Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest
Snowblind's second hack and slash effort is their best yet, but it hasn't arrived without more than a few problems.
Published: February 22, 2004
The bulk of CoN's gameplay is simple hack and slash goodness, meaning you wade through a sea of enemies beating the crap out of them and occasionally blocking the attacks of bigger baddies, and at the risk of seeming a little lazy (which I am), I'll just say the game plays exactly like Baldur's Gate Dark Alliance, which you should already own by now (you DO own it, right?); it's identical, right down to the process of warping back to town to sell off your excess inventory. The game does offer more than 10,000 unique items ranging from weapons to armor and accessories that are randomly generated every time you play, so the chance of you wearing at least the same duds and wielding the game weapon as someone else when you play with friends is rare.
Playing with friends is indeed CoN's biggest attraction, but it also reveals some of the game's bigger faults. Online or off, there's no easy way to share gold or items among friends. Picked up gold is grabbed by whoever gets it rather than being split among the party members and experience is also a little on the wonky side. Online issues range from players loading into walls to numerous crashes and hangs to levels not loading up at all and synch issues for people even on the required broadband connection.
Those same crashes are quite common in the regular game too, and while the hangs that frequent the PS2 can supposedly be remedied by simply ejecting the disc from the PS2's tray and then closing it again, I didn't have any luck with that. It seems most of the crash and hang bugs, though, are caused by early PS2s that have a hell of a time trying to read dual layer discs (CoN is only the second game to ship on a DVD-9; the other, Xenosaga Episode 1, won't even play on some PS2 models). Hardware issue or not, there's a significant portion of the gaming populace that will have the game lock up or crash altogether on them, and while Sony Electronics has apparently come forward and taken the blame for it, it's still a major problem for those of us who were early adopters of the system.
One of the leading causes of these bugs may come from the fact that seemingly everything in the game is being pulled off the disc. Literally almost everything you see and hear is streamed, from the mind-blowingly detailed graphics to the items in your inventory to dialogue from NPCs (that'd be non-player characters, or, in other words, anyone that's not you that interacts with you) to music. It's all being streamed from the disc in an admittedly impressive display of programming hoojoo, but the second it all crashes, the illusion is destroyed.
When it doesn't crash, gamers will be treated to arguably the most graphically impressive PS2 game ever made. Snowblind's technique of rendering the game at a high resolution and then shrinking it down to TV resolution gives the game a sheen that is unequivocally the smoothest looking in the systems nearly three and half year history. Even more impressive is how detailed the texture work is. Take one look at the walls of the undersea caves about halfway through the game, or at the cobblestone-like floors of one of the earlier caves, the organic flow of things that are still obviously tiled and it's all nearly overwhelming.
The same trademark water effect from the BGDA games that creates wakes behind anything moving through it is back, and in top form, with the water less constrained to large pools and now residing in everything from small little puddles to in between those above referenced cobblestones. Even the particle effects that Snowblind seems to exploit at every turn look better than they ever have, and I find it odd (but altogether pleasing) that the first developer to really capitalize on the PS2's ability to kick out particles better than any other system were newcomers to it.
There's also the variety in animations, ranging from the way enemies die (usually at least two ways per foe), to the variety in the way your attacks affect them, sometimes lopping off a limb or head, and even occasionally cleaving them in half. While I found it a bit annoying that attacks could be interrupted, the animations themselves were fantastically tweened, even to the point where a button mashing combo looked seamless from one swing to the next.
Unfortunately, while the game usually runs at 60 frames a second, all this newfound detail can often cause drops in resolution and serious framerate hitches. Whether or not these are due to my older PS2 choking while trying to read from the dual layer disc is still unclear, but the random bug of entire patches of the world not streaming in ahead of the camera is not. These problems, hardware-based or not, do take away from what is an otherwise graphically flawless affair, and if it weren't for these hitches, I'd easily call this the best looking game on the system.
