Sony Online Entertainment recently released a new version of its immensely popular MMORPG Everquest for the PS2. This is not a rehash of Everquest carried over to a new platform, but instead is an entire new game based in the same world 500 years earlier and using many of the concepts that made Everquest so popular. I have to admit that I was skeptical about whether Everquest’s interactive and compelling game play could be successfully brought over to a console, given the obvious limitations a console game suffers in comparison to a game for the PC. Thus I have to say I am pleasantly surprised at how much fun this game is and how well it captures what has kept me playing Everquest for the past four years. Much of this review assumes that you have some familiarity with Everquest, but I have also written it to help describe the game to those who have never played Everquest or even any other MMORPG but are interested in learning about whether EQOA is for you. Is it? In a quick nutshell, for the console gamer who likes role playing games, the answer is yes, get this game. Nothing else for the PS2 comes even close to it. For the PC MMORPG gamer, the answer is more complex. Whether you like this game will depend upon your playing style and how much you like console games in general, because you have to keep in mind that this is a console game and not a PC game and needs to be judged accordingly. Hopefully the descriptions below will help you decide. The World of Norrath The graphics of EQOA are very well done, though admittedly relatively simple compared to Everquest. They have a nice variety and give you a nice feeling of space and location. Best of all, there is virtually no lag at all in this game, even when playing with a 56K connection and in an area with a large group of other players. There is a nice variety of creatures to fight, from the standard rats, bats and snakes at lower levels right up to the high level dragons. The game does suffer from the syndrome of many of these games of retexturing and renaming old mobs and bringing them in later on as a newly named higher level creature, but there is enough variety that this does not cause the boredom that some other games that do this suffer from. There is definitely no lack to things to see and do. The world they have created is simply immense. I created an Erudite and decided to make the trip north from the Erudite city of Highbourne to the Human city of Qeynos, a relatively short trip according to the map that comes with the game. That short trip took me almost a half hour of real time. Moreover, it took me through several different terrains and past several small towns. I can’t imagine how long it would take to make the cross continent trip from Qeynos to Freeport, but I am itching to find out. It is conceivable that a player could play for hundreds of hours and still not see everything the game has to offer. This gives the game incredible replay value. Even after you have spent the enormous amount of time it takes to level up that Elf Druid to level 50, you will not have exhausted the game. You can roll up a Troll Warrior and you will basically start over with an entirely new playing style due to the class change and an entirely new playing field due to the Troll city being hours of real time distance away from the Elf town. Even after four years, I haven’t seen everything you can see in Everquest, and EQOA seems to have much the same depth to it. The Multiplayer Experience I know there are many reading this review who have never played a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game). If you have never played a MMORPG, then you are in for a real treat. Once you experience interactive game play with thousands of other players in one world, the single player stuff just seems kind of lame. This is a world that never sleeps. Unlike other games, when you log out, things do not just freeze and wait for you to log back in. Instead, the world keeps on going and the people you met may have moved on to other areas while you were gone or fought and gained several more levels. Social interaction is as important as the traditional game play, and you gain status within the game as much by how well you play with the other players as by how you play against the actual game environment. It is a concept that new players have a hard time grasping at first, but one that eventually can hook you into the game far more than the basics of the game play. If Joenewbie comes in and starts stealing your kills or starts a train that gets you killed, you are going to remember his name. Moreover, you are going to tell all of your friends and guild mates about him. Do this enough times and Joenewbie will suddenly find that very few people will group or trade with him, and without that interaction it is very difficult to play the game. This interaction extends to all areas of the game. If you are stuck on a quest, you have an instant source of help. Just ask the other players. It’s likely someone has already done it and will gladly give you advice on what to do. MMORPG’s also have thriving economies. Players actively buy and sell items and goods from each other. In EQOA, as in most games, the best items are not available from the NPC vendors, but instead from the other players. Friendships also develop during the game. Players that you group with on a regular basis can become close friends and companions, even though you have never actually meet them in person. Join in guilds and you become part of a small community within the larger one. The more you play the game, the more you get to know the other players and they get to know you. While EQOA does not completely capture the multiplayer experience that has made Everquest the most popular game on the internet, mainly due to some of the communication problems I will detail later, it is still far better than anything else available on the PS2 in this area. If you can’t experience this through your PC, then by all means get it through the Playstation. It’s worth it. Quests The best part about EQOA are the quests. The developers obviously put a lot of time and thought into the quest system and it shows. Unlike Everquest, every quest is worth doing for the experience alone. In fact, they may have gone a little too far with this, since most of the major quests seem to give you an entire level’s worth of