From the featureset below, it sounds pretty cool. I might have to sign up for a month again or just do a trial to check it out.

Griffins in Butcherblock await to transport travelers eager to explore the lands of New Halas. Dangers and rewards await those who are willing to step into the icy unknown of Halas.

• New premium designed content from level 1-20. A unique starting zone unlike anything available in EQII. Ideal for both new players and alt-characters.
• Progress through Norrath in a whole new way through the Storyteller UI Guide. A visual adventure journal that displays your exploration.
• New and improved character progression featuring new creatures and quests experienced through the Golden Path.

Source: EQ2 Halas Reborn

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.

Performance

EQ2 is the only MMO I tried where I couldn’t run it at max settings. Well, I could, but I didn’t get a framerate I was happy with. It would dip into the 20s far more often than I liked at Extreme High Quality. I set it at Very High Quality, and it seemed to run better. I couldn’t really notice much of a difference between the two anyway except for a bit of fancier lighting and shadow effects. It runs very well on that setting.

The Good

Heroic Opportunities. A very interesting addition to your standard 1-4-6-3-4-2 (insert your sequence here) hotkey presses for combat. What Heroic Opportunities are skills that you use during combat. After they are triggered, you are prompted (by your icons glowing) to perform certain skills in sequence. Completing the Starter Chain will then trigger a Finishing Chain. If these are completed, various effects will occur, from beneficial buffs and heals, to direct damage or damage over time. The outcome will vary, depending on your Class and which Heroic Opportunity you choose to complete. This is a great addition to combat, as if you become proficient at them, they can greatly add to your effectiveness in battle. Plus, they’re loads of fun to pull off.

Alternate appearances. When Sony introduced EQ2 to Eastern audiences (Japan, China, Korea), they created new models for all of the Races in game. Since that time, they’ve incorporated the models into all player’s games with a patch. So if for some reason, you just don’t like how you look, you can change your appearance to the alternate model, from the Login screen. Then, in game, you can choose to view the alternate models from the Options menu. You can do this for all races, or just one, as you wish. This is a cool idea as I wasn’t overly thrilled with the look of the Elves when I first started the game. I much prefer the alternate models for them.

Appearance slots. Another great idea. Sometimes, you get a hat with some great stats. So you put it on and think ‘Awesome!’. Then you look at yourself. And you look like an idiot. (LotRO, I’m talking about YOU here). So what are your options? Well, you can turn off the visibility of that item, in most games – usually if it is a hat or cape, you can. In EQ2, you can put on an entirely different set, just for looks. I love this. So I get some awesome looking gear, but it has crap stats… no problem! Put it into your Appearance slots and enjoy. It doesn’t affect your stats at all, it only makes you look cooler Since you’re going to spend every second playing this game and looking at your character… well, you’d better like what you see.

Tweaks to usability and UI. I’m lumping these into one. I could go on and on about how EQ2 does things smarter than in most MMOs. But instead of writing an enormous paragraph on it, I’m going to try to summarize. Keep in mind, I’ve only played for about 6 hours total, so I might even be missing other stuff. In no particular order:

• • Your characters turn their head to look at stuff. Dumb, hey? Nope. This makes sure you don’t miss something while you’re running through the world. Like a quest-giver, or just something of interest. It also draws you into the game, as your character acts like something smarter than a mannequin.
  • Import UI. Best. Idea. Ever. Why don’t all games do this? Seriously. Once again LotRO, I love ya, but take a tip here. I don’t know about you, but when I start a new character, I usually spend about my first 5 minutes customizing things onscreen to get ‘em just the way I like ‘em. Not with EQ2. A handy little box pops up, asking you which character you’d like to import the UI from. Well damn. That saves me a ton of time. Love it.
  • Windows on a grid. You may not be a Type A person. (some say OCD) I am. I like my stuff to line UP, dammit! EQ2 is the first MMO that makes me happy to play around with my toolbar arranging. Or my popup windows. It’s all good – I can make them line up on a 20px grid and it soothes my inner OCD freak. Ahhhh… it feels good.
  • Launch straight to character. Man, here’s another one I don’t know why more MMOs don’t adopt. From the launcher, I can just choose the character I want to play and it bypasses the Login screen altogether. Way to feed my addiction faster, Sony!
  • Best minimap ever. First off, it’s square. I love square minimaps – they just make much more sense to me. Secondly, the minimap has cursor-sensitive zooming. Right off, you don’t have to click the stupid +/- buttons to zoom in or out. Who’s great idea was that, anyway?? Wow, someone way back failed in UI school. Nope, you just hover your cursor where you’d like to zoom in, and scroll the mousewheel – the map zooms in on the location of your cursor. Exactly like how it works in Black & White 2 or other strategy games. I love it.
  • General UI and notification smarts. Like being able to un/lock any UI element individually. The ability to resize pretty much any UI window. Remembering UI window positions on a per-character basis. Automatically fading in or out when you mouseover elements; AND the opacity is defined by you. ‘Mini-dings’ tell you audibly every time you hit a multiplier of 10% towards your current levelup. On top of that, it indicates you’ve been returned to full health and mana, without you having to stare at your XP bar.

