Massively posed the question of the F2P (or in more semantic terms, pay-as-you-play) models of LOTRO and EQ2X - which won?
In typical fanboi fashion, since I was playing and enjoying LOTRO at the time, with no monthly subscription, one is inclined to give the trophy to said game. However, in an attempt to be fair, and since I have always wanted to try the Everquest brand, I pulled up the EQ2X faq to consider giving it a shot.
Alas, the faq lost me at the race/class limitation, which is such an essential part of why one plays MMOs that I can't imagine placing any such limits on it unless it's a prestige class or race. Especially for Everquest, since the beauty of the oldschool model is in the flexible customisation option of race and class for your avatar.
The pricing plan for this server's ruleset is also off-putting. One would think that the price of a monthly subscription on these servers would net you everything, but no, the race limitation is still in effect. What the heck? They have essentially made all non-humanoid races into 'prestige' cosmetic items to be paid for.
All new players are now funneled into this EQ2X server. The old 14-day trial is no longer in effect, so the only way to access the subscription servers now is via a refer-a-friend trial. That's kinda slimy. Goodness knows if they will convert all the monthly servers if EQ2X takes off.
Still, it occurred to me that I had previously signed up for a 14-day trial of EQ2 about the same time I was giving Vanguard a spin. I made a SOE Station account and everything. The nice thing about that trial was that it only activated on logging into the game.
To my surprise, that trial was still active and claimable. This was a good chance to finally sample the world of Everquest. Helping my resolve along was a coffee table book commemorating 10 years of Everquest 1 and 2 that I stumbled over at the National Library - lots of pretty fantasy art pictures, not many real screenshots (I suppose the graphics quality wasn't up to snuff), one or two nice developer insights consisting mostly of stories that spoke of more nostalgic, MUD-like times.
For example, one developer who had just been made a GM, took his brand new level 1 gnome character out for a spin in Everquest after having carefully toggling on the GM tag and all his special functions.... And accidentally hit forward for a couple seconds too long, plummeting out a window and splatting on to the steps of the building below in front of two bemused normal players, who went "Um, you ok, dude?" and offered him rezes and power-leveling.
Then there were the stories of the giant riddling gnome, played by the head developer, who would port in front of players and ask them riddles. Get it right, and he would give you fun gifts. Get it wrong, and he would kill you (and rez you after that).
It was all rather reminiscient of the good/bad ol' MUD days of imm slaying and trans-in CRs. It also mentioned the difference between EQ1 and EQ2, the first taking more genre conventions from MUDs and designed on purpose for forced grouping (such a taboo term now), and the second with a mind towards catering for increased soloability.
Well. Increased soloing options in EQ2? By design? That sounds rather encouraging, in this newfangled day and age. So what the heck, I would finally take time to taste the world of Norrath.
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The choice of servers was an interesting experience in itself. There were PvP servers, and PvE as per normal. (Though I have to wonder about how new citizenry not exposed to MMOs would comprehend the difference in terms. See this fascinating thread from LOTRO about a completely new to MMO player. He points out many of the genre conventions we take for granted.) RP and non RP.
And something mind-boggling known as Exchange Servers. Wut?
What is Exchange? There was a PvP Exchange server and a PvE Exchange server. I sat there, scratching my head, wondering if I would be forever gimping myself by going exchange or non. Could it mean something about server transfers maybe? Were you able to swap characters in some way? After aborted attempts to understand something so enigmatic, I resorted to Alt-Tab googling.
It took some hefty googling, but I eventually gathered that SOE has something going known as Station Exchange, wherein one can 'exchange' in-game items for real world cash. Buying gear via RMT by any other name. Ok, scratch those servers then. It's nice they have a server for people who like to play that way. Just not for me.
Seeing as it is a 14-day trial, I didn’t agonize too much over the server I picked eventually. There was only one roleplaying server option that wasn’t full PvP, Lucan D’something, so I picked that on the offchance that it would have a more pleasant environment. (Turns out there is another more crowded, more official roleplaying server known as Antonia Bayle or something like that, but well, not a biggy.)
(I looked at the dragon-man, or Sarnak, for a while. About 3% less cool, so Iksar it was.)
Classes were a substantially significant challenge, Everquest appears to have a gazillion nonstandard named classes similar to MUD days of yore. Well, Iksar were evil, according to the lore, so all the good-aligned classes were handily sifted out of the picture. Though all the mage subclasses sounded quite interesting, prior preference has indicated that I don't really take well to squishy ranged casters as mains. Bards were right out.
I drooled over the Fury and Defiler (druid and shaman types) for a while, was tempted by the brigand and assassin (rogue types), seriously considered the Shadowknight (rumored to be somewhat OP) and settled on something that sounded straightforward and simple for a tall strong not-too-sophisticated fighter-type Ikstar - the Bruiser.
