The onslaught of A-list games has begun. Case in point: Everquest II came out recently, and it's been taunting me. I've been pretty intrigued by what I've seen of the World of Warcraft beta, but also finding myself less than thrilled at the prospect of devoting time to a character that'll disappear when the beta ends in a few weeks, so picking up EQ2 seemed like a way to scratch that itch and check out the competition at the same time. (Plus, I'm weak.) Happily, Best Buy had it on sale :).

(Up front, I'll say that WoW and EQ2 feel extremely similar in terms of features, and are probably interchangeable depending on how you feel about particular nits and world backstory and graphic design. Here I'm talking about elements of EQ2 that jumped out at me, for better or worse.)

The absolute first thing that slaps you about the face in EQ2 is the graphics. Morrowind was a pretty RPG; EQ2 kicks all that up a notch. There's pretty extensive use of high-end shader technology (which looks damn good even on my "old" GeForce 4Ti, which is pulling duty while my Radeon is off for warranty service, grrrrr). There are detailed environments and detailed characters galore. Shiny, bumpy armor looks better than it ever has before. The animations seem not so great (especially the most common one -- the running animation). I mean, they're OK, but City of Heroes just nails this.

EQ2 makes a big deal out of character customizability, but I'm a little underwhelmed. They spent most of their energy on the face editor, but frankly, all face editors suck compared to The Sims 2. Here, you can adjust a few knobs on eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, but you can't switch to different nose or eye or whatever types without changing to a different character race, and changing the race has gameplay effect on your stats. So pretty much all high elves still end up looking alike, especially if you have picked the same hairstyle (which isn't hard, since there are around five hairstyles per race/gender combo).

I'm also feeling the pinch on archetype customizability. You start the game picking one of four generic types (fighter, mage, priest, scout), and at level 10 and again at 20 you can further refine this into a subspecialty (three choices at level 10, two choices at 20, although some choices are constrained by alignment, so aren't really choices at all). So far, when I level, some new spells get magically dropped on me -- I don't even have to go train up. I have yet to encounter a way to focus my power set to a particular style of play, so it seems like every person of class X at level Y is going to have mostly the same abilities. WoW seems to have a much more extensive power tree and ability to specialize, as does CoH.

Adventuring seems to be oriented towards to solo adventurer up front; in fact, monsters are either labeled as solo or group to indicate whether or not you need to team up to take 'em on. Most "group" monsters have been for specific quests, and have specific spawn points, and so far I've only teamed up for the express purpose of killing these beasts (and the teams disbanded shortly after that). Contrast this with CoH, where you'd frequently join up in a hunting group and spend an hour farting around a danger zone with a crew of folks, dispensing fiery justice and one liners.

It's also worth noting that once you've engaged in combat, that monster (or monster group) is "locked" to you, and no one outside of your group can engage it unless you "call for help" (which also entails giving up XP). It's an interesting game mechanic, and certainly prevents the rampant kill stealing that early areas of City of Heroes suffer from, but it also means you can't play a do-gooder priest who randomly heals folks.

That being said, the ability to adventure solo isn't a bad thing; they've done a good job of giving you a lot of the kinds of things to do you'd expect to find in Morrowind or the like. There are tons of NPCs that want you to do things for 'em (of the standard ferry/kill/collect variety) and tons of environments to wander around in. I spent several hours in the game playing it almost like I would a single player CRPG, except that I had fellow players to ask questions of, and to occasionally enlist the aid of. It was a lot of fun.

Also, there are like a billion emotes with specific animations (ok, maybe like a hundred). It's pretty crazy.

Another aspect that's surprisingly fun is the crafting aspect; you have a subprofession as a artisan, which you can specialize in various ways. As you're wandering around in the world, you can harvest or buy various raw materials, and then you can use crafting stations to turn these into usable/sellable items. What's cool here is that bad events can occur while crafting (which can damage the item you're building, or sometimes, you), and you have to counter these with spell-like abilities like "knotwork," "measuring," and "theory." The actual mechanic is sort of basic and stupid (match this icon of the bad condition with the icon of the counter in your knowledge book, within a certain amount of time) but it kept me fascinated for a good hour; it adds just the right amount of flavor. WoW has the crafting, but it didn't include this whole counter system.

Another cute detail is that you get your own room at the inn when you arrive, and you can later upgrade that bigger and better lodgings. You can buy furniture to stock the room, although I haven't yet managed to acquire a book case. I did buy a trunk and was disappointed to find I couldn't stash inventory in it. Still, it's a nice touch -- you can invite other folks back to your pad, or even give them the keys to it. It is, however, a little weird that your starting apartment is through the same door as everyone else's starting apartment. "What's this guy doing coming out of my apartment!?" Wandering around town, there are definitely less accommodations than people, so that's a little weird.

Rounding out the cute details are pets; you can buy a cat or a turtle or a dog or... well, there's a lot of stuff, but mostly cats and dogs, which you can then deposit in your pied a terre. Also, you can buy a "horse whistle" which I assume magically summons your horse without having to screw around with stabling it, or going back to where you've stabled it. However, these items all cost much more than I have, so I can merely hypothesize.

One last gripe: there's some kind of memory leak; after going to about four zones, the frame rate drops to about 1 a second, and the inter-zone loading rises into the minutes. This is crazy, especially since there's a lot of ferrying quests. (I don't remember WoW having zone loading, for what it's worth.) On the other hand, one last huzzah: there's an in-game help system that includes the ability to full-text search the (pretty extensive) list of help notes. I saw someone running around with their hood down, and it took me about ten seconds to learn I could do the same with the /showhood command. That's pretty sweet.

What's the overall verdict? Boy, I don't know. The memory leak is clouding my enjoyment, but one hopes it's fixable. The characters are maybe a little too shiny and plastic. But it's a pretty world, and it sucked me in for several hours over the weekend. I'm going to play some more (I'll certainly play it at least as I much as I play any single player CRPG, so I'm not worried about getting my money's worth) and see if I can actually achieve some character differentation. I'll probably play the WoW beta some more too. In the end, I expect I'll pick one, and it'll depend on a lot on who else I can suck in (brother Chris is also playing the WoW beta, so that's a pretty a big argument right there). This feels like it'll scratch a similar but slightly different itch than City of Heroes, which still pretty much totally rocks, but doesn't have quite so much in the way of persistent social interactions. (Oh, did I mention you can type /role in EQ2 to enter role playing mode, so that you can find other people who actually want to role play?)  11:15:06 AM  (comments [])