While I relate these features antiseptically, they are actually quite organic and engage the player in a sense of being and purpose. It’s more than just “survive the battle”, you are trying to save your people, your race and the tenets of your faith.
Beyond a great backdrop that progresses an already rich story, EverQuest II offers a wholly new, and much needed, user interface. While it is by no means the pinnacle of UI design, it is slim and very functional. As with the original, the interface is designed with a minimalist approach, keeping only the most necessary objects on the screen.
Which is a great idea considering the really superb graphics displayed in EverQuest II. This is by far the best engine of any MMORPG and yes, that includes Lineage II. Certainly this will be a short lived honor, but it is very impressive never the less. In fact, the sheer amount of options available for tweaking the graphics is daunting, but thankfully several profiles are provided, such as “Balanced”, “Maximum Quality” and “Maximum Performance” which will help you adjust the engine as needed. I tried several of the profiles and found that the “Balanced” option does exactly what it suggests, provides the best performance with excellent quality. While the quality of the “Maximum Quality” profile did create some really impressive graphic details, it also hammered my box and torqued the framerate down to about ten frames per second.
EverQuest II is a beautiful, imaginative, and rich game that has an excellent music score and inspiring voice work. It is also tedious. The tedium is not unbearable, but in the lower levels you will likely spent hours performing mundane tasks for the simple reason of driving up your character level enough to leave the training region and journey into the real world. There are only so many goblins I can kill before I gouge out my eyes and cut off my fingers. It probably wouldn’t be such an ordeal if the reward for gaining a level were a little more…rewarding. Each level seems to come with a skill or spell of mostly marginal value. Occasionally there is a diamond in the rough, but as a whole they simply do not amount to anything but clutter.
Which brings us back to fun. EverQuest II is a brilliantly crafted work art in almost every respect. It just never became fun for me. It always seemed like I was supposed to be working for something, but I never figured out what that this was. Even grinding levels stopped being fun when each level seemed to bring me only a marginal valuable ability. Perhaps it was just me. Perhaps I just don’t grok. I’ll buy that and I would certainly recommend EverQuest II to anyone who enjoys MMORPG games. Just the graphics and music make this a game worth trying.
