AcousticToad
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The Everquest 2 Beta has officially had its NDA lifted so beta players can share their experiences, infact, its encouraged that they do.
Here is what i think about it.
I have never played EQ before so i was unsure what to expect, MMORPG's all have the same basic elements (leveling, merchants, coin etc) but none has gripped me with this much info. For starters the 4 different type of coin, Copper, Silver, Gold and Platinum. They work as 100 copper = 1 silver piece, 100 silver = 1 gold etc. Most stuff for low level characters is around 3-5sp and will get you through your first 4 or 5 levels.
The first 6 levels incidentaly, tkae place on The island of Refuge, here you can partake in various quests and hallmark missions to get you upto level 6. The first 2 levels take place on a boat called teh Far Journey, here you get to see a huge Dragon like beast called a Drakota (or Dragota, i cant remember which it was) blow away some boxes on the ship, shortly followed by you killing a goblin that escaped from a cage. After this is done you get the option to goto land orstay for a while, if you goto land you end up on the island of refuge. These first few levels work well as a tutorial to the games system, you can make quite a bit of money on these levels for later on.
The first thing you do here is talk to a guy about your chosen class, the starting classes are Priest, Mage, Fighter and Scout. When you choose your class you get told to kill a golblin, when you have done so you get a special bit of kit for your troubles and told where to go to find more on your profession. The coice is yours, you can have upto 4 characters so you can have one of each (i have, i like the scout the best :cheese: )
Each profession has different objectives to complete in this inital area but they all meet up at the end to battle an Orc in his cave. Now with most games, you go into a cave to complete a quest, there a huge ammount of people waiting to fight the battle...Not here, the cave is an instanced zone where you and your group get given your own area to fight in, meaning everyone has a shot of doing the quest when they want to. It works pretty well too. A great battle for newcomers to see.
After you do this you can complete other generic missions on the island or goto the city. Theres 2 cities, Freepot and Qeynos. Freeport is all about hardship, the city is ruled by an evil leader, thats why only eveil characters get to live there (although good characters can choose their allignment) while Qeynos is a beautiful city, a place where everyone is friendly and willing to help you out. I like qeynos best, everyone is helpful (npc wise) while freeport you get shouted at and everything.
Now earlier i mentioned about character allignment, this is done while creating your character, theres a pool of about 10-15 races, maybe more, who each have their own strenghts and weaknesses, for example the Half-Elf have Infravision which allows them to spot enemies body heat from far away while the Iskar have Aqua breathing and sight because they aer lizard like. While creating your character you can change almost everything about their appearance, like nose size, chin length, eye tilt and so on. This makes the character process extremely rewarding as you can choose to look how you want. A great system.
Now the cities are each based roughly the same, you have inns, taverns, shops and stuff, you can go to all of these and ask around looking for work which gets you a mission, usually to collect something far away of kill stuff. Once you reach level 9 you automatically get given a second hallmark quest, this is where character development comes in. While you have been leveling up you gain new skills and abilities all leading upto this quest. You get a mission to visit a person from your chosen profession, once there you learn about the next stage of evolution. You get 3 choices for each class, Scouts get the coice to become a Bard, Rogue or Predator, Mages have the choice to become Sorcorer, Summoner or something else (cant remember) Fighters can become crusaders, Barbarians or something else and Priests can become Clerics, Druids or Healers.
Again, each of these has their own strengths and weaknesses in combat, which is discussed now.
While you can go it alone and kill stuff by yourself, you can also group with 5 or 6 other people and take on the toughest monsters. The combat works really well, you can trigger things called 'Heroic Oportunities' which allow you to deal extra damage on the opponent while sometimes getting a bonus ability for a short time. Im pretty sure there is PVP between good and evil characters but i've not saw any yet.
Another important thing is timing, there is a realistic night/day cycle which can work to your advantage, nght time ambushes on various monters work well while early morning assults work well on others, again, they both have their advantaged and disadvantages. You also have to eat and drink, you can vuy this from bartenders and the like pretty cheaply. You also have to pay upkeep for your house which you get given during citizenship (more on that in a sec) the price is usually 5sp every 6 ingame days. You dont have to pay you can give up ownership and just live on the road if you like but a recent addition to the game allows players to make their own merchant shops from their homes.
Service Guarantee's Citizenship! Which it does by the way. You have to get citizenship to enter the city proper. This entail running to a sign, getting a mission and then killing 5 or 6 creatures to get tokens, once this is done you return to the sign and have to kill a group of enemies to the city. You get special kit again for doing this.
As for coin, you get this by looting chests (recent addition adds traps to high level chests, the bigger the chest the bigger the loot, but also bigger trap) the loot can be sold for a nice price. You can also take parts of monsters and sell them too.
Travelling around the outta area (Qeynos has Antonica and Freeport has the Commonlands) can be dangerous so the devs added mounts to the game (horses) that you can buy when you have reached a certain guild level (like clans but much much larger) I have only saw a couple of these but they look cool. You can also take the Griffen, which will fly you to the other side of the map, or you could wait for a boat and take that instead.
Group looting is also good, the group leader can assign 'lotto' status to the loot, this means everyone has a fair chance of winning the loot from missions.
All in all, for a first time EQ player, i find the experience of playing the game really fun, at times levelling can seem a little tedious but if you get a good group you can have lots of fun.
So far there are four servers Beta 1 and 2 and French and German beta, the total number of players is around 35,000 so you wont be far from finding a group.
