EQ2 came out right before WoW hit. It was in the old school camp. After WoW hit it's now in the new, eg like WoW, camp.
You can see the difference between the quests. In old EQ2 there was this quest called '999 year old bottle of port'. Basically you got this detector that told you the direction to where the bottle was buried. Your task was to retrieve it. What made it tedious is that the map of Antonica is huge so searching for where the bottle is buried can take hours unless you do something fancy like triangulate. Also there are impassable mountains in the way. Once the indicater indicated the bottle was near, you used another quest object to dig it up.
The new part of EQ2, post WoW have quests where you have to kill ten of something and bring back their shin bones, necklaces, teeth, toenails or something.
So the main difference I see in the two styles is the old style had you spend a lot of time on one, perhaps more complicated, quest.
The new style emphasizes combat. Basically the quests break up the monotony of grinding mobs by making you take breaks and switching locations.
Another thing I've noticed is that a lot of the old EQ2 quests required groups.
Old School vs New School MMOs
