Everquest 2, when it was released, was a game that I managed to play for about a week before abandoning it as a disappointing follow-up to one of my favorite addictions. I offer that as an opening statement so you know from the start precisely what kind of mindset I'm coming from. I loved Everquest, kept trying to resist the wanton lure its siren song but always and inevitably found myself drawn back with every new expansion, every promise of new territory, every opportunity to finally play as a sword swinging toad. One of my most fond gaming memories is the overwhelming feeling of first stepping out of the gates of Qeynos into what seemed a limitless world, hoisting a club that might as well have been made by Nerf, and promptly getting myself killed by a most foul tempered rat. Over the past year as I abandoned myself to World of Warcraft, my connection to the Norrathian lands faded and it occurred to me that perhaps my first impression of EQ2 had been unfairly measured against my passion for its predecessors, which is why, when Sony Online Entertainment announced 7 days of free play to reactivate my account, I took the bait.

Please note: This is not a review. A week is clearly not enough time to form comprehensive and objective statements about Everquest 2. This is simply my record of impressions from my seven day trial –

Day 1 – I need a break from World of Warcraft, so there's some genuine enthusiasm for this project. I've had this EQ2 icon sliding down the order of gaming priority on my desktop for months, now hovering tenuously just a few spots from the looming Recycle Bin between Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 and Dawn of War – all of which are games that I have thought might still get some more playtime eventually. I don't recall my first attempt at Everquest 2 with much fondness, so I'm hoping a year of polish, the recently announced combat changes, and my renewed interest in the MMOG genre will see me into this post-apocalyptic Norrath with better results.

I had forgotten how solid EQ2's character creation is. One of my frustrations with World of Warcraft, which I admit will be my primary point of comparison simply because of the wealth of hours which have evaporated before it in recent months, has always been its lack of character customization. Why must my big walking cow look like every other big walking cow? It just perpetuates the stereotype that all us big walking cows look alike. As I intended, my future dark elf necromancer looks dour and unapproachable. However, and this was not intended, he also has the look of a man whose not exactly interested in the lady dark elves, if you know what I mean. Ah well, c'est la vie.

I appear on the Isle of Refuge where voiced characters – nice - set me out on simpleton tasks. The week long experience bonuses in celebration of the freshly released Desert of Flames expansion makes the levels dash by much faster than I remember. I scream to level six in a few hours and log out before making my way to the mainland, feeling pretty satisfied with my first experience.

Later I try to log back in, but discover that the same freshly released Desert of Flames expansion has left the game in a brief chaos. I am unable to log into my character so I visit the forums briefly to discover that many EQ2 fans are capable of the same kind of mindless ravings that I was all too familiar with from the first game. I abandon the forums quickly.

On further exploration I discover that not only is there already a retail expansion to EQ2, but also 2 pay-to-play Adventures available for the game. To play the current and complete Everquest 2 a customer would have to buy the game, pay for the subscription, buy the expansion, and two bonus Adventures. It seems excessive.

I resist the urge to play World of Warcraft during the EQ2 downtime.

Day 2 – Into Freeport now, and round I go through the bureaucracy of setting myself up as a Freeport citizen, getting a room, going to the bank, filling out tax forms, and itemizing synergistic productivity for the TPS report, or so it seems. I ache to hit things with a stick, or cast sparky spells at piles of animate goo. Instead I'm asked to hang a mirror, and interior decorate. Maybe this quality time is supposed to be dedicated to creating an identity for my character so I don't feel detached. I have time to think about that as I load from Longshadow Alley to my house and back again.

Eventually I'm set upon the task of finally killing some creatures in the ruins so that I can get tokens so that I can become a citizen of Freeport. It feels good to be zapping things again, and I'm almost disappointed to get all the tokens because it means I have to load back into Longshadow Alley, and then I'll have to log into the Citizen quest instance, and then I'll have to log into Freeport itself, and in all that time to get from where I am now to where I need to be I'll spend more time looking at a loading screen than the game world.

I press forward through the citizenship quest, and find myself standing on a deserted side street of Freeport. I have no idea what to do next. I wander through the streets for a while and talk to NPCs. Most of them say nasty things to my character. I begin to realize that the primary difference between good and evil cities in EQ2 is how rude NPCs are to your character.

