MMORPG > PC : DEMO > Everquest II: Trial of the Isle

Everquest II: Trial of the Isle (PC : DEMO)
Release Date: February 9th, 2005 (Trial of the Isle)
Publisher: Sony Online Entertainment
Developer: Sony Online Entertainment
Genre: MMORPG

Last Updated : January 7th, 2006

Rating: Average rating: Ratings 5 4 3 2 1

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Off-Site Links Everquest II: Trial of the Isle Official Site Fileplanet's EQII: Trail of the Isle Offer EQII: Trial of the Isle Official Forums

I was recently aching for some good MMORPG addiction, so I looked nowhere else but Everquest II. Fortunately they are currently offering a limited trial named "Trial Of The Isle" which basically gives you 7 days to go through the fully interactive tutorial, and get to level 6 on the "Island of Refuge" (aka Newbie Island). After such you will not gain anymore experience, and are eventually forced to go off the island, which ends the trial of that specific character (for a maximum of 6 characters). So it is somewhat limited, but surely enough to get a player hooked.

The game itself is beautifully done. The models are great, the shadows are good, lighting is excellent, and the textures are crisp and clean. When playing on higher settings, you can even see the shadows of a player's eyelashes. But graphics aren't everything, and alas, there are some gameplay problems that I personally found. One of these is swimming. Fighters and alike are allowed to combat water creatures while swimming, but when fighting them, your character stands and fights as if he/she was on land (only sometimes). It looks really bogus. The tutorial also seemed out of place, but I think that was only because of the voice actor explaining things. They got such a generic voice, it seems to lose the whole RPG experience and atmosphere. But I guess Sony only really cares about setting the player up as perfectly as possible so they don't have questions in their support forum.

The most annoying thing that happened to me while playing this game is a really stupid bug, where the option menu in-game is completely blank. Instead of Sony releasing a patch, they released a work around, which needs to fully download the game again (which is around 7 hours on broadband by the way). I think Sony is just trying to hard to make the experience player friendly, and to milk more and more money out of everybody, as such it's really hard to get in the "RPG mood".

There is some new things in Everquest II over the original. One thing I found incredible was the effort to make almost all non-player characters have spoken speech. Another very nice feature is the ability to change your characters appearance in almost every way (but it is somewhat limited currently), complex things are included like facial structure and body structure. There is also some very cool sub quests which allow you to collect certain items and apply them to "collectable sets", like finding 5 different sea shells, or 5 different feathers. All these objects to my knowledge spawn on the ground, and are spotted by a glowing orb which you pick up.

Dying in Everquest II is also different from the original. This time around instead of loosing some belongings, you occur an experience debt, and lose durability off your items, both of which are easily fixable, so dying isn't so feared anymore, again this is done for friendly play. There is also a greatly expanded trade skill (or artisan) emphasis in Everquest II, there is plenty to do as a merchant character if you want, like mining, lumberjacking, black smithing, wood working, potion making, tailoring, etc. All in all, although Everquest II offers some expanded and added features over the original, it is still in essence the same game, and is such just another MMORPG to add to the list of hundreds. And just like the original, expect to keep Sony's hand in your pocket as you shell out hundreds for expansions, and advanced web site features.