Gorgeous Art

I'm only just beginning adventuring in the new expansion but I had to say something about the wonderful art. The new desert dweller characters are especially beautiful. The faces have so much character and there is a lot of nuance in their expressions too. They also dress in clothes I wouldn't mind trying on! These are people I'd love to meet and talk to.

Also the coyotes are terrific as well as the peacocks. And the face in the waterfall! And I'm just getting started in the new zones.

Thanks again for such a beautiful expansion, I really appreciate it.

Totally agree. The artists manage to squeeze a lot of beauty out of this old game engine SOE developed 20 years ago.

Oh yeah, agreed, seems like Ttobey and folks are going the extramile for us again. Very much appreciated! Interesting that you mention the upgraded characters though. I have been working on a very short video showcasing the difference between the two since this has been a hot topic of discussion for many years now, just haven't found the time to finish it yet. It's a step in the right direction ofc, but now we really need to upgrade everything else character-wise, bc when you see the old npc models standing right beside the new and upgraded ones = huge difference in quality. We have discussed this topic here before, feel free to join in on the fun: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/new-character-models.603362/

New vs old

Closeup

Comparison

Closeup DoF models

New models Ro

2023 models?

So Ttobey, kudos mate, you guys are moving in the right direction, and honestly you have been doing so with recent model upgrades in the last few expacs (beautiful VoV vamps and werewolves, Siren female npc from Siren's Grotto etc.), but the longer we wait to upgrade both our old char and the npc models, the more obvious the difference between the two gets. And now throw in the outdated japanese soga models on top of that and we have a huge, nay, a tremendous difference in quality and art direction.

Cheers

The graphics in this game have always been fantastic. I spend a lot of my time just flying around looking at the graphics. And the characters do seem to have more personality now plus some of the armor sets have been awesome.

How crazy would it be if they had unreal 5.

Yeah, even though I'd say if they ever do this, they could also just use their own in-house Forgelight engine, which seems to be very capable from what I've seen so far. Funcom did this with Anarchy Online, Age of Conan and Secret World, which all use the same underlying Dreamworld engine. One ENGINE to RULE them all. Might be better using your own tech, avoiding licensing fees and whatnot. That said, if you go to Youtube and watch the comment section of the official EQ2 RoR trailer, you'll see this post, which has the majority of likes so far (closing in on 40 likes rn):



And after speaking with some folks during different YT live streams, like Nathan Napalm's followers for example, it would seem that lots of ppl do indeed cherrish the depth of the Everquest (2) franchise, and they would like it even more if it could get a noteworthy facelift and bugfix. My gut feeling tells me that something might be in the works, only time will tell. Daybreak has a lot of talented ppl and just going by what we saw in EQN, which looks like something you'd see coming from Disney's Pixar from a quality pov, I'm pretty sure there is still a lot of magical moments to be witnessed around here.