EQ2 (FIRST IMPRESSION!)

So, Everquest II.

As some of you may (or may not) know, I'm a bit of a MMO lover. My first love in this regard was Everquest, a game at which I was hopelessly bad at, not having umpteen hours a day to dedicate to it and suffering from chronic alt-itits (a condition which forces me to create new characters, then attempt to distribute my time equally amongst all of them). Even so, I loved my time in Norrath, even if it did take five minutes to load up zones with my 56k modem.

When I finally quit Everquest, I went dry for a while on MMOs. My next real MMO experience would be beta testing World of Warcraft, which has gone on to enjoy some small success. At around the same time, Everquest II came out, but I was turned off for two reasons: first, my computer was hardly up to snuff, and could never dream of running a game so demanding; second, World of Warcraft was fucking fantastic!

Fast forward to last week. Bored at work and aching for entertainment, I come across a link to a 10-day EQ2 trial. Figuring "What the hell", I signed up that evening when I got home.

First of all, I had to deal with The Station's retarded method of retrieving passwords. It's been, what, six months since I tried Vanguard? Like I remember what my damn information is! Even so, it shouldn't be a fucking chore to retrieve it...which it was.

Second, downloading the game and all it's patches took upwards of 10 hours. Holy crap! I always forget what I'm getting into with these sorts of games. So, it took me some time before I could actually, you know, play it.

Alright, now that I've got all that out of my system, here are my first impressions:

It's good. Like, really good. I haven't had copious amounts of time to dedicate to it, but even so I've been enjoying what time I have spent in Norrath. The character models are all very pretty, and my Dark Elf Assassin is a hell of a lot of fun to play! Any race (there are 19 of them) can be any class (there are 24 of them), which is pretty sweet.

Gameplay is pretty standard MMO fare, but caught me of guard at first due to the simple fact that it's harder than WoW. An equal-level creature can kill you, if you're not careful. That took a little getting used to with my first character (a Trabadour), but a DPS-based class had much less difficulty.

Performance thus far has been a bit spotty, but this might be mitigated by adjusting my video settings.

So, my first impression is: Positive! I like what I see thus far, and I've been enjoying the time I've spent! Unfortunately, I know I'll never get a chance to really play the game, as I will never be able to convince people to play with me. Except for maybe Seth, but then we'd never play together.