EverQuest II

State: Final
Website: http://everquest2.station.sony.com/
Developer/Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
The Pitch: EverQuest^® II is the next generation of massively multiplayer gaming, a huge online world where friends have come together for adventure and community. Featuring breathtaking graphics and a vast, beautiful and dangerous game world to explore, EverQuest II sets the standard for graphical realism as players are immersed in the game’s exciting locales and mysterious lands.

EverQuest II (EQ2) was a game I nearly didn’t try. Not because the pitch didn’t draw me in; the pitch is pretty bland but I can ignore that. For whatever reason, I had low expectations of it and didn’t figure it would come close to today’s ‘AAA’ MMOs like Warcraft or Warhammer.. or anything with ‘War’ in the title, I suppose. But I figured if I was going to try 25 MMOs, I should try 26. After all EverQuest was the so-called grandaddy of current MMOs, so what did I have to lose other than my social life? I think a wee bit of me was terrified of the ‘EverCrack’ label that was applied to the original game after players found themselves addicted. But I tried it anyway.

Unique to EverQuest II

Races. The most obvious thing when creating your character is that you’ve got 19 Races to choose from right off. 19!! Runes of Magic has… um, 1. That is 19x the amount of races! Hot diggety! Even cooler than that, the races are broken up into 3 main categories; Good, Evil and Neutral. This classification will determine the type of Class you can choose. For instance, Ratongas (rat people) are evil, so they can only choose evil-based Classes. In addition, it affects your starting zone/city. What this offers the game is a competely different starting set of quests and areas to explore if you have alt-itis, like me. Lots of fun to be had with this. Especially when you can choose from Frogs, Lizard-people, Cat-people, Ogres, Trolls, Dwarves, Faeries… It’s fantastically diverse.

Classes. As for Classes, there are 24 in the game. Twenty-freaking-FOUR! This sounds like an MMOers wet dream. And it is. But to simplify things, the classes all fall within the 4 aforementioned archetypes: Scout, Mage, Priest and Fighter. They are further subdivided within each archetype into 3 sub-types. And then within those, they are split into good and evil mirrors. So of the 24 available, 8 are Good, 8 are Evil, and 8 are Neutral. No matter which alignment your character is, you have 16 Classes available to you at the beginning of the game. Still very impressive; it’s impossible to not find a class where you’ll enjoy the play style if you try a few.

Voice Acting. I had no idea this had been implemented, so I was in awe after starting my first character – a High Elf Wizard. Pretty much ALL text in the game is voice-acted. It’s absolutely incredible. Not only that, the vast majority of it is well done. I loved the Goblins’ Quests (Grexx etc) in the Queen’s colony. Superbly animated and well voice-acted. It really drew me into the game. If this can be done, why isn’t it, by other MMOs? This is one feature that make the game feel more real and alive than any other MMO out there, to me. Yeah, the characters still all stand around in one spot for hours on end… but the fact that they talk to you makes it feel more like I’m in Oblivion or something. And that’s a good thing.

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