So, Sally and I bought EQ2 over 2 years ago after we quit WoW the first time.  With the new Living Legacy promo going on, we decided to hop in and see what it looked like so many years later.  Patching and all that wasn’t too bad - we just let our clients download over night.  Character creation always takes us (read: Sally) some time, so we played around with that.  We went back and forth between good and evil, human-like chars or furry chars, and eventually settled on the evil fairies, because, c’mon: evil fairies.  So we logged in with visions of grandeur of toppling heroes and making lives for ourselves in Norrath.

We quit about 5 minutes later.

Now, we know EQ2 is a well-loved game by many.  We are just totally and absolutely unable to get past the UI and visual style.  And I mean totally.  We both logged in, ran around for a minute, picked up our first quest, killed a few monsters, went outside to take a break, and both agreed that we should immediately quit upon returning.  To us, almost everything about being in-game “feels” wrong.

I actually have a lot of similar complaints about LotRO.  Things like floating names above NPCs, the style of the interface windows, the fonts used, and the size, shape, and design of the tooltips always bother me.  These games always tout the “immersion” factor as big selling points, but I find badly designed UIs one of the fastest ways to break immersion.  For me, immersion is more about not really thinking about the fact that I am playing a game so that I can just *play* the game.  Ornately decorated bag panels, floating names about NPCs that I don’t really care about, tooltip dialogs that are badly formatted and huge, and really ugly, badly rendered “fantasy” fonts all really put me off.

We might be back to WoW… again.  We also briefly played with DDO and played a decent little bit of Mythos, so we’ll have more to say on that stuff.  For now, back to work.