By Rob Willmore

In this, the age of World of Warcraft, it’s easy to forget that there are alternatives to Blizzards 300 lb Gorilla in the Fantasy MMORPG space. No, I’m not talking about the other surprise of the year, Guild Wars, I’m talking about Everquest 2.

*crickets*

There, see what I mean? Mention Everquest 2 to just about any gamer these days and you’re going to get the “Have you just smoked crack?” look from those you are attempting to converse with. The problem EQ2 faces is one of perception. The game is widely perceived to be tedious, have hardware requirements that are ridiculous, favors punishing players and be way too involved for the casual gamer.

All of it true. Of the game a year ago.

18 Live updates later, the game continues to undergo a rules renaissance. The design mistakes were legion, and thankfully, so are the fixes.

The Game Today

January 2006 marks a major turning point for Everquest 2 and its attempt to reform and redeem itself in the eyes of MMORPG players. This month will see the launch of Live Update #19, an update that should cap off a litany of changes begun earlier in the year when Sony decided to take a long, hard look at what they were doing wrong with a game that at one time was the industry leader.

Barriers to entry

EQ2 suffered quite a bit from a list of woes that would cause all but the intensely devoted to eventually log out and stop playing. An important thing to remember when designing any MMORPG: Anything that causes your customers to want to log out and stop playing is a bad, bad thing. In a nutshell, in an attempt to make the game more appealing to the kind of customers it enjoyed with EQ1, Sony tried building in time sinks to the game that would keep people playing, and paying, for months on end. Unfortunately for Sony, Blizzard redefined the way a MMORPG should be played by giving the customers what a majority of the customers wanted. A game that is fun, easy to play and can be enjoyed without having to spend 20+ hours a week doing stupid, tedious things that serve no purpose (Well, at least up until the Battlegrounds patch. Nobody is perfect.) As a result, EQ2 quickly all but disappeared into the shadow of WoW and what was once designed to be an industry leader in the MMORPG space became little more than a niche player in a space it once dominated.

To give you an idea of just how bad it was, consider this. You want to sell your hard earned good and crafts. You log into your house, open up a selling “bulletin board” and sit there, watching it, for hours. You can’t log off, you must sit there for hours watching this board so other players can see and purchase your goods.

For hours.

This isn’t a joke, this is the way selling actually worked in eq2. This is how far the insanity had gone. At some point saner heads prevailed and this was changed, allowing the customer to actually play the game or even log off while their goods were displayed for sale. From that point on it seems someone or someone(s) at Sony had finally gotten the message: We are becoming irrelevant because we are not giving our customers what a majority of them want. What followed was a list of changes that practically remade the way the game was played.

But is it too late?

“The Dead Collector: ‘Ere, he says he’s not dead.
Large Man with Dead Body: Yes he is.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m not.
The Dead Collector: He isn’t.
Large Man with Dead Body: Well, he will be soon, he’s very ill.
The Dead Body That Claims It Isn’t: I’m getting better.
Large Man with Dead Body: No you’re not, you’ll be stone dead in a moment.”

Having someone come out of left field to dominate the space you once owned has got to be demoralizing (Just ask USC about those Longhorns!). Having someone come out of left field and so totally dominate you with *millions* of subscribers has got to be downright humiliating. World of Warcraft now claims something in the neighborhood of 4 millions subscribers worldwide while Everquest 2 is thought to have something in the much more modest range of 200,000. There would have to be changes, and quickly if the game was to have any chance of surviving much less succeed against such dominating competition. To list every change or tweak made to the game over the last 18 updates would take more time than we have here, so I’ll highlight the most important ones for returning or new players.

A complete combat system revamp. Now for newer players there is going to be little of interest here since you’ll be learning the game “as is” anyway. Older plays, however, will want to check out the changes to combat skills and spell lines. The general consensus among players is that this was a good thing, adding balance and excitement to combat again.

The SOGA models. SOGA is a bastardization of Sony and Gamania (SO+GA), the company selected to publish EQ2 in the Asian market. They are called SOGA models because the publisher felt, correctly, that the models used in the American and European versions of the game would not meet the “Japanimation” standards many Asian gamers are accustomed to. The result being the more humanoid races were given new appearances more fitting to the Asian market. Before the new models could even launch in the Asian version however, screenshots started popping up on the Internet and it soon became clear that quite a number of American and European gamers also liked the new character models and would prefer using them over the original ones the game shipped with. As a result, Sony added the option to use either the American or SOGA character models on a race by race basis. For example, like the American version of the Ogre but hate the Dark Elf? You can simply select the SOGA Dark Elf appearance and any Dark Elves you run across will use those character models. You can do this with any or none of the models that offer the option. There are some races, like the Troll, Ratonga, Kerran, Iskar and Frogloks that maintain only one appearance set, the SOGA models only cover the most humanoid ones. It’s also important to note that when I say appearance set, I mean a huge range of options, not one identical appearance. The options available to character appearance in EQ2 are vast and surpassed only by City of Hero’s and City Of Villains in that regard.

