EverQuest 2 Hands-On

Steadying myself for combat, I targeted a goblin that was coming up through the trees, making a bee line for the barricades. He was close enough to my level that the computer was forecasting an even fight, so I steeled myself and unleashed my first spell: Smite.

As my little half elf priestess waved her hands in arcane gestures, lines of power began glowing around my character until finally thrusting her hands forward, holy bolts of electricity fell from the sky, surrounding the goblin with a mighty crack and throwing up dust and small rocks from the impact on the ground.

Stand down you vile fiend! I'm a turtle, you tart!

What exactly are you suggesting, sir?!

Pretty impressive stuff for a low level spell! The goblin was momentarily dazed but soon regained his composure and headed straight for me. As I waited for my spell to become available for use again, I unhooked the wooden club I had gotten from the dock master and took a swing at the approaching goblin. As my club swung through the air, missing by inches, he tore into me with a clawed hand. We exchanged blows for a few more seconds before I hit him with another smite and he fell to the earth, uttering a final cry. My first battle was over and as I looted his corpse for anything he had. I was informed that I had to kill 4 more goblins before I was to return to the priest. After a few more minutes of combat, I returned to the priest and told her of my exploits.

My next mission, if I wanted to help, was to find a goblin camp where their mystics were using totems to aid the goblins in their assault. I was tasked with finding these totems and destroying them with my Holy Smite as they were immune to any other kind of damage. I headed out past the barricades and into the forest where I encountered a young Scout who was fighting two goblin guards. As I watched the battle, things were not going well for the Scout. He was hurt and it looked like he would not survive without some help. I had a healing spell that would give him a bit of an edge so I targeted him and fired it off... or tried to anyway.

When I hit the button to fire off the spell, nothing happened. I was confused that maybe I had done something wrong but then I noticed that near his name that was over his head, there was a small icon of a lock. Another icon was over the heads of the two goblins he was fighting. The game had locked these three in combat and until it was resolved one way or the other, I could not interfere in any way. I assumed (and learned later that I was correct) that if I were in a group with him, I would be able to interact with any of the three combatants. This was EQ2's solution for one of the biggest gripes in an online game: Kill Stealing. Locking groups of combatants like this means that players do not have to worry about people coming along and taking a swat or two on the monster they are fighting and sharing in the experience.

As I watched and grit my teeth for his plight, he executed a slashing attack that felled the goblins. He invited me to join him in a group and we set off to find those totems I needed to destroy. As we moved deeper into the forest, we encountered wolves, giant spiders and various members of the goblin army. We soon came upon a group of goblin mystics that were guarding the totems I was looking for. As we entered into combat, I cast smite on the mystics as the Scout waded into combat swinging. Soon the scout was in need of healing so I targeted him and fired off my healing spell. After I had done this, one of the goblins spun around and charged me yelling. In healing my teammate, I had become a bigger threat to the monster. I pulled my club and bashed his head in. I had seen this sort of things in other games before but as I saw in subsequent combat, it happens more often when fighting creatures that are more intelligent than a spider.

Another addition was the ability to start a combat chain of attacks. I still do not have it completely figured out yet but when you are in a group, attacks made by other party members can do extra damage when a chain is active. It is an interesting idea that I am hoping to see more of as the beta goes on.

The last cool feature I discovered was that, as my group mate and I were assigned and completed quests from our trainers in the starting areas, we were working towards the same goal. While I was tasked with destroying goblin totems, he got a task to scout the goblin camp. After doing four or more missions with different goals but all fitting into the story of our battle against the goblin, our final mission in the goblin story arch (to borrow a term from City of Heroes) was to go into the goblin caves and defeat their leader. By this time we had a dwarven fighter join our group and he had the same mission. The nice thing about this was that we were three different classes all pursuing different tasks trying to accomplish the end game in a single story: Defeating the goblins who were making life hell for this little village. If this is an example of how quests and missions will work in the final game, that's a very good thing indeed.

I have yet to spend much time in EveQuest II, (about ten hours so far). Dastene is only level seven and is currently trying to complete a quest that will gain her citizenship in one of the two cities. It's clear that Sony is trying hard to build upon the original game and expand greatly beyond it. This is a huge task of course because EverQuest is such a huge world. It should not be long now before we learn if the company that produced the most popular MMORPG to date can capture lightening in a bottle for a second time.