Engine-wise, I agree, EQ looks a bit old. Hell, it looked a bit old when it came out. =) After playing with EQEmu for a few hours, I went and played some DOaC and was amazed at how good it looked sometimes (mostly, nice dawn lighting).
It's not all about the latest greatest engine though. In EverQuest, there was many times when I saw something and said "WOW" or "cool!" out loud. EQ was very rich on atmosphere, despite the old engine. The fog in greater faydark, the noises of the picklaws under the floors of highkeep, heck, the weird conspiracy bits that seemed to go on there, the gorge of king xxorb, runnyeye, permafrost..
They were all very rich with atmosphere. You felt like you were some very specific place, that had it's own world/life going on, and you never know when that evil eye might come down the hall..
The dungeons in DAoC are pretty pathetic. They're all 'stock' dungeons. Usually about 2-5 'real' rooms, with a few corridors or minor rooms (wide passages) along the way. There's no feel like this is an actual place where something happens -- it's just a hole in the ground with some mobs, which might happen to drop a certain kind of armor (frequently enough that no one bitches about it). You never wonder why things are this way, or who's the leader of these guys and what does he want, or what kind of conspiracy or plans are going on behind the scenes.. just rooms with mobs. On the upside, there's not much that forces you to stay in those dungeons once you have the armor pieces you need from it. There are plenty of places to get exp.
Horses are handy, but only because there's no teleports at all. Horses are like trains with set routes, often long round-about routes. It'd be cool if you could go cross-country, but you can't. Trails only. Sometimes it's faster to jump off the horse in mid-trip and run the rest of the way, because you can cut across that short field but the horse has to follow the trail around the entire zone.
Spell effects are quite nifty, at least compared to the repetive and generic ones I saw back in the original EQ. But at least in EQ, the spells were interesting. I'd rather have interesting spells than interesting spell graphics, if I have to choose one.
I agree, camping is terrible, and not having to do it is a boon. I'm sorry to hear that EQ still requires camping. Hell levels were annoying too... generally levels took too long, I think. I love how you get see your exp with good granualarity in DAoC. 10 bubbles, and you get a second bar which shows what percentage of the current bubble you're in.
I think for someone coming to DAoC from EQ, they'll be very relieved by the lack of aggravating things. There's not much that's 'bad' or 'wrong' about the game. But I think you'll find yourself missing the richness of EQ. I loved EQ because it let me explore these worlds I had only fantasized and read about. When you take that away, it's much more of just a rolling dice within a complicated ruleset type of thing. I think things will feel somewhat 'empty'.
But hey, again, despite everything I've said, I'm still playing. My main char is an Briton Paladin in Albion. And I'm already thinking about playing a Theurgist next char, if I end up sticking around that long.
Really I'd love to see a game that 'fixed' the EQ problems like DAoC did (no lack of enemies, no camping, less downtime) but created another wonderfully rich world to explore.
I should mention, some of the stuff which makes the DAoC world feel even more autogenerated is the non-sensical placement of things and how close everything is together. A bandit camp is on one side of a hill, and not 30 feet away, on the other side is a druid camp. No, there's no story there. There's no explanation for how these two interact or cope with each other. Nevermind that the bandit camp is 30 feet away from a guard post... I don't think DAoC will ever have that feel like going into Lesser Faydark and finding the bandit camps, these people living just outside of gfay and making their own life/living, in the seclusion of the forest.. and that's not even close to the best of EQ ambiance..
Never was a part of Ultima, can't comment on it.
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