Why is this game never mentioned.....

I think a cool advertising campaign could feature real life players and how they play EQ2. Like you could have one commercial with someone that decorates and creates really cool houses. Another commercial could have a guy that raids full time and shows that aspect of the game. A third could show one person doing some of the holiday events.

I think they could improve this game by expanding the house editor features... Allow us to actually create dungeons from a blank canvas, such as the Tenebrous Retreat, rather than a pre-built dungeon. Up the prizes and change the loot system for Dungeon maker, make people want to create new zones for people to play in. Add more events and contests for prizes for each holiday event. These only come once a year and should be really big and memorable. Introduce a few new signature quests that allow you to purchase a special house. You can expand that idea to a few mounts and flying mounts as well.

My only contention with your rebut Seffreid is that this game only exists because of EQ1. EQ1 was 100% hardcore. So really, the hardcores paid for this game to exist.

A video of some fat spotty geek (stereotyping I know!) staring at a screen while they move furniture around, or even just mashing some buttons in a raid, doesn't sound like a good commercial.

WoW had awesome commercials with celebrities saying "I'm a troll warrior, I kickass, who are you?" with some snapshots of battles and gameplay. That caught my eye, and if I wasn't a EQ fanboi I'd have tried it.

EQ2 had some good YouTube commercials in the past, they make anyone interested in the genre interested in the game. The trouble is it's like finding a needle in a haystack to see them, whereas WoW had a WORLDWIDE advertising campaign on TV. I must have seen 20 or so commercials on TV in the UK and Australia advertising WoW. The only time I ever saw an EQ2 commercial is when I went looking for it on google.

EQ1 wasn't just for hardcore players. It was unique. The first proper 3D MMORPG. It had a niche market for 4 years. Because it was king, everything could be designed around grouping and interaction, as the population was there.

WoW changed the genre by making MMOs that you could solo all the way in.

LOL

Not as good as I remember it, but add a bit more exciting videos and it could work.

I love the terrible framerate in most of the shots in that video Regolas. made me LOL
I hope that wasn't an official trailer!

Choppy or not... the funny thing it it looks about 3-4 times better than the gameplay actually does even on Maximum settings.

Ah, the discrepancy between Animations (rendered 1 time) and Games (rendered 60 times a second preferably)

I thought this looked pretty good when I made it like 5 years ago heheh
I miss being able to play the game like that >.<

You're confusing "hardcore" with "loyal." Hardcore are the ones who spend the majority of their time in raid tweaking out their toons in the best gear. Loyal players are the ones who stick around for 8 years.

Way to back pedal there. A previous post of yours stated that casual players should look outside the MMO community, implying that MMOs had no room for casual players. Now casual has its place? Pick a side and stay on it.

So your argument is because raid zones exist, MMOs are strictly "hardcore?" That's idiotic. I can turn around and say casual gameplay DOES have a place in the MMO environment because there are SOLO instances too! And not just solo instances, but solo instances that drop FABLED gear with RED SLOT adorns! So explain to me again how casual players have no place in the MMO environment?

If MMOs were strictly about "hardcore," they wouldn't release ANY casual content. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. None. We wouldn't be getting fluff items on the Marketplace every week like clockwork (hardcore content doesn't get released every week, you know), and there wouldn't be strong, sometimes rabid but very passionate decorating or roleplaying communities, now would there?

I'll leave you with this: A game older than Everquest 2 and a game that has a higher population than Everquest 2 shifted from a hardcore game, where in order to get ahead you had to devote at least 3 hours A NIGHT in an end game setting (not leveling your other classes, not doing missions. Strictly in end game), sometimes sitting on your bum for as long as 6-8 hours just to camp some contested named AND hope you are lucky enough to out claim the bots in the field, to a more casual game where you log in and farm seals for your gear. The contested spawns we pulled our hair out over were replaced with spawn points that you trade pop items to. They went the more casual route, because after 10 years, people got bored and people started leaving.

Now? People came back after not playing for YEARS. And their population is sustaining, while this game's population is dramatically declining. And that game is still subscription based.

Explain that.

no game should be completely casual on this scale, there needs to be a shallow end for people who want to test the waters, and a deep end for people to test their mettle. I don't know why people defend one or the other, because this game needs both to survive, as well as people who are in between casual and hardcore. Think about how the economy on each server would be if there weren't any hardcore players farming stuff to sell to casuals to make plat for whatever they need to raid/develop toons to raid with on their account...

Hardcore players are the fuel that any MMO runs on, if they dont have hardcore players, they dont have a foundational community. Its that simple.

