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The simple reality of why EQ was "the one"
dcoleman07
Member Posts: 126
Like many others who will read this post, EQ was my first mmo, and the only mmo that I can honestly say took my breath away and captivated my attention fully. I started playing Pre Kunark, and continued playing through the Legend of Ykeshka, spending countless hours exploring, crafting, feeling genuine excitement at going to do somthing like slaying a dragon or a god that I hadn't even seen before but only heard of. When the population fell off drastically as new games were being introduced into the genre, I left EQ like many others to see what else was out there. I tried a multitude of games, including AO, DAoC, CoH, SWG, WoW, ect and so forth... like many others I was also let down. Sure some of these games seemed to have new and better features than EQ, and they did, and sure they kept my attention, maybe for a little while, but there was never that same feeling like the first time you took that shuttle from Butcherblock Mountains to Kunark. And that got me thinking, what the hell is it about EQ that provided that feeling?
I pondered this question for awhile, and I have come to acknowledge a stark reality of why EQ was what it was. That which makes EQ archaic and very difficult compared to this new "User Friendly" mmo genre is that which makes it great. Its the Time Sinks and all the old pains in the ass about EQ ( such as say a very difficult corpse retreival) and the fact that NPCs dont have a damn target over there head , you have to actually interact with them to learn about a quest.
I thought of an analogy to compare it to, lets say your really craving a turkey sandwich. If you hunt and prepare the turkey yourself, your gonna appreciate the hell out of that sandwich, because you busted your ass for it and it means somthing to you. ( Thats EQ )
Or you could just go to the store and buy some pre packaged lunchmeat that doesnt taste as good (Everything Else out there to date)
thats my theory, if anyone has thoughts on it i'd love to hear it.
haters, if your bored, feel free.
Comments
Sounds like me with SWG, only thing is though I have also played WoW longer than I played SWG.
But I have a friend who played EQ from the start and he could agrue with me all night on which was better EQ or SWG.
To me your first is always your best, but there can be others.
-Jive
For me EQ was fun, b/c at that time the only alternative was UO. If we have DAoC then I might find DAoC to be better. Honestly, hours spent grinding thru the hell levels (30, 35, 40, 45, 49, 51-59) and the painful corpse recovery is not really fun. It was just about the only thing to do during those days.
Once I found RVR in DAoC, I will never imagine the life of EQ1.
For me, the best memory of EQ1 are the friends and generally very mature and friendly people. The community is not just mature, its tolerant, positive, cheerful ... until the game hits the RAID stage.
Funny, there were a lot of us that tried EQ and absolutely hated it. I would hardly classify it as a good game at any time in it's existence.
So while I respect that you liked it, EQ was never that great a game and the current games are far more fun to play.
Early EQ was an extraordinary experience and i agree with the OP 100%.
Sure some people didnt like EQ but they WRONG, WRONG I SAY!!!!!
And while i do think the "First Kiss" theory does have some merit i have to say that the first kiss is only the best kiss if you kissed something good.
EQ was great for many years but did lose interest for me. I didnt like the PK Books and the bazaar but what really did it for me was when you start actually killing Gods. Once you go so far as to kill the actual game Gods what is there really left to do?
Note to all game developers: Never let your player base kill your Dieties!!!
I never make it to see the bazaar, for us it was always the tunnel (east commons?) where everyone shouted selling/buying. I found the plane of air too taxing, and soon I found DAoC. That is the end of my EQ history. I never looked back to the gameplay, I always remember the friendly people there. The esprit de corps.
Yes, once EQ reached the point where it was a guild race to kill the latest and greatest God or Dragon out there ( though that was fun for awhile ), it became a shadow of its former self, and remains even further from that today
A lot of people express this sentiment about the first mmo they ever played. EQ popped your cherry and now you get all warm and fuzzy thinking about it. I get the same feeling thinking about precu SWG.
I suppose you could say 'You never forget your first.'
I missed EQ so I promised not to miss the 'next' EQ. I picked up WoW in early 2006 after playing a bit of EQ2(was alright for a time but I grew tired of it.) Eventually, I found a guild and leveled my Human Rogue to 60 for BC. After that, all downhill.
I could say though, that WoW will reach that same point of lost interest as EQ, the only question is when.
i never did like EQ. but god when i played my first mmorpg game DAOC took my V card from me lmao.
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I have to wonder if entering your first online world puts you into a mindset that forms your opinions about what MMOs are supposed to be like. You die and recovering your corpse requires skill and effort, surely all MMOs are supposed to be this way, right? Traveling across the continent takes a good forty-five minutes to get from one side to the other, shouldn't all MMOs make travel times this realistic?
Well apparently not if this is not the MMO you were introduced too. If you started with a game that let's you recover your corpse with a click of the mouse and travel across the world in 5 minutes, then playing one that is just the opposite must seem ridiculous.
I'm an EQ devotee as well. It was my first, it's still my favorite and I seem to compare all other MMOs to that one. I don't know if I will ever play another game that good, but that is my real life gaming quest. I wait for the game that will surpass EQ in fun.