You feel like a Hero. Capital ‘H’. In EQ2, the combat is visceral and interesting. I don’t mean later on at level 20 or maybe level 45 or when you get 1337 gear. I mean in the starting zone. I got a wicked lightning spell as a newb Mage that really kicked ass. Okay, it’s not really that powerful, but hot DAMN does it look cool. Cause seriously, if you want me to keep playing your game, make me feel cool right off and you’ve got my dollar. Immediately after trying out the mage in EQ2, I went out and bought the Shadow Odyssey bundle pack. Immediately. Because not only did I feel wicked cool throwing around lightning and giant glowing hammers and stuff, but I was fighting enormous wolves, larger than myself. I truly felt like a hero, even though deep inside, I knew it was just the starting zone. But I didn’t care.

Side note here. WoW, here’s why I will likely never sub with you, even though I dally with you occasionally. All games have starter zones. But frankly, yours are LAME. I’m bored out of my skull. Why? The quests make me feel like a newb. They monsters aren’t exciting and I know I won’t even feel like I’m competent for at least 15 or 20 levels. That’s a long slog for me. I want to jump in, have fun, jump out. And you make me feel like a slowly evolving newb. Too slowly. /end rant

Interesting quests, excellent tracker. Yes, there’s your typical fetch quests. And there’s the ‘discover the evil behind X’ quests. Aaaand there’s the ‘kill me X number of Y quests’. But, there’s also the interesting quests – and I’m talking about the starter area here – like the one where you have to lure the ghosts to the priest. And the one where you have to defend the gnome that’s hiding in the tree from the giant wolves. I thought for the most part, though similar to what you’ll find in other games, there was a bit more imagination put into these quests. It didn’t hurt at all that they were voiced as well, making me actually pay attention to what I was supposed to do, not just hitting ‘next’, ‘next’, ‘accept’, like I do in some games. And then once you’ve accepted the quest, the tracker is fantastic. You only track one quest at a time, but it’s always clearly marked, both on your main map and your minimap, making it a snap to find where you’re supposed to go. Good job on this. BTW, you can change which quest you’re tracking at any time by simply choosing it in your Quests window.

Fast levelling, easy gameplay. Yep, I had those preconceptions too. EQ2 is for t3h h4rdc0r3. It’ll take you ages to level. Nuh uh. I was very wrong. I’ve played a few hours on my mage, levelling her leisurely, doing lots of quests, sometimes just running around exploring and gathering stuff. I’m level 11. This is not the EQ2 you may have played at the end of 2004 (so I heard).

Graphics and Animations. I figured it would go without saying when I said I couldn’t run it at the highest settings, but I’ll mention it here just in case. The graphics are phenomenal. If they aren’t the best of any MMO I’ve played, they are at least the equivalent. No other MMO has water like this that I’ve played. LotRO’s is close, but since you can go underwater, this wins. I could go on and on, gushing about how amazing they are, but I won’t bother – just play the game with a good video card and you’ll see. I probably shouldn’t lump the animations in with the graphics, but they are equally exceptional. From the goblin’s insane dancing to my mage swiftly flipping her staff behind her back, to the trotting little deer or the insidiously slithering snakes. They are all exceptional.

Sound and music. Let’s just put it this way. I sometimes find myself humming the song on the way to work.

The Bad

Well now, what can I tell you that’s bad? Hmm. Well… Um. Hmph. Okay.

The intros are kinda choppy. I like the camera gliding in and settling on your character while the disembodied voice tells me the history up until now.. but if it didn’t shift and jerk all the way through, it’d keep me from just hitting escape. What else?? Hm. I can’t complain about the community – I was invited to someone’s guild within about 4 minutes of playtime on one character and without request, teamed up with others to chop through some baddies on another. Um.. High system specs maybe? Addiction? That would be bad. I dunno. I’m stumped. Oh wait, I’ve got one!

9-ish GB trial download. I knew I could come up with one! Yeah, it’s big. And it takes a long time. But man, oh man, it’s worth it.

Summary

A completely unexpected treat for me. I’m still going to be playing LotRO as my friends love it.. and I like it a lot. But EQ2 is the game I’ll be playing in my spare time. Now to find a group. I play on Oasis if anyone is interested, but I’ll happily start a new alt on a new server. Just email me.

