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EverQuest: The Making of a Classic
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Best MMO ever. (up until 2002).
An honest review of SW:TOR 6/10 (Danny Wojcicki)
You just got better at Nostalgia (100).
Warp
@Velocinox
what your saying WOULD make sense....
IF there were thousands of MMOs out there with every permutation of different features and attributes. so people actually had a choice of these things.
some don't play EQ (for an example), because its a ghosttown everywhere and one of the whole appeals of it was being immersed in a POPULATED world that felt full of human life (my reason). some people don't play it because graphics matters to them, and in the context of what they are used to in modern games, the game looks really UGLY today, even tho it might have looked sweet to them back in its heyday.
when a progression server was new in 2010 and i heard it was extremely populated, i DID play it and and enjoy EQ again, like it was 1999 all over again. it was so delightfully full of life again. there were people running all over the place, and no shortage of pick up groups INSIDE of whatever dungeon i felt like wandering over to.
but once the expansion packs are unlocked, its NOT a game that fulfils my requirements. the world becomes too huge and the players too spread out. the magic is gone. Vanguard would be another game for me, but it suffers the same problem. world is too big for how many players there are. therefore its a ghosttown everywhere.
so really, alot of people just DO NOT have the choice of playing their preferred type of MMO, because it just DOES NOT EXIST at this moment in time. therefore they have to pick the lesser of all evils, or just not play MMOs at all. which is my case, outside of some brief bouts of Darkfall here and there.
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Corpus Callosum
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I have very fond memories of EQ1. I still remember being ganked by the griffins outside the huts in East commonlands many times. Being terrified making the long journey through the cave (Forget the name, with the eye in it) through the canyon with the minataurs through to South Korana. The penalties are what made it fun, I made many good friends playing EQ1 and stayed friends with them for years after, moving on to other games together.
I think that Vanguard could have been the game to replace it, it had the same feel to it, and would have been a fantastic game if not released to early.
I have played most of the mmorpg's since, always trying to find a game which captures the magic that EQ1 was, but alas I fear my search will forever be in vain.
Or maybe i'm just too old now. /hail EQ1
I have very fond memories of EQ1. I still remember being ganked by the griffins outside the huts in East commonlands many times. Being terrified making the long journey through the cave (Forget the name, with the eye in it) through the canyon with the minataurs through to South Korana. The penalties are what made it fun, I made many good friends playing EQ1 and stayed friends with them for years after, moving on to other games together.
I think that Vanguard could have been the game to replace it, it had the same feel to it, and would have been a fantastic game if not released to early.
I have played most of the mmorpg's since, always trying to find a game which captures the magic that EQ1 was, but alas I fear my search will forever be in vain.
Or maybe i'm just too old now. /hail EQ1
EQ and UO, will we ever again see the the launching of games (not just MMOs) with such vision that were prepaired to see it through, from being the new kid on the block to being a major new genre.
Great article... well-researched and well-written. EQ is the shit.
I always thought it was rather amusing that even the headline semi-nude pretty girl on the EQ publicity manages to look like a nerd.
Lemme correct that for you.... EQ was the shit.(Until Luclin).
I agree 100%.... People today don't understand how EQ felt more of living in a second world than just playing a video game.. Nothing has ever come close to what EQ felt like to me.. In a way, that's a good thing.. If there was a true successor to EQ, I probably would be without a job and homeless right now, lol.. I was so addicted to EQ, I'd normally play for 15 hours straight on average.. In the summer when school was out, there were times I played for more than 24 hours straight,, only stopping to relieve myself and grab something to eat/drink, lol...
I'm sad but also kind of relieved there has never been a game released quite like it.. In my opinion, MMO's are not even close of what they used to be and used to mean to the person.. They are now shallow quick themeparks with no character whatsoever..
Rallithon Oakthornn
(Retired Heirophant of the 60th season)
Everquest was the first MMO I ever played and I will never forget the time I spent with it. It took my conception of what an "RPG" is and expanded it ten-fold, never before had I gotten to explore such a vast world that felt as alive as it was dangerous.
