Dirty little secret

[Murgos]

I'm playing EQ2 and I'm having fun.

[Rasix]

Sinner.

[stray]

I can barely get past character creation. Should I go bushy eyebrows or no eyebrows at all?

Maybe I'll give it another shot in a couple days.

[sinij]

Sinner.

He will surely go to hell.

[Signe]

Perv.

[Sable Blaze]

I played for about five days, then the powers-that-be struck my power supply down for my temerity.

Sooooo...from the very depths of MMRPG hell I strike at thee...with 430 watts of Pentium-crushing power. All will fall to the power of a gold card and next day air.

[Soukyan]

I'm playing EQ2 and I'm having fun.

Psst. Me too.

[schild]

Can one of you all email me the Launcher for EQ2? I have a uhm, account, I just need to patch over the entire game. I think it's like 5 megs, if your outbox can handle it, my inbox can: schild@f13.net

[AlteredOne]

Both my wife and I are enjoying it.  For folks who play as a duo, the bonuses for grouping are nice.  We're still very low level, so we'll see how it progresses.  The difficulty level seems more challenging and rewarding than WoW beta.   Lots to discover!

[Soukyan]

Can one of you all email me the Launcher for EQ2? I have a uhm, account, I just need to patch over the entire game. I think it's like 5 megs, if your outbox can handle it, my inbox can: schild@f13.net

If you haven't managed to get it by the time I get home, I'll send it on over, schild.

[schild]

Don't bother waiting for me to respond, just send it when you get home. I'd rather have 5 than zero and god knows what kind of traffic I'll hit on the beltway this afternoon. Oh, and thanks! :) Feel free to send over the launchers for SW:G/JtL and Planetside also. ;)

[Sky]

I was on vacation last week, spent a lot of time with EQ2. I initially loved the game, to my surprise, and a week with it only deepened that love. It's a great mmog.

Except the forced grouping. I don't pay to be forced to group with random mmog chuckleheads (I only group with friends and the occasional non-chuckleheaded stranger). The only alternative to that is not adventuring in dungeons or taking on named mobs. All yard trash, all the time.

Cancelled already. Doubt I'll try WoW, they just don't make those games for my playstyle.

[Alkiera]

I've started playing too, despite my plans to wait till January.  Mostly because the RL friends I play these games with had all picked it up, and were playing.  We had a group visit to Blackburrow the other night, had a blast, the 5 of us plus someone we knew from EQ1.  A fairly ideal group, warrior, cleric, rogue, predator, sorcerer, and me, enchanter.  We were there for an hour, hour and a half, and all of us leveled once.

The trick is to avoid the, uh, 'chuckleheads', as Sky put it.  I don't group much outside this group of friends.  I stopped random grouping somewhere around the high 50's, low 60's with my enchanter in EQ, where random people often tended to make my exp gain negative over the course of a night...  It'd be faster to wait for the couple nights a week everyone could get on, and group with useful people, than to gain negative or very low exp the other 4 nights.

So, yeah.  I'm enjoying the game quite a bit, but I knew I would after the beta.

Alkiera

[shiznitz]

This game seems to certainly be a "bring your own friends" MMOG. That is fine for those that have gaming groups. The very few times I have tried to do pickups have met with silence so apparently lots of people are veterans with their own crews at the ready.  

I just wish I could play more. I am getting left behind quickly and that doesn't bode well given the aforementioned dynamics.

[Rasix]

Cancelled already. Doubt I'll try WoW, they just don't make those games for my playstyle.

A great majority of WoW can be done solo.  Only instances are pretty much group only.   But you're an eye candy person, so, might not be the game for you.

[Sky]

My favorite chucklehead so far was the one who kept getting into combat so we couldn't dissolve a quest group (that had finished the quests), we had no idea where he was, and then he died giving us all a share of his debt.

Ras, my concerns about WoW lie along different lines, though forced grouping is a small concern there, too. My concern for WoW has more to do with the entire playerbase, from blizzbois to ubers.

random people often tended to make my exp gain negative over the course of a night...

That was the final straw in EQ for me. It took me a year to do lvls 1-51, then another year to do 52-54. I had climbed to almost 55, then throughout a month lost experience faster than I could gain it, until I logged out for the last time with only a sliver of experience keeping me from sliding back into level 53 again (and losing some good spells).

EQ was one of the easier games for me to drop cold turkey. What surprises me is not that I've cancelled EQ2 already, but that I enjoyed it so much until I hit that artificial barrier to solo play, and if it weren't for that single game mechanic, I'd be completely addicted. Too bad, eh.

