Everquest 2 NDA Lifted

According to the Everquest 2 Player Site, the NDA has been lifted on the upcoming Massively Multiplayer Game. If you've been looking forward to detailed information on the game, EQ2 Vault has a special feature on available in-game information. Tobold, of Grimwell Online, has commentary both on game mechanics and on his personal opinion.

Thoughts

[mabu]

As an existing EQ player since the beginning, but without any direct experience with EQ2 yet, I can't say I find much of the information about EQ2 compelling.

As I understand it, they've shrunk the world, reduced the number of starting cities, homogenized the race/class arrangement, and added a few extra hamster wheels for crafting and acquiring spell/skills. Nothing exciting IMO. They didn't even get rid of zones.

By their own admission, SOE says that hardware *does not yet exist* which is capable of running the game with max video settings.

The eye-candy aspect may be appealing, but that's something that wears thin after the first half-hour. It seems to me the visual appeal of the game is one of the more substantive characteristics, but really has nothing to do with game play.

The most notable addition seems to be player housing -- that's intriguing. The notion of player and guild cities would seem cool, but it's not enough to encourage me to play.

Differences between EQ2 and EQ

[mabu]

I've been doing a bit of reading on EQ2 and it seems that many of the characteristics of EQ2 are direct attempts to "nerf" features in EQ that have become core components of the gameplay.

* Complete heal is gone

* Shaman slows are apparently gone or no longer as potent

* Mobs that have helpers/range aggro are now "grouped" and cannot be single-pulled by FD'ing classes

What's disappointing is that both these "features" of the game spawned extensive gameplay strategies and talent. It's sad to see them go... clerics using cooperative ch rots or anticipating cast timing, or pullers with amazing abilities to extract single mobs in very hostile zones.

* When you die, you don't lose your corpse, but you incurr some "debt" that you have to pay off before you can continue to get max experience from kills. Instead of a corpse, you have a spirit shard that needs to be recovered in order to avoid great debt and stat loss. Also these shards get automatically absorbed into your char after 72 hours. Furthermore if someone dies in a group, the entire group shares debt... an interesting approach towards balancing the risk/reward of classes that may end up dying more often.

This seems to be a big improvement over EQ.

* Automatic zone instancing... apparently if some zones get too crowded, the system may create another instance of the zone and people zoning in can select which instance of the zone they want to enter.

I can see the value of instanced zones for isolated adventures and expeditions, but splitting real in-game areas into multiple zones seems a bit freaky and unrealistic.

How do you maintain the immersive nature of the game when, upon entering a dungeon, you're prompted with a menu to choose which alternate reality you want to enter?

* Combat Locking - in order to avoid kill-stealing, once a player/group attacks a mob, nearby players cannot do damage to this mob. Apparently the player can yell for help and disable this "feature" at the cost of xp/loot.

Kill stealing has always been a troubling issue in EQ, but I'm not sure I like this mod. It flies in the face of realism. Furthermore, I see much potential for this feature to be abused.. casters with long-range spells can now easily take a mob away from another group heading to pull it.

And if KS'ing is such a deal that the developers had to hack the system to address it, what have they done about the even more annoying problem of training mobs on other people?

* Less class specialization - I'm under the impression that in EQ2 there is less distinction beteen classes. All the tank hybrids seem to be more comparable in terms of tanking; all the healing classes also have the ability to ressurrect players, etc.

I am not sure what purpose this homogenization of classes and races serves, other than seeming to turn race and class into more an issue of vanity than functionality.

Again, we have core components of the game, not necessarily designed to make a better game, but to address frustrations such as certain classes not being as desireable in groups. This could be a blessing to those who in the past felt in retrospect they chose the wrong class, but it also dulls the unique nature of classes and races.