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What was so great about Everquest?
Ankor
Member Posts: 258
This is the one MMO I have never palyed, yet it is considred to be one of those Hall of Fame games the revolutionized the field.
I get the greatness of World of Warcraft and EVE Online. I understand how Ultima Online was like the founding father of MMORPGs....and can see why games like Guild WArs, Runescape and other free to play games have multi million subs currently. I even understand why Lord of the Rings keeps on trucking as a wonderful PvE/RP game and how Anarchy Online was ground breaking for numerous reasons. For me personally, SWG pre-nge was the best MMO I have ever played (as well as those listed above).
But I never got hooked on the Evercrack that folk tell me about.
For me a game must have superior music and sound, non-instanced player housing, PvP (the more open the better), both a casual gamers and hardcore gamer appeal, decent graphics and a player base.
What exactly was Evercrack? Was it that this game simply had no competition and was groundbreaking in every catagory....but during a time when there was no real competition?
Comments
Everquest was a world rather than a theme-park. The game thrived due to it's playerbase having control. There was no Auction House, rather people used a main City or a tunnel in a close by zone for trading.
There was no "gather 6 pelts" or "gather 4 snake fingers" type quests. And unless you picked a certain few classes soloing was very difficult after the lower levels. This promoted group play and social interaction, and gave people a choice as to what they wanted to do in the game.
What made Everquest so special for most of us was that it gave us the option to do what we wanted to in the game and didn't force us one direction or the other. It promoted Social play and that is the benefit of playing an MMORPG over a single player game, whether some people like to agree or not.
By the time you reached max level ( it took me over a year for my first toon, which sounds long, but the game was so fun and immersive you didn't even notice ) you had made hundreds of friends and usually found a decent guild of people or one you strived to join. End game guilds took on new players and gave them the benefit of the doubt, rather than just checking their gear and dismissing them. The guilds had high confidence that if you attained maximum level in a game like this, you had a good knowledge of how to play and interact with other people and how to control your class in a co-op setting.
Everquest will never be re-created again. It's not economically sound. The mass market of MMORPG players now days ( brought in by WoW ) are not interested in an Immersive world but are instead interested in a single player game with other people around them so that they can flex their Epeen and feel special. They do not enjoy a game like Everquest because they do not want to be immersed into a game world and/or social environment. This does not promote investors to re-create a game like Everquest because that's just not where the money is.
If something like Everquest ever came along again, it would only have a fraction of what WoW has in terms of subscribers sadly to say. It's an unfortunate devolution and it can't be fixed now.
That pretty much somes up your own question...
I started playing Everquest about 6 months after it came out and was my first MMO so it will always have a place in my heart. For me what made the game so great was the people that played it. I think your reputation meant more (not sure about now) . There was nothing really great about the game just was fun to play and there was always someone to talk too. I still stay in contact with people that i met through the game and lived in the same city. Havent had as much fun with a game since.
troll post, at least make it less evident then 'was it because it was a time of no competition'. With that statement you have already indicated your intentions.
Everquest wasn't great, but it was good- and had a big part in inspiring WoW. (some of the people behind WoW played EQ- unfortunately transferring the detestable raiding over as well)
Yup, the communtiy made it great...much like it did in SWG.
Huge, well designed world
Many, varied classes
Many, varied races
Decent world lore
Decent coding (not so buggy like vg)
Good combat system
Everquest was great until it became Expansionquest (god, there was loads of them) and Sony wrecked the game with Plane of Knowledge, the Bazaar and those XP-by-the-truckloads mini-instances in Darkhollow. Still, this is Sony we're talking about. They could always snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
Nothing was so great about Everquest. People wear rose-colored glasses, and it was the first game for a lot of folks.
In reality, it was a grind-fest that took everything that was great about the virtual world aspects of these games and dumbed them down into a stats-driven treadmill that WoW and every other theme park game ever made has copied.
You didn't miss a thing by not playing EQ, as large bits of it are still around today in just about every game on the market.
To be honest you had to be there in 1999 to really understand , wasnt only the gameplay and dungeons to me it was that everquest was a new kind of gaming called mmorpg's with online folks in it and that was new .
