I worked on some QA for this game a while when they were SOE still. Before that I had ~10,000 hours in game play. The engine was a terrible dumpster fire. It was built on the idea single core clock speeds would keep going up and graphics cards would be "secondary." Processor with 4.2Ghz speed was better than a multicore and super video card. Faces were highly customizable for the defunct "SoEmote" option that would animate character face based on the user camming their face. They have LOTS of dragons, but that's a drakota because its not a dragon because it doesn't have 4 legs and isn't intelligent. Seeing you right click everything and not hitting the attack buttons faster is painful for me lol. Camera is a shit show, they have LOTS of settings to modify it behavior though. Using Steam to check player numbers for ANY game that existed before Steam is always going to be quite bad. That's not to say there are tons of players, but its not ever going to be accurate. 11:07 AHAHAHA oh man, in end game DPS is measured by BILLIONS of damage per second. that's a Carl Sagan "B" billions. 12:45 stealth is meant to work that way, later you get multiple types that cast much faster with additional effects like dropping aggro or even teleporting. 14:50 oh boy. yeah MTX is nuts on EQ2 now. Lots of it is avoidable for "winning" but there are a few for end game like instance resets and buying mercenaries and stat pets. However it is allowing the game to be quite profitable working off whales. They do not want genuine free players AT ALL. It is far more "free to try." Trying to be a "free player" is crippling and in some weird cases would be more expensive than just getting a sub. 21:55 What you did is go to another newbie area like the island, there are several of them. what you need is to find an area with higher enemies and thus higher quests. There are MANY standalone quests that aren't chains. Content in the early game is split into 10 level tiers. So 1-10, 11-20 etc etc. You were working your way through a 1-10 area and then started over in another 1-10 area. 28:35 hitting loading screens on griffons is rare, you just happened to find one that takes you to another area. Most do as you explained, flight paths with carefully curated vistas and usually confined to one map. So I'm not saying all this because you are wrong or bad, just providing context. The fact that none of this was made apparent to a new player is obviously a red flag for the newbie experience. However as you saw hints of they aren't hot on traditional "new player" experience and want people using heroic characters or playing on one of the special ruleset servers. The experience you played hasn't been updated in years, AFAIK, and likely won't be any time soon.
@@tjcondon3954 Exactly. With newer games it can be an indicator of population even if you can play without steam but if its a game where its "peak" is years pre-Steam, Steam charts means very little.
@@tjcondon3954 Maybe it's helped by the fact that the steam version of FFXI is region locked. But yeah, if the game is playable somewhere else too, doesn't really means the game is dead just because steam chart says so.
I FORGOT THAT. I remember that was a big ad for that. Honestly it was a hard choice for me. I was in the Beta2 run (taped my key onto my monitor and was like that for years hah) but also knew the quality and what blizzard could bring. In the end I chose college. Though 4 years latter I went full 300+ days in WoW. Not sure Everquest 2 could pull that.
Also. WoW had an ACTIVE campaign against everquest, with ads in magazines that stated "Would you rather be killing rats" directly targeting EQII's early game grind
@@FieldsOfConfusion Yep. that was the first WoW ad I saw. Blizzard saw EQ2 as their primary competitor and ran ads against it. EQ2 never ran any ads at all. Anywhere. They just expected to grow based on their name, and in the end, it cost them dearly.
@@AJBernard I totally agree. Players have been complaining for years at the lack of publicity for our game, when WOW used Mr. T, William Shatner, and more in their commercials.
@@AJBernard My philosophy is that if a game's publicity relies primarily on devaluing its competitors, then it likely isn't a worthwhile venture on its own. WoW was good, but my statement would be validated with how the toxic community grew and the ultimate downfall of the development.
For me, Everquest 2 will always be the housing system. I remember playing it for a bit a few years back and not being terribly impressed, but then I got myself a lovely room in the frozen north with two floors and a window providing an amazing view of the ocean and nearby penguins. I loved that room so much that I kept playing the rest of the game to spruce up that little spot of respite. I learned the relevant crafting and gathering professions to make furniture and decorations, I killed stuff and leveled up so that I could try out new materials and maybe even get new designs... By the end what was once a simple, empty room with stairs leading to smaller empty room had a kitchen, a living room, dining room, three bedrooms, and a library. And the library actually works! You can put actual in-game books of your choosing on the shelves and read them whenever you like! And you can take those books off the shelves, go downstairs, and read them in front of the fireplace! People still sometimes say that WoW should have a housing system, and the dev team as well as players who don't know better just point to the garrison and say "there you go, have fun". They're missing the point entirely. Player housing is not about granting mechanical benefits for putting the right size of prefabricated building on the correct predetermined plot. It's an aesthetic, creative experience where the only reward is the satisfaction of getting the rug in just the right spot. It's not an extra place to hearth to for you to sell stuff and use your bank that actively gets worse at the job the more you expand and upgrade it. It's a place to wind down before you log out, a place to hang out with friends and guild members, when you know you want to play but don't know what you want to do... Player housing does not become an irrelevant and abandoned feature as soon as the next expansion drops. It's a little slice of the game you carve out for yourself and make your own.
I think the usefulness of player housing in WoW passed around the start of Cata - so many casual players (me included) that wanted to the social stuff, but didn't always have time to engage in the niceties; queue, run, repeat - if you had a mate or two you could party queue, otherwise you just take whatever you can get. Like he discussed in another video - social interaction on the internet changed from the early 00's to now - it's migrated out of games and the novelty has worn off. I'd like to think that when millenials start hitting retirement age we will see a resurgence of in-game socialization - or a "Metaverse" sort of cross-game socialization, once our kids are grown and gone and we have a bit more free time.
customizable housing and being able to build pretty much wherever was the ONLY thing that kept me going in Skyrim. I actually thought the game was pretty ridiculously bad otherwise. I had a nice split level mansion with terraces I built in a small forest an a cliff overlooking a lake. I spent more time on that than on the rest of the game I think. Never finished the game.
Back in the day I played Ultima Online and remember when EQ came out. Everyone was raving how it would kill UO because of the 3D graphics and "immersion." I tried EQ up until the first expansion and was bored to tears. I didn't know it back then, but it was the first of the theme parks and that's why I hated it. Ultima Online was a world where player decision mattered (before all the horrible updates).
First played EQ 2 in 2020, and quickly went on a quest of betraying my city, becoming an exile, and grinding faction to gain a new home. As far as I can tell, a truly unique experience that involves changing class and was very very fun.
I played way back when in the mid 00's, on a roleplaying server, and one of my fondest memories is betraying from Freeport and befriending an Iksar paladin who also made the journey.
My favourite character ever is from EQ2. Way back before they changed classes to neutral. I had a High Elven Bruiser living in Neriak. Was one of the few High Elves running about Neriak at the time. So much fun.
This was my jam, too. Before Ratonga could be good or evil, I used to love betraying Freeport and living in Qeynos. The roleplay community was stellar in EQ2, and it made for some really fun encounters. Also, the dirty looks you'd get from the NPCs were amusing. "[Soandso] knows you don't belong here."
been playin EQ2 for too long to remember. My characters were always fae who betrayed the good side and turned evil to live in Freeport😅And the guards in 'good' cities actually attacked me, and NPC said remarks about me. Also the server community always noticed 'out-of-place' people like us. Such an amazing game. In more _modern_ games like ESO you just roam around factions and cities like it's nothing. No city, no race, no faction is special, nothing is special and your _side_ means literally nothing. Nothing is at stake, play your way but all ways are practically the same and it's sad.
Me at the loading screen - "Ooh, looks like Colossal Dreadmaw." Josh - "Lovely dinosaur, looks like it costs two green and four generic to cast, probably has tramble." ... God damn it Josh
I love how he's surprised that the evil maniacal clown laugh is on an undead knight in the tutorial. It's the exact same sound from lvl 1 Decaying Skeletons in every newbie zone in EQ1 since 1999 😁
@@victoriahunter4684 From what I remember, it was one of the primary NPCs near spawn points. Because, in EQ 1, the attack key was autobound to "A". And hailing an NPC was also "A". Punching your lvl 50 guildmaster as a lvl 1 was a fast way to respawn
The point of Gryphons and flight paths is a huge one. I remember in the early days of WoW, taking a flight path from Ironforge to Wetlands (I think?) and along the way seeing The Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge below me. High level zones that would be deadly to my level 20 Dwarf Hunter. It's a view of where the game will take me at my later levels and it gave the world a grander sense of scale and danger which was amazing!
There are more flights within zones than connecting zones in EQ2. Hayes just found the one that works this way instead of the many others doing exactly what he would have liked.
yes, i know exactly how you describe as forever f2p in wow since 2019 i think. first time i got northrend and then every time i used griffin to get to dalaran. at the time i wasn't even suppose to be in the dalaran since i was lvl 20. and northrend was like lvl 30+, including the portal to get up there, so i used mechanic that i have been using ALOT: check first if area has griffin for everybody when they are dead, there is? brilliant. now i queue into random dungeon & random battlefield&random epic battle as dps, now before it finds me a dungeon or battlefield, i try to get as many mobs to attack me and to die in wow and use the ghost griffin to get to normally unreachable area to me. then i wait until it matches me into dungeon or battle, i either finish the dungeon/battle or just leave instantly, usually if its dungeon or normal battle, i stay to finish it but if its epic battle i leave, either way i am now resurrected at the place where i was with griffin instead of at graveyard or death spot. warning: dungeons and battle exits are different. i learned this when i had to get to dalaran that was above the karazhan for quest, while for dungeon exit there was nothing even though i saw it at ghost griffin, but when exited battle, it spawned me to dalaran that was above karazhan instead of me falling to my death in world of warcraft.
@@martinforsterling4814 That's probably my biggest gripe about the video. The flight paths do take you over large vast landscapes but he just so happened to use the one in Halas and go to Butcherblock which is going from one zone to another and use that single use griffin to describe them all.
11:50 That was the laugh the skeletons used in Everquest I which reached meme status at the time and it's a beloved memory of the game, so them using it here was quite intentional. :D
When I was in high school I played a ton of Everquest 1. And I was lucky enough to get into the Everquest 2 closed beta. The developers designed the game to be 'future proof', so it was impossible at the time to run the game on max settings with any hardware currently available, and it didn't really run well on most systems with the graphics set to low. Even so, the game was a substantial improvement over the original Everquest. In early to mid 2004 I was again lucky enough to get into the WoW Phase 3 Closed Beta. Even in closed beta, WoW was overwhelming better than Everquest 2 in almost every way. The EQ2 beta was filled with bugs, crashed frequently, and its focus on group and raid content meant that it was next to impossible to solo any content after level 10. WoW on the other hand, while it had bugs, it was rare to get an actual crash (I think I only had maybe 1-3 crashes when I played beta, which for a closed beta MMO at the time, was unheard of). And while the talent system, classes, and the ability system they briefly had in beta would change dramatically, it always gave off the feeling of being a completed game (keep in mind that this was in comparison to the current MMO's on the market at the time). When WoW went open beta for a few weeks and the NDA dropped, the world saw what WoW had to offer. It had a much more rich and rewarding quest system, a travel system, and you could actually level up by yourself if you wanted to (you also didn't lose 8 hours worth of exp when you died, and you leveled up MUCH faster). EQ2 devs knew that they wouldn't be able to compete so their best bet was to beat WoW to market and bank on the Everquest name. In the last few months of development, instead of focusing on polishing everything, they instead scrambled to add many features that were already part of WoW. The terrible griffon travel network mentioned in the video is one of those systems that were added. Funnily enough, up until release both games had huge fallowing. And there were constant flame wars about which game would end up on top. When WoW was released however, everything changed. There were a still a handful of EQ2 fans that argued the graphics in EQ2 were better and more realistic and that it's focus on team based combat was better for the community than WoW's solo-able content. But, those fans quickly faded. Since Everquest 2 wasn't popular, and everquest Next was canceled in development (but not before selling a bunch of useless "play early" packs to players), it seems Everquest may be just another dead franchise. It's a shame really. The original Everquest revolutionized the MMO industry. And while you had to go out of your way to find quests and learn the lore, for those that did it was a very rewarding experience. While I doubt I'll every pick up everquest again, I do occasionally think of the fun times I had with friends in high school on my old bard.
Oh yeah i remember back in that day when i was happy that my shitty PC actually ran a new game. Played WoW on a fx5200 until WOTLK where i finally got something with more power.
Honestly, I can totally imagine an MMORPG "Tour Group" - a massive community of players who agree to spend some amount of time leveling up together on a new MMORPG. It would allow people to explore old games without the need to do it solo or with whatever the current player base is.
It is so nice to hear someone discuss the success of WoW being the fact that it allowed for solo play. I played EQ1 for a while and was playing FFXI at the time when WoW launched. I will never forget about a week or so after it launched how linkshell members were discussing quitting FFXI because you could level solo in WoW all the way to max level. It was mind blowing. WoW changed MMO gaming forever with that one key element, bringing the genre from being very niche to mainstream.
I played this game with my dad years ago when I was young young. When I found out it was free, I told my dad and we've been playing it together ever since. it's definitely still one of my favorite games to play
@@JaycobSirduke My dad actually started me on EverQuest 1 when I young young (I was 5 when EQ1 released and you better believe I was playing it then--poorly when my dad wasn't around to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing, but I played it), then eventually as time passed and EQ2 came out, we both went there. We didn't jump on the WoW train until WotLK was about to release. EverQuest 1 still holds a TON of nostalgia for me, and so I'll occasionally load up Project '99 and relive my nostalgia for a bit. Never stick for long, because I know what P99 endgame looks like (and it ain't pretty), but it can be a fun romp and trip through memory lane remembering when me and my dad played for so long. Druid and Ranger are still my favorite classes in most game settings because of EQ1. So many hours, so many memories. I liked the 2 druids in EQ2, as well, so there's that. More nature bois! My love of rangers really set me up to be disappointed by Rangers in most games since they always seem to have an identity crisis and the creator of the game/ruleset (for tabletop) can never decide what the hell they want the class to do
@@JaycobSirduke How can people play a game for so long?? 12k hours is literary 500 hundred days. You have invested over 500 days in a single game like how?
@@Selvyre I was 14 when EQ1 dropped and it was my life for a year or two. Never played it since. I just recently looked into the fact that it’s still around. What happens at the end of Project 99?
EQ2 did many things right. Cities were big enough that they FELT like cities. Betrayal Quests meant your faction wasn't forever locked in when you rolled your character. The graphics were really amazing. The crafting minigames, I at least, thought were fun. NPC's were voice-acted, and there was a distinct feel and flavor for each area. I loved the flying carpets, and flight paths in general. I actually enjoyed unlocking each area when you still had to do that. But they also committed HORRIFIC blunders. In their quest to make sure they could balance the game, they over-homogenized each class. wizards had elemental nukes and dots, enchanters had psionic nukes and dots, but damage was ... not noticeably different. Not during levelllng, anyway. I LOATHED the "combo moves". I hate combo systems, let me choose what spells I want to use based on the effect of the spells, not on your "if you follow this recipe you'll get bonus damage because reasons". Drops, and crafted gear felt over-homogenized while levelling, too. "Oh, this one has an extra +1 to INT". Woo Woo. I hated the "linked mobs" that no matter if they were 900 yards apart always aggrod as a group. Clearly that was there answer to FD pulling and splitting. Just saying "no, you can't do that anymore." I'll never forgive what they did to Charm. (my EQ1 main was an enchanter). Overall, I think they did a lot more wrong than right. But they did do several things right.
@@Trensharo WoW also looked better on release, imo. Especially character design. WoW still has an aesthetic that is eye catching today. EQ2 looks like puke in that area. They almost seem to have used the same talentless hack who made the Luclin-era model revamp for EQ1, which always has looked like the most clunky, badly animated models of any MMO I've ever seen and still holds the crown today.
I played a lot off EQ 1 and 2, and you are way off base with the damage not being different. One thing both EQ games did well was have noticeable differences for classes. Sure, if you compare an assassin and a brigand for dps they will be similar while leveling, but they both still have different things they do. Leveling as a warden was not easy until they implemented AA, as healers in general had no dps to speak of because of the class system. Enchanters and Coercers were stun machines that did have dps, but nowhere near a wizard. Combo moves weren't necessary by any means, and honestly almost no one used them soon after launch anyway. That point is completely moot. They helped but not enough to focus on them solely for their bonus. A good dps rotation would outdo them easily. I don't understand the complaint about gear...it's a natural progression. Armor gets better, stats get better. Their crafting system was actually quite brilliant in that you could almost self twink if you focused on harvesting and crafting a mastercrafted set at 12, 22, etc. Every mmorpg has a system like this. I don't know why this surprised you. Hell, any game with loot generally has a system like this. White, green blue, purple etc...loot gets better as you level. I'm not sure why that's a point of contention. You are also completely missing the point on the linked mobs. They were meant to be the opposite of what EQ did in that you could aggro everything in a zone and train it to the exit. If you played EQ back in the day, you know what a "train to zone" call was. People accidentally aggroed dragons, specifically Gorenaire, and the only way to drop aggro was to zone. I can't tell you how many times I saw dozens of dead bodies at Karnor's Castle because of it. Linked mobs were meant to combat that issue, and honestly it was a great idea. Mobs were not "900 yards" away, either. Unless there was a weird bug, I generally never say any come running from more than 20-30 yards at most. And it was a minor inconvenience at best. It sounds like EQ2 just isn't or wasn't the game for you. It did far more right than wrong since all of your "wrongs" are personal preferences and some were QoL improvements from the original. I just think you couldn't be more wrong, especially about the classes. Objectively they did one of the best jobs of managing having a lot of options for various roles that most games like that struggled with. When you needed a healer in a group it could be a warden, fury, mystic, defiler, inquisitor, templar. They all had unique differences, and some were better at certain tasks than others, but they really did a great job with the classes. It sounds like you played to the first expansion at least and I don't know how that part escaped you if you played that long.
My largest gripe about EQ2 at the time it released was that I played as an "Illusionist" this was my classes name. That class had fewer illusions than all other classes with illusions. The Shaman could transform into tons of creatures, and I could do jack all. One of the biggest draws of the class was to "mez" things, or take them out of combat if you pulled too many mobs, crowd control and buffing party members was the idea behind the illusionist, and yet, there were better versions of my spells coming from other classes. I was further done withthe game when the NPCs had better looking armors than was available to the players through raiding on release.
hehe, I forgot about the armour thing - yeah - I played a plate class and was hella pissed I couldn't get a shiny suit of armour (apart from the zero stat ceremonial set or something?) =D
Illusionist isn't a cosplay you don't need "illusions", You cast your Illusion and it mimics all the spells you do, so basically double the damage, and its one of the classes that can mesmerize which is kinda like a "Sap", its also one of the few classes that can regenerate Mana for the entire group/raid, early game is slower and harder, later its alot fo fun, the AL:T of this class is the Coercer which instead of an illusion, coerces an enemy at the same level to fight for you, if you lvevl 35 you can mes an orc on Zek and he will fight with you until the spell breaks, then stun and mes again, its a more skillful class but also very fun.
I played EQ as a young kid, like the year before EQ2 came out (born in '95, was it 2001 so maybe 6YO) I remember EQ2 not being as good as EQ , I don't know why, but even as a kid I knew. My dad was the one who actually played th
almost certian its a stock sound effect, can hear it in older bottom-of-the-barrel indie horror and almost certian on the game over screen in COD world at war
I remember my parents playing EverQuest and hearing stories about how they played this game with their friends back even before they were married. From their stories it always sounded like the greatest thing ever but when I tried it I couldn’t get into it but it started my wanting to play video games and it was my first real game so I’ll always respect this game
I had a somewhat similar experience. My father worked with computers during the first big home boom, so we always had one since I was born. I would run around just randomly beating low level skeletons and running from bears on my father's character in EQ1 when I was 7. Fun memories, but I bet I would absolutely hate it now.
@@TheCalmPsycho TBH I played it a little around the same age, I found out it was free recently and decided to try it. I found it fascinating if a bit clunky. Some of the old mechanics really change how things work and its interesting to think about why modern games make different choices and what they gained/lost. I tried EQ 2 to see what it changed, and it lost a lot of charm, it's more clear where to go but it's also more clearly 'gamey'. For example some of the early areas in EQ1 are clearly designed to look cool over being designed for the quests/enemies, but that actually has interesting side effects. Having it be kinda hard to find where to go makes it a lot easier to just get lost and wander and appreciate areas. So when you're told to go kill some enemy, you more likely to go 'Oh that one I fought in a random cave 4 hours ago and thought was way too tough? Lets goooooo!' As I said, I find this shit fascinating.
@@compassionatecurmudgeon7025 I do enjoy that kind of feeling, Elden Ring really struck me with that sense of true exploration and wonder. It is just so old and clunky that I can't get rid of the QoL things I am used to so that I can truly enjoy EQ.
this is my favorite game of all time, i started early 2000s with one of my best friends we were both 10 years old.... played till present day lol.. its a great game honestly or was before sony sold to daybreak
There's a lot to be said about this game and this video is a great insight into how MMOs have changed in the last 15-20 years but also Josh called a frog a lizard and I just think that that's worth discussion
@@thomasneal9291 If you found it funny, it's not a fail but a somewhat successfull joke. It achieved its goal, even though it did so by unintendet means.
Just logged back into EQ2 after many many years. Loving it. Nostalgia hit satisfied. I played and raided back in 2004-6. The music and atmosphere alone brings back memories of better times. Skeleton laughing and Scarecrow laughing are the best. Never forget them. My fav quest chain in any MMO ever was Claymore.
Making a comment that no one will read on a two year video because of how much I cared about this game. I miss this game. The comment from steam about " there being two separate games" is 100% accurate. You can tell when the quality went downhill, around the time they stopped including voiceovers (I think Shadow Odyssey?) There was so much detail and effort put into this game for many years (they had lore written in books that were in game, that you could take and put on a bookshelf in your in-game home!), and now it's end game content for long time players, and that's it. As you showed in this video, they really don't care about the new player experience. IF they had, you would have known that you could have opened more than one skill hotbar. Sometime around 2010 they made a "golden path" that was supposed to guide new players through the game, but it was never "official" and nothing was really implemented to guide you to it. The starting area that you picked was one of the two original starting areas (the other was the exact same map, but with evil). Those two starting areas were actually removed from the game later on in favor of Frostfang Sea (which you visited, not a huge fan of it but it's level 1 to level 20 for new good players), and Timorous Deep (added in what is my opinion the last good expansion, Rise of Kunark). Also, the evil faction is more popular in this game than the good faction. I always figured (and heard from several others) that it's because the layout of Freeport is better than Qeynos. Most of your qualms with the game were added way later on. A lot more of your complaints could have easily been remedied if the new developers actually cared about pulling new people in, and improved the old areas. But there's no incentive to do that, because all the current players have been playing for years now, and any new players are brought in because of those old players and they just buy the max level boost. Everquest 2 was amazing for many years. Especially after the acquisition of SOE by DBG, the game quality fell to the wayside in favor of "hehe big number go up". The story (as loose as it is) is so convoluted now and ingrained in the cities, that even on timelocked servers that have only the first expansion unlocked, the npcs will mention events that haven't happened yet (like the NPCs in the main cities mentioning how happy they are that Luclin is whole again, but that doesn't happen for many, many expansions). The mechanics have changed so much since beginning, that even with the timelocked servers, you aren't getting the original experience. Everquest 2 occupied a large part of my childhood, even into my teenage years. I'll always remember it for what it was, and always lament it for what it has become. I started on the PvP server Venekor, which eventually got merged into the PvP server Nagafen, which eventually merged with non-PvP servers when they shut down PvP totally (they didn't want to balance their classes because hehe big number go up). Now the PvP servers you can play now are timelocked to the first expansion (Desert of Ro). The server population is usually pretty high when these PvP servers start, but fall off almost completely before the second expansion ever unlocks. (They also pander to a core number of higher end players on the PvP server, causing further balance issues, but that's a gripe for another comment). This video made me feel a lot of emotions. It was a game that I felt very passionately about for a long time, and I got to witness its decline first-hand. Rest in piece, EQ2. Also, as in EQ1, Qeynos, the good city, is SonyEQ spelled backwards.
Had a blast playing this when it first launched. Only because my friends switched to WoW I eventually made the jump as well. When I came back to EQ2 several years later, I couldn't find that same feeling again, the game had changed. Faster, easier leveling, streamlined, stripped from it's uniqueness. Sad story really.
EQ2 was legendary. My computer physically couldn't handle I still, but I still played it as a wee lad. It still holds some serious real estate in my mind to this day.
WoW basically caused those changes to the whole mmo market it was so sad to watch all the unique challenging mmos get turned into streamlined WoW clones. Really just murdered the creativity of a whole industry by being so commercially successful.
