Everquest II

I remember in 2004 when I got in family and friends beta as SOE calls it, at this time I had been following it for years mainly because I loved the style of the graphics in the E3's been shown in 2002 and 2003. Then I got into the beta and quickly realized the armor doesn't look anywhere near as good as what was shown at E3 and the character models don't look as good too which was weird and the game just lacked the massive open world atmosphere of the E3 demos. This was probably because of all the loading screens I had to enter and really it was putting me off the game because I wished it was seemless.

However I made my first character and the IOR was fantastic and the boat scene just amazed me too, I wish'd the boat would have sailed up to the island instead of load upto it but oh well. It was sooo detailed and nicely made and a great tutorial for a first run but I'd soon realise that only having one starting area for everyone would soon get boring.

I had a real time picking out a class because there was 16 or something of them and not one of them stood out to me, you only had 4 classes until 20 and you had to be well into your 30's before you knew you made a mistake and by that point you just thought to yourself "I can't be bothered to play again" lol. I think what WOW did soo well with what EQ2 failed at was the classes.... I really think it's a case of less is more. So yeah in the beta I just didn't have fun with any class and found them to be very uninteresting.

I got to Qeynos and the city took my breathe away and all the quests there were fantastic and so was having player housing and all the little areas around Qeynos like the bogs and the mini forest thing in the city and the castle one were all nicely detailed and well made and fun.

Then where the game suddenly got real shit was when you had to go out to Antonica and at that time there was a a boat running from Antonica to TS which I really liked but when you got higher up there were no boats and that disappointed me because I hate all the clicking on bells to suddenly teleport me, rather it be immersive. That sums up EQ2 though because they were going for immersion and they totally lost out because of how instanced it was where as WOW did a better job at immersion because it was seemless.

Anyways Antonica was soooooooo boring because it wasn't very detail, most of it was empty and bland looking and the quests just wern't fun. I wish Antonica was more like the mini forest in the Qeynos city, like that detailed and packed with fun.

So I rolled to Freeport because Antonica bored me and went to Freeport and I have to say the slums didn't spell out evil to me, they just looked horrible and freeport seemed to have lost the feel of the E3 build which to me looked like more of a city in the desert which was nicer with palm trees. Anyways Freeport seemed like the devs left it to last as a afterthought. Anyways I stuck to it and qucikly got to the Commonlands and again it lost the great look of the E3 build.

I loved CL though because it just had a real nice feel to it and by this time beta was getting packed with Antonica having like 6 instances and lag spikes of like 5 mins quite often. CL on the other hand was lag free because noone wanted to go to freeport really but there was still alot of players there. I was always getting into full groups and doing group content of what EQ2 was about and there was soooo much more risk involved then which made it really fun. One thing I will always remember is camping out in CL with my group and the sun was setting and doing all these fantastic quests around these ruins and then this big bird came with bad animations and killed us all lol.

Then I got into Nek and suddenly the game turned shit agai, the land was boring and uninteresting and the detailed level seemed to have gone and the graphics looked horrible too. So I decided to run to TS and it was even worse because it was like a more empty version of Antonica.

After this point I decided to stop the beta because SOE were shipping the game and the game was very unfinished, there was nothing like a email system in the game and generally just missing alot and we all thought some things needed to be changed and the game needed PVP before release. As usual SOE didn't listne to people in beta about the game being unfinished and just like SWG and PS mmorpgs only get one chance at a first impression and because it was buggy as hell it would have a low population and slowly die.

Unlucky for EQ2 and much better and polished mmorpg with good PVP and a seemless world and a very well made world came along and drew all of us players away from EQ2 when it launched in 2005 for us europeons. I'll always remember running the dead Mines with my mates because the horde rogues would come over and pick us off outside the instance and was really fun having fights with them which is something all other mmorpgs missed for me upto that point, having 2 sides fight like that in PVP. That instance though was soooooooo amazing and i've been playing mmorpgs since the 90's but I'll be honest I've never really done a group instance, specially on that scale and for that low level. WOW just blew me away like that and no wonder it was successful because it got everything right but character customization and crafting + no player housing.

I remember all the EQ2 crowd saying things like the WOW community is kiddy and immature but everyone I knew was into their 20's and 30's playing the game and having fun. I just looked at it as the EQ2 community is being the immature one for saying this and you know atleast we had a community to gorup with lol.

I bought EQ2 anyways in Nov 2004 after launch and the population seemed to die very quickly on the game and by Dec 2004 hardly anyone was playing because of WOW I guess. I look at the new EQ stats thing and what shocks me is on my server I'm in the top 10 or 20 for fastest levelers at that time and I'm like int he top 10ish for first people to get to level 20 on my server. I'm thinking no wonder why I don't get any groups because theres noone to group with!

Anyways I had alot of fun with EQ2 in beta and having groups constantly in CL and loved playing through the cities and that. What killed EQ2 for me though.......

