I played it for a week now and have 3 characters
Drafac, lvl 8 Mage - Qeynos - Runnyeye
Drafac, lvl 9 Fighter - Qeynos - Blackburrow
Rhialto, lvl 11 Sorcerer - Freeport - Runnyeye
let me say this:
Pro's:
- GFX are MUCH better than HZ no question about it but you need a beefed GFX card liek a 9800 Pro 256 MB to see all the textures in High resolution in 1600x1200 res!!
- hundreds of working quests, more than you can actually complete. With a nice quest journal to keep track. All quest do actually WORK!!!
- Nice items to get from quests and for sale
- Housing from the moment you arrive in the city inclusive furniture (quests/buy) etc.
- Crafting is nice (I spoke to a former very high level HZ crafter in EQ2 !!)
- Game engine rocks, game play is fast and has tactical aspects, you get more spells/abilities while you go
- No lag (yes NO LAG), Fighting is bliss !
- Great athmosphere in towns (NPCs actually do walk around)
- Dungeons with collision detection and enough challenge
- YOU CAN SOLO NO PROBLEM!!!! (played 3 days solo and made 3 characters - fighter lvl 8, mage lvl 8, Sorcerer lvl 11)
- Fighting a group of 2 mobs solo which are 1 level below you is a real challenge!
- Grouping works flawlesly (raiding options are also possible to merge a few groups)
- Hundreds of different mobs
Con's:
- Mob encounters are different. Some are for groups and some are for solo. You can see this when scanning a mob. Also the color of a mob shows the difficulty. This makes the game less immersive, but because the mobs are really hard to fight solo especially groups of 2+ mobs this is a necessity but maybe could have been done different.
- You have to buy a lot of backpacks to get a decent amount of storage
so to keep its short everything that HZ misses for the PURE ADVENTURER EQ2 has and better!
Greetings,
Rhialto