Originally posted by eburn I made the mistake of going back and the game has changed. It has, but not for the better.
If you hate WoW then you have to hate EQ2. It's best points now are just standard in most other MMOs. Sure the graphics are pretty and it performs well even on a 6800 based machine. Indeed, it does. There's just hardly any game play to it and the quests are so repeative.
The lack of choice and the fact your hand is held all the way through EQ2 and WoW is what makes them blow ass. Stop supporting cookie cutter companies folks. You'll just encourage them to keep doing the same..
"Oh it looks pretty and I can play pretty for years." "How does it actually play tho'?" "PRETTY I SAID! It's pretty!"

Originally posted by lancelot76
A few good points, but statements like:

 "At release, the graphics were somewhat shadowed by its competitor World of Warcraft, but with the latest expansion the graphics were given a boost, and are now up to par with its counterpart"

Betray a severe lack of understanding or familiarity with this game. The graphics were not "given a boost" with the latest expansion, there was no update to the engine, etc. Statements like this make this article opinion at best, and at worst, a waste of time. To the author: either learn more about the game or interview people who do.

"The customer service department for Everquest II is very lacking. It used to be readily available and quite easy to get in touch with a customer service rep, but this is one area of the game where SOE has downgraded. "

This is true in Planetside, as well, and has been an on-going problem for a year now.  You'd think customer service would the one of the number one areas of business to improve. 

I couldnt keep reading after the few first sentences so I probably shouldnt post... but to compare any graphics to wow and making wow's graphics sound good.... thats not something funny to me... it pisses me off.... I dont care whatever you say about objects and how much you can have on screen without lagg.... guess why you can have so much on screen without lagg... BECAUSE ITS SOOO UGLY!! ....

oh and I have eq2 somewhere... I bought it for like 5$ at some shop and played the free trial for a bit.... I dont remember why I stopped playing... but I remember the character creation was very customisable compared to other games... or do I remember that part wrong?

Article title should have read 'WoW fanboi reviews EQ2 for the first time'. Sorry, but there is so much bias in that article it is hardly worth the space its stored in ...

The graphics engine wasnt updated with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion, it has barely changed since launch in Nov 2004 with the exception of a few bug fixes. The graphics engine has always been technically more advanced than the one in WoW. SOE decided when they wrote the graphics engine that it would still be good a few years after realise, i.e. when I first played EQ2 at launch with my highend system I got 1-2 fps when using maximum settings, I tweaked my settings to get my desired fps and it still looked as good as WoW (style differences aside), now thanks to computer upgrades I can turn the settings up higher and it still looks very good, comparable to recent releases. Blizzard on the other hand went with the idea of making the graphics engine run well on the existing hardware, therefore at release I could run WoW on my highend machine with maximum settings and have a nice fps, but now it is showing its age, with my upgraded system I cant turn the graphics up any higher, so I get the same appearance with much higher fps, fps I dont really need, and as a result WoWs graphics are not upto scratch when compared to recent releases.

I dont get that much lag in the game, certainly very little in the way of server side lag. The only performance issue I do get is the same ones I have had in every MMO since UO, i.e. if you get lots of people in one place then you get a performance drop. Orgrimmar during peak times is no different, relic raids in DAoC were no different. Its simple netcode issues, every players details (gear, actions, etc) needs to be sent to every other player in the area, with every extra player in the area the amount of data that gets sent becomes exponentially higher and normally once you reach 50+ players in an area you start to hit bottlenecks. The developers combat this by keeping the data sent to a minimum, but there will always be a point where there are just too many players in the same area and no matter what they do someone will experience packet loss or lag. Most of the time this isnt server side, but something between the server and the client that is causing a bottleneck.

id tend to agree the customer service is horrid. and also i agree with the issue with lag, graphics lag despite having a 5600+ X2, 2gb Corsair XMS2 DDR PC6400 Ram, 8800 GTS 640mb, X-fi extreme gamer, and  WD Raptor 10k RPM SATA 75GB HD, SEAGATE SATA 120 GB HD

so my system is actually pretty damn good. but yet there is are areas which run better, other areas that run like total crap. its down right frustrating with such uneven performance.but otehrwise i enjoy the game, and its quite fun being back in it and finding new things, quests, items, and reexploring old areas, and finding new ones.

id say you can run it approximately  on balanced performance textures on high, characters on high, character LOD on low/medium. rest will be probably be a bit of testing seeing what works. but remember to put particles on minimal as it for some reason eats up your framerates when it is average or above.

i am finally getting better performance in general due to new drivers coming out for my 8800 so hopefully sooner than later ill start getting some respectable framerates even with shadows put on. id say get it, as it is a really good game. its fun, quest lore is done well, risk to reward ratio is done nicely. guilds are very active. grouping isnt hard even at low levels to some degree, though it depends on the time of the day. servers across the board are medium+ every single time i have checked only the RP servers are light.

but realize that most people are lvl 50-70 but you still shouldnt have too much of a hard time getting groups regardless. Id say get it, definitely worth the purchase get the packaged EQ2 with all the expansions including EOF for $40 at best buy or whatever store you go to. if you come on blackburrow server ill help get you started. my name is nakuma im a officer in Guardians of Light.

Originally posted by heerobya
How much did Sony pay you to say that?

Originally posted by Amatal

I would expect a staff writer to do a bit more research before making claims about bad preformance. Yes, the game will most likely prefore very badly IF YOU HAVE A GF8800 series card.
Drop the 8800 and use an ATI or a 7000 series and you will be able to play perfectly fine.
Now, that topic has been dragging on the official SOE tech forums since the cards were released, it also has a rather leanghty thread on the Nzone forums hosted by nvidia itself.
It is actually a very disturbing issue, seeing that the most expensive gfx card on the market has drivers that preform like utter crap on many games- and in this case especially EQ2.
It is even more disturbing founding out how uninterested and slow Nvidia seems to be in adressing those matters. After my experience with this, i am positive that the 8800gtx was the last card i have bought from Nvidia as it would seem that thier driver-writing staff consists of badly trained circus monkeys.

Originally posted by Browser_ice
How would my PC handle EQ2 ?  Should I just go with EQ1 instead ?

I like the idea of playing a bad guy.

The only other similar game I have ever played is the 10 day WOW trial last week. I liked it but ... 
I want to go solo in my first MMORPG game for a while to explore and then go in guilds. I was also looking at GW but just saw reviews of EQ2/EQ1.

AMD Athlon 3000+
2Gb memory
XP Pro SP2
ATI Radeon 9600XT
DirectX 9.0c
Plenty of HD space

Originally posted by Ciredric
I like the game, but I have to agree that the customer service is horrid.  I think the GM's are on strike in this game.  That downgrades it to a 7 in my opinion, that and the lag he talks about.