EQ -- The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

[Scott N Fitz]

Here are my thoughts on Everquest after playing perhaps 15 hours total. I
was not in the beta, but I followed the alt.games.everquest.newsgroup
closely during the beta test. My machine is a PII 400 and 128 megs of RAM. I
use a Diamond Viper 550 and a Soundblaster Live. Obviously, YMMV with a
different machine-- having only 64 megs of RAM reportedly leads to very long
zone times. With my setup (and a V90 connection) it only takes me 20-30
seconds to change zones.

The Good
1. The graphics look fantastic.
Disclaimers: I don't play first person shooters, so I have no idea what
Quake or Unreal look like; if you've played a lot of 3D FPS games you may
think EQ is mediocre. My perspective comes out of previous RPG and RPG-like
games such as Might & Magic, Wizardry, Diablo, Fallout and UO. This game
looks spectacular compared to those games. The highlight of the graphics is
not the way your character looks, it's the way the WORLD looks. The
snow-covered canyons of Halas were kind of boring, but Misty Thicket is
downright beautiful. Kelethin, the wood elf city high in the trees, made my
jaw drop in amazement. I love watching the high platforms of Kelethin come
into view out of the fog as you run towards the elevator.

2. Lag: there isn't any.
That's not to say there hasn't been some packet loss; there has been. And
during the first two nights there were brief periods where the game became
essentially unplayable (packet loss approaching 100%). Supposedly, those
incidents were related to a specific hardware problem that 989 claims is now
fixed. But the vast majority of the time, I run around with no stuttering of
the image or teleporting of stuff on my screen. Packet loss seems inevitable
-- the key thing
is that the game engine seems to deal with it very well.

3. Sound: great, if you like that kind of thing.
I'm not a big sound fan; I don't even have a four-speaker setup for my
Soundblaster Live. The music is inoffensive (and you can turn it off
easily). The two-speaker stereo effect works well enough to occasionally
track creatures by sound they come near. The thunder that accompanies the
storms is nicely done.

4. The Players:
I haven't seen anyone engage in serial kill-stealing; a few times it has
happened by accident when someone zaps a monster at range. Even that is
rare.
And I have been healed and buffed many times by players I was not even
grouped with. People have been willing to help me when I got in over my
head, and I have tried to return the favor whenever I could.

5. PKing
There isn't any. Thank god that the EQ design team didn't make the same
idiotic mistake the UO team did. I'm not interested in hearing any drivel
from PKers on this matter -- if the only way you can have fun is to kill
others (or if you get off on "the tension of knowing that you could be
killed by another human at any second") you CAN; go to the Rallos Zek Server
and do it there. Just stay the hell out of my face.

The Bad
1. Levelling up is very very slow. This doesn't bother me as much as it does
some people -- I knew in advance that it would take a long time to advance.
But people who come into the game expecting to rapidly become stronger will
be very disappointed. Unlike UO or Diablo, it will take a long long LONG
time to get a powerful character. Many people will not have the patience for
this -- which is why I list this in "The Bad". Personally, I am prepared to
stick it out and have fun along the way.

2. The Inventory system is very clumsy. You have an extremely limited
ability
to hold more than a few items until you shell out some hard-earned money for
bags (my advice: buy Purses to begin with; they carry small loot items like
wasp wings, snake fangs, and spider webs just as well as the Bags that cost
10 times more).

3. It's VERY easy to get lost. The "Sense Direction" skill works about one
time
per 50 tries for me. I probably used it 400 times in 8 hours and it went
from skill level 1 to skill level 3. It still only works about 1 time in 50.
Hopefully zone maps will be posted on the web before too long; losing your
body is not very fun. Currently, the /loc command still works, but since
they have officially said they don't plan to keep it, I'm trying not to get
too attached to it.

4. The Darkness. Well, I go back and forth on this. My Barbarian in
Everfrost
could actually see pretty well with his little candle in one hand and a
sword in the other. I could always see the canyon walls and was never in
danger of getting lost because of the dark. It was harder to see the
monsters way off in the distance, but I ALWAYS had enough time to see them
and decide whether to fight or flee. As a Halfling in Misty Thicket, I
hardly noticed the darkness at all; I had thought infravision just made mobs
glow in the dark, but I felt like I could see everything more or less as
well as I could during the daytime. Oddly, as a Half Elf in Kelethin, the
nightime was much worse than as a Halfling in Rivervale; I'm not sure why. I
wish they had made hand-held light sources stronger (or that the nights were
only half as long as the days), but there are enough ways to deal with this
in the game (play a non-human, buy a candle, play a magic-user with light
spells) that it's not a crippling problem.

The Ugly
1. The Hint Book. Man, it is so bad it would be funny if I hadn't PAID for
the damn thing. Let me reprint what I said in another post:
Now, I like to buy hint books, so I've seen quite a few of them over the
years, and I can safely say that this is the WORST one I have ever seen.
Half of it simply reprints stuff that is in the manual. The other half is
taken STRAIGHT from two web sites -- http://eq.stratics.com and
http://www.eqvault.com. I don't mean "you can find similar information on
those web sites", I mean they CUT from those web sites and PASTED into a
Pagemaker file and then sent it off to the printing press! No joke; the
"guides" to the different character classes include verbatim text from the
eqvault guides -- they even come out and credit the authors of the online
versions! Please don't let my wasted $10 be in vain; learn from my mistake
and skip the hint book!

2. Those Pirhanas in Rivervale. And they pack a hell of a bite. A word of
advice: be very very careful not to fall in the river!

Overall: This is the game I've been waiting for ever since I first played
Larn (a Rogue / Nethack variant) on my college roommate's Tandy 1000 in
1987. It's not perfect (what game could be?), but it is a blast to play. I'm
eager to explore and group up with people. UO whetted my appetite for
massively multiplayer gaming, but it was such an unpleasant disaster overall
that I left feeling very unsatisfied. EQ is the game I wanted all along.

[Michael A. Walsh]

A small hint. Make friends with a bard.

[Scott Nathaniel Fitz]

I most certainly will -- as soon as they EXIST in Misty Thicket. :)
For now, there are no Necromancers or Bards available to me.

Michael A. Walsh wrote in message <36F28063...@sybase.com>...

[Chris Hartman]

Scott Nathaniel Fitz wrote in message
<7cu3sp$n...@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com>...

It appears that Rangers are inherently good at Sense direction. I've had no
trouble maxing sense direction to 20 with my level 3 Ranger. I'm happy they
make design decisions such as this. Other classes should need the help of
rangers to know where they are going in the woods :)

[Han]

Scott Nathaniel Fitz <sf...@uclink4.berkeley.edu> wrote in message
news:7cu3sp$n...@dfw-ixnews5.ix.netcom.com...

> I most certainly will -- as soon as they EXIST in Misty Thicket. :)
> For now, there are no Necromancers or Bards available to me.
>

In Ak Anon, it seems like all there are are Necromancers. The last couple
of days I played, I(gnome wizard) was either alone or with a warrior type.
When I looked around practically all the other gnome spell-casters were
necromancers. I guess it definitely depends on the area and race.
--
...Han (El Pollo)
http://www.gamepost.com/editorials.html