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What was wrong with EQ2.
Geeky
Member UncommonPosts: 446
I know it had some bugs but none that ever really stopped me. It may have had balance issues, I wouldn't know because I never cared that much. I knew they'd be worked out....if it was even something I noticed.
So what was wrong with EQ2 when it launched that made people loath it? I played it solidly for 5 years with a couple more years broken up by a few hiateses but I never understood why people hated the game?
Am I just an undiagnosed simpleton that enjoyed what I thought was an enjoyable, well done, casual friendly game?
So what was wrong with EQ2 when it launched that made people loath it? I played it solidly for 5 years with a couple more years broken up by a few hiateses but I never understood why people hated the game?
Am I just an undiagnosed simpleton that enjoyed what I thought was an enjoyable, well done, casual friendly game?
Comments
MAGA
I think alot of players who initially went to EQ2 were EQ1 players and EQ2 was a completely different game than EQ1. I think the problem was SOE was competing with Blizzard and WoW had a HUGE player base of warcraft fans. Much bigger audience than EQ1 player base (those of course willing to give up EQ1 which was still running strong at the time). So #1 there was a big difference in the starting fan base WoW just had a ton of warcraft fans which fed blizzard a crap load of money, then #2 EQ2 needed a top of the line computer to run where WoW could run on a decent laptop at the time. #3, WoW had a huge world with a ton of really cool environments. EQ2 lacked diversity and world didn't seen as large, especially with it being divided up into all these smaller zone sized islands rather than two massive continents. #4 WoW was easier for a new MMO player to get into, #5 WoW had classes that all felt very unique and played very differently from each other. Different skills on different cool downs... Blizzard got the combat dynamic of the classes down pretty good.
Oh, another thing, EQ2 I 'believe' had more bugs as well and had that strange linked encounter mechanic that I don't think the majority of players enjoyed. Also the weird challenge ranking system with those weird unit frames. WoW had it much better. Simple regular and epic mobs. Thats it. EQ2 had regular, undercon, medium, hard, very hard, epic. They eventually made it easier with an arrow system but the system was still convoluted.
I absolutely adored EQ2 for a solid 4 years. I only disliked it when it started to try and be more like WoW and give up the qualities that made EQ2 special to me. I never played WoW until burning crusade came out and even then I played it off and on without ever falling in love with it the way I fell in love with EQ2. I had a good computer and was an EQ1 player so I had more attachment to the Norrath lore than I did blizzard lore. Again, this is where myself and all other EQ2 players were in the minority. I think its safe to say there were a lot more people who both knew and were in love with the blizzard warcraft lore.
EQ2 could have won people over in the longer span of the MMO's history if it wasn't for the issue that it never ran well on regular PCs that most people had and by the time a 'regular PC' could run it the game was so dated that it's graphics style made it look really aged, where WoW still looks great today. Thats a big factor too. Its a very critical difference. Blizzard went with an artistic approach sacrificing 'realistic' and that was a winning move cuz I STILL love to check out the new zones that come out for WoW even though I've stopped enjoying the game since end of Lich King era. Its just a beautiful looking game even if I still don't like the cartoony sprites. I love the environments. EQ2 was much more social than WoW and it had alot of other things going for it I would need 10 pages to mention but people judge a game rather quickly and I don't think most got deep enough into EQ2 to see how great it was.
~Seiroth
I saw the chat and imo was unwarranted jealousy and anger of a new game taking players away from EQ1.Wow had nothing to do with it,i didn't even know of Wow until the last day b4 release and never cared at all about Blizzard so basically Wow was never on the radar.
To answer the question...NOTHING,it was easily the better version of Wow except with more bugs.Sorry but i am not playing a crappier game just because it has less bugs,so i easily tried both and went with EQ2 and never thought twice about trying Wow again.
It is like right now,why play a lesser game of HOTS when they have LOL and i wil be going to MTG arena and forgetting Hearthstone because imo Blizzard makes inferior copy cat games.
Geesh i still remember back in the day,i had way more fun playing Runes of Magic,another Wow clone but it was done better,offered more types of content,had guild wars and all the same stuff as Wow,so even an Indie dev did it better.
Back to the question,EQ2 was the best Themepark design and still worth playing.If i had to choose,my choice would be Eq2 or FFXIV but i detest the item level gaming,so likely EQ2 over all.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I feel the same about HOTS and LOL as well as MTG and Hearthstone but wizards of the coast has made such horrible versions of their digital side to their card game that I have to admit I've been playing Hearthstone over "magic online". It looks like arena is the game Magic Online should have always been and I can't freaken wait to never play hearthstone again. I'm just a little freaked out right now that I haven't seen flavor text shown in arena and I want flavor text on the cards so bad. Its one of the things with the physical card game I really love.