I won't miss all of the corpse runs, levels lost from dying, and load times between zones, but I will miss that sense of wonder and awe I experienced during my first few months of playing. Everquest did so much more for me than introduce me to the MMO genre; it offered an outlet for me to fuel my creativity, it helped me bond with my brothers (I managed to get them hooked too) as well as new friends I made at school, and it taught me that sometimes the best adventures are the ones you didn't even expect to have.
Yes corpse runs stank -- and they always stank... People argued over that from day one.
But losing levels and heck levels were a completely different story.
Having levels NOT progress linearly changed your strategies...
IE you are 39th in a normal level -- you fight in X way.
Now you are 40th in a level that lasts 2.5 times as long... This does affect your play.
You ding 41st ... Now you are in the most interesting old level type of all of them... The DEATH PENALTY in the level after one of those long levels was HUGE because it was based off the exp in the prior level.
If you died in level 41 you lost like 2 full bars of exp, very often dropping you right back into level 40. The levels after the long levels were the levels where you had to really carefully plan your play. You did NOT want to die in a level after a x5 or x0 level.
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Levels having themes could be a good addition to games...
People always talk about Luclin being the expansion that ended old school EQ. I completely disagree and feel that it was actually PoP that ended old school EQ. Luclin still very much had the feel of the first two expansions, despite the fact that people didn't like fighting snakes and aliens. PoP was responsible for:
1) Taking exploration out of the game by adding portal stones.
2) Making a very centralized, linear game by having a central hub zone (Plane of Tranquility) and tiered zones.
3) Taking a lot of the danger out of the game by having a graveyard in every PoP zone.
4) Began the shift towards and entirely raid focused end game (you couldn't even access the best zones for grouping unless you raided to unlock them).
Not to mention PoP flagging was one of the worst things ever in an MMO. Worse than VT keying by a long shot in my opinion. PoP was actually responsible for my qutting EQ for the first time. Granted I ended up coming back and playing for a long time, finally quitting for good about a year ago, but I've never really understood the hatred people have for Luclin when really I see PoP as the expansion that changed the game.
Also don't forget the completely abysmal method for acquiring spells in PoP.
WoW killed EQ? That's news to me. If anything I would have made the argument that EQ2 killed EQ. The truth is, WOW had such success because of name recognition, Google, broadband, Gameing Sites and an audience that found paying for online content acceptable. I had to learn of EQ the old fashioned way, word of mouth from a kid on a bus back in 1999. Back then the internet was still a monotonous beast, but with crappy search engines and metasearch engines - good ol Hotbot - and it tied up my phone line. I'm not even sure what kind of gameing sites were around then. If EQ waited 4 more years to release, everyone would be playing EQ and in 4 more years WOW would be suffering the same fate as every other MMO since then. I'll bet the majority of people playing WOW had never heard of EQ back in the late 90's. Even if they did, you have to understand that playing EQ back then meant also adding a new phone line or if you were lucky, testing out early broadband.
We have gone from a death penalty that meant something to one that means nothing. In SWtOR I dont think you have a penalty and can rez near by or back at a base (as often as you want I think). Every player can rez someone out of combat. For me that makes death of no consequence. Solo RPG'S were the seed that planted the idea of a MMO in game designers minds, now we are heading back, giving MMO's the death penalty of a solo RPG, i.e. none.
For me only certain classes should be able to rez, you should get a xp penalty that you can recover with play and a not too severe but stackable debuff. The old death penalty was too harsh, the modern death penalty is non exsistant.
I tried EQ and UO in the same week. Having been a long time Ultima player on Apple II I loaded UO up first. I still clearlly remember logging into UO. It had a lot of that familiar feel except for truely horrendous amounts of lag. I walked around for maybe 2 hours. I got bored. I recall the people being rather nasty and rude. Couple of days later I booted Everquest-- within moments my jaw litterally dropped. I honestly got choked up and tears in my eyes.
It was amazing. So, so much more then anything I had ever seen or even expected to see at that time. It started the genre. No doubts of that for me.
I lost UO disk. I never logged in again. I played EQ for 5-6 years. Met and married a long time group mate. It was a dream that continues to shine and is the comparison I judge all games by to this day. Played many, many other MMOS since then and even while still playing EQ. EQ is the source of magic. It just needs a modern repolish it will capture the genre again.
