Everquest II: Echoes of Faydwer or How I Learned to Love The Fae

So, the impetus for us creating this blog was the fact that SOE sent me a copy of Everquest II: Echoes of Faydwer for review. I haven't played Everquest II since just after it launched. I wasn't all that happy with the game, mainly because of the confusion factor and the sheer amount of grind that was involved, especially in trade skills.

However, I knew that SOE had put a lot of work into changing and updating the game (30 updates and counting!) and that it was worth a second look, and a official GT review.

The first thing that pleasantly surprised me when I opened the package was that the game ships on 2 DVDs (pay attention here, Blizzard). The install was ten gigs and I wasn't sure how much patching I was going to have to do. Luckily, over a 3 megabit connection it only took about two hours to update, although I can imagine how excruciatingly painful a dialup connection would be with this.

Since I'm focusing on the new expansion, I decided to roll up a fae. The interesting thing here is that you create your character before you choose your server. It's a bit different, but it gives you a little bit of freedom here, since you don't have to spend an hour (or more) making up your character just to find out that you didn't choose the same server your friends did.

And yes, I said an hour or more in chargen earlier. The reason I said it is because there's a solid amount of detail in the character generation system. It's no CoX, but it still gives you a solid amount of options as far as coloration, facial features (and wings for the fae!) and even hairstyles (one of which, for the fae, is known as the Faerie Courtesean).

About thirty to forty minutes later (since I went a bit quickly through it), my little faerie monk looks like this:




Once I got into the game, I discovered pretty quickly that they aren't lying anymore when they call the game Everquest II. In my first six levels (which took only an hour or two), I only killed a random monster once or twice. Everything else was quest-related. I also spent a fair amount of time harvesting the numerous Tier I resource nodes that littered the newbie area in Greater Faydark.

While the NPC voices were nice, and some people will probably want to listen to them, I grew tired of waiting on the quest information, and found myself clicking 'next' each time just to get the information needed to go on my next quest. Then again, that's just my personal playstyle.

One interesting thing about the controls is that everything defaults to a left click. You can right click, and then choose from a number of options for something, but a left-click is the default for looting a corpse, talking, buying/selling...and your icon will show you which action corresponds to the left click. While I spent the first twenty to thirty minutes right-clicking, I soon found that left-clicking was easier and faster.

What did I immediately miss from other MMOs (namely WoW) that isn't in EQ2? A minimap, or a scalable map. The default map is small, and it's really hard to pick a particular spot on the map with any accuracy. The UI is completely skinnable and there are a number of mods out there, but it doesn't seem that EQ2's ui has as much depth to the modability that WoW does, or if it is, I just haven't found the right mod...yet.

So far, I'm enjoying myself, but we'll see how things go when I get higher level, and see what else really annoys me about the game.