I've played EQ2 intermittently for the past year or so. It's a really great game, with a lot of features that I simply adore.

1. Excellent RP community, helped by the fact that the game seems to have been made with RP in mind. OOC channels, character descriptions, the way the chat system is setup, and lots of other little details.
2. A wonderful amount of stuff that I can have my character do: achievements, collections, quest lines (heritage), more quests than I will ever be able to complete, etc.
3. Many races and classes. The latter overlap, but they're all still unique. I love my fae warden.

However, there are two things that really kill the game for me.

1. Zones. They're huge, thankfully, but breaking up the world so frequently simply kills immersion. I really wish they had made the game more like Vanguard, where if you can see that mountain in the distance, chances are you can probably reach it.
2. The animations. Not for casting and fighting, most of those are very good, actually. But really, really grates on me is how all the creates in the game (PCs and NPCs both) always move like they're in fast-forward. I'm not talking about the thing it does when you see them from a distance. That's a graphical setting that can be changed. But the speed of everything in terms of movement is just off. If you're walking (or running with some kind of slight speed impairment), it looks great. Otherwise...
3. Clothing/armor. I know it gets better as you get higher, but there are far, far, FAR too few variations in this department. I mean, to date I think I've only seen like 3-5 variations in armor/clothing design. The rest are just recolor. I mean, the entire appearance clothing line (the Young Rogue's something, the Maiden'sfancy, etc) is just a bunch of recolors. Very annoying.

The reason I'm posting this is two-fold:

1. I'm curious as to whether people think the currently named "Everquest Next" will suffer from these same issues
2. And two, if current EQ2 players have the same frustrations with the game, or if I'm simply a minority.

From what I've seen so far, Vanguard fixes the above, but due to the mannequinn-type character faces and lack a warden/druid flavored healing class, it loses to EQ2 for me.

<3

everquest next will probably be like wow meets freerealms with eq lore.  Just a guess...

Seems to me like all the new soe games seems like an evolution from freerealms so I'd guess that eq next will be the same.  It will also probably run on the ps3....

I'm thinking I might be staying with eq2 forever... Well Wow did just announce a change that really caught my eye so at this point I'm thinking when the next wow update comes out I'll be giving wow a spin.  The feature they added is the ability to group across servers to do an instance.  So if this works the way I think it will you can enter a queue to do a dungeon and it will pull people from all the servers and create a cross server instance.

I love grouping and one of my big gripes about wow was it was all solo play or pvp till you hit max level I guess.  Now this new feature might make it so you can level doing a lot more group content which sounds very interesting to me.

Originally posted by dreamscaper

The animations. Not for casting and fighting, most of those are very good, actually. But really, really grates on me is how all the creates in the game (PCs and NPCs both) always move like they're in fast-forward. I'm not talking about the thing it does when you see them from a distance. That's a graphical setting that can be changed. But the speed of everything in terms of movement is just off. If you're walking (or running with some kind of slight speed impairment), it looks great. Otherwise...

1. Clothing/armor. I know it gets better as you get higher, but there are far, far, FAR too few variations in this department. I mean, to date I think I've only seen like 3-5 variations in armor/clothing design. The rest are just recolor. I mean, the entire appearance clothing line (the Young Rogue's something, the Maiden'sfancy, etc) is just a bunch of recolors. Very annoying.

I agree that the animations for movement are very odd. If you attack anything or if you yourself move around it's very frenetic feeling.

Also, the variation of gear is not so great. It's a lot better now and of course one can purchase cosmeitic kits through the marketplace but sometimes looking at the same shield over and over gets ridiculous.

I imagine that Everquest next will allow for more customization and be very smooth. However, as another suggested, it will most likely have some sort of cash shop.

Originally posted by Sovrath 

I imagine that Everquest next will allow for more customization and be very smooth. However, as another suggested, it will most likely have some sort of cash shop.

Cash shops don't bother me as long as it's only for fluff, kind of like the current EQ2 shop thingy is. It's only when it's for actual gameplay stuff that it irks me.

My hope is that EQ3 will be a combination of EQ2, Vanguard, and LotRO. That would be simply amazing. EQ2's classes, races, and lore, Vanguard's seamless open world, diplomacy, and character creation, and LotRO's quest-style, story-telling, and music-system. The ideal MMO. :)