experience for completing them. Moreover, many quests also result in items better than anything you will get at that level via a drop, and the class quests give you crucial spells and abilities that you cannot get any other way. Every race/class combination gets a series of quests that kick in every so many levels. These are well designed to teach you how to play the game and to force a player further and further out into the world. Thus at level 1, you learn how to buy things, at level 2 you learn how to bind and how to sign in with the Coachmen for traveling. Level 3 teaches you how to fight and level 4 how to group. Then each quest after that sends you further away from your home city and gives you more and more difficult tasks to complete. At least in the beginning, a player can level up solely by doing the quests and fighting the mobs you find on your way to and from where they send you. I like how they give you a sense of purpose. You really feel like you are moving up in importance within your guild and are getting assigned ever more necessary tasks. I think this adds a great deal of fun and depth to the game. If there is any disappointment with the quests it is that there seem to be only a limited number of side quests in the game. I would like to be able to travel around to all of the small towns in the world and solve their problems for them, but nobody seems to have a problem to solve. Sony has promised that they will patch more quests into the game, so hopefully this is something in the works, but right now it is an area that is lacking. Combat and Gameplay I was a little leery of how EQOA would play with a PS2 controller. Everquest is a complex game and I could not figure out how you could get all of that into a single controller. They have actually succeeded pretty well. You target from mob to mob using the upper right controller button. This soon becomes a habit since the targeting button tells you the relative level of the mob to you and, more importantly, whether it will attack you if you go near it. A lot more mobs attack on sight in EQOA then in EQ, making it dangerous to just run through many areas. All of the controls you need for combat are easy to reach on the controller and have a nice, logical flow to them. Obviously, it takes getting used to in order to react quickly during battle, but the more you play the game the more instinctive the controls become. I did find that some of the lesser used functions were not as easy to figure out without consulting the manual, but fortunately, they were not the ones you needed in the heat of battle. Once you target a mob, you can attack it or cast a spell on it. Combat is more along the lines of traditional console and arcade games than the PC Everquest, and gives you a good feeling of the battle. You move up to the target and keep hitting the attack button to attack. There is no auto attack button. Casters do not get interrupted when hit and can cast while moving, though they do slow down when they cast. Plus, skills such as kick and taunt are now treated like spells and are cast using power much like you would cast a lightning bolt as a wizard. This adds an extra dimension to the fighting classes, and also an extra degree of caution since you can actually run out of power from kicking the mob. There are only five spots to store spells and skills, which really makes choosing what to keep memorized tough. I rather wish they had stuck with the 8 available in Everquest, as that seems to give you more options than you can get in EQOA. The spells and skills that you get are the basic sort anyone who plays RPG’s would be familiar with, and vary widely by class. You have direct damage, damage over time, and damage to groups of mobs. Plus, you have buffs for party members that increase their stats and skills and debuffs for mobs to make them easier to fight. Then there are utility spells, charm spells, root spells, pets you can summon to fight with you, teleports and probably some others I am missing. Fighters get ranged attacks and other special attacks to do extra damage to the mobs. Basically, everything that exists in Everquest in the way of spells exists in some form in EQOA, although the fighting classes actually get some additional abilities to use. The biggest difficulty I had with the combat setup was the hotkeys. Commands that you would normally hotkey in EQ have been consolidated into a set of option commands worked by the buttons on the left side of the controller. This works fairly well, but is no substitute for a quick hotkey button. For example, to get your pet to attack you need to pop up the options menu with the lower left button and then hit the left joystick four times to the left. Assisting the puller means hitting it several times in different directions, wasting valuable seconds and missing completely if you mess up the combination. This is an understandable compromise given the fact that there are a limited number of buttons on a PS2 controller compared to a keyboard, but it is still awkward and hard to master. Players who hate sitting around between battles in Everquest will love EQOA. Combat is very fast paced and there is very little down time between fights. This is due to the addition of food and drink that you can use to regenerate power and hit points in between fights. The biggest downtime comes from being poisoned or diseased, as the food and drink won’t work as well while you are experiencing those conditions. A group with a healer and caster should pretty much never have to stop fighting. On the whole, players are more powerful for their level than in Everquest. Most players can easily solo anything that is blue or white to them (i.e. at or below their level) and have a pretty good shot at winning against yellow conning mobs (i.e. those a little higher in level than them). Good groups can chain pull yellows and reds with very little difficulty. This makes combat much easier than EQ, or for that matter than many combat oriented console games, and may be a turn off for some, but it also makes combat more exciting overall. The ease of the combat is somewhat offset by the fact that there are no zone lines in EQOA, so there is no place to run. If you make a bad pull and get in over your head, you have no real way to escape and will definitely be killed. I have yet to be able to outrun an angry mob. Also, the