Soe created some of the best dungeons I have memory of and I mean the best in terms of complexity, layout, texturing, atmosphere. From the good old EQ1 to the unforgettable EQ gems, the main issue I had, especially with EQ2, is that most of the hours spent to create that content were wasted, because these places were usually skipped by the playerbase, for being a hidden place, mid level only, with no loot and no working quests in them. I always went to explore every nook and corner of the world, but I had to admit, it was just pointless and all I got was the sense of exploration.
EQ2: Obelisk of lost souls (did you know it goes down very deep and the few nameds at the bottom didn't drop shit?), the beehive in Enchanted Lands (Rivervale) where there was absolutely no loot and there were two possible events that didn't work or bugged out, and many many more places I could add to the list, like Silent City and its neighbour area, egyptian underground cities, used mostly to grind shit for the peacock line quest, but not much more, were in my opinion underused and possibly subject to an old school design (is there anything interesting spawning here? you won't know if you don't camp it for hours, cheers!).
Then we got Unrest, the EQ2 version: brilliant, fun, challenging with a storyline akin to the old Netropos Castle design (great zone that one).
I think SoE has and certainly had an abundance of talent in design, some technical issues (animations were kinda meh) and the art department could have certainly done better for character models. What crippled the game, talking specifically about EQ2, was that incomplete vanilla launch competing with WoW release and a lot of design decisions that baffled a large portion of their existing fanbase, just think of locked encounters, named camping for heritage pieces and so on and so forth (the list is way too long).
Once they pulled their heads out of their asses, some things were improved, but others were (sadly) set in stone.
I remember Scott saying they he couldn't really have gotten away with culling half of the skills causing the hotbar bloat, because at that point, the playerbase was attached to that playing style and changing it would have risked many more subs than it would have possibly gained. Nonetheless Faydwer was a very good time to play EQ2.
I tried to reload EQ2 when it went f2p, because I always liked the game, but I forgot how bad it run even on good machines and once I saw my hotbars and the stupid amount of stuff in my bags I was a bit turned off.
Then I did mouseover on a piece of semi recent gear (at that time) and the tooltip took over half of my screen. I said "fuck this shit". Logged off, uninstalled and never looked back.
