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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Bait and Switch, March 15, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: EverQuest (CD-ROM)
I have been very disappointed with Everquest. The game itself is quite good, although the company has been slow to resolve bugs, often denying that they exist. 1) The biggest problem is that the company is not truthful with the players. The starting statistics for character formation, for example, are extremely incorrect, and the company refuses to give the actual effect of various statistics. 2) More serious, the company vowed that it would keep online servers at 1500 players. Now that a lot of people have signed up and spent a lot of time building up their characters, the company has reneged on its promise and lets over 2000 players on a server in order to make more money. This means that you are frequently disconnected in the middle of a fight and also that, many times, you simply cannot play when you want to -- on weekends and between 6 pm and 11 pm. The most important effect of this overcrowding, though, is that the game is downright unpleasant to play. The "prizes" that players get for accomplishing various missions are very limited. Thus, you will have maybe 50 players wanting to get into a dungeon and fight a particular battle, but only 6 are able to do so. And even then, the object will be obtainable only, say, once every four hours, so even among the six, only the one who has been there the longest will be able to get it. Like an overcrowded highway, this makes the players very irritable towards each other and makes for an extremely unpleasant gaming environment. Not to mention, a lot of people paying money for a game they can't play. In practice, therefore, if you want to play this game, you must be willing to play for 24 hours straight while snarling at other people.
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16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Huge World; Great Graphics; No Role Playing;, March 3, 2000
This review is from: EverQuest (CD-ROM)
Visually this game is awesome. The monsters the NPC's the other players, all stunning. At low levels this game can be a lot of fun. You have a sense of accomplishment every time you log on. Whether its for half an hour or an entire day. As you progress it becomes more and more diificult. Eventually you cannot log on for half an hour and accomplish something. The creatures you have to fight to lvl are camped with 20-30 other players (during peak time) with a waiting list to get at them. They have made it impossible for the casual player to get to high lvls. I have had fun in this world. But i caution anyone without a whole lot of free time, DO NOT BUY THIS GAME. All the high lvl players are students who are skipping class, guys who are laid off from jobs, or housewives. Buy this game if you have tons of free time and a lot of patience. Do not buy this game if you like a story line, and historical background. This game is visually stunning, but behind the graphics there isnt much else!
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34 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
EverQuake is more like it, December 10, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: EverQuest (CD-ROM)
They call EverQuest a massively multiplayer roleplaying game. A better description would be a massively multiplayer cooperative first person shooter. There's very little roleplay going on in EverQuest but a whole lot of hack-n-slash. The publisher's slogan is, "You're in our world now!" It should have been "tastes great, less filling." EverQuest is beautiful eye candy but, when you get right down to it, there's not a whole lot of substance to the gameplay. From level 1 to level 50 it all comes down to killing the monsters to take their stuff so you can kill bigger monsters to take better stuff. The basic system will be familiar to anyone who's ever played AD&D which means that there won't be a whole lot to distinguish your character from everyone else who's playing the same class. A wizard is a wizard is a wizard. They all have the same spells and the same skills. They even look the exactly the same. Yes, you can select your character's face but there are only about 8 choices for each race/sex combination and with server populations now starting to exceed 1700 players at peak times, there will be a lot of people running around with your face. Female characters, with the exception of spellcasters, are pretty much locked into the chainmail bikini look. There's even an "easter egg" that allows you to oggle a semi-topless half-elf's nipples. Which just serves to encourage the less mature players to sexually harrass female characters. I actually had a nice bit of RP going the other day when some slobbering simp started sending me /tells about how great I looked in my thong. That pretty much ruined the mood instantly. Trade skills are largely worthless. With the exception of jewelcraft and, on the younger servers, smithing they mainly amount to expensive hobbies. Customer support is virtually non-existant. When I had a video problem it took tech support a week to reply to my email, their preferred method of contact, and then they just sent me a form letter referring me to their video FAQ which I, as I had indicated in my initial email, had already gone through and tried. In game support is just as bad. If you need help, expect to wait a minimum of 20 minutes to get a response from someone and several hours is not unheard of. When a GM finally does show up...well, they have well deserved reputations for being rude, obnoxious, arrogant, and not particularly helpful. And I hope you like sitting in one place for hours on end killing the same thing over and over again waiting for something that only spawns once ever 8 hours (or more) to show up so you can kill it in the hopes that it will drop an item that it only drops on rare occasions. In fact, I hope you like standing in line for hours on end waiting for your turn to sit in one place for hours on end, etc. because you will be doing that alot at the higher levels. You see, that's the only way to get a lot of the nicer high level items. Special events are largely excuses for GMs to run amok with high powered creatures that the players have little to no hope of defeating, killing players left and right until they get bored. Verant is constantly tweaking the game to improve play balance which would normally be a good thing but they favor quick fixes over good fixes and that means they usually cause more problems than they fix. Also, it is their standard procedure to *NOT* announce when they make a change that will have a major negative impact on the players. Which means players find out about the changes the hard way. A lot of necromancers died when the previously unresistable Lifetap spell series became very resistable but no one bothered to tell them. For what it is, EverQuest is a good game but it does have some serious problems. There's not a whole lot of depth to the game and customer support is among the worst I've ever seen. If all you're interested in is hack-n-slash, then EverQuest may very well be the game for you. But if you're looking to get anything else out of the game, look elsewhere. I know people who've played for a few months before finally quitting in disgust and going back to text-based MU*s because they're more fun. When you think about it, that's a pretty sad comment about EverQuest.
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