Sturm und EQ2 drang

I’m not using my own, brand-spanking new computer right now because it brand-spankingly came with a brand-spankingly duff graphics card. Which, on the bright side, gave me the excuse to avoid blogland and feeds for over a week, since most of my stuff had been yanked off the old machine and I couldn’t be arsed to set it back up. Until today that is, when I saw the EQ2 squall come in over the horizon (thanks for the heads up, Stropp!).

Wolfshead has impressions of EQ2. Two of them. Well, there are two EQs, so it’s fair.

Tipa disagrees.

Stropp has comments of his own, except they’re upside-down.

EDIT — but wait! Dragonchasers’ Pete weighs in! This is where I get the popcorn.

(If I’m missing any here, let me know!)

For the record, I mostly agree with Tipa. EQ2 does indeed have flaws, and some of Wolfshead’s points are very valid indeed; however, I — like many other readers — felt those points were buried inside an approach that isn’t nearly as objective as it might wish to be. That said… I’m not sure any of us old MMO hands, bloggers or not, are entirely capable of being unbiased anymore. Oh, we try, but it’s not easy to set aside everything one knows and everything one has spent so long learning. You’re really only an MMO-virgin once.

A week’s break made a few things clear to me, one of which is that the polemics we see daily in Bloglalaland aren’t earth-shattering. Interesting, for sure; fascinating and amusing quite often too, and instructive rather more often than one might expect from the intarwebs. But for now, I’ve lost my taste for 18-page debates.

What I’ll do instead is post my own extremely short impressions of EQ2 and WoW as a returning player to both. When asked what kind of player I am, I describe myself as a crafter, even though that still sounds like I’m coming out of some dark closet where people will gasp and titter behind their hands because I don’t raid and don’t care about loot. Point is, that biases me very much against WoW. Not that WoW is a bad game, just that it doesn’t do it for me beyond the first couple of “oooh” and “aaaah” weeks.

1. WoW is like the date who spends all evening talking about how great he is. And sure, he’s really good looking in a roid rage meets the electric kool-aid acid test cartoony kind of way, but there’s nothing beyond the facade of killing stuff to get stuff so you can kill more stuff to …. yeah.

2. EQ2 is more of a nerd with glasses, but at least he lets you take your time rooting through his record collection if that’s what you want to do (and he has vinyl!). His house is a bit of a mess with a zillion nooks and crannies you may not even find for 6 months, but hey, at least he HAS housing.

Of course that’s ridiculously biased and far too short to give any kind of a complete picture. For today, however, it’s good enough for me. With a bit of luck my new vid card will be here tomorrow and I can go back to playing EQ2 in high-quality mode. I’ll tell ya something I had to learn just recently: you don’t always notice an increase in performance all that much, but you sure as hell notice when you have to downgrade again, for however limited a time. YECH!

(Oh and PS Spinks and Arbitrary — that EQ2 crafting guide is in the works. Honest. Except by the time I finish it, nobody will need it. (Or so I hope!))