I think it now looks better than that on max settings, does to me anyway.

I think it was Mohee, but was a long time ago. I think it was vanilla EQ2 judging from the zones used (crypt of betrayal, etc).

I am not confusing anything with anything as you seem to think. The reason the game has lasted this long is because of hardcore people. If you remove them from the game then the game will wither and die. You saying its loyalty... its not. Its the fact they haven't found something better or aren't looking for something better, that is hardly loyalty. If I don't want to quit something I have quite a bit of time invested in, thats not loyalty either. Maybe you should look up the definition of loyalty.

And yes I personally believe that casual people should not play MMO's. However that is my opinion but just because it is my opinion does not make it a reality. The reality is the casual people are there, and they do have there place in the MMO industry. But, nice try at trying to twist my words.

Again you misread what I said. For every piece of fluff there is 1 raid mob, for every solo instance, there are 2 raid instances. If it was turned around and there was 2 solo instances for every 1 raid you might find the game withering and dieing because the hardcore community would leave, there is nothing hardcore about the sims.

Your last statement is garbage. You are making an assumption without any proof to support it. However there is proof to support that is not what happened. The proof is with the merging of the servers. The proof is with how many people complain about not being able to run instances.Just from watching the community, I would say the game is very slowly declining just like EQ1 is.

Again thanks for taking everything I said out of context I just have one question for you, you mad bro?

SJ admits the brand "Everquest" is now only a niche game. Oh how the mighty have fallen. First to one of the worst. Sad what they did to our game.

Allow me to offer my perspective as a newer player to EQ2. I have played different MMO's throughout the years, including WoW, and here are my impressions.

Firstly, I'll talk about the graphics. It's not the most critical part of an MMO, but for people like me who spend hefty parts of their lives playing, it is important to a degree. EQ2 is a very beautiful game. The terrains are beautiful, the character designs are beautiful, and it has a very high level of polish. I actually enjoy looking at my character.

A lot of people criticize SOE for re-engineering the game instead of pushing out new content, but I applaud them for this decision. Blizzard has made no sincere attempts to update WoW since it's launch, instead just pushing out more and more new content on a game engine that is very stale. Every character in WoW might as well be an orc, because that's what they all look like. The controls themselves are also very clunky when compared to EQ2, which flows much more smoothly during combat. LoTRO suffered from the same issue, putting out a mounted combat system that completely changed the direction of the game and in no way could ever have been properly implemented due to their very outdated game engine.

I will say that the challenge level in EQ2 is not very high. However, this is hardly an issue unique to this game. Practically every mainstream MMO has followed this trend. It's unfortunate, and part of me misses the days of unforgiving gameplay, where you died often and wanted to throw things, blow up developer's offices, and perform other unpleasantries, but you still kept coming back. WoW is certainly no more difficult than EQ2, actually easier in many ways. I can't speak on the endgame content of EQ2 yet, but endgame content is WoW is not difficult if you are in a competent group.

The questing - EQ2 has by far the most enjoyable questing I have ever experienced. The minimap is the perfect size for questing. I no longer have to spend hours in an area looking for any quests I may have missed, but it still encourages exploration. Why so many other MMO's have tiny little minimaps is beyond me. WoW took this to a whole new level of frustration by not showing interior quests until you entered the building. I won't say that the quests themselves are any more exciting in EQ2, but they are certainly more pleasant to complete, although there are far too many of them to stay on level. However, EQ2 has addressed this as well by giving the option to disable combat XP, a feature that most MMO's either have not implemented or charge players to do so, or you can choose to put it all in AA. Then you have the self-mentoring system, another refreshing change. This really opens the world to explore at my own pace, fight the enemies I want to fight without feeling like I need to hold back or I'll level too fast.

And then there's the cash shop, which is the most well-implemented cash shop in any MMO I've played. There is not one single pay to win item in the shop. There is not one single pay to win feature, not even with the skill researching. The items are mostly for novelty.

In Runes of Magic, you had to rent out additional backpack space, by backpack. Same for bank storage. Same for house energy (rent). All of this cost real money. The amount of the storage you got was very limited, so this almost became a necessity. There were no permanent mounts in the game (unless you won one from a lottery-based system - almost impossible). If you wanted one, you had to buy it with real money - $20+. $30 if you wanted a two-seater. To get an endgame weapon like what everyone else had was about $200. Same price for each piece of armor if you wanted that. Gear could be upgraded unlimitedly. Absolutely unlimitedly, if you had the money to pay. There was no tier cap.

