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Alot have been seeking an alternative to WoW..It's been here all along

13

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  • AethaerynAethaeryn Member RarePosts: 3,149

    Originally posted by Kilrane

    Originally posted by HarmTouch


    Originally posted by cyress8

     




    Originally posted by HarmTouch






    Originally posted by cyress8

     









    Originally posted by Alot

    The title is wrong. Alot has not been awaiting the "WoW killer".











    I lol'd

    *High-Fives Alot*

     







    Well this could mean 1 of 2 things.Either your in love with WoW and aren't waiting for any other titles.Or, your already playing eq2 and your aswell, not awaiting the wow killa because you already playing it! <3

    but i do assume you play wow since you added an unecesary 'd' at the end of 'lol'.... LOL

    /boggled







    I play EQ2 and no it is not a WoW killer Also, I added 'd to make it past tense. :P

     

    but why? You already 'Laughed out loud', no need for the d for past tense.... anyhow!! thanks for clearing this up!!

    Since you're now giving grammer advice, I hope you realize that 'alot' isn't a real word.

     

    Back on topic, I think EQ2 is an ok game but I wouldn't have ever considered it a great game at any point in its life.  Let alone a game I would have pitted against the two ton gorilla in the room.

    grammar ;P  sorry could not resist.

    Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!

  • FrostWyrmFrostWyrm Member Posts: 1,036

    Originally posted by Vegetto

    I played from beta and at the time, it wasn't the game it is now is any area. But the grind was horific. If i got ha third of a level from a 12 hour session, i would be happy. We used to count in 0.1% amounts, so after a big battle, the XP bar would move 0.2% and we would go "awesome XP for those!".

    I guess I'm a bit of the opposite. I played at release, and I thought the game itself was fantastic save for the terrible performance issues my PC had with it. It wasn't until they made it 10 times easier not long thereafter that it started to lose me. I'm sad to hear how limiting the F2P version is, though. I've been thinking of picking it up again since it went F2P.

  • NightCloakNightCloak Member UncommonPosts: 452

    I find it difficult to give more money to SOE.

    Also, nothing about this game appeals to me more than resubbing and rolling an new toon on WoW. The problems you stated with its start are standard SOE. And the 8 billion expansions that have come out lead me to the belief that this game is far more expensive than initial glances.

     

    No thanks for this one, but good concept at looking backwards.

  • zhombiezhombie Member UncommonPosts: 160

    Something that makes me curious... Why, after all these years since launch for both games, is this still a debate? They are two different games for the most part. I've played both and was not entranced by either. The only reason I played to 'endgame' (how I loathe that term) in WoW as opposed to never making it past 20 something in EQ2 is I had friends I played with in WoW. Which, incidentally, is the only reason I played WoW in the first place.

    EQ2 had it's own following when it launched. The EQ players hated it. WoW was announced and everyone had to choose a side. I never did. I play a game for my own reasons and interests, not because it was a [insert mmo title] -killer. I will give this much: WoW, for all it's flaws, is more polished and accessible than EQ2 and always will be. Those 'high quality' videos you posted show a lot of sad clipping and blasé animations.

    There's no need for a WoW killer. WoW will kill itself eventually. People will find new games. (Emphasis on new.) If you like a game, just say so! If you want to find people to play your game of choice then ask. Otherwise, why is this fanboy nerdgasm in LFG forum?

    Now if you'll excuse me I'll go back to fiancée raging over her math homework while I try to find a different game to play until GW2 and TSW comes out.

    /forumgreybeardrant

    ___________~____________
    Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth. - Oscar Wilde

  • HarmTouchHarmTouch Member Posts: 28

    Originally posted by Yamota

    I played EQ 2 when it was launched and sticked with it for a while s and I can tell you it is no alternative to WoW. It was very linear, simple with small zones and PvP was very bad done and didnt even exist at first.

    It was a shadow of the prequel which was a much richer and complex MMORPG. EQ 2 felt like how EQ 1 would be like if it was like WoW and when I am looking for an alternative for something I am not looking for a simpler version of it, I am looking for something better and preferably different and EQ 2 is neither of those things.

    Ofcourse this may have changed during the years I stopped playing it but somehow I doubt it. It is SOE we are talking about...

    LMAO..EQ2 is simpler than WOW and has SMALL zones.....?! that's a really hilarious statement.You're judging a game that you CLEARLY stated you played at launch only (8 years ago).Its been almost a year since DoV xpac release and there's still content no guild WW has cleared... And how in the hell can you say eq2 is linear? At this point, after seing you say that idk if its even worth arguing with you lol. the game is absolutely MASSIVE.And in no way is the gameplay or lor/story linear... by far.you clearly have no clue.... either you are just trolling or you are pretty dim.