The bonds peoples created in everquests because it was like the only 3D mmo at the time , besides AC also .
the commuity was top notch were grouping not soloing was the main essence of the game guilds helped each others and players were happy to buff new players at freeport gates little things like that .
yes it's mostly nostalgic i have to agree but then again i remember wearing my yellow canary robe as a erudin enchanter not knowing what happening and who are alll these players that my friend is something i wont forget .
today mmorpg's players are totally a new generation and so has the way mmo's are played and made more casual more solo and alot of loot and being on top of your game .
Do i miss it , kinda would i go back never , most players now simply wont put the time and effort to do what we did in everquest.
Nowadays there simply too many choices in mmo's to stay in a game 5 years like i did .and choices is not a bad thing after all .
Why alot of players still love everquest was it is one of the few games where the PvE was so challenging you didn't miss the challenge of PvP. Pre-Velious, bad players didnt get to 50-55, because they died to much, the game was hard, the raids were hard, some mobs like in the plane of Air would just instantly kill the first person to aggro them. IMHO Everquest was the only PvE game that could call itself Hardcore.
It was the last game I played that gave you a challenge while leveling which I feel created community. The ride to end game was just as important as the end game. The games today seem all about how quick you can get to end game with the least amount of effort which I feel hurts community. (instant gratification) That about sums it up for me. The only other two games I found that created community like EQ was UO and SWG with the edge going to SWG.
1. Substantial consequences for failure. (i.e., corpse retrieval, experience loss for dying)
2. Rewards were hard-earned.
3. Combat pace allowed for time to type (and talk) during and in-between fights.
4. Hidden surprises in zones (i.e., hidden quests, hidden caves, sewer tunnels, etc...) added mystery to game.
5. Wonderful and simple musical tunes for background.
6. Freedom to wander in world without being compelled or forced to follow some quest line or sit as a captive audience through some trite cutscene drama.
7. Myriad of things to do (farm for material, gold, craft, gain experience, explore).
8. Exploration was unaided by radar map and therefore seemed more immersive.
9. First person view gave feeling you were looking through your character's eyes.
10. Encumbrance (gear had weight and you could only carry so much) felt realistic.
11. Day/Night cycles were frequent enough to add atmosphere to game world.
12. Boat travel gave world a sense of scale and geography.
13. Well-designed zones.
14. City factions that could be raised or lowered due to character interaction with the environment.
15. Beautiful (but incomplete) map was your informal guide to decide where you wanted to go and what you wanted to explore.
16. Soloing difficult and risky, but possible. Groups were needed to better ensure surival, so "needing" others certainly built community.
17. No instances (initially). Dungeons were public dungeons.
18. TRAINS (i.e. aggroing monsters could peel off and attack others) kept players on their toes and added some humor and drama to gameplay.
19. Good zone-wide chat system.
20. Basic design was a "world", not a "themepark", and gameplay was open-ended rather than "herded."
While EQ is long in the tooth, the above elements are timeless in my opinion and could be well-adapted to future MMO's. Hoping FF XIV gets it right if no Everquest 3 comes out.
Like others have said before this, you really had to be there in 1999 and open up the box and install it on your computer at the time. There was so little to compare it to - Everquest boldly went where only one game had gone before (Ultima Online) but did it with a bigger vision (tm).
The game was ambitious. Obscenely ambitious. There were the good, the bad, and the neutral races and classes. There was the sense of desperation for a player as they grubbed for every hard earned coin they could get when they first started off. There was also the sense of ever present danger if you aggro'd a mob you hadn't intended to set off... and as other said, solo'ing was a true fine art that required preperation and practice.
People had to care about their In Game reputation as a player when they interacted with other players. If you wanted to reach endgame and see the cool stuff, you had to be PATIENT, SKILLED, and NOT be an ass. I think the most crazy thing about the game is that the developers had their own sense of how the game would be played, which in turn provoked amazement when they saw how players chose to play it.
Pulling mobs out of groups hadn't been considered by the staff. Crowd control spells were initially a niche afterthought, not created with the idea of shutting down key monsters when a pack was pulled. The idea of "the cloth caster should do the most damage in the game because they wear cloth " versus the thought of " lightly armored melee dps should do the most damage since they are flimsy and are required to be put in the spot of greatest risk ".... The development team hadn't considered any of it on launch.