@@BarnsHolledayArt. This is really only half of the problem. The truth is, WOW was partially so successful due to timing alone. The MMO genre today is partially dead because the internet is now much better developed. Back then, you still had a world to explore and a game to learn. You didn't know if a quest chain would give you a good reward or not, so you did it anyways. Now, MMOs are kind of pointless. Why bother making a big world with crafting skills and such if everybody is already in the endgame because they can just look up a guide and know everything about the game in a matter of hours? So now everyone just makes a mad dash to max level while playing the strongest race/class combo there is and turn the game from an interesting world to explore and inhabit to a set of boring exercises with a completely predictable outcome. The truth is, the players are their own worst enemy. They want to "win" above all else. So the developers streamline and overbalance the game, and we get another sterile experience.
As someone with far too many hours spent in that game... honestly for me the biggest thing that ruined the game was that the devs threw the baby out with the bathwater almost every time they tried to fix anything.
If they had just stayed true to what made EQ2 unique it would still be alive. Like who asked for instanced battlegrounds in eq2? They just kept chasing WoW and ruining what made it special.
So here is something hilarious. This game actually has a lot of big voice actors in it. Including Invader Zim's who voices a Gnome in the Wailing Caves (good beginner dungeon in The Commonlands) Definetly my favorite MMO.
They probably send way too much money on that but its cool wow did not have much voice acting back in vanilla it became more common later on in tbc more raid bosses had voice acting then in wrath you had a few cutscenes and all the bosses had voice acting in cata there was a lot of voice acting in the leveling quests too and there was even more in mop and wod but that is a long time after 2004.
It was a fabulous mmo in it's time. I picked it up just after its first expansion released, and I played it solidly for the next 5 expansions. It had a great player base then. The content was worth doing, and it came out pretty fast, all newer versions of lore from EQ1. Oh and the grython flight you took was a bad example. That mechanic was a later one added. Catch an old grython flight path in other zones and you do get the epic sweeping views as you cross a zone. It just doesn't have the seamless travel between zones like WoW does. But yeah it slowly died a death. About the time it went free to play, shortly after Sony Online Entertainment became Darkpaw games. The team shrank and so did the work quality sadly. I still have fond memories, of years of Epic loot and 5 mansions full of stuff to show I did it all. Tackling the sun gods in desert of flames. Soaring to flying islands in the kingdom of sky. Claiming my epic weapon hidden in Veeshan's Peak. Guarded by dragons of course, hidden in the isles of Kunark. Sadly I've lost the account details lol Yeah WoW did things better. But for a smaller crowd EQ2 was pretty damn epic for a few years, and did things a little differently. I still fondly remember the seasonal events, and the superb guide recruitment program they had. Players could apply to be ingame guides. I was one for a few years, Rohar my ingame persona who answered player questions, gave out goodies, and ran scripted lore stories for players to gain more goodies too. It was a lot of fun. And it made the game richer. I wish games did it now. I loved EQ2.
My wife and I used to play Everquest 2, it was one of the only video games I could get her into 🤣 it was very new player friendly, and she was a beast at playing the auction house. Every year we reinstall it to go to to Frostfell.
I played EQII from launch until about 2010. I loved my time on there. It was more than a game, it was a social experience. I made so many friends and we spent hours slowly slogging through instances and camping mobs. I tried everything I could from just spending an entire day expoloring maps, to crafting, to dungeon crawling, and even did raiding in a top guild. I loved my time on there, and really felt passion from the devs. So many quest lines, so much lore, the details in the different areas (I miss you Nektropos castle). And of course the music was stellar. I watched the game transform from a social experience where finding a group and spending the entire night with them on vent was the norm turn into a WoW clone with dungeon finder. That's why I quit. But I do from time to time think back fondly on the years I spent in Norrath. (funny easter egg. The main "good" city, Qeynos is "Sony EQ" backwards)
EQ2 was absolutely badass when I played from about 2006 - 2009. PVP on the Nagafen server was INTENSE and before they started nerfing certain scout abilities (like point-blank arrow, which had a knock-back effect that let you yeet people off of cliffs) I absolutey loved playing. The Kunark expansion was the height of EQ2 much like Velious was the height of EQ1. I had a great time on the giant maps the Kunark expansion offered, not to mention the raid content was amazing.
I played on Vox before Naggy and loved the PvP. The PvP during Kunark/Shadow Odyssey in Kylong Plains was unreal. Orrrr way back, flying from griffon station to griffon station in Antonica battling it out with raids of Freeps and Q's was epic. Haven't had an experience like that in a game since.
I played on nektulos server back when it had soul shards if you died. Fallen gate with a bad group was a nightmare if they pulled a whole room and got you squashed. Then they got rid of that merged with guk and soon after I stopped playing in Aug of 2013 and only recently logged in to see what was up. All my characters had been their names butchered.
@@Nakasasama yeh same thing happened to me, they got rid of PVP servers entirely and I got merged into some random server and my characters name had an “_” with a random word after it
@valcaron that’s actually a really awesome idea. And something that is totally explorable nowadays with game dev engines/IDEs like UE5. There’s actually a UA-cam channel Where someone is taking assets from original EverQuest and dropping them into unreal engine, and it looks pretty amazing. Basically making “EverQuest unreal”.
Oh man, I played this hard when it launched. The EQ2 website used to keep a kind of leaderboard/progression tracking, so you could pull up your character profile. When I hit 50 (initial level cap), it said I was the 4th one to hit max on my server for my class. After that, with like no initial raid content, I ended up jumping ship to WoW, which my wife had started playing. Have some fond memories running guildies through fabled item quests like jboots, but don't remember much beyond that anymore.
Great video, only nitpick would be that they do in fact use actual fantasy names for things, but the few things you ran into that were different, were actually sub-species type things. Drakota aren't dragons, they were made by dragons, and the grobins are just the goblins of that region.
as a little kid who couldn't afford WoW (and i literally got scared of it because of all those addiction stories) I remember finding a free demo of EQ2 maybe a year or so later after its release. First what impressed me that the office pc rig which my dad had could actually run this game pretty well and for me it looked GAT DAMN INSANELY GOOD. Second thing i started as a fairy in this mushroom world which was impressive and huge. I loved th mechanic of the fairy being able to glide down when jumping from a hight. So instead of running to the quest-enemies I climed this huge tree and glided down to their location, avoiding other enemy encounters. I think the limit of the demo was lvl 12 and it blew me away how many things, questsand platforming there were to do just to reach this level alone. And the thought about what else is there to explore made me very interested... I played it the whole day deep into the night and enjoyed it a lot... which made me even more scared of WoW... Neither had money for EQ2 too xD
My entire guild from EverQuest 1 jumped ship to play this stupid game. You needed a NASA computer to run it. I was using a toaster. SO I went to WoW instead. Did give it a try years later, with a better PC. It has some fun points, but after Daybreak took over it just got worse and worse.
LOL Seriously dude, I begged my family to buy a new PC for EQ2... which we did, and it fucking ran at like 15fps. This is one huge reason WoW did so well. It could run on any PC. My new comp at the time ran WoW at 30frames easily.
@@sweetfry "This is one huge reason WoW did so well." This must be the most underrated factor in wow's rise and fall ever. I could literally only play wow with my toaster at the time-didn't even need a download. Nowadays you need state of the art tech to run it at all.
@@archvaldor Wow? its not that bad nowadays either, if you dont raise the graphics, which we never did on our toasters either. I have a fairly middle of the ground pc and wow runs at ultra graphics..
I miss this feeling of those early 2000s games. Being young and having a bunch of time to explore this virtual world in a genre that was relatively young. You could tell they put in more gamedev effort back then, good times.
As you probably figured out by now EQ2 was released with multiple starting areas. The city you were in was the human starting area, the enchanted forest area was the fairy/elf starting area, the ice area was the starter area for the Barbarians, and so on, including multiple starting areas inside of each faction (good or evil). Then they decided to chuck it all and make the starter island for all players to start in, both good and evil (and doing it like multiple games, starting with a shipwreck). Once out of these "starter zones" you get the normal point progression. WoW would go on the use that type of business model of creating multiple DLCs to be released around the same time as other games. Only to store them away for when the next big "WoW Killer" came along releasing them close the the other games' release date. Even though it is getting long in the teeth, WoW probably still has 2 or 3 DLCs waiting in the wings for the next big game to come out to drop them on. I always come back to EQ2. I was one of those people who waited till midnight to buy the game by being snuck into the back door of a Gamestop. I play it off and on for about 3 months out of every year. I have 12 characters all around level 60+. I am one of those gamers who find enjoyment in playing every class in the game simultaneously and being the best at that class no matter how many years it takes me.
im told that practice with dlc's/exp packs was killed off by current management, they have vague ideas and outlines at best for what they could rush into production in a pinch, and just work on the next exp pack as they previous ones ready for launch takig time from work on the next for debugging as needed, mostly this is due to the managment that caused the recent massive firing after MS bought the company.. at least im hearing MS are reaching out to people let go who they want back and offering them jobs as they re-staff studios and restructure them, one fellow i know is getting to move back where he and his wife grew up and making more working from home then he was working for blizzard, with way lower cost of living, hes quite happy with the result, also hes moving from being a "Grunt with a title" to a manager/lead whos getting to form his team from those they hire and he got input on who to bring back from his former coworkers. anyway, i know alot of people who come back to eq and eq2, the only other one i see people come back to and stick around to play for any extended time is ESO...
This video makes me sad. There seems to be a very fun game here, but one that never got the chance to really shine. That, and the fact that the social part of MMO's has kind of died off. I wish I had a chance to experience the older generation of MMORPGs in their prime as I find their slower, more methodical gameplay loops and focus on exploration and social activities enticing.
The game is still going, Josh relies on broken stupid metrics to gauge a game. The majority of EverQuest 2, and EverQuest, don't play on steam. EQ1 still gets 10k players on peak, EQ2 is around 4500.
Have you tried ESO? It’s not an exact match for the good ol’ days of FFXI and EQ, but it’s definitely more exploration-focused, go at your own pace, pick your own alignment and define your own journey. Combat’s not the greatest, but it still scratches that nostalgic itch when I get tired of other modern MMOs’ rush to endgame treadmill approach.
A friend of mine used to tell me in the late 90s about how these PC games called "MMOs" were on the "internet" and that people would hang out, group together, have adventures, kill enemies, and make friends all through a video game. I was amazed, the first thing I wanted to do if I ever got the "internet" was to play one of these games. Around 2004 I got my first PC, started Runescape and... I was underwhelmed. I bought WoW... once again, underwhelmed. I tried a dozen and none of them stuck. To this day I think I have my most hours in FFXIV and that's only because I had unrelated reasons to play it.
The best times I did have in MMOs however were when I had at least one friend to play with synchronously (ie; only playing together). Any other arrangement is like watching paint dry.
EQ2 was incredible. Some of the best co-op play I ever experienced was a team of three of us. A Paladin, a Druid, and Battle Priest (Cleric). We as a team of three, could cover places that normally took a group of 6. Was great. Then the other two, a husband/wife team, quit EQ2 and it went back burner as I could never find that caliber of players again.
Same Here, i played everey time with one or three People and we have so mutch fun. But then they left and it wasnt the same anymore. Slowly the Guild decayed.
@@damiion666 Maturity doesn't think that way. If they were interested, they would have invited. Besides, these are people online. I do not know them in person and therefore would have no interest in such. Attraction only takes place via articulation which requires in person interaction.
Played at launch and loved the hardcore grouping nature of the game. The accomplishments felt bigger. After WoW started eating EQ2's lunch, SOE just started copying whatever Blizzard was doing... but obviously not as well. A recipe for disaster. They tried to change, when they should have doubled down.
Ditto, I second that. Ended on Nagafen server when it went free to play. Game died. Got filled with billies wanting an easy win. Starting saying it was "too hard" so they dumbed it down like WoW and made it to where you could buy a max lvl character at teh start. They killed it just like SWG was killed. Remeber when becoming a Jedi meant somthing? Then boom...everyone can be a jedi just at character select...doesnt mean anything anymore. In fact, its a slap in the face to everyone who dedicated 100s of hours in order to accomplish such a feat. Just like in EQ2 and having a max character. Now its means nothing.
To be fair the game did succeed for many years. it wasn't until microtransactions were introduced that the playerbase dropped. That was when I quit. I used to raid with a big guild. 12 years of my life and probably a thousand dollars sunk into expansion packs and subscription fees... And I'm not even playing it anymore...
Imagine how some of us feel that jumped on multiple big bandwagons - EQ2, WoW, SWOTR, Wildstar... I don't even want to think about how much $$ I've lost over the last 20 years - all to games that I can't replay for more $$, assuming that it's even recognizable after years of updates.
I like to think about how much fun I have had compared to the money I have spent. There a very few things that you buy and last a life time. I would say 12 years of hopefully mostly enjoyable play time is well worth roughly a thousand dollars. I kind of think about it like going to a movie. Is spending 10 dollars for 2 to 3 hours of enjoyment worth it. Most of the times yes. I did the same thing with WoW spent 10 years of my life playing that game and ended up quitting because I don't like the direct the game has gone but I do not regret for a moment the time and money I spent playing it because for the most part I really enjoyed the experience at the time.
@@randzopyr1038 swtor is actually still relatively similar to how it was at launch. Ofcourse with power creep. But it doesn't play that different. Like current wow does compared to vanilla
That part where you were talking on Empty/abandoned cities with their own NPCs and stories being forgotten reminds me of Accursed Farms's video on a mapping software that not only preserves old and dead game's maps and cities but also could help them be re-imagined into something new. Fantastic video I believe you'd enjoy it. Plus also he makes a good point on games as as service being basically fraud as the devs/studio can just kill the game by shutting down the servers regardless of how much money you put into it.
Love the video, and as a fellow swashbuckling froglock, I respect your choice in Character creation. A few side notes, Griffin flight was sooo cool when they added it, not all zones had a loading screen when flying by so you get that sweeping landscape as you ride, some of the paths had swooping animations and went through different landmarks, it was fun to not have to run everywhere. Secondly, I always liked the difficulty, from tutorial island there are a few harder bosses I could solo if I wanted(That damned shark off the coast did kill me a few times), and even in the later dungeons/instanced zones they scaled to whether you were in a party or not. Granted, I played with my father when I was a teenager, but I would like to think I'd be better at playing now than then, plus he had a guild to run, was triboxing at some points, and I'd be off doing my own thing.
Everquest 2 was an awesome game. Played it for years. It had (has?) one of the best player housing systems ever - they kept adding new houses and guild housing and furniture. It was a lot of fun decking your place out and visiting other players homes to see what they had done. There were a few balance issues at launch, and they had to do a rework fairly early on, but the gamme kept a sizable population for years, so I wouldn't call it a failure. It just wasn't WoW - but then, Everquest was never truly king of the hill either: that title always belonged to Lineage.
I loved the first Evercrack. Had a blast until some in-game "GM" changed my name IN GAME and told me my name violated their world's "lore". I had a high level monk class named Atomicmental. Dude told me that "atoms" hadn't been discovered yet so he changed my name. 😂😂😂. Needless to say my Evercrack addiction was solved immediately. I tried 2 years later but the magic was long gone.
@@pinktaco4937 Cancel culture doesn't exist obviously but I get it. Someone needed to flex their authority and did so. The game moved on without me and life continued. Shame but there you have it.
@@lewislovelord8977 Joking? Cancel culture is 100% real. Some dude playing a dark elf female told a GM I called him a blue haired N word. Last MMO I tried was wow classic, it's automated now, wanted a free name change so had my guild report it but your enemies do the same.
@@pinktaco4937 Naw. 100% of "cancelled" people are still active in their professions one way or another OR they've moved on to some new thing in life due to choices they made. That's disgusting, what happened to you though. People are petty as hell.
@@lewislovelord8977 Um...that doesn't make cancel culture not real. It just means being cancelled doesn't mean your life is over. Cancel culture isn't new and has been around longer then you have been breathing. These days it's the hyper sensitive diversity crowd that wants to make sure everything fits their standard. Not long ago it was christian conservatives doing it. TO say it isn't real is just a slogan for ignorant politically brainwashed kids that don't want to admit their "Side" is just as reprehensible as whoever they crusade against.
Heya, one of the EQ2 Trailblazers here. I've been playing the game since its early days and oh boy was it a whole lot of joy. The major problems you discuss here (namely shop) weren't even a thing then - the system was Pay to Play (P2P) and everyone was having the world of it. Each zone had its own que of music, the player base was vast and it even had some punches to exchange with WoW. But, unfortunately, SOE completely numbed the balance and their power creep issue, which lead to the game's slow and steady death. The F2p and shop were introduced years later - just to try to get new people on board, but the game was at its inevitable death state anyways. I could go on for hours why the game worked back in the days and way it was a whole fairytale of experience, but trust me on this one - it was fun and worth the investment. But up to a point. Also, this is subjective, but raids complexity was cool, but probably was one of the main reasons why the game died (high entry ceiling).
Everquest 1 was my first MMO and I still have amazingly fond memories of it. The coldain ring war for my monk, getting my Monk epic in Kunark, raiding Temple of Veeshan, traveling to the moon, fighting Gods in the Planes of Power. When EQ2 and WoW were announced, it split our raiding guild hard. It split the entire player base. I ended up playing WoW with my close friends for years and while I remember enjoying WoW, I can't recall many memories from it like I did in EQ1. I might just have my Rose tinted glasses on, but it was a huge part of my gaming life.
As someone who still plays EQ on one of the progression servers, I will say that you are definitely wearing rose colored glasses on the ring war. It's like 2 hours of kill and wait boredom. Source: Did it a few months ago when my server hit Velious.
Everyone tells me it's rose tinted glasses but I still play on the project 1999 servers and have a great time with the velious locked servers. I'm excited for the next progression server they drop since it progresses in the same real-time as the original launch. Even prenerf items can be gathered by the poop sock enthusiasts. Come check out P99 if you want to see if it's Rose tinted or not. If you see a Carnassius Bloodjaw (green and blue) on send me a message, I can get you some newbie gear.
EQ went down hill when it tried to be like WOW. I played for 7 years. I tried playing WOW for a couple of years, it was just too easy and the player base was just too toxic.
We were so excited when this came out, thinking it would be EQ but with better graphics. Instead, we got a game that was clunkier and more restrained. The fact that your character SLOWED DOWN when you entered combat to prevent kiting was enough for me.
this is a huge gripe for me in swtor too, the second you're in range of an enemy your movement speed is cut to 30% so you cant escape forcing you to engage in every single bit of combat the game has between objectives, even on a mount it slows you down enough to get hit then kicked off it.
My mind has also just been blown by the concept that some games slow the player character down upon aggro just so players can’t kite mobs. I’m astonished that any Dev would think that’s a great idea and none of the others corrected him/her. Kiting is a valid fight strategy especially for players like me who always tend towards mage classes. Often I’m so squishy that I need to kite to survive or avoid the boredom of having to cast a healing spell every few hits. My other favoured mage tactic is to go with a mage class that has the ability or choice to have a familiar or pet if it’s capable of tanking for me. That’s why I chose the mage class in ESO and made good use out of the conjuration skill. In FF14 that was one of the factors that led me down the path of becoming a Summoner for solo content and Scholar for group content and that’s how I learnt that I absolutely love being the healer in that game. So much so that I unlocked Conjurer progressing into white mage. I have to admit I don’t like what was done to Smn during the Endwalker release. While I did think it needed simplifing and adjusting I don’t like what it was changed to. No Egi primal pets accompanying me and worse Carbuncle doesn’t actually help me by fighting at my side. Instead it just follows me around and only does anything when I transform it into an Egi for the single strike power attacks. Instead I must now rely on my chocobo for tanking when not in solo duties. I specced him into the tank skill tree. Fortunately though the class still works out as DPS and I still enjoy the lore around it. And yet I’m also tempted to give red or black mage classes a try. But yeah I tend to kite a bit more than I used to because I no longer have Titan to semi tank for me, or even use Ifrit or Garuda to help me kill mobs quickly. A shame really.
I actually use to be one of the Guides in EQ2. It was a ton of fun hosting role playing events on a non-role play server. People really got into it because of the prizes you could get from it. I -really- miss those days. I'm still salty about EQ Next not being released, and Landmark being taken down even though they said they wouldn't do that.
@@biblehistoryscience3530 Oh that's just ridiculous. I was lucky to win a package from a streamer, so if I'm annoyed by that I can only imagine how people that actually bought into it feel.
33:20 "MMORPGs in a modern era need to cater for solo players." Bingo. Well-said. This is the most important point that I have been trying to hammer into the skulls of the development staff of almost every MMORPG that I have played ever since approximately 2006, when I first started playing another online gaming title, "Final Fantasy XI Online" (I had previously played "EverQuest for Macintosh," my first true MMORPG, in 2005). As a solo player myself, I am happy to hear someone finally to make this statement in a nutshell. Compared to other MMORPGs that I play, "EverQuest II" is not terribly solo-friendly. Specifically, the game overall feels more of a grind than many other similar modern titles, and as you pointed out, the maps, although enormous, feel relatively sparse compared to other titles. One pet peeve of mine toward "EverQuest II" in particular is the lack of sensitivity of the development staff toward the needs of solo players--especially those interested in role-play. For example, back in 2017, Daybreak released the "Planes of Prophecy" expansion pack. One of the perks contained in the Collector's Edition (then available for $89.99 USD) and Premium Edition (then available for $139.99 USD) of that expac was a prestige house, "Sprocket's Interlocking Plane." As a Gnome, I was extremely interested in this house, which was essentially a pair of steampunk-style buildings that could be used as houses placed on a platform floating high in the sky. Unfortunately, I was unable to afford the house initially, and did not know that the price would decrease the following September; therefore, I only purchased the Standard Edition (then available for $34.99 USD). When I later learned, after the release of the next expansion pack, that the editions containing my desired house had become affordable the next September, I was heartbroken. Immediately, I posted a message on the official forums (see forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/acquiring-past-clockwork-themed-bonus-items-in-pop-expac.594858/) requesting that this house, together with other related items, be made available during the in-game Tinkerfest festival; however, my post did not receive any response from the developers, and as of July 2022, 5 years after the release of the expac, it has not yet been made available. This situation forced me to consider changing my character race to High Elf, only to encounter a different problem: For some reason, the homeland of the High Elf race, Felwithe (renamed to "New Tunaria"), is not a player city. Instead, it is a dungeon area. This means that High Elves, who are traditionally an arrogant race proud of their heritage, have become refugees, forced to live among others whom they do not enjoy living together with in a foreign city. Someone even posted a message, "High Elf Homes 'URGENT' REQUEST" (see archive.eq2wire.com/showthread.php?p=5063224), desperately requesting a dedicated housing area for the High Elf race, on a non-official forum board, back in 2009, 13 years ago. However, this situation has yet to be remedied. Annoyances such as these seriously detract from the role-playing experience. I have always dreamed of role-playing a mad scientist in an online universe. In terms of "EverQuest II," this means that I initially wanted to be a Gnome fascinated with Clockwork gadgets and steampunk-themed housing; however, my dream house, "Sprocket's Interlocking Plane," seems to have no hope of ever becoming available again; worse, my fallback option, becoming a High Elf, has also been derailed because of lack of a dedicated High Elf player city, which is taken for granted in every other MMORPG that I currently play where the High Elf race is playable. On many occasions, I have seriously considering abandoning "EverQuest II" altogether in order to forget about this nightmare; however, I do happen to like the Clockwork Calamity illusion that allows my character to assume the countenance of the Clockwork Calamity, as well as the "Dok-Tok Mk III" mercenary, a tinkered equalizer clockwork mercenary. Most other MMORPGs periodically re-offer past expansion pack reward items for at least limited durations to players in a similar predicament; however, Daybreak does not do this. Instead, I read on the official forums that it seems that they are afraid to sell the editions of past expansion packs containing reward items because they feel that players might expect them to be discounted, and they do not with to offer them for a discount permanently. Therefore, instead of offering them for a discount, they simply do not offer them at all. Strangely, they do not seem to realize that in doing so, they risk permanently losing paid subscribers for lack of necessary in-game items to enhance their play experience. Dissatisfied, frustrated players are much less likely to maintain paid subscriptions than happy players, and it is difficult to be a happy player if in-game items essential to an expected play experience are deliberately made unavailable for the sake of maximizing developer profit.
I've tried to get into it occasionally over the years and thankfully got some free level 80s in a promotion, so I can play several characters at high level. I love the huge number of abilities you get in EQ2 compared to WoW after the ability pruning, but the lack of funds and thus lack of updating the client to improve usability and responsiveness was really telling every time I tried it.
I always did like how EQ2 had more of a "priority" of abilities rather than "rotation." Any idea of having some 6-10 abilities cycle through was unheard and the games GCD was MUCH lower than most, 0.5 or lower in most cases.
