Everquest II Starter Kit - Part 3

I played around with the 2 CDs from the EQ2 Starter Kit, and as I thought, the most interesting thing are the Journeyman Boots for your character, which you get by entering a code on a SOE webpage. Well, you are promised to get them, no way to find out before the game is there.

CD 1 has some videos, and music scores, but I've seen most of them before. It also has a button to "scan your system", but that only directs you to this webpage. The scan is very basic, with no benchmark performed, but it will give you an idea if your computer is powerful enough for this game. Happily my computer even meets the "recommended" stats.

CD 2 is to install the EQ2 character creation tool on your hard disk. And then it still only runs when the disk is in the drive, heaven knows why. Character creation is very detailed, but somehow not so much fun as in City of Heroes. That is maybe because in CoH you mainly play with your costume, which is highly visible. In the EQ2 character creation, you only have minimal control over your body, you just set the size, skin color, and clothing color. But then you have very intricate control over your head. There are a total of 17 sliders to set for your head, 3 of which are just for the nose. You are extremely unlikely to meet somebody in the game who has exactly your head.

So how does it look? As a premiere in this blog, I'll add two pictures for comparison. The first is from the dwarf I created with the EQ2 Starter Kit. The second is a little reminder how dwarves looked in EQ1 (pre-Luclin):



Graphics have sure improved in the last 5 years. As you can see, the newly created characters are just wearing some rags. And the background is a ship. And the video showing parts of the tutorial is also playing on a ship. I think it is reasonably safe to assume that your character in EQ2 will start ship-wrecked, and the tutorial ship will save you and get you to your starting city. See you there in November!

Now what the heck will I play until then?

- posted by Tobold @ 10:21 PM Permanent Link