I've been a bit neglectful with EQ2 lately but I made a point to log in for the Anniversary event. I've never done it on the evil side but it was pretty much the same, a bit uglier if anything, since West Freeport is pretty much trashed. It was still fun though!
This month the server mergers are happening, which should breathe some more life into some of those corners gathering dust. I like it kind of quiet but lately it's sort of lonely feeling in EQ2, so it will surely be nice to see if things liven up a bit more on some of the less populated servers.
Anyhow, the quests were pretty much the same this year, a few little tweaks. New rewards and they were some nice things. I like the quests a lot, you can do them at any level and still get the title and rewards without a problem.
I thought I'd show off some pictures of my travels from the dreamer quest line, which rewards the Dream Hero title, I just love that title! Basically you gather shards from dreams to help him wake. ZzzZzzz... I actually enjoy the quest very much as well, it's rather, dreamy ;)
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| Unrest, same layout outside here. (Original EQ zone) |
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| Red sky at night.. Necromancer's delight. It's that how it goes..? |
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| Wake up! |
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| A resting moment. |
Its a great quest line (and I started in the game too late to turn up to those epic areas, so its really good to at least see them here).
ReplyDeleteOne comment though, its clear that you don't run with shader 3.0 enabled there, I'd heartily recommend it as long as you have a graphics card capable of handling it.
I have two computers that I run EQ2 on (weekend and weekday), the desktop is powerful although relatively cheap (AMD Phenon 955) with a ATI 4870 card, there I find shader 3.0 runs 10-20% faster on overland zones going to 100%+ faster with some indoor instances.
The laptop though (used to be a 1.5ghz core 2, upgraded to a 2.4Ghz) only has a ATI HD2600 card, that one just cannot handle shadows or shader 3.0 without a significant slowdown. I suspect its effected a lot by the shared memory as CPU shadows are a no go too.
Out of interest that same laptop though runs EQ2 nicely on high settings now (was high performance before the upgrade), but the upgrade made no difference at all to WoW (which runs at low with max range), its actually a bit slower now since I cannot turn off shadows.
The "wake up" screenshot to me showed the biggest difference with shader 1.0 vs shader 3.0, I know Freeport is murky and run down but shader 1.0 exagerates this, the graphics are much crisper there with the 3.0 shaders enabled.
Yes, it was nice seeing some of those areas through the quest, my first year with it I really had a blast.
ReplyDeleteThat picture you mentioned was just sort of gross due to weather and blogger. When it rains in Freeport and the fog carries over into the houses and buildings. While I have the setting up high I don't use shadows. And also the quality of the pictures goes down once I upload them to blogger, sadly. They get a bit grainy :(
The lighting with shader 3.0 is really cool but I don't like how most everything has a metallic (even more so) plastic look with them so I never bothered when I noticed how different my gear looked, like I was wearing tinfoil :(
I may try it again in the future, it just didn't click with me so far :)