This one is gonna hurt. I by far put the most hours into this mmo and its like home. It just never had the casual appeal of WoW and WoW milked that hard advertising to a much broader audience and nailing it. The graphic requirements made it hard to bring a lot of friends in cause low settings meant pudding face but at the high end it was such a beautiful game. The crafting was deep and had its own storylines and quests and heritage equipment. It was an amazing experience for so many years. The holidays were so unique and fit the universe you could decorate your home and do so much to make this game your home away from the real world. It's a shame to even call the current dumpster fire everquest 2 cause its just a cash grab for the last few years sadly...oof my teenage self is crying over this one... Honestly dont know why they let you start as a new player in the Queens island still. New Halas and TImorous Deep give a much better 1-20 experience than the rest. The goblins are still goblins they just have local names based on tribes... grobin... runnyeye... etc That's a weird example of how the griffons normally work... Usually they travel within a zone but yeah that one is kinda weird... There used to be boats for area changes like that but I guess waiting for boats was deemed too hard so you got a lot of add ins like this to make it simpler to travel directly. If Everyquest 2 had focused on what made it special instead of trying to be mediocre WoW. It would be fine till this day. It had a great population for many years. People were in every zone. People were grouping constantly. They just completely nuked the population in last few years with blatant cash grabs. The fact that you can't steamroll the content on any class is what made it special. You either struggled or you picked a solo friendly class to start. Summoners/tanks/some healers could all do this content no problem. The others required more thought and prep and that was why older mmos were so great. Not everything ironed out for you and when you figured out how to overcome those challenges the rewards were amazing. Last time I seriously played this game was the Race to Trakanon event... no lifed the game for three months with some buddies ... was first healer to 80 on the server our tank was first on server to 80 ... honestly was great nostalgia ... then we discovered they hadn't even bothered to make sure the epic weapons for each class were updated with current stats or any stats in some cases along with most other equipment from raids etc... so the main goal of killing Trakanon was a disaster. Daybreak DOES NOT care anymore skip this game even if you see some glimmer of value in this video it dies quickly I promise. Wow. I never comment on youtube videos but this is getting me so worked up. It was such a good game for many years and I have many many beautiful memories with friends. RIP eq2.
WoW did that thing to where waiting for the boat was deemed to hard and 'time consuming' so they implemented gryphons. A couple of areas you still hit a loading screen due to it. Thankfully, there are still boats in the game and skipping between Kalimdor/EK you still have you use it a low levels, though this may have changed in retail as I haven't played in a while. I do remember that the Mage tower has portals to everywhere now but it is by level I believe, or it once was. I do get the complaints when they were about the boat from Menethil Harobr to Northend. That one always took a long time - if you just missed it you were in for a long wait. Having messed around on their Classic servers, I haven't found going back and forth between the continents a hinderance, it's been nice especially seeing people on the boat with me. It's pretty sad that half of the problems with MMORPG's are caused by poor implementation/foresight and the other half are caused by attempting to try to gain the 'casual' crowd, casual meaning here the ones who claim they have no time to play because they have 'lives'. I've never understood why people who don't want to invest time in a time intensive game play such a game - they'd rather just spend money to skip playing the game. And that money is shiney, which companies go after, even though it skewers the game longterm. Those people aren't going to stay and your actual core-audience is going to get frustrated and leave when anything they've worked at is pretty much invalidated by someone with a credit card or worse, they can't even invest the time without spending loads of cash.
@@Amoreyna That is one of the greatest mysteries. Why do so many people who don't seem to enjoy primary mmo mechanics want to play mmos? MMOs used to be immersive social experiences and we blame a change in the internet as a whole but all my old MMO buddies are still looking for that immersive social experience. The market has just decided to shape itself for a group of players who seem to hate everything that makes an mmo an mmo. There are so many co-op/ competitive games that people can hop in and get instant action but instead people play mmos ... complain everything is too slow as they rush to end game ignoring hundreds of hours of content. It's just frusturating lol While you wait for that boat, you used to message friends and look at your skills and all that other stuff that made you more connected to the world you were in. Even the current mmos I consider pretty good feel hollow compared to original everquest.
You two are reminiscing over maybe 10% of players who play mmos. Most have more than enough time. Like time to hop off your nostalgia train it’s blinding you
@@BarnsHolledayArtprogression servers might be the thing for you. We can relive eq1 and eq2 quite close to how they were. It is as close as we can get until pantheon releases.🙂
When EQ2 first came out it was VERY fun and exceded expectation. I feel WoW and the cult that followed was it's primary downfall. I enjoyed EQ2 over original WoW no doubt about it, but even I felt forced to switch over to WoW due to it being where all the friends were.
3:46 the frog was teased as a locked race at the beginning of EQ2. Much later it still hadn't been unlocked but the devs said 'the community just hadn't found the unlock yet'. Lies. Later they unlocked it and a huge patch resulted because the frog hadn't been fully implemented.
Well, that was sad. I played it from Release in a succesful raid guild, but somehow I couldnt resist wow pre burning crussade. It just was a masterpiece.
I knew this video was coming some day... this is bringing up a lot of memories. Especially the sound design, since that's been changed the least. I used to play this game with my dad all the time when I was young... and then daybreak acquired it and we both fell off. At least I'll always have those memories of bonding with him, I guess. My favorite class was the beast tamer one, don't quite remember what it was called.
I remember playing this y'know... In the first two weeks. Picking an 'evil' race in the Iksar but being able to do a series of quests to be on the 'good' side always stuck with me, like picking a Tauren but being able to do a quest to play Alliance, I thought it was really cool. Oh also the infamous /pizza emote that was tied in to actually order pizza from Domino's or Pizza Hut via the game so you never, ever have to stop playing 🤣
Everquest was the very first MMO I ever played when I was 11 with Shadow of Luclin. I remember my first character, it was a human magician named Rayor and then I discovered the Vah Shir and made a warrior. God those days I longed for in my MMOs when you actually had to talk to people, ask a druid or Beastlord for the SOW buff every chance you got, and just overall a positive experience in terms of actual gaming community...some days those days would come back a little...
Other than the performance, I still think of this as the best MMO ever made. The class system was incredible. When you blended the classes right to form a raid party, everything snapped together like a puzzle. It was beautiful. I played an illusionist, which, to this day, is the most interesting class I've played in any game.
I played this when it still had people playing it, before it turned free to play and it was really fun then.. It's so sad to see games like these slowly die. I remember it had such fun things to do, there was an in-game card game you could claim free booster packs for every once in a while and if you got lucky with it some card packs had loot cards for goodies in game like mounts and stuff. There were languages to learn for almost every monster race in game so at first you only could see weird symbols if they talked to you but later you could learn their language and understand them. The housing system was amazing, I've seen so many creative things..
There are still people playing it and we use the Daybreak launcher not Steam. The game has a limited free option so called f2p but no sane person would play the game for real this way, its a taster really, the game is still a subscription based. 🙂
The original EQ2 soundtrack was composed by Laura Karpman. All of the areas from the original release have her songs. After growing up playing the game, its by far and away my favorite soundtrack of anything ever. Everything Karpman touched in that game was magical. More recently, she did the soundtracks for Lovecraft Country and Marvel's What If...?
Loved EQ2 back in the day - still has my favorite housing system of any MMO - especially when combined with the woodworking profession. Had a blast with a gnome illusionist. Was so bummed when it got absolutely spanked by WoW. Would love to find a current MMO with a similar housing system. Fun fact I'm pretty sure this is the game that blew the power supply in my first ever "gaming" computer that I built :D Never mix a pentium 4 and a cheap PSU haha.
I just want to take a moment to say explicitly that "dashing rogue" absolutely fits your character based on all the videos of yours I've binged recently.
I just started playing it and making an entire Let's Play Series and having a blast. Sure it's not perfect, but then again no MMO is or I would not be playing EQ2 right now lol.
I burned out on the theme park aspect of EQ2 in probably 6-8 months or so. I ended up going back to EQ1 for a time, but Planes of Power just completely sucked the soul out of EQ1 and I lost interest in the whole franchise. But looking back, that first year of EQ2 was still better than almost every other MMO I've tried since then. Whatever soul was lost back then has only continued to trickle out of the whole gaming industry (except indie games of course). When you get done with your EQ2 retrospective, you should take one more step back and check out Project1999 (EQ1 before it started sucking).
Love the game, I left EQ1 when this released to have an amazing experience. I wouldnt go by Steam numbers, I use the original launchers. ALSO, my OCD is flipping out that you didnt harvest any of the SHINIES!
The original 2004 EverQuest II will probably forever remain my most favorite MMO. The gathering, the crafting, the housing, the dungeons and some of the quest chains were just great. Also the graphics; I still have fond memories of the rain setting in while I was outside in Qeynos Province. That was some next level immersion. I could never get into WoW after that.
same here. i have such good memories of this game. i think something that really messed it up is that they started to try to be more like WoW at the cost of losing its own personality
I never played EverQuest II on release, WoW was my introduction into this genre. Though after having watched this video, I found myself quite impressed with the character models and animations... especially considering what year this came out.
EQ2 was kind of boring mechanically (lacked the danger and tension of EQ1), but I absolutely loved that you could make your own completely unique home. I basically played just to furnish my gothic horror home. Kind of played it more like the Sims than like EQ1. At the time I was also really in love with the whole cosmetic armor overlay thing, but in retrospect I'm not sure that was a great idea.
@@MaximumCarter Definitely. But it was also one of the game's biggest weaknesses. Even though I had a gaming PC that could run the poorly optimized Lineage II just fine, I had to buy a new GPU just for EverQuest II. I could not even launch the game before that. Even if everything else had been perfect, that alone would probably have made it impossible for EQII to compete with WoW.
Absolutely , i loved this game so much, my absolute favorite mmo ever. The epic long questlines was so much fun " speak as a dragon" etc etc . The crafting and housing was absoluterly masterfull. Combat was so much fun, dungeons that was actually diffucult and a world that was dangerous, very challangeing raids, add to that an amazing "skill tree". I played a Swashbuckler named Inigona Bloodfur for a long long time, loved every second of it!
The skeleton sound is so iconic to me I love the music of everquest 1 and 2. It's a shame that EQ2 is relatively dead. I had so much fun its one of 2 games I've actually gotten into a guild with actually a cool community. Sadly I stopped playing the game around level 42 and when I came back the guild was basically dead after the server merge that removed the PVP server. Great vid so far! (Watching the vid while commenting haha)
I spent way too much time in this game over the years. There's still videos from it on my YT account. It was a blast back then, it was subscription based and no microtransactions, they were slowly added later once it went semi free to play.
i love the ffxiv loading screens because you get vast scenes of the area you are entering or loading into when you get a loading screen. like seeing an aerial view of one of the main cities in the endwalker dlc, or a nice cinematic shot of an area in a dungeon or something.
Watching this video is making me sad, I played this game so much when it came out. Had so much fun with the community, started out as a evil character but decided to betray the evil side. The quest to turn side was hard and required alot of rep grinding to make the other side even let me into the city. Did alot of RP so that made it even more fun, trying to convince other good RP players to help me. It was such a fun time, amazing stories from the game and community, its sad to see how it have died.
I always come back to this game, you're spot on with WoW really killing it on launch back in 04. I suggest coming back and trying the new classic server called Varsoon sometime this May. Yes you need to pay a subscription, but the game is a million times better without the free to play crappy ads. If you want to see the towns full of people and the chat bursting with conversation, check back in May for sure and give it another chance. Stay away from the free to play model though, it was implemented years ago as a quick cash grab.
There was a lot that was really well done in EQ2. Imagine the old class customizing of early WoW with the complex crafting of early FFXIV plus housing back in 2004! The major factors for EQ2 failing back when it did were the demanding PC requirements pushing people to WoW, the obvious popularity of Warcraft, the difficulty difference between WoW and EQ2, and also just people not wanting to leave EQ1. A lot of the hardcore playerbase from EQ1 was very divided on staying or leaving, breaking many of the top guilds and fracturing the interested playerbase. Since a lot more of the fickle players were the ones who went to EQ2, the shiny land of Azeroth was a pretty easy sell with no death penalty, the mentioned soloability of the game, and what's still just one of the smoothest combat systems out there. The slow death of EQ2 was really showed me the death of the "hardcore" concept of MMO's.
WoW played better. It's as simple as that. Class customization is of zero value. What matters is how your class plays. The further you can get away from hotbar combat, from standing in place waiting for you or the enemy to fall over dead from exhaustion because heavens forbid the hp actually mean something, the more fun and immersive the game will feel. While WoW does have a lot of hotbar combat, it doesn't feel as bad as EQ2's did.
@@GeorgeMonet That's really not it. I'm not sure how you describe WoW as a "less hotbar combat bar game" when it's literally a tab-target MMO. In terms of gameplay, WoW was just a lot more simple. It was tank, dps, healer, with buffers and debuffers built into those 3. EQ2 had dedicated buffing and debuffing classes and a vastly more varied combat system. The MUCH easier combat allowed for a low barrier of entry for people new to the genre at the time, which is why most WoW players started in middle school and high school. It was designed for kids to play. You had more fun because the game catered to you more. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just that it was a very purposeful design choice to make WoW the easy game in a market full of much harder games, hence my comment about EQ2 signaling the death of the hardcore MMO genre.
my friend's dad helped me build a PC specifically for eq2 so I never had any problems with the game performance wise. He was a huge eq1 nerd and he tried getting me and his son into the game. but while I loved the game they didn't as it wasn't enough like eq1
EQ2 was my first MMO, and I really loved it. You had the freedom to level how you wanted at the beginning (didn't want to do quests? Cool, you could just grab a group and grind dungeons all day). Then, with some of the later expansions, they just made it so you had to do the solo quest lines. That's what kind of killed it for me. It just got so tedious, and I spent less time doing the things I enjoyed in the game due to being forced to do the stupid solo quests to level.
I played WoW first and something people don't often appreciate as much about it is how fluid it was, for the time. The controls, the movement, the attacks etc were all quite fluid. I played Everquest 2 *after* already capping a 60 in WoW, and I couldn't play for longer than an afternoon because it felt so janky and clunky in comparison. The same for City of Heroes/Villains, I felt like I was controlling Frankensteins monster (from the movies) compared to the more fluid controls and movement of WoW. Combine that fluidity with the simple, but compelling and appealing 'cartoony' graphics of WoW (despite some seriously dark area's like the Plaguelands) and it's little wonder that WoW took off due to ease of access to more casual players.
It's true that WoW had the fun factor down. There were just so many "hooks" in that game. EQ2 on the other hand, not only did not have a good launch, it really missed the "fun factor", taking itself far too seriously, and painting the world in muted, almost drab, colours. This did change dramatically as time went on, with far more colourful zones, expanded housing options, magnificently varied mounts, etc.
I'm honestly the opposite - didn't notice any lack of fluidity, and I always remap all my controls anyway. I tried WoW for a grand total of 3 or 4 hours in a single day, and concluded that despite it's many flaws EQ2 was better. WoW felt way too casual, over-simplified, lacking skills and abilities, and just felt like a lesser game. So I went back to playing EQ1 instead, because it made me realise that EQ2 was the same when compared to EQ1. The cartooney graphics was one of the many big put offs of WoW for me. And the graphics were meh. I was living in South East Asia at the time though, so we didn't have the issue of "needing high end hardware" - as having a computer that could run it at near max was pretty much normal everywhere.
It was so much easier too, I remember old school raids and the buff lines and fight prep and casualty rates in EQ. Raiding Hate? You’re losing 5-10% on the way in. Die? XP loss gonna wreck your life. Wipe? Gotta camp them clerics. It was hard and unappealing to people who weren’t into it and that’s just raiding. Solo gameplay was wild.. but hey, it made for great stories.
@@BustedThimble Honestly, those stories and experiences is why I played EQ originally. Death had meaning. Content was hard. Preparing and good leadership meant the difference between a smooth run and several wipes. There was always stuff you could improve on or do differently with your character. And things like corpse runs - as much as people like to hate on them, was a mechanic that made challenging content actually enjoyable and feel like an accomplishment, rather than (oh everyone just farms X in zone Y all the time at level Z)
@@iSkateNate This and I think it comes down to preference. EQ2 is the first game that required me to buy a standalone GPU. I couldn't run it at launch for more than like 20 minutes without it freezing. I'm trying to remember what it was, I spent like $125 on it at Circuit City. Not a great GPU, but it did what it needed to do. But once you got EQ2 running it was absolutely fine. Definitely a hardware issue in the beginning; it was tough to run.
As a player that spent thousands of hours playing this game and raiding at the top level from launch through to the Shadow Odyssey, while I agree with many things in this video, I do feel that its important to clarify that unlike most subjects of this series, criticising it for the steam concurrent player count is pretty meaningless for this game, much like the steam concurrent count for Runescape is unrepresentative of its true popularity and playerbase (according steam charts, there are currently only around 4000 Runescape players in the world). The vast majority of long term players of EQ2 use the standalone launcher, which is important to note because original accounts, and those that were not created via steam cannot be converted to or used on the steam client. Not sure that I would wholly agree with all the comparisons to WOW towards the end. While its certainly true that WOW did attract a large percentage of players that might otherwise have played EQ2, I think its important to note that there were many factors that went into this, such as the vastly lower system requirements to even run the game at the time which was a huge barrier to entry for EQ2. At launch the game quite literally had graphics settings labelled to only use them at your own risk as current tech was incapable of running them without massive overclocks or very expensive early iteration SLi GFX builds, and the game was also horribly optimised on top of this and would bring even a relatively high end PC to its knees on anything more than minimum graphics. What WOW did an incredibly good job of, was identifying and then appealing to the lowest common denominator when it came to repetitive gameplay loops that trigger a positive dopemine response, rather than actually having superior overarching gameplay or storytelling, and spreading that appeal to a wider audience that had not played MMO's before. A very high percentage of people that came from other more complex or involved games that preceded it simply bounced off WOW for being way too simplified and moved on to other things (Out of the dozens of MMOs i have played over the years, WOW still holds the impressive distinction of being the single only MMO i couldn't force myself to keep playing long enough to at least get a character to level cap and try the endgame). Certainly very interesting to see that content wise the tutorial boat and island do not appear to have changed at all in any way since 2004, I even remember that first boss fight being a nightmare for anyone trying it solo. First divergence from the original experience seems to be when you arrive in Qeynos. That city used to have NPC voice acting all over that now seems to be disabled. For example, any original player will shudder at the memory of Nathan constantly asking "Have you seen a Gnoll before?" when a player entered his proximity. Such a huge shame to see all the DB coin "convenience" monetization that has been jammed into the game since SOE sold it off. Looks like it has ruined what was once a fantastic experience. Also, even though its wholly unimportant, the complaint that they gave things different names just because bugged me more than it probably should, the Drakota isn't called a dragon because its not a dragon. Drakota are lesser dragonkin, and are mostly just bipedal drones under the control of a greater dragon. Actual dragons (at least in the Everquest universe) are generally far larger, intelligent, and also always quadrupeds.
I paused the video when he did the Steam count and was contemplating commenting but saw you already did. I think most players of EQ and EQ2 play with their own standalone launchers, not the Steam version. Same with DDO. I know it's available through Steam, but I play with it's own launcher.
All great points, just to add another thing to your excellent comment, I never had any issues with music, sound or speech from various NPC's in Qeynos. Might have been a glitch or issue with Josh's installation as the music and ambience has always been fantastic.
I was going to make a similar comment. I watched this video while I was raiding on the Mangler server and at the time there was over 300 people online just on that one server out of a dozen servers or so.
The housing for its time was phenomenal IMO. A very robust furnishing system, plus guild bases. People could do amazing stuff with the housing and it paved the way for some of the better modern housing systems. The crafting was good too. Could have been better, but being more than "Just spam the craft button" was a nice change. I do think removing the interdependence between crafting trades almost completely was a mistake, though it needed some serious toning down from the original incarnation. I did like the multi step process of making the parts before the final product.
I have tried many MMORPGs and to this day, I still think EQ2 has the best housing experience of them all. Menus are smooth, items can be leaned, rotated and resized, and you have tons of items slots per house. Add to this the dungeon creator and flexible creative systems, like custom books, and you are golden.
And there's a dedicated population of professional decorators who would showcase their designs in-game; there was also a sizeable economy for "contractors" to decorate player homes and guild halls.
And EQ2 housing has only gotten better over time. I agree, games like ESO "think" that the offer good player housing, but it doesn't even come close to EQ2.
I have so many fond memories of this game. I basically lost my life to it on release and stayed on it for years. It's kind of nice to see the game again but also saddening to see how it's been hollowed out in the name of money.
In original Everquest, there was no clickable, highlighted text - there were words in [square brackets]. Say the NPC was talking about a quest involving orc bandits. You would "hail" the NPC by typing h while the NPC was selected. This would cause "Hail, NPC Name" to appear in the /say channel. If the NPC had something to say and was interested in you (through having high enough faction standing) the NPC would respond. It might say, "Some [orc raiders] stole my [hat]." You would then respond with a phrase, typed into the /say channel, that would include the phrase in square brackets - most commonly "/say what hat," but the sometimes the response could be anything including the words in square brackets, and sometimes the response could be _highly_ esoteric (one quest prompt I remember being "you are one but two. your vengeance shall find a home"). If the NPC replied to your response, you would be given some more information about the quest, usually being told what was required to turn in to complete the quest. If the NPC did _not_ respond, it (usually) meant that your faction standing was not high enough to complete the quest. Note that in no sense were you "given" a quest: you did not have to accept it, and no record of any kind was made. You could go and do the quest if you wanted, which would be completed when and if you returned to the NPC with the required items. So quests in EQ worked _very_ differently from how quests in basically any other game ever worked, and the actual mechanics behind them remained opaque to most players. Considering that the rewards for quests were almost always underwhelming, and quests in EQ, for those that bothered to do them at all, were mostly done for the sake of faction grinding or endgame progression. Speaking as the proud former GM of Luclin server.
Best sense of adventure I have ever had in any game. So many good memories, so much fun. I wish back the good old times. Of course this game has heavily changed and personally I think it is not very enjoyable anymore, but for people who want to try it out, I recommend the new time-locked progression server coming in May which will morph the game back to how it was in 2004 with each expansion being added after a few weeks. Apart from the technical problems, the game was very good in vanilla, and personally I would still prefer it over every modern MMO today.
Only caveat for the time locked server it’s not true 2004 experience. The original item stats were loss when Soe handed the game off to daybreak. This is huge because that means the overpowered items that are balanced I believe every 5 levels are all we have. Why does this matter? Well because you’re going to be 3x as strong as players were in 2004. The content is a cake walk and there is no point to craft master craft items anymore. That was what made the game fun for me, the unique itemization and finding oddball fabled items in those moldy green chests. Unfortunately we will never get to experience this again.
@@Jay16872 From what I have heard is that in these time locked servers they also have XP Potions in the cash shop enabled which means everyone just grinds dungeons in the first couple of days with pots to get to "endgame" skipping basically the whole game. The person also said that the world therefore is pretty much dead. I don't know if this is entirely true since I haven't played it since 2005ish besides an occasional login every few years finding that the game I onced loved seemed pretty much butchered (e.g. the microtransactions are so incredibly horrible I just couldn't get over it). I would have loved to give it another try but if what I said is true then I'm gonna keep my fond memories of the adventures I had in 2004-2005+
@@RoXx1811 Yea exactly. It'll not be the same as it used to be. The epic battles in Antonica around that era were glorious. PvP from level 10-40 flourished there. Even if they brought back itemization the the correct flow of leveling... it would be a ghost of its past. It was heartbreaking at the time seeing the population dwindle and dwindle. I still would be playing to this day if it didn't die out.
@@Jay16872 Well, I have tried it, and I have to say it was not very enjoyable at all. Not so much because the world was empty (in fact, there were a lot of people playing), but it was more a dungeon grind and "skipping to endgame" as David W. suspected.
I remember I tried the game, as I was in beta of warcraft. I got to the city, landed up in the moat, and was swimming around. A fish took offense to that, and attacked me. I jumped out, so did the fish. I ran, the fish followed, and so the chase began. Through several parts of the map, and a full group of enemies, including a fish chasing me. I logged off, and never played it again.
Someone tell Asmongold to play this for a day and single-handedly shock it back to life. The effect on the community is an issue we'll sort out later. Also, Ratonga are the best race in anything.