[UD_Delt]

I'm also enjoying EQ2 as well although I haven't recently been able to play as much as I would like.

I've only gotten 3-4 nights into the game so far and have split time between adventuring and crafting. The problem with that is I'm now about 10 levels behind the RL people I know playing the game which is soon going to make playing catch up near impossible...

[HaemishM]

I would say you're all going to hell, but then again, you're playing EQ2, so what could Lucifer really do?

[AlteredOne]

I would say you're all going to hell, but then again, you're playing EQ2, so what could Lucifer really do?

Hell isn't so bad, if you have a good heat resist buff, and a pair of jboots.

[Sobelius]

I would say you're all going to hell, but then again, you're playing EQ2, so what could Lucifer really do?

Hell is the XP Bar in any MMORPG. It is the taskmaster that spoils the fun by saying "See, you aren't good enough yet! Keep going, you pathetic worm! Everyone else is so much farther ahead. Trust me, once you reach the next level, things will get better. Just keep going until you level, then you'll see all the cool things you've been missing!"

Turning off the XP bar from my display provided a release from Hell. It's not heaven, to be sure, but it's also far from Hell.

Now, on to the new Hell: the graphics card and system requirements! This little demon has been running around my head saying things like:

""See -- actually you can't see very well here can you? Keep playing at these settings, you pathetic worm! Everyone else sees a gloriously rendered world because their systems are so much farther ahead. They never have the combat lag you have. Trust me, once you buy a system that is worthy of a GeForce 6800 Ultra, things will get better. Just put it all on a credit card -- what's a little more debt on top of the debt you already have that you know you'll never get out from under anyway -- so go on, buy the new system and the new card, then you'll see all the cool things you've been missing!"

Let the sounds of wailing and the gnashing of teeth commence!

[Sky]

I just found the level-up history thingy over at the eq2players.com site, turns out exp isn't bad at all. Even though I was on vacation, I was playing very casually and I was the 50th lvl 16 summoner and 44th level 17 summoner. As a catass, total failure. As a casual, hey, nifty!

[Mesozoic]

Dirty little secret?  Is there some shame to liking EQ2?

[Resvrgam]

Trust me, once you buy a system that is worthy of a GeForce 6800 Ultra, things will get better....buy the new system and the new card, then you'll see all the cool things you've been missing!"

Sorry to break the news: the engine still looks like ass with a GF 6800 Ultra and a decent rig.

I ran the game on a pretty decent system (which runs Half-Life 2, a game with superior graphics[IMO], as smooth as silk).

The "shadows" need to be disabled in order to get a decent framrate and all the bells & whistles need be unseen to play beyond slide-show framerates (especially in cities and battles consisting of more than 5 combatants).

I pointed out several of the graphical inefficiencies on the official fanboy forums and was shat on for my troubles.  It's a shame they didn't deliver on a decent engine they the way they claimed. :(

[Sky]

I only have a 9800pro, I've already decided the game isn't for me, but you can /hardly/ call it ass graphics, for crissakes. I can run almost everything maxed (shadows simple or off mostly, though) and it looks great, with a year old system. I just saw it as a chance to get a nice kick out of next year's upgrade, I'll have full shadows then. Bonus, and an intended one. It's not supposed to run at full settings, it would look horribly dated in two years.

You can debate the /style/ of the graphics, but judging by your icon you must be judging technical things by the most cutting edge graphics engine to debut on the pc in a while, when you should be judging by genre peers. Let's see HL2's engine with all the shinies render freeport with a ton of players with high polys. I'm not saying it won't look great, but it's optimized for a totally different genre.

[HaemishM]

EQ2's terrain looked great. It's models of anything not inanimate were pretty bland at best, dead ugly at worst. The fact it won't run well on even the best hardware is not a design decision, it's a failure.

[Murgos]

EQ2's terrain looked great. It's models of anything not inanimate were pretty bland at best, dead ugly at worst. The fact it won't run well on even the best hardware is not a design decision, it's a failure.

I'm actually mostly convinced its a programming error.  The initial five minutes of any play session are fine.  My rig is not uber, Athlon 2100+, 512mb pc2700 ram, SATA harddrive, Radeon 9800 SE,  and if I don't zone I can play with fairly high graphic detail without video lag or disk access lag for the better part of an hour.  But then something happens and the HD starts to churn and usually by that point its all over but the wait while the game exits.

