Rating: 
Summary: A few things you need to know before trying this game
Review: 1 If you have a dial-up connection you will never get the game to run smoothly.
2 You need a 2500 cpu with 1 gig+ of ram and a 256 video card to run with out severe
lag
3 The base monthly fee is $15 but your playing options will be very restricted if you don't get an all access pass for $7 per/month stat tracking $3 per/month an buy the new areas $4 every other month. Bring the real cost to $27 per/month
4 To sell items you find or make to other players you need to stay on-line in spot and do nothing. Most people leave the game running when there are asleep or at work so the can sell there stuff.
5 At about level 20 to make progress in the game you will blocks of at lest 3 hours uninterrupted playing time. At that level there is very little solo content. You will then need to work in a team to level, quest and create items. There are 50 levels.
This game does the best graphic of any game I have ever seen. After that there are no innovations that are unique to this mmopgs. If you have less than 30 hours a week to play per week you might want to skip this.
If you like mmopgs there are a many out there that are a lot more fun.
Word of Warcraft
City of heroes
Ever Quest Live
EQOA
Star Wars Galaxies
Final Fantasy XI Online
Ultima Online
Rating: 
Summary: EQ, but *NOT* EQ.
Review: First, the good side:
) Nice graphics.
Second, the bad side:
) Nice graphics. Unless you're rich, and can afford a Geforce 6800 256MB PCI-E card on a P4 3.8GHz machine with 2GB of DDR2 RAM, this game will lag to death.
) XP Debt. For some reason, no one at Sony has been listening to the thousands of complaints about XP Debt for the last few years. Now, when you die, everyone pays for it. What the hell?!
) Want to solo? Forget it.
I'd like to smack the person who makes the rules at Sony. Apparently, he/she's never played an MMORPG. Until they get smart, I'm moving to WoW.
Rating:
Summary: Not for YOU
Review: I am an avid game player, XBOX and PC Games I own over 100. I bought EQII expecting a great Role Playing game. I got a game that is frustrating and forces my computer open to the internet by making me turn off my firewall.
I have a 3.2 Ghz Pentium
NVidia Ultra 5700U
Ultra High Performance 500 Gigabyte Harddisk in a raid 0 configuration
2 Gigabytes of dual channel low latency 3200 memory.
I Play DOOM3 and HalfLife2 with no problems on their highest graphic setting and get framerates well over 60.
The game will occasionally, the last three days, choke my system frame rates drop to the point I can't control the character. The travel time involved in questing is horrendous. It is tough and no productive to solo. You are forced on line and cannot play with out connecting and paying a subscription that is close to the same amount I pay for 4 MBit cable internet access. In addition the servers are frequently down. Even a level 12 I find the questing repetitve and boring. Soem quests are never ending. The Tour of Antonica took forever and gave almost nothing. Give me DaggerFall!
I am very frustrated to purchase a game for $50 and find out I can only use it for a month before they force me to pay another $21 every month for the same stuff just to make sure that I don't lose my tediously earned character.
My advice DON'T BUY THIS GAME!
Rating: 
Summary: Better than the competition
Review: I love Everquest 2. I've played the original Everquest since Pre-Kunark and I've played FFXI and this game, in my opinion, greatly surpasses those.
It's graphics are simply amazing. Best I've expierienced on any game I've played. The battle system is excellent. No longer do you stand around an enemy, hit it, wait 5 seconds for another hit, repeat, no it's very faster in EQ2, with a vast array of abilites to use as well. The raid zones are extremely fun, complex and just wonderful all around. Grouping is amazing too, everything come together very nicely and, as some previous reviews complained about, you do gain expierience debt if a party member dies. Many people are blowing this out of proportion, you lose 1% of your level, and it is a good thing, if you know you have something to lose when group members die, you will be more motivated to keep them alive and play to the best of your ability.
Now to put some of the complaining in perspective:
While there is a lack of solo-content, there is enough to keep most people satisfied. One thing you should realize before you buy this game is that it is a MMORPG. Why would you buy a game, and pay a monthly subscription fee for it, that stresses community, interaction between other players, and grouping in the process if you want to remain isolated from everyone? Play Fable or Morrowind or something else, but for your own good don't buy this or any other mmorpg if you don't want to solo.
Another aspect some people seem to complain about is seeing "new" mobs look just like old ones. Show me one game, mmorpg or not, that doesn't use the same graphics for stronger enemies as for weaker ones. Everygame from FFVII to the original Everquest does this.
One trend I've noticed in many of the negative reviews is that the reviewee's are all 25 and below. That's not very much expierience in a game. To use an analogy, that would be like buying a book, reading a page or do, and deciding that you don't like it before you know what its about.