     

    See, we all laughed when SOE put instanced pvp in EQ2 a couple xpacs ago. We already and still do have a very lively vibrant open world of pvprs.We (most) dont just sit and que for the very terrible thing (the worst implementation in mmo history) known as instanced pvp.Our world is alive, not to mention it looks 10x bettr than wow. Did you watch any of the videos i posted? I mean, wows cool if you like cartoons and faceroll content. I know my 5 year old sure does love his WoW!! i can't keep him off of it.

    But its a kind of a good thing i guess.I do love wow for keeping alot of the teeny boppers and or tiny children away from eq2 =D GG

    Outstanding visuals/partical effects, massive non-linear world, challenging content, 26 playable classes, 25 races, appearance slots,hundreds upon hundreds of diffrent mounts, very highly cutomizable UI = WIN.

  • BadSpockBadSpock Member UncommonPosts: 7,979

    Originally posted by Alot

    The title is wrong. Alot has not been awaiting the "WoW killer".

    LOL

  • HarmTouchHarmTouch Member Posts: 28

    IKR? I know my 5 year old sure isn't awaiting the wow killer. He enjoys world of warcraft so much!!  he uses the same ~5 abilities over and over to WIN!! Im proud of him he does really great! He's a perfectionist at moving out of fire and vile or any fail condition!! /facepalm

  • KiyonoriKiyonori Member UncommonPosts: 70

    Originally posted by HarmTouch

    IKR? I know my 5 year old sure isn't awaiting the wow killer. He enjoys world of warcraft so much!!  he uses the same ~5 abilities over and over to WIN!! Im proud of him he does really great! He's a perfectionist at moving out of fire and vile or any fail condition!! /facepalm

    Funny that you should mention a lack of abilities in Warcraft, I feel like EQ2 has way too many abilities and is the main reason I can't really get into it. It feels like a lot of the skills could be combined into a single spell/ability but instead you have around 4 hotbars of spells you may need at any given time, not to mention everything has a cooldown which puts me off even further.

     

    Instead of doing 1-2-2-1-3-4-5 like in WoW you have to go 1-2-3-4-1-6-9-5-1-7. If most fights require a large amount of skills then every fight becomes tedious(to me). If you prefer to require 30+ spells for every encounter that's fine but me, I like to have a medium about of abilities with a unique, situational use. Fights tend to feel more fluid with that system instead of having a grocery list of skils to use every fight.

    Everquest 2 is a great game, I won't argue, but I just can't get into the combat.

     

  • KhaerosKhaeros Member Posts: 452

    Whoa, did the thread title get ninja-edited?

  • teakboisteakbois Member Posts: 2,154

    1.  OP:  You are just a little to over the top with your enthusiasm.  You are in full on fanboy mode and to be a good ambassador of the game you need to take a deep breath, slow it down, and chill with the hyerbole.

    2.  The overall message is correct though

    3.  Vanilla WoW > Vanilla EQ2.  EQ2 took a big swing upward wth Kingdom of Sky and then nailed it with EoF.  WoW has gone downhill and Current EQ2 > Current WoW.  The last few expansions havent been as strong, but were getting a large continuation of Velious in April

    4.  Someone mentioned cost to catch up (expansions).  To start from scratch and get everything costs 45-60 bucks.  Im not positive if they have dropped the price on DoV yet, if its not 20 yet it will be 20 soon.  DoV includes the whole game, minus AoD.  AoD is 40 bucks.  HOWEVER if you go to walmart and buy 3 station cash cards you get 20 bucks of point for 15.  So 3 cards (or 4 if DoV isnt dropped yet) and you have everything.  45 bucks.   Whats the cose of starting WoW from scratch these days?

    5. Free to play limitations:  There is a TON of misconception still about this.  Yes, there are limitations.  Yes, you cant get the top level of spells and a lot of gear will be unwearable.  However, people dont realize how unnecessary this stuff is until 85+.  Crafted gear is very, very good.  You will never feel underpowered wearing it, even in you only upgrade it every 20 levels instead of every 10.  The spells you can get are still quite powerful.  And if you see something you absolutely have to have, for 50 cents you can equip it.  The bags in eq2 are quite large (40 slots).  The only bad thing is bronze is limiting on gold cap and bag slots, but opening up silver for 5 bucks makes the gold cap insignificant (you can cheat and buy stacks of fuel to hoaard more money, they have same resale price as sale price and stack to 200).  But all the content (save DoV) is there, and 95% of it is accessible even if your entire group or raid is f2p

