Kowaru
04-05-2004, 09:09 PM
First of all let me explain something, i was not at all looking forward to this game...until now. my close minded views of this game was based on my experience with the normal EQ, but this one clearly is an improvment. first of all i thought FFXI took a long time to down load, my fucking god. this thing was like 2 or 3 gigs of downloading and it was SLOOOOOOOOOW, i mean slow.
skip ahead 10 hours later.
i finally get down to making my char, and just like swg you can customize your character facial features, tatoo's, nose, hair, etc. anyway after making my character i was put onto a boat as i was found lost at sea or soemthing. upon arriving at the town called the Isle of Refuge, i was then asked or talked to a guard, asking what class i was etc. it reminded me of morrowind except a eq theme..ok weird anyway bare with me. i picked a fighter. i like fighting stuff. apparently you can choose an additional class at lvl 10, and an advance class at lvl 20. unlike ffxi where it had you starting all over from lvl 1 if you chose a ranger or something. so that was cool, now what next.
i forgot to mention this earlier, but the first thing you notice is the audio voice overs (recently added read my below post). It is simply fucking amazing. its like playing baldurs gate on PS2 or the eq version of it. great voice acting, and its all INSTSANCED, just like ffxi instanced story cut scenes, the npc's will go into their own thing and you will hear them talking to you only. if someone else is interacting with them you dont have to be spammed with their text etc.
the next thing is the interface, where the hell did it go? well it gets weirder. you click somewhere and a window pops up, YES ITS EXACTLY LIKE THE FFXI UI. i thought i was in the wrong game at first. if you dont know what the ffxi ui is like, its hard to explain, basically think of pop up video except thats the boxes and stuff that has attack. range attack. items. etc. when you go into combat however, you right click, so it is a little differn't, just gotta remember to do left click, right click and its not so bad. and just like ffxi you can set up hokeys and activate them useing the shift key. but you only get 10, they may add more later on. ffxi had about 200 hotkeys available with 20 normally useable with the same set up. but eq II is still early in the making so i forgave them.
quests: as mentioned the quests you are given are alot more personal and more story driven. you feel as if you're playing morrowind except things are so much more brighter and colorful. i started off in freeport, and it was considered the evil city and because i wanted to be a ranger, i took the ship to qeynos. oh yeah the ship travel, is so much better, you just warp to the other city instead of waiting, think legacy of yeksha expansion. tho i wont hold my breath, maybe the ship travel wasn't finished......anyway moving on.
qeynos...wow, it looks totally differn't, the people walk around doing their routines it makes it feel as if the city is alive yet im the only PC in the zone, ever play that game "Gothic"? sort of like that, tho i didn't stick around to see if they went to bed. i hooked up with some other testers and we were remembering the good ol days of EQ, and i mentioned Black Burrow as my favorite newbie zone. which led to...lets check it out! Black burrow, just like qeynos was totally new. our small band of 4 was having trouble with some of the zone in gnolls, so we went to go exp up some and come back later on. tho shortly after the server crashed..imagine that.
let me mention combat, its just like normal eq, except the animations are alot better. you do multiple types of swings not just the same repitative slash over and over and over and over... now its multiple repitative slashes. you also see the special flash and stuff when a mob gets hit or when they parry. the higher classes weren't available for play just yet but all in all it looks great. also water swimming = the own. looks soooo great.
skip ahead 10 hours later.
i finally get down to making my char, and just like swg you can customize your character facial features, tatoo's, nose, hair, etc. anyway after making my character i was put onto a boat as i was found lost at sea or soemthing. upon arriving at the town called the Isle of Refuge, i was then asked or talked to a guard, asking what class i was etc. it reminded me of morrowind except a eq theme..ok weird anyway bare with me. i picked a fighter. i like fighting stuff. apparently you can choose an additional class at lvl 10, and an advance class at lvl 20. unlike ffxi where it had you starting all over from lvl 1 if you chose a ranger or something. so that was cool, now what next.
i forgot to mention this earlier, but the first thing you notice is the audio voice overs (recently added read my below post). It is simply fucking amazing. its like playing baldurs gate on PS2 or the eq version of it. great voice acting, and its all INSTSANCED, just like ffxi instanced story cut scenes, the npc's will go into their own thing and you will hear them talking to you only. if someone else is interacting with them you dont have to be spammed with their text etc.
the next thing is the interface, where the hell did it go? well it gets weirder. you click somewhere and a window pops up, YES ITS EXACTLY LIKE THE FFXI UI. i thought i was in the wrong game at first. if you dont know what the ffxi ui is like, its hard to explain, basically think of pop up video except thats the boxes and stuff that has attack. range attack. items. etc. when you go into combat however, you right click, so it is a little differn't, just gotta remember to do left click, right click and its not so bad. and just like ffxi you can set up hokeys and activate them useing the shift key. but you only get 10, they may add more later on. ffxi had about 200 hotkeys available with 20 normally useable with the same set up. but eq II is still early in the making so i forgave them.
quests: as mentioned the quests you are given are alot more personal and more story driven. you feel as if you're playing morrowind except things are so much more brighter and colorful. i started off in freeport, and it was considered the evil city and because i wanted to be a ranger, i took the ship to qeynos. oh yeah the ship travel, is so much better, you just warp to the other city instead of waiting, think legacy of yeksha expansion. tho i wont hold my breath, maybe the ship travel wasn't finished......anyway moving on.
qeynos...wow, it looks totally differn't, the people walk around doing their routines it makes it feel as if the city is alive yet im the only PC in the zone, ever play that game "Gothic"? sort of like that, tho i didn't stick around to see if they went to bed. i hooked up with some other testers and we were remembering the good ol days of EQ, and i mentioned Black Burrow as my favorite newbie zone. which led to...lets check it out! Black burrow, just like qeynos was totally new. our small band of 4 was having trouble with some of the zone in gnolls, so we went to go exp up some and come back later on. tho shortly after the server crashed..imagine that.
let me mention combat, its just like normal eq, except the animations are alot better. you do multiple types of swings not just the same repitative slash over and over and over and over... now its multiple repitative slashes. you also see the special flash and stuff when a mob gets hit or when they parry. the higher classes weren't available for play just yet but all in all it looks great. also water swimming = the own. looks soooo great.