I'm only waiting for that day to log in again. The tears will be there I am sure!
Great post.
EQ introduced a number of us to MMOs, and everything else paled in comparison.
Fuck Owen play, and fuck FFA PVP. It appeals to a very minute segment of MMO gamers, and even before they went mainstream with WOW, EQ was towering above all.
I wish they would relaunch EQ, and make it with a lot less brutal of systems. "Grind" is not challenge, it is simply a time sink. Which is one thing EQ had plenty of, to go with a metric shit ton of PVE content.
To me, it seems rather ignorant to place anything above the importance of PVE content. That is the meat and potatoes of MMOs....everything else is simply side dishes. Throw in the choice of PVP for desert, and you got a pretty damn good meal.
Asking Devs to make AAA sandbox titles is like trying to get fine dining on a McDonalds dollar menu budget.
This was a great article. It provides background info that I never knew about EQ. It reminds me about an article I read about DAOC's development and launch on another site.
I bet most of these early MMORPGs have great stories to tell about how they came to be. I agree with other posts, if more articles like this are written about other earlier games -- UO, DAOC, AC, I'd really enjoy reading about them -- even if I didn't spend time in the game. I'm not sure recent games' development and launches can match the stories these older games can tell. While the goal of these earier games was still to make money, it was also gamers making games and developing great ideas, not just money-making scams. Today its about business models and stuffed shirts in corporate sucking the souls out of games.
(I never got an opportunity to play EQ. I bought the game but my poor internet connection at the time couldn't handle it.... after days of trying to connect and reconnect with just minutes of game time in between, I gave up. I'm sure this article meant more to you if you spent a lot of time in EQ, but I can tell you that it was a fun read even though I didn't play it.)
My first character became my main for the rest of my time in EQ (several years). In fact it is my user name on mmorpg.com
, and I have used it in several MMO's since.
No game since has given me the same challenge and thrill. The server community was like a family.
I recently subbed for a free trial and went to BB for old time's sake..those nasty Gnolls were still there making trouble - thank goodness I remembered not to go into the hollow tree =D
No way did EQ 'hurt the genre', this website would not exsist if it had not broken new ground and been a huge success.
Actually -- I don't know...
Lets say Everquest never existed...
In the early days of MMORPGs it would have been Asheron's Call vs Ultima Online.
Yes some themepark might have come along, but something tells me without Everquest (no matter how good and addictive a game it was) there would have been far more sandboxes made.
DAOC would certainly have been different and a lot more innovative.
Sometimes removing a good thing from the tapestry of time can end up improving things overall. And sometimes some of the worst possibilities could have been necessary... IE sometimes you need one thing to cause another thing and that second thing is really bad but the first thing may have been the best at the time. But without the former you have a much better latter.
I think you are wrong. EverQuest's success hinged upon two things 1) it was 3D and 2) it was simple. A lot of Ultima's lack of success beyond EQ's was simply that it was very daunting to get into, for instance until Reinassance it didn't come with a new player manual, or experience. Asheron's Call again, was a great idea, but possibly too complex to take into the mainstream. With Ultima, which reached 250,000 subs, and Asheron's Call which was about the same, the genre probably wouldn't have developed into the levels of popularity we see now, and may have been an oddity of the late 90's, rather than the massive industry pusher it is now. Would that have created more innovative, sandbox worlds? Possibly, but would it have given the genre the space to develop any further beyond two slightly succesful titles? Maybe not.
What you are saying is a little like, if Ultima Online didn't come out, Meridian 59 and Never Winter Nights Online would have directed the genre - it doesn't really come into contention because without UO, without EQ, without WoW, we wouldn't see the type of money rolled into making new games.
"In 1999, I was just 8 years old."
This statement made me feel old
I've never played an MMO that was as enjoyable as EQ back before Sony screwed it up. Its the only MMO that made me feel like part of a world and not like a character in a game.
I wish more games these days made your choice of race affect how you would play your class like EQ did. There seems to be this belief in modern MMOs these days that all player races have to be equal in most every way or that their advantages/disadvantages can't be significant. I loved my chainmail tank Iksar ShadowKnight.