Anyone play EQ II?

S

Sky15

2[H]4U
Joined
Oct 1, 2001
Messages
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I just started playing EQ II since there are no MMO's right now that interest me, and I thought I'd give EQ II a 100th try :D. I've had my account since 2005 so I have all these vet rewards to use.

Anyways, it's actually a pretty good MMO, very underrated since it's been overlooked by WOW, considering they were released mere weeks apart. I've been playing on the only PvP server since I like having a little extra when I play. It is kinda lonely,since the server pop is low.

There are a couple things I don't like.

1. I've always thought the game looked like ASS from the models, art, animations, and graphics, and overall design of the game never impressed me.

2. UI is very old looking and everything is extremely small from you Character itself to your items, i have to squint to see a lot of the crap in the game. Compared to other MMO's EQ 2 UI is just so 'meh'

All in all it's a fun game, I plan on keep on keeping on until EQN is released.
 
At the time it came out I though the graphics were amazing, I remember having to turn a lot of things down on my pc just to get ok fps.

To me one of the main downfalls of EQ2 was just how damn heavily instanced everything was.

Every single zone was instanced, there was a sense of no connection to anything and you felt like you were playing on shards an dthings separate from other players.

Instead of like EQ, where it was one world and everyone was together. It lost that sense of community.
 
I played off and on from launch to a couple of years ago. Raided pretty heavily with Perdition and enjoyed the game quite a bit. I think the big thing that kind of killed the population of the game was the addition of guild halls. It essentially emptied the cities for years. They were like ghost towns. I have always enjoyed the EQ/EQ2 franchises and played them both quite a bit. Even though the housing were instanced, it was neat to see the parade of homes and see how some people really outfitted their homes/castles/etc. Even though crafting wasn't too good for the end game, I really like the way they did crafting in early EQ2. I also liked how they did the classes/subclasses as well, but they took that out too...
 
Sky15 said:
I thought EQ was zoned too?

Yea, it's like FF XIV.
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Zones and instances are two very different things.

EQ was "Zoned" (As in moving from one part of the world to another you'd have a loading screen going into a new zone).

Instancing is when you take a zone/area and make "copies" of it and limit the amount of players within the instance.

In EQ1 the world wasn't instanced, if you were at "x" part in the world that was the ONLY "x" part of the world, there was no "instance 1, instance 2, etc."

In EQ2 however the world itself was all instanced, the zones would hold a a certain number of people then it'd make a new instance and place players in that instance.

So the world always felt "disconnected" from everything, if you get what I mean.
 
I see, I'm sure there isn't even enough people to have 'instance 1' or 2 on the PvP server, LOL.

I'm surprised new games still instance and zone their world. I could see them doing this years ago when they technology wasn't there, but now I find it really bad when they do.

EQN is suppose to be a seamless world with out instanceing I hope.
 
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I played for a long time when it came out. Sony sent a bunch of copies of it and tons of game cards to Fallujah while I was there in 04 so I played for free for like 3 years or so. I had tons of fun in the game but the population dropping off hurt the game so much. They slowly made it easier and easier and you could solo stuff that would wipe groups of 6 in the early age of the game. That and they kept fucking my 2 main classes. And when they removed the level restrictions on zones. It was real hard to quest in the plains area for alts when everyone could just skip it and get power leveled in the orc zone.

The desert expansion was great and I liked the Fae expansion a lot too. The vampire expansion was good but I slowed my playing around its released and got way passed by my friends in game so it was hard to complete a lot of that content. I remember that mansion being super hard. The air expansion with the birds was dumb if I am recalling right but the expansion with the dragon people in the sky was pretty good. I played that quite a bit on one of my returns to the game, but noting grabbed me like it did at the beginning. Because so much was soloable unless you were raiding it hurt so much of my gameplay. Got boring real quick


EQ2 looked so amazing when it came out. I remember turning it up all the way just to see the shadows the eyelashes on my character cast on her face lol.

