Originally posted by tixylix

I think if you have to say is EverQuest 2 a more complete game now, then that is true as EQ2 was rushed to launch missing most features and was a complete disaster of a launch that like a week later got forgotten about due to WoW being much more complete.

However like SWG, PS and EQ all games SOE driven into the ground like a year or two later, it was the original concept that I buy into. I play a game I originally like and then SOE always has to then completely change it in the wrong direction. EQ2 is not a successful game, it didn't sell very well, it never had many subscribers after the first month and I have my doubts about how many people actually spend money on their F2P model that is so restrictive you'd rather just not play. 

I loved the original concept back in beta, it filled me with such hope, it was mind blowning back then just how good EQ2 was graphically. Sadly though they launched with like 20-40 servers and after a month they were dead, I found myself grinding on crabs and stuff by the beach most the time because I couldn't find groups. However in beta when it was just one server and people were excited for the game, you could get groups all the time and it was the most amazing grouping experience I've ever had in an MMO. It's that promise of a beta that puts people in a mind set that they can allow these things that are wrong with the game, however once launched and people don't want to play and quit, suddenly all that promise is gone and it becomes a depressing experience.

The other thing I don't understand is I loved the original art style of the game back in the alpha shots of like 2002 and then at some point it changed and it didn't look nearly as appealing. I still liked the look of it being a more realistic looking fantasy game, it was much more gritty and a darker more frightening place to be than most fantasy games. Weird things like making the character models so ugly, there was a patch before launch in beta that made Human females look like they've been taking drugs, they never fixed that weird drugged up eye look they've had and still have. They put the Asian models in there but they just look ridiculous..... I don't get why they cannot spend the time to redo some of the character models. 

That though is SOE all over, they'd rather rush out new poor content than take the time to create something meaningful. They don't seem to get that an MMO is a service, it isn't just a game, the whole game needs upkeep, you cannot just focus on slapping newer stuff over the old.

I don't like how it's a solo game now, all they ever had to do was merge servers but that time is gone now. I don't like how they got rid of the death penalty, that made things scary, it gave the game tension and made your heart pump, that is what makes combat exciting. Now it is a bore where I can solo 10 mobs at once and if I die, whocares? It is no good putting challenging stuff at the end game in the form of Raiding because I'll never get to it as I'm so bored of the game being so easy that I quit way before then. 

What makes Dayz? Perma Death. Now I'm not saying every game needs it or needs a harsh death penalty as games like TF2 would suck if you lost all your items every time you died. However certain games bennefit from it and EQ2 was one of them, without it I just find stuff boring. I'm constantly being rewarded and it means nothing as it wasn't hard to achieve. I remember when a chest drop was an amazing time where everyone in your group couldn't wait to see what was dropped. Now for one you#d be on your own but it's like loot drops over and over and over and it becomes boring to the point you ignore it now. They simplified crafting too which is another gripe because it used to be time consuming and rewarding to make stuff, now it's so bloated and worthless because the process is easy. It used to feel like a whole other part of the game you could devote so much time to, it doesn't have that impact any more.

 

I don't like the new music, it's very generic, the older stuff had such a distinct stuff. It felt dark, eerie but often magical and it reminded me more of like listening to real classical music. I could imagine it being in the Tudor period or something, where as now the music has changed into that boring generic fantasy drone we have in games today. 

I don't like how the art style as gone to this very cartoony and more unrealistic fantasy setting that like Warhammer and Warcraft has made popular. I miss that more realistic style that even EverQuest very crudely had as well. The game has lost that dark gritty look it used to have, it's lost the fear of exploring the game world. It is like I loved the feel of Oblivion, I know a lot of people didn't but it felt much more real, I loved the whole cult story and setting. That didn't exist in Skyrim or Morrowind which felt very alien like and that is how EQ2 has gone now.

 

For me in the beta I was young, I probably had unrealistic dreams of the game staying in beta another year and SOE working with the community to get it to a place they wanted. I had dreams of them removing the doors in the cities (which recently happen but the new look and music sucks) and traveling by real boats through the water ways. I had dreams of not blicking on bells and having boat travel which the beta did have at some parts before it was patched out. I wanted to travel from island to island like WoWs boat ride between the two conts so it felt much more real. Instead SOE went the other direction for the most part and rushed the game to release with not even having mail in it. 

Also what happened to all that amazing armour and clothing that was in the alpha? All that seemed to go by the time the beta hit and we had like 2 or 3 sets of armour and I remember that never changing for years.

 

I so wish someone other than SOE was in charge of this game and could have taken it down the right direction. I'll miss the heavy grouped based MMO it used to be and hate the solo WoW clone it has become. 