  • teakboisteakbois Member Posts: 2,154

    Originally posted by Kiyonori

    Originally posted by HarmTouch

    IKR? I know my 5 year old sure isn't awaiting the wow killer. He enjoys world of warcraft so much!!  he uses the same ~5 abilities over and over to WIN!! Im proud of him he does really great! He's a perfectionist at moving out of fire and vile or any fail condition!! /facepalm

    Funny that you should mention a lack of abilities in Warcraft, I feel like EQ2 has way too many abilities and is the main reason I can't really get into it. It feels like a lot of the skills could be combined into a single spell/ability but instead you have around 4 hotbars of spells you may need at any given time, not to mention everything has a cooldown which puts me off even further.

     

    Instead of doing 1-2-2-1-3-4-5 like in WoW you have to go 1-2-3-4-1-6-9-5-1-7. If most fights require a large amount of skills then every fight becomes tedious(to me). If you prefer to require 30+ spells for every encounter that's fine but me, I like to have a medium about of abilities with a unique, situational use. Fights tend to feel more fluid with that system instead of having a grocery list of skils to use every fight.

    Everquest 2 is a great game, I won't argue, but I just can't get into the combat.

     

    This is a valid point, there is severe ability bloat in EQ2.  Each encounter probably wont use 30 skills, but theres a lot of shit youll have on hot bars for situational use and theres a metric asston of buffs.  EQ2 is a number cruncher's dream though, and the different classes have different synergies with others to make putting the right people in the right group extremely important in raids.

     

  • BarelyEinsteinBarelyEinstein Member UncommonPosts: 245

    EQ2 is more complex than wow in many ways, and although they have tried to dumb it down(shame on them), it is still a lot less casual than wow. The crafting system is still way better than wow and the combat is much, much more interesting too. There is a huge amount of content, and a lot of it remains pretty unique to this day.

     

    But wow continues to be the king of user friendliness. Wow is *made* better too, my computer should run EQ2 without any trouble, yet I get bad preformance and enough crashes to make it unplayable. I really love EQ2, have since beta, but I prefer wow because of the ease of playing. It loads quick, runs well and never crashes, three things EQ2 has yet to do.

     

      The price isn't that bad if you're smart. They have double and triple statin cash events now and then, and since almost everything can be brought with station cash, including subs and expansions, you can get into the game dirt cheap. I dropped $60(a huge amount for me) on it over christmas and got $180 worth of station cash. Destiny of Velious isn't really needed till a lot later in the game, and Age of Discovery isn't really needed at all. AoD has some neat stuff, but it is the worst value in mmo history imo. Keep in mind though, if you intend to really play you will need a gold membership, f2p is worse than a trial. But the base game has all but the last two expansions(one of which is totally unnessessary) included. That is a metric funk ton of content for $15 a month.

  • teakboisteakbois Member Posts: 2,154

    Originally posted by BarelyEin

     

     

      The price isn't that bad if you're smart. They have double and triple statin cash events now and then, and since almost everything can be brought with station cash, including subs and expansions,

    Walmart cards can be redeemed on triple cash days for 6000 SC for 15 bucks.

     

    a 1 year eq2 expansion is 12000 SC

     

    one year of EQ2 can cost 30 bucks (40 bucks if you have no walmarts by you)

     

     

    Of course the triple days dont happen often, but if you are patient it pays off.

  • BarelyEinsteinBarelyEinstein Member UncommonPosts: 245

    Aye, as far as I know they happen twice a year, but damn they are good value.The double SC days happen way more often, and they're still pretty good.

  • TortanicTortanic Member Posts: 85

    EQ2 is honestly good.

    No shit.

    I swear.

    $0E are not, nor is the games' sorry excuse for an engine.

  • NadiaNadia Member UncommonPosts: 11,798

    Originally posted by Tortanic

    EQ2 is honestly good.

    $0E are not, nor is the games' sorry excuse for an engine.

    good discussion thread - I agree with this quote too,  but I do enjoy EQ2  ;)

  • ChilliesauceChilliesauce Member Posts: 559

    I have played each and every MMO on market but i always go back to EQ2. in 2008 i decided to see all the content in the game. I level locked my paladin so that my AA are always higher than my physical level. It took my 2years and 6 months to see everything that game has to offer and reach the level cap. Now i recently went back and enjoyed making dungeons and leveling beast lord i am so tempted to do this again and hit max lvl around 2014;)

    EQ2 is king when it comes to content. WOW doesn't even come close.

    image

  • KanesterKanester Member UncommonPosts: 375

    As much as I liked EQ2, WOW was a better game at the time for me. Back then WOW was alot harder than it is now.

