Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft again, my mind has started to wander. I thought to myself, "If I want to play a MMO, why am I going back to WoW?" I know that I enjoy Everquest II better, so why not go back to that game instead? So I created a trial account to see what kind of changes have been made to that game or if anything substantially new had been added to it.
The patch updates took almost an entire day but at least it
didn't suck all my bandwith dry like the WoW patch installer.
There is no doubt that WoW is more polished between the two in terms of its overall execution but there are several things that make EQII a more favorable game for me: the better graphics and the friendlier community. I found out that a recent update has brought multi-core support to the game and the 3D engine has been slightly tweaked. Immediately after I started the game, I noticed how much smoother the graphics are running at the Extreme Quality setting. I have planned to visit the larger city areas to make sure that things don't go downhill when they are a lot of players running around. Because WoW attracts a lot of casual players due to its high accessibility, EQII's more esoteric existence attracts a more rounded and predominantly more mature group of players in its community. Throughout my past experiences playing EQII, I have never - as in ever - gotten frustrated by anyone I encountered there except this one time when I accidentally selected a player-vs.-player server to play on. Let me tell you, avoid the PvP servers if you ever want to play proper EQII for the game is not made with PvP in mind. This is not to say that jerks don't exist in EQII - they are everywhere - but their numbers are kept to a minimum here.
Pretty pretty pretty.
Man, this game is pretty but they have to fix that new but nasty looking mini-map soon.
The whole PvP question does raise a concern for me in regards to EQII because I do enjoy WoW's Battlegrounds tremendously and it was PvP that got me to play WoW again in the first place. Then I thought maybe I should try Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning again since it's all about the realm-vs.-realm PvP action. Unfortunately, the server for WAR is down at the moment so I have to wait and see if it's able to make a better impression on me this time around.
Surely this must be a bad sign for WAR.
Perhaps the most curious thing about this whole process is that around the same time last year, I was doing the exact same thing with MMO games - switching from The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar, to Everquest II: Rise of Kunark and eventually to the ill-fated Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. It's a little creepy: Apparently my MMO itch is seasonal and it has its own biological calendar.
1 comment:
Age of Conan and City of Heroes are both equally decent games.
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