spot for EQ2 but wont return, its gone down a path I didnt want to follow - and I think you should vote with your wallet rather than sit in a game and whine about what isnt to your liking.
for the record I always felt the EQ2 dev team were dedicated people who were let down by a jerk at the top.
OMHO
Compared to the first one it was crap.
I am guessing that is why...
so many reasons eq2 is not a good game anymore
1) gold farmers... the devs actually created a website to exchange gold to profit from (see number two).. and of course allowed many people to run around in control of six characters that were autofollowing ganking areas and just spamming people all to hell.
2) dev corruptions.. aside from certain devs making cash off of the game by selling gold.. they also were members of the "elite" raid guilds.. i use elite lightly as the devs gave out the secrets to the raids in order to profit from #1. not to mention told those guilds the bugs etc.. so they could farm raid zones easily..sell items for plat.. and yeah sell that plat for cash.
3) station exchange killed off a lot of the decent players
4) end game raid zones... normal casual even semi-hardcore guilds could not compete with the elite guilds.. as their better players always left to join the top 3 guilds on the server to raid with.. as they would get all the awesome gear with little effort. this killed all of the smaller guilds.. and alienated quite a lot of the population
5) the game was really great,, up until about the kunark expansion.. maybe even the expansion before that... they did nothing to curtail the plat farmers (all they needed to do really was remove autofollow from the game)..
6) class balance... when a class could roam around high level dungeons feigning death non stop and collecting all kinds of treasures.. not to mention one or two boxers dominating names on their own with no help.. then you have balance issues. when certain classes were useless on raids.. and others were the elite on raids.. you had problems.
the good thing about the game is you could quest on your own up to a certain point.. but then some elite items you needed to kill some very hard raid mobs.. and if you were a casual gamer.. you would never see that item as the guilds that were clearing those zones were not going to help some non guild member with anything. The player base is very elitist to say the least... very selfish... i lived that life for 4 years.. and could not understand the A-hole attitudes.
I joined EQ2 the day it was launched. It was an aweful game then, and no way it can compare with games like DAoC or SWG. Once WoW comes out EQ2 is not worth the time then.
I returned to Antonia Bayle some years later and levelled a fury & SK to 70. The game was much better already. There are still some serious issues.
(1) Inflation. A good master spell (drop) could cost you your left arm. Even a good crafted one would cost you half of an arm. It is totally meaningless, unless you have a few maxed level characters and bent on farming plat, or join one of the elite guilds that can directly farm the drops. Not to mention gear. Unfortunately that spell or skill and the gear combined dictates your performance. If you play with the default spells, you might as well fold up. You can't dish out half as much damage or heal.
(2) Elitism. While WoW allows most gamers a taste of the end game raid, EQ2 continues the old line of elitism. It was a selected few who can get to farm the end instances. After my days in Plane of Power in EQ, I am not joining such elitist activities again. It is as if you are playing another game in the gamer server. Exclusivity ruins the community.
(3) Graphics engine. I know everyone have different views about how a game looks, but the fact that EQ2 performance fails to scale with hardware is most annoying. It runs as snuggish or smooth on a 3 year old PC as it will on a brand new PC. It cannot take advantage of the new upgrades, and as my LOTRo and WoW runs better and better as I upgrade annually, EQ2 looks like a a stubborn resistant baby. I begin to wonder, what kind of coding scheme and foresight the development team has.
While WoW is built for everyone and every PC, EQ2 is built for a few elitist and the oldest line of PCs. Wonder why it never gain popularity? It was not mean for the population.
Yeah, personally I think EQ2 has awful art direction, and the graphics engine in general is simply terrible. It sucks up a ludicrous amount of system resources to deliver rather bland and muddy graphics, or it did when I tried the game a year or so ago. My PC's no slouch, either: It can handle new first-person shooters on high settings with smooth frame rates, not to mention newer, much better-looking MMORPGs.
Regarding EQ2's art direction, I'd swear many of the character models look better in EQ1 (especially Froglocks), and the EQ2 armor sets just look mediocre, awkward and even silly in many cases. Here's a juxtaposition of an EQ2 "legendary" armor set and a FFXI "legendary" armor set (Lineage 2 would shame EQ2 even more):
Can you even look at that silly outfit and keep a straight face?
Of course, the art direction/graphics factors don't mean people shouldn't play EQ2, but they're definitely going to be off-putting to new players. Personally, I don't care about HIGH-TECH graphics, but I do care that the graphics used, no matter what year the game was made, don't look like crap by their very design.
Currently Playing: EVE Online
Retired From: UO, FFXI, AO, SWG, Ryzom, GW, WoW, WAR
That's a pretty serious charge. I don't recall hearing anything about corruption within EQ2 (unlike the corruptions at CCP within EVE).
Do you have a news article or link?
_____________________________
Currently Playing: LOTRO; DDO
Played: AC2, AO, Auto Assault, CoX, DAoC, DDO, Earth&Beyond, EQ1, EQ2, EVE, Fallen Earth, Jumpgate, Roma Victor, Second Life, SWG, V:SoH, WoW, World War II Online.
Games I'm watching: Infinity: The Quest for Earth, Force of Arms.
Find the Truth: http://www.factcheck.org/
Lol ye i noticed the clothing in general was out of the ordinary, but for me it was nice to have devs try to spice it up but i agree sometimes like above it was plain silly, but still funny.