Most people who dislike EQ talk about the tedious time sinks of recovering your body and traveling, but the thing is, if the game is crazy fun, they don't even seem like time sinks because that's part of the challenge. There are days when I would play the game from the time I woke up until it was time for me to go to bed and it didn't even seem like hardly any time had passed. In fact, my biggest regret is how much of my life I wasted playing that game
But the point is that, first and foremost, an MMO has to be immersive. If I don't feel like I'm in the world that's painstakingly been created, I'm just wasting my time. And secondly, it has to be a challenge. Things like quick travel times, simple corpse recoveries and fast leveling just seem boring to me. What's the point? Yet, others look at the opposite and see nothing but time sinks and also say, "What's the point?"
So what's the answer?
I did a blog along these lines. Feel free to post up a comment from your EQ experiences on there, I was actually hoping to get some input from the "old school" MMO players.
http://mmorpg.com/blogs/Tatum/032008/1430_Accessibility-in-MMOs
Although I never played EQ and only looked into UO, I do agree that MMO's have taken the route of "accessibility". Like I said in the blog, it's really hard to put your finger on exactly whats missing, because many of the changes are very subtle.
I hope the answer is that one day (sooner than later preferably) an MMO will come out that will break the mold of what we see in todays more popular MMO's. these games that hold your hand until Max level and follow a very predictable trend, The game is released, people level as fast as they possibly can, following the quest lines put in place for them, move up the chain, and when they've reached the level cap they start raiding endlessly to get the best gear available, about that time the same company gets ready to release an expansion or a new game so the players can rinse and repeat that cycle. If I want bust my ass grinding just to eventualy have the nicest stuff I'll stick with trying to do that in real life. As for an MMO, I would like to get away from all that and experience somthing thats fun and exciting that I couldnt do in real life. It seems like all people are worried about now is being the most bad ass in the game, not the fun level of the content
I thought FFXI was a great MMO. They did a lot of good things, that I sorely missed. So I reactivated a couple of times, and EVERYTIME it just reeks of a wasted time sink. I couldn't believe I actually liked this game.
Now I'm more for user friendly, casual games. It may change once college semester is over, but I doubt it.
getting together with a bunch of your buddies and being the first to kill a high level named mob like Vox and Nagefen back in the day, just for the hell of it, not really about the loot, now that was some fun
I never make it to see the bazaar, for us it was always the tunnel (east commons?) where everyone shouted selling/buying. I found the plane of air too taxing, and soon I found DAoC. That is the end of my EQ history. I never looked back to the gameplay, I always remember the friendly people there. The esprit de corps.
I never really minded the time sinks ( i really hate that term) with EQ because i was always having fun. If there was downtime i was talking to my friends, if i had to make a tricky CR at least it was exciting.But i agree that at best part of early EQ was the community. I got into the game just after release and it was awesome. No body knew what to do so we all had to figure it out together. The first time i saw a guy in full bronze i was like "EWWWWW".
I think that is actually the biggest thing about why EQ, or UO or AC or even DAOC were so very popular with us old timers. We were all in it together for the first time, it was new to all of us.
The new games come out and we all already know what to do for the most part. I miss the unknown.
Classic EQ was great, the period the OP describes from launch til Planes of Power. SOE ruined the game after Brad quit and focused on raiding and forced grouping after that.
The classic EQ world was more dangerous, exciting , and fun. There were no stupid minimaps showing you exactly where to go, no idiotic floating icons above questgivers heads, a real meaningful death penalty that made you actually fear dying and respect the environment, realistic travel times with porting limited to two classes so the world remained large, meaningful differences between the races and classes and their abilities which fostered grouping and cooperation, a slow and lengthy leveling process which increased the longevity and interest in the game and it's various regions, real faction results for attacking various NPCs which made you consider what you killed.
I really miss quality quests with key word responses which required a player to actually read and think about what the questgiver was saying and explore the lands and learn the lore and problemsolve to finish the quest. Anyone who ever performed the Langseax quest in Halas knows how great some of the classic EQ quests were. You just don't see real quests like that in the newer MMOGs because they make everything so simple for every idiot to complete and most players don't even bother reading what the NPC says because they can just follow the arrow to the next NPC with a question mark above their head. Pathetic.
You have seen the light.
I agree. The difficulty was what made for a good community. You NEEDED friends and help in that game. It wasn't like WoW where you could just play the game by yourself to max level.
There were some things, however, that were ridiculous. Things like a 30 minute real time boat ride across the ocean, or sitting down to learn spells and being able to see nothing but your spell book until the spells were learned.
There's a happy medium between EQ and Wow, IMO. A few more time sinks than WoW, and few less than EQ.