For the interface I believe I used this one with a few addons to make the health and mana look like diablo orbs
http://www.eq2interface.com/downloads/info4633-ProfitUIUpdater.html

And the game is almost 10 years old so its expectedly bad looking. All I've seen of the next line of EQ is N3 doing this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eiz64I2CCCo

Just looking at a video from Aug last year... not sure I like the new art style :/ What I do like is that it doesn't look like there are invisible walls in the terrain.
 
Yea, it's sad that it never took off. I guess it was too hardcore and relied on grouping too much, while the mmo genre was moving towards casual play thanks to WOW.

I use profitUI too, way better and easier to use than the original UI.

I love the look of EQN, I think SOE did a great job this time around.
 
I was playing hardcore again for a couple of months but just ended up getting burnt out on it yet again. I purchased the new expansion but didn't make it through all of the content, and doubt I will at all. The game just loses it's flare really quickly with me these days. It was fantastic when it came out, but I think the model just doesn't work for me anymore. I still say it has the best overall world though out of all of the MMOs, it is truly massive.
 
Sky15 said:
Yea, it's sad that it never took off. I guess it was too hardcore and relied on grouping too much, while the mmo genre was moving towards casual play thanks to WOW.

I use profitUI too, way better and easier to use than the original UI.

I love the look of EQN, I think SOE did a great job this time around.
Click to expand...

Let's hope for more armor variations in EQN at least. Instead of one robe model for every single robe in the entire game. Such an artistic let down. When Gis were introduced I was really happy for my monk. I found the red one as a drop before it was craftable and I think she's still wearing it today lol. Can't recall the name but it was so cool looking and that was such a fun and hard class to play
 
Caelum Atra said:
Let's hope for more armor variations in EQN at least. Instead of one robe model for every single robe in the entire game. Such an artistic let down. When Gis were introduced I was really happy for my monk. I found the red one as a drop before it was craftable and I think she's still wearing it today lol. Can't recall the name but it was so cool looking and that was such a fun and hard class to play
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Yea, the armor and weapon models in EQ2 are just so 'meh' looking, and they all look uninspired.
 
I played at launch and for about 6 months after. Sold my characters on eBay for 500 bucks when I quit.

Then started playing again a few years later. Hit max level and started raiding. Raided fairly hardcore off and on for 2 years. Then quit probably two years ago. I still log in once in a while to see if any of my old guildies are on (they never are), but I haven't actually played in years.

In the state it was in when I quit it's still the best MMO I've played to date. It's got everything (soloing, grouping, raiding, crafting, resource harvesting, collecting, PvP servers, instanced PvP, houses, guild halls, etc, etc) and everything is fairly well done, IMO, and I did all of it with the exception of playing on a PvP server (I regularly hit whatever they call the cross server arena PvP though).

I don't think I'd ever play now on any server but Antonia Bayle or maybe one of the other top 2 or 3 most populous servers though.

Sky15 said:
As old as EQ was I thought the armor was good,because it was so colorful. EQ 2 is just really bland and muddy.
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That was certainly true in the early years, but they've got some pretty gaudy and garish stuff now.

Stiler said:
At the time it came out I though the graphics were amazing, I remember having to turn a lot of things down on my pc just to get ok fps.

To me one of the main downfalls of EQ2 was just how damn heavily instanced everything was.

Every single zone was instanced, there was a sense of no connection to anything and you felt like you were playing on shards an dthings separate from other players.

Instead of like EQ, where it was one world and everyone was together. It lost that sense of community.
Click to expand...

Over instancing is the only thing I'd seriously criticize the game for. I don't mind that most of the dungeons were instanced to your group, since they at least made a token effort at making some of them non-instanced, but instancing all the regular open world zones was just dumb (though I doubt it matters much anymore, and it probably did avoid some things getting pretty messy near launch). But the thing that was really annoying was how they handled the starting cities. Chopped them up into dozens of tiny zones and then instancing half or all of them made the game feel a lot smaller and less MMO than it actually was. Having 150+ people in one zone all acting like idiots was part of them charm of EQ1.

