I've been seeing people barking about EQII over the last few days/weeks on the other boards (mainly WoW)...and I have to admit, it's gotten me curious. I picked up two copies of EQII when it first came out, and I played for a little while and enjoyed it. Alas, the power that was (at the time) FFXI pulled me back in.
Coincidentally, today I get an email from my wife interested in reactivating either EQII or CoH...so I mentioned how I had been hearing all kinds of good buzz about EQII. So what's the deal??? I've read the sticky, and gone through a number of informative posts and sites to get as much info as I can...but I wanna know the nitty gritty stuff!
First...is it good enough to warrant purchasing the Expansion(s)? What are there, two expansions already? Am I going to regret not having them right away due to new content that makes it worth experiencing to make a final judgement call? And if so, are the expansions exclusive in content per each (meaning I would need two of each expansion for each account owned...one for me and one for my wife)?
Second...I see there is "customizable" methods for the User Interface. This makes me drool (that's half the fun in WoW!!!)! What type of script language does this use? And how modifiable is it really? I noticed that Ogaming has a similar site to wowinterface.com (eq2interface.com) and noticed a lot of familiar names from addon/interface developers. Curious...because I'm very much into the addon/interface modification portion of these games and was wondering if I could get a jump start on doing some of my own CUI's/Addons.
Lastly...has it really gotten that better? I mean, I've been reading and whatnot, and I remember what the game was like prior to leaving (very laggy, kinda group orientated, etc). I know games evolve so well when they're moving in the right direction, almost to the point where sometimes it's "wiser" to start playing about 4-6 months -after- release to give them time to tweak and work bugs out. I did like the game, loved the crafting system because of it's depth and "interactive" method. But here's the real question for this "last" part:
My wife and I have a baby due in August. I like WoW because I can casually play it (this is not a content driven question). With the updates in soloable content and whatnot in EQII, and the tweaking of the game overall...is it something that we could enjoy, as a couple playing together, without a large demand on time & stress of group play and long-term hardcore commitment?
We come from FFXI, so we know about hardcore end-game demand and time consumption with gameplay. Basically, can we hop on for an hour or two if time is a little short and still have fun and accomplish things? Of course on times we could play for hours on end we would...but I'm wondering more the "short game" and if it's worth it. Thanks in advance for replies, and I hope I'm not repeating something recently asked...I swear I read stickies & recent posts!!!