To be honest, I'm not paid enough to write some essay test answer for you, bub. EQ2 is vastly superior to EQ1, not just in terms of eye candy but crafting diversity and complexity, play style that works well for soloers AND groups/raids, and a marketplace that is increasingly learning from the extra-gaming world.
Trial of the isle shows levels 2-6, or about 4 hours of game time; that's enough to use the interface and thats about it. You can do a little crafting after speaking to Dreak, but I don't think you'd understand the nuances of crafting, especially reactions to events and how these affect durability, or the inter-dependence of skills at the middle of the crafting "sub-game" on the isle. Too many materials (like aerated water)that are normally sold in the crafting society are missing on the isle and need to have substitutions that aren't obvious need to have substitutes that aren't obvious (saliva from animals can replace mineral water in crafting) to be used. This said, at FREE the price is right. You'll have a LONG download to get updated, but from there you're 65% of the way to "real" EQ2.
Is your PC up to it? This isn't just a flippant question -- most people just don't have the system at start. To get decent performance, even with "performance options" in-game set to "extreme", and thus lowering the graphics quality while speeding game response, you'll eventually need 1 GB RAM to move smoothly in the cities, as there are too many complex items that need to be rendered for 3D to fit into 512 KB RAM, and thus considerable disk swapping occurs as virtual memory is used to store the objects. Your video card may not be enough; 64 MB video RAM isn't enough to store the textures and above mentioned opbjects, so your memory bandwidth and overall system architecture (Front Side Bus speed etc) will be impacted. You'll certainly want to tune your system.
Are YOU up to it? The game can be considerably harder to master, not so much from spells or melee but specifically crafting. Otherwise its similar enough to other games.
Inflation is lessened -- a gold piece here is like 10K platinum in EQ1; mostly people get money by harvesting a "rare" item, which happens around 1 time in 800 tries. Patience is rewarded. Most of the activities are not bot-friendly, by design, so real people have to do their own fishing etc, unlike elsewhere.
There is no mandatory PvP, no "best class", no requirements to group; you can get good gear without raiding, if a player makes it. Indeed, player made stuff is generally better than drops, except for boss mobs. The player base seems more relaxed than EQ1. Now that the kids are at school, its a lot quieter.
If you show up, fine. If you don't - fine. In the end its your choice - nobody pays me royalties based on more people. But the people, especially the QUALITY of the people - that makes a MMORG differet than a solo game.
My opinion, my choice.
Edited, Fri Sep 2 04:17:08 2005 by DobriyIvan