Listened to this while taking down a shelf. Truly, the best second monitor UA-camr. Also, I love your stuff, been watching the otherland videos as the beginning intrigued me, but UA-cam decided to not show it. Now I've finally gotten around to watching it
Played the original EQ when I was 14 and it blew my mind. Learning languages, making money by finding people's dead bodies for them using my bard's song, riding on a boat and being terrified of falling off, and swimming in a fountain for hours to level my swimming skill... So many great memories. Wish more MMOs today had so much lore-building and neat little mechanics.
my experience with EQ2 is a fond one. My dad was playing it and i would watch him for hours so he made me an account. I was Soloing as a ratonga in Temple street, and yes killing rats was a big part of it, but exploring the town was such a memorable experience for me. I'm not sure why since i've never actually quested the zone, but the Commonlands was my favorite. The questing is INCREDIBLEY sparse but something about running through this huge zone and then discovering something you've never seen before was really incredible to me. I think i probably started playing during the Shadow Odyssey because i remember one of the shadow men being near the wizard spire. being killed used to be detrimental to the character so I kept a safe distance and just watched this thing pace back and forth as a creature and then stand still in the silhouette of a person. As i got older and understood actually game functionality it definitely had its faults. But then DayBreak took over. Grinding constantly, one-shot killing mobs in any zone but for the quest zones beating on a mob for ten to twenty minutes. Not being able to make any progress in the expansion. In some cases they just removed the overworld completely and only introduced dungeons i couldn't solo as a brigand. The last three expansions have taken place in three separate lush jungles which was very fun to run through in Vetrovia but got pretty boring seeing it again and again. In fact Vetrovia was the only recent expansion i was able to do. Both parts of Luclin i couldn't solo and thus never finished. Adornments were annoying. Ascension classes are annoying. Having familiars and mount armor and mount leveling is annoying. They just added a grind to go to a dungeon that isn't impressive, kill whatever you need to which could take hours despite being maxed on all the things only to do that several more times. There isn't any gameplay anymore, and its skewed the original content. I one shot kill everything as a level 5 brigand and if i play on a time locked server which doesn't bring back any of the original geometry for Freeport, i get wiped out. I still love EQ2 and I'm still a fool who goes back to it, but once DayBreak took it over they just sucked out the fun for money.
I have some fond memories of playing back when this came out, it's a very different game than it was back then. It was definitely more group dependent for some content, it was still possible to solo but grouping was obviously the push. Sadly it required a significantly more powerful computer than most folks who came over from the OG Everquest had and likely the average PC gamer at the time of it's release. This mistake wasn't the first time SOE at the time had made that mistake, they did it with the OG Everquest Luclin just expecting players would upgrade their PC's. You'd think they'd have learned from that but no they did it again with EQ2. In the end WoW was just the inevitable nail in the coffin consigning EQ2 to niche status from then on. SOE trying to WoW'ify the game didn't help either with sweeping huge mechanical changes over the first few years. I mean when you started originally you leveled up that base class to 20 then picked your specialist class (that was ditched for just picking the classes from level 1 later, though IMO this wasn't terrible). The same thing happened to the crafting system among others. The games new player experience is definitely a mashed up mish mash of their various "new player" content. Some of the choices for defaults, such as the hotbar starting locked. The dragging hotkeys you mentioned, though in the monumental amount of options the game has does allow you to tweak a lot of this sort of things, it's just not really explained. Also not all starting zones are created equal IMO, IE New Halas for good characters I remember being pretty decent. While the old starting area's of Qeynos have a lot of hold overs from before the initial revamp(s) etc so it's closer to the OG experience I think (IE a lot of your starting quest chains started in your home districts etc). Same goes for classes, some are harder to solo than others. There are systems to help with some of the harder or group content, mercenaries for example but you either need to have bought the expansion they were released in or again daybreak store purchases the option. Like the OG EQ a subscription is really the only way to enjoy most of the games content. Trying to do it as a free player is going to be annoying and possibly more expensive in the long run. At any rate both EQ and EQ2 are good games, which EQ2 languishing behind EQ these days, but their quite niche. There's fun to be hand but as old as they are now there's a LOT of content / systems. Frankly it's hardly inviting for new players in most cases. Even veteran players coming back it's a tad overwhelming, I've tried a few times but when you need a guide out of game to get back into it the dev's have sort of failed IMO.
*"Sadly it required a significantly more powerful computer than most folks who came over from the OG Everquest had and likely the average PC gamer at the time of it's release."* What was so stupid about that was we were still coming out of the 2001 recession. Even people that had the money were too scared to spend it. Really showed what kind of a bubble they were in.
I was so sad about New World too. I played it for about a month, and despite having a job where I worked over time, I kept up in the lead for crafting and gathering.... the player run market was garbage, you couldn't make money it was next to impossible, and I was first on the market for most things, and everything was a money sink. I absolutely don't know why player run markets are so absolutely garbage. Or rather, I don't know why players are so stupid, lol. I understand undercutting for a quick sale, but instead of undercutting by .01, I would constantly see people undercutting by 70-95%, flood the market, and then that would be the new price until it fell even to .01.
Always heard so much about everquest when it came out a long time ago, I was tempted to play but went with WoW instead. It will be interesting to see how its changed
To answer the question "What happened to you Everquest 2" The answer is simply WoW. I played the game when it was new, and honestly it was fantastic, the only problem with it being its performance. The game was optimized for hardware that did not exist yet, with the expectation that processors would keep getting faster. The thing is, at the time EQ2 was released, MMOs (with the exception of Runescape) were aimed at the limited market of people who could afford beefy hardware, a monthly an internet connection, and who were nerdy enough to play games like dungeons and dragons. So EQ2 launched with in-depth and complicated systems and an expansive world, all of a sort that would appeal to people who enjoy the complexity of advanced pen and paper role playing games. A Month later WoW released. And for a year or so everyone playing EQ2 laughed and mocked WoW. WoW didn't really have anything EQ2 didn't have, but EQ2 had a lot of things that WoW did not. How could WoW possibly compete? But what EQ2 players didn't understand, was that WoW wasn't aimed at them. So when it captured a much larger audience of people who hadn't played MMOs before, or could not afford the best hardware it came as something of a surprise. Then the EQ2 developers started trying to make their game more like WoW. Systems were simplified, the game was made more solo friendly and the original target audience began to be alienated. It was a downhill slope from there. Eventually EQ2 became another microtransaction game, with new systems slapped on top of old ones in ways that didn't quite fit. I haven't played the game for a long time now. I loved it for the first few years. But the game I loved doesn't exist any more. This other thing just shares a name and some assets. EDIT: Ok I have finished watching the video now. I have a few more comments: 1) Originally graphon flights were cinematic, the one you tried was added much later after the developers lost all love and passion. 2) EQ2 was the first MMO I played to properly do away with the long wait to regenerate. Your meant to put level appropriate food and drink in your food and drink slots, which will rapidly increase your regeneration rate. 3) The boss in the cave on the tutorial island was meant to teach you to group with other players. It is not meant to be solo able. 4) EQ2 did not fail because it launched at the same time as WoW. I remember when they launched, the MMO communities of the time had much higher expectations of EQ2 and for the first year or so that both games were around WoW seemed to be a loosing prospect. Everyone I knew who played both games seemed to think WoW was going to fail. The problem was just that you needed new hardware to play EQ2, But old hardware would do for WoW. Then WoWs marketing and accessibility to people who hadn't played mmos before caused it to blow up beyond expectations. It didn't really capture the EQ2 target market, it captured a new and bigger one. Where EQ2 faltered was in attempting to change and be more like WoW. It succeed by the standards of proceeding MMOs. But WoW showed that far grater success was possible. So SoE tried to reshape EQ2 to go for the same demographic. It took the knife to many of its systems and simplified and streamlined things. In doing so it lost a lot of its appeal to the old school MMO gamers, but failed to capture the new demographic, because while it became more like WoW, its hardware requirements were still too high, and WoW was always going to be more like WoW then anything that wasn't WoW. At this point EQ2 had lost the qualities that made it more enjoyable to play then WoW, but A bunch of your friends who couldn't play EQ2 were playing WoW, so you might as well switch your sub over to WoW instead. That was where EQ2 failed. Not at launch, but afterwoods when it tried to become something it was not originally designed to be.
The boss in the cave of this tutorial island has been soloable forever. Don't remember how it was on the original island though. Usually by this point you are equal level or higher and have not been blocking your skills out by having only 1 bar. He literally didn't equip any new gear he had in bags which were permaopen either.
I just think Warcraft is a known IP and it brought in people who didnt play mmo's prior to its launch. And for some reason, before WoW's big numbers. Ur MMO was a success with 20-50K playerbase. All WoW did was kill the genre, because 20K no longer was considered a success because wow had 10+million at its peak. So because of capitalism companies no longer were ok with the 20k and wanted millions. So they just copied it and some mental Boss at SoE said lets gut Everquest (both one and two) uniqueness and copy WoW.
You are right. The worst mistake the developers made was that they wanted to make EQII more like WoW, and that way EQII lost its own identity and its appeal to players who enjoyed the game. Although I have to say that even after these changes, the game was still not terrible, it only really fell apart after turning F2P.
I was a huge EverQuest fan after it came out in 1999 and into the early 2000s. I had to stop playing after Shadows of Luclin was released in 2001, due to (a) the system requirements being bumped up, and my PC couldn't handle a lot going on in-game at the same time; and (b) I started college and lived on campus, and so had to deal with firewalls and throttling, so lag was insane. I returned with the first Progression Servers, just a couple years later, and played it a ton then, too. EverQuest was my first MMORPG, and it was a beautiful experience for its time. Sure, some of the game mechanics didn't age very well, and some of the design choices related to the inferior technology (particularly Internet/bandwidth issues) are obnoxious to deal with today. But... it was a great game for its time. Later expansions really took away much of the spirit of EverQuest, though. Some of that is to be expected, as we're two decades into the game, and countless writers and developers have come and gone. The UI is garbage by 2022 standards. The graphic changes and character model updates look so strange and alien in today's gaming landscape. But... the classic EverQuest experience of Project 1999 and the PoP EQ experience of the TAKP (Mac EQ) emulated servers are quite brillian. And I'm grateful for all of the developers and testers who put in work to keep the game alive. NOW... EverQuest 2, on the other hand, never captivated me in the same way that EverQuest did. The lore and zone changes were obnoxious. I hated some of the race and class changes. The graphics lost a lot of the charm of the original (classic era) graphics. The new character models were largely without charm. And the game felt, well, clunky. And it never really got its feet under itself. The EQ to EQ2 thing taught me a few things about game design for sequels. If you're going to create a sequel, be very careful about lore and character model design changes. If you're going to change too much, just create a new IP. Don't try to create an entirely new experience but using the place and race names of the original game. Like Kelethin in EQ2 is a dumpster compared to have magical Kelethin felt in EQ1. I suspect EQ Next or Landmark or whatever would have been just as alienating. "EverQuest" and "Norrath" will always be what I experienced in EQ1 to me. I mostly just ignore EQ2's existence. It's easy, I've been doing it for 15 years. But cheers to another Josh for giving it a go for us all.
Some things from a veteran player, in the order they come up in the video; EQ doesn't need to rename mythical creatures. The thing that attacks you on the boat is called a Drakota and not a Dragon because it IS a Drakota, and a Dragon is a different animal. In fantasy settings some places use dragon like monsters that have two hind legs and wings, like Skyrim for example. In EQ those are Drakotas. Dragons have 4 legs and a set of wings, like say D&D Dragons. It's presumably not self evident enough that you can right click your hotbars to get at all sorts of options. In particular allowing you to click and drag buttons off the hot bar. Or open a new hotbar so you can drag and rearrange them to your liking. Disallowing click and drag is probably default because in combat it's very easy to click and drag an attack and accidentally shuffle your icons and now you have a skill hanging on your cursor. Being able to stealth in the middle of combat is absolutely not a bug. You've just naturally discovered a little bit of being a Rouge 101. Later levels provide easier/faster ways to do this, and its very much intended and allows you to set up high damage attacks that require using from stealth. I have no defense for the micro transactions in the game. I play on TLE and it isn't as egregious as in the video. That's really scummy. Regular subscription gets you 500 DBC free every month and I mostly spend it on cosmetics. Also you are correct, the horrific micro transaction market place was not present at the launch of the game. There is absolutely background music in the Qeynos harbor. That sounds like a local setting. I wouldn't go by the Steam numbers you listed. Those numbers would be only the people using it through steam, or even worse only the free to play players using the steam client. I don't think anyone I play with or have been in guilds with have ever mentioned using the Steam client. Using the games own launchpad is the norm. I have personally seen more than those numbers listed online at one time in one place on my one server. Giving the impression that EQ2 servers are so dead as to a 500 player count at peak is just misinformed. While I can't speak for whatever server you were restricted to on a free account, I wish you would have seen Kaladim at the time of your recording, or Varsoon today. The nitpick on Grobins is overplayed. This time I got no explanation of how grobins are different, but it's also not "EQ has to make everything unique and different'. There are goblins. Regular ass goblins. Everywhere. Griffons; The particular flight you picked on, all fair criticism. The ones that are interzone transport can be boring. Did you use any of the intrazone griffons? Ones that are fast travel within a map? Those ones soar and swoop around the map and buzz past landmarks and show the place off. I am guessing not as you immediately follow that up by going into Antonica, a place with the other kind of Griffon travel and immediately set off running. The zone is rather large and there are griffon stations for traversing large swaths of the land quickly by gliding through the air and seeing the landscape and landmarks and how everything connects, just as you lamented a minute earlier. Criticism on group focus vs solo focus is valid. However I wonder if your solo frustrations are not just you being used to things being easier. I don't know what you're expecting when you go into fights outnumbered. Most of the deaths you show in the video are because you engaged multiple baddies at a time. Earlier you seemed to understand that the game had a color coded system for difficulty. In addition to that each fight is defined as an 'encounter', or to say that enemies might be solo, or act as a group, and each individual encounter is balanced on it's own. So when you fight two forest guardians at a time, of course you're losing, you are fighting two encounters that are each saying to you 'I am balanced to be a fair fight with you one on one'. Fighting two monsters at once when a single one on its own is a fair fight is a losing plan and it seems like you should know this, even just with what you've shown in your video. Remember tutorial island? You had such kind words to say about the tutorial as it taught you to pull creatures back to a safe spot, what you called 'luring'. What happened to this information you clearly learned, processed, and spoke about? I agree with the bad timing argument, that's for certain. But to say WoW just did things better is not something that can be said with such certainty. There are several mechanical things EQ2 does better, or at least in my option. There are still mechanics in modern MMOs that to this day EQ2 does better than they do. Speaking of personal experience in FF14 (GCD's & appearance/glamor system for examples). It's easy to claim WoW was better because it survived longer, but that doesn't actually guarantee quality. VHS beat out Betamax. Apple continues to exist and thrive on branding and market share despite better products existing. Telsa continues to make cars that catch fire for no reason and self drive themselves off roads and still people buy and defend them. WoW beat out SOE in the same vein of popularity.
Oh man that skeleton laugh was like a nostalgia punch to the face. It's the same laugh from the original EQ, and every skeleton used it. Both enemy AND player Necromancer pet skeles!
Should have started at Frostfang, possibly the best starting area of any MMO. Also, do not go by Steam numbers for people playing this game, actual player numbers are far better. I used to play this when Everquest Next was still on the books. This game has the best mount too, the Saliraptor @lvl30 in Butcherblock, this mount leaps very high and far, loved it :).
Exactly. He really showed his ignorance of the game by going from newbie island to ... wait for it ... Antonica!! Nobody plays Antonica anymore. Frostfang Sea or Darklight Woods are 2 of the best newbie zones of any MMO, both taking you right up to level 20, and both rewarding a mount at the end. Both are story and quest driven.
@@solidus_spence He could have spent 15 minutes prep time reading a newbie guide to playing EQ2 in 2022. Or even more simply, who could have simply sent a tell to a high level player and asked where the best starting zones are. I do both of those things when I start a new MMO: research and communication.
Its sad how original MMO's from back in the day used to have a variety of races, like the frogmen or gargoyles from ultima or ogres and trolls...and now its mostly just elves or things that look like elves. Gone are the monsters, replaced almost entirely by hot and sexy badass edgelords and babes...
That's greed for you. Instead of spending money on unique races, you can spend 10% of the money on boobie girls and edgelords, and pocket the rest. And then you will get far more return-on-investment from people buying boobie girl bikinis to fap to and edgelord XXL magnum dong swords to complement their emo lifestyle.
@@Clawthorne Sometimes you dont even get that, with body shape being strictly controlled or sometimes even copypasted between man and woman so that they can skip designing armor for each of the sexes.
I just saw your video and the all-time peak went from your 523 to 532. You've literally doubled the 24-hour peak of people playing the Game since may. Not bad.
I tried to get my WoW guild to move to EQ2, couldn't ever really get into it with people, I played it solo when I wasn't raiding and it was super fun, but I couldn't afford both and went with WoW, got burnt out on MMOs and now I just play other games and watch the genre from afar. Always good going down memory lane, glad you had fun in this game way back when!
@@dismiss3d323 I just upgraded to a 3070 Ti so i'm like going through some of the more modern games right now after years of waiting. I am gonna download P1999 since i've only heard good things about it, I used to play UO way back in the day and made money to play by selling stuff on ebay through my mom's account lmaoooo If it has that like sense of community and stuff that I miss with old MMOs I'll go REALLY hard into which is not a bad thing at all! Thanks for the recommendation ! Is the server / community still like accepting of newer players? These days it seems like if you don't know what your doing to the umptieth degree people don't want to play with you and I have like refractory temporal lobe epilepsy so my time in general just gets SUPER scattered and it really messes with personal relationships so it'd be easier to just get along with a group of people where like if I'm sick, it won't like adversely effect the folks I play with, which is a big problem in modern FPS games. Example Rainbow Six Siege, I get TK'd for trying to communicate sometimes, it's hard to find a fun social experience within gaming these days, it's really really really hard.
@@TWEEMASTER2000 I'm on a 6900xt and have never been higher than level 15, both players have been nothing but great to me. I just had a full group for crushbone on my first character on the blue server and I've mostly been soloing on green but people always help. it's great man I can't recommend it enough.
@@dismiss3d323 Wowww 6900XT is no slouch either, I looked at them but it was out of my price range. I've heard REAL good things from benchmarks people run! That's really good to encouraging and good to hear, I'll give a whirl when me and my wife are watchin some reality TV, seems like the perfect time to MMO l0l
I have such a a special place in my heart for this game. It was my first mmorpg I have ever played. When I bought it I didn't even quite understand what I was getting into and was just a random buy - I didn't even know it was near the opening day that I played way back in Nov of 2004. I put in thousands of hours and had the chance to meet many people and used to love logging in. For me the game peaked around EoF and I then went to sporadically playing the expansions until the around the time of Daybreak taking over. I logged in dec 2021 and got the new expac. Wandered around with a few of my old toons, had a few memories and just felt the game had changed too much for me to get back into. There seems to be so much potential in the game that it is sad to see it go the route it has. I am sure it is beyond the means of being practical; but I would love to see a EQ2.5 that could really rebuild the game. At least I have my memories of late night contested dungeon runs, broken bunnies all over norrath and that time my ratonga girl won that giant Roquefort cheese wheel in a live dev rp event.
I think there's a certain charm and feel about this game that no MMO has captured, at least for me, since its release. I'd love to really get back into it again, but the population issue is just a huge problem.
Try the TLE servers. There is a new one, "Varsoon", launching in May this year. Starting back at the beginning is where the big nostalgia hit comes from, and I think you'd enjoy it.
There's a frog who hangs out under a tarp on my porch. I can just tell if he was an intelligent humanoid that he would be super chill. We've shared many a fine evening together.
I worked on some QA for this game a while when they were SOE still. Before that I had ~10,000 hours in game play.
The engine was a terrible dumpster fire. It was built on the idea single core clock speeds would keep going up and graphics cards would be "secondary." Processor with 4.2Ghz speed was better than a multicore and super video card.
Faces were highly customizable for the defunct "SoEmote" option that would animate character face based on the user camming their face.
They have LOTS of dragons, but that's a drakota because its not a dragon because it doesn't have 4 legs and isn't intelligent.
Seeing you right click everything and not hitting the attack buttons faster is painful for me lol. Camera is a shit show, they have LOTS of settings to modify it behavior though.
Using Steam to check player numbers for ANY game that existed before Steam is always going to be quite bad. That's not to say there are tons of players, but its not ever going to be accurate.
11:07 AHAHAHA oh man, in end game DPS is measured by BILLIONS of damage per second. that's a Carl Sagan "B" billions.
12:45 stealth is meant to work that way, later you get multiple types that cast much faster with additional effects like dropping aggro or even teleporting.
14:50 oh boy. yeah MTX is nuts on EQ2 now. Lots of it is avoidable for "winning" but there are a few for end game like instance resets and buying mercenaries and stat pets. However it is allowing the game to be quite profitable working off whales. They do not want genuine free players AT ALL. It is far more "free to try." Trying to be a "free player" is crippling and in some weird cases would be more expensive than just getting a sub.
21:55 What you did is go to another newbie area like the island, there are several of them. what you need is to find an area with higher enemies and thus higher quests. There are MANY standalone quests that aren't chains. Content in the early game is split into 10 level tiers. So 1-10, 11-20 etc etc. You were working your way through a 1-10 area and then started over in another 1-10 area.
28:35 hitting loading screens on griffons is rare, you just happened to find one that takes you to another area. Most do as you explained, flight paths with carefully curated vistas and usually confined to one map.
So I'm not saying all this because you are wrong or bad, just providing context. The fact that none of this was made apparent to a new player is obviously a red flag for the newbie experience. However as you saw hints of they aren't hot on traditional "new player" experience and want people using heroic characters or playing on one of the special ruleset servers. The experience you played hasn't been updated in years, AFAIK, and likely won't be any time soon.
Steam Charts currently shows two (2) active players on FFXI. A quick "/sea all" from inside the game shows 400+ on Quetzalcoatl server alone.
@@tjcondon3954 Exactly. With newer games it can be an indicator of population even if you can play without steam but if its a game where its "peak" is years pre-Steam, Steam charts means very little.
@@tjcondon3954 Maybe it's helped by the fact that the steam version of FFXI is region locked. But yeah, if the game is playable somewhere else too, doesn't really means the game is dead just because steam chart says so.
Yeah, I imagine for a game like EQ2 the vast majority of people still playing are using the third party launcher.
I FORGOT THAT. I remember that was a big ad for that. Honestly it was a hard choice for me. I was in the Beta2 run (taped my key onto my monitor and was like that for years hah) but also knew the quality and what blizzard could bring.
In the end I chose college. Though 4 years latter I went full 300+ days in WoW. Not sure Everquest 2 could pull that.
Also. WoW had an ACTIVE campaign against everquest, with ads in magazines that stated "Would you rather be killing rats" directly targeting EQII's early game grind
lmaoo I didnt know that
@@FieldsOfConfusion yup. Im pretty sure I still have an old EGM magazine with the ad in it.
@@FieldsOfConfusion Yep. that was the first WoW ad I saw. Blizzard saw EQ2 as their primary competitor and ran ads against it.
EQ2 never ran any ads at all. Anywhere. They just expected to grow based on their name, and in the end, it cost them dearly.
@@AJBernard I totally agree. Players have been complaining for years at the lack of publicity for our game, when WOW used Mr. T, William Shatner, and more in their commercials.
@@AJBernard My philosophy is that if a game's publicity relies primarily on devaluing its competitors, then it likely isn't a worthwhile venture on its own. WoW was good, but my statement would be validated with how the toxic community grew and the ultimate downfall of the development.
For me, Everquest 2 will always be the housing system. I remember playing it for a bit a few years back and not being terribly impressed, but then I got myself a lovely room in the frozen north with two floors and a window providing an amazing view of the ocean and nearby penguins. I loved that room so much that I kept playing the rest of the game to spruce up that little spot of respite. I learned the relevant crafting and gathering professions to make furniture and decorations, I killed stuff and leveled up so that I could try out new materials and maybe even get new designs... By the end what was once a simple, empty room with stairs leading to smaller empty room had a kitchen, a living room, dining room, three bedrooms, and a library. And the library actually works! You can put actual in-game books of your choosing on the shelves and read them whenever you like! And you can take those books off the shelves, go downstairs, and read them in front of the fireplace!
People still sometimes say that WoW should have a housing system, and the dev team as well as players who don't know better just point to the garrison and say "there you go, have fun". They're missing the point entirely. Player housing is not about granting mechanical benefits for putting the right size of prefabricated building on the correct predetermined plot. It's an aesthetic, creative experience where the only reward is the satisfaction of getting the rug in just the right spot. It's not an extra place to hearth to for you to sell stuff and use your bank that actively gets worse at the job the more you expand and upgrade it. It's a place to wind down before you log out, a place to hang out with friends and guild members, when you know you want to play but don't know what you want to do... Player housing does not become an irrelevant and abandoned feature as soon as the next expansion drops. It's a little slice of the game you carve out for yourself and make your own.
