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PC | RPG | EverQuest II

Boxart for EverQuest II
EverQuest II 60 screen shots
  • GRAPHICS: 4.0
  • SOUND: 4.5
  • CONTROL: 4.0
  • FUN FACTOR 4.0
  • AVG USER SCORE 4.8
  • AVG CRITIC SCORE 4.1

Hands-On: EverQuest II

Hands-On by DUNJINMASTER | 06/10/2004 | 17:00:47 PM PST

Hey. We?ve played EverQuest II. Neener neener neeeeenerrrrr.

Seeing EverQuest II for the first time at last year?s E3 was a revelation, but some questions nagged us: Could an MMORPG really look that good? Could Sony Online really remove itself from the established weirdness of EverQuest to produce something that?s not only different but also better?

You Have Become Better at MMORPG Design (201)!
We played EQII at the EverQuest Fan Faire in Las Vegas in front of a crowd of jealous, plotting EverQuest fans. Despite the fact that we got in for free and the Faire attendees paid tons of money to be there, we had a good, solid four hours or so with the game, and with some exceptions, it?s fair to say that the answers to the above questions are in the affirmative.

Working under the belief that MMOs had to be graphically simpler than the average contemporary single-player game, EQII players will find their expectations trounced in the first moments of the game. The early version included a ship-board tutorial that not only introduced the basic concepts of the game (how to speak to NPCs, buy things from merchants, and kill monsters and take their stuff) but also the cool graphical tricks EQII?s designers are using.

Besides the sweet graphical look, the game itself is actually quite different from the EQ some of you know and love. Emphasis is now on small encounters rather than huge raids, and once you engage an enemy, you?re locked into that fight until one of you dies. No one can attack your foe unless you call for help, but in doing so, you surrender any reward for the fight in exchange for an increased chance of survival. This keeps kill-stealing to a minimum while also emphasizing pre-encounter preparedness?magic users can no longer sit and regain mana during a combat, so they have to fight smarter while the battles are going on.

BetterQuest
In the version we played, there were a few snags. Low frame rates made the game chunky when tons of characters were around, and on some PCs, the visual options had to be rolled back quite a bit, even with 512 MB of RAM. Still, those are the things developers fix last, so you can expect the game to perform better when it launches this fall.


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