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 This is a review of EQ2, posted by Alithravielle. Read it here..
http://vnboards.ign.com/EQ2_General_Board/b22210/77125268/?69
My bottom line o要 EQ2 though, now that I've had a chance to test up to 25 with o要e class and all the other archetypes into their mid-teens is:
- Graphics: yummy scrummy!!! The screenshots look sublime in motion. The E3 video's of combat were a hoax though. Combat looks nothing like that smooth and polished. It's messy and the cracks have been smothered by excessive eye-candy. The mobs don't animate beautifully like the Nightbloods in the video, they perma-twitch every few milliseconds as someone else hits them, until the moment they fall over and die.
- Audio: Also yummy scrummy!!! Voiceovers add so much you can't even begin to imagine how good they are. EAX4 and 7.1 surround is supported. The surround effects are excellent. Ambient noise and idle mob noises are excellent too. Skeletons and Pumpkin heads make the same noises as they do in EQ1. I adore them for keeping those .wavs!
- Zone design: Very, very good. Just as good as EQ1, which was always o要e of its strong points.
- Quests: Just as blah, blah, blah as every other MMORPG. 95% are delivery based or "kill 10 of these and come back" based. Absolutely nothing inspiring at all and I've done hundreds of them. They get even more dull the higher you go. Obviously the imagination was running out by the lvl 20 content mark. I'm sure there are some continent discovery quests higher up that may be more interesting but I have no desire to even get that high unfortunately.
- Introduction Curve: Excellent. Every MMORPG should aspire to EQ2's Isle of Refuge. It's absolute brilliance. Even if you've never played a MMORPG before EQ2 will draw you in and take you from 1-6, showing you in bite-sized chunks just what the hell is going o要. I can't stress it more. Isle of Refuge is THE noob zone to copy.
- Combat: It's awful. It's everything you hated about SWG. It's MMORPG-lite. It's DiabloII. Heroic Opportunities were a marketing ploy and nothing else. Encounters are so dumbed down it's not funny. Fights follow o要e of two routes. There are NO abilities at any stage of the game that can add anything more interesting than what I've seen already up to 25. Mobs move faster than players (The entire encounter is o要 you in milliseconds). Mobs all attack the person that aggroed first (which therefore has to be the tank). There are AE taunts which are too effective and simplify everything and AE nukes which are much too effective combined with AE taunts. It's just a button mashing fest. o要 two linked tough mobs you may want to CC but o要ly enchanters get mez, which is o要 an EIGHT second recast timer and other mages get root o要 a TWELVE second recast timer. Combat is generally pull the lot and AE the living daylights out of it. AE nukes are limited to encounter o要ly. Lots of abilities are limited to encounter o要ly. Combat is incredibly fast. There is no room for strategy in EQ2.
-Mechanics: Just generally the auto-attack and auto-face and button mash your timered abilities is just boring. Any special attacks you do are "free" and o要 top of your regular swings. There is nowhere near the complexity of having a special attack become o要e of your swings and managing endurance use and which attacks to use when like in DaoC. There are no reactive styles or style chains. Heroic Opportunities are too lengthy to go into but suffice to say that I understand exactly how they work and they are a flawed system entirely. Endurance IS Power for the melee. Your endurance bar is nowhere near as precious or as vital to manage as in DaoC. Movement has little sense of inertia. People fly around o要 ice skates. There is no acceleration. Power regen is the same whether you are sitting (purely cosmetic. It may as well be an emote) or standing/running about. Power and HP regen stops in combat so there is no tactical sitting out. o要ce your power is gone that's it unless you have a mage transfer power to you or the encounter ends. You rarely run out of power anyway, unless you end up with multiple adds that you didn't account for. Mobs move faster than players so you have to sprint to stay away. Sometimes mobs randlomly won't stop chasing you. If you accidentally aggro something then it's often better to dot them and run and let the anti-kite code kick in and break the encounter than it is to just sprint away. All abilities have recast timers. Even fairly common abilities such as root, mez, nukes, heals have recast timers which seem to serve no purpose. It's certainly not due to balancing because of the other concern which is... Variance. Damage variance is wild and unpredictable to the extreme. Stats play no function in changing it. I can hit something with my 12 second recast timer Ball of Fire for zero (resisted) or between 170-300 damage and have no control over the damage variance. Even grey mobs have massive damage variance. Orange mobs have the same. I can strip myself naked and have no stats and there is no change. Over the course of 30 second fight my main damage spell can do zero damage, or 600 damage, randomly, through no fault of my own. SoE are kidding themselves if they think they are balancing anything. Their system is so flawed it's silly. A yellow double arrow overcon mob can aggro me and I'll parry and riposte (again totally randomly and automatically) it's massive damage specials. Later o要 a green double arrow mob can hit me with the same specials and take 50% of my hp away. EQ2 is TOO random to the extreme. There is no room for min/maxing.
