Well, 2 weeks i found an interesting ad in search for a job. It simply said "get paid to test this game". Well, they gave me a time slot and i showed up. Seems that Sony is beta testing Everquest 2. I got paid $60 for 2 hours of testing and critiqueing.
Well, it was more like 1hour and half because there was an initial problem with the drivers. We created characters, logged in and the game would suddenly die and go back to the desktop. so we ate some pizza while the techs did their tweaking.
anyways, we came back on and it was only 8 of us on the EQ2 server. imagine that. a huge world and only 8 people playing.
It starts off on a ship with a tutorial about getting used to the controls, strategies for battle, chatting and then finally docking into the world.
The character design is SO expansive. So many models and so many ways to tweak the appearnace, from the skin color, to the size, even to the position of the eyes on the head. Truly stands out.
Anyways, tutorial done, we started the game. The environment is beautiful. However, there are frame rate issues once you get more than 2 people on the screen. All the NPCs have voice-overs. The camera is a lil dodgy tho. The zoom out is not effective in battle. It's hard to click on the enemy u want to attack when your own character is blocking the view.
The text window is sometimes blocked by the graphics of the game. It's hard to explain, but it's difficult to make out some of the text. And there is only white text. There is no different color or font for say, tips, messages from other players, or play-by-play scripting.
Very early into the game, u are forced to join a guild to take on goblin camp outs.
One problem i had with it was that the NPCs vaugely describe your tasks. One thing we all agreed on was the task to "talk to the ambassador." There were no hints to where he/she was or what they looked like. U can also stack missions, such as taking on 2 missions at the same time. However, none of us could find a menu to look back at each individual task. you simply have to memorize what tasks you are on.

any questions? we only played for about an hour (the rest of the time was critiqueing). So i woulnd't know too much about the leveling up, the other environments or even what spells look like. None of us got that far in the game during our alloted time.

but ooooo ya, $60 to play a game

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Thank You and Goodnight