I think the usefulness of player housing in WoW passed around the start of Cata - so many casual players (me included) that wanted to the social stuff, but didn't always have time to engage in the niceties; queue, run, repeat - if you had a mate or two you could party queue, otherwise you just take whatever you can get.
Like he discussed in another video - social interaction on the internet changed from the early 00's to now - it's migrated out of games and the novelty has worn off.
I'd like to think that when millenials start hitting retirement age we will see a resurgence of in-game socialization - or a "Metaverse" sort of cross-game socialization, once our kids are grown and gone and we have a bit more free time.
WoW missed the mark on a lot of things, not just that.
customizable housing and being able to build pretty much wherever was the ONLY thing that kept me going in Skyrim. I actually thought the game was pretty ridiculously bad otherwise. I had a nice split level mansion with terraces I built in a small forest an a cliff overlooking a lake. I spent more time on that than on the rest of the game I think. Never finished the game.
I had a home which was so full of stuff my frame rate diiiiiiiied
Back in the day I played Ultima Online and remember when EQ came out. Everyone was raving how it would kill UO because of the 3D graphics and "immersion." I tried EQ up until the first expansion and was bored to tears. I didn't know it back then, but it was the first of the theme parks and that's why I hated it. Ultima Online was a world where player decision mattered (before all the horrible updates).
First played EQ 2 in 2020, and quickly went on a quest of betraying my city, becoming an exile, and grinding faction to gain a new home. As far as I can tell, a truly unique experience that involves changing class and was very very fun.
I played way back when in the mid 00's, on a roleplaying server, and one of my fondest memories is betraying from Freeport and befriending an Iksar paladin who also made the journey.
My favourite character ever is from EQ2. Way back before they changed classes to neutral. I had a High Elven Bruiser living in Neriak. Was one of the few High Elves running about Neriak at the time. So much fun.
This was my jam, too. Before Ratonga could be good or evil, I used to love betraying Freeport and living in Qeynos. The roleplay community was stellar in EQ2, and it made for some really fun encounters. Also, the dirty looks you'd get from the NPCs were amusing. "[Soandso] knows you don't belong here."
been playin EQ2 for too long to remember. My characters were always fae who betrayed the good side and turned evil to live in Freeport😅And the guards in 'good' cities actually attacked me, and NPC said remarks about me. Also the server community always noticed 'out-of-place' people like us. Such an amazing game.
In more _modern_ games like ESO you just roam around factions and cities like it's nothing. No city, no race, no faction is special, nothing is special and your _side_ means literally nothing. Nothing is at stake, play your way but all ways are practically the same and it's sad.
Me at the loading screen - "Ooh, looks like Colossal Dreadmaw."
Josh - "Lovely dinosaur, looks like it costs two green and four generic to cast, probably has tramble."
... God damn it Josh
this joke made me laugh so hard goddamn
I love how he's surprised that the evil maniacal clown laugh is on an undead knight in the tutorial. It's the exact same sound from lvl 1 Decaying Skeletons in every newbie zone in EQ1 since 1999 😁
Yup, I remember it fondly from Estate of Unrest
Sounds like the laugh from call of duty zombies when you lose
Seems like the same laugh Skeletons use in Dungeon Keeper 2
Glad someone else noticed
I was gonna say. . . I question whether he actually played EQ1 if he didn't notice that. I barely played EQ1 and will never forget that laugh haha
When this game came out, crafting was a potentially lethal undertaking as well as combat. I remember all the corpses laying around the forges.
Hiring a healer to stand with you as you worked at the forge. Speaking of the forge, is it still topping the charts with the most player depths?
@@victoriahunter4684 From what I remember, it was one of the primary NPCs near spawn points. Because, in EQ 1, the attack key was autobound to "A". And hailing an NPC was also "A". Punching your lvl 50 guildmaster as a lvl 1 was a fast way to respawn
Rofl - I had totally forgotten that haha :)
Soul shard runs. To the crafting hub.....
oh gods...the forges ... i was terrified when. i took up weapon smithing...
The point of Gryphons and flight paths is a huge one. I remember in the early days of WoW, taking a flight path from Ironforge to Wetlands (I think?) and along the way seeing The Burning Steppes and Searing Gorge below me. High level zones that would be deadly to my level 20 Dwarf Hunter. It's a view of where the game will take me at my later levels and it gave the world a grander sense of scale and danger which was amazing!
There are more flights within zones than connecting zones in EQ2. Hayes just found the one that works this way instead of the many others doing exactly what he would have liked.
@@martinforsterling4814 and you can jump off if you see something interesting along the way.
yes, i know exactly how you describe as forever f2p in wow since 2019 i think. first time i got northrend and then every time i used griffin to get to dalaran. at the time i wasn't even suppose to be in the dalaran since i was lvl 20. and northrend was like lvl 30+, including the portal to get up there, so i used mechanic that i have been using ALOT: check first if area has griffin for everybody when they are dead, there is? brilliant. now i queue into random dungeon & random battlefield&random epic battle as dps, now before it finds me a dungeon or battlefield, i try to get as many mobs to attack me and to die in wow and use the ghost griffin to get to normally unreachable area to me. then i wait until it matches me into dungeon or battle, i either finish the dungeon/battle or just leave instantly, usually if its dungeon or normal battle, i stay to finish it but if its epic battle i leave, either way i am now resurrected at the place where i was with griffin instead of at graveyard or death spot. warning: dungeons and battle exits are different. i learned this when i had to get to dalaran that was above the karazhan for quest, while for dungeon exit there was nothing even though i saw it at ghost griffin, but when exited battle, it spawned me to dalaran that was above karazhan instead of me falling to my death in world of warcraft.
Meanwhile grifons in gw2
@@martinforsterling4814 That's probably my biggest gripe about the video. The flight paths do take you over large vast landscapes but he just so happened to use the one in Halas and go to Butcherblock which is going from one zone to another and use that single use griffin to describe them all.
11:50 That was the laugh the skeletons used in Everquest I which reached meme status at the time and it's a beloved memory of the game, so them using it here was quite intentional. :D
When I was in high school I played a ton of Everquest 1. And I was lucky enough to get into the Everquest 2 closed beta. The developers designed the game to be 'future proof', so it was impossible at the time to run the game on max settings with any hardware currently available, and it didn't really run well on most systems with the graphics set to low. Even so, the game was a substantial improvement over the original Everquest. In early to mid 2004 I was again lucky enough to get into the WoW Phase 3 Closed Beta. Even in closed beta, WoW was overwhelming better than Everquest 2 in almost every way. The EQ2 beta was filled with bugs, crashed frequently, and its focus on group and raid content meant that it was next to impossible to solo any content after level 10. WoW on the other hand, while it had bugs, it was rare to get an actual crash (I think I only had maybe 1-3 crashes when I played beta, which for a closed beta MMO at the time, was unheard of). And while the talent system, classes, and the ability system they briefly had in beta would change dramatically, it always gave off the feeling of being a completed game (keep in mind that this was in comparison to the current MMO's on the market at the time).
When WoW went open beta for a few weeks and the NDA dropped, the world saw what WoW had to offer. It had a much more rich and rewarding quest system, a travel system, and you could actually level up by yourself if you wanted to (you also didn't lose 8 hours worth of exp when you died, and you leveled up MUCH faster). EQ2 devs knew that they wouldn't be able to compete so their best bet was to beat WoW to market and bank on the Everquest name. In the last few months of development, instead of focusing on polishing everything, they instead scrambled to add many features that were already part of WoW. The terrible griffon travel network mentioned in the video is one of those systems that were added.
Funnily enough, up until release both games had huge fallowing. And there were constant flame wars about which game would end up on top. When WoW was released however, everything changed. There were a still a handful of EQ2 fans that argued the graphics in EQ2 were better and more realistic and that it's focus on team based combat was better for the community than WoW's solo-able content. But, those fans quickly faded.
Since Everquest 2 wasn't popular, and everquest Next was canceled in development (but not before selling a bunch of useless "play early" packs to players), it seems Everquest may be just another dead franchise. It's a shame really. The original Everquest revolutionized the MMO industry. And while you had to go out of your way to find quests and learn the lore, for those that did it was a very rewarding experience. While I doubt I'll every pick up everquest again, I do occasionally think of the fun times I had with friends in high school on my old bard.
after level 10 you progress through, Antonia or Commonlands, counter clockwise, at level 15 there are small mini zones to explore,
thank you for the neat history lesson, i didn't really get to be part of this era of gaming but its really nice to hear context on what it was like
Oh yeah i remember back in that day when i was happy that my shitty PC actually ran a new game. Played WoW on a fx5200 until WOTLK where i finally got something with more power.
Ah member when Blizzard used to make good games? I member
@@Azazreal I still play wow just got into it this year not sure what everyone has an issue with been pretty fun for me on my worgen Druid
Honestly, I can totally imagine an MMORPG "Tour Group" - a massive community of players who agree to spend some amount of time leveling up together on a new MMORPG. It would allow people to explore old games without the need to do it solo or with whatever the current player base is.
Dude, I would absolutely join a discord channel for this exact thing. If I had a good computer, that is.
I'd love something like this
@@awesometonio1 yup same
@@awesometonio1 hi hi let's play 😋
Great minds. I was just thinking that while watching this. Trying to rope some friends in to spruce up an older game.
It is so nice to hear someone discuss the success of WoW being the fact that it allowed for solo play. I played EQ1 for a while and was playing FFXI at the time when WoW launched. I will never forget about a week or so after it launched how linkshell members were discussing quitting FFXI because you could level solo in WoW all the way to max level. It was mind blowing. WoW changed MMO gaming forever with that one key element, bringing the genre from being very niche to mainstream.
I played this game with my dad years ago when I was young young. When I found out it was free, I told my dad and we've been playing it together ever since. it's definitely still one of my favorite games to play
My dad bought the game for me too. We played together initially until he dropped it and I proceeded to spent 12k+ hours in this game.
@@JaycobSirduke My dad actually started me on EverQuest 1 when I young young (I was 5 when EQ1 released and you better believe I was playing it then--poorly when my dad wasn't around to tell me what I'm supposed to be doing, but I played it), then eventually as time passed and EQ2 came out, we both went there. We didn't jump on the WoW train until WotLK was about to release. EverQuest 1 still holds a TON of nostalgia for me, and so I'll occasionally load up Project '99 and relive my nostalgia for a bit. Never stick for long, because I know what P99 endgame looks like (and it ain't pretty), but it can be a fun romp and trip through memory lane remembering when me and my dad played for so long.
Druid and Ranger are still my favorite classes in most game settings because of EQ1. So many hours, so many memories. I liked the 2 druids in EQ2, as well, so there's that. More nature bois! My love of rangers really set me up to be disappointed by Rangers in most games since they always seem to have an identity crisis and the creator of the game/ruleset (for tabletop) can never decide what the hell they want the class to do
Playing it now; it's a very good game now despite the stigma trash videos like this project.
@@JaycobSirduke How can people play a game for so long?? 12k hours is literary 500 hundred days. You have invested over 500 days in a single game like how?
@@Selvyre I was 14 when EQ1 dropped and it was my life for a year or two. Never played it since. I just recently looked into the fact that it’s still around. What happens at the end of Project 99?
EQ2 did many things right. Cities were big enough that they FELT like cities. Betrayal Quests meant your faction wasn't forever locked in when you rolled your character. The graphics were really amazing. The crafting minigames, I at least, thought were fun. NPC's were voice-acted, and there was a distinct feel and flavor for each area. I loved the flying carpets, and flight paths in general. I actually enjoyed unlocking each area when you still had to do that.
But they also committed HORRIFIC blunders. In their quest to make sure they could balance the game, they over-homogenized each class. wizards had elemental nukes and dots, enchanters had psionic nukes and dots, but damage was ... not noticeably different. Not during levelllng, anyway. I LOATHED the "combo moves". I hate combo systems, let me choose what spells I want to use based on the effect of the spells, not on your "if you follow this recipe you'll get bonus damage because reasons". Drops, and crafted gear felt over-homogenized while levelling, too. "Oh, this one has an extra +1 to INT". Woo Woo. I hated the "linked mobs" that no matter if they were 900 yards apart always aggrod as a group. Clearly that was there answer to FD pulling and splitting. Just saying "no, you can't do that anymore." I'll never forgive what they did to Charm. (my EQ1 main was an enchanter). Overall, I think they did a lot more wrong than right. But they did do several things right.
@@Trensharo WoW also looked better on release, imo. Especially character design. WoW still has an aesthetic that is eye catching today. EQ2 looks like puke in that area. They almost seem to have used the same talentless hack who made the Luclin-era model revamp for EQ1, which always has looked like the most clunky, badly animated models of any MMO I've ever seen and still holds the crown today.
I played a lot off EQ 1 and 2, and you are way off base with the damage not being different. One thing both EQ games did well was have noticeable differences for classes. Sure, if you compare an assassin and a brigand for dps they will be similar while leveling, but they both still have different things they do. Leveling as a warden was not easy until they implemented AA, as healers in general had no dps to speak of because of the class system. Enchanters and Coercers were stun machines that did have dps, but nowhere near a wizard. Combo moves weren't necessary by any means, and honestly almost no one used them soon after launch anyway. That point is completely moot. They helped but not enough to focus on them solely for their bonus. A good dps rotation would outdo them easily.
I don't understand the complaint about gear...it's a natural progression. Armor gets better, stats get better. Their crafting system was actually quite brilliant in that you could almost self twink if you focused on harvesting and crafting a mastercrafted set at 12, 22, etc. Every mmorpg has a system like this. I don't know why this surprised you. Hell, any game with loot generally has a system like this. White, green blue, purple etc...loot gets better as you level. I'm not sure why that's a point of contention. You are also completely missing the point on the linked mobs. They were meant to be the opposite of what EQ did in that you could aggro everything in a zone and train it to the exit. If you played EQ back in the day, you know what a "train to zone" call was. People accidentally aggroed dragons, specifically Gorenaire, and the only way to drop aggro was to zone. I can't tell you how many times I saw dozens of dead bodies at Karnor's Castle because of it. Linked mobs were meant to combat that issue, and honestly it was a great idea. Mobs were not "900 yards" away, either. Unless there was a weird bug, I generally never say any come running from more than 20-30 yards at most. And it was a minor inconvenience at best. It sounds like EQ2 just isn't or wasn't the game for you. It did far more right than wrong since all of your "wrongs" are personal preferences and some were QoL improvements from the original. I just think you couldn't be more wrong, especially about the classes. Objectively they did one of the best jobs of managing having a lot of options for various roles that most games like that struggled with. When you needed a healer in a group it could be a warden, fury, mystic, defiler, inquisitor, templar. They all had unique differences, and some were better at certain tasks than others, but they really did a great job with the classes. It sounds like you played to the first expansion at least and I don't know how that part escaped you if you played that long.
My largest gripe about EQ2 at the time it released was that I played as an "Illusionist" this was my classes name. That class had fewer illusions than all other classes with illusions. The Shaman could transform into tons of creatures, and I could do jack all. One of the biggest draws of the class was to "mez" things, or take them out of combat if you pulled too many mobs, crowd control and buffing party members was the idea behind the illusionist, and yet, there were better versions of my spells coming from other classes.
I was further done withthe game when the NPCs had better looking armors than was available to the players through raiding on release.
hehe, I forgot about the armour thing - yeah - I played a plate class and was hella pissed I couldn't get a shiny suit of armour (apart from the zero stat ceremonial set or something?) =D
DC coins pay to win
Illusionist isn't a cosplay you don't need "illusions", You cast your Illusion and it mimics all the spells you do, so basically double the damage, and its one of the classes that can mesmerize which is kinda like a "Sap", its also one of the few classes that can regenerate Mana for the entire group/raid, early game is slower and harder, later its alot fo fun, the AL:T of this class is the Coercer which instead of an illusion, coerces an enemy at the same level to fight for you, if you lvevl 35 you can mes an orc on Zek and he will fight with you until the spell breaks, then stun and mes again, its a more skillful class but also very fun.
I played EQ as a young kid, like the year before EQ2 came out (born in '95, was it 2001 so maybe 6YO) I remember EQ2 not being as good as EQ , I don't know why, but even as a kid I knew.
My dad was the one who actually played th
Funny to think kids play Roblox or Fortnite and i was a kid playing EQ annoying you boomers 🤔😂
Too old for zoomers to young for boomers 🤔
The Everquest skeleton laughter is iconic for me. I love it.
It sound like that one Demon from Call Of Duty Zombies when you get the teddy bear from the mystery box
Same, used to play it in like 2002 as a child
@@lilboss1330I was thinking that too, eerily similar
Always reminds me of Kithicor Forest as you try to outrun them.
almost certian its a stock sound effect, can hear it in older bottom-of-the-barrel indie horror and almost certian on the game over screen in COD world at war
I remember my parents playing EverQuest and hearing stories about how they played this game with their friends back even before they were married. From their stories it always sounded like the greatest thing ever but when I tried it I couldn’t get into it but it started my wanting to play video games and it was my first real game so I’ll always respect this game
I had a somewhat similar experience. My father worked with computers during the first big home boom, so we always had one since I was born. I would run around just randomly beating low level skeletons and running from bears on my father's character in EQ1 when I was 7. Fun memories, but I bet I would absolutely hate it now.
That's soo awesom!!awesome!!!
@@TheCalmPsycho TBH I played it a little around the same age, I found out it was free recently and decided to try it. I found it fascinating if a bit clunky. Some of the old mechanics really change how things work and its interesting to think about why modern games make different choices and what they gained/lost.
I tried EQ 2 to see what it changed, and it lost a lot of charm, it's more clear where to go but it's also more clearly 'gamey'. For example some of the early areas in EQ1 are clearly designed to look cool over being designed for the quests/enemies, but that actually has interesting side effects. Having it be kinda hard to find where to go makes it a lot easier to just get lost and wander and appreciate areas. So when you're told to go kill some enemy, you more likely to go 'Oh that one I fought in a random cave 4 hours ago and thought was way too tough? Lets goooooo!' As I said, I find this shit fascinating.
@@compassionatecurmudgeon7025 I do enjoy that kind of feeling, Elden Ring really struck me with that sense of true exploration and wonder. It is just so old and clunky that I can't get rid of the QoL things I am used to so that I can truly enjoy EQ.
this is my favorite game of all time, i started early 2000s with one of my best friends we were both 10 years old.... played till present day lol.. its a great game honestly or was before sony sold to daybreak
There's a lot to be said about this game and this video is a great insight into how MMOs have changed in the last 15-20 years but also Josh called a frog a lizard and I just think that that's worth discussion
Exactly. Since it's a big frog and therefore a big lizard he should have called it a dinosaur.
@@Alresu that is so fail, it's funny.
@@thomasneal9291 If you found it funny, it's not a fail but a somewhat successfull joke. It achieved its goal, even though it did so by unintendet means.
Just logged back into EQ2 after many many years. Loving it. Nostalgia hit satisfied. I played and raided back in 2004-6. The music and atmosphere alone brings back memories of better times. Skeleton laughing and Scarecrow laughing are the best. Never forget them. My fav quest chain in any MMO ever was Claymore.
Making a comment that no one will read on a two year video because of how much I cared about this game.
I miss this game. The comment from steam about " there being two separate games" is 100% accurate. You can tell when the quality went downhill, around the time they stopped including voiceovers (I think Shadow Odyssey?) There was so much detail and effort put into this game for many years (they had lore written in books that were in game, that you could take and put on a bookshelf in your in-game home!), and now it's end game content for long time players, and that's it. As you showed in this video, they really don't care about the new player experience. IF they had, you would have known that you could have opened more than one skill hotbar. Sometime around 2010 they made a "golden path" that was supposed to guide new players through the game, but it was never "official" and nothing was really implemented to guide you to it. The starting area that you picked was one of the two original starting areas (the other was the exact same map, but with evil). Those two starting areas were actually removed from the game later on in favor of Frostfang Sea (which you visited, not a huge fan of it but it's level 1 to level 20 for new good players), and Timorous Deep (added in what is my opinion the last good expansion, Rise of Kunark).
Also, the evil faction is more popular in this game than the good faction. I always figured (and heard from several others) that it's because the layout of Freeport is better than Qeynos.
Most of your qualms with the game were added way later on. A lot more of your complaints could have easily been remedied if the new developers actually cared about pulling new people in, and improved the old areas. But there's no incentive to do that, because all the current players have been playing for years now, and any new players are brought in because of those old players and they just buy the max level boost.
Everquest 2 was amazing for many years. Especially after the acquisition of SOE by DBG, the game quality fell to the wayside in favor of "hehe big number go up". The story (as loose as it is) is so convoluted now and ingrained in the cities, that even on timelocked servers that have only the first expansion unlocked, the npcs will mention events that haven't happened yet (like the NPCs in the main cities mentioning how happy they are that Luclin is whole again, but that doesn't happen for many, many expansions). The mechanics have changed so much since beginning, that even with the timelocked servers, you aren't getting the original experience.
Everquest 2 occupied a large part of my childhood, even into my teenage years. I'll always remember it for what it was, and always lament it for what it has become. I started on the PvP server Venekor, which eventually got merged into the PvP server Nagafen, which eventually merged with non-PvP servers when they shut down PvP totally (they didn't want to balance their classes because hehe big number go up). Now the PvP servers you can play now are timelocked to the first expansion (Desert of Ro). The server population is usually pretty high when these PvP servers start, but fall off almost completely before the second expansion ever unlocks. (They also pander to a core number of higher end players on the PvP server, causing further balance issues, but that's a gripe for another comment).
This video made me feel a lot of emotions. It was a game that I felt very passionately about for a long time, and I got to witness its decline first-hand.
Rest in piece, EQ2.
Also, as in EQ1, Qeynos, the good city, is SonyEQ spelled backwards.
Had a blast playing this when it first launched. Only because my friends switched to WoW I eventually made the jump as well. When I came back to EQ2 several years later, I couldn't find that same feeling again, the game had changed. Faster, easier leveling, streamlined, stripped from it's uniqueness. Sad story really.
Same! I switched to EQ2 after playing FF 11 online. I loved EQ2, but, WoW won out.
EQ2 was legendary. My computer physically couldn't handle I still, but I still played it as a wee lad. It still holds some serious real estate in my mind to this day.
Me too. I actually ignored my gf on my birthday to fight the djin in the sands to get the flying carpet. Fond memories
WoW basically caused those changes to the whole mmo market it was so sad to watch all the unique challenging mmos get turned into streamlined WoW clones. Really just murdered the creativity of a whole industry by being so commercially successful.
@@BarnsHolledayArt. This is really only half of the problem. The truth is, WOW was partially so successful due to timing alone. The MMO genre today is partially dead because the internet is now much better developed. Back then, you still had a world to explore and a game to learn. You didn't know if a quest chain would give you a good reward or not, so you did it anyways. Now, MMOs are kind of pointless. Why bother making a big world with crafting skills and such if everybody is already in the endgame because they can just look up a guide and know everything about the game in a matter of hours?
So now everyone just makes a mad dash to max level while playing the strongest race/class combo there is and turn the game from an interesting world to explore and inhabit to a set of boring exercises with a completely predictable outcome.
The truth is, the players are their own worst enemy. They want to "win" above all else. So the developers streamline and overbalance the game, and we get another sterile experience.
As someone with far too many hours spent in that game... honestly for me the biggest thing that ruined the game was that the devs threw the baby out with the bathwater almost every time they tried to fix anything.
Ah, the SOE/DBG classic
If they had just stayed true to what made EQ2 unique it would still be alive. Like who asked for instanced battlegrounds in eq2? They just kept chasing WoW and ruining what made it special.
That's Daybreak for ya.
DC coins pay to win
What does this mean?
So here is something hilarious. This game actually has a lot of big voice actors in it. Including Invader Zim's who voices a Gnome in the Wailing Caves (good beginner dungeon in The Commonlands) Definetly my favorite MMO.
yep - Christopher Lee did the VO for Lucan D'Lere (Freeport SK), Heather Graham did Antonia Bayle (Qeynos) - the VO for launch was great
They probably send way too much money on that but its cool wow did not have much voice acting back in vanilla it became more common later on in tbc more raid bosses had voice acting then in wrath you had a few cutscenes and all the bosses had voice acting in cata there was a lot of voice acting in the leveling quests too and there was even more in mop and wod but that is a long time after 2004.
@@belstar1128 actually if you think about it EQ was so successful at the time that money didnt matter lol
Best npc in the game that gnome!
"I was not amuuuuuuused!"
It was a fabulous mmo in it's time. I picked it up just after its first expansion released, and I played it solidly for the next 5 expansions. It had a great player base then. The content was worth doing, and it came out pretty fast, all newer versions of lore from EQ1.
Oh and the grython flight you took was a bad example. That mechanic was a later one added. Catch an old grython flight path in other zones and you do get the epic sweeping views as you cross a zone. It just doesn't have the seamless travel between zones like WoW does.
