I’m a big fan of MMORPG’s, especially the fantasy genre. I’ve tried just about all of them that are out there, Asheron’s Call, Asheron’s Call 2, EVE, Final Fantasy XI, City of Heroes, Star Wars Galaxies, you name it, I probably played it. The exception to this was EverQuest2 due to all of the horror stories I heard about how unfriendly the game was to new players. With the upcoming release of EverQuest 2, Sony has combined all the previous expansions into one game and released it as everquest 2 plat.
For those of you out there that don’t know what a MMORPG is, it’s a massively multiplayer online role-playing game. EverQuest (EQ) happens to be the most popular MMORPG in
From the get go, EverQuest is huge. The first thing you have to do is make a character, which if your familiar with RPG’s, then you’ll have no problem here. Once you choose your race and class you get to distribute points among your stats. I personally am not a power gamer, so I make my characters based on what I like and how I want my characters to be. If you are a power gamer though, you can do the research online and find your “uber-build”.
Visually, the graphics are dated, and it shows. You can tell this game is more than a few years old to say the least, especially when you compare it to the other MMORPG’s that are out there or are coming out soon. The models are very blocky, and the animations for combat are less than impressive. While the landscape is not the most visually stimulating thing that you have ever seen, I personally enjoyed it. In these types of games, the environment should be background, not something that is an annoying obstacle that you get stuck on every time you try to follow something. One thing that is very important to remember, is the fact that this game is 5 years old. While it’s been repacked into a nice new box with shiny cellophane, the game itself is not. So take this into account when you look at it and cringe at the sub par graphics.
The sounds in EverQuest are expectable. Most games like this the sound effects aren’t top notch. They usually are decent, but nothing mind-boggling. EverQuest is no exception. While nothing great, the sounds are not rancid either. They too are dated, but fit the game and the setting.
The true strength of EverQuest lies within its game play. The controls are a bit funky, and take a little bit to get used to. Once you do get the hang of the movement and the controls you can dive into the fighting. This can be done a few ways. You can hotkey your attacks, click them with the mouse, or simply auto attack. The spells within EverQuest are pretty well done also. You have to memorize them from a list of spells you learn from quests or scrolls you can buy at the store. Once memorized, you can cast them as often as you like, pending you have enough mana that is. The game is very quest heavy, which is a good thing. It takes away the sense of the “experience grind” that many online massive games have. As I said earlier, this game is huge, in addition to the basic world of EverQuest2, you get 7 expansions with it in the everquest 2 plat game. This leads to a vast world that you can explore and hunt within. If you get tired of one zone or fighting one specific group of monsters, leave. Travel to a different zone to fight different monsters, group with different people, and complete different quests.
The skill system that EverQuest has in place is also very well done. You gain a certain amount of skill points each level that can be used to train unlearned skills which you learn from your guild master. Once learned, you can either spend more skill points to increase them, or simply get out into the world and train them by practicing them. The more you fight with your long sword, the better skilled you become at one-handed slashing weapons. This is true for magic and spells, crafting, and the miscellaneous skills such as foraging, tracking, swimming etc. Each of these skills has a use and compliments your class nicely.
Speaking of crafting, this plays a large role in the world of EverQuest. Not only does it save you money when you are able to make your own items instead of buying them from a vendor, you can make money by selling them to other players. There is a wide list of crafting skills to choose from and you can make just about anything. You need a crafting kit of some kind and the proper ingredients and you’re good to go. As with all skills, the more you craft, the more adept you become at it and the higher quality items you can make. While I’m not a big fan of crafting, I personally find it boring and tedious, to many people within the online community look for this as one of the most important things in an online game.
There are a few things that I did not like about eq2 plat. First and foremost the inventory system is horrible. There is no “get all” button, and you have to individually pick up each item off of the corpses and place them in your inventory. To top it off you only have 8 inventory slots, so you have to buy sacks, bags, and backpacks to hold more things. But when looting, it gets very annoying. Kill the monster, open the corpse, open your inventory, open your backpack, put the loot in your backpack, rinse, lather repeat. Also, the map, which is a necessity in a game this large, is not very well done. Maybe this gets better as you level and get some random skill up, but from what I’ve seen, it’s not a very good mapping system. I could find no way to mark it with a pin, and the detail on it is, well, not very detailed.
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