But anyway, to recap what makes this game so great: Awsome graphics, extremely fun grouping and interaction between other players, fun combat system, and great questing. If you are a fan of mmorpg's, get this game, and you will probably love it as much as I do.
Rating:
Summary: I played 1 week of beta and loved it!
Review: I was able to get in to the last week of EQ2 beta and had a blast! Being beta, there were some bugs to be sure, and there will still be some on release, but it was quite playable and fun. The game has great graphics, cool voiceovers, and tons of quests. There is a new crafting system that is much more complex and interesting than what I've seen in EQ1 or DAoC, or even Horizons. Only A Tale in the Desert had a more interesting crafting system - but that game is almost entirely about building. <br /><br />In addition to the game, your account will also give you access to their "Player Station", which includes extras like a guild web site including a message board, and an item database. I'm on pins and needles waiting for the release, which is Nov 9th (shipping Nov 8th), not the 17th, as listed here.
Rating:
Summary: Never again
Review: I was excited, no, make that obsessed, before EQ2 came out. I visited the fan pages, found all the latest info and news, kept ahead of the curve on all aspects of the game. I knew it back and forth before ever stepping a virtual foot inside the game. I even purchased a new computer system especially for the game with lots of horsepower for the needs of the game. With that in mind, please take a few minutes to read this review if you so choose.
Once I started EQ2, I was floored by the reality of the graphics. They were outstanding. They weren't "realistic" but fantastic none-the-less. The fluidity of the movement was unparralled in a game of its size. This was not only in the players' movements, but in the animal or monster movements, the flags waving, the torches on the walls, the water in the streams. It was all better than I had hoped.
And the talking characters were great. They would tell you what to do, even though you were reading it before they spoke it in most cases. They would even motion for you to come to them if they had a quest for you AND the quest was automatically written in your journal. No more pen and paper notebook hunts wondering why you have a letter in your pack.
With all that said, I was happy to play for a while. More than happy, I was finding myself playing well into the night! It was addicting. That is until level 20 or so...
At about level 20 to 25:
1) You start to realize that all the "new" monsters look the same, or exactly like the "old" monsters only with different titles. The fluidity and graphics aside, if you have to see the same old monster over and over, its going to get boring.
2) You realize that the quests are all but identical, especially those for access: Talk to someone, kill something (or lots of something), talk to someone again, kill more things, talk to someone yet again, find another person (usually in a zone 15 minutes away), and then come back to kill more stuff and be rewarded with access to another zone in which the monsters all begin to look alike. There are several quests that give rewards such as armor or money, but they all involve delivery, viewing a certain place, killing a certain number of monsters, or a combonation of those aspects. And they all have the same bland quality to them. Once you do 25, you're ready to just go out and kill things.
3) You realize that you must group at all times or be rewarded with 1/3 or so of the same experience point total that you would have received in a group for the same amount of time / effort / number of kills. This is quite frustrating since it will then take you 3 times longer than your friend who groups to level up.
4) You realize that gear, especially good gear, is next to impossible to come by. Let's face it, you are in the game to get stuff since the quests have become an exercise in boredom and the kills all begin to look the same. But when that is taken away, you start to ask yourself why you are even bothering to play. Some would say that questing provides good gear but to them I would say that the rewards aren't worth the time and effort and to make a note of items 2) and 3) above.
5) You realize that the "spells" are nothing more than wastes of time and money. EQ2 forces players to upgrade spells, not only spell casting classes but fighting classes, as well. And if you can't find a rare item that is necessary for a spell, you will either have to find someone who can produce that spell for you at a very high price or be a sub-standard player in your class. This is, again, very frustrating since you are often times unable to find anything other than "artisan" spells when you are soloing or grouping.
6) You realize that the game is setup entirely to waste time in getting things accomplished. Another reviewer asks why the cities are layed out in such a winding fashion. The simple answer is so that you will waste more time in finding things and getting from point A to point B. Travel, while quickened by a few means within the game, is an obvious "time sink" that is intentionally there so that you will have to waste more and more time to get things accomplished, even within one part of one city. And the fact that one MUST travel back into his / her hometown is also a waste of time. Even at level 20, you can easily spend 10 minutes venturing from zone to zone to zone just getting back to a particular place that you must go. And if you spend 10 minutes traveling to, you will spend 10 minutes traveling back; and this is not counting the time spent within the city trying to find that which you are looking for. And this is just one example of the time wastes within the game. There are several others such as spawn times, spawn place holders, quest giver locations, monster locations, locations on the map, item decay and the placement of menders (required if you don't want your items to be unusable), and several others.
I may come off as sounding harsh or biased or like I am not trying hard enough to find the good but to that I would say this. I started a new character after reaching 25 since I became bored with the game to determine if my boredom was just due to the character. I was able to level him to 8 within a couple of hours and then onto 11 on the next session. But then I thought about the road ahead; the questing, the same monsters over and over, the tediousness of it all, and the repetativeness of it and just logged out. I decided that its not worth my time and its ultimately not fun. And I am not alone in that line of thinking.
