I played Everquest 2

[kageneko]

It was very interesting. Some things are very different from Wow. Some things are better. Some things are worse.

* Player/Guild housing. Wow. I've never cared for it before, but I will freely admit I am wrong. It was pretty fun to decorate my room at the inn.

* Shared bank. Half of the slots in your bank are shared among all of your alts.

* Crafting. I'm not sure what to say about this. For the most part, I like it a lot more than WoW. The crafting system has a lot more things and a lot more useful things. The only bad thing is that actually making items is like a minigame. They have this interesting commission system for creating NOTRADE items for other people. Basically, someone puts in a request for a craftable item and you can pick up the request and it automatically exchanges the item for the money.

* Combat. Umm. I never really got used to it. The ability to queue a command is great. I played a paladin and never grouped, so I can't tell how things are in general. I pretty much just pushed buttons as they lit up.

* Quests. Wow... there's a lot of quests. I mean, a lot. And you get a huge quest log (80 things, I think). And then there's a Collections, which lets you collect butterflies, bones, flowers, shells, and other things. When you complete a collection, you get a reward. There's also lore quests, which are an awesome idea. You study the body parts that fall from classes of monsters (zombie, skeleton, gnoll, fairy, etc.) and when you study all of the parts, you get a bonus when attacking that creature.

* The world. HUGE. And instanced. The capital of Qeynos is divided up into a lot of different zones. However, the continent of Antonica (where Qeynos is located) is one single zone. There's a lot of story going on, too, but sometimes you have to dig through things to find it.

* Graphics. Uggh. It's more realistic looking than WoW and gives you a metric ton of ways to customize your appearance. But there were a lot of graphical glitches -- the most common was that my weapon would disappear when I was swinging it.

* Food and Drink. These are automatically eaten/drunk as needed. They give passive bonuses to health/power restoration as well as additional strength, stamina, etc. You have a food slot and a drink slot that you have to fill in order for this to work.

* "Talents". You get two sets of "talents". First, every race has its own set of abilities they get to choose every 10 levels. Secondly, you can put a percentage of your earned experience into "Alternative Advancement" and earn AA points. These are very similar to talents. The talent trees are a little weak. There are two (three with the expansion) trees: your class archetype and your specific class.

* UI. The default UI (I didn't use any addons) was fairly usable and customizable. Much more so than the default WoW UI. Pretty much every window can be moved around, have its opacity changed, etc.

I must meditate upon what my next 14 day trial will be.