I used to bitch about the time sinks in EQ, but then I played CoH and it has almost zero time sinks. You don't shop for gear, you don't spend time healing, and in combat there's almost no downtime at all. In fact there's not even time chat while you're traveling, because you're zipping around, flying around obsticles, making super jumps, or teleporting.
the pace is so fast, you join a group, kill, kill, kill, where's the next mission?, kill, kill, kill, and then it's, thanks for group, cya. There's no time to chat unless you're using voice chat.
Very simply, your first MMO will always be "the one". For me it was UO. I absolutely hated EQ. In UO it seemed like you could do anything, while in EQ it seemed like you could only kill things and spawn camp.
But like I said, UO was my first MMO so to me it seemed like it was better. Was it better than EQ? Maybe, maybe not. I'm just glad that I was able to experience UO while it was in its prime. It really was an extraordinary gaming experience, unmatched still, in my opinion.
Actually UO was my first but i only played for a couple weeks. Just couldn't get into it for some reason. Not sure why, its a great game, but at that time I just couldn't.
EQ to me, like the op and a couple here, was just the greatest game ever. I spent days at a time cracking out in that game. Played from right after release (maybe a month) and stayed for years. The experience, the traveling, the sights, the encounters, it had the feeling of an actual MMO world, the people that played, it just all seemed like the perfect game. Still trying to find a replacement for it sadly, theres been some that has kept my interest but none that has really gave me that wow factor that EQ did.
UO had a pretty steep learning curve. You were basically thrown into the world and you had to learn everything on your own. That combined with lots of skills, some useless and others important, made for a very hard time for new players. But it offered options unmatched in most modern MMOs.
Maybe the correct phrase would be "first MMO players stuck with" is "the one" for them.
Like many of you, I was among the masses of players who logged on to EQ that fateful night in March of '99 when it went live. You never know, maybe we even shared a group or two at one time. For 9 straight years, at least an hour a day, I played. It's safe for me to say I've done just about everything there is to do including taking a character to 75, flagging up to Plane of Time, and participating in a Sleeper raid. What's interesting is that despite how long I've been playing, despite how many alternate characters I've created, it wouldn't take much convincing for me to go back and start it all over again.
During the last three months of my time on EverQuest, I started branch out and try some newer MMOs. Of course, World of Warcraft was the obvious choice for me. For all the hype and what I had seen with my own eyes, there was no doubt in my mind that WoW would be my next great MMO experience. I think I managed a month on WoW before I canceled my account, uninstalled the game, and gave the discs away.
The reason for my utter hatred of WoW has absolutely nothing to do with the game itself. I actually love the game. I'm a huge fan of the Warcraft universe. I still play Warcraft 3: Reign of Choas and Frozen Throne. So why? Why such contempt for WoW? One word: Community!
You can compare World of Warcraft to EverQuest and WoW will come out on top in every category except the one that, in my opinion, is the most important: the community of players you're sharing the game with.
The WoW community has got to be filled with the most ill-mannered, bad tempered, ne'er-do-wells I've ever had the misfortune of being insulted by. The first time I ever approached someone for help in WoW the response to my question went something like, "Stfu u n00b." Way to make a new player feel welcome, guy! Everywhere I turned I saw nothing but griefers. Heated (and truly vicious) arguments would break out between people for something a trivial as selling an item for 2 gold pieces more than it was worth! I honestly don't know how people can be so nasty in a video-game, but I do know that you couldn't pay me to install that garbage on my machine again.
My overall experience with WoW would have been much better if the community was more like that of EverQuest. Sure you're going to have to put up with the occasional troublemaker, but EQ makes up for it by having a much higher population of mature individuals, most of whom are long-time veterans of the game who are only too pleased to share their extensive knowledge.
In a MMORPG, the community of players and their general attitude towards others can be the deciding factor of whether to stick with the game or find something else.
I completely agree. Even with gamers whos first MMO wasn't EQ, they still felt the same way about EQ back then. I came close to that feeling again with DAoC but it had been dilluted much as EQ had. Sure things were a pain in the ass, but you got a better feel and connection because of that.
"God, please help us sinful children of Ivalice.."
The WoW community is what happens when a game gets marketed to the masses and a lot of ignorant children get ahold of it and fill it with their own insecurities.
EQ and the older games were for gentlemen and women who just wanted to sit back and have a good time and know they were in good company
But back to EQ; yeah I loved EQ at first. A big part of it was because it was my first mmorpg. And partly it was what someone else said, we were all new to it. A bunch of newbies all thrown in together trying out this new thing. And yes, the community was very good in the early days of EQ.
I was soooo addicted to that game. And then I reached high levels and got a taste of raiding. Um...wait a minute...this ain't fun. Looked around, um, surely there's something else for us? Surely this isn't what it was all leading up to? Uh...there isn't anything else? You mean I either endure this mind numbing boredom and schedule my life around this crap or my character will stall out and die a slow death?
Well...geez, that sucks. The game was so much fun untill this point.
And that was the beginning of the end of EQ for me. I hung around far longer than I should have because I thought that surely the developers would come to their senses. But instead it just kept getting worse. So eventually I gave up waiting and quit.