Download value: [rating: 10] (10)

You must think I’m nuts. I downloaded 67 GIGABYTES worth of MMOGs to test. 26 of the suckers, 10 of which I’m focussing on here. As for the other 16? Well, they’re listed at the bottom of the article. If and when I get around to discussing them, they’ll be linked here as well. Let’s just say they weren’t worth my time to review, for one reason or another. Not necessarily because they were bad (although some were beyond bad)… just that I had to choose a sample that would be the games that I’d be most interested in trying out. Besides, it’s not as if one MMO isn’t enough already for most people that actually want a social life. Like you know, a social life that doesn’t involve hitting / or ENTER first.  And I had to pick and choose. So these are the ones I chose:

Dungeon Runners (overview forthcoming)

Guild Wars (overview forthcoming)

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Everquest II

World of Warcraft (overview forthcoming)

City of Heroes/Villains

Lord of the Rings Online

Runes of Magic

Ryzom

The Chronicles of Spellborn

Happily, I can say that I managed thus far (knock on wood) to avoid severe addiction to any of them. Well, mostly.

The Scope

Before I even get started, I should mention something: I’m a PvEer. I don’t play PvP and it’s not my focus, nor interest. So I didn’t test out any PvP while playing these games. If that’s your thing, these articles may still be of interest to you, but they are talking only in terms of the PvE component of these games. Just thought I’d mention that up front.

I’m not going to be writing hard-core, in-depth reviews of each of these games. If you want reviews of them, the vast majority of these games (perhaps excepting a lot of the free to play ones) have been reviewed ad nauseum elsewhere on the web. What I’m going to do is tell you which ones I think are worth the time downloading and testing. I’ll tell you what I liked, what annoyed me, and what I thought stood out – both in a good and bad way. If you are a newbie, this might be a good place to start before you get your download on.

Just FYI, I don’t really get into that whole ‘role-playing’ business very much. I play these games to get sweet loot. I play to kill monsters.. of some sort or another. I suppose leveling and assign skills or stats has become synonymous with role-playing, which I don’t entirely buy, or take part in. But whatever, that’s for another article.

NEWB!

First and foremost, the difference between a ‘newbie/newb’ and a ‘noob/n00b’. The Urban Dictionary breaks it down like this: Newbs are those who are new to some task* and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more.

Read more here: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=noob.

The Breakdown

The articles are broken up into 3 main categories, as I see them:  Free to play games with cash shops (Part 1), Free to play games with caveats (Part 2), and Pay to play games (Part 3).

For each game, I’ve tried to give it an honest shot. Really. Even if it sucked and I swore at myself for doing this while playing, I pushed on. I put myself through the torture so you wouldn’t have to. For the greater good, right? That’s not to say that I played each of these games up to level 30 or anything. Heck, I doubt I broke level 10 in more than a handful. But that wasn’t really the point of these articles; if you want guides, go elsewhere. These articles are intended to give you first impressions of the games and to summarize whether or not it’s worth your while to wait several days (for anything over 3gb) to download and play.

The System

I’ll be talking a bit about how the games perform, so I should give you some context about what I’m running them all on. It’s not a dream rig, but it isn’t bad. I put it together about 6 months ago for a modest $1700 or so. You should be able to build a similar machine now for much less. Nothing’s overclocked, it’s all running at defaults.

Here’s the specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad 2.83Ghz
4 GB RAM
BFG GTX 260 896MB
Built-in Realtek sound
640 GB HDD
Windows XP SP3
26″ LCD running at 1920×1200

I attempted to run every game at full screen and at my default resolution. If possible, I cranked the graphics to the max. I’ll let you know how each game performed at those settings.

The Games

These overviews focus on three main types of MMORPGs: Free to Play games with Cash Shops, Free to Play games with Caveats, and Pay to Play games.

For the uninitiated, the first type listed are games that are (and this is loudly screamed at you on pretty much EVERY game’s site) – Free to Sign Up (no credit card necessary), Free to Download, and Free to Play. So what’s a Cash Shop? That’s how these games make their money. They offer bits & bobs for you to buy via RMT or MT – short for Real Money Transactions or Micro-Transactions – which allow you to enhance your character or overall playing experience. Whether or not you buy anything is completely up to you. So theoretically, you could play each and every one of the following games without every spending a dime.

The second type are Free to Play, but have caveats that adjust your gameplay experience. So what are the caveats? Well, that’s different for each game. I’ll outline what the limitations are on a game-by-game basis.

The final type are Pay to Play games. Clearly, if you want to play them beyond the trial, you have to pay monthly to do so. In some cases, you’ll also have to pay for the game before you can play them, on top of the monthly fee.

I’ve downloaded and tested the following games:

Free to Play games with Cash Shops
Runes of Magic

Free to Play games with Caveats

The Chronicles of Spellborn
Dungeon Runners
Guild Wars
Pirates of the Caribbean Online
Ryzom (formerly the Saga of Ryzom and Ryzom Ring)

Pay to Play games

City of Heroes/Villains

Everquest II

Lord of the Rings Online

World of Warcraft

All right, enough precursor, click on the links below to read what I thought about these games.

Other games I tried in the name of science:

2 Moons

9 Dragons

Air Rivals

Archlord

Atlantica Online

Ether Saga Online

Florensia

Rohan Online

Perfect World International

Pirates of the Burning Sea

Shaiya

Star Wars Galaxies

Talisman Online (shudder)

Vanguard

Warhammer Online

World of Kung Fu