EverQuest II is highly addictive, yet very underappreciated in a MMORPG world dominated by the Overated World Of Wacraft
I was very late arriving to EverQuest 2, infact it wasnt all too long ago I stumbled upon this hidden gem.
EverQuest 2 is a game I had heard of, but had never heard anyone speak of it. It was always World Of Wacraft this, and GuildWars that.
6 months had passed since I cancelled my WoW account before I found this game, the void between that time was filled with Guildwars which I will admit I really enjoyed. I just wanted somthing that wasnt instanced, somthing I could fill my days playing thats when I must have tried lots of online games, from Matrix Online, Maple Story, Ragnarok and many others, I even got chance to play the Dungeons & Dragons Stormreach BETA, which I was sadly disapointed with. Then one day I downloaded "EverQuest II : Trial Of The Isle". It was not long before the LU19 update, so by the time I had got to grips with it, I purchased the game only to find I had to re-learn the game (which was actually much easy after the update).
The game itself I will compare to WoW (dispite this game coming out before) its non-instanced and is very similar in gameplay only its much highly quality in graphics, gameplay, sound and story. The community itself is very friendly and appears to be much more mature than the WoW players.
The graphics at first I couldnt make my mind up, they looked great, but they also didnt. I cannot quite put my finger on what I didnt like about them, but I have now grown to really like the graphics, and to look at WoW with its blocky models and stretched textures, EQ2 hasnt aged abit.
My first suprise was that the NPC's / Quest givers, even monsters actully had speech. With right away shows that the game had alot more thought and time go into it, and really does well at making you feel more involved in the situations are you.
The quests themselves are much like WoW's, the same old, Kill X Number of Y and Return to Z, but after playing many other MMORPGs it was a blessing to have a task to do, rather than to be stuck with nothing to do, no goal. Altough there is also all your other style of quests that WoW also had, only these are less strussful unlike WoWs which tended to be stressful due to the fact that you either had to grind you way to a lvl below or the same as the enemy in order to kill it to complete the quest, or a bug would occure and enemies would spot you through walls or from below or above.
EQ2's quests seem fair, and unlike many RPG's are actually rewarding as you tend to get items of use, rather than items to fill your bags before you dump them at a merchant.
The only letdown with EQII is the customer support, if you are a europoan player like myself, don't expect any help from Sony Online Entertainment, as they appear to focus most of their time with the U.S servers, that includes bonuses, patches and technical / customer support.
This however can be overuled if you are a WoW player and use to the shenanigans of Blizzard .I.E removing their unsubcription pages when the servers go down or suffer from major lag, thus stopping players from canceling thus being charged another month for a broken service.
Overall, if you want the style of WoW, only with better graphics, sound, gameplay, community and more monsters, races, classes and bigger locations and with more regulary content upgrades and expansions packs. EverQuest 2 is the game for you.
Again, thankyou for reading.
Kind Regards
Jason A Orme AKA jasonthedwarf - Splitpaw Server