I have spoken with several players who were almost as excited about EQ2 as I was before it began. We wanted to play it and get to the highest level quickly and begin the fun. But then we were told about the highest level and the lack of fun. Then we took a short look at the "fun" we were having getting there. The reward, the fun, just wasn't there. And so, I have quit as have numerous others.
So, to sum it all up, EQ2 is revolutionary in its design, packaging, and overall look and feel. The graphics and world look are second to none. The motions and AI is outstanding (for an MMORPG). It is, however, boring, tedious, and repetative to the point of numbing. I would say its a good game for the most part until you reach the higher level teens and lower level 20s. From then on, its only for those with nothing better to do or those that love the teamwork aspect of it or the relationships they have built with others. It is not for those that want gear, like to solo, those that like to see and do new things, or have less than 20 hours a week to devote to the game.
Rating:
Summary: A horrible game, a horrible company
Review: I'm impressed by the graphics of EQ2, but after playing up to about level 20, I got bored. I was disappointed by the removal of many special and quirky features of various races. People who played high level druids or bards or enchanters in EQ1 will be very unhappy with EQ2. Forget about kiting, chain casting pets, or even spirit of wolf (now nerfed to uselessness). Cleary there was an attempt to make this game easier to play for everyone, but much less interesting for the expert.
Rating: 
Summary: What are you bashing? The game or the company?
Review: I've seen a lot of folks on here that have rated this game one star simply becasue it is made by Sony. Judge Sony how you like, but I feel this is a fantastic game.
Some positives:
-Customizeable character: Not quite as customizeable as City of Heroes, but years better than the original EQ.
- New grouping system: If you're signing up for EQII and planning on having one of your uber-high-level buddies login and powerlevel you, you're in for a shock. You get to group with players six levels up or six levels below you. Anything more and NONE of your encounters give experience.
- New looting system: Lotto! Need I say more?
- The graphics: Are the most incredible I've ever seen for a MMORPG. Which brings me to my one negative...
-The Graphics. I run an AMD Athlon 2600 with 512MB of RAM and a GeForce 4 Ti vid card with 128MB. Outside the cities, I can leave the settings on balanced, which still provides for some stunning graphics. Unfortunately, inside the cities a much lower setting is required to compensate for the lag. I've also noticed the longer you stay on line, the worse the lag gets.
To sum this up, I wholeheartedly recommend this game to people who have a lot of time on their hands they need to get rid of. On the other hand, if you have a problem hunting the same prey over and over again, perhaps you should try some other game.
Oh, and for the kiddie who whined about not getting his time back after the EQ servers were down in January, you may want to check your statement. Sony gave 3 DAYS free to every player, and jacked up the XP for all players as well for a full week. I have also ahd no server crashes since, with the exception of the daily server reset, which happens with every MMORPG.
Rating:
Summary: Not Interested in Verant
Review: My daughter and I played EQ loyally for a year and a half. It was awesome, an escape into a fantasy world of dungeons and dragons and marvellous elves. The expansion packs were nice until EQ went to the moon. I never bought an expansion after that.In the old days, all the classes had purpose. My wizard was a remarkable traveller and I used to make a few plat porting people people around. My guild had fun banding together for raids and hunts too. But then it became so easy to port anywhere. Why bother playing a basically weak druid or wizard?! Then cat people started running around, and lizards on their heals. Sigh, how I missed the Tolkienish feel of the old EQ. I finally quit EQ when DAC came out. I left EQ on one of our computers for a few months more for my daughter. But one day when she entered the wrong password while logging in, they locked her out of her account. I called them and they were very arrogant and refused to fix it. Nevermind they had just cut off a 9 yr old child from her favorite winter passtime. They were very arrogant and clearly implied that they owned the MMOLRPG market, so we could play be their rules or rot. Instead, I introduced my daughter then and there to DAC. There are a dozen good MMOLRPGs out there now that have beaten EQ hands down. As long as Verant runs it, I'll never go back. EQ has always had lousy customer service. The game was a good RPG but turned into a videogame. I doubt EQ2 will be an improvement.
Rating:
Summary: You've may have heard this!
Review: The cake looks real good but tastes dry and stale. that pretty much sums up EQ2. EQ1 had a feel to it that has yet to be duplicated or improved. Overall EQ1 was a mess but it still had a adventure feel that was great. Remember the evil eyes in EQ1 ? Creatures like that were fun as hell to fight. All of the games out now, including WoW, are kind of too clean cut. No feeling. I like WoW a lot but EQ1 is still the best MMO out there. Too bad they don't just improve the original game by changing the death penalty, etc...
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