I also wish they'd at least made a few nods to EQ1 when it came to item rarity. As it was, only the really high end raid gear was ever really rare, even the mid and low end raid gear would get farmed out and sold to the highest bidder by the more capable raid guilds. Having some soloable or groupable mobs with rare/random spawns and/or rare loot tables that are capable of dropping some pretty uber stuff always appealed to me, even though I don't recall ever getting any of it from EQ1. Even some artifact type stuff.
 
I set my models to the Japanese ones and it looks a ton better, it also make you character 'larger' which is nice too.
 
I put a lot of time into EQ2 but I never really got into it. For me the sense of 'community' that I had in EQ1 just wasn't there in EQ2. The player demographics were just different and EQ2, WoW, and EVE started the trend that people play MMOs to be assholes to each other.

The sense of exploration, discovery, and cooperation is totally lost in MMOs today. Everyone just rushes through the content to the end-game, and then whines that the end-game is repetitive. People don't do exploration anymore at all, if time spent in game doesn't result in loot or XP then it's wasted time. No one bothers to just go some place to look at it, find out the lore, figure out how it all fits together. Likewise devs don't create actual content anymore, it's all just grind grind grind, raid raid raid. MMOs have completely lost their appeal to me. How's that for a rant....
 
The lore for the Prismatic quest in EQ2 was about as far as I cared. I liked the story a lot but when the desert came out, it turned very grindy for me but still fun. I did like the lore between the two kung fu clans though. I can't remember any of it lol but I liked it and how it worked in game. By the time the first cloud expansion came out with bird people my interest in lore was gone. It came back slightly with the vampires and werewolves in the next expansion but I think I took a break and got passed in level pretty significantly by my buddies so it was hard for me to get back into it.
 
I played until shortly after Kunark expansion was released. I just found the game too easy, and I played it mostly solo (not my wishes.) I was a defiler. There was just a lack of community in the game. The only time I remember grouping was running the dungeon Runnyeye when I was in that level range (30-40ish). When I quit I was level 80+.

This is the main reason why I quit every MMO. Lack of community/grouping. I went back to EQ1 and still play that today. Even though its nearly impossible to find groups in that game these days as well. Needless to say. I'm all burned out with non-grouping, solo friendly MMOs.

Anything on the horizon that will fix that? I haven't seen anything.
 
Scoobydo said:
I played until shortly after Kunark expansion was released. I just found the game too easy, and I played it mostly solo (not my wishes.) I was a defiler. There was just a lack of community in the game. The only time I remember grouping was running the dungeon Runnyeye when I was in that level range (30-40ish). When I quit I was level 80+.

This is the main reason why I quit every MMO. Lack of community/grouping. I went back to EQ1 and still play that today. Even though its nearly impossible to find groups in that game these days as well. Needless to say. I'm all burned out with non-grouping, solo friendly MMOs.

Anything on the horizon that will fix that? I haven't seen anything.
Click to expand...

I never had a problem finding groups in EQ2 when I was playing regularly (probably 2009 to 2011?). What server were you on? Like I said before, I'd probably never have gotten back into it if I was on one of the less populous servers. When I came back my characters were on whatever server Oasis had merged with and it was pretty dead. Switched servers to Antonia Bayle, problem solved.
 
I have a character on AB and one on Nagafen, The difference is day and night; Nagafen being dead, but AB always having people talking and LFG in chat.
 
Scoobydo said:
I played until shortly after Kunark expansion was released. I just found the game too easy, and I played it mostly solo (not my wishes.) I was a defiler. There was just a lack of community in the game. The only time I remember grouping was running the dungeon Runnyeye when I was in that level range (30-40ish). When I quit I was level 80+.

This is the main reason why I quit every MMO. Lack of community/grouping. I went back to EQ1 and still play that today. Even though its nearly impossible to find groups in that game these days as well. Needless to say. I'm all burned out with non-grouping, solo friendly MMOs.

Anything on the horizon that will fix that? I haven't seen anything.
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Yeah Brad McQuaid's failed Kickstarter is just the thing you're looking for. Haha.
 
delita said:
Yeah Brad McQuaid's failed Kickstarter is just the thing you're looking for. Haha.
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Probably but I won't back Brad. While I respect him as a game designer (risk vs. reward -- vision) I don't respect his ability to execute properly.
 
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