The game is gorgeous, but I'm turning down video options to improve those old familiar performance issues. Down goes the rendering distance, the texture resolution, the number of light sources, and on and on. And as I wander from NPC to NPC slowly beginning to uncover a few cookie cutter quests across different zones I notice the performance degrade. Loading is taking longer. Stutter is getting worse. Eventually I just stop for the day.

Day 3 – Before beginning I look over some of the monumental combat changes in EQ2 that reshaped the game. I'm not in a good position to talk about how these changes have affected the game as its been almost a year since I played, and even then my experience was woefully limited. I'm sure people who've spent the past six month obsessed with the game would speak to no end about the fine tuning adjustments and how every little statistical anomaly has completely redefined their entire experience with EQ2. I can barely make out any substantive difference between what I remember and what I'm playing now. Press button, cast spell, repeat until dead. It's low level stuff, I know, and I'm not going to get the opportunity to talk about higher level minutia, but neither do I really want to get that intimate with the game. Our relationship is strictly professional.

Looking over the long list of actual changes, most of it makes sense. In fact, much of it seems like it should have been done this way from the start. Players will have an adjustment period, of course, but as written these changes sound like a step in the right direction.

I log in.

I've progressed to the point of fine tuning my mage profession and spend an hour becoming a conjurer. I notice there are a lot more abilities than I remember, and I'd forgotten the heroic opportunity design, which I frankly like. Now that I have a pet I find myself a bit more formidable, but I'm finding myself no more interested in the quests or my environment. I still lack a good sense of direction. My quest log is full of some twenty or more quests – there is room for a whopping 75 quests at a time – but they all start to blend together. Also, they are growing increasingly less solo friendly. The rewards aren't particularly inspiring for the quests, mostly just coin which I spend to shore up my spells and equipment.

It occurs to me that I feel like I'm already grinding, and I'm only level 12. I can't figure out whether there's some thread that I should be following, something that will make it all more cohesive and approachable that I'm just missing.

I play for a few hours and log out to the character select screen. I log into the character that I abandoned with my first try at EQ2 last year. I appear and am greeted to a slew of new skills that appear. Encouraged I wander off into the wilderness to try a few old quests. After two deaths and less than thirty minutes I log off entirely.

Day 4 – The enthusiasm is gone. I'm pushing forward out of a desire to have content for this article more than any interest in the game. I can't force myself to log back into my two existing characters, and create a dwarven fighter instead. I cruise more competently through the Isle of Refuge and even the annoying citizenship hassle in a few hours. Again my performance degrades with each loaded zone.

The NPCs are friendly to me, so I must be playing a good character.

Maybe it's because I'm hungry, but as I play and reach that point again where I'm aimless I think of EQ2 in terms of a well stocked kitchen. All the ingredients are here to make delicious food stuffs if you just have the right chef to slap it all together. The chef, in this case, is the player who recognizes how to bring all the elements together in the right proportions to deliver something memorable.

I am a bad EQ2 cook.

I have a honeydew melon, a can of Cream of Mushroom soup, a tin of sardines, some Lipton Soup Mix, and Vienna Sausages waiting impotently on the kitchen counter. Eventually I just give up and eat refried beans right out of the can, and it just doesn't taste that good. The badly phrased point is that for the right player with the right resources – like a guild, a high-end system, and a great deal more patience than I can seem to muster – this is probably an outstanding game.

I meander my way to level 9 and can't put up with the performance anymore. I log out.

Day 5 (6 and 7) – I sit down and try to figure out which character I'm going to force myself to play. While debating this I decide to just check in at my World of Warcraft character.

I do not log back into Everquest 2 again.

I feel bad about that for exactly seven seconds, but as I realize most of the things that turned me away from EQ2 don't exist for me here I get over it. I am riding a strangely domesticated bat above the Plaguelands, looking down at a constant stream of points of interest that I someday plan to conquer, never taken out of the game environment as I skirt across the breadth of a continent, it feels like a pleasant homecoming.

I don't offer these comments as any kind of review of Everquest 2, because I don't consider them particularly objective. They are merely my impressions of a brief revisiting of Everquest 2, a game that I'd already long since decided I didn't much like. The experiment only served to confirm that my issues with the game are not ones that can be resolved with fine tuning and expansions. I recognize that this is a game well suited to many, which is why it is genuinely flourishing, but now, finally, I can confirm that it is not well suited to me.

- Elysium