But yeah it slowly died a death. About the time it went free to play, shortly after Sony Online Entertainment became Darkpaw games. The team shrank and so did the work quality sadly.
I still have fond memories, of years of Epic loot and 5 mansions full of stuff to show I did it all. Tackling the sun gods in desert of flames. Soaring to flying islands in the kingdom of sky. Claiming my epic weapon hidden in Veeshan's Peak. Guarded by dragons of course, hidden in the isles of Kunark.
Sadly I've lost the account details lol
Yeah WoW did things better. But for a smaller crowd EQ2 was pretty damn epic for a few years, and did things a little differently. I still fondly remember the seasonal events, and the superb guide recruitment program they had. Players could apply to be ingame guides. I was one for a few years, Rohar my ingame persona who answered player questions, gave out goodies, and ran scripted lore stories for players to gain more goodies too. It was a lot of fun. And it made the game richer. I wish games did it now.
I loved EQ2.
My wife and I used to play Everquest 2, it was one of the only video games I could get her into 🤣 it was very new player friendly, and she was a beast at playing the auction house. Every year we reinstall it to go to to Frostfell.
I played EQII from launch until about 2010. I loved my time on there. It was more than a game, it was a social experience. I made so many friends and we spent hours slowly slogging through instances and camping mobs. I tried everything I could from just spending an entire day expoloring maps, to crafting, to dungeon crawling, and even did raiding in a top guild. I loved my time on there, and really felt passion from the devs. So many quest lines, so much lore, the details in the different areas (I miss you Nektropos castle). And of course the music was stellar.
I watched the game transform from a social experience where finding a group and spending the entire night with them on vent was the norm turn into a WoW clone with dungeon finder. That's why I quit. But I do from time to time think back fondly on the years I spent in Norrath. (funny easter egg. The main "good" city, Qeynos is "Sony EQ" backwards)
EQ2 was absolutely badass when I played from about 2006 - 2009. PVP on the Nagafen server was INTENSE and before they started nerfing certain scout abilities (like point-blank arrow, which had a knock-back effect that let you yeet people off of cliffs) I absolutey loved playing. The Kunark expansion was the height of EQ2 much like Velious was the height of EQ1. I had a great time on the giant maps the Kunark expansion offered, not to mention the raid content was amazing.
I played on Vox before Naggy and loved the PvP. The PvP during Kunark/Shadow Odyssey in Kylong Plains was unreal. Orrrr way back, flying from griffon station to griffon station in Antonica battling it out with raids of Freeps and Q's was epic. Haven't had an experience like that in a game since.
I played on nektulos server back when it had soul shards if you died. Fallen gate with a bad group was a nightmare if they pulled a whole room and got you squashed. Then they got rid of that merged with guk and soon after I stopped playing in Aug of 2013 and only recently logged in to see what was up. All my characters had been their names butchered.
@@Nakasasama yeh same thing happened to me, they got rid of PVP servers entirely and I got merged into some random server and my characters name had an “_” with a random word after it
@valcaron that’s actually a really awesome idea. And something that is totally explorable nowadays with game dev engines/IDEs like UE5. There’s actually a UA-cam channel Where someone is taking assets from original EverQuest and dropping them into unreal engine, and it looks pretty amazing. Basically making “EverQuest unreal”.
nagafen world pvp was what pvp is all about.
Oh man, I played this hard when it launched. The EQ2 website used to keep a kind of leaderboard/progression tracking, so you could pull up your character profile. When I hit 50 (initial level cap), it said I was the 4th one to hit max on my server for my class. After that, with like no initial raid content, I ended up jumping ship to WoW, which my wife had started playing. Have some fond memories running guildies through fabled item quests like jboots, but don't remember much beyond that anymore.
Great video, only nitpick would be that they do in fact use actual fantasy names for things, but the few things you ran into that were different, were actually sub-species type things. Drakota aren't dragons, they were made by dragons, and the grobins are just the goblins of that region.
as a little kid who couldn't afford WoW (and i literally got scared of it because of all those addiction stories) I remember finding a free demo of EQ2 maybe a year or so later after its release. First what impressed me that the office pc rig which my dad had could actually run this game pretty well and for me it looked GAT DAMN INSANELY GOOD. Second thing i started as a fairy in this mushroom world which was impressive and huge. I loved th mechanic of the fairy being able to glide down when jumping from a hight. So instead of running to the quest-enemies I climed this huge tree and glided down to their location, avoiding other enemy encounters. I think the limit of the demo was lvl 12 and it blew me away how many things, questsand platforming there were to do just to reach this level alone. And the thought about what else is there to explore made me very interested... I played it the whole day deep into the night and enjoyed it a lot... which made me even more scared of WoW... Neither had money for EQ2 too xD
My entire guild from EverQuest 1 jumped ship to play this stupid game. You needed a NASA computer to run it. I was using a toaster. SO I went to WoW instead.
Did give it a try years later, with a better PC. It has some fun points, but after Daybreak took over it just got worse and worse.
LOL Seriously dude, I begged my family to buy a new PC for EQ2... which we did, and it fucking ran at like 15fps. This is one huge reason WoW did so well. It could run on any PC. My new comp at the time ran WoW at 30frames easily.
Daybreak can DIAF.
@@sweetfry "This is one huge reason WoW did so well." This must be the most underrated factor in wow's rise and fall ever. I could literally only play wow with my toaster at the time-didn't even need a download. Nowadays you need state of the art tech to run it at all.
@@sweetfry That's one thing blizzard undestood. Not everyone had a beefy PC at that time.
@@archvaldor Wow? its not that bad nowadays either, if you dont raise the graphics, which we never did on our toasters either. I have a fairly middle of the ground pc and wow runs at ultra graphics..
I miss this feeling of those early 2000s games. Being young and having a bunch of time to explore this virtual world in a genre that was relatively young. You could tell they put in more gamedev effort back then, good times.
As you probably figured out by now EQ2 was released with multiple starting areas. The city you were in was the human starting area, the enchanted forest area was the fairy/elf starting area, the ice area was the starter area for the Barbarians, and so on, including multiple starting areas inside of each faction (good or evil). Then they decided to chuck it all and make the starter island for all players to start in, both good and evil (and doing it like multiple games, starting with a shipwreck). Once out of these "starter zones" you get the normal point progression.
WoW would go on the use that type of business model of creating multiple DLCs to be released around the same time as other games. Only to store them away for when the next big "WoW Killer" came along releasing them close the the other games' release date. Even though it is getting long in the teeth, WoW probably still has 2 or 3 DLCs waiting in the wings for the next big game to come out to drop them on.
I always come back to EQ2. I was one of those people who waited till midnight to buy the game by being snuck into the back door of a Gamestop. I play it off and on for about 3 months out of every year. I have 12 characters all around level 60+. I am one of those gamers who find enjoyment in playing every class in the game simultaneously and being the best at that class no matter how many years it takes me.
im told that practice with dlc's/exp packs was killed off by current management, they have vague ideas and outlines at best for what they could rush into production in a pinch, and just work on the next exp pack as they previous ones ready for launch takig time from work on the next for debugging as needed, mostly this is due to the managment that caused the recent massive firing after MS bought the company.. at least im hearing MS are reaching out to people let go who they want back and offering them jobs as they re-staff studios and restructure them, one fellow i know is getting to move back where he and his wife grew up and making more working from home then he was working for blizzard, with way lower cost of living, hes quite happy with the result, also hes moving from being a "Grunt with a title" to a manager/lead whos getting to form his team from those they hire and he got input on who to bring back from his former coworkers.
anyway, i know alot of people who come back to eq and eq2, the only other one i see people come back to and stick around to play for any extended time is ESO...
I love the nostalgia I get from watching this. Not just for EQ2 but for EQ. The skeleton laugh is iconic.
I swear I heard one of the EQ fire spell sound effects in a song the other day. Brought back memories.
The skeleton laugh remind me the laugh at the end of the zombies mode in cod when you die
@@dragoncovemusic3827 it really does
There are only two acceptable types of skeletons:
1. Ones who laugh like the EQ skeles.
2. Ones who talk like Skeletor.
Reminds me of Army of Darkness
As former GM of EverQuest's Luclin server, I can say authoritatively that it's pronounced "Luck-lin," not "Looselin."
THANK YOU
it's spelled as if it should be "looselin" phonetically. that's how one would expect to pronounce it.
Luclin gang rise up
I joined Lucklin When it opened and to be fair to be fair the only people who ever called it Looselin were wrong.
Preach this truth to the horizon
This video makes me sad. There seems to be a very fun game here, but one that never got the chance to really shine. That, and the fact that the social part of MMO's has kind of died off. I wish I had a chance to experience the older generation of MMORPGs in their prime as I find their slower, more methodical gameplay loops and focus on exploration and social activities enticing.
The game is still going, Josh relies on broken stupid metrics to gauge a game. The majority of EverQuest 2, and EverQuest, don't play on steam. EQ1 still gets 10k players on peak, EQ2 is around 4500.
Have you tried ESO? It’s not an exact match for the good ol’ days of FFXI and EQ, but it’s definitely more exploration-focused, go at your own pace, pick your own alignment and define your own journey.
Combat’s not the greatest, but it still scratches that nostalgic itch when I get tired of other modern MMOs’ rush to endgame treadmill approach.
A friend of mine used to tell me in the late 90s about how these PC games called "MMOs" were on the "internet" and that people would hang out, group together, have adventures, kill enemies, and make friends all through a video game. I was amazed, the first thing I wanted to do if I ever got the "internet" was to play one of these games. Around 2004 I got my first PC, started Runescape and... I was underwhelmed. I bought WoW... once again, underwhelmed. I tried a dozen and none of them stuck. To this day I think I have my most hours in FFXIV and that's only because I had unrelated reasons to play it.
The best times I did have in MMOs however were when I had at least one friend to play with synchronously (ie; only playing together). Any other arrangement is like watching paint dry.
@@ErgonomicChair hell even project 1999 can get close to 2k players on weekend peak hours across green and blue servers.
EQ2 was incredible. Some of the best co-op play I ever experienced was a team of three of us. A Paladin, a Druid, and Battle Priest (Cleric). We as a team of three, could cover places that normally took a group of 6. Was great. Then the other two, a husband/wife team, quit EQ2 and it went back burner as I could never find that caliber of players again.
Same Here, i played everey time with one or three People and we have so mutch fun. But then they left and it wasnt the same anymore. Slowly the Guild decayed.
You should have made moves on the wife 😆
@@damiion666 Maturity doesn't think that way. If they were interested, they would have invited. Besides, these are people online. I do not know them in person and therefore would have no interest in such. Attraction only takes place via articulation which requires in person interaction.
@@tahoma6889 you’d be surprised. People used to meet up all the time when the mmo craze hit
I have this issue with all the older mmos
Played at launch and loved the hardcore grouping nature of the game. The accomplishments felt bigger. After WoW started eating EQ2's lunch, SOE just started copying whatever Blizzard was doing... but obviously not as well. A recipe for disaster. They tried to change, when they should have doubled down.
i loved it too. even most of the normal quests were ^^^(group quests) and i met a lot of ppl in this time without any need to rush anything
Ditto, I second that. Ended on Nagafen server when it went free to play. Game died. Got filled with billies wanting an easy win. Starting saying it was "too hard" so they dumbed it down like WoW and made it to where you could buy a max lvl character at teh start. They killed it just like SWG was killed. Remeber when becoming a Jedi meant somthing? Then boom...everyone can be a jedi just at character select...doesnt mean anything anymore. In fact, its a slap in the face to everyone who dedicated 100s of hours in order to accomplish such a feat. Just like in EQ2 and having a max character. Now its means nothing.
To be fair the game did succeed for many years. it wasn't until microtransactions were introduced that the playerbase dropped. That was when I quit. I used to raid with a big guild. 12 years of my life and probably a thousand dollars sunk into expansion packs and subscription fees... And I'm not even playing it anymore...
Imagine how some of us feel that jumped on multiple big bandwagons - EQ2, WoW, SWOTR, Wildstar... I don't even want to think about how much $$ I've lost over the last 20 years - all to games that I can't replay for more $$, assuming that it's even recognizable after years of updates.
I like to think about how much fun I have had compared to the money I have spent. There a very few things that you buy and last a life time. I would say 12 years of hopefully mostly enjoyable play time is well worth roughly a thousand dollars. I kind of think about it like going to a movie. Is spending 10 dollars for 2 to 3 hours of enjoyment worth it. Most of the times yes. I did the same thing with WoW spent 10 years of my life playing that game and ended up quitting because I don't like the direct the game has gone but I do not regret for a moment the time and money I spent playing it because for the most part I really enjoyed the experience at the time.
What stop you from going back
Everybody grows up eventually. Except for dead children, of course.
@@randzopyr1038 swtor is actually still relatively similar to how it was at launch. Ofcourse with power creep. But it doesn't play that different. Like current wow does compared to vanilla
That part where you were talking on Empty/abandoned cities with their own NPCs and stories being forgotten reminds me of Accursed Farms's video on a mapping software that not only preserves old and dead game's maps and cities but also could help them be re-imagined into something new. Fantastic video I believe you'd enjoy it. Plus also he makes a good point on games as as service being basically fraud as the devs/studio can just kill the game by shutting down the servers regardless of how much money you put into it.
Love the video, and as a fellow swashbuckling froglock, I respect your choice in Character creation. A few side notes, Griffin flight was sooo cool when they added it, not all zones had a loading screen when flying by so you get that sweeping landscape as you ride, some of the paths had swooping animations and went through different landmarks, it was fun to not have to run everywhere.
Secondly, I always liked the difficulty, from tutorial island there are a few harder bosses I could solo if I wanted(That damned shark off the coast did kill me a few times), and even in the later dungeons/instanced zones they scaled to whether you were in a party or not. Granted, I played with my father when I was a teenager, but I would like to think I'd be better at playing now than then, plus he had a guild to run, was triboxing at some points, and I'd be off doing my own thing.
It had Christopher Lee in it; it is therefore factually incapable of being the worst.
The housing system was also pretty great.
Everquest 2 was an awesome game. Played it for years. It had (has?) one of the best player housing systems ever - they kept adding new houses and guild housing and furniture. It was a lot of fun decking your place out and visiting other players homes to see what they had done. There were a few balance issues at launch, and they had to do a rework fairly early on, but the gamme kept a sizable population for years, so I wouldn't call it a failure. It just wasn't WoW - but then, Everquest was never truly king of the hill either: that title always belonged to Lineage.
Player housing is still in game 🙂. Did WOW get player housing in the end?
@@hoodwinktheranger2967 no lol
@@hoodwinktheranger2967 Ultima Online might even have the best housing system and that game came out in 1997
@@Eyrothath Maybe, I only very briefly played UO while playing EQ1, so can't comment.
@@hoodwinktheranger2967 WoW housing is not planned in Dragonflight, so maybe we can hold out hope in the next next expansion in 3 years?
I loved the first Evercrack. Had a blast until some in-game "GM" changed my name IN GAME and told me my name violated their world's "lore". I had a high level monk class named Atomicmental. Dude told me that "atoms" hadn't been discovered yet so he changed my name. 😂😂😂. Needless to say my Evercrack addiction was solved immediately. I tried 2 years later but the magic was long gone.
Same thing happened to me. Cancel culture started a long time ago.
@@pinktaco4937 Cancel culture doesn't exist obviously but I get it. Someone needed to flex their authority and did so. The game moved on without me and life continued. Shame but there you have it.
@@lewislovelord8977 Joking? Cancel culture is 100% real. Some dude playing a dark elf female told a GM I called him a blue haired N word. Last MMO I tried was wow classic, it's automated now, wanted a free name change so had my guild report it but your enemies do the same.
@@pinktaco4937 Naw. 100% of "cancelled" people are still active in their professions one way or another OR they've moved on to some new thing in life due to choices they made. That's disgusting, what happened to you though. People are petty as hell.
@@lewislovelord8977 Um...that doesn't make cancel culture not real. It just means being cancelled doesn't mean your life is over. Cancel culture isn't new and has been around longer then you have been breathing. These days it's the hyper sensitive diversity crowd that wants to make sure everything fits their standard. Not long ago it was christian conservatives doing it.
TO say it isn't real is just a slogan for ignorant politically brainwashed kids that don't want to admit their "Side" is just as reprehensible as whoever they crusade against.
Heya, one of the EQ2 Trailblazers here. I've been playing the game since its early days and oh boy was it a whole lot of joy. The major problems you discuss here (namely shop) weren't even a thing then - the system was Pay to Play (P2P) and everyone was having the world of it. Each zone had its own que of music, the player base was vast and it even had some punches to exchange with WoW. But, unfortunately, SOE completely numbed the balance and their power creep issue, which lead to the game's slow and steady death. The F2p and shop were introduced years later - just to try to get new people on board, but the game was at its inevitable death state anyways.
I could go on for hours why the game worked back in the days and way it was a whole fairytale of experience, but trust me on this one - it was fun and worth the investment. But up to a point.
Also, this is subjective, but raids complexity was cool, but probably was one of the main reasons why the game died (high entry ceiling).
Everquest 1 was my first MMO and I still have amazingly fond memories of it.
The coldain ring war for my monk, getting my Monk epic in Kunark, raiding Temple of Veeshan, traveling to the moon, fighting Gods in the Planes of Power.
When EQ2 and WoW were announced, it split our raiding guild hard. It split the entire player base.
I ended up playing WoW with my close friends for years and while I remember enjoying WoW, I can't recall many memories from it like I did in EQ1.
I might just have my Rose tinted glasses on, but it was a huge part of my gaming life.
As someone who still plays EQ on one of the progression servers, I will say that you are definitely wearing rose colored glasses on the ring war. It's like 2 hours of kill and wait boredom. Source: Did it a few months ago when my server hit Velious.
Everyone tells me it's rose tinted glasses but I still play on the project 1999 servers and have a great time with the velious locked servers. I'm excited for the next progression server they drop since it progresses in the same real-time as the original launch. Even prenerf items can be gathered by the poop sock enthusiasts.
Come check out P99 if you want to see if it's Rose tinted or not. If you see a Carnassius Bloodjaw (green and blue) on send me a message, I can get you some newbie gear.
EQ went down hill when it tried to be like WOW. I played for 7 years. I tried playing WOW for a couple of years, it was just too easy and the player base was just too toxic.
EQ on project 1999 is still an incredible experience.
@@Xorthos Did it on p99... Enjoyed the nostalgia run before end game. Raid scene and end game politics is just awful.
We were so excited when this came out, thinking it would be EQ but with better graphics. Instead, we got a game that was clunkier and more restrained. The fact that your character SLOWED DOWN when you entered combat to prevent kiting was enough for me.
Facts
this is a huge gripe for me in swtor too, the second you're in range of an enemy your movement speed is cut to 30% so you cant escape forcing you to engage in every single bit of combat the game has between objectives, even on a mount it slows you down enough to get hit then kicked off it.
DC coins pay to win
That blew my mind. The devs actually slowed your character in combat to prevent kiting? Wtf why? That just sounds horrible
My mind has also just been blown by the concept that some games slow the player character down upon aggro just so players can’t kite mobs.
I’m astonished that any Dev would think that’s a great idea and none of the others corrected him/her. Kiting is a valid fight strategy especially for players like me who always tend towards mage classes. Often I’m so squishy that I need to kite to survive or avoid the boredom of having to cast a healing spell every few hits.
My other favoured mage tactic is to go with a mage class that has the ability or choice to have a familiar or pet if it’s capable of tanking for me. That’s why I chose the mage class in ESO and made good use out of the conjuration skill.
In FF14 that was one of the factors that led me down the path of becoming a Summoner for solo content and Scholar for group content and that’s how I learnt that I absolutely love being the healer in that game. So much so that I unlocked Conjurer progressing into white mage. I have to admit I don’t like what was done to Smn during the Endwalker release. While I did think it needed simplifing and adjusting I don’t like what it was changed to. No Egi primal pets accompanying me and worse Carbuncle doesn’t actually help me by fighting at my side. Instead it just follows me around and only does anything when I transform it into an Egi for the single strike power attacks. Instead I must now rely on my chocobo for tanking when not in solo duties. I specced him into the tank skill tree.
Fortunately though the class still works out as DPS and I still enjoy the lore around it. And yet I’m also tempted to give red or black mage classes a try.
But yeah I tend to kite a bit more than I used to because I no longer have Titan to semi tank for me, or even use Ifrit or Garuda to help me kill mobs quickly. A shame really.
I actually use to be one of the Guides in EQ2. It was a ton of fun hosting role playing events on a non-role play server. People really got into it because of the prizes you could get from it. I -really- miss those days. I'm still salty about EQ Next not being released, and Landmark being taken down even though they said they wouldn't do that.
Greetings, former guide Rohar here :)
It was a fun time being a guide in EQ2.
@@RustyDalek72 It really was! More games need to implement guide type programs.
Someone reported that DBG is going to use Landmark assets in a new game, which is insulting to those of us who paid for their development.
@@biblehistoryscience3530 Oh that's just ridiculous. I was lucky to win a package from a streamer, so if I'm annoyed by that I can only imagine how people that actually bought into it feel.
33:20 "MMORPGs in a modern era need to cater for solo players." Bingo. Well-said.
This is the most important point that I have been trying to hammer into the skulls of the development staff of almost every MMORPG that I have played ever since approximately 2006, when I first started playing another online gaming title, "Final Fantasy XI Online" (I had previously played "EverQuest for Macintosh," my first true MMORPG, in 2005). As a solo player myself, I am happy to hear someone finally to make this statement in a nutshell.
Compared to other MMORPGs that I play, "EverQuest II" is not terribly solo-friendly. Specifically, the game overall feels more of a grind than many other similar modern titles, and as you pointed out, the maps, although enormous, feel relatively sparse compared to other titles.
One pet peeve of mine toward "EverQuest II" in particular is the lack of sensitivity of the development staff toward the needs of solo players--especially those interested in role-play. For example, back in 2017, Daybreak released the "Planes of Prophecy" expansion pack. One of the perks contained in the Collector's Edition (then available for $89.99 USD) and Premium Edition (then available for $139.99 USD) of that expac was a prestige house, "Sprocket's Interlocking Plane." As a Gnome, I was extremely interested in this house, which was essentially a pair of steampunk-style buildings that could be used as houses placed on a platform floating high in the sky. Unfortunately, I was unable to afford the house initially, and did not know that the price would decrease the following September; therefore, I only purchased the Standard Edition (then available for $34.99 USD).
When I later learned, after the release of the next expansion pack, that the editions containing my desired house had become affordable the next September, I was heartbroken. Immediately, I posted a message on the official forums (see forums.daybreakgames.com/eq2/index.php?threads/acquiring-past-clockwork-themed-bonus-items-in-pop-expac.594858/) requesting that this house, together with other related items, be made available during the in-game Tinkerfest festival; however, my post did not receive any response from the developers, and as of July 2022, 5 years after the release of the expac, it has not yet been made available.
This situation forced me to consider changing my character race to High Elf, only to encounter a different problem: For some reason, the homeland of the High Elf race, Felwithe (renamed to "New Tunaria"), is not a player city. Instead, it is a dungeon area. This means that High Elves, who are traditionally an arrogant race proud of their heritage, have become refugees, forced to live among others whom they do not enjoy living together with in a foreign city. Someone even posted a message, "High Elf Homes 'URGENT' REQUEST" (see archive.eq2wire.com/showthread.php?p=5063224), desperately requesting a dedicated housing area for the High Elf race, on a non-official forum board, back in 2009, 13 years ago. However, this situation has yet to be remedied.
Annoyances such as these seriously detract from the role-playing experience. I have always dreamed of role-playing a mad scientist in an online universe. In terms of "EverQuest II," this means that I initially wanted to be a Gnome fascinated with Clockwork gadgets and steampunk-themed housing; however, my dream house, "Sprocket's Interlocking Plane," seems to have no hope of ever becoming available again; worse, my fallback option, becoming a High Elf, has also been derailed because of lack of a dedicated High Elf player city, which is taken for granted in every other MMORPG that I currently play where the High Elf race is playable.
On many occasions, I have seriously considering abandoning "EverQuest II" altogether in order to forget about this nightmare; however, I do happen to like the Clockwork Calamity illusion that allows my character to assume the countenance of the Clockwork Calamity, as well as the "Dok-Tok Mk III" mercenary, a tinkered equalizer clockwork mercenary.
Most other MMORPGs periodically re-offer past expansion pack reward items for at least limited durations to players in a similar predicament; however, Daybreak does not do this. Instead, I read on the official forums that it seems that they are afraid to sell the editions of past expansion packs containing reward items because they feel that players might expect them to be discounted, and they do not with to offer them for a discount permanently. Therefore, instead of offering them for a discount, they simply do not offer them at all. Strangely, they do not seem to realize that in doing so, they risk permanently losing paid subscribers for lack of necessary in-game items to enhance their play experience.
