SOE's John Blakely tells us about the character archetypes and adventures in EverQuest II.

Massively multiplayer online role-playing games are seemingly here to stay. These games let you choose a character from a list of different races and professions, then gradually gain power through experience levels and equipment you acquire on adventures with other, like-minded players. And you could argue that the online role-playing games we know and love now, and that are on the horizon, all owe a great deal to Sony Online Entertainment's 1999 game EverQuest. That was one of the first games to take the addictive, hack-and-slash action of role-playing games and bring it online in a huge and colorful 3D world. Other games have been released since EverQuest, but the original game remains one of the most popular and eventful online RPGs around. Now, it's finally getting a sequel. And we've finally had a chance to play it.

The sequel to EverQuest will still take place in the world of Norrath, as the original game did, but several centuries later. A series of disasters has ruined most of the world, leaving behind only the major cities of Freeport (now controlled by evil factions) and Qeynos (now controlled by good factions). Despite the disaster, the sequel will let you play as one of the original game's 15 races (humans, barbarians, dwarves, high elves, wood elves, dark elves, half elves, halflings, trolls, ogres, iksar, erudites, gnomes, frogloks, and the catlike kerrans, rather than the vah shir), as well as a new "evil" race, the rodentlike ratonga, for a total of 16 different races. And unlike in the original game, all player races may play as all classes...eventually. EverQuest II takes a completely different approach to creating characters. You start off as one of four basic "archetypes," a fighter, a scout, a mage, and a priest--you'll later be able to "specialize" your class further into more-familiar (and more-powerful) classes, like holy paladins and nature-loving druids.

You're in their new world now. And it looks fantastic.

The character-creation menu is one of the first menus you'll use, and it's a great way to get a close look at the game's exceptionally detailed character models. While the environments in EverQuest II look great, the game's character models look incredible. They feature tremendous detail, right down to the lustrous sheen on the scales of the reptilian iksar. The current version of the game affords you a tremendous number of choices on superficial details for your character's appearance--even more than Sony Online Entertainment's last game, Star Wars Galaxies, did. You can choose different colors and orientations for your character's eyes, different angles for your nose and chin, a huge number of different hairstyles, and use a slider to adjust your character's stature. Several races also have additional features, such as facial tattoos. One common criticism of the original EverQuest was that characters tended to look the same; one dark elf wearing a robe really looked no different from another. Thanks to EverQuest II's huge variety of character creation options, you will have a much easier time making distinctive-looking characters.

Not all of Norrath's lands are at war. Just most of them.

Once you've created your new EverQuest II character, you'll begin the tutorial, a guided adventure narrated with the game's recently announced full audio speech. You'll start the tutorial on a strange ship--your character was apparently lost at sea and recently rescued by a boat on its way to the Isle of Refuge, the game's first area. On the ship, you'll be carefully walked through the basics of interacting with other characters, buying and selling items, engaging in combat, and performing quests. The game lets you interact with most objects and characters by double-left-clicking, though you can also right-click a character or object to bring up a context-sensitive menu that will let you open a closed chest or greet (or reply to) a chatty character. The same applies to melee combat; you can right-click an enemy, like the captive goblin that escapes its prison and wreaks havoc on deck, and choose the "attack" option or use your auto-attack hotkey.

EverQuest II's current interface seems much simpler and cleaner than that of the previous game. Though the interface we saw isn't necessarily final, it took up far less space onscreen. The current, prerelease test version of the game has a "hotkey bank"--a set of 10 hotkey shortcuts (and you can switch between multiple groups of hotkeys by pressing shift plus a number key) that can include anything from melee attacks to magic spells. In the current version of the game, every base character archetype has an innate power; for instance, priests begin the game with a basic blessing (that adds protection to a teammate), while mages begin the game with a short-lived boosting spell that increases the rate at which a teammate regains "power," which is what all characters use to cast magic spells and use innate abilities.