    Blizzard Moved fast to Improve the game where as SOE didn't.

    Warcraft Won hands down, Not because it's easyer, But Because it always has been the better game.

  • Eir_SEir_S Member UncommonPosts: 4,440

    I didn't stick with EQ2 simply because I didn't prefer the combat and general gameplay to WoW's.  It feels buggy and stiff.  If they ever changed that, I'd think about playing the game since it's free now.

  • GinazGinaz Member RarePosts: 2,455

    And hear I thought the OP wasn't going to bash WoW.  As for EQ2, played it at released and wasn't very impressed.  I played it again in 2009 off and on for a few months (2 month sub came with the bargain bin box I got from Wal mart for $3) and was impressed even less.  Lets just say it hasn't aged well.

    Is a man not entitled to the herp of his derp?

    Remember, I live in a world where juggalos and yugioh players are real things.

  • ChromeBallzChromeBallz Member UncommonPosts: 342

    The graphics engine shouldn't matter, but sadly it does for EQ2.

    Given that it's been coded with very little thought for GPU's it still runs rather horribly on a modern system.

    The original EQ2 devs expected that CPU's would now be running at 20-30GHz and all still be single core - Dual cores or more for the average consumer only started becoming popular in late 2006. However, they did really miss a beat by only implementing some basic DX7 features at first, only really using the most basic features of GPU's at the time. Despite the absolutely massive growth of GPU's since the original GeForce, the EQ2 devs believed it was just a fad and PC's would still rely mostly on their CPU's for gaming.

    So now we're 7 years after the launch of EQ2 and the game still barely uses 2 cores, only offloading animations to the second core and running everything else on the first. A shader 3.0 implementation was tried but it's still ridiculously buggy seeing as it's tacked on to a vastly outdated core engine, same with GPU shadows which for some reason look vastly inferior to the CPU shadows. GPU shadows however are shadow maps as far as i understand it while CPU shadows are software stencil shadows...

    But, my point is, the game looks incredibly dated, even though it shouldn't. Even compared to WoW it lacks any kind of coherent identity and most of it's zones are very empty and devoid of detail untill you get to the very recent expansions. This in addition to looking simply bland.

    The quests themselves are actually pretty decent, though still standard fare for the most part. Some quests have some original objectives.


    Where the game shines is in it's details: Book quests, playing housing, appearance and the AA tree which is one of the best mechanic-customizing features in any MMO, basically "talents done right". There's voice for most of the game and the crafting system is a lot more involved than most other game's 'gather and click button to make epic items' crafting.

    Still, where it wins out over a game like WoW it loses in the areas that really matter: The basics. EQ2 is unbelievably deep but it's very unapproachable. The graphics engine amplifies this by making the game run terrible on PC's with cpu's slower than ~3GHz, which is why the game will run better, believe it or not, on an old Athlon 64 3GHz single core than it would on a Core i3 2120T (2.6GHz dual core w HT). Together with the rather schizophrenic art style the game is hard to love.

    People will have to be prepared to poke through a LOT of oddities in EQ2 if they want to have fun with it. While it's incredibly deep and has a lot of quality content, the presentation and accessability are mediocre at best. At the time, WoW didn't win out just because it was Blizzard but because it actually ran on most contemporary PC's, unlike EQ2 which needed a souped up P4 to run properly.


    I like the game, but it has so many little things that are wrong with it and will never be fixed that i can't really play it anymore.

    This, and i can't help but think that EQNext will pretty much be killing off (or rather, making irrelevant) EQ1 and 2 given how SOE has moved resources there and moved EQ1 and 2 to the F2P arena.

    Playing: WF
    Played: WoW, GW2, L2, WAR, AoC, DnL (2005), GW, LotRO, EQ2, TOR, CoH (RIP), STO, TSW, TERA, EVE, ESO, BDO
    Tried: EQ, UO, AO, EnB, TCoS, Fury, Ryzom, EU, DDO, TR, RF, CO, Aion, VG, DN, Vindictus, AA

  • xenogiasxenogias Member Posts: 1,926

    After about 3 min I uninstalled. The game ran like crap. And before anyone says "upgrade your computer" um no. I dont think I need to upgrade a computer that can play anything else out there in DX11 with maxed settings (thats not poorly coded, I'm lookin at you metro 2033). Even on average settings, I couldnt even say what the game named it. It was stuttering badly, skills where extreemly delayed/choppy. Overall I am glad I just went to a free server to check it out. It may be a great game. But if framerates are that bad on my system I'm not even going to give it a chance or try to find the issue. I mean it was HORRIBLE.

