Everquest 2 Vs. World of Warcraft

Everquest 2 and World of Warcraft. These are the big players in the Fantasty MMORPG world in this day and age. Everquest 2 was first on scene, being released about 3 months earlier than World of Warcraft, but ultimately was left with less players than WoW boasts nowadays. That being said though, it doesn't necesarilly make Everquest 2 worse than WoW. In my opinion, there are two different types of players and different playstyles for MMORPGs today. I'll run over the basics of each game and the details that seperate them from one another in this article.

Everquest 2 is a massive, massive, and I mean massive world. It has zones, yes, and unlike World of Warcraft, those zones are required to load before you enter then and start tearing up your quests and killing creatures. However, upon first look, the zones look much better than those of World of Warcraft and they're somwhat more immersive. When Everquest 2 first came out, nobody could run the game. Okay, Okay, there were a few people that could run it, but aside from Mr. Supercomputer with the crazy fast and efficient processor, you couldn't run this game at full potential. When asked about this "issue", the creators of Everquest 2 said something like:

"We want the game to last longer than Everquest 1 did and we want the graphics to be pristine even after the game has been out for multiple years."

They certainly accomplished that goal. Even today, the graphics are nearly unrivaled except by that of Crisis and some of the cutting edge games coming out today. Everquest 2 definitely takes the cake in graphics.

World of Warcraft though, claims a higher player base and a more broad player demographic. For a while there, it seemed like everybody and their mother played World of Warcraft. I'll admit it, I played that game for an extremely extensive period of time and I still dabble today. My thoughts are though, that even though World of Warcraft has more players, those players tend to fizzle faster than those of Everquest 2.

Everquest 2 is reserved for die-hard Norrathians that never give up the fight. It's harder to level up. It's harder to get gear, and it's harder to kill creatures and complete quests...but something about that seems right to me. I mean, personally, the quests in World of Warcraft aren't hard! They're just not! Aside from raiding at max level in the most difficult dungeon, a player doesn't face real difficulty within the confinds of the game until they're almost done playing the game. World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 are both great games, but one is for the hardcore...and one is for the casual!