I had some ask me what I thought on Discord and my response was too long to type it all out there, so here it is all written out.
Graphics
Graphics don't mean much to me (I still think EQ Project 1999 looks fine) so I'll get it out of the way quickly.
Despite not being into the voxel look (never played Minecraft) I was surprised to find that very quickly I didn't even really notice the art style any more. In fact, several times I even found myself thinking things looked very pretty, especially with certain lighting effects applied! There were even a few animations on these blocky enemies that were pretty good. The effects (spell particles etc) were well done as well. The art style also makes it very easy to see stuff and what's going on which I appreciated.
First person view is done better than in M&M (doesn't have the issue of my own hand flying in front of my face a lot when running with certain races, or the camera suddenly shifting back into 3rd person because I stood too close to a wall). It's worth noting that first person is the default, and I ended up spending more time in that mode than 3rd person (out of habit from playing EQ1 more than anything), while the opposite is true in M&M due to the above issues.
My one issue was that I found myself less engaged with my own character's appearance than I might normally be. So it doesn't have as much of that "wow I hope one day my character can wear that cool-looking armor" that can be a fun factor in other MMO's. Even stuff like being a spell caster you can't really wear a "robe", it's just a robe texture slapped on the same blocky model.
Otherwise, I don't think the art style was as much of an issue as I worried it might be and I don't think it would bother me. It may even grow on me.
Audio
I was a bit concerned about the music before because I thought the music in the trailer wasn't especially promising, and the human town daytime music was maybe a bit too "happy" and might get on my nerves. But as I explored more, I found several areas had great music that was well composed and appropriately atmospheric and matching the environment it plays in. Maybe not as good an M&M's music but better than many MMO's (of those that even bother having much music at all).
I was also actually quite impressed with ambient sounds in general - like the birds chirping in the forests sounded great! The actual SFX (combat hits etc) was a bit lacking in oomph, but wasn't annoying or anything.
Oh, they also included a few combat music tracks, unlike in M&M, and they weren't too bad. Better than EQ1's for sure, no where near FF11 of course, but good enough that they wouldn't annoy/distract me and I'd probably leave the combat music option turned on.
User Interface
So it's interesting to see how, rather than M&M and ECO feeling like different stages of completeness in their UI, they just seem to each be missing different things. In some ways I like ECO's UI a lot more than M&M's, but it also was missing some stuff M&M has that seems odd to not have bothered with yet.
For example, ECO has multiple hotbar pages - yay! - yet no hot key to change pages, making it useless for having a lot of abilities accessible purely via keyboard. It also has no hot key to directly cast spells - you have to add them to your hot bar first. It shows your group member's positions relative to you with little compass arrows for each of them in the group window, which I REALLY appreciate as I'm often getting separated from my group. Yet it doesn't show mana bars or your group members' class and level like in M&M, so you have to spend time asking or doing /whotarget (which, on a side note, M&M doesn't even have /whotarget yet) and reporting your mana in chat.
Both games display your target's target, but in M&M it shows that target's health/etc too, whereas ECO only shows the target's name. And currently only in M&M can you target your target's target with a macro (/assist - though I wish we could assign a direct key to it!) whereas ECO you have to manually click in the UI. Oh, and ECO actually doesn't currently have macros AT ALL, so if a button isn't provided for a command (which they do include some like /whotarget as a button you can drag to your hotbar, to be fair) then you can't add it to your hot bar at all for faster access.
The biggest issue I ran into with ECO is its mouselook implementation is pretty bad. Your mouse is still moving around the screen, just hidden, during mouselook. It doesn't actually start mouselook until you move the mouse a minimum distance after you hold the button down so there's an initial delay too. So if you right-click on the right side of your screen and move your mouse right, you won't look right (because the cursor can't move that way being at the edge of the screen already). You'll have to move your mouse left first to start look mode then back to the right. And if you try using your mouse wheel during mouse look, it *might* zoom your camera in/out... or it might scroll up a chat window or something, because it depends on where your hidden mouse cursor happens to actually be. If you have an item on your cursor, you'll actually see the item moving around on your screen during mouselook as it follows the invisible mouse. I also often had the mode just seem to refuse to work at all, having to click multiple times on the screen with both buttons before it would let me mouselook again. It seemed to get particularly confused if you tried switching quickly between left-click and right-click mouselook modes in 3rd-person view.