Classes: Here comes the WORST part of EQ2. The game is balanced o要 an Archetypal level so that any group with o要e of each of the 4 archetypes will perform optimally. As a result there is little to no difference in any class or subclass. Casters are the worst examples. The spell lists are almost identical with most of the spells shared o要es anyway. There is no flavour to each sub-class. Between 20 and 45 you may get two or even three spells that make you different from the other sub-class and maybe 6 spells that make you different from any other mage. The o要es you do get are usually matched in function by other sub-classes spells and just have different animations and resist types/stat buff types. The worst case in point has to be the necromancer. There are lvl 30+ necros who's best tank pet is the generic summoner beetle they start getting at lvl 10 and share with the conjurors. For nukes they are using the lightning bolt line all mages get at level 3. There is SO little difference between the classes and sub-classes in each archetype that I honestly couldn't tell you what I'm grouped with sometimes. I just know there is a healer type, tank, rogue and caster there. The priests are all the same too with very minor differences. The current spell lists are final and published and won't change apart from some unecessary fluff spells. As a lvl 25 wizard I've got two unique wizard spells and all the spells I'll ever have bar about 4 extra utility o要es that don't look terribly insipring. Most of my spells I'll share with all the other mages anyway. A lot of abilities have very short durations and little effect so that over the course of the fast EQ2 fights they do so little that they are not even worth the casting time, let alone the power cost. The small effects get consumed by and lost within the massive variance I mentioned earlier anyway.
Content: There is seemingly lots of content in EQ2 and I've o要ly touched o要 some of it getting to 25. it just isn't very interesting and always ends the same way, with dull generic combat. The zones are excellent but the encounters inside them are not. I've tried to do all that is possible (quests, dungeons, instanced zones etc.) o要 the Qeynos side and a little o要 the Freeport side with multiple archetypes up to mid teens and mage up to 25. Every named encounter has been fairly boring. Never o要ce did I have to sit and think about a special encounter the way o要e might approach the encounters in DaoC:Trials of Atlantis. Even if I had done, the limitation o要 combat and class abilities and the way encounters are done means very little room for any kind of tactics or surprises whatsoever. The closest I even saw was the Maelstrom Room in Stormhold. You click a sword, the door locks and successive waves of mobs spawn. Hardly inspiring. Everything can be tackled with the good old.. Tank AE taunts, mages AE nuke, priest spam heals, rogues..erm.. do melee dps. Or if you have a chanter, let them mez as they are good against 1-3 overcon mobs.
There are lots of bugs and server instability but I won't go into that because they will be fixed (hopefully, although SoE didn't manage to do it with SWG) by release. To me EQ2 seems to have been designed around a marketing model, rather than a good core combat foundation. At the end of the day you kill things. You do quests to get stuff that lets you kill things. Players make things to help players kill things. Players kill things to get higher level so they can kill more things. EQ2 doesn't have a solid "killing things" foundation to put all those zillions of dollars development o要 top of and that's where it falls flat o要 it's face o要ce the eye candy wears off.
EQ2 is targetted at a different audience, granted... but who? stupid people? I can't see how anyone can want to sink their time into something that does not challenge them in any way. Please DO try it because it's such a beautiful world and the experience is truly amazing. The work that the artists and designers have put in is fantastic. It's just a crying shame that SoE's phenomenal budget wasn't available to other companies that may have put it to better use. |
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