Gen Con 2002EverQuest Online Adventures impressions, beta test details

We caught up with Sony Online Entertainment at GenCon 2002 and got a chance to see EverQuest Online Adventures in motion. We last saw the game at E3 2002 back in May, and the game didn't look especially good back then--its player models and scenery were puny and extremely jaggy. But based on what we saw today, the developers of EverQuest Online Adventures have made huge improvements on the game's appearance--now EQOA's character and monster models look much more well-defined, more detailed, and are anti-aliased. We watched a gnome character in action against a snow griffin--a white-feathered, winged creature with the head of a spotted owl and the claws of a lion, and both the character's hammer attacks and the griffin's claw and bite attacks were animated much more smoothly than the monsters and characters we saw at E3. We were also able to take a look at the game's impressive variety of different giant-sized monsters, including ice giants, fire giants, and cyclopses--and all of these will have male and female versions in the game. We were told that the game should ship with about 300 different monster models. And despite the fact that the original EverQuest on the PC had the unfortunate quality of reusing and resizing monster models--for instance, taking a small spider, enlarging the model, and calling it a "giant spider"--EverQuest Online Adventures will reuse hardly any of its character models in this way, since the development team felt that enlarged versions of smaller models tended to look too jaggy.

EverQuest Online Adventures will clearly attempt to appeal to console-game fans by offering them a streamlined interface and control scheme. Players can initiate combat simply by pressing the X button, for instance, and can use their character's inventory menu to quickly examine and evaluate their characters' possessions, and exactly what sort of bonuses or extra abilities each of their weapons and pieces of armor provide. What's more, EQOA will have no separate zones and no loading time, and will not force players to hunt for their corpse (and its possessions) after they die. Players will also be able to utilize the services of coachmen and horses to help them travel quickly from the game's different areas which, despite the fact that the game's story will take place about 500 years before the events of the original EverQuest, include well-known EverQuest locations such as Guk, Oggok, Blackburrow, Permafrost, and the Ro Desert.

Sony Online intends to include most of the content in the original EverQuest into EQOA; for instance, the PS2 game will have all of the original game's character classes and races, though it won't have the iksar lizardmen of the Ruins of Kunark expansion for the PC, or the Vah Shir beastmen or beastlord character classes of the Shadows of Luclin expansion for the PC. However, in true EverQuest fashion, Sony Online is making sure to hold a public beta for the game by offering signups for anyone who purchases the PS2 online adaptor later this month. Applicants that are chosen for the beta will get a beta CD sent to them in the mail. The final version of EverQuest Online Adventures is currently scheduled for release next year.