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EverQuest II Final Hands-On - Early Going

EverQuest II has finally launched. We decided to give it a try.

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The highly anticipated sequel to the groundbreaking massively multiplayer game EverQuest has finally launched to retail, and it has also launched on our computers. We managed to log in to the game at approximately 4:00pm PST today and met with nary a technical problem. While most of the game's 14 running servers, which include a UK server and a role-playing server, were running at nearly full capacity with heavy server load, we had no trouble finding a less-populated server, logging in, and creating a character.

Character creation hasn't changed much since the beta. Like in the beta, you choose from the game's 16 fantasy races, the 16th of which (the frogloks), has yet to be revealed. Like in the beta version of the game, you can choose a male or female, then you can choose various facial features and hairstyles for him or her, in addition to being able to tweak your character's general size and build. You can then choose whether your character is "good" or "evil" in alignment, which determines, among other things, the main city from which he or she will eventually base an early career. For instance, Qeynos is home to good characters, while Freeport is home to evil characters.

We had no trouble creating a new character and then jumping onto the Isle of Refuge, the starting zone for all new characters, from which players will eventually catch a boat to Freeport or Qeynos. Even on a server designated as "lightly populated," there were still plenty of players running across the isle, busying themselves with the game's many starting quests and using the "/shout" and "/ooc" (out of character) channels to ask minor questions. However, the Isle of Refuge's quest content seems mostly self-explanatory, and when you've completed each task, it makes liberal use of the original EverQuest's "pathfinding" feature, which creates a shimmering yellow trail that hovers in midair and leads to whichever character gave you the quest. There also didn't seem to be any shortage of other players interested in joining up for quests. Despite this, however, nearly all the Isle's quests can be completed by a lone player.

Though we did admittedly miss the morning rush, the game's early performance seems just fine. We encountered a few very slight instances of graphical slowdown while running the game on our networked T3 connection on an above-average system with a 2.4GHz processor, a GeForce 5950 graphics card, and a gigabyte of RAM. At moderate settings, the game ran quite well, though it seemed to have a bit more trouble at the absolute highest settings. Sony Online Entertainment has previously stated that it intended EverQuest to make good use of high-end hardware, so if what we've seen is any indication, players with several sticks of RAM, overclocked CPUs, and GeForce 6800 cards will be able to get more from all that horsepower. Stay tuned to GameSpot for a full review of EverQuest II.

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