Overview

I’ve never been an EverQuest fan. Now this will hardly come as a surprise to those who’ve seen me post news stories and articles over the years, but for the sake of disclosure, it had to be said. EverQuest II thus never really interested me. Oh sure, the screenshots were pretty – but they looked soulless, like CGI from the mid-90s. There was no warmth to them, no character or personality. E3 – well, what can you show of an MMO at E3? Sony had a nice-looking canned presentation that could hardly satisfy my questions of “how much of a grind is it”. Asking a PR rep that question is akin to asking Karl Rove if George Bush has been a good President.

So here I found myself with a stack of work piling the “in” box… pile… mess, and the EQ2 beta invitation was harmlessly hidden deep in Thunderbird, off where it shouldn’t tempt me. Still, given the gushing I’ve been doing over World of WarCraft, it seemed only fair to at least try EQ2 for a comparison. You know, a baseline off which to judge how awesome World of WarCraft will be.

Am I ever glad I tried it. EverQuest 2 is very, very little like EverQuest. The hated, despised, tyrannical “Vision ™” is nowhere to be found. There are real, actual quests. Interacting with NPCs isn’t a matter of spamming them with the right keyword in chat – they have menu chat options. Boy, is the world ever full of content. It seems like every NPC has voice acting behind it, and quite a few of them have quests. Yes, they’re the “go kill X to fetch me # of Y” type, but that’s been RPG canon for the better part of 20 years. The quests also result in huge XP rewards – it might take a player hours to grind from even level 5 to 6, but he can go from 5 to 7 in one hour with quests.


EQ2 falls in between World of WarCraft and the original in terms of how much freedom it offers. World of WarCraft has a relatively small world and the progression of the players is quite obvious – it’s almost like a traditional RPG in that regard. EverQuest basically dumped a player in his starting zone, said “well, here you are – try not to die”, and left it at that.

EQ2 has an impressive tutorial and beginner’s island, for starters, but there’s more. There is no serial progression of quests as in World of WarCraft, so it leaves the player to explore more for himself but unlike EQ, there are many things to do in the city. Cities have housing, markets, crafting equipment is there – but it’s for the player to find. Crafting itself is a hugely involved process, judging from the number of things a player has to do while making something, though I’ve yet to figure out how to do it. There are manuals to buy, ingredients to acquire and – quite honestly – I don’t even know where to get started on it.