Dissatisfied, frustrated players are much less likely to maintain paid subscriptions than happy players, and it is difficult to be a happy player if in-game items essential to an expected play experience are deliberately made unavailable for the sake of maximizing developer profit.
I've tried to get into it occasionally over the years and thankfully got some free level 80s in a promotion, so I can play several characters at high level. I love the huge number of abilities you get in EQ2 compared to WoW after the ability pruning, but the lack of funds and thus lack of updating the client to improve usability and responsiveness was really telling every time I tried it.
I always did like how EQ2 had more of a "priority" of abilities rather than "rotation." Any idea of having some 6-10 abilities cycle through was unheard and the games GCD was MUCH lower than most, 0.5 or lower in most cases.
This one is gonna hurt. I by far put the most hours into this mmo and its like home. It just never had the casual appeal of WoW and WoW milked that hard advertising to a much broader audience and nailing it. The graphic requirements made it hard to bring a lot of friends in cause low settings meant pudding face but at the high end it was such a beautiful game. The crafting was deep and had its own storylines and quests and heritage equipment. It was an amazing experience for so many years. The holidays were so unique and fit the universe you could decorate your home and do so much to make this game your home away from the real world. It's a shame to even call the current dumpster fire everquest 2 cause its just a cash grab for the last few years sadly...oof my teenage self is crying over this one...
Honestly dont know why they let you start as a new player in the Queens island still. New Halas and TImorous Deep give a much better 1-20 experience than the rest.
The goblins are still goblins they just have local names based on tribes... grobin... runnyeye... etc
That's a weird example of how the griffons normally work... Usually they travel within a zone but yeah that one is kinda weird... There used to be boats for area changes like that but I guess waiting for boats was deemed too hard so you got a lot of add ins like this to make it simpler to travel directly.
If Everyquest 2 had focused on what made it special instead of trying to be mediocre WoW. It would be fine till this day. It had a great population for many years. People were in every zone. People were grouping constantly. They just completely nuked the population in last few years with blatant cash grabs.
The fact that you can't steamroll the content on any class is what made it special. You either struggled or you picked a solo friendly class to start. Summoners/tanks/some healers could all do this content no problem. The others required more thought and prep and that was why older mmos were so great. Not everything ironed out for you and when you figured out how to overcome those challenges the rewards were amazing.
Last time I seriously played this game was the Race to Trakanon event... no lifed the game for three months with some buddies ... was first healer to 80 on the server our tank was first on server to 80 ... honestly was great nostalgia ... then we discovered they hadn't even bothered to make sure the epic weapons for each class were updated with current stats or any stats in some cases along with most other equipment from raids etc... so the main goal of killing Trakanon was a disaster. Daybreak DOES NOT care anymore skip this game even if you see some glimmer of value in this video it dies quickly I promise.
Wow. I never comment on youtube videos but this is getting me so worked up. It was such a good game for many years and I have many many beautiful memories with friends. RIP eq2.
WoW did that thing to where waiting for the boat was deemed to hard and 'time consuming' so they implemented gryphons. A couple of areas you still hit a loading screen due to it. Thankfully, there are still boats in the game and skipping between Kalimdor/EK you still have you use it a low levels, though this may have changed in retail as I haven't played in a while. I do remember that the Mage tower has portals to everywhere now but it is by level I believe, or it once was.
I do get the complaints when they were about the boat from Menethil Harobr to Northend. That one always took a long time - if you just missed it you were in for a long wait. Having messed around on their Classic servers, I haven't found going back and forth between the continents a hinderance, it's been nice especially seeing people on the boat with me.
It's pretty sad that half of the problems with MMORPG's are caused by poor implementation/foresight and the other half are caused by attempting to try to gain the 'casual' crowd, casual meaning here the ones who claim they have no time to play because they have 'lives'. I've never understood why people who don't want to invest time in a time intensive game play such a game - they'd rather just spend money to skip playing the game. And that money is shiney, which companies go after, even though it skewers the game longterm. Those people aren't going to stay and your actual core-audience is going to get frustrated and leave when anything they've worked at is pretty much invalidated by someone with a credit card or worse, they can't even invest the time without spending loads of cash.
@@Amoreyna That is one of the greatest mysteries. Why do so many people who don't seem to enjoy primary mmo mechanics want to play mmos? MMOs used to be immersive social experiences and we blame a change in the internet as a whole but all my old MMO buddies are still looking for that immersive social experience. The market has just decided to shape itself for a group of players who seem to hate everything that makes an mmo an mmo. There are so many co-op/ competitive games that people can hop in and get instant action but instead people play mmos ... complain everything is too slow as they rush to end game ignoring hundreds of hours of content. It's just frusturating lol
While you wait for that boat, you used to message friends and look at your skills and all that other stuff that made you more connected to the world you were in. Even the current mmos I consider pretty good feel hollow compared to original everquest.
You two are reminiscing over maybe 10% of players who play mmos. Most have more than enough time. Like time to hop off your nostalgia train it’s blinding you
@@Valvad0ss Reminiscing about the old days is more engaging than playing a modern mmo so I'll just stick with it.
@@BarnsHolledayArtprogression servers might be the thing for you. We can relive eq1 and eq2 quite close to how they were. It is as close as we can get until pantheon releases.🙂
When EQ2 first came out it was VERY fun and exceded expectation. I feel WoW and the cult that followed was it's primary downfall. I enjoyed EQ2 over original WoW no doubt about it, but even I felt forced to switch over to WoW due to it being where all the friends were.
3:46 the frog was teased as a locked race at the beginning of EQ2. Much later it still hadn't been unlocked but the devs said 'the community just hadn't found the unlock yet'. Lies. Later they unlocked it and a huge patch resulted because the frog hadn't been fully implemented.
Well, that was sad.
I played it from Release in a succesful raid guild, but somehow I couldnt resist wow pre burning crussade. It just was a masterpiece.
It was good during tbc as well lol 😂 imagine not liking tbc and liking classic more😂😂😂😂
@@Valvad0ss never said anything against tbc, but classic was by far the superior experience compared to eq2.
I knew this video was coming some day... this is bringing up a lot of memories. Especially the sound design, since that's been changed the least. I used to play this game with my dad all the time when I was young... and then daybreak acquired it and we both fell off.
At least I'll always have those memories of bonding with him, I guess.
My favorite class was the beast tamer one, don't quite remember what it was called.
I remember playing this y'know... In the first two weeks. Picking an 'evil' race in the Iksar but being able to do a series of quests to be on the 'good' side always stuck with me, like picking a Tauren but being able to do a quest to play Alliance, I thought it was really cool.
Oh also the infamous /pizza emote that was tied in to actually order pizza from Domino's or Pizza Hut via the game so you never, ever have to stop playing 🤣
Honestly more MMOs should have a /pizza command
Everquest was the very first MMO I ever played when I was 11 with Shadow of Luclin. I remember my first character, it was a human magician named Rayor and then I discovered the Vah Shir and made a warrior. God those days I longed for in my MMOs when you actually had to talk to people, ask a druid or Beastlord for the SOW buff every chance you got, and just overall a positive experience in terms of actual gaming community...some days those days would come back a little...
Spirit of Wolf was doable by BST too? Thought only DRU or SHM were able to.
@KubaxKristallmond yep, rangers too
Other than the performance, I still think of this as the best MMO ever made. The class system was incredible. When you blended the classes right to form a raid party, everything snapped together like a puzzle. It was beautiful. I played an illusionist, which, to this day, is the most interesting class I've played in any game.
That's some rose-tinted glasses. Game is objectively very far from being anywhere near one of the best MMOs ever made.
@@reveriesduh And you played it for how long? .....
Was the game more populated outside of Steam? Because with 500 players across all time I'm not sure how you were getting into raid parties lol
@@sparkyspinz9897 ez pz
@@sparkyspinz9897 the game existed before steam
I played this when it still had people playing it, before it turned free to play and it was really fun then.. It's so sad to see games like these slowly die. I remember it had such fun things to do, there was an in-game card game you could claim free booster packs for every once in a while and if you got lucky with it some card packs had loot cards for goodies in game like mounts and stuff. There were languages to learn for almost every monster race in game so at first you only could see weird symbols if they talked to you but later you could learn their language and understand them. The housing system was amazing, I've seen so many creative things..
I wish games did that with languages still!
There are still people playing it and we use the Daybreak launcher not Steam. The game has a limited free option so called f2p but no sane person would play the game for real this way, its a taster really, the game is still a subscription based. 🙂
I keep going back to EQ2. I love it so much! It's still my favorite game.
The original EQ2 soundtrack was composed by Laura Karpman. All of the areas from the original release have her songs. After growing up playing the game, its by far and away my favorite soundtrack of anything ever. Everything Karpman touched in that game was magical. More recently, she did the soundtracks for Lovecraft Country and Marvel's What If...?
Loved EQ2 back in the day - still has my favorite housing system of any MMO - especially when combined with the woodworking profession. Had a blast with a gnome illusionist. Was so bummed when it got absolutely spanked by WoW. Would love to find a current MMO with a similar housing system. Fun fact I'm pretty sure this is the game that blew the power supply in my first ever "gaming" computer that I built :D Never mix a pentium 4 and a cheap PSU haha.
Professions were great. Using skulls and what not. Been so long.
I just want to take a moment to say explicitly that "dashing rogue" absolutely fits your character based on all the videos of yours I've binged recently.
I just started playing it and making an entire Let's Play Series and having a blast. Sure it's not perfect, but then again no MMO is or I would not be playing EQ2 right now lol.
I burned out on the theme park aspect of EQ2 in probably 6-8 months or so. I ended up going back to EQ1 for a time, but Planes of Power just completely sucked the soul out of EQ1 and I lost interest in the whole franchise. But looking back, that first year of EQ2 was still better than almost every other MMO I've tried since then. Whatever soul was lost back then has only continued to trickle out of the whole gaming industry (except indie games of course).
When you get done with your EQ2 retrospective, you should take one more step back and check out Project1999 (EQ1 before it started sucking).
Love the game, I left EQ1 when this released to have an amazing experience. I wouldnt go by Steam numbers, I use the original launchers. ALSO, my OCD is flipping out that you didnt harvest any of the SHINIES!
I love that the frog jumps around, so cute 🤭
The original 2004 EverQuest II will probably forever remain my most favorite MMO. The gathering, the crafting, the housing, the dungeons and some of the quest chains were just great. Also the graphics; I still have fond memories of the rain setting in while I was outside in Qeynos Province. That was some next level immersion. I could never get into WoW after that.
same here. i have such good memories of this game. i think something that really messed it up is that they started to try to be more like WoW at the cost of losing its own personality
I never played EverQuest II on release, WoW was my introduction into this genre. Though after having watched this video, I found myself quite impressed with the character models and animations... especially considering what year this came out.
EQ2 was kind of boring mechanically (lacked the danger and tension of EQ1), but I absolutely loved that you could make your own completely unique home. I basically played just to furnish my gothic horror home. Kind of played it more like the Sims than like EQ1. At the time I was also really in love with the whole cosmetic armor overlay thing, but in retrospect I'm not sure that was a great idea.
@@MaximumCarter Definitely. But it was also one of the game's biggest weaknesses. Even though I had a gaming PC that could run the poorly optimized Lineage II just fine, I had to buy a new GPU just for EverQuest II. I could not even launch the game before that. Even if everything else had been perfect, that alone would probably have made it impossible for EQII to compete with WoW.
Absolutely , i loved this game so much, my absolute favorite mmo ever. The epic long questlines was so much fun " speak as a dragon" etc etc . The crafting and housing was absoluterly masterfull. Combat was so much fun, dungeons that was actually diffucult and a world that was dangerous, very challangeing raids, add to that an amazing "skill tree". I played a Swashbuckler named Inigona Bloodfur for a long long time, loved every second of it!
The skeleton sound is so iconic to me I love the music of everquest 1 and 2. It's a shame that EQ2 is relatively dead. I had so much fun its one of 2 games I've actually gotten into a guild with actually a cool community. Sadly I stopped playing the game around level 42 and when I came back the guild was basically dead after the server merge that removed the PVP server. Great vid so far! (Watching the vid while commenting haha)
Sometimes I listen to the EQ2 soundtrack on UA-cam. One of the best MMO soundtracks imo.
To me WoW was far superior, sad what they did with it after WOTLK.
I spent way too much time in this game over the years. There's still videos from it on my YT account. It was a blast back then, it was subscription based and no microtransactions, they were slowly added later once it went semi free to play.
i love the ffxiv loading screens because you get vast scenes of the area you are entering or loading into when you get a loading screen. like seeing an aerial view of one of the main cities in the endwalker dlc, or a nice cinematic shot of an area in a dungeon or something.
Watching this video is making me sad, I played this game so much when it came out. Had so much fun with the community, started out as a evil character but decided to betray the evil side. The quest to turn side was hard and required alot of rep grinding to make the other side even let me into the city. Did alot of RP so that made it even more fun, trying to convince other good RP players to help me.
It was such a fun time, amazing stories from the game and community, its sad to see how it have died.
I always come back to this game, you're spot on with WoW really killing it on launch back in 04.
I suggest coming back and trying the new classic server called Varsoon sometime this May. Yes you need to pay a subscription, but the game is a million times better without the free to play crappy ads. If you want to see the towns full of people and the chat bursting with conversation, check back in May for sure and give it another chance. Stay away from the free to play model though, it was implemented years ago as a quick cash grab.
There was a lot that was really well done in EQ2. Imagine the old class customizing of early WoW with the complex crafting of early FFXIV plus housing back in 2004! The major factors for EQ2 failing back when it did were the demanding PC requirements pushing people to WoW, the obvious popularity of Warcraft, the difficulty difference between WoW and EQ2, and also just people not wanting to leave EQ1. A lot of the hardcore playerbase from EQ1 was very divided on staying or leaving, breaking many of the top guilds and fracturing the interested playerbase. Since a lot more of the fickle players were the ones who went to EQ2, the shiny land of Azeroth was a pretty easy sell with no death penalty, the mentioned soloability of the game, and what's still just one of the smoothest combat systems out there. The slow death of EQ2 was really showed me the death of the "hardcore" concept of MMO's.
WoW played better. It's as simple as that. Class customization is of zero value. What matters is how your class plays. The further you can get away from hotbar combat, from standing in place waiting for you or the enemy to fall over dead from exhaustion because heavens forbid the hp actually mean something, the more fun and immersive the game will feel. While WoW does have a lot of hotbar combat, it doesn't feel as bad as EQ2's did.
@@GeorgeMonet That's really not it. I'm not sure how you describe WoW as a "less hotbar combat bar game" when it's literally a tab-target MMO. In terms of gameplay, WoW was just a lot more simple. It was tank, dps, healer, with buffers and debuffers built into those 3. EQ2 had dedicated buffing and debuffing classes and a vastly more varied combat system. The MUCH easier combat allowed for a low barrier of entry for people new to the genre at the time, which is why most WoW players started in middle school and high school. It was designed for kids to play. You had more fun because the game catered to you more. I'm not saying that's a good or bad thing, just that it was a very purposeful design choice to make WoW the easy game in a market full of much harder games, hence my comment about EQ2 signaling the death of the hardcore MMO genre.
my friend's dad helped me build a PC specifically for eq2 so I never had any problems with the game performance wise. He was a huge eq1 nerd and he tried getting me and his son into the game. but while I loved the game they didn't as it wasn't enough like eq1
EQ2 was my first MMO, and I really loved it. You had the freedom to level how you wanted at the beginning (didn't want to do quests? Cool, you could just grab a group and grind dungeons all day). Then, with some of the later expansions, they just made it so you had to do the solo quest lines. That's what kind of killed it for me. It just got so tedious, and I spent less time doing the things I enjoyed in the game due to being forced to do the stupid solo quests to level.
@@lyrrakell they wowified it for sure
I played WoW first and something people don't often appreciate as much about it is how fluid it was, for the time. The controls, the movement, the attacks etc were all quite fluid. I played Everquest 2 *after* already capping a 60 in WoW, and I couldn't play for longer than an afternoon because it felt so janky and clunky in comparison. The same for City of Heroes/Villains, I felt like I was controlling Frankensteins monster (from the movies) compared to the more fluid controls and movement of WoW.
Combine that fluidity with the simple, but compelling and appealing 'cartoony' graphics of WoW (despite some seriously dark area's like the Plaguelands) and it's little wonder that WoW took off due to ease of access to more casual players.
It's true that WoW had the fun factor down. There were just so many "hooks" in that game. EQ2 on the other hand, not only did not have a good launch, it really missed the "fun factor", taking itself far too seriously, and painting the world in muted, almost drab, colours. This did change dramatically as time went on, with far more colourful zones, expanded housing options, magnificently varied mounts, etc.
I'm honestly the opposite - didn't notice any lack of fluidity, and I always remap all my controls anyway. I tried WoW for a grand total of 3 or 4 hours in a single day, and concluded that despite it's many flaws EQ2 was better. WoW felt way too casual, over-simplified, lacking skills and abilities, and just felt like a lesser game. So I went back to playing EQ1 instead, because it made me realise that EQ2 was the same when compared to EQ1.
The cartooney graphics was one of the many big put offs of WoW for me. And the graphics were meh. I was living in South East Asia at the time though, so we didn't have the issue of "needing high end hardware" - as having a computer that could run it at near max was pretty much normal everywhere.
It was so much easier too, I remember old school raids and the buff lines and fight prep and casualty rates in EQ. Raiding Hate? You’re losing 5-10% on the way in. Die? XP loss gonna wreck your life. Wipe? Gotta camp them clerics. It was hard and unappealing to people who weren’t into it and that’s just raiding. Solo gameplay was wild.. but hey, it made for great stories.
@@BustedThimble Honestly, those stories and experiences is why I played EQ originally. Death had meaning. Content was hard. Preparing and good leadership meant the difference between a smooth run and several wipes. There was always stuff you could improve on or do differently with your character. And things like corpse runs - as much as people like to hate on them, was a mechanic that made challenging content actually enjoyable and feel like an accomplishment, rather than (oh everyone just farms X in zone Y all the time at level Z)
@@iSkateNate This and I think it comes down to preference. EQ2 is the first game that required me to buy a standalone GPU. I couldn't run it at launch for more than like 20 minutes without it freezing. I'm trying to remember what it was, I spent like $125 on it at Circuit City. Not a great GPU, but it did what it needed to do. But once you got EQ2 running it was absolutely fine. Definitely a hardware issue in the beginning; it was tough to run.
As a player that spent thousands of hours playing this game and raiding at the top level from launch through to the Shadow Odyssey, while I agree with many things in this video, I do feel that its important to clarify that unlike most subjects of this series, criticising it for the steam concurrent player count is pretty meaningless for this game, much like the steam concurrent count for Runescape is unrepresentative of its true popularity and playerbase (according steam charts, there are currently only around 4000 Runescape players in the world). The vast majority of long term players of EQ2 use the standalone launcher, which is important to note because original accounts, and those that were not created via steam cannot be converted to or used on the steam client.
Not sure that I would wholly agree with all the comparisons to WOW towards the end. While its certainly true that WOW did attract a large percentage of players that might otherwise have played EQ2, I think its important to note that there were many factors that went into this, such as the vastly lower system requirements to even run the game at the time which was a huge barrier to entry for EQ2. At launch the game quite literally had graphics settings labelled to only use them at your own risk as current tech was incapable of running them without massive overclocks or very expensive early iteration SLi GFX builds, and the game was also horribly optimised on top of this and would bring even a relatively high end PC to its knees on anything more than minimum graphics.
What WOW did an incredibly good job of, was identifying and then appealing to the lowest common denominator when it came to repetitive gameplay loops that trigger a positive dopemine response, rather than actually having superior overarching gameplay or storytelling, and spreading that appeal to a wider audience that had not played MMO's before. A very high percentage of people that came from other more complex or involved games that preceded it simply bounced off WOW for being way too simplified and moved on to other things (Out of the dozens of MMOs i have played over the years, WOW still holds the impressive distinction of being the single only MMO i couldn't force myself to keep playing long enough to at least get a character to level cap and try the endgame).
Certainly very interesting to see that content wise the tutorial boat and island do not appear to have changed at all in any way since 2004, I even remember that first boss fight being a nightmare for anyone trying it solo. First divergence from the original experience seems to be when you arrive in Qeynos. That city used to have NPC voice acting all over that now seems to be disabled. For example, any original player will shudder at the memory of Nathan constantly asking "Have you seen a Gnoll before?" when a player entered his proximity.
Such a huge shame to see all the DB coin "convenience" monetization that has been jammed into the game since SOE sold it off. Looks like it has ruined what was once a fantastic experience.
Also, even though its wholly unimportant, the complaint that they gave things different names just because bugged me more than it probably should, the Drakota isn't called a dragon because its not a dragon. Drakota are lesser dragonkin, and are mostly just bipedal drones under the control of a greater dragon. Actual dragons (at least in the Everquest universe) are generally far larger, intelligent, and also always quadrupeds.
I paused the video when he did the Steam count and was contemplating commenting but saw you already did. I think most players of EQ and EQ2 play with their own standalone launchers, not the Steam version. Same with DDO. I know it's available through Steam, but I play with it's own launcher.
All great points, just to add another thing to your excellent comment, I never had any issues with music, sound or speech from various NPC's in Qeynos.
Might have been a glitch or issue with Josh's installation as the music and ambience has always been fantastic.
I was going to make a similar comment. I watched this video while I was raiding on the Mangler server and at the time there was over 300 people online just on that one server out of a dozen servers or so.
Everyone I play with and I do stand alone, not steam launcher so that metric is not reporting the true player numbers.
The housing for its time was phenomenal IMO. A very robust furnishing system, plus guild bases. People could do amazing stuff with the housing and it paved the way for some of the better modern housing systems. The crafting was good too. Could have been better, but being more than "Just spam the craft button" was a nice change. I do think removing the interdependence between crafting trades almost completely was a mistake, though it needed some serious toning down from the original incarnation. I did like the multi step process of making the parts before the final product.
I have tried many MMORPGs and to this day, I still think EQ2 has the best housing experience of them all. Menus are smooth, items can be leaned, rotated and resized, and you have tons of items slots per house. Add to this the dungeon creator and flexible creative systems, like custom books, and you are golden.
EQ2 still has the best player housing experience of any MMO I've ever played.
And there's a dedicated population of professional decorators who would showcase their designs in-game; there was also a sizeable economy for "contractors" to decorate player homes and guild halls.
And EQ2 housing has only gotten better over time. I agree, games like ESO "think" that the offer good player housing, but it doesn't even come close to EQ2.
Don't think Steam numbers are accurate as a lot of people use the stand alone launchers.
playerbase are very damn low
@@bingchilling569 saying that is worse than what op sad,cas u cant prove eny numbers.
Op is correct though.. everyone uses the official site version
Most people do use the stand alone launcher but interestingly the numbers on steam for eq1 vs eq2 are pretty spot on proportionally
About 29k players players. Especially on the TLE servers
As soon as his face appeared at 24:02, an ad played starting with an explosion. It was perfect.
I have so many fond memories of this game. I basically lost my life to it on release and stayed on it for years. It's kind of nice to see the game again but also saddening to see how it's been hollowed out in the name of money.
Tried giving EverQuest 1 a go on Steam a couple weeks ago. Had absolutely no clue as to what to do or how to play
I fired up Windows XP to check out Everquest. I was very disappointed to find that it doesn’t even run on it anymore.
Just the way I remember it! Legend has it- no players knew there were quests until they highlighted the text you click for more info...
In original Everquest, there was no clickable, highlighted text - there were words in [square brackets].
Say the NPC was talking about a quest involving orc bandits. You would "hail" the NPC by typing h while the NPC was selected. This would cause "Hail, NPC Name" to appear in the /say channel.
If the NPC had something to say and was interested in you (through having high enough faction standing) the NPC would respond. It might say, "Some [orc raiders] stole my [hat]." You would then respond with a phrase, typed into the /say channel, that would include the phrase in square brackets - most commonly "/say what hat," but the sometimes the response could be anything including the words in square brackets, and sometimes the response could be _highly_ esoteric (one quest prompt I remember being "you are one but two. your vengeance shall find a home").
If the NPC replied to your response, you would be given some more information about the quest, usually being told what was required to turn in to complete the quest. If the NPC did _not_ respond, it (usually) meant that your faction standing was not high enough to complete the quest.
Note that in no sense were you "given" a quest: you did not have to accept it, and no record of any kind was made. You could go and do the quest if you wanted, which would be completed when and if you returned to the NPC with the required items.
So quests in EQ worked _very_ differently from how quests in basically any other game ever worked, and the actual mechanics behind them remained opaque to most players.