LoTRO's cash shop was more balanced, but it was still about $60 to get all the shared storage. It wasn't pay to win, but prices were a little high.

WoW has an in-game economy, but really, it's not much different. Station cash is still for novelty.

Crafting is also enjoyable to me. Really, there's nothing groundbreaking about pressing a few buttons here and there, but at least it does require you to engage. Not make 200 potions and sit there in utter boredom for 10 minutes until they are all done.

I'm not an EQ2 fanboy (still too early to be called one). But the new player experience in this game is astounding. No other game has drawn me in more. I too am really surprised that this game is not more active. For better or worse, this game is not a cookie-cutter MMO and is a unique experience all its own.

I couldn't agree more with this post (as well as the others you've made in this thread). EQ2 has always been the game that I've wanted to love, more than just about any I've tried over the years, because it offers so many of the "little" things that I've come to appreciate in this genre. Tons of class variety, plethora of races, an AA system to help with differentiating yourself even further, deep player housing system, tons of content - just to name a few. But the ONE thing that has always kept me from truly getting into the game and staying with it, is what I personally feel is a really god awful combat system. I never understand when I hear, "People play EQ2 for the deep combat mechanics...." I'm sorry but, in my eyes, having 30-40 different abilities to hit, many of which do very similar things, doesn't equate to complexity for me. From what I've seen and experienced, combat in EQ2 feels like "whack-a-mole" but without the randomized element. It seems as though you could just set your abilities up a certain way and literally just bash your face on your keyboard for the same result. How is that deep? Watching cooldowns and consistently hitting them over and over again in a certain rotation is not deep in any sense that I can think of.

I'm not a WoW fanboy by any means (haven't even touched it in many years), but I can safely say that combat felt much deeper and involved for me than it ever has in EQ2. Every abilitiy I had in WoW felt useful, they all had purpose. It wasn't, "oh look, I have like 15 abilities that all do essentially the same thing, so really, I can just fist pump my keyboard and profit." Sure, you could argue that in raiding, some classes didn't have much to do really, but in smaller dungeons and pvp, the combat mechanics really shined. You had to be on your toes and react accordingly to changing situations. In EQ2, at least in the level 30 ranges (the highest I've ever been able to get before succumbing to the tedium), every fight pretty much went exactly the same, and I was rarely ever in danger of dying. I had a set rotation that I used every single fight, and honestly, I think I could have made a one-buttom macro that could have did it all for me. I had hoped it would get better during the higher levels, but after asking around and watching tons of videos of higher end content, it seemed exactly the same, just with more abilities to spam. I just don't see the complexity there. Can anyone explain what I'm missing?

WoW is just one example. I could list many other mmos that I feel have considerably better, more in-depth combat, but in the end, most of them lack in the areas that EQ2 dominates, so for me, it's a no-win situation. It's either play a game with interesting combat but lackluster content, or the opposite. I guess that's the reason I'm still mmo-less at the moment.

Anyway, I know I'll get flamed for this post (especially since it's a necro), but I just wanted to give my own opinion as to why I could never stick with this game. It's the boring, mundane combat for me, plain and simple. I know many people like it, and I wish I could share in that opinion (as like I said, the game has everything else I want in an mmo), but when it gets to the point that I actually want to avoid combat or fall asleep during it, I just have to accept that it's not working for me. If they could clean it up a bit, make it more reactionary and situational, and redo some of the horrid animations, I'd give it another shot. Until then, it will continue to be that game that I want to like more than any of them.

If you don't understand something, it will certainly seem to be whack-a-mole. A lot of the point in EQ2 combat is to know when to set up something big and when to just use a bunch of lesser spells/arts.

The low levels in this game are in an absolutely terrible state. I'm surprised you were actually able to recognize the elements you liked with the huge imbalances between player and mob power prior to end game.

It does actually get better (more reactionary and situational, more challenging, more collaborative between players) as you get to end game, but few players make it that far.

Let's be honest though - you don't need to understand anything to do the level 30 content, which is as far as Rensol has gotten.

And really most of the things that make combat deep don't even happen until you're either in groups/raids or at least 70+. I struggle to think of anything Rensol could be missing about solo combat pre-40. The "depth" comes from either grouping (aggro, different types of buffs and heals, ect) or the newer abilities/AAs (Exploit Weakness, Fiery Blast, Victorious Concerto, ect).

Why is this game never mentioned?

Well, I tell everyone SoE sucks. I don't tell them I played EQ2, or how much they ruined the game.

I mean, I'm not gonna be nice about it. (inb4 banned for trolling because my account is flagged for it)