mobs in EQOA are far more aggressive than in EQ and adds are pretty frequent, so you need to remain on constant alert as to where you are and what is happening around you. Group Combat Grouping together with other players to take on the hoards of creatures is what makes MMO’s so much fun, and EQOA is no exception. In fact, there is almost no reason not to group in this game. Unlike other MMO’s like Everquest, you do not lose experience for group combat. The same level mob will get you around the same amount of experience whether you are soloing it or fighting it with three other players. Yes, that is three. Whereas Everquest has gone the way of expanding group sizes through the raid functions, EQOA has reduced the size, limiting groups to four players rather than the six player groups found in Everquest. I personally wish they had stayed with six, since I think the four player group is going to make certain classes much harder to play. Every group needs a tank, healer and crowd control. This basically leaves one spot open for another class. They have fixed that somewhat by giving the utility classes more ability to fit into those traditional roles. For example, Druids and Shamans can heal almost as well as a Cleric, and Paladins and Rangers can tank almost as well as a Warrior. Still, I have to admit I am baffled as to why they decided to reduce the group sizes like they did. It will remain to be seen if certain classes are able to hold their own against the traditional classes or will instead find themselves searching for groups that will take them. Nonetheless, there is little reason to not form a group in EQOA. All of the excuses for solo play have been eliminated. You gain the same amount of experience per kill in a group as you would soloing. And you can kill things that are a much higher level at a much faster rate, meaning you will gain better and faster loot. Thus, players that consistently play in groups will level much faster than players that mostly play solo and will find better loot faster than solo players. Also, group battles are just more fun than solo battles. A smoothly run group can pretty much fight non-stop until they get tired to fighting. It is only when you form a group that your particular class’s skills and abilities really start to stand out. The game is designed so that the classes compliment each other and no single class can do everything needed to succeed in the game. Cooperation is in the long run not only more fun but actually necessary to really experience all the game has to offer. For those who have played Everquest, you will find that group combat is very similar to how it works in Everquest. In a good group, the cleric stands back and heals and buffs, the tank pulls the mob and fights up front, taking the damage, the casters stand back and cast their damage spells as needed and the other classes fit in with their own various abilities. It is this interaction of the various classes that has made Everquest so interesting to play, and EQOA transfers that interaction very well to the console. Death and Travel The death penalty in EQOA is completely different than in EQ. The developers chose to make dieing much less of a burden. Instead of having to run back to your corpse and retrieve your equipment, you are resurrected whole wherever you last bound yourself. You can never lose a level either. Instead, you incur an experience point deficit that you need to make up. About 50% of the experience you get from future battles is then taken out until you make up for the experience deficit, meaning you still level to some extent, but just at a slower pace for a while. Thus, you still do not want to die, but if you do, it is not quite a devastating a consequence as it can be in Everquest. Travel in EQOA is actually more difficult than in Everquest. As a new player, you are pretty much homebound. Travel between cities must initially be done on foot through dangerous terrain full of aggressive monsters. Moreover, the path from place to place is not always well marked, and it is easy to stray from the roads. I personally think this adds a nice element of suspense to the game. Once you reach a new city, you need to register with the local coachman. After you are on the coachman’s books, you can use the coach to instantly travel to any city that coachman is linked to where you have also registered for the books. Thus, after traveling from Highbourne to Qeynos on foot, I was thereafter able to make the journey instantly via the coachman. Not all coaches are interlinked. For example, there is no coach that goes directly across the continent from Qeynos to Freeport Thus, to make the long journey from Qeynos to Freeport, you will need to be registered at several towns in between, which means you initially will have to walk all that way. This means that exploration of the world is necessary if you want to eventually be able to travel it at your leisure. Communication The biggest problem with EQOA, and its most serious debility when compared to Everquest and the other PC MMORPG’s, lies in the communication features. It is designed so that you can play it without a keyboard, but as a practical matter a keyboard is a necessity. Even with a keyboard, communication is very difficult. This is because you use the controller for movement and combat and when you want to talk, you have to put down the controller and type. I have found that it is just not worth trying to talk to anyone while fighting. If you are typing, you can’t also be hitting the attack or spell buttons. Since combat is pretty much non-stop in a good group, this means you can go quite a while without any communications at all. The game, as a result, can often be pretty quiet, and the fun banter you can get in a friendly group in Everquest is non-existent in EQOA. Furthermore, when I play console games, I like to lie back on my couch, relax, and play the game in a relatively prone position. I doubt that I am the only one who does this. But in order to type on the keyboard, you need to be positioned in a sitting position more like you assume while playing PC games. EQOA forces you to compromise this and either play while sitting back and not do much typing or to sit up by the keyboard and give up the more relaxing position. The forms of communication available are standard to all MMO games, and the commands are the