Elements

I’m beginning the process of convincing myself to cancel my EQ2 subscription. This process gets easier and easier each time I do it, from my endless unplayed EQ1 subscription, through my vague depression at letting my DAOC subscription slide into oblivion, to my quick and painless excision of City of Heroes.

I have struggled to identify what I don’t like about EQ2, and it’s challenging. They’ve made a very thorough game, with few obvious holes. It isn’t a whining nerf-fest with broken PvE content the way DAOC was. It isn’t City of Heroes’ utterly bland and textureless content. It isn’t even buggy the way my short-lived experience with AO was. It isn’t ugly the way AC1 was, and it isn’t punishingly hard the way EQ1 was.

Even so, it has failed to engage me.

I think the key to this failure lies in how I play console RPGs. From the first days of playing Dragon Warrior 1 on my Nintendo and Phantasy Star 1 on the Sega, I’ve had a simple approach. I assume the game designers intend for me to accomplish some task, and I try to figure out how they expected me to do that. So I look for the NPC in town who will heal me for free, I look for the cheap inn that will allow me to recover my resources, I look for the weapon shop and compare the weapons there to my starting money (”I have 100, that costs 25. I’m supposed to buy that. That one costs 100; I’m not supposed to buy that.”).

And, more than anything else, I treat each trip out to experience gameplay as a resource management problem. Let’s say recovering at the inn costs 30 gold. Let’s say I get 5 gold per fight at the early levels. This means that I need to win 7 fights before returning to the inn, or I’m falling behind, gradually losing money. I assume the game designers did this math, too, and have tuned their game so I can win at least 7 fights without needing to replenish my resources.

So I’m always looking for an answer to the question, ‘What am I supposed to do? How is this supposed to work? What is the path through this content the designers intend for me?’

In FFXI, I can answer that question. I’m supposed to level up. To level up, I need equipment. To buy equipment, I need money. To get money, I can farm, craft, fish, or garden. Then I can apply this same analysis to each of those: How was I intended to farm? What is the right path through the crafting content? What items do I need to fish? What gardening is the most profitable?

But in EQ2, I don’t know how to do the things I’m supposed to do… and worse, I don’t really even know what I’m supposed to do. Case in point: archery. I decided it might be nice to have a bow to shoot monsters with, since I’m always frantically chasing them around hitting my ‘taunt’ ability. I can make a bow; I’ve seen the components in my list of craftables.

So I make a bow, after some degree of sweating and straining, and I’m pleased with it. It’s crappy, but I got crafting experience, which I believe is a good thing, and I got to make some new items I’d never made before. But now I need arrows. I don’t want to craft them, really; I just want to try this bow out, and crafting arrows is boring. I go to the weapon store, and find the fletcher.

He wants ungodly amounts of money per arrow. I’m astonished; I can’t afford these arrows, and moreover, I can’t imagine anyone getting enough use out of arrows to justify this cost. I ask my guild, who say that Rangers get a lot of use out of arrows… but they can use a spell to make their own arrows.

So back to crafting. I have a hope: quality while crafting seems to affect the number of items you get. If I make really nice arrows, I should get a lot of them. I start the process. The cost mounts, because there are so many steps, but I’m convinced it will be cheaper, because I’ll get 20, or 40, or even 100 arrows. Dreaming of 100 arrows, I complete the final step.

I get 7 arrows.

Keep in mind that this process took 30-45 minutes of game time, during which I had to pay attention and carefully manage a piece of UI. 30+ minutes of intense concentration * (100 / 7) = about 7.5 hours for a stack of 100 arrows.

Now I’m asking myself, ‘Ok, what the hell is the developer’s intended path through this content? What should I be doing?’ And I don’t know. I honestly cannot envision the proper series of actions to make a bow and arrows relevant to me.

You can say, ‘Well, you shouldn’t use a bow,’ but I’ve had the same experience through most of the game’s content, in every area. How do I upgrade my skills? Where should I go to fight? What should I be fighting? What quests should I do? What quests should I not bother with? What places will get suddenly, abruptly dangerous when I walk 20 more feet (I died a lot in the sewers…)? What is my class’s role? What special ability should I take, and when should I use it?

I look for answers to these questions, and I’m just left with more questions.

I think it’s a lack of discoverability. I don’t know the answers, and I don’t know where to look to find them. Did you know that you can make a waypoint to a group member? I didn’t, until someone told me how. I can’t even figure out how to set a chat channel as my default chat option in a window.

EQ2 feels like a lot of great ideas, any one of which is sufficiently complex for the whole game, and all of which are only tenuously strung together into a whole. It doesn’t ever cohere for me, form a solid, single experience.

Oh, and it lags like a bitch. It’s not that attractive. I can play HL2 and Doom3 at 30+ fps. What the hell is EQ2 doing that’s so much harder? Whatever it is, I’m not seeing it reflected in the graphics quality on-screen. FFXI looks nicer and never stutters or drops frames.