EverQuest 2 Beta Confirmed, Producer Quizzed

Kemanorel writes "After a couple years of development, several months of hints and previews, and four weeks worth of drooling after a live demo in Vegas, Sony Online announced that EverQuest 2 Beta sign-ups begin next Monday. Minimum specs are 1 GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, and a DX9 compatible video card with at least 64 MB of memory - not too bad. Get in line now!" There's also an interview with EverQuest II producer John Blakely over at GameSpot in which he mentions: "Currently we have over 80 people working on the EQII development team", before arguing that the sequel shouldn't necessarily siphon players from the original: "EQII is being designed to complement EQ in terms of the gameplay experience. EQII is a game that will focus most of our content on the individual and smaller groups, while EQ's endgame encourages large raid forces to play the high-level content."

They are lying through their teeth

[linzeal]

These specs will never run the game at a decent enough level to participate in raids and the like. Currently 1 GB of ram [sony.com] is being prescribed for most latancy issues. If SWG [amazon.com] is using a lesser engine and they are having problems than I could not imagine that Everquest 2 will run on anything less than that.

Yet another MMORPG

[obeythefist]

The MMORPG is here to stay! And here's another one. This one of course is a biggie.

But what will happen in the market?

Will all the EQ players upgrade to EQ2?

Will nobody upgrade to EQ2?

Or will all the players feel rich and buy time on both EQ and EQ2?

What about all the other MMORPG's coming out? Will they steal time off EQ? Is the MMORPG market saturated yet?

And, here's the one I really want to know about, will the open source community make their own sleek, efficient and free MMORPG that runs efficiently on a 286?

Fan Faire Demo

[Fiz Ocelot]

At the recent Fan Faire demonstration in Las Vegas they were running it on a system with a geforce 5950, 1gb ram, and I believe a 3.2 ghz P4.

It looked awsome, and no choppiness with quite a few people all together fighting.

They also accidentally ran it on a 512 mb system, on which is was a little choppy. But looks isn't everything.

Re:happend before.

[Tobias Luetke]

Well so pick one of the games made for this kind of play available today !
AC1 matches EQ in amount of content and plays like an action game ( you can actually jump over arrows and dodge war magic ! )

AC2 looks leagues better then EQ judging from screenshots.
AC2 is great for soloing and grouping and has a fun endgame and the newly released City of Heroes has casual written all over it.
( give that one a try, its a ton of fun )

Eq is flawed

[this takes too long]

Eq is a flawed game. Current mmo game design is time = power. Its a stupid premise and if there wasnt people in the world that have way to much free time on their hands it would fail. The genre can never break mainstream as long as it follows this formula. Except, of course, in korea.