WoW was also a more streamlined experience. Blizzard is very good at taking a core feature set and iterating over it. In contrast, EQ2 had a lot more systems. For people new to the genre (which most people were - remember, MMOs were very niche before WoW), having fewer options and a more polished base experience is likely more appealing.
I think WoW had a big advantage of accessing the mainstream fanbase through the Blizzard brand. When WoW released, many of my friends in central Europe bought it on launch day. In contrast, I don't know anyone from my circle of friends who bought EQ2 on launch (the fanbase was non-existent in central Europe).
EQ2 was the superior experience for me. I had played Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies extensively, so by the time I picked up EQ2, I wanted deep and complex systems. I also hadn't known Warcraft too well, so the storyline of Everquest seemed more interesting to me personally. Looking at most of my friends though, their situation was the exact opposite. They were either completely new to MMOs, or with very little MMO experience. A good amount of people were also Warcraft 2 fans. And the very large majority knew nothing about SOE - which in retrospect, is a big factor in me hearing about Everquest 2 in the first place (I was already a customer through SWG).
The optimization kind of sucked too. I waited a bit and played it later and enjoyed it. I think it was a couple years after release when I really started playing during a break from WoW. It had to be around the time BC came out which killed our Guild because of the raids being cut in half.
There was a lot of stuff I liked better than in WoW, like the amount of races and classes, the AAs (1 of my favorite additions to MMOs), the housing! In WoW I liked the movement, response, combat, the near seamless world. I would have loved to combine the 2 games.
Also EQ2 is one of the few games I played a beast race. I loved my Ratonga swashbuckler (betrayed over from brigand). I also really liked my house in Neriak.
1. SoE decided to charge a sub for EQ1 and a sub for EQ2. They had the option of one sub for both games.
2. There was no "link" offered between EQ1 and EQ2. Ideas were thrown around e..g. "stasis pods" in EQ1 into which a character could get or some powerful artifacts could be placed to emerge into the reborn world of EQ2. So the only option EQ1 folk had - some of whom had played years - was to start afresh in EQ2.
3. WoW. Two impacts. First without WoW EQ2 might have attracted new players; there were huge WoW promotional boards in e.g. Fry's (in the US) but EQ2 promotions .... well I didn't see many. Second - reportedly - SoE rushed to get it out before WoW. Maybe this led to some bugs. I don't recall bugs being that big an issue though.
4. It very quickly - deserved or otherwise - got a reputation of needing a "powerful PC". See points 1 and 2. If SoE had treated it like an expansion EQ1 players - in time - could have transitioned.
Feel free to add all the valid bullet points from the posters above.
I never played EQ1, but EQ2 felt like it's possibly among the biggest wasted potentials in the mmo industry. A good game drowned in flawed technology, i guess.
My opinion.
Just never understood. It was a good game, at least I always thought, that had a lot of depth. So was it just the first 3 months that set the course of it's life.
Played it through The Shadow Odyssey.
But neither was it good enough game to be liked. It was average and uninspired.
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I love the game it is still in my cycle of games it is awesome questing and character building/ housing. It had to come a very long way though. Didn't this game have the first character housing of its type?
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
As for those that say Specs were the issue, I can't help but think this is just an excuse to say thats why you, or heard of people not wanting to try the game. I lived in Guantanamo Bay at the time and in GTMO we were still using dial-up internet, I also had an average, at best, PC and never had much issues with the game. So idk..
No one has mentioned how they had to dial back the fidelity of their models either. The avatars used to be much more detailed (though they did still look plastic) ... that's how bad it was. They had to do it in order to get the game to play on people's mid range machines.
Another thing was how they gated the starting. If memory serves you only started as 4 classes (warrior/Cleric/Rogue/Mage) and didn't actually unlock your true class until something around level 20(?).
ex: Warrior until level 10; Crusader until 20(?); finally you got to choose Paladin/Shadowknight after that.
People didn't like that. They wanted the 'freedom' of being locked to the class they started with from the start, like in EQ1.
I did enjoy the depth of mechanics and such, though.
In the grand scheme of things, it's pretty obvious that WoW - a much more polished and accessible experience - had a profound effect on the popularity of EQ2, as it was released soon after.
It clearly demonstrated that you don't need to punish players to motivate them to play or engage. It's enough to challenge them.
Why was it not as successful as WoW ? Higher pc requirements and WoW had from it's single player Warcraft RTS series also a much bigger player base and therefore popularity as EQ2 with EQ which had still a tiny community compared to other games/genres. And SOE marketing sucked compared to Blizzard.