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.

Two questions

[Anonymous Coward]

For someone who has played MMORPGs before, but not Everquest - will EQ2 be pretty much impossible for anyone who hasn't spent the last six years playing? Or will ir be pretty even keeled for all who want to get into it?

And second, is there any new gameplay involved or is it the exactly same "make character, buy stuff, kill stuff, buy bigger stuff, kill bigger stuff, buy even bigger stuff, kill even bigger stuff" game like every other piece of crap MMORPG out there? (like Shadowbane, Anarchy Online, etc, etc, etc).

Re:Two questions

[Fizzl]

Well, you COULD have read something from the linked pages, but that would have be unorthodox.
Anyway, seems to me it's more of your bog standard exp grind&loot whoring. From the unofficial n00btutorial I got the impression that EQ2 pretty much picks ups where now bastardized EQ1 is abandoned. Meaning dumbed down gameplay for retards and kids with less than two minute attention span.

Err.. I mean, a game for the masses.

Re:Thoughts

[_xeno_]

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.

It sounds, although there wasn't enough detail for me to confirm this 100%, that the "housing" will be like the "housing" in Final Fantasy XI: you get a room in some amorphous "residential area" all to your own, that no one else can ever enter.

So there are no "player-built" cities, just some zone that instead of taking you to another area instead takes you to your "house." It sounds like it's exactly like Final Fantasy XI's "Mog-House," in that you can do things like check your mail for items people have sent you, place and arrange furniture, and store items from your inventory into a safe.

I'd love to see an MMORPG that allowed players to tame wilderness areas and build towns - it sounds intriguing. I don't know if computers and network connections have yet come to the point where they can do that, though. Modem connections probably make that infeasible for the near future.

Re:Differences between EQ2 and EQ

[_xeno_]

* 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?

Final Fantasy XI does this, and it isn't that bad for the most part. You can "call for help" on a mob in FFXI, allowing anyone to attack it. However, mobs killed in this way never drop anything and offer no XP.

Yeah, it flies in the face of realism, but, it's a game. Realism is just a tool. If realism gets in the way of having fun, then it should be ignored. Do your characters have to eat and use the lavatory? Do they have to sleep?

There are several issues with the way the system works in Final Fantasy XI. Yes, casters and players with ranged attacks and abilties can "steal" monsters from other players, claiming them with ranged abilities before another player can. (It should be noted that in FFXI, at least, every class has some form of ranged ability, even if it is just a ranged weapon.) Generally speaking, though, if someone is going to try and do that, they probably would have stolen the kill anyway, since such a thing is, not surprisingly, looked down on.

Far more annoyingly, a player can run past a group which has aggroed another mob but not "claimed" it, and use some ability that doesn't damage it much to "claim" the monster, but the monster will continue to attack the group it has hate against.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't really hurt much (although it turns camping various NMs into a "who-can-claim-it-first" battle over lag), and helps quite a bit. I like the feature, honestly. It works well.