EQ2 may be one of the most confusing MMORPG experiences I’ve ever had. Normally, I’m kind of binary when it comes to MMORPGs: I either like them or I hate them. With EQ2, it’s different. Every time EQ2 manages to positively impress me, some annoyance or another pops up and royally pisses me off. Today’s observations:
1. Splitpaw Saga. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, the game slaps me right into the face with a humungous cock of suck in form of an eight hour lockout timer. I’m talking about the Trials of Harclave, of course. So yeah, I died about one hour into the instance. Bad enough that I’ll have to do it all over again - I guess that’s what I deserve for being a retard who managed to die in a solo instance. What I didn’t expect was the sheer malignant evil of the design monkeys who created this POS. Seriously, EQ2’s instancing system sucks the shit right outta your ass.
2. The new quest difficulty system. Quite possibly I’m just being an idiot and completely misunderstand how it’s supposed to work but I was under the impression that group quests were tagged as “heroic”. Problem is that there are a ton of quests in my journal that are not “heroic” and yet aren’t soloable. What’s the point having a system for categorizing quest difficulty and requirements in place when it isn’t even consistent?
3. The Broker is fucked up yet again but this time he still took my money. I just blew 4g on a skill upgrade I never received. Thanks a ton. What’s up with that anyway? How can such a fundamental part of the game be constantly broken? We’re talking about a $20 million flagship product that was released more than 18 months ago!
4. The Brigand class is growing on me. I’m 23 now and I like this toon, even though it looks like Necros and Sorcs can wtfpwn shit I can’t even dream of killing. I feel like a gimp - a fun gimp. Stealth rocks in this game. I love that skill that lets you feign death and retaliate with a OMGWTF huge damage attack when the mob hits you. I wish I had more skills to deal with groups of mobs, though. The one low-damage AE attack on a 30 second timer doesn’t really cut it. It still bugs the hell out of me that melee skills feel like spells in EQ2 but still, the class is fun to play.
5. I’m getting annoyed with the outdated rare spawn mechanic. I’m working on the Lightstone heritage quest and the damn lion won’t spawn. I’ve cleared the placeholder like 20 times but no avail. Wasted like 2 hours on this so far. Definately not fun.
6. Access quests are ghastly abominations and all games should avoid them like rape. In an 18-months-old game it’s hard enough to find low-level groups for dungeons. Finding groups for access quests is virutally impossible. The access quests were a bad idea to begin with and they should have been removed months ago. What’s the point of artificially locking out players from content? I can live with access quests for high-end raid content but in EQ2 half of the dungeons are locked.
7. I’ve encountered several broken quests. Broken low-level quests. That’s plainly unacceptable for an 18-months-old game.
8. I hate how arrows, food, poison and such are scattered all over different vendors and zones, depending on level. It’s annoying as hell and I see no good reason whatsoever for this.
The one thing that strikes me as odd is how unpolished the game feels. Maybe World of Warcraft spoiled me but I can’t shake the impression that EQ2 feels even less polished now than it did at release. Sure, there is a lot more content, less bugs, the classes are all better now and combat is much more fun. The game plays definately better now but it feels, well, patched to death… somehow less coherent. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly the problem is. I guess it’s the sum of all the small and not-so-small annoyances. Hard to tell.
I’m aware that I’m coming off as awfully negative towards EQ2. It’s not my intention to rant my fucking head off like a god damn lunatic. I’m not one of these pathological SOE and EQ2 haters who act like Smed had personally kicked them in the nuts and stole their lollipop at the playground. I quit EQ prior to the release of SoL so I never went through the experience of getting assraped by SOE. That’s why I don’t harbor any particular ill-feelings towards that company.
I think my negative attitude towards EQ2 is the result of feeling let down for the second time. I’ve mentioned before that I used to write for a German EQ2 fansite prior to EQ2’s release. I was quite the fanboy. I quit the job at the fansite two weeks after I got into beta because I thought the game didn’t even begin to live up to my expectations. At release, I leveled a Mystic to 50 and then quit. It felt like a waste of time. I was suckered back into EQ2 by all the recent positive buzz about how greatly EQ2 had supposedly improved. And in many ways, it is a much better game now. Yet, there is still so much about EQ2 that plain sucks and it’s overshadowing all the redeeming qualities EQ2 may have acquired during the past 12 months. I ended up being dissapointed yet again.