EverQuest II Battlegrounds Preview

Ten Ton Hammer has conjured up a quick hands-on preview of the Battlegrounds system being added to EverQuest II tomorrow. A bit of what to expect:

If you die, you’ll have to wait out a minor timer before you respawn back at your original location. Other than the timer, there is no down time and you can jump back into the fray immediately after popping back to life.

When the battle ends, a window will pop up announcing the winning team and giving the summary of performance including kill count, deathblows, damage and healing done and damage received. At this point you’ll be returned to your home server exactly where you were before. If you drop out of the battleground before it ends and before you have been returned back to your home server, you’ll be smacked with a (truancy) which will keep you from engaging in any battleground game play for a period of time. This is an unfortunate fact I learned when a game I was playing in became bugged and didn’t release players after it ended. I closed the game out to restart and hopefully get out of the broken battle and when my character finally dropped out, I had sad little red text on my battlegrounds page telling me I had a penalty for truancy. Looking at the official forums, this is a known problem that is being actively worked on at the time of writing this.