I could go on but I think the simplest, easiest way to state why Everquest is so great is because World of Warcraft copied it SOOOOO closely with their design. As did Dark age of Camelot, etc. It all comes back to this one game, and you had to be there for it when it happened to understand it.
It was the second MMO I had ever tried. The community was great, but to highlight SOME of the things that I liked about EQ:
I know a lot of these features exist in other games, but this is about these features all existing in one game, that I very much enjoyed, even after other MMOs came out. I played EQ tor almost 5 years, as I recall.
Basically its a nostalgia thing, for many older gamers EQ was their first true mmo
It's more than nostalgia. There are some things in EQ I woud leave behind, such as crappy graphics, clunkly interface, lop-sided class designs. And some things that SHOULD be brought into newer MMO's, such as harsh death penalty, only few classes can hearth, TRAINS, non-instanced public dungeons, faction that matters, hard-earned rewards, and the list goes on.
EQ is no longer a success because it is long in the tooth. WOW is a success ONLY because it is so well polished.
But WOW in its heyday was a nothing game compared to EQ in its prime.
(And no, Vanguard is not EQ3; Vanguard doesn't hold a candle to early EQ.)
Then my question is why not go back and play?
Then my question is why not go back and play?
Most players won't go back post-lucelin. Pre-velious was the glory days of EQ, similar to how most UO players won't go back with trammel/felucia.
FOr those that couldn't experience it. Imagine WOW except all the classes had a 10th of the abilities. Imagine you had to group up constantly to get any exp. Imagine you had to sit down after almost every fight for minutes at a time to recharge. Imagine spending lots of time after each death going after your corpse naked. You lost EXP as well. Imagine a really lousy UI and generally bad control. Imagine very, very few quests. Imagine graphics circa 1998. Imagine sitting in 1 spot for hours pulling the same spawn of mobs overt and over again for days. Then you'd move on to the next spot that offered the best EXP per hour. Imagine if other players could run right through your group with a while bunch of mobs on their tail. Then all those mobs would attack YOUR group, most likely killing everyone, causing those fantastic naked corse runs, EXP loss and many hours of frustration. Those were called TRAINS and they sucked. YOU could do NOTHING to stop people from doing this.
Now imagine a dungeon in WOW, but you're sharing it with everyone, so in order to kill anything you had to stake a claim to certain spots. You then had to wait in line to kill the boss which sometimes could take days since the spawn timer was in hours. People would rotate in and out. NO JOKE. Imagien the boss required little to no strategy. Imagine early WOW bosses but even less scripting and raids of 80 people instead of 40. Imagine one person could just jump right in and screw up the entire raid unpurpose. Imagine waiting 20 minutes to travel some place, then you had to sit on the boat while it sloooooooooooooowly traveled to where you wanted to go. If you were impatient on a flight in WOW, that had NOTHING on EQ's boats. Imagine no AH. To sell or buy anything you had to just go to a certain part of the city and yell in a channel. This could take hours.
Of course if EQ was your first MMO, you didn't know there was any other way that everything could be done. Well, besides UO or AC, but they weren't any better. Theres a MAJOR reason MMOs now don't play like EQ did. Its because EQ played like ^$%#&, was very frustrating, unforgiving and required amazing amounts of time(single sitting) glued to the computer.
I won't deny the community that formed was excellent. Everyone playing was bascially the same stereotype, Nerdy, D&D background, geeky. People generally got along. It was a great way for anti social people in real life to be social and DIFFERENT in a game. You could be yourself in a way for the first time.
EQ was great because it was first major MMO that blew the doors off. But that greatness was due to it being first. That style of play just doesn't translate in a sea of competition. It worked when people just didn't know any better. It WAS great. It isn't great now. People just need to keep it in perspective. Its a classic, but it should remain in memory. It just doesn't hold up today or even 4 or 5 years ago. Its just old.
For those that played, they'll have great and bad memories, but just don't let them become rose colored. And if you didn't play, dont' beleive for a second that you'd enjoy it now. It would be like going back and driving a flinstones car;) Its like going back and playing Doom. Its better left as a memory.
