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At E3 you can just about expect companies to go to great lengths to dress
up their booths but as me and other Stratics staff approached the SOE
booth, I both smiled and locked my knees as we checked out the exterior
of their EQII presentation room.
The most obvious eye catching thing was the gigantic spider crawling
down some castle stairs next to the two systems setup to demo EQII to
the masses (did I mention this spider was huge? Or that I can't stand
spiders? That they are evil and should be wiped off the face of the planet?)
Luckily we quickly moved inside the demo chamber for a quick look at EQII
where they had the obligatory large screens demoing the game features.
A developer briefly talked about the game in general and some of the
highlights that players can look forward to in EQII such as the very wide
choices a character can make during creation to really create a character
that will look unique as well as the extremely high quality of the graphics
of the game (yes, we compared their demo reel graphics with those of the
actual game to make sure they were the same..)
The graphics were fluid and the fighting and casting movements were realistic
(probably since they used motion capture for all their movements). The
voice-overs for NPCs for both general interaction and combat were extremely
well done to the point I actually found myself listening more then reading
the text box. The spell graphics were astounding as well as the melee
skill graphics really adding to the combat experience.
The developers then briefly talked about their 'city ecology' where the
NPCs of the city are aware of your character and actually act accordingly,
depending on your character's standing (or lack thereof). They discussed
the improved monster AI where the mobs are much cleverer then before.
One example given was if your party, which is fighting Orcs, gets the
Orcish healer down below 75% health there is a good chance the other Orcs
will surround and protect the healer. On the other hand they might see
their healer has no chance and just retreat.
We then moved onto the demo clients they had setup to take a quick spin
of the game and see how intuitive the system was to control. During our
character creation we learned how characters can actually change classes
or even alignments over the course of the game (although some changes
are not done easily or at a whim), because we all know deep in our hearts
we want to play that Iskar paladin convert. All in all as a first look,
things looked extremely nice which really did not help my impatience to
play but did help tide me over until that day comes when we can all play
EQII.
Chris "Zedin" Crowder
Staff Writer At E3, May II004