Turned out to be one of the most serendipitous choices ever.
Being all evil and such, I was given the choice of two hometowns, a place built by the Sarnaks, and Neriak populated by dark elves. Given my limited knowledge of Everquest lore, wherein I had vaguely heard that the Sarnaks enslaved the Iksar once upon a time, and by the look of the two start areas (they helpfully provided a picture. The Sarnak place was grey, mountainous, kinda gloomy red lava. Neriak was distinctly purple and drow-ishly Evil), I went for Neriak.
Dumped off in a small village adjacent to Neriak, known as Hate's Envy, one was introduced to the standard tutorial quest NPCs. There were distinct user interface differences. Double-clicking was apparently the way to activate stuff, though by default, single-clicking has now been enabled. Left-clicking, mind you, not right clicking like WoW or LOTRO.
NPCs produced speech bubbles and often engaged in some text-heavy conversation for a few branches before offering you the standard quest popup.
Building doors and cave entrances, most startlingly, did not bring up a loading screen before showing you the next instance. It was all connected!
And sophisticated connection at that. Deep cavernous buildings similar to Oblivion or Morrowind. Tunnels that rival City of Heroes 'cake room' tunnels without any prior load screens. Load screens come up per zone (Darklight Wood was one, the city of Neriak another) but within the zone itself are very 3-dimensional buildings and caverns.
Yes, I am aware I am coming at this game all backwards in time, since many others have whined about the frequent instancing and subsequent lack of immersive 'world' feeling in modern MMOs. Helping the sensation of world immersion along was the choice of scale to the world.
Everquest 2 puts the character and surrounding buildings as significantly larger than say, World of Warcraft. It's about the same scale as Age of Conan. The character takes up a good 4+ inches of screen real estate. World of Warcraft and City of Heroes are on a mid-range scale, imo. Warhammer is somewhere in between here as well. Smallest of all are Lord of the Rings Online and Guild Wars, wherein I am most often scrolled out till the avatar is about 1.5-2 inches on the screen.
The graphics were nothing spectacular, but passable. The one memorable stand out feature for me, the thing I'll point to when mentioning Everquest 2, are the quality of the character animations. I hear the bruiser has especially good ones. They are crazily expressive. And smooth.
By level 10, I was skill chaining attack skills and looking like a kung fu master with roundkicks, big swings of a maul, and other such dramatic effects. Swimming is fantastic, the Iksar takes on a streamlined body shape and sways side to side like a fish or crocodile. (They also get free underwater breathing, I think, which is cool. And an aquavision skill that clears up underwater fog into something like above-air clarity.)
For whatever mysterious reason (I can't recall if I entered my Vanguard serial number into the Station Account, I thought I only played the trial), I had about 1300 Station Cash, freebies or otherwise. That's about $13. Curiosity got me scrolling through the nag screen store that popped up on log-in, and I ran into some prestige mounts. There were epic uber prestige mounts at 2700 SC, which were unaffordable, but there were a couple of normal prestige mounts which looked pretty cool. A warg, a white charger, a dark deathknight type horse, and... a rhino.
Yes, a fat-arsed, white, head-swaying beasty with small ears and pointy horn. After due consideration, seeing as I have no idea where the Station Cash came from, and that I was deathly curious to see if my lowbie was allowed to ride a mount at his level, I clicked the 'buy' button and used up 1250 SC.
The rhino dropped into my inventory. And yes, I could ride it. Did I mention Everquest 2's animations are spectacular? I laughed myself silly for 5 minutes straight as I gallumped (not galloped) through the zone I had been slowly walking at a sedate pace, my Ikstar hanging on like a stubborn jockey to the head-tossing charging rhino.
It wasn't an Age of Conan Killer Rhino. But it sure came close.
Mount handling was a lot more like World of Warcraft, but even better. In LOTRO, you are forced to mount/dismount to interact with NPCs, forcibly dismounted on fighting, and basically spend a lot more time clicking on the 'H' for horse hotkey than actually riding.
In WoW, I believe that the mount load time is quite instantaneous, and you can chat with NPCs and do stuff while mounted, except you get dismounted when you begin combat and have to call it to ride again.
Well, in Everquest 2, you can interact with NPCs while mounted, pick up nodes while mounted, and while not strictly having mounted combat, it loads in the unmounted animations and causes you to appear on the ground fighting... the mount is actually a buff that lasts for hours, so the speed buff is always on you, and when you leave combat, you are automatically back on your mount without having to summon it again. Score one for EQ2 and uber convenience factor.
