Well, I have 2 characters, both warlocks, one undead and one human…and come from an EQ background=)
The zoning is as smooth as owl snot, you get a momentary blip and the name of the zone pops up and fades away=)
Graphics - well, you know the little movies you got in the old PC game Warcraft when you spoke to an important NPC? The overall graphics are rather like that…mildly cartoonish but in a semi real sort of way. You can do some customization of the characters, but pretty much all the clothing/armor is pretty similar, but I expect that with more access to higher level recipes and drops, things will shake up a bit, and I am not sure if you can dye items like in EQ.
UI is pretty simple, I actually like it, but I would like to have a second chat box that I could filter guild and tells into because they flip by so fast when embedded in battle spam [hell, in eq i generally have 6 chatwindows open at any given time=)] Kudos to a good beginning design for a UI, not sure how customizable they will end up becoming=)
Map - sucks and doesnt suck…it stays teh exact same size, a fairly small round in the upper right corner, cant get a really good large map to look at, when I visited a major city I was pretty much wandering around lost ebcause it wouldnt pull back far enough to show me the character location flag the guard put on the map=\ But you get these little diamonds around the edge that will waypoint your body, or a particular town.
Quest NPCs are marked, an ! in yellow for someone who has a quest for you, a ? if you need to talk to that person as part of the quest. For example, you talk to a guardsman in a small village, and he sends you to a guard outpost to talk with another person, the person you need to talk to will have a ? floating above him. You right click to open a dialog box, and it is clicky driven. The neat thing is, it seems that once you get a quest [for example] to kill and loot a certain number of items, then the mobs that you need to kill will start dropping them for you, I was killing timber wolves for xp, and tough meat didnt drop until I took on a quest that needed tough meat, now they always will have a chance to drop tough meat.
Since it is in stress test mode, the server is absolutely crowded with as many peole as they can cram in to give it the smoke test. So far I have gotten kicked off server or locked up 2 times, which is not bad.
Would I play it when it goes live? If I had the money to afford the subscription fee, yes. Since I havent worked in 19 months, and have well established characters in EQ, I will stick to EQ. I have a tentative agreement with mrAru to go ahead and add an eq2 account on a month by month basis, again - that would change if I can turn around and get a job, or my parents/his parents give us gamecards for christmas again=)
I find it a quick, light play, suitable for 8 year olds[under supervision] on up. There are a fair number of idiots playing, again probably due to the stress testing going on. The quests are at the beginning levels quick and simple, and serve more as a tutorial before getting out into the real world. The UI is simple, it is mouse and arrow key driven with hot keys [numbers 1-0 not the number pad] the fighting AI works pretty smoothly, pet AI is still a bit wonky, but then again it is on eq after 5+ years…