The end of the corpse run. Anyone who has played enough MMORPGs has run into this brilliant idea. It goes something like this: You die and resurrect at a nearby location, leaving behind either a copy of your body with equipment or some of your hard earned experience with it. End result being you must make your way back to the location of your demise, avoiding any roaming beasties, and collect your equipment and or experience. Originally, EQ2 used a variation on this idea by leaving behind a “shard”, something like an etheric double of your character, on the spot you died on. Upon resurrection at a nearby safe point, you’d have to make your way back to your shard and click on it to regain a sizable chunk of experience that would be held back if you choose not to make the run. Compared to the system used in World Of Warcraft, in which you die, appear in spirit form some distance from your body and make the trip back to your corpse at a high speed run and completely invulnerable, the EQ2 system looked more like punishment than game play. Sony finally did away with the whole “shard’ system and now upon dying you simply resurrect at a nearby safe point with a very modest amount of temporary experience loss. This has caused more than a few people to complain that the game is now too easy, the “O Death, where is thy sting?” crowd. However, I think most players would agree the game still offers more than enough challenge without the tedious and often boring corpse run.

Quest Markers for quest givers and purpose tags. Taking a page straight from the WoW handbook, Sony recently decided to add an optional floating icon above the head of NPCs that have a quest to offer you. This is a *great* idea and and I think it hardly matters where it originated at. EQ2 has tons of quests and trying to find them before this feature was added was like trying to pull teeth. Now it’s no problem finding which NPCs have a quest you’re eligible for. And trust me, there are tons and tons of quests available. It’s not uncommon to have over 80 in your quest queue at times. Oh, and if you’re of the opinion this makes the game too easy for you, be my guest and toggle it off, because that’s also an option. Another no-brainer feature recently added to the game is purpose tags. Over the heads of various NPCs you’ll see “Mender” “Merchant”, etc. This allows you to have fun playing the game rather than running up to every cursed NPC you see trying to determine who can sell you the goods you’re in need of.

Live Update 19

This brings us to one of the biggest and most important changes to the game Sony has announced. Sometime in January, Sony plans to completely redefine how players can select their class as well as adding the much clamoured for PvP server. First, let’s tackle the biggest game change of them all, class selection. It’s a little known fact to people who haven’t played EQ2 that there are a staggering 24 classes available to the player. There’s just one problem. You can’t start off as any of them. Now before you accuse me of once again smoking crack, I’ll explain. The character class system as originally envisioned by Sony had you selecting a rather generic “starter class” and as your character evolved and gained levels, you would make choices as to what kind of class you would end up playing. So starting as a Fighter would allow you to play as such up until level 10 where you would then narrow your options down to a Warrior, Brawler or Crusader. Finally, at level 20, you select your final and ultimate class. In the case of the fighter, depending on which of the 3 previous choices you made, these are Berserker, Guardian, Bruiser, Monk, Paladin or Shadow Knight. So in a nut shell, each archetype had 6 final destination classes.

What at first looks like a novel and interesting method of character selection soon develops a major weak point: What if what all you really wanted was just to play as a Paladin or Warden or Fury or any of the 24 final classes? You had to play to the 20th level before you could even try the class out to determine if you liked it, something that did not encourage people trying out play styles and truly finding the class that fit them. Amazingly, Sony has decided that in Live Update 19 you will now be able to start off as any of the “true and final” 24 classes. Want to be a Necromancer? No more waiting until level 20 until you can even get a taste of what that’s all about. Paladin? Same thing. In doing this Sony has finally given the player 24 different play styles that are available right from the get go. Finally, Sony has at last decided to allow wide scale PvP in EQ2. Opening sometime in January or February, two new servers dedicated to PvP, good side vs. bad side.

The last barrier and final words

Perhaps the biggest and longest lasting blunder Sony made with Everquest 2 was the insane hardware requirements it takes to run the game.The stated reason from Sony was that Everquest 2 was meant to be scalable for years and years into the future, which is logical. The problem is, they made the options that will only run on future or current high end hardware available *today* in the here and now. This can have a *huge* psychological impact on customers who are use to installing a game and hitting medium, high or maximum and running a game with no problems. Try that on a untweaked EQ2 installation and 95% of the people installing it will be watching a slide show. Sony should have hidden the really high end settings until such time as the hardware that supported them was widely available on the market and then made them available with an update/patch. There are some maximum settings in EQ2 that from the day of launch required a video card with 512 megs of onboard RAM. Instead you get customers complaining to their friends and families that the games bogs down and refuses to play or that it runs like @!$%# compared to that other famous MMORPG. A huge mistake on Sony’s part that they will continue to pay for well into the future. In spite of this, if you have a current generation or previous generation video card, the settings in EQ2 can be tweaked to be very playable and look gorgeous indeed. Screenshots do not do this game justice, seeing it run in real time on a decent video card does.

So is EQ2 set to come back from behind and retake the MMORPG crown from Blizzard? Not a chance. Remember, this is the age of World Of Warcraft and nothing can change that. However, if you want a game that is making leaps and bounds and isn’t afraid to change in order to get something right, EQ2 might just be for you. Think WoW in some ways, but deeper character development and much more in the way of updates. In short, it’s a game that doesn’t suck anymore and should be given a first or even second chance by those who like playing MMORPGs. Give it a shot, you can usually find EQ2 available for under $20 by just using Froogle, CD universe has it for $18.79 with your first month free.

See you in Norrath.