Combat is fast-paced and fairly exciting, but fairly conventional nonetheless.
Death is a part of life in any online RPG, and EverQuest II handles it in a now-traditional fashion, by making death annoyingly undesirable but not so much the soul-crushing affair that it often was in the original EverQuest, where dying meant potentially losing all your hard-earned belongings, or spending hours trying to hunt them down. When you die in EverQuest II, you incur "experience debt" and all your equipment loses durability (which can be restored for a fee by an NPC mender character). You also suffer a temporary penalty to your ability scores. However, you leave behind a ghost, or "soul shard," and if you trek back to the scene of your demise, you can recover this shard and mitigate many of the penalties incurred upon death. This system works well--it makes you not want to die, but also not want to delete your character in despair if you do. Incidentally, EverQuest II makes it easy to find your soul shard, thanks to a glowing waypoint that'll guide you straight to its location. These waypoints are used to plot you a course from point A to point B for some of the game's easier quests, but don't expect to have your hand held like this for long. EverQuest has always been a game about exploration, and having to rely upon fellow players to help steer you in the right direction, and this is also true of the sequel.
If you prefer a less violent way to pass the time in Norrath, there's always the tradeskill system to fall back on. There are three different types of tradeskill professions (craftsman, outfitter, and scholar), each of which has several of its own specializations. You choose from these independently of your adventure class, and you gain experience in tradeskills separately from your adventure experience, too. You even earn "tradeskill arts" as you level up, which are special abilities akin to your spells and combat skills. They help make the actual process of crafting stuff and leveling up rather more exciting than what's typical of online RPGs. Yet while tradeskills and adventuring are not directly linked, to find the best crafting ingredients you'll invariably need to venture out into the wilderness and scavenge for them. Crafting items, from baked goods to weapons to magic scrolls, requires you to first locate the necessary ingredients, and then use the appropriate device (a forge or a chemistry desk, for example) to create the desired item. Of course, you need to know the right formula first. There's obvious demand for player-crafted goods in EverQuest II--for example, players can create better versions of skill scrolls. You'll learn the basic form of a new skill just by raising your experience level, and you could then buy a slightly improved version of that skill, but a player-made scroll will make your powers even more efficient. At any rate, fans of crafting in online RPGs should find plenty to like here.
True to the title, there's a lot of questing to be done here, though much of it consists of thinly veiled fetch quests and kill tasks.
The presence of lots and lots of different quests is one of the most noticeable differences between the original EverQuest and the sequel. In the original, many players would almost completely avoid questing (at least until higher levels), since the best way to level up often involved simply hunkering down and fighting lots of monsters. In EverQuest II, you can often kill two (or more) birds with one stone if you talk to the various NPCs in each zone. Chances are one of them will charge you with weeding out a bunch of local critters, which you'd be inclined to do anyway, so you might as well do it for a bonus in experience and cash. Of course, EverQuest II's quests don't just revolve around killing stuff--some are fetch quests, some require you to seek out certain areas, and so forth. Most of the quests aren't terribly original or provocative, but there are definitely a lot of them, and it's easy to rack up several dozen different pending quests at a time.
While it's great to have this much stuff to do, you'll also notice that EverQuest II's journal feature could be markedly better. It lets you sort all your pending quests based on the adventure zone in which you accepted them, but what's noticeably lacking is a way to look up all the quests you have pending that have anything to do with the zone you're in. That is, it really would be nice to be able to filter your quest list by end points, and not just by starting points. One other issue is that you're often prompted to accept or reject a quest without having any real clue of what's involved--you get the details only after you accept the job. You can cancel the quest from your journal if you're not cut out for it, but this is still a bit annoying. Nevertheless, the sheer volume of different quests in EverQuest II does a lot to make the world of the game feel more alive and more interesting than it otherwise would have been, and the journal feature is a whole lot better than nothing.
The almost painfully long loading times of the original EverQuest are unfortunately back in the sequel.
Many quests require you to go somewhere beyond whichever zone you're currently in, and then return for a reward. It's great that all this stuff encourages you to explore your city and its outskirts, but what's not great are the loading times between adventure zones, and some of the frame rate issues that crop up within the game's metropolitan areas. On a system that exceeded the game's recommendations, and with the game's settings optimized for performance in lieu of quality, we experienced between-zone loading times sometimes in excess of a minute, as well as abysmal frame rates that occasionally fell into slide-show-style single-digit territory, in both Qeynos and Freeport. On a faster system with a top-of-the-line graphics card, the situation improved somewhat, but we still experienced noticeably smoother gameplay when traveling out in the open than when traveling in the densely packed cities or taking part in large battles. This is obviously unfortunate, since the highly detailed areas of the game are especially appealing in theory--but, in practice, they can be pretty painful to explore.
When it's running smoothly, EverQuest II basically looks great, and features lots of detail, high polygon counts, and numerous graphical frills that lend the gameworld a tangible, textured appearance. The character designs for all the different races aren't terribly impressive or as memorable as the original EverQuest characters, but the sprawling environments are believable and often very pretty, and the imaginative assortment of fluidly animated monsters is fun to look at. Again, you'll need a monster of a system to really appreciate all this, and if you don't have one, then you'll need to cut out all the fancy effects and be relegated to playing a game that looks merely OK. Presumably, the developers of this engine were thinking ahead toward the computers of the future when they built EverQuest II's technology, but this game's visuals aren't so incredibly impressive that they seem to justify the extreme system requirements.
The audio is one of the highlights of the experience. As mentioned, one of EverQuest II's boldest moves is the inclusion of tons and tons of recorded speech for its NPCs. The speech is of generally high quality and certainly fits well with the fantasy-themed personality of the game. A few notable actors, including Christopher Lee and Heather Graham, lend their talents, and whoever provides the voice-over for the game's intro deserves some kind of award for sounding just like Cate Blanchett from The Lord of the Rings. Not all the speech is great, but it's still a nice touch for so many characters in the game to have speaking parts, especially since most online RPGs are largely silent. The rest of EverQuest II's audio is also impressive. Combat features some lively, hard-hitting effects, and each of the character races grunts and groans convincingly when fighting or jumping around. The game also delivers a sweeping symphonic soundtrack that captures the fantasy feel just right, but is maybe a little too overblown or repetitive for its own sake--when you're just walking around town trying to find a mender, it still sounds like you're weaving the greatest story ever told.
EverQuest II clearly has room for improvement, but it's also a solid foundation for another long-running online RPG.
EverQuest II is clearly the product of an experienced committee of online RPG players and designers. It addresses many of the issues that arose during the course of the original EverQuest's lifetime, though, on a feature-for-feature basis, many of these solutions have previously appeared in similar games. As such, this game is yet another marginal step forward for the genre, insofar as it's in many ways slicker and easier to get into than most of its predecessors. Yet the question of whether it's worth your while is ultimately going to be a personal one, as this is still a time-consuming game that fundamentally delivers the same sort of thing that the genre has been providing since EverQuest fired it up in 1999. So if you've given up on games like this until some sort of revolutionary development, then EverQuest II probably won't have what it takes to reinvigorate your interest. But if you want a big new fantasy world to explore and find stuff and kill monsters in, ideally in the company of some friends, then EverQuest II has got it.
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