same as in EQ, making it easy for an EQ player to pick up on it. In fact, most of the commands in the game as well as the chat terms players are using use EQ terminology, giving an old EQ player a distinct advantage in knowing how to play. You can /tell an individual player anywhere in the game. You can /shout to the players in the zone you are in. You can /group talk to just your group or /guild talk to just your guild. There is no OOC in EQOA – just shout. As long as you are sitting still, communication is as simple as typing in your keyboard. If you are fighting or traveling somewhere, it is much more difficult to hold a conversation. When you go to type something, a giant keyboard pops up on your screen, basically blocking the view of everything else. This is there for people to use who don’t have a ubb keyboard, but it is just a distraction for those who do. The combination of the screen being blocked and the fact you need to put down the controller to type means that very few conversations are made on the run. I find this to be the biggest drawback in what is otherwise an excellent game. There are shortcut keys and game keys on the keyboard that are designed to let you play without the controller. I confess that I have not really tried to use them since I feel one of the nice things about playing the PS2 is using the controller. Perhaps the use of these commands would solve the communications problems. The Community Right now finding that good group I was talking about is pretty difficult. EQOA has enticed a whole new set of players to try out an MMORPG. This is great on one hand and extremely aggravating on the other hand. Right now, the game is pretty much a free for all. Players attack everything in site, break into other people’s camps, steal other people’s kills and generally do whatever they want. In a group, many, if not most, players still have little idea of how to integrate with the other classes. In effect, the EQOA community is still very much in its infancy and is experiencing some serious growing pains. As a long time MMO player, it can drive me crazy to group with clerics who consistently attack rather than heal, casters who don’t even realize they have a pet much less know how to use it, warriors who don’t know how to taunt, and so on. Nonetheless, this is to be expected in a new game like this. The game is young and over time the players will learn how to play it and when they do it the game play and player interaction has the potential to become as complex and detailed as it now is in Everquest. This will be helped by the fact that there are a decent number of experienced players in the game who are slowly teaching the rest of the players the basics of how to play in this type of game. For now though, expect more chaos than cohesion. Then again, while on one hand it can definitely be annoying for an experienced player, it is also kind of exhilarating to be watching a brand new community develop from scratch. Players who are new to Everquest come into a world where the rules have long since been hashed out and developed by the players. They have no real say in how things are done. EQOA players, on the other hand, are entering a blank slate and will play a role in deciding where the game goes from here. I personally find that kind of exciting and am enjoying seeing the game community develop in front of my eyes. Conclusion I believe Sony has done an amazing job of translating to the Playstation 2 the experience that made Everquest so popular on the PC. They have created an incredibly large and complex interactive world that is likely to entice many players into its fold for hundreds of hours of enjoyment in much the same way Everquest has done. However, you need to keep in mind that EQOA is a console game and not a PC game. It is geared more towards a console game player than the traditional PC role player. Some people may consider that to be an advantage, and others may never really enjoy the changes. I personally find it to be a nice change of pace from Everquest rather than a complete substitute for it and plan on playing both games. So is this game for worth buying and worth the $10 per month fee to keep playing it? If you are a console game player who loves role playing games, then the answer I will give you is a definite “yes”. You are very likely going to love this game. There is really nothing quite like it for the Playstation 2. Massive Multiplayer gaming is something that once you experience it makes all other forms of gaming seem simple and Everquest Online Adventures is an excellent MMORPG. The group combat and character interaction you experience in this game is far beyond what any single player game can give you in terms of depth and reality. Plus, the replay value of the game makes the price well worth it. I am not exaggerating when I say that most Everquest players have played the game for thousands of hours and are still entertained by it. EQOA has that potential as well. How many other games are going to give you this much pure entertainment in one purchase? If you are a PC MMORPG gamer and are wondering if this is worth sacrificing time you could spend playing Everquest, Dark Age of Camelot or other MMO games on the PC, you need to think about what types of games you like and what you enjoy about the games you are playing. EQOA is faster paced than EQ, experiences less down time and a lower death penalty, and has a generally different feel about it then EQ. Casual players may actually get more out of EQOA than Everquest because you can play for shorter stints and get more out of your game play. Yet EQOA is also less complex than EQ and does not have the depth of game play or community that EQ has developed over the years. It is more of an arcade game and less of a strategy game, so you really have to decide if you will enjoy a more arcade style MMORPG. From my personal perspective, I really like this game and plan on continuing to play it, but I don’t plan on canceling my EQ account or stopping playing EQ. I envision logging into EQOA when I know I only have an hour or two, but logging into EQ when I find myself with a nice block of time to play. That may be the perfect compromise between the two – well until Star Wars Galaxies comes along that is. For more information about the game, visit our Everquest Online Adventures site at eqoa.allakhazam.com.