  • Superduper69Superduper69 Member Posts: 363

    2500 quests completed with 300 AA and i am still lvl 60. ;) Gotta love this game. There is so much to do it really over whelmes me sometimes. Game is huge..huge...huge.

  • RidelynnRidelynn Member EpicPosts: 7,383

    This thread is amusing mostly because, WoW has mostly been the EQ killer - not really the other way around.

    What Chromeballz says about the graphics is spot-on. It does not run well and never will. Yes, it is "multithreaded" now, but it's still a huge kludge of a gaming engine and runs poorly, and likely always will. That being said, it's serviceable and will run on most PC's, it just will never run great, or with "MAX ULTRA" options.

    The ironic part of this thread is EQ2 being the WoW killer. EQ1 was the king of MMOs. It, even in it's hayday, was never a 1M+ population, but it was the largest of the MMO's (comfortably in the 6-digits) and by a large margin was bigger than any other MMO out there. It had more content than anything else, it had an aggressive expansion schedule, it was gaining players at a slow but steady rate. The talk was "Can Blizzard even compete?"

    Remember, Blizzard was not with Activision at the time, was self-publishing, and this was Blizzard's first MMO. EQ1 had a very (relatively) large and mostly loyal player base, with a working MMO title (and tools, and engine), and very rich lore. MMO's were all about being intentionally difficult and making you work to feel "hard core", there was no such thing as a casual MMO player at the time (EQ had just recently released the Omens of War expansion, on the back of the very lore-intensive and fiendishly difficult Gates of Discord expansion; anyone that played either of these at release can tell you just how casual they were). The vast majority of the players at this time were still working on Planes of Power content that had been released for almost 3 years. Then EQ2 and WoW released pretty much neck and neck. It was Sony's war to lose, they had all the advantages and were playing on home turf.

    Blizzard was by no means a small company, but they were no wear near the collossus they are today. They had ... 3 IP's - Warcraft, Starcraft, and Diablo. Sure, those 3 IP's were doing fairly well, but they were no Sony. Battle.net mostly sucked and was rife with hacks and cheats. And MMO's are different animals than networked, single player linearly oriented games. WoW was no sure thing, by any stretch of the imagination. Being independant at the time, Blizzard did not have the marketing resources that Sony had; there were no Chuck Norris or Mr. T. ads for WoW when it first came out.

    WoW released, it was very unfinished (but at the time, it wasn't as big of a sin). There was no raid content, and no end game at all to speak of. The "PvP" didn't exist (well, you could attack the opposing faction and duel, but they had promised BG's and Honor rewards from the beginning, that took several months). Class balancing was very poor. WoW very much had to set out to compete with Sony and the Everquest franchise, and the talk of the town was the WoW was an EQ clone, with cartoon graphics, dumbed down for the masses.

    Sony gambled that game players wanted to be hard core. Blizzard doubled down on the number of casual players that would want to feel heroic too. Blizzard won (that being an understatement), so today we are talking about EQ2 being the David to slay the WoW Goliath. I just had to chuckle at the irony of it.

    I was an avid EQ1 player. I did not jump onto the EQ2 bandwagon for two big reasons:
    *) I had a lot of time and effort invested into my EQ1 character. Literally years of play time. I felt going to EQ2 that I would simply be losing all of that investment, EQ1 wasn't going anywhere, and I was still having fun playing and raiding in EQ1, so I stayed there.
    *) When I finally did take a break from EQ, it was to go check out WoW - it was new, it was different, and I had fun playing it. EQ2 was too similar to EQ1 for me to really feel like I was taking a break from the game. I bounced between several games, but always kept going back to EQ1 where most of my friends played.

    EQ2 wasn't a bad game, it has a lot of positives. It is still one of the premier crafting games out there.

  • marinridermarinrider Member UncommonPosts: 1,556

    Originally posted by xenogias

    After about 3 min I uninstalled. The game ran like crap. And before anyone says "upgrade your computer" um no. I dont think I need to upgrade a computer that can play anything else out there in DX11 with maxed settings (thats not poorly coded, I'm lookin at you metro 2033). Even on average settings, I couldnt even say what the game named it. It was stuttering badly, skills where extreemly delayed/choppy. Overall I am glad I just went to a free server to check it out. It may be a great game. But if framerates are that bad on my system I'm not even going to give it a chance or try to find the issue. I mean it was HORRIBLE.

    I ran it perfectly fine (and if your running DX11 then my computer isnt as new).  I wont say the problem doesnt exist, but I didnt have it.  

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