You are living in the past.  Why talk about events that happened over 8 years ago?  The game has evolved, and the community has grown with the changes or moved on to other games. I don't understand why you are here complaining about this.  

Good troll I almost fell out of my chair.....sorry you took so much time to write this troll.

 

More to the point. If you consider EQ2 a failure then every mmo out in the last 8-9 years has been a Failure.

As many before me stated it's far from it by any means of the word "Failure"

Originally posted by vonryan123

Good troll I almost fell out of my chair.....sorry you took so much time to write this troll.

 

More to the point. If you consider EQ2 a failure then every mmo out in the last 8-9 years has been a Failure.

As many before me stated it's far from it by any means of the word "Failure"

 

Well pretty much every MMO has been, I don#t see how you could call any of them a success.

 

God I hate these people who call everything a troll......... 

Originally posted by vonryan123

More to the point. If you consider EQ2 a failure then every mmo out in the last 8-9 years has been a Failure.

Given a look around at the bitterness on mmorpg.com, you could actually make a fairly strong case in support of that.

But only if you accept the usual rabblerabble as evidence of anything, I suppose.

This is strictly taken from release day and a month in.

 

1. Zone monster from hell. The amount of times you had to zone in this game was insane and the memory leak didn't exactly help that situation either. You had to constantly relog and reform your group.

2. SoE tap dancing around making all equipment BoE to cater to the crafters and then changing it back, repeating this process at least twice

3. System requirements were too high because SoE had the brilliant idea of making it future proof.

4. In an effort to combat kill stealing, SoE thought it would be a good idea to lock combat from outside interference unless you typed /help in which case you forfeited loot and exp (this was later changed after people had or were abandoning ship)

5. WoW being released shortly after with NONE of the issues above

 

 

People who bought EQ2 wanted a worthy sequel to EQ. Too many things had changed and not for the better. Crafting was the only exception where EQ2 actually improved on the original EQ. Those were the downfall of EQ2 from my point of view and many others I played it with

Originally posted by Wolfenpride

Loved EQ2 at release and up until about Echos of Faydwer. It's pretty depressing to think about what they've turned the game into.

Hopefully EQ Next won't end up the same way.

 

The best prediction of future behaviour is past behaviour.

 

 

Played quite a number of SOE titles in the past, I remain very sceptical and cautious when I read Smedley's articles about EQNext and their visions, but one can only hope that they have learned from past debacles.

I agree that the start of EQ2 was very addicting and immersive. Much more so to me than WoW was.

Heck, I even let a friend play through the starting isle at my home and though he'd sworn never to get a subscription game he went to the store and bought EQ2 after that.

 

But the game was also a representation of much older and more grindy games whereas WoW was already offering an alternative to that at the time. I really liked exploring the world in EQ2, but fact was that I only got to leveling once I had a group and we started grinding Gnolls / Giants / Giant rats of some sort / Orcs / ...

The later zones were also very bland as you say and even though it was more like the older MMO's, it totally lacked things like PvP (and after they started putting it in, the PvE balance was bound to screw it up imo) and it was actually very instanced in some areas.

I saw a lot of people leave for WoW (2 guilds I was in disappeared gradually as players went to WoW) and it created a lot of resentment amongst those who remained, which didn't much improve the community imo.

 

Personally I played both games alongside eachother for a time, but when I had gone through Elwynn forest and Westfall in WoW and had done my first Deadmines run, I realised: "This is something EQ2 doesn't have and never will have."

I left when they released the first expansion with a cap raise to 60 after I had just painstakingly hit level 50 and had just started out doing some endgame. Still bought the expansion, but the cap raise came way too quickly for me and there wasn't all that much to do in the first expansion (through I admittedly never really digged into it).

As my guildleader in EQ2 says about complaints as this. "It was so hard so we only had one sword to share in the raid".

I truly hope that all that wants it find this ultrahardcore MMO so they can be happy again, but it would be refreshing if at least there was an acceptance among the "oh its so easy mode" crowd that a product has to sell and be competitive on the market, it is still OK to dislike whatever you dislike. However I expect that a new launch of a old style hardcore game would be a failure as there are not enough hardcore MMO fans out there anymore.

I had played at launch for three months and came back a couple years later enjoying it a great deal more with the changes they had made.   I didn't like it at all at release.  But after returning, I continued to play for over four years.  But the EoF expansion was really the only one I got enjoyment from and I found my interest diminishing with each expansion after...especially when they started the all the daily quests.  I felt I was logging in for an overwhelming number of appointments rather than just playing for fun.

