For those that might not have caught it on the newstracker Wolfsheadonline has a great breakdown of the first 15 mins of a newbie to EQ2. I don't agree with some of his more subjective stuff, but if you love EQ2, this is certainly certainly worth your time to read.

One thing that I think that he REALLY REALLY hit the nail on the head was his first sentence:




OHHH SO TRUE. I think most of us here on the boards have been playing for such a long time that we generally will give a game what I would call the "lvl 20" rule. Lets get past the main introduction and kill 10 rat quests and get to the meat of a game before we decide if we like it or not. Unfortunately that usually means that we "play till we start to grind", but most games we generally give a shot. If not because we know that MMO's take awhile to get into, and also that there has to be that generalized "learning period" for people who have never played an MMO.

WOW had this right from the beginning and their streaming client helped so much with this. For a non MMO person to come to an MMO and see load times and lag, immediately destroyed their faith in an MMO. I want to say around Podcast #40ish we (Rot, Val and I) had this very same discussion as SOE was revamping the intro isle in EQ2. The fact that you could kick in a small client on WOW and then start to play the game within 5-10 min and then have the rest of the intro part streaming in on the background while you played was worth its weight in gold.

SOE missed that with EQ2 and its 1 gig+ download, Blizzard won on that one, and won big.

We who are reading this are seasoned MMO players, we accept the grind somewhat, but what really strikes me when reading Wolfheadonline's post is that he is completely looking through the eyes of a noob, although we can tell he has been playing MMOs for awhile.

That is what makes this a great read if you have not read it:

EverQuest2 Revisted Part 1: Analysis of the First 15 Minutes

Also be sure to check out Tipa's rebuttle (which is a great read in and of itself):

West Karana : EQ2: The sixteenth minute — a rebuttal

Also some comments from We Fly Spit Fires & Stropp are worth your time to read:

We Fly Spitfires: Blizzard vs MMORPGs

Stropp's World: Praising With Faint Damning

I love the movements on my Frogloks too, the way they crane their necks up to look at things, all the movements really are pleasurable to just watch.

As for ugliness I think he's totally wrong, while the hair on humans etc could be improved its not far out, and on ugliness seeing some Scandinavian guy playing a troll is cool since they must be the ugliest race out there. Looking at WoW you cannot call the undead, Tauren, or orc race beautiful, yet they are popular.

On animations, I remember listening to that podcast where you discussed trying out WoW and specifically mentioned about the poor animations, I think coming from EQ2 with their film division motion capturing I can see now why.

Although for me apart from a few humdingers in there like the wooden riding animation, and the human casting animation that looks like it was motion captured with an action man, they were acceptable, but not anything that made me want to zoom in and see in detail. But maybe the difference here is I came from Guildwars, then played WoW, and then played EQ2, going in reverse I guess my perception of what is bad would be different.

For me the biggest problem with WoW to start with was how at the character select screen every race looked so ugly, since I'd played Guildwars before. I cannot say I'd feel the same with EQ2 since there are a lot more races to choose from, and playing Guildwars for the first time, the main disappointment there was that you could only be human since my idea of a RPG came from playing AD&D style games.

My guess is Wolfshead has a personal preference for the asian style of MMO art, me personally I find it too perfect and therefore artificial and detracts from the immersion of the game.