Pretty simple if you think about it. It was the first of its kind, that's why it was great. I personally hated the damn game, not my style, ranked it up as one of the worst MMOs I've ever played, but again it wasn't my thing. I liked UO but I will recognize EQ being a pioneer in what every single theme park MMO has tried to duplicate with new ideas every since then.
Pretty much describe the whole game, I really enjoyed everquest because it was more of a close knit community then people trying to be the wealthiest player or who could level the quickest. People played at there own pace no one tried to knock a player for not having the right gear or playing time.
Guilds tried to help the low lvl characters out assisting them in quests which where more involved then they are today good gear could be obtained from these quests or from raids.
The world was vast and took time to explore everything because if you where not a certain lvl or travel spell you would not be able to reach it with just a quick run thru the park.
Not even EQ2 has taken the place of EQ but with the development of newer MMO's people moved on to experience what we try to say is the new improved genre of MMO gaming but i have yet to come across that perfect one. WoW was good just for there concept but the community for me was its biggest downfall unlike alot of other MMO's.
I would not tell anyone to play it now due to the simple fact if you have played any newer MMO's you will scream how bad it is this being the first major game with that type of detail I think after that came DAoC which gave everyone a taste of what RvR would be like these games had a different play style then what is out now.
It definatly wasnt a theme park initially the 1999 launch of EQ was a serious attempt at a fantasy world with at the time amazing value graphics in comparison to UO and so on. It had for example a starter area for every single race with its own initial enemies and so on. If you created a dark elf you had a 3 zone city to begin in and a dark forest and would really only meet other dark elves initially ..somethng akin to vanguard today. (and in many other ways) The attention to detail in EQs world lore was pretty high making Norrath an enduring memory for anyone who began EQ early on.
EQ was a very social MMO you literally MUST make friends to progress even if your friends are also asshats like you or nice people like you, you need them badly to get but this meant it became a necessity to have guilds and so on not just an add on.
It isnt true to say it was a theme park MMO as someone above mentioned it is the forerunner for WoW in every respect combat wise but what WoW did was produce very careful theme park streamlined areas one after the other where you conveyor belt a long a series of crippling obvious quests a baboon could work out..and if not the big X or whatever on the map worked it out for you. Quests in EQ were often hard you needed help and to disocvered them before anyone else was a real possibility as they were often hidden entirely even parts required a voice trigger and you to READ what was being said.
EQ definatly went bad in the long run but this is the same in every game ever since how do you develop any game that will last people a lifetime to play without grinds and new tiers and so on ..this is the golden ticket every dev is looking for ..in the end the average duration of an EQ sub i imagine is what made it epic...mine was about 3 years I think.
EQ was like being repetadly punched in the balls.
But it was GREAT !!
The game was major harsh .. Death was harsh. Travel was harsh. Trading was harsh. Faction grinds were harsh. Quests were harsh ... are you getting the picture now? HARSH.
I burnt a majority of my freetime for 4 years playing that game. Lets put in in perspective ... Me and the wife once sat at a single mob camp (OOT AC) for near 50 hours to get two AC rings (used in the Jboots quest) We set aside a weekend for it ... from friday night until sometime sunday afternoon we were there (in shifts thankfully) ... I just could'ent do sh1t like that anymore lol.
Game was harsh .. but it was good times. Mostly because of the community and depth of the game. There will never be another EQ.
But you could'ent PAY ME to play it again lol.
It was a "world" not just a game.
That's why it was so great.
I saw this the other day and thought it was interesting:
At the Syndicate World Conference, SOE President John Smedley told the story of the first 11 minutes of EverQuest in 1999. EQ had 10,000 concurrent users online in the first 10 minutes (a gargantuan number for 1999, mind you), and all went smoothly until minute eleven, when everything crashed due to an overage in bandwidth demands. That the provider had sold a dedicated T1 line to SOE and 4 other businesses in the San Diego area despite only having one actual pipeline was only part of the reason. It turns out that all the work SOE had done to optimize bandwidth had worked except for one important thing - someone had forgotten to do the bits & bytes conversion, meaning that EQ was using an order of magnitude more bandwidth than was needed.
The Old Timers Guild
Laid back, not so serious, no drama.
All about the fun!
www.oldtimersguild.com
An opinion should be the result of thought, not a substitute for it. - Jef Mallett