This article is nothing but advertising for Aion. I hope the author has been paid well. You need every single quest to not grind your way up. When doing every single quest and repeat 1005 with every single alt, this is as far away from a sandbox as you can be.

A sandbox would be a bunch of choices, which you simply don't have in Aion so far. You can choose to do all the quest or to grind grind grind. You don't have the choice to level here or there, doing this with you sorceror and come back later to do something else with you gladiator. You will do exactly the very same thing with you second, your third, your fourth and you fifth charakter.

There is no such thing as a sandbox in Aion. It might be somewhere in the future though. We will see. Why I talk about a fifth char? Because there is a hidden quest, you can only do, when you level five different chars up to lvl 30. When you have done that, come back and tell us about the sandbox.

Aion is a nice game though, much better than the article we discuss here.

It's an average game with good enough grafics and the worst combat system ever. Not worth any money...

Originally posted by Loke666

You meant there actually are solo players in EQ2? They usually quits very fast, the game is very grooup oriented.

My theory is: Smedley sat brooding in his lair, he thought to himself "-I need bigger bonus, we must make more money.- We could off course make the games better so more starts to play them but that takes time and money. -I need money now". And then he got the brilliant idea to sell stuff to the already paying customers. My theory about Legends of Norrath is kinda the same.

SOE was hoping that few or no players would quit and therefore they make a lot of extra cash with minimum of work. But I am a cynic so I might be wrong.

The game has more solo players than you would believe. Many of them are quitting now, because TSO offers not enough to get them happy. With station cash another wave of players are quitting and it might be accounted the one reason for the other. I did cansel my account because of the station cash (I hate RMT but I did it, because SOE lied again to us), many of the other players I know of quitting, do this because of the lack of solo content. In any case, TSO and station cash will earn them less money overall, but it will take them a year to regcognize, as always.

The combat system is the worst I have ever tried. For many quests I had to run around more than for an old school adventure. The skill wheel is a serious limitiation, not a great addition. The grafics have been nice, the story too, but everything else is a no-go. The is really nothing to hook you in this game.

Hopefully, it will be their first MMO with some quality

I subscribed to EQ2 news, not to LoN news. Legend of Norrath is NOT Everquest 2, no matter how much SOE would like to see things like this. Please make a new entry for trading card games or something. I am here to read about MMOs.

Thanks

Perhaps the author of this article should read things up on Massivly or  go to Bruce Ferguson's Blog to read what TSO really is about. There will be no Dungeons scaling to the levels of either Antonica or Commonlands as you put it (both will get one of those new dungeons). The lowest level to begin scaling up to 80 will be lvl 50 in i.e.  Najena and Miragul. The land mass auf The Moors of Ykesha, once known as Innothule Swamp, wil be the largest overland zone in the game, larger even than any single zone in Kunark, but not bigger than whole kunark as you stated it.

And Papa, you don't need to bash anything with 'SOE' in the text, we all know how you feel...

PvE is nothing more as grind. You feel its only purpose is to reach level, not to have fun. RvR is just a bunch of ideas, nothing ready to enjoy. WAR will have another unfinished buggy release which seems to be state of the art for current MMOs. I am not even sure the game will survive the first year but perhaps hype alone carries the game to a somehow finished state. Quality an fun will certainly not do the trick.

Every game I try sends me back to EQ2. Best Fantasy MMO out there. Can't understand all the hate too.

Ah our 'I-bash-SOE,-no-matter-what-they-do' friends are first in this thread

Let's see what this expansion is like. After that, we will have to rate it.

What is great about this level cap thingy? It doesn't take the players any longer to reach it than they need to visit all (of 20 announced!) dungeons...

I am german. I am playing the game since release and I still love it. Best pve game out there imho. Even though the localization has improved nearly each day, the same english voiceovers which greeted me in 2004, after logging in in Baubbelaue, do greet me still.

Great game, nearly each NPC of the old zones has good voice overs, but don't expect them all to be in your tongue. If you can live with some english here and there, go for it :)

Most D&D fans like it Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk Style, even Dragonlance. Though I love Eberron it is the wrong setting for a MMO.

Less than a few hours to find out every MMO out there has bugs. Less than a few hours to find out EQ2 gets better and better. Best PvE ever made

Europeans got hit again, because it is €79.99 for us which equals about $120 . No CE is worth $120 with preorder still another $15 to add. Wake up dudes! The day the dollar equaled the euro is long gone

I am so sick of SOE discussions. I have read so many posts from people hating SOE, but never ever has one of those told a single true line, what they did wrong with the exception of perhaps SWG, but then even this error might belong to lucas games. You are all ranting, crying and telling you have read from other cry babies. Every second one of you not even played a game from SOE, but hey it is so much fun to hit them.

Disgusting!

Depends. If you have much time and patience, try EvE. You will need some months, because your skill points depend on account time, not played time. If money is not a problem, buy both. While you only spend skill points in EvE you can play pirates from start to lvl 50. You will have done some port battles, before you reach the cap. When pirates starts getting boring, you will have found a EvE guild suiting your style of play and have distributed enough skill points to those skills you would like to learn. I played both and I left both, but both games are good, but the learning depending on real time is something you have to get used to. ;)

Please give LoN its own topic. Stop sending it to us as EQ2 news, cause it isn't! I am a long time EQ2 player and I don't even know someone who is playing it.

This article is a joke, you can easily find a dozen people saying good things about anyone. In EQ2 not the devs are the problem, it is the non-communication between their teams. Each expansion brings wonderful content but kills the nearly done balance, they are eager to fix between expansions. If those devs would not mess with the mechanics in every expansion (or talk to each other during development) there would be much less beating in the forums. The point is: most players do not even visit the forums, but the talk on guild forums is much the same. So there are not a very few number of trolls in the eq2 forum, it is the average view of the game. And if you look closely, most comments in the eq2 forums are even peaceful, positive and constructive. When there is beating, it is earned and part of the devs job.

Most of what zOMGREI rants is simply worng, don't want to discuss it further. PE did some things seriously wrong. Doing an MMO is unlike doing normal games. PE did not start working on one but two(at least) without experience and payed for it. The graphics have been ok, the quests have been ok, the zones have been ok, but content and stability have been lacking. Even stable it would have been not enough for an successful start in the MMO world. It was all pretty average with the exception of the 'Rome Fealing' with they did great.

...and if testers keep leaving it does tell about the game...