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The Adventures of a Beta-Warrior in Everquest 2

Since I first caught a glimpse of the upcoming Everquest 2 (EQ 2) at this year’s Games Convention (GC) in the German city of Leipzig, I couldn’t await the day to actually play the game and be a part of the online community that is about to settle down in the “new” Norrath! Despite all this enthusiasm, however, I pondered some skeptical questions while finally downloading the huge beta client (around 3 GB): Would EQ 2 go down the way of another hype or would it live up to its potential and be a more than worthy alternative to that other “Big One”, Blizzard’s World of Warcraft (WoW)? And would Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) finally manage something that no other company in the MMO-business has been able to, yet – bring a devout single player like me into the online community?

Shattered Moon

The world of EQ 2 is still called Norrath – but it’s a whole new place compared to the still-popular Everquest: 500 years after the events of the first game, the moon Luclin exploded and its shards fell down on the world, tearing whole continents asunder and creating a world full of different islands. Most survivors of this catastrophe settled down in two major cities – Qeynos and Freeport. While Qeynos, under the rule of Queen Antonia Bayle, heir to the Bayle family known from the first Everquest, turns into a bastion of Good, Freeport evolves into a fortress of Evil under the tyrannical rule of the Overlord.

All new players arrive as refugees on the Isles of Refuge and, eventually, have to choose which side – and city – they will be on. This choice is not only about which city and country sites you will get to explore early on, but it’s also about your general alignment.

Morphing Deluxe

I decided to start my career in Norrath as a seemingly mundane character, a human warrior named Braen. Having bought the Pre-Order CD of the game which already contains the powerful character creation tool, I soon found myself in familiar waters. Nonetheless, I had as much fun to create Braen as I had the first time: The tool is easy to use, gives a fine first impression of the beautiful graphics of the game and really lets the player create individually looking alter egos due to being able to “morph” nearly every facial characteristic as you like.

However, one of the tool’s restrictions turns out to be annoying: Hair cuts are limited to certain traditional styles meaning you can’t have thin eyebrows and a full beard since this is obviously not the way hair is supposed to be worn in Norrath. It’s a bit strange why SOE restricted hair styles that much while on the other hand giving the player almost infinite possibilites to alter every mimical and facial aspect. Hopefully, there’ll either be a lot more hair cuts or less “traditional” restrictions in the full version of the game.

Listen to the Voices

Moments after choosing my character, I found myself aboard a sailing ship – and right in the middle of the tutorial of EQ 2. Before I was able to get a hold of my surroundings, the vessel’s captain addressed me in a coarse voice telling me that we were bound for the Isle of Refuge – and by that giving me a fine first impression of EQ 2’s most talked-about feature, the NPC voice-overs.

Over 130 hours of speech will be in the final game, and every voice I heard so far is perfectly chosen to fit the character’s appearance and mood. In combination with the marvelous optics of the game, EQ 2 gains a huge boost of atmosphere that makes the world of Norrath much more lively and authentic. It’s great to run through an outpost or the streets of a city, hearing people talk to each other or calling out for your attention. And by using surround audio, you are even able to hear someone shouting from left or right!

To Take Control

During the tutorial, you are asked by the captain and other crew members of the ship to do some easy deeds, which give you a useful overview over the most basic controls of EQ 2. You learn how to move, how to change the camera’s angles, how to manage your inventory and how to interact (talk and trade) with people. You also learn how to fight by sweeping the decks clean of rats that have decimated the ship’s livestocks.

Movement is basically done by the renowned WASD-combination – along with smooth mouse controls, you are able to navigate your character pretty easily through the game in no time. However, nearly every single action in the game can be controlled by hot keys, which are not mentioned during the tutorial. So if navigation and control should get even quicker, there’s no other way than to study the keyboard settings or the manual.

Another great point of EQ 2’s controls are the innumerable possibilities you have in configuring your game display. Every single window is movable or adjustable in size and can be opened or closed anytime. So it’s no problem to speak with an arms dealer, check his items for sale and then look up in your inventory if the merchant’s offer really has any value to you.

My Ever-Growing Hero

Character development starts out with a surprise: Gaining a new experience level doesn’t mean that you are allowed to distribute points to different attributes and skills. The only choice you have is to basically outline your path of adventuring – whether you want to be a fighter, a scout, a crafter or a magician depends on what you say and do at certain stages in the game. After that, your character automatically gains skills after reaching another level, according to the chosen class.

As weak as this may sound compared to other RPGs, it doesn’t really matter the longer you play because they are numerous items, skills, spells and other factors that influence the development of your avatar. Every single armament, weapon and jewelry gives a various enhancements to your basic attributes – and you are able to gain even more potential out of those objects the more experience you earn. For example, a basic long sword gives you a damage factor of 4 to 10 if you are at level 4. If you reach level 7, however, you are much more skilled in sword-wielding, so you hit with a factor of 6 to 12.

Furthermore, you can learn special talents at trainers, who “sell” fighting moves and spells. You can also buy books and recipes for developing your alchemy or artisan skills. If you want to try out crafting or repairing, just search for the right materials and then try your luck at a forge.

As a result, SOE took away the often tedious work of distributing skill points to more or less useful attributes, while giving players countless possibilities to improve skills by training and equipping characters with ever more powerful items, thus raising the motivation to hunt for treasure!

1001 Quests

I had always been skeptical about MMOs due to their apparent lack of depth and well-told story lines. Sure, you had numerous quests to tackle, all set in a more or less outlined world. But the main focus of games like Dark Age of Camelot was to gain as much experience as possible by defeating respawning creatures in a group. As motivating as that can be, it’s still stale compared to brilliant story lines in single-player Role-playing Games like Baldur’s Gate 2 or Planescape: Torment.

To be honest, I can’t say much about EQ 2’s main storyline, yet! It’s apparent that it will somehow come down to a major conflict between the two cities, Qeynos and Freeport, but, so far, I haven’t been able to gather more hints about what players are supposed to achieve in the end. However, the numerous minor and major quests in the game create their own sense of depth and immersion by being extremely diverse and wonderfully designed. You got to eradicate vermin to protect the city population, run some errands for important people, gather herbs or ingredients for alchemists, search for a special item or foil the plot of some saboteurs – just to give a few examples. The Quest Journal outlines every quest in detail, giving a fine amount of background information on the objectives.

In addition to that, EQ 2 offers so-called “Hallmark Quests” to either continue the general storyline or to give the player the opportunity to gain higher experience levels. For example, if you want to reach level 7 as a follower of Qeynos, you have to become an official Citizen of that city, so you apply for citizenship resulting in one such “Hallmark Quest”. Having completed that, you not only gain a level and thus access to more skills and actions, but you can also move freely through all of Qeynos’ city quarters.

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