Still, overall I'd say ECO's UI is more polished than M&M's actually. Very clean look, easy to use, and has nice QoL stuff like having /consider info right there on the UI saving you needing to press C constantly. It feels like ECO has put more work into their UI even though they otherwise appear to be further away from release than M&M is.
Performance
I have a pretty low-end machine (can barely reach 30fps @ 720p in M&M) so I'm not the best judge of framerate performance. I didn't even try to check FPS in ECO, but if it was low, it wasn't distractingly so for me.
In fact I didn't notice performance issues at all, including network lag, which is pretty impressive given the fact that it doesn't have zones to assist with server load balancing. Even in moments of high user count, I didn't notice any delays for any actions. In this way ECO seems to have a real leg up on M&M in these early pre-alpha tests, where so far no M&M test has managed to avoid having huge delays just trying to scribe your starting spells at the start of each test when everyone is crammed into the same zone.
Core mechanics and challenge
As mentioned above, ECO doesn't use zones. This is great for a smoother experience (no loading screens, even when I died far, far from my spawn point I would pop back pretty much instantly) and a more immersive world. There are some gameplay downsides though.
Even though it is unrealistic and was done for technical limitation reasons, the zones in EQ, and by extension M&M, do change the dynamics of play. Enemies can't follow players past zone lines, making the go-to method to survive a bad pull to be a rush to the zone line ("Train to zone!!"). This also means that enemies don't need a "leash" mechanic - they can just be programmed to follow the player forever until the player zones out or dies. Leashing mechanics can be annoying sometimes, so this is worth noting. For example, at one point in ECO I was fighting something that had chased another player, and then I guess I moved slightly too far away and it just suddenly restored itself to full health and ran back toward its spawn point.
ECO has a tamer death penalty than M&M or classic EQ. Corpse recoveries are still a thing, and you do (eventually, at 10+) lose XP. But you respawn with all your gear and cash, so it's basically just your bags and loot on your corpse. It still has corpse dragging, but it is more convenient - a single command begins automatically dragging your corpse rather than tapping the command over and over. I honestly wish M&M would do this (limited to only one corpse at a time), because tapping the button repeatedly isn't something that adds to fun or challenge, it it just tedious wearing out of your keyboard.
That said, I personally prefer the harsher punishment for death in M&M (which is even harsher than EQ due to the spell book dropping thing) because it makes for some great bonding moments helping each other do CR, as well just making everything feel more intense with the higher stakes for death.
Food is a powerful regen buff that you should try to keep active rather than a survival necessity. I'm not sure how I feel about that one. I must admit that just having to keep food and water on you all the time but you don't benefit from it doesn't seem particularly fun or challenging, but it does provide a money sink, another way some classes that can summon food can help others, and in a way is actually less annoying than ECO's more-interesting implementation.
Let me expand on that last point.... in ECO the food buff is so good that you want to have it active all the time or you're clearly playing sub-optimally. But you have to eat food in town and it only lasts 30 minutes. So it takes more effort to maintain optimal play by going back to town to eat regularly, than it is to just load up your bag with a stack of 20 food and water and not worry about it for a long time.
Other than that the mechanics are mostly exactly like you'd expect from an EQ clone. Even moreso than M&M in many ways, like classes have both skills AND spells as separate things (meaning hybrids have more abilities to juggle than pure casters or pure melee), and the fact that within a few levels every coin denomination below a platinum piece is largely worthless and makes you wonder why bother even having copper, silver, and gold instead of just having a single type of coin =P.
Class designs
There seems to be less stuff done with the classes so far in ECO than in M&M, and there's less information on what is really planned for each of them. Several of them seemed so straightforward from looking at their ability lists on a wiki that I didn't feel any need to try them at all as it was pretty clear how they would function. That said, they did have some things that shook up the formula a bit - with some equally hated and loved by the player base.