Zone structure of the lowbie/newbie zone was a LOT like World of Warcraft. A small village, mobs spread apart by very distinct level ranges that increment from 1-4, moving down the road to the next outpost, with mobs at levels 5-8, and then the next quest hub, unsoweiter. And along the way, there is the big city (Ogrimmar/Neriak) that you can visit for a change of pace.
I have to give the win to Everquest 2 for being less obviously on rails. Some of the quests make you backtrack a little. There are a couple of named mobs in each area that are a tougher but soloable fight. A summonable quest mob broke the "being funneled and handheld" pace by being abominably hard. Some of the mobs fly - and not just hover about the ground flapping wings like WoW's harpies, and flap down to fight you - ranged attacks pull them, and if you position directly below them, a melee attack will hit them, but not if they fly off erratically. A couple of mobs in the teens levels showed off some scary aggro mechanics, as they would call out and attract the attention of the 3-4 other mobs nearby, and you could be halfway through those mobs and get another 3-4 on you.
And yes, I could fight multiple mobs and win. 2 was fine, 3 was a bit touch and go. 4 was ouch, but doable if they were a couple levels lower.
"Con" ranges are very tight in Everquest 2. White-con, even-level was ok. +1 or +2 yellow cons would tend to kick my arse as the hit rate dropped off abominably. -1 and -2 light blues and greens were quite easy.
And to my surprise, I found myself capable of surprise in Everquest 2. Halfway through the many standard "here's an excuse to go kill a bunch of level-appropriate mobs" quests, a scholarly dark elf wanted me to exterminate and genocide ALL the nightmare walking mushrooms in a particular area.
Hang on, ALL, you say? Yup, all. Um, ok...
So I wander over, wondering if I can kill all of the mushrooms fast enough before they respawn. On killing one, it spawns a bunch of baby mushrooms that wander off. Hmm, problem, says the quest. You better go back and tell the dark elf that it's quite impossible to genocide them when they multiply like that.
Wow, says the dark elf. That's interesting. You better go back and get me a sample of the baby mushroom spawnling so that I can figure this problem out.
So I head back and do just that. Kill another big mushroom, pick up baby mushroom.
On my return, -whoa-, why are there 3-5 baby mushroom wandering around by the dark elf's feet? I assumed there was someone else that had maybe completed another stage of the quest. To my surprise, the dark elf acknowledges the situation around his feet.
Here's your baby mushroom, I say.
Uh huh, as you can see, he says, I already have quite enough samples.
Where did those come from? I ask.
Goddess only knows, he goes. Probably from you. You must be crawling with microscopic baby mushroom spores. Don't stand so close to me!
Hmm, guess you don't want this one anymore...
So the dark elf thinks of another way to get rid of the pests. Ha, I know! He says, and he gives you a pet boarfiend (cross between a boar and a humanoid demon). Go back and kill them and the boarfiend will eat the baby mushrooms.
The boarfiend sticks to me like glue as I head back. Score one for Everquest 2's pathing over CoH. I kill a mushroom, the boarfiend eats the babies. Hey, this is working. Alright. Time to genocide. I kill another. He eats the babies. I kill a few more, and the boarfiend is struggling and panting as he stuffs them in his mouth. Suddenly the boarfiend explodes. Uhh, think his stomach couldn't take it.
And I head back to dark elf to report that it was a good try but no dice. And then I stop and LOL as I run into the encampment, because there are about 50-60 baby mushrooms spread across the entire outpost.
I'm not sure if that's phasing technology at work, but it was hilariously amusing and a fun storyline that continued on to finding the cure for the infestation and so on.
The last thing of note is EQ2's player housing. The trial seems to offer lots of freebies, because it gives you a free basic house too. The housing is amazing. Along your quests, you earn lots of housing items. You can pluck these out of your inventory and arrange and rotate them nearly wherever you want, similar to CoH superbases, except slightly more responsive. Resizing is possible too.
Haven't tried much of the crafting yet, looking forward to giving that a spin.
Alternate Advancements are an interesting system in EQ2. It extends the xp grind somewhat by allowing you to apportion a fraction of the xp earnt to AA. Each AA point allows you to select skills on a talent tree, in standard WoW/Diablo/Torchlight style.
Collections are a sidelong minigame. Shiny random nodes on the ground that you pick up. There is a lottery as to what you found. And they can be arranged in moth, bone, shard collections and given to NPCs for rewards.
Mobs drop items that give faction rewards too, if I could find the proper head of class guilds I was supposed to give them to in the city.
EQ2 is chock full of systems. After six years, I guess they would be.
And they are fiendishly good at keeping the achiever bug going, because the very first quest awarded to me was "Reach level 20 in 14 days." It eventually dawned on me that it was the trial offering a quest itself.
And it's very achievable. Someone did it in 7 hours or so. My more sedate pace will probably be 7 days.
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