Everquest 2: First Impressions

When first stepping into the world of Norrath, well, before, I'm struck by the sheer amount of customization options compared to WoW. The only class restrictions are faction affiliation? You can be a gnome healer?

And then there are the choices once you've chosen your race! Wow! Almost twenty hairstyles per model, not to mention the ability to change the size and shape of your facial features, seems almost overwhelming and is downright addicting to an unrepentant alt-oholic such as myself.

You see, World of Warcraft only allows for about five customizations per model. You change your face model, not feature, hairstyle, hair color, and one or two other things. That's it. What's more, you can't change your model size! With the amount of players and NPCs, it's not uncommon for someone to run into at least one double.

Moving on to classes. There are a million of them! And the only racial restrictions on them are technically factional. The neutral races can be anything! You read that correctly. You can be a gnome or human druid or shaman. Let that sink in for a bit.

I've noticed that there's a huge difference in how both games handle factions as well. You know in wow that there are a few NPCs that seem to hang around the wrong faction. Or maybe one or two.

However, as far as players in the factions go, you stick with your faction. You can't communicate with players of the opposite faction. If you want to play the opposite faction, reroll, on your own server if it's not PvP.

In Norrath, faction decisions are not final, nor are they really barriers. You want to play a High Elf, but with a Evil aligned class? You can switch. Yep, as long as you do the quest chain to do it, you can change your alignment without rerolling. My good-aligned gnome can even communicate with my friend's evil-aligned Erudite! The guild I've joined is cross-factional. This just blows me away.

In WoW, this is one of their strictest areas. It's even in the EULA. Cross-factional communication is not allowed. Custom emotes comes accross as *Name makes some strange gestures.

Now, they have a lot of the same restrictions for PvP servers, so no cross-factional anything and no Evil-aligned characters on there until you delete your Good-Aligned.

Another thing I like much better is the professions. There are no gathering professions at all in Norrath. Everyone can mine without talking to a trainer or even possessing a pick-axe. So getting your supplies is simple and easy. Walk up to that gathering node and left-click. You're gathering.

Crafting itself is not quite as simple as in Azeroth, but boy is it a lot more fun. First off, it's not something you can do while you're afk. It requires reaction. It requires input. It requires judgement. You can fail at making your object. This is the way crafting should be done. What's fun about crafting in WoW are the results. What's fun about crafting in Norrath are the process and the results.

Furthermore, you start off being able to craft from any profession. You can woodwork, scribe, tailor, and metalwork in one crafting session. You get to try them all out before you choose a specialty. Infact, you must try them all out before you can choose a specialty.

There are a few downsides to Norrath, as well. It simply requires bigger machines than Azeroth does. This is a pain for me, because I don't have the cash to upgrade right now. Have you not heard about the economy? Are you going to buy it for me? I didn't think so.

My enjoyment of the game is severely limited by the large amount of lag I get when the server gets populated. I can't have anything at all running in the background. So if I'm lost and confused, there's no alt-tabbing out to check the wiki. It also means that I can't turn the settings up to experiance the full glory of the graphics.

But guess what, I'm still enjoying the game. That's saying something.

The maps are just a pain. Not nearly as accurate as I'm used to. Even with my little compass in my UI...I just get lost so easily.

The UI seems a little less intuitive than WoW, too. And the various features don't start out locked. That's a minor pain for someone who's not used to her chat box moving suddenly when she's trying to click on something.


Over all, very enjoyable and definately a new experience. But I'm thinking each game can learn a bit from one another.