Not being able to find groups for any of the content and I spose now it's even harder to get low level groups. Really noone wants to play a mmorpg all alone solo'ing though the game because I play for the group content which is what I have the most fun with. I remember grouping up in the Venekor Instance, devs in beta would fast track people to tets out higher content. Anyways that instance was fantastic and I loved Venekor but abit of a shame he didn't do all the kool stuff like talk from the preview trailer.

What EQ2 needs to do to get people like me back?

- Get rid of loading screens and clicking on gates and bells or w/e and replace it with like a Half-Life type of thing where when you can see the other side but you hit the loading screen and it keeps you in game but just says loading. So like say you're in Freeport and running up to the main gate to go to the CL, you'd be able to see the CL and a open gate instead of a shut one and when you go to walk through it, it keeps you in game but just saying loading.

- Get rid of bells and make the use of boats like in WOW to keep you in the game and I don't mind a loading period between hand but it just keeps the immersion of sailing upto and island. Like what used to be in the beta betweenAntonica and TS before they removed it for clicking on a door at the end which was really shitty lol.

- Ditch auto facing (not sure if it's still in the game) 

- Redo all of the characters and make them look good because right now some look good and others just look terrible.

- Gives classes more personality in the game, reduce the number of them and just make each one unique instead of having lots of boring classes.

- Redo Antonica, TS and Nek to give them more detail and more fun.

- Remove levels so it opens up the world and new players can group with veterans and everyone can do all the content and makes it fun. Sorta like a Mix between SWG and WOW's talent tree system so say like instead of level progression you gain XP but like say the way you advance your character could just be unlocking new abilities like when you unlock new abilities in WOW's talent tree system. Everyone would have the same health like in SWG so it lets you play with everyone from the start but the differences are in the abilities instead of the stats.

English isn't my first language so I hope this makes sense.

A lot has changed since beta/release times, i was in beta too and i'm still playing so i thought i add some comments to your points.

Originally posted by JustBe

 

What EQ2 needs to do to get people like me back?

- Get rid of loading screens and clicking on gates and bells or w/e and replace it with like a Half-Life type of thing where when you can see the other side but you hit the loading screen and it keeps you in game but just says loading. So like say you're in Freeport and running up to the main gate to go to the CL, you'd be able to see the CL and a open gate instead of a shut one and when you go to walk through it, it keeps you in game but just saying loading.

in the newer expansions they increased sizes of the areas more and more so you don't hit loading screens that often like you did in the original game. They alos included position based zoning, so you usually don't see a wall with a door anymore in the expansion areas its usually a passage and when you pass a point it starts zoning. Additionally most custom ui's shrink loading screens to the size of a small window in the center of the screen so you can still be see most of your ui while you are zoning.

- Get rid of bells and make the use of boats like in WOW to keep you in the game and I don't mind a loading period between hand but it just keeps the immersion of sailing upto and island. Like what used to be in the beta betweenAntonica and TS before they removed it for clicking on a door at the end which was really shitty lol.

They now have real boats to connect TS or Nf and Butcherblock mountains and boats between Amt or CL and Kunark. But the old content still has the classic bells, if you had boats too all locations i think travelling would take too long even with just 3-5 minutes waits for each boat line.

- Ditch auto facing (not sure if it's still in the game) 

as far as i can remember you had allways the option to disable autofacing if you didn't like it.

- Redo all of the characters and make them look good because right now some look good and others just look terrible.

can't say much about that, i personally am happy with the looks of my chars, but some prefer other art styles. at least you have the option to select betwen the original models and the eastern style soga models for most classes so most people are happy with what they get now. 

- Gives classes more personality in the game, reduce the number of them and just make each one unique instead of having lots of boring classes.

They already made each class more different with the big classs revamp on DoF expansion, then kingdom of skys and echoes of faydwer added more and more specialisations. also the changed the gamestart so that you can pick the final class from begin and don't have to play the first 10 levels as archetype, next 10 as baseclass and pick final class at 20. The differences between classes might look small at lower levels but at higher levels they get more and more noticable. they also added an achievement point system which lets you specialise further in some parts of the classes.

- Redo Antonica, TS and Nek to give them more detail and more fun.

there have been minor revamps of some of the older zones but mostly to make the overland zones like ant/cl/nek//ts more single player/small group areas. group content is now nearly exclusive in the dungeons, and eq2 has some really good dungeons out there even for low levels if you can manage to find a group most of them are worth a visit.

- Remove levels so it opens up the world and new players can group with veterans and everyone can do all the content and makes it fun. Sorta like a Mix between SWG and WOW's talent tree system so say like instead of level progression you gain XP but like say the way you advance your character could just be unlocking new abilities like when you unlock new abilities in WOW's talent tree system. Everyone would have the same health like in SWG so it lets you play with everyone from the start but the differences are in the abilities instead of the stats.

I personally also don't really like level absed games, but changing a level based game into a skilltree based one would probably result in about the same mess as the nge in swg where tehy went the other way round. I personally think thats a thing to hope for in a new game.

English isn't my first language so I hope this makes sense.