EQ2 impressions

[ammokk]

Hmm, well I gave away my EQ2-Beta Account because:

-It looks awfull

-You don´t even have a "real" full screen. Only 2/3 of the display are "play-view"

-The people don´t really co-operate



Good things ´bout EQ2:

-Better quests even immedialty after the beginning!



But if I really would buy another MMORPG-game it would be Final Fantasy XI

[Nirvy]

I pretty mucha gree with that review. EQ2 to me seemed vastly dumbed down compared to EQ and other new games. It feels like EQ for 12 year olds. No depth what-so ever

Sums up what i heard too. I only knew two people who played it, but both described it as EQ lite, or MMORPG lite.

I watched a friend play it, and at first i thought it looked amazing, but after seening combat, and asking when you got all the specials and diferent spells i was suprised to have him tell me that was about it.

Quests looked interesting, graphics were great, but combat was like a cut down version of all other games combat, many characters looked identical, and the lag was appalling. And the DP system is unbelieveable, people would quit my friends group when it looked like one of the team was about to die to avoid penalties, nothing worse than getting some idiot who dies all the time as he messes about and your DP's pile up because of him.

[jenuviel]

Does Ryzom have special attacks? and do they make a difference, do i interact with combat? If i dodge do i get special moves?

There are special attacks, yes. The primary special attacks are based on the type of weapon you use: Slow for blunt weapons (sort of a mini-stun), Bleed for slashing weapons, and Ignore Armor for piercing weapons. There are also specials for increasing accuracy, area attacks (circle attack), aimed shots (you can target specific body parts- aiming for a creature's hind leg reduces its dodge, for example), and quite a few others that I'm forgetting.

The thing that makes Ryzom so utterly unique, however, is the fact that each of those abilities are little "bricks" that come with an associated cost. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but let's say something like Bleed-1 has a +15 cost. To use Bleed-1 you'd then pair it with something that gives you at least -15 in credit. This could be a Stamina credit stanza (as in it takes X amount of stamina to use the skill), it could be a HP credit stanza (the skill is powered by your HP instead of stamina), it could be a combination of both, or you could even use a credit stanza like Attack After Dodge in which the skill costs no stamina or hp but only goes off after you've successfully dodged an attack.

That said, it's possible to create a single action that uses Bleed, Accurate Attack and Increased Damage as long as you balance those skills out with credits. And that's just melee combat. Magic has a whole different batch of toys to play with (bomb effects, casting time, range modifiers, riccochet, etc).

Now as far as interacting with combat, there's really not much need to in the very beginning. Your tactics get more and more important the farther you go, though. As a newbie, you can pretty much just hit Increased Damage 1 all day long. After you leave the starting island and begin to face increasingly difficult creatures, you'll have to balance your actions carefully with the weapon you use and the armor you wear. You don't want to run out of HP, and you don't want to run out of stamina. Heavy weapons and heavy armor increase the stamina required to use all combat skills (in exchange for doing more damage/preventing more damage), so you can see how stamina could be a problem in long battles. Most people past a certain level have at least 6 tailored actions designed for whatever equipment they're using at the time.

Different creatures have different resistances, so perhaps you carry several weapon types. Perhaps you use a pike and Ignore Armor for that angry Kipee, but your stamina is going down much more quickly than your health- time to switch to the Ignore Armor powered by hp. Then again, it just so happens that you're dodging an awful lot, so it might be more efficient to use that Ignore Armor + Accurate Attack powered by Attack After Dodge. Or maybe you'd rather just cast Fear on it, hit your Speed Up action and get the heck out of there.

The whole system is incredibly detailed. There's an awful lot to learn, but that learning really is an awful lot of fun. There are just so many skills to choose from (you can choose them all if you have the time) and so many ways to alter and edit those skills that there probably aren't two identical characters in the game.

[miths999]

I played in the beta for about a week, and besides the fact that it did not spur the least bit interest in me to keep on playing (assuming I had wanted to redownload the 3.5 Gb after they changed the filestructure of the client), the thing that bothered me the most were the insanely high system requirements.

I am running a P4 2.6, with 1 Gb RAM and a Geforce FX 5900XT - not state of the art for sure, but still resonably fast, and to get consistent framerates just barely above 20 (barring looking into a wall or visiting deserted/small areas) I had to turn most graphics settings (and to their credit there are a whole lot) down to medium or well below in some cases.

Let me tell you that EQ2 at those settings are a far cry from the visual feast you see in screenshots and videos - low resolution blurry textures, low view distance (not just characters but much of the surroundings), few light sources, no shadows, no or little (few meters ahead) bump mapping etc.
And still the game felt sluggish most of the time (well, with framerates still rarely reaching 25, with the aformentioned exceptions, you would expect so I guess).

Playing only for around a week I will refrain from talking about the actual gameplay - I am sure a lot of people will love it, and just as many will hate it.
But I bet there are even more that will not even be able to run it unless they can stand the torture of moving around with framerates in the teens or below (I am personally not that much of a masochist - nor rich enough to upgrade to a 3.2+ GHz system with one of the latest Geforce or ATI cards within the next six months or more) - in a game that for them will look nowhere near as good as what they have probably come to expect.