If I'm in a dungeon or outdoor zone I can sometimes extend that play period up to an hour and a half if I'm not moving around too much.

Either they have multiple memory leaks, not unplausible, SWG had several and EQ1 had one from launch that hung around until well after Kunark was released.  It was standard practice in EQ 1 to get to your camp and relog so as to clear out the mem leak for an extended play session for a very long time.  Or, they made some custom memory management utility that just really, really sucks if you have less than like 2 gigs of ram or something.  Just a guess, but the slowdowns certainly seem tied to texture use, probably the way thier routine looks up whether a texture has been loaded and the system for timing out the cache lookup and reloading it from the disk.

Other than that the game can look pretty good at times.  The outlying Freeport villages are AWEFUL though.  What dumbass made the decision to make the worst looking zones the area where new players will spend the vast majority of thier time?  Crap-tastic.  I've had conversation with several players that restarted in Qeynos just to get away from the nasty appearance of the Freeport villages.  Having progressed into the teens with characters in both Freeport and Qeynos I have to say that that is just too bad really because North Freeport is da bomb yo!  Certainly its among the better attempts at art design in a video game around.  Too bad the zone is usually dead empty compared to Qeynos at even peak hours.

The Qeynos zones are all, err, quite pleasant. They are all typical fantasy fair straight off some uninspired paperback cover, you know the ones I mean?  The franchise fiction books whose cover art is probably the BEST thing about the story?  To me anyway, it's a little tedious, the general theme is 16th century gothic stone construction but without any chance at all of conveying the heavy dark feeling customary with the gothic style.  Mostly I think this is because every building is a little island floating on a manicured green lawn.  At best it's like the too thick confection on a cheap store bought cake.  As long as you just glance at it it's fine but if you actually try to eat it your mouth ends up feeling like its covered in rancid lard (which oddly enough is what they make that kind of frosting out of.)

But, I'm still having fun playing the game, I'll let you know in another week if that still holds true.

[Resvrgam]

EQ2's terrain looked great. It's models of anything not inanimate were pretty bland at best, dead ugly at worst. The fact it won't run well on even the best hardware is not a design decision, it's a failure.

I'm actually mostly convinced its a programming error.

I'm thinking it's a combination of poor programming and lack of graphic optimizations.  

The polycounts aren't all that absurd but: the techniques used to squeeze every ounce of performance out of a card is non-existent in this engine.  There's million of polys being rendered that players never even see (beneath hair, clothing, etc.), that "lets use bump maps to make new types of armour over a cat-suit that's rendered over a nude body that is also rendered" just makes for both poor performance and poor aesthtics [IMO]...I've never really liked the spandex look for mail armour and it's rather disheartening to see ass cheeks poking through a suit of protective gear.

The hair was just a BAD call IMO.  The UVW's assigned to them produce some of thoe most god-awful swears being passed off as textures and all the pixel-shaders in the world can't mask poor design.

It'd be one thing if EQ2 looked better than EVERY game out on the market right now and demanded the "hardware of the future" it seems to now but, with games like Half-Life 2 recently released, EQ2's 4-year-old engine is already starting to look dated (and still performs worse than games looking better than it).

To be fair, it'd be more realistic to fire-up FRAPS and gauge the performances of all games recently released and adjusting the bells & whistles to make each perform identically.   If this were the case: not only would EQ2 be considered ugly....but many may find EQLive's graphics superior (aka a 6 year old engine with band-aid improvements to it).

I could have modeled something in the Quake 3 engine and made it a few billion polys...and when it ran like ass, just claim it's intended for "future hardware."[/i]

[Toast]

I am always surprised when I read continuing complaints about how the game runs. The game runs flawlessly on medium+ graphic settings for me (2.8, 1 ghz, radeon 9800, 10k sata hd).

I know were just comparing meaningless anecdotes here.

I am playing and enjoying the game still. I have a number of friends who tried it out and all are still having fun.

[Sky]

It should be funny in a couple years when EQ2 comes into its own graphically and still looks solid and WoW looks 6 years old instead of just 4 years old.

I'm just glad I can run it almost completely maxed out with a crappier system, without the problems you folks seem to be experiencing and I'll leave it at that.

(I agree with you on a few points, like the plastic hair, though)

[Mesozoic]

It should be funny in a couple years when EQ2 comes into its own graphically and still looks solid and WoW looks 6 years old instead of just 4 years old.

I think you're misunderstanding the point of view of those who like WoW's graphics.