And there was something about the colors they used in more recent expansions that would cause eye strain and headaches after awhile.  Maybe it's just old age, but boy that red/orange in Skyshrine...I never returned after the first trip. 

I got a lot of years of enjoyment out of it, more years than EQ1 even, so it wasn't a failure in my eyes.

played EQ2 at release alongside SWG, loved the game, downside was that  I had to wait VERY long for people to do dungeons, up to hours....my guild and other guilds didn't do those, instead they just skipped dungeons and started good old powerfarming to gain XP.

Shame that I got to see only like 5% of the game to the point I canceled.

 

Originally posted by Fdzzaigl

 

 

Personally I played both games alongside eachother for a time, but when I had gone through Elwynn forest and Westfall in WoW and had done my first Deadmines run, I realised: "This is something EQ2 doesn't have and never will have."

 

The flip side is, Stormhold or RoV or Runnyeye is something WoW doesnt have and never will.  Open world dungeons.  And EQ2's instances tend to be more interesting than WoW's.  Places like Nektropos arent the straightforward n rails experience that WoW instances are.  Unrest has heavy puzzle solving elements.  Unrest > any WoW instance by far, but thats personal opinion.  It can frustrate those that want a quick fix.  EQ2 dungeons and instances arent the instatnt gratification linear affairs that WoW dungeons are.

 

WoW did play with some non linear dungeons (Uldaman, Mauradon, WC) but quickly scrapped that idea.

 

Deadmines is a really cool experience though

 

One thing that EQ2 does right that should be a no brainer in any game but almost no one does it:  the Heritage quests.   Obviously not all games have heritage items, but the concept of long, rewarding, multistage quests is lost on games like Rift and modern WoW.  

Yes, but at least in vanilla WoW (that's what I'm talking about, not the current day stuff), you did have elite areas, in fact I would say that those were very much like the ones in EQ2, except you probably wouldn't be grinding them as much. EQ2 did have far more of an emphasis on them, especially with many bosses also being open world. That was definitely very cool as it gave more of a character to each location. On the other side the real endbosses were camped by guilds.

Heritage quests were also nice, except that they were some of the only quests between all the thousands of other ones that were actually worth doing.

And when the population dropped down deep they weren't doable anymore, many weren't in each case.

I was on Innothule, which got merged after I left I think.

I am hoping Everquest Next is a HUGE sandbox world where we can build our own homes, inns, tavens, work shops, towns, including walls and gates, ships and air ships. Farms, raising chickens, pigs, lambs for wool, goats, cows, and fruit, vegetables, grains(wheat, barley, oats etc including rice.) Allow us to build windmills and watermills for grinding flour and making armor/weapons.

WoW had a better world, it was seamless with great zone transitions that EQ2 just never had, I kept suggesting in beta to do something similar to what EQ did when I played it back in the day but SOE obv didn't. I also loved how WoWs instances were built into the world like you had to travel through a cave to get into DMs and it took up real world space, you could even see the rear of DMs from STV. EQ2 on the other hand the instances were always outside of the zone and never felt real. 

What I loved about EQ2 however was the feel of the game back then which has since been ruined, it was a very dark and spooky setting and the music was just so good, wish that composer kept doing the music. Also though I'd be grouping all the time in EQ2, I didn't feel lonely like I did in WoW and the content did feel like a grind, the way they presented it was much more atmospheric, however sadly again most of the voice overs are gone. The quests used to have quite some variety too but going back to the game, not only were all the city quests gone because the starter areas have changed, but then were all dotted around in hubs and sent you off to do boring kill 10 rats quests. The old EQ2 dotted the quests around natrually, didn't do that WoW bullshit. The unlock and Armour quests were amazing fun too but they don't seem to be there any more either, probably cause they required grouping lol.

I loved how I could go to The Forest Ruins (I think it was called) or any low level questing area in the cities and I would die over and over, they forced you to group and were hard. You just randomly group up with people who were also waiting outside say the castle bit in The Forest Ruins and try and do the content. However seriously back then you'd die and die and die and end up being hours behind in XP that when you started. I just loved that feeling because progression felt dynamic, it was never one way and it forced you to play well as a group.

I miss running through the world and being scared I might be killed, remember how packed Nek was back in the day? Now it's mostly barren and you can stand there for like half hour before anything your level kills you.

I can play my SK now, hit the same 3 attacks over and over and just tank 10 mobs now and be at full health by the end of it because those 3 attacks heal you as well as do so much damage. If I ever get into trouble (which I don't) I just use Harm Touch, which I can actually use to kill Heroics that I shouldn't be able to touch.

