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EQ2 doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of an improvement on EQ. I’m waiting for World of Warcraft to come out .. meanwhile here is my banter on EQ2.

Graphics .. the initial wow factor is attributed mainly to the graphics engine, it kicks ass the graphis are stunning, great water effects and environmental effects. All this eyecandy comes at a cost tho. It takes ~30 seconds of load time between each zone, and zones are not that big (give or take similar in size to original EQ).

Quests .. quests are my other beef inEQ2. How about this .. “Please deliver this bow to ‘Bob’ in South Queynos” .. how’s that for vague. South Queynos is a prety large zone with lots of NPC’s. Finding Bob among them all is prety much left up to luck, you spend so much time just blindly running around trying to find your quest npc’s it gets on your nerves quick.

Combat .. combat is ok, every skill has its unique animation, they look nice (again eyecandy and all). You gain one skill per level (I havn’t really gotten a character up real high yet (and I don’t know if I ever will), so I don’t know what’s in store much higher, but this seems to be the pattern. Grouping is mandatory prety much, ther’s a lot of groups of monsters roaming around, which means that if you attack one of them you have the whole group on you, not fun at all solo. Past the initial bootcamp it becomes prety hard to do much without grouping. I hate being forced to group in MMORPGs.

Customization .. big props in here, you can customize probably 50 aspects of yourself (mainly your face), with very fine grained controll. The only problem is, you never really look at most those details on a character, I supose you could, in first person view mode, but I dubt most people do, making the great customization options moot.

well that’s about all .. I’ll have something up on WoW when I get it.