The biggest one people talked about frequently in the global chat was Clarity moving from Enchanter to Wizard. Lot of people had strong opinions about that. I personally agree with the change and think it makes sense thematically and game-design wise. To me the only non-pet-using cloth caster that depends 100% on mana ought to have more access to mana than the pet users. It finally gives Wizards a reason to be invited to groups, and Enchanters (in M&M and classic EQ at least) have plenty of other things to offer a group and can always get Clarity the same way everyone else does now - ask the class that has it to cast it on them!
Many of the people that argued about this change were not high enough level to have either Clarity on a Wizard or Charm on an Enchanter yet though, so I feel it was mostly heresy and not opinions based on actual experience. On the surface though, I have to say that Enchanter does seem pretty weak compared to M&M/EQ1 and Wizard may be too good, with Wizard getting not only Clarity but also a Mez and a Mem Blur and Enchanters don't even get Invis like Wizards do. I agree with the Clarity thing but those others don't belong on Wizard IMHO (except Invis which should be on both). I assume this will likely change as the classes are fleshed out more.
There were also a handful of cool ideas I wouldn't mind seeing M&M borrow. Probably too big of a shift for M&M would be the Beastmaster implementation, which has you actually go out and capture a beast, feed it, stable it, etc. Not just a basic summon spell.
A smaller example is that I discovered that the blind spell on Clerics has a Snare component and does, in fact, make the mob just wander aimlessly in a small area for a few seconds if no target is in their melee range (rather than behaving like they've been feared). The snare component means you also have an opportunity to get away from said melee range in the first place since they move slower than you. This makes it FAR more useful than the EQ version where it was only used for snap aggro by Paladins or a way to get your group killed by the mob running off and starting a train. I used it to get a head start running away from a mob, stop runners, kite mobs a bit in the open, and save other players. Became one of my most-used spells on my Cleric, unlike for my P99 Cleric where it sits entirely unused.
They had some interesting stuff related to mob health too like Wizards having a nuke that refunds mana if you finish an enemy off with it or abilities that give bonuses when used on enemies at < 50% health. I also heard about an SK mechanic where you built up curse points on an enemy (rather than yourself) and then could "spend" them on a move.
Overall the ability lists were pretty sparse though and clearly uneven between classes and missing many basic things I would have expected to see. This is partly why I feel this game is not as far along as M&M is.
I also prefer M&M's design ideal of making each class have most of its "core identity" right at level 1. You can feel out pretty quickly if a class is going to resonate with you or not and get right into your role, but for several classes in ECO you'd need to be level 8 before the class had some of the core features (though still much earlier than in EQ1 where some core class features might not come online until level 30+).
Quests
ECO works like M&M and EQ in that you don't have exclamations above NPC heads and instead have to actually go around hailing them and using text chat with them to get and do quests. ECO is less involved than M&M though because all key words are highlighted and you can just click on them to automatically say the key word. Plus there's no MUD commands. So you hail an NPC, click the blue words, and then go do whatever they asked. There is a journal of all conversations, but it's not a "quest journal" in that it doesn't act like a checklist or anything. You do have to actually read the dialog and pay attention to know what to do, just like in M&M.
Both games have no built-in map and, more importantly, no GPS for player position or markers for quest destinations, so you need to actually pay attention to directions NPC's give you to accomplish quests. I personally very much agree with this design choice, but many players (in both games) seemed quite shocked and upset by the absence. ECO at least has a compass item which I think is reasonable (even classic EQ had Sense Heading) - though it was buggy and didn't work for me, so I had to learn to navigate without one.
One big difference between how ECO works and how M&M/EQ mostly work is that ECO clearly saves hidden quest progress flags as part of your character. This means that simply talking to NPC-A before you talk to NPC-B might change what NPC-B has to say. There are quests that progress simply by going back and forth talking to NPC's and not doing any item turn-ins at all. This actually threw me off at one point because I thought a quest couldn't progress any because I hadn't got any items to go turn in and I had exhausted all dialog with each relevant NPC. I didn't realize simply talking to an earlier NPC again would change what they said and progress the quest!
