Everquest 2 versus World of Warcraft.
Had a really good time this weekend playing EverQuest 2 that I got in the SOE Station Access Collection. Lyndal and I got it at the same time to try out. For one thing we have been using Xfire and/or Teamspeak to do voice chat during the game and that just makes it a heck of a lot more fun. So we got some evil characters up to around level 9 or so in EQ2. Here are some random thoughts about the game.
First, leveling up is way faster than EQ was, but maybe it will slow down a lot later. I think it’s even faster than wow up to 9. Secondly, the game has some very decent quests. Way better than the quests from EQ1. About on par with WoW, really. I enjoyed the quests, especially the one where you have to go murder this guy’s ex girlfriend because since they are for opposing factions he can’t have her so he’d rather her be dead. There were other choice ones, like poisoning a loud mouth dark elf, and of course the standard go kill N mobs, or collect X widgets. But I did enjoy them overall.
The graphics to me are not as good as World of Warcraft. Sure, technically they are fairly impressive, but artistically I just think WoW is heads and shoulders above EQ2 and pretty much every other MMORPG. I also think the animations in WoW are much smoother and nicer looking than EQ2’s. Also the environments are nowhere near as compelling as WoW’s, at least not so far as I’ve seen. I was able to get EQ2 to run in a window much like the way WoW works so that was nice, I like being able to access Firefox or whatever while playing. EQ2 didn’t want to play nice with Xfire though, so I had to disable that.
The bottom line… would I pay $15 a month to play EQ2? Well, in a world without World of Warcraft, for sure, no problem. But I think I still prefer WoW over EQ2. I can see myself getting a toon or two up into the mid teens or early twenties in EQ2, though, because it is pretty fun. I will say that EQ2 is so far the best MMORPG I’ve played besides World of Warcraft, even better than City of Heroes which I liked a lot. So if you don’t like WoW for some reason and still want a fantasy MMORPG, check it out.
Yeah, I’m enjoying EQ2 more than I thought I would. I even fired up EQ1 last night and they’ve made a lot of interface improvements there too!
EQ2 has very impressive graphics. But… WoW has great environments… The models and animations in EQ2 are great though. Water effects are great. Tough call - they are both great graphics.
Comment by Lyndal — November 13, 2006 @ 1:54 pm
Played both of them but World of Warcraft is still my favorite.
Comment by WoW — January 19, 2008 @ 8:13 am
Uhh.. are you kidding me? EQ2 rapes WoW in every way it can. What do you do in WoW? You grind, you pvp, and you farm. That’s it. What are the quests? “Farmer bob needs some boars killed for his stew” over.. and over.. Everquest 2 has some story depth to it..
Have you seen EQ2 lately? WoW looks like a bunch of cartoons running around.. this is great quality. The Reviewer must have been drunk while playing. Sorry, no go.
Comment by Zenasa — March 25, 2008 @ 10:55 pm
Are you referring to the original blog post above dated in 2006? To answer your question, no, I haven’t seen EQ2 lately, but in November of 2006 it was definitely not a WoW killer and actually looked worse graphically in my opinion. It may be great now but I didn’t go into the future to check if EQ2 would still be suck compared to WoW over a year later when I wrote that, sorry.
Comment by virtuadept — March 25, 2008 @ 11:38 pm