 

SOE should release one classic server for a laugh, I don't get why they never do this.

 

I think they tried to take on too much in the beginning. It took them a while to get to a place where the game felt whole. The change in difficulty was largely a response to the player base. Originally the game was actually way too group dependant. Personally I agree that most games make open world content too solo friendly and leave out any actual group content outside of dungeons. I think there should be a nice middle ground so you can solo but hey, I need a friend to get this finished I think.

Well SOE were doing EQ2, SWG and PS at the same time, all the while throwing out expansions for EQ like every 6 months too which started around like 2003 time, so that was probably trying to fund these 3 MMOs they had in development. If you remember Planetside was originally going to be a bigger project but SWG and EQ2 were so far behind and costing money. SOE had to get SWG out first due to a contract with Lucas Arts and the license costing money in itself. So they pulled a load of developers away from PS and put them in SWG and EQ2, so PS released as a smaller project and SWG released early because of agreements with LA. Then after all that SOE needed to get EQ2 out the way, they released an expansion for PS 3 months after launch and with no testing, probably again to try and get some of the costs back. 

I think it was a bad time for them where developers were jumping from project to project and it all got too much for them to juggle, so you ended up with 3 lack luster but innovative projects. Then SOE was never really able to bring it all together, they kind of rested for awhile after that, probably trying to restructure and get their focus back after what had been a disaster losing all that ground to WoW also. DCUO came out and while again SOE showed they weren't afraid to change the mold, it was another failure due to a poor UI and lack of content, you could finish the game in 2 days, that is actually true! 

I think now SOE has put all their eggs into the F2P basket and really banking on it big. The problem is you need a good product because if a F2P game comes out and isn't good, then people never put money into it and you're more screwed than if you charged the initial box price. 

PS2 has come out and who knows how well it is doing, all the servers I'm on are dead and none of my friends liked the game so it isn't a good sign. However if they can pull it back then I'm sure it'll make money, I'm just not interested in it as it doesn't feel like Planetside. Was a big disappointment for me really, we told them in beta what was wrong and again we were ignored and they just released it broken.

Really it's all on EQ Next to deliver the goods, if it doesn't then I'm not sure what SOE have left? They've probably made profit on everything they've done but I really think they need a new CEO, John Smedley might be passionate but he hasn't done a stella job over the years.

What bothered me then is one of the same things that bothers me now - EQ2's art and especially player models look like plastic. I hated that and still hate that.

Originally posted by Razperil

Originally posted by tixylix

Originally posted by Camaro68

I finally got into EQ2 a couple years ago and I thought it was probably the deepest MMO on the market.  Lots of small group content and tons of character customization.  The fact that there's a bazillion classes doesn't hurt either.

 

But between the funky graphics engine and the feeling that some gameplay aspects were never polished left me with the feeling that SOE started the game with one overall concept in mind and did(OK, tried) an about face when WoW started open beta testing.

 

That all said I'm looking forward to the next EQ.  I'm interested to see what SOE defines as "sandbox" and if they can launch a game that feels complete this time.

The class system was one of the weakest I thought, you had to play 20 odd levels to see how your class would play out and if you liked it. They then changed it to what it is today but all the classes in each archetype feel rather bland and samey. Where WoWs classes always felt so unique from each other...

I found a lot of people, including myself all suffered from not being able to find a class we liked, trying a few and then quitting. Where as WoW, every class was fun and unique, every person can find a class they instantly like too. I found the class system to be a weak spot but I loved so much more about the game it made up for it.

Wow classes were fun and unique? Well, glad I don't share that opinion. EQ2 has changed a lot, we all know that. And of course people will always bring in this and that about Borecraft. It seems that is the bandwagon these days.

You don't say...

 

Originally posted by tixylix

Originally posted by vonryan123

Good troll I almost fell out of my chair.....sorry you took so much time to write this troll.

 

More to the point. If you consider EQ2 a failure then every mmo out in the last 8-9 years has been a Failure.

As many before me stated it's far from it by any means of the word "Failure"

 

Well pretty much every MMO has been, I don#t see how you could call any of them a success.

 

God I hate these people who call everything a troll......... 

The version of success and failure that people like you use on these forums is world apart from what it really means out of these forums.

On mmorpg.com failure usually means 'the games which fell short on my expectations'. If you are going to use that then yes pretty much every MMOS has been a failure. But the reality outside your little bubble is something else.

TBH i still believe (even though i don't play it anymore) that EQ2 is one of the best games on the market today.  Had SOE been proactive and done even half of the amount of advertising that Blizzard did at launch it would have been immensly more popular of a game than it was.