First impressions after leveling to 50 as a semi new EQ player

Everything I write here is my opinion. I'm also aware that the devs are working hard to get everything as launch ready as it should be. This is not meant to be a final review since it's pre-order beta (this is NOT an open beta, we're paying to be beta testers and that's fine) and with live service games, it's hard to give a final opinion since tomorrow's patch or any future patches might change things.

First of all, a bit about me: I've played Wow (classic & retail & private servers), FF14, GW2 and a bunch of others I played shorter than those. Despite all my experience in the MMO genre I never played EQ at launch or it's highest moments. I was just starting to live on my own back then and cash was tight enough that a monthly sub seemed over the top. All my friends played DAOC, so I dabbled a bit in that back then. Credentials out of the way.

When EQL caught my eye, back when the streamers were allowed to show closed beta, I was intrigued to say the least. Joined the discord, realized I couldn't play yet (sad), but I was (hyper)focused enough that I started watching other content creators. To prepare for EQL I actually played on a private server a bit, to get a feel for the classes and fell in love with Druid, so I took that character up to 41 before Legends became available.

Based on all my experience, these are the things that I noticed as a new player that I feel could be made more interesting:

Race unlocks, and quests in general. I get that the name neverquest is lovingly bandied about by the community, but just because something has always been a certain way doesn't mean that there isn't a more interesting way. Right now, we're expected to look up things outside the game, and have no idea ingame which npc's give quests and what the rewards are. I did find a quest log but it doesn't seem to be in use yet? At least, none of my quests have shown up in there. So I had an idea where you put a Quests NPC where people can get told where they can go for their next class quests. Or with a lore tab so loreheads can do the quests that show off this amazing world. Also, unlocking a race should be a journey and not delivering 4000 of the same item to the same guy. YMMV of course, and I know that any change to systems so many people are used to can be received as hostile by the community.

More revamped zones, and perhaps some random loot table that can drop off any npc in a zone. I know that EQ is the game where you can target your drops, but allowing certain items to drop off every npc in the zone will nudge people to kill everything and not just the same old mobs. These drops should be rare, obviously, but I think it would also spread people around more and bring them into the open world. Right now this feels more like all you do is dungeons, because that's where I know decent loot can drop.

I was going to mention achievements, but I know that's a work in progress. Only feedback I really have is that explorer should be something more than just running into a zone. I have ideas, but I'll launch those when the achi's have been revamped and we can see how the unlocks work there.

Combat feels good, and I felt that on higher diffs I was forced more to juggle with stances and invocations. I had DRU/WAR/ENCH as a trio and I'm not sure I've understood the whole kit enchanter brings to the table. I do love all three classes and will probably go the same classes on launch.

The tutorial is fine, basic but fine. I did not read everything because I had been binging a lot of Classic EQ content (videos about private servers, and some TLP's). So I figured I knew everything I needed to hit the ground running.

The UI could use some scaling and font size choices besides the chat, because I feel like the playerbase will be mostly “dad gamers” as we're called (I'm the wrong side of 40 as they say) and some of us have bad eyes and way too high resolution monitors. And even I sometimes sit squinting at the numbers in my character box.

The level grind was fine. I mostly played on diff 2 because I like the challenge and the occasional double class is fun to encounter. I've since become aware that purely for leveling you should just breeze on 0, but I find that to be kinda boring. The last part of leveling felt slow, and also as someone new I had no idea where to go. Thanks to chat I found the hole (and if that isn't a sentence that can be taken out of context, I don't know) and that helped a lot. An ingame guide for where to go at certain levels (even if it's an npc in town that can tell you how you need to go) would be good for noobs like me.

I'm not gonna touch on monetization, I have my opinions, but those are more general gaming gripes than Game Jam/Daybreak complaints. Also, those things are always subject to change, and until I know how we can unlock the same things that you can buy, I feel uncomfortable commenting on that. I do feel that a decent website would help a lot, having to find stuff on discord is a chore and I've rarely gone back there after I started playing. But I also feel that communication, as so often when handled by IT nerds, is not very well done. There were some rug pulls, some (imo) ways of communication that felt rude.

I've been having great fun so far, and am now screwing around with different combo's to level 10, different start zones etc. Also searching for the race I will enjoy the most to play. If you like grinding and a big world to get lost in, I highly recommend the game to you. Yeah, it's janky, but that's part of the charm. Because it's a single player focused experience, you can test a lot of classes until you find what clicks right w you.

People I would not recommend this game to: if you're not into researching and expect the game to lay out the golden brick road, I imagine it's going to get frustrating. The sometimes random jump in difficulty in mobs in dungeons, finding your way through the dungeon zones, the random high level mob every zone seems to have (and which mostly seems aggro) can lead to a situation where the frustration gets too high I feel.

Thanks for reading my first impressions and what I feel are things that could be iterated upon.