Freed from the non disclosure agreement barring players from posting about the beta test, IGNIQ member dek has posted a detailed preview of the EverQuest II beta:
K, EQ2 has now found its way onto my blacklist, but this is hopefully only temporary.
I'll start by saying this, yes you can have lots of customization with your character, not so much as SWG with weights, but facial meshes are yours to play with as well as wodes and hair (which has 2 tones, very unique look). However, with these customizations you get the worst hairstyles I've ever seen, they're just horrible.
Now the good part, the first 20 levels are great and focused and make you feel like an important part of the gameworld unlike most other MMOs out there.
You start up going to level 7 on the Isle of Refuge, there you are introduced to the new combat and magic systems and you learn how to link HOs (Heroic Oppurtunities) through your actions. Basically spells and special moves drain only one of your status bars (health, power, concentration) - power unlike SWG's rediculous draining all three.
Then you leave the Isle and have to become a citizen in either Freeport or Qeynos. After you become a citizen you cna start leveling again. At lvl 10 you choose your more specific class, and you can begin quest (which are quite good) for that specific class. Eventually you hit lvl 20 and can become the specialized class you want, personally I went with the warrior subclass of Berzerker an offense oriented tank.
Graphics and sounds what can I say. Even with what was previously thought of as "weaker" model of a nVidia card this game looks amazing.
I defy another MMO to even try the detail you see in this game; for the performance I get (feels like 15-30 fps) I can run the clip plane and shader details at 75%, I can run character models and draw details on max, environmental textures on max (high while in cities), particle bias on max limiting the count to 2 per each character on screen, flora on about 50% and shadows that actually look like shadows (at the cost of 8fps or so) all on a Geforce 5900SE w/ 128mb ram. Also have to mention they make extensive use of blurring and heat distortion which makes the game look as fantasy like as Fable at times, both of which can be turned off of course but you gotta keep them up for the full effect in this game.
This is also the only game that sounds perfect on my horrible onboard sound chip. All music is very well performed orchestral scores, and its everywhere: every battle, every discovery leading to knowledge about what happened, its all got a score. One thing that surprised me was the voice overs. Nearly every character has one and they either sound great or goofy depending on dialogue, but it really catches you off guard when an NPC yells at you as you pass by.
Obviously Christopher Lee and Heather Graham are in there (not implemented quite yet though) and I'm sure SOE will recruit other high profile actors and actresses as well, but they are already getting voice actors (which I can't name) from games like the MGS series, KOTOR, etc.
Now what am I? I'm a level 24 iksar berzerker who deals more damage then all guardians, and most other tank classes I've come across, however my strangely my specials are weak by comparison. And now my ability to actually maintain the aggro I hold so well (I hold perfectly while guardians struggle) I can easily die because of the difficulty of mobs from the last patch. At levle 24 (midway through the game mind you) they can hit for 700 damage, 700 damage while I (one of if not the most badass zerkers on the server) only has 990hp buffless and maybe 1400 buffed. That is two hits, thus you have to have 2 healers just to chainheal the tanks to keep them alive. Absolutely rediculous.
Item decay: really no point to it. Its there, once you die you go into xp debt for a short while (50% of gained xp is wasted til you get out of debt) and items take 10% decay. It cost next to nothing to repair and items never weaken or get ruined, so why even bother as its not working on anything I'd even consider a fractino of its intent?
Stability: none at all. This game is running so poorly server side that its not worthy of even looking at when it hits shelves.
I would NEVER buy a game that is so unstable as this is at its current state, all stemming from the last patch. Servers (mainly my xp zones) come down w/o warning and last however long it takes to get them up, I was soloing (which is getting harder and less beneficial which is NOT what SOE was promising) and my zone crashed 4 times, 4 times I came back and most of them I would have died had I not been riding a horse.
So what is EQ2 as of now?
2 weeks or so ago I started, last weekend I got to 20, now I find no fun in it. I know its beta and I do report bugs and feedback what I find unlike most of the noobs who get excepted who play to play, however, this game is one month from its expected release date and if it ships now with such huge bugs in stability, combat, healing, encounters, and quest it will flop miserably even though its still much better in beta then SWG is now.
This game is quickly becoming a game where you group to advance, just like EQ, its a game that has most of the good content (ie: Nagafen and Vox the two original EQ dragons) not even included until the first expansion, and its a game that is marketing is gonna push and sell based solely on its ungodly production values. As is now I would never buy it, if they somehow manage to fix these issues before launch then I may just.
There, the first preview to describe settings in detail, quite an accomplishment the scaleability is, shame its in such a buggy game. Oh bare in mind this is a game that relies quite wholely on pixel and vertex engines, so if you set your settings to minimul or basically no pixel based shading you will see flat textures with little to know design...something to consider.
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