I've never heard anyone - not even the most stark raving mad fanboi - claim that WoW's graphics were advanced or realistic.  They like the artistic direction, the concept, the use of color, the layout and presentation of the zones, etc.  These things don't become dated the way that the more technical aspects of graphics do.

[HaemishM]

It should be funny in a couple years when EQ2 comes into its own graphically and still looks solid and WoW looks 6 years old instead of just 4 years old.

Even at the best performance I could get out of the system, or at the worst performance but best-looking, EQ2 simply wasn't immersive to me, not in the same way WoW is. I feel part of an animated world in WoW. EQ2 just felt like a bland video game with lots of sound. It isn't the hardware that makes it bland; it's the art direction.

In musical terms, it's the difference between Yngwie Malmsteen and Alex Lifeson. The former is technically superior, yet boring as reading computer programming manuals. The latter may not play as many notes per second, but the compositions he puts together can make you cry.

[Sky]

I thought we were talking technical game engines. I never said EQ2 had a better style than WoW, I do not partake in processed cocaine products.

Hammy and his musical references....ok, I'll respond. It's like Yngwie (he don't like fuckin' donuts) vs Lifeson (good comparison there, actually)...but if Lifeson couldn't play 16th notes. Technically, impared at the top end from what's available to consumers in a very visible way.

Point being that WoW's style paired with a technically forward-looking engine (rather than the dated-out-of-the-box engine it is) would have been the best possible solution, especially a few years down the road when WoW's engine is really blatantly dated.

Now, if Blizz puts out a full engine upgrade with shaders and whatnot in a couple years, I'll eat my words. If I were in management over there, though, EQ2's decision seems the best long-term one. I recently found my EQ1 screenshots from release, btw, so I'm going on that mental image and analogy.

[HaemishM]

Now, if Blizz puts out a full engine upgrade with shaders and whatnot in a couple years, I'll eat my words. If I were in management over there, though, EQ2's decision seems the best long-term one. I recently found my EQ1 screenshots from release, btw, so I'm going on that mental image and analogy.

Except that EQ1 is still making money on a bastardized version of a woefully-outdated graphics engine. Dark Age of Camelot has maintained its position in the MMOG hierarchy with some upgrading as well, but nothing on the scale of "needs two generations of future hardware before it'll run correctly" shader type tech.

You don't NEED shaders to make a good graphics engine. Hell, WoW's engine looks dated NOW, especially when you see some of the armor textures. But if it's a fun game with lots of stickiness, it doesn't matter what it looks like because sooner or later, the GOSH WOW factor of seeing the graphics engine do stuff wears off. Once that's done, it's the art direction and not the pixel shaders that make the game look good.

[Alkiera]

I'm actually mostly convinced its a programming error.  The initial five minutes of any play session are fine.  My rig is not uber, Athlon 2100+, 512mb pc2700 ram, SATA harddrive, Radeon 9800 SE,  and if I don't zone I can play with fairly high graphic detail without video lag or disk access lag for the better part of an hour.  But then something happens and the HD starts to churn and usually by that point its all over but the wait while the game exits.

If I'm in a dungeon or outdoor zone I can sometimes extend that play period up to an hour and a half if I'm not moving around too much.

This is a RAM issue.  I increased my RAM to 768MB, and the hard-drive grinding has stopped more or less completely, even over long play sessions with lots of zoning.  Part of the issue is that in many zones the game takes up nearly 500mb of space in RAM, and so cannot all get into RAM as the same time, due to the need for space by the OS.  So it ends up swapping something out in order to get the presently-needed meshes/textures into ram...  then when someone shows up wearing different armor, or with a mesh you hadn't seen yet, or you turn a corner to view a new building, your machine has to swap stuff around so you can see it.  It eventually gets so insanely far behind at this that your swap space drive is constantly grinding.  Increasing to 768 lets you have the whole game and the OS in memory at once, even in South Qeynos.  I can sorta actually move around in there now, and zoning times have improved everywhere.

It's not a bad engine, really, just more memory hungry than the min. reqs. really allowed for.  Minimum should really be 768.

Alkiera

[trias_e]

IMO, I don't think WoW will ever look dated, just like Windwaker won't ever look dated.  As of right now I'd say its the best environment art I've ever seen in a video game, though the characters are not nearly as good they still are at the very least pretty good. Thats just for me though, I thought Alice looked great and just played it this year, so I could care less about polycounts and engine features.  

Actually I take that back, Source pretty much made Half-Life 2, but thats less to do with graphics and more with physics.