Considering that the rewards for quests were almost always underwhelming, and quests in EQ, for those that bothered to do them at all, were mostly done for the sake of faction grinding or endgame progression.
Speaking as the proud former GM of Luclin server.
@@straightupanarg6226 this was actually really interesting and insightful to read thank you!
It's a bit archaic now, and mostly around still for nostalgia for the AOL days. :P
Best sense of adventure I have ever had in any game. So many good memories, so much fun. I wish back the good old times.
Of course this game has heavily changed and personally I think it is not very enjoyable anymore, but for people who want to try it out, I recommend the new time-locked progression server coming in May which will morph the game back to how it was in 2004 with each expansion being added after a few weeks.
Apart from the technical problems, the game was very good in vanilla, and personally I would still prefer it over every modern MMO today.
Only caveat for the time locked server it’s not true 2004 experience. The original item stats were loss when Soe handed the game off to daybreak. This is huge because that means the overpowered items that are balanced I believe every 5 levels are all we have. Why does this matter? Well because you’re going to be 3x as strong as players were in 2004. The content is a cake walk and there is no point to craft master craft items anymore. That was what made the game fun for me, the unique itemization and finding oddball fabled items in those moldy green chests. Unfortunately we will never get to experience this again.
@@Jay16872 Yes, I believe they are working on this, although I don`t know how much ressources they have - probably not a lot.
@@Jay16872 From what I have heard is that in these time locked servers they also have XP Potions in the cash shop enabled which means everyone just grinds dungeons in the first couple of days with pots to get to "endgame" skipping basically the whole game.
The person also said that the world therefore is pretty much dead. I don't know if this is entirely true since I haven't played it since 2005ish besides an occasional login every few years finding that the game I onced loved seemed pretty much butchered (e.g. the microtransactions are so incredibly horrible I just couldn't get over it).
I would have loved to give it another try but if what I said is true then I'm gonna keep my fond memories of the adventures I had in 2004-2005+
@@RoXx1811 Yea exactly. It'll not be the same as it used to be. The epic battles in Antonica around that era were glorious. PvP from level 10-40 flourished there. Even if they brought back itemization the the correct flow of leveling... it would be a ghost of its past. It was heartbreaking at the time seeing the population dwindle and dwindle. I still would be playing to this day if it didn't die out.
@@Jay16872 Well, I have tried it, and I have to say it was not very enjoyable at all. Not so much because the world was empty (in fact, there were a lot of people playing), but it was more a dungeon grind and "skipping to endgame" as David W. suspected.
I remember I tried the game, as I was in beta of warcraft. I got to the city, landed up in the moat, and was swimming around. A fish took offense to that, and attacked me. I jumped out, so did the fish. I ran, the fish followed, and so the chase began. Through several parts of the map, and a full group of enemies, including a fish chasing me. I logged off, and never played it again.
Someone tell Asmongold to play this for a day and single-handedly shock it back to life. The effect on the community is an issue we'll sort out later. Also, Ratonga are the best race in anything.
We should fckn do it
That would be amazing lmao
Classic WoW rather proved this kind of experience is at best a flash in the pan.
He'd rather react to someone else playing it
@@chillhour6155 you're very correct. It'd be much easier money.
Listened to this while taking down a shelf. Truly, the best second monitor UA-camr.
Also, I love your stuff, been watching the otherland videos as the beginning intrigued me, but UA-cam decided to not show it. Now I've finally gotten around to watching it
I had him on my main monitor for a minute. Felt weird.
Played the original EQ when I was 14 and it blew my mind. Learning languages, making money by finding people's dead bodies for them using my bard's song, riding on a boat and being terrified of falling off, and swimming in a fountain for hours to level my swimming skill... So many great memories. Wish more MMOs today had so much lore-building and neat little mechanics.
100% agree - I played during the same era & loved it
remember no jumping on the elevators either.
my experience with EQ2 is a fond one. My dad was playing it and i would watch him for hours so he made me an account. I was Soloing as a ratonga in Temple street, and yes killing rats was a big part of it, but exploring the town was such a memorable experience for me. I'm not sure why since i've never actually quested the zone, but the Commonlands was my favorite. The questing is INCREDIBLEY sparse but something about running through this huge zone and then discovering something you've never seen before was really incredible to me. I think i probably started playing during the Shadow Odyssey because i remember one of the shadow men being near the wizard spire. being killed used to be detrimental to the character so I kept a safe distance and just watched this thing pace back and forth as a creature and then stand still in the silhouette of a person.
As i got older and understood actually game functionality it definitely had its faults. But then DayBreak took over. Grinding constantly, one-shot killing mobs in any zone but for the quest zones beating on a mob for ten to twenty minutes. Not being able to make any progress in the expansion. In some cases they just removed the overworld completely and only introduced dungeons i couldn't solo as a brigand. The last three expansions have taken place in three separate lush jungles which was very fun to run through in Vetrovia but got pretty boring seeing it again and again. In fact Vetrovia was the only recent expansion i was able to do. Both parts of Luclin i couldn't solo and thus never finished.
Adornments were annoying. Ascension classes are annoying. Having familiars and mount armor and mount leveling is annoying. They just added a grind to go to a dungeon that isn't impressive, kill whatever you need to which could take hours despite being maxed on all the things only to do that several more times. There isn't any gameplay anymore, and its skewed the original content. I one shot kill everything as a level 5 brigand and if i play on a time locked server which doesn't bring back any of the original geometry for Freeport, i get wiped out. I still love EQ2 and I'm still a fool who goes back to it, but once DayBreak took it over they just sucked out the fun for money.
I have some fond memories of playing back when this came out, it's a very different game than it was back then. It was definitely more group dependent for some content, it was still possible to solo but grouping was obviously the push. Sadly it required a significantly more powerful computer than most folks who came over from the OG Everquest had and likely the average PC gamer at the time of it's release. This mistake wasn't the first time SOE at the time had made that mistake, they did it with the OG Everquest Luclin just expecting players would upgrade their PC's. You'd think they'd have learned from that but no they did it again with EQ2.
In the end WoW was just the inevitable nail in the coffin consigning EQ2 to niche status from then on. SOE trying to WoW'ify the game didn't help either with sweeping huge mechanical changes over the first few years. I mean when you started originally you leveled up that base class to 20 then picked your specialist class (that was ditched for just picking the classes from level 1 later, though IMO this wasn't terrible). The same thing happened to the crafting system among others.
The games new player experience is definitely a mashed up mish mash of their various "new player" content. Some of the choices for defaults, such as the hotbar starting locked. The dragging hotkeys you mentioned, though in the monumental amount of options the game has does allow you to tweak a lot of this sort of things, it's just not really explained.
Also not all starting zones are created equal IMO, IE New Halas for good characters I remember being pretty decent. While the old starting area's of Qeynos have a lot of hold overs from before the initial revamp(s) etc so it's closer to the OG experience I think (IE a lot of your starting quest chains started in your home districts etc). Same goes for classes, some are harder to solo than others. There are systems to help with some of the harder or group content, mercenaries for example but you either need to have bought the expansion they were released in or again daybreak store purchases the option. Like the OG EQ a subscription is really the only way to enjoy most of the games content. Trying to do it as a free player is going to be annoying and possibly more expensive in the long run.
At any rate both EQ and EQ2 are good games, which EQ2 languishing behind EQ these days, but their quite niche. There's fun to be hand but as old as they are now there's a LOT of content / systems. Frankly it's hardly inviting for new players in most cases. Even veteran players coming back it's a tad overwhelming, I've tried a few times but when you need a guide out of game to get back into it the dev's have sort of failed IMO.
*"Sadly it required a significantly more powerful computer than most folks who came over from the OG Everquest had and likely the average PC gamer at the time of it's release."*
What was so stupid about that was we were still coming out of the 2001 recession. Even people that had the money were too scared to spend it. Really showed what kind of a bubble they were in.
"I mean you lasted longer than New World."
....True, but nonetheless savage.
I was so sad about New World too. I played it for about a month, and despite having a job where I worked over time, I kept up in the lead for crafting and gathering.... the player run market was garbage, you couldn't make money it was next to impossible, and I was first on the market for most things, and everything was a money sink. I absolutely don't know why player run markets are so absolutely garbage.
Or rather, I don't know why players are so stupid, lol. I understand undercutting for a quick sale, but instead of undercutting by .01, I would constantly see people undercutting by 70-95%, flood the market, and then that would be the new price until it fell even to .01.
@Warco outlands has player run vendors and its so great
Always heard so much about everquest when it came out a long time ago, I was tempted to play but went with WoW instead. It will be interesting to see how its changed
Pretty sure Daybreak will charge you $10 for the patch notes.
@@AllegedDev Patch Note Tokens 10 DB cash a piece and they reveal one sentence each lol
DC coins pay to win
Go play Project1999. It's Everquest frozen in time between the years of 1999-2003. EQ's best years. Thousands of people still play it.
This is Everquest 2. Not one. Read the title. Of course you played WoW. You seem to have a 64 IQ. Makes sense.
11:25 that is just an isolated portion of the laugh that plays at the end of a CoD Zombies game.
To answer the question "What happened to you Everquest 2" The answer is simply WoW. I played the game when it was new, and honestly it was fantastic, the only problem with it being its performance. The game was optimized for hardware that did not exist yet, with the expectation that processors would keep getting faster.
The thing is, at the time EQ2 was released, MMOs (with the exception of Runescape) were aimed at the limited market of people who could afford beefy hardware, a monthly an internet connection, and who were nerdy enough to play games like dungeons and dragons.
So EQ2 launched with in-depth and complicated systems and an expansive world, all of a sort that would appeal to people who enjoy the complexity of advanced pen and paper role playing games.
A Month later WoW released. And for a year or so everyone playing EQ2 laughed and mocked WoW. WoW didn't really have anything EQ2 didn't have, but EQ2 had a lot of things that WoW did not. How could WoW possibly compete? But what EQ2 players didn't understand, was that WoW wasn't aimed at them. So when it captured a much larger audience of people who hadn't played MMOs before, or could not afford the best hardware it came as something of a surprise.
Then the EQ2 developers started trying to make their game more like WoW. Systems were simplified, the game was made more solo friendly and the original target audience began to be alienated. It was a downhill slope from there. Eventually EQ2 became another microtransaction game, with new systems slapped on top of old ones in ways that didn't quite fit.
I haven't played the game for a long time now. I loved it for the first few years. But the game I loved doesn't exist any more. This other thing just shares a name and some assets.
EDIT: Ok I have finished watching the video now. I have a few more comments:
1) Originally graphon flights were cinematic, the one you tried was added much later after the developers lost all love and passion.
2) EQ2 was the first MMO I played to properly do away with the long wait to regenerate. Your meant to put level appropriate food and drink in your food and drink slots, which will rapidly increase your regeneration rate.
3) The boss in the cave on the tutorial island was meant to teach you to group with other players. It is not meant to be solo able.
4) EQ2 did not fail because it launched at the same time as WoW. I remember when they launched, the MMO communities of the time had much higher expectations of EQ2 and for the first year or so that both games were around WoW seemed to be a loosing prospect. Everyone I knew who played both games seemed to think WoW was going to fail.
The problem was just that you needed new hardware to play EQ2, But old hardware would do for WoW.
Then WoWs marketing and accessibility to people who hadn't played mmos before caused it to blow up beyond expectations. It didn't really capture the EQ2 target market, it captured a new and bigger one.
Where EQ2 faltered was in attempting to change and be more like WoW. It succeed by the standards of proceeding MMOs. But WoW showed that far grater success was possible. So SoE tried to reshape EQ2 to go for the same demographic. It took the knife to many of its systems and simplified and streamlined things. In doing so it lost a lot of its appeal to the old school MMO gamers, but failed to capture the new demographic, because while it became more like WoW, its hardware requirements were still too high, and WoW was always going to be more like WoW then anything that wasn't WoW.
At this point EQ2 had lost the qualities that made it more enjoyable to play then WoW, but A bunch of your friends who couldn't play EQ2 were playing WoW, so you might as well switch your sub over to WoW instead.
That was where EQ2 failed. Not at launch, but afterwoods when it tried to become something it was not originally designed to be.
This is so true, but it still lives on. The development team is small but sustainable and they do a decent job considering their limitations.
The boss in the cave of this tutorial island has been soloable forever. Don't remember how it was on the original island though. Usually by this point you are equal level or higher and have not been blocking your skills out by having only 1 bar. He literally didn't equip any new gear he had in bags which were permaopen either.
I just think Warcraft is a known IP and it brought in people who didnt play mmo's prior to its launch. And for some reason, before WoW's big numbers. Ur MMO was a success with 20-50K playerbase. All WoW did was kill the genre, because 20K no longer was considered a success because wow had 10+million at its peak. So because of capitalism companies no longer were ok with the 20k and wanted millions. So they just copied it and some mental Boss at SoE said lets gut Everquest (both one and two) uniqueness and copy WoW.
@@googleifyouseekayu yeah, even with the competion EQ2 achived 300K+, successful by any other measure at the time except WoW🙂
You are right. The worst mistake the developers made was that they wanted to make EQII more like WoW, and that way EQII lost its own identity and its appeal to players who enjoyed the game. Although I have to say that even after these changes, the game was still not terrible, it only really fell apart after turning F2P.
I was a huge EverQuest fan after it came out in 1999 and into the early 2000s. I had to stop playing after Shadows of Luclin was released in 2001, due to (a) the system requirements being bumped up, and my PC couldn't handle a lot going on in-game at the same time; and (b) I started college and lived on campus, and so had to deal with firewalls and throttling, so lag was insane. I returned with the first Progression Servers, just a couple years later, and played it a ton then, too.
EverQuest was my first MMORPG, and it was a beautiful experience for its time. Sure, some of the game mechanics didn't age very well, and some of the design choices related to the inferior technology (particularly Internet/bandwidth issues) are obnoxious to deal with today. But... it was a great game for its time. Later expansions really took away much of the spirit of EverQuest, though. Some of that is to be expected, as we're two decades into the game, and countless writers and developers have come and gone. The UI is garbage by 2022 standards. The graphic changes and character model updates look so strange and alien in today's gaming landscape.
But... the classic EverQuest experience of Project 1999 and the PoP EQ experience of the TAKP (Mac EQ) emulated servers are quite brillian. And I'm grateful for all of the developers and testers who put in work to keep the game alive.
NOW... EverQuest 2, on the other hand, never captivated me in the same way that EverQuest did. The lore and zone changes were obnoxious. I hated some of the race and class changes. The graphics lost a lot of the charm of the original (classic era) graphics. The new character models were largely without charm. And the game felt, well, clunky. And it never really got its feet under itself.
The EQ to EQ2 thing taught me a few things about game design for sequels. If you're going to create a sequel, be very careful about lore and character model design changes. If you're going to change too much, just create a new IP. Don't try to create an entirely new experience but using the place and race names of the original game. Like Kelethin in EQ2 is a dumpster compared to have magical Kelethin felt in EQ1. I suspect EQ Next or Landmark or whatever would have been just as alienating.
"EverQuest" and "Norrath" will always be what I experienced in EQ1 to me. I mostly just ignore EQ2's existence. It's easy, I've been doing it for 15 years.
But cheers to another Josh for giving it a go for us all.
That maniacal laugh by that skelly is probably one of the most identifiable sounds in EQ history, other than the ear splitting DING.
Some things from a veteran player, in the order they come up in the video;
EQ doesn't need to rename mythical creatures. The thing that attacks you on the boat is called a Drakota and not a Dragon because it IS a Drakota, and a Dragon is a different animal. In fantasy settings some places use dragon like monsters that have two hind legs and wings, like Skyrim for example. In EQ those are Drakotas. Dragons have 4 legs and a set of wings, like say D&D Dragons.
It's presumably not self evident enough that you can right click your hotbars to get at all sorts of options. In particular allowing you to click and drag buttons off the hot bar. Or open a new hotbar so you can drag and rearrange them to your liking. Disallowing click and drag is probably default because in combat it's very easy to click and drag an attack and accidentally shuffle your icons and now you have a skill hanging on your cursor.
Being able to stealth in the middle of combat is absolutely not a bug. You've just naturally discovered a little bit of being a Rouge 101. Later levels provide easier/faster ways to do this, and its very much intended and allows you to set up high damage attacks that require using from stealth.
I have no defense for the micro transactions in the game. I play on TLE and it isn't as egregious as in the video. That's really scummy. Regular subscription gets you 500 DBC free every month and I mostly spend it on cosmetics. Also you are correct, the horrific micro transaction market place was not present at the launch of the game.
There is absolutely background music in the Qeynos harbor. That sounds like a local setting.
I wouldn't go by the Steam numbers you listed. Those numbers would be only the people using it through steam, or even worse only the free to play players using the steam client. I don't think anyone I play with or have been in guilds with have ever mentioned using the Steam client. Using the games own launchpad is the norm. I have personally seen more than those numbers listed online at one time in one place on my one server. Giving the impression that EQ2 servers are so dead as to a 500 player count at peak is just misinformed. While I can't speak for whatever server you were restricted to on a free account, I wish you would have seen Kaladim at the time of your recording, or Varsoon today.
The nitpick on Grobins is overplayed. This time I got no explanation of how grobins are different, but it's also not "EQ has to make everything unique and different'. There are goblins. Regular ass goblins. Everywhere.
Griffons; The particular flight you picked on, all fair criticism. The ones that are interzone transport can be boring. Did you use any of the intrazone griffons? Ones that are fast travel within a map? Those ones soar and swoop around the map and buzz past landmarks and show the place off.
I am guessing not as you immediately follow that up by going into Antonica, a place with the other kind of Griffon travel and immediately set off running. The zone is rather large and there are griffon stations for traversing large swaths of the land quickly by gliding through the air and seeing the landscape and landmarks and how everything connects, just as you lamented a minute earlier.
Criticism on group focus vs solo focus is valid. However I wonder if your solo frustrations are not just you being used to things being easier. I don't know what you're expecting when you go into fights outnumbered. Most of the deaths you show in the video are because you engaged multiple baddies at a time. Earlier you seemed to understand that the game had a color coded system for difficulty. In addition to that each fight is defined as an 'encounter', or to say that enemies might be solo, or act as a group, and each individual encounter is balanced on it's own. So when you fight two forest guardians at a time, of course you're losing, you are fighting two encounters that are each saying to you 'I am balanced to be a fair fight with you one on one'. Fighting two monsters at once when a single one on its own is a fair fight is a losing plan and it seems like you should know this, even just with what you've shown in your video. Remember tutorial island? You had such kind words to say about the tutorial as it taught you to pull creatures back to a safe spot, what you called 'luring'. What happened to this information you clearly learned, processed, and spoke about?
I agree with the bad timing argument, that's for certain. But to say WoW just did things better is not something that can be said with such certainty. There are several mechanical things EQ2 does better, or at least in my option. There are still mechanics in modern MMOs that to this day EQ2 does better than they do. Speaking of personal experience in FF14 (GCD's & appearance/glamor system for examples). It's easy to claim WoW was better because it survived longer, but that doesn't actually guarantee quality. VHS beat out Betamax. Apple continues to exist and thrive on branding and market share despite better products existing. Telsa continues to make cars that catch fire for no reason and self drive themselves off roads and still people buy and defend them. WoW beat out SOE in the same vein of popularity.
I think, to be accurate: 4 legs, no wings = wyrm, 4 legs, 2 wings = drakota or drake, 2 legs, 2 wings = wyvern, 4 legs, 2 wings = dragon
neeeeerrrrrrrrddddd
Oh man that skeleton laugh was like a nostalgia punch to the face. It's the same laugh from the original EQ, and every skeleton used it. Both enemy AND player Necromancer pet skeles!
And players in skeletal form.
@@TheHordeQ Oh man, I had totally forgotten about Skele Form!
Should have started at Frostfang, possibly the best starting area of any MMO.
Also, do not go by Steam numbers for people playing this game, actual player numbers are far better.
I used to play this when Everquest Next was still on the books.
This game has the best mount too, the Saliraptor @lvl30 in Butcherblock, this mount leaps very high and far, loved it :).
Exactly. He really showed his ignorance of the game by going from newbie island to ... wait for it ... Antonica!! Nobody plays Antonica anymore. Frostfang Sea or Darklight Woods are 2 of the best newbie zones of any MMO, both taking you right up to level 20, and both rewarding a mount at the end. Both are story and quest driven.
@@murrayallinger2830 Yeah, screw him for not knowing the best areas to go in an outdated and damn near dead mmo.
@@solidus_spence He could have spent 15 minutes prep time reading a newbie guide to playing EQ2 in 2022. Or even more simply, who could have simply sent a tell to a high level player and asked where the best starting zones are. I do both of those things when I start a new MMO: research and communication.
Its sad how original MMO's from back in the day used to have a variety of races, like the frogmen or gargoyles from ultima or ogres and trolls...and now its mostly just elves or things that look like elves. Gone are the monsters, replaced almost entirely by hot and sexy badass edgelords and babes...
And so many of the new ones have even less customization of your character than the old ones. Its honestly sad.
That's greed for you. Instead of spending money on unique races, you can spend 10% of the money on boobie girls and edgelords, and pocket the rest.
And then you will get far more return-on-investment from people buying boobie girl bikinis to fap to and edgelord XXL magnum dong swords to complement their emo lifestyle.
I've gone from playing a troll to a catgirl and as much as I like catgirls I definitely miss the troll
Glad Wow still has stuff like Tauren, Vulpera, Worgen, Pandas...
@@Clawthorne Sometimes you dont even get that, with body shape being strictly controlled or sometimes even copypasted between man and woman so that they can skip designing armor for each of the sexes.
I just saw your video and the all-time peak went from your 523 to 532. You've literally doubled the 24-hour peak of people playing the Game since may. Not bad.
I tried to get my WoW guild to move to EQ2, couldn't ever really get into it with people, I played it solo when I wasn't raiding and it was super fun, but I couldn't afford both and went with WoW, got burnt out on MMOs and now I just play other games and watch the genre from afar. Always good going down memory lane, glad you had fun in this game way back when!
Try p1999
@@dismiss3d323 I just upgraded to a 3070 Ti so i'm like going through some of the more modern games right now after years of waiting.
I am gonna download P1999 since i've only heard good things about it, I used to play UO way back in the day and made money to play by selling stuff on ebay through my mom's account lmaoooo
If it has that like sense of community and stuff that I miss with old MMOs I'll go REALLY hard into which is not a bad thing at all!
Thanks for the recommendation ! Is the server / community still like accepting of newer players? These days it seems like if you don't know what your doing to the umptieth degree people don't want to play with you and I have like refractory temporal lobe epilepsy so my time in general just gets SUPER scattered and it really messes with personal relationships so it'd be easier to just get along with a group of people where like if I'm sick, it won't like adversely effect the folks I play with, which is a big problem in modern FPS games. Example Rainbow Six Siege, I get TK'd for trying to communicate sometimes, it's hard to find a fun social experience within gaming these days, it's really really really hard.
@@TWEEMASTER2000 I'm on a 6900xt and have never been higher than level 15, both players have been nothing but great to me. I just had a full group for crushbone on my first character on the blue server and I've mostly been soloing on green but people always help. it's great man I can't recommend it enough.
@@dismiss3d323 Wowww 6900XT is no slouch either, I looked at them but it was out of my price range. I've heard REAL good things from benchmarks people run!
That's really good to encouraging and good to hear, I'll give a whirl when me and my wife are watchin some reality TV, seems like the perfect time to MMO l0l
I played this from release until 2018 when they jumped the shark on pricing. Made many friends and killed many monsters along the way.
I have such a a special place in my heart for this game. It was my first mmorpg I have ever played. When I bought it I didn't even quite understand what I was getting into and was just a random buy - I didn't even know it was near the opening day that I played way back in Nov of 2004.
I put in thousands of hours and had the chance to meet many people and used to love logging in. For me the game peaked around EoF and I then went to sporadically playing the expansions until the around the time of Daybreak taking over.
I logged in dec 2021 and got the new expac. Wandered around with a few of my old toons, had a few memories and just felt the game had changed too much for me to get back into. There seems to be so much potential in the game that it is sad to see it go the route it has. I am sure it is beyond the means of being practical; but I would love to see a EQ2.5 that could really rebuild the game.
At least I have my memories of late night contested dungeon runs, broken bunnies all over norrath and that time my ratonga girl won that giant Roquefort cheese wheel in a live dev rp event.
I think there's a certain charm and feel about this game that no MMO has captured, at least for me, since its release. I'd love to really get back into it again, but the population issue is just a huge problem.
Try the TLE servers. There is a new one, "Varsoon", launching in May this year. Starting back at the beginning is where the big nostalgia hit comes from, and I think you'd enjoy it.
There's a frog who hangs out under a tarp on my porch. I can just tell if he was an intelligent humanoid that he would be super chill. We've shared many a fine evening together.