This means you can have one-time-only quests with different outcomes and never see the other outcomes on the same character. I found one quest that I tried with different characters that I did in a different way and got different rewards, with no way for a single character to also get the alternate reward. This allows for some quests, even outside of class-specific ones, to potentially have large rewards, knowing the player can only do them once, without the reward needing to be some no-drop lore item. It also is a bit more realistic in that you don't encounter an NPC having a problem for you to fix that you know you've already fixed for them. Instead, talking to them in the future just gets you a "hey thanks for helping before!" message, which is nice.
It also could have some big negative consequences for players though. For example, a character gave me a letter to take to another character. If that letter was lost somehow (let's say my corpse decayed), I could NEVER do the rest of that quest. The original NPC wouldn't give me another letter, and there's no way to restart the quest now. It is forevermore flagged on my character that I already did the part where I was given a letter.
So there's good and bad about this system, is what I'm saying. ECO does also have repeatable quests that don't use this system though, for simple turn-ins for extra rewards beyond what you'd get for just selling the items.
In-game Community
Last thing I want to touch on is the other players. This is obviously very subjective and may only be my personal experience. I also want to clarify that this has nothing to do with the Discord community and fans and so on talking about the game, but with how people behave when actually in-game, which I find is two very different things.
Both games have the typical amount of jerks etc, you can't avoid, but I noticed ECO was just overall less friendly, less of a feeling of "we're all in this together", and seemed lacking in etiquette and maturity compared to the likes of M&M or P99/PQ.
Like, people would join and leave groups with no warning at all. Just invite blindly and then vanish. No "hey you want to group?" No "hey I need to go, want to try to find someone to replace me in my role?" Very little in the way of conversation. There was a lot more "bad behaviour" I encountered directly like kill stealing, not respecting "camps" whatsoever, and so on. I got the impression that this wasn't necessarily intentional either - more like players just didn't know proper etiquette... or didn't think it mattered?
In my entire play time, only one other player actually stayed grouped for any length of time and engaged in any conversation as we tried to figure out some class quests.
I'm wondering if it might just be that ECO has a lot more appeal to players that are less experienced in EQ-style MMO's? Maybe the Minecraft aesthetic drew in a younger crowd? It's also possible that it relates to the game's design and mechanics though. Like maybe the less harsh death penalty, the lack of zones, the way the quests were designed, etc, perhaps just made people feel less like they needed to really bother with etiquette? Like having a good reputation and building comradery just wasn't necessary to achieve your goals? I'm not sure, but I was surprised because I wouldn't say the Discord communities were all that different, with many members belonging to both communities anyway.
There was also a lot more fighting in the global chat channel than I'm used to from the M&M tests. More insults thrown at other MMO's (including people calling M&M "vaporware", which I thought was just crazy...) or fighting about some of ECO's design decisions (like the Clarity/Wizard/Enchanter thing). The same kind of thing you'd see all the time on M&M's discord - but rarely while actually in-game in the stress tests, where people mostly focused on just discussing what was actually going on in-game (asking for help and so on) and saved their in-depth design arguments for Discord.
Just thought that was a bit odd, and one of the things that would make me lean more toward M&M for sure. But maybe as the ECO playerbase matures and people get higher level it would shift to feel more like the wonderful (in-game) communities of P99 and PQ.
Conclusion
In many ways ECO was not what I expected. It impressed me in ways I did not expect, while also being disappointing in some ways I did not expect. It feels like its release is likely further away than M&M's, but at the same time in many aspects it actually feels more polished than M&M does already (UI and performance in particular). It just shows a different focus by each dev team I guess.
I think ECO seems like a very solid foundation though, and depending on how each project progresses (and ECO's still unknown monetization plans), I would not discount the possibility that I may even end up liking ECO more than M&M in the long run. For now though, I'm still more interested in M&M due to the more interesting class designs (besides Enchanters being OP), more traditional art style, and the stronger push it seems to have with its mechanics etc towards a more mature (in-game at least) community with a feeling of all working together to overcome hardship. If M&M didn't exist though, ECO would be my most-anticipated MMO.
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