I will post some screens later on.
Here is what i think about it.
I have never played EQ before so i was unsure what to expect, MMORPG's all have the same basic elements (leveling, merchants, coin etc) but none has gripped me with this much info. For starters the 4 different type of coin, Copper, Silver, Gold and Platinum. They work as 100 copper = 1 silver piece, 100 silver = 1 gold etc. Most stuff for low level characters is around 3-5sp and will get you through your first 4 or 5 levels.
The first 6 levels incidentaly, tkae place on The island of Refuge, here you can partake in various quests and hallmark missions to get you upto level 6. The first 2 levels take place on a boat called teh Far Journey, here you get to see a huge Dragon like beast called a Drakota (or Dragota, i cant remember which it was) blow away some boxes on the ship, shortly followed by you killing a goblin that escaped from a cage. After this is done you get the option to goto land orstay for a while, if you goto land you end up on the island of refuge. These first few levels work well as a tutorial to the games system, you can make quite a bit of money on these levels for later on.
The first thing you do here is talk to a guy about your chosen class, the starting classes are Priest, Mage, Fighter and Scout. When you choose your class you get told to kill a golblin, when you have done so you get a special bit of kit for your troubles and told where to go to find more on your profession. The coice is yours, you can have upto 4 characters so you can have one of each (i have, i like the scout the best :cheese: )
Each profession has different objectives to complete in this inital area but they all meet up at the end to battle an Orc in his cave. Now with most games, you go into a cave to complete a quest, there a huge ammount of people waiting to fight the battle...Not here, the cave is an instanced zone where you and your group get given your own area to fight in, meaning everyone has a shot of doing the quest when they want to. It works pretty well too. A great battle for newcomers to see.
After you do this you can complete other generic missions on the island or goto the city. Theres 2 cities, Freepot and Qeynos. Freeport is all about hardship, the city is ruled by an evil leader, thats why only eveil characters get to live there (although good characters can choose their allignment) while Qeynos is a beautiful city, a place where everyone is friendly and willing to help you out. I like qeynos best, everyone is helpful (npc wise) while freeport you get shouted at and everything.
Now earlier i mentioned about character allignment, this is done while creating your character, theres a pool of about 10-15 races, maybe more, who each have their own strenghts and weaknesses, for example the Half-Elf have Infravision which allows them to spot enemies body heat from far away while the Iskar have Aqua breathing and sight because they aer lizard like. While creating your character you can change almost everything about their appearance, like nose size, chin length, eye tilt and so on. This makes the character process extremely rewarding as you can choose to look how you want. A great system.
Now the cities are each based roughly the same, you have inns, taverns, shops and stuff, you can go to all of these and ask around looking for work which gets you a mission, usually to collect something far away of kill stuff. Once you reach level 9 you automatically get given a second hallmark quest, this is where character development comes in. While you have been leveling up you gain new skills and abilities all leading upto this quest. You get a mission to visit a person from your chosen profession, once there you learn about the next stage of evolution. You get 3 choices for each class, Scouts get the coice to become a Bard, Rogue or Predator, Mages have the choice to become Sorcorer, Summoner or something else (cant remember) Fighters can become crusaders, Barbarians or something else and Priests can become Clerics, Druids or Healers.
Again, each of these has their own strengths and weaknesses in combat, which is discussed now.
While you can go it alone and kill stuff by yourself, you can also group with 5 or 6 other people and take on the toughest monsters. The combat works really well, you can trigger things called 'Heroic Oportunities' which allow you to deal extra damage on the opponent while sometimes getting a bonus ability for a short time. Im pretty sure there is PVP between good and evil characters but i've not saw any yet.
Another important thing is timing, there is a realistic night/day cycle which can work to your advantage, nght time ambushes on various monters work well while early morning assults work well on others, again, they both have their advantaged and disadvantages. You also have to eat and drink, you can vuy this from bartenders and the like pretty cheaply. You also have to pay upkeep for your house which you get given during citizenship (more on that in a sec) the price is usually 5sp every 6 ingame days. You dont have to pay you can give up ownership and just live on the road if you like but a recent addition to the game allows players to make their own merchant shops from their homes.
Service Guarantee's Citizenship! Which it does by the way. You have to get citizenship to enter the city proper. This entail running to a sign, getting a mission and then killing 5 or 6 creatures to get tokens, once this is done you return to the sign and have to kill a group of enemies to the city. You get special kit again for doing this.
As for coin, you get this by looting chests (recent addition adds traps to high level chests, the bigger the chest the bigger the loot, but also bigger trap) the loot can be sold for a nice price. You can also take parts of monsters and sell them too.
Travelling around the outta area (Qeynos has Antonica and Freeport has the Commonlands) can be dangerous so the devs added mounts to the game (horses) that you can buy when you have reached a certain guild level (like clans but much much larger) I have only saw a couple of these but they look cool. You can also take the Griffen, which will fly you to the other side of the map, or you could wait for a boat and take that instead.
Group looting is also good, the group leader can assign 'lotto' status to the loot, this means everyone has a fair chance of winning the loot from missions.
All in all, for a first time EQ player, i find the experience of playing the game really fun, at times levelling can seem a little tedious but if you get a good group you can have lots of fun.
So far there are four servers Beta 1 and 2 and French and German beta, the total number of players is around 35,000 so you wont be far from finding a group.
I will post some screens later on.
