f13.net

And I'm sure a lot of you were there too.

I look at AoC, WAR, and all the other fancy, complicated ... failures. It was so much simpler then and what an impact it had.

Everquest was the first time I really felt like I was in a 3D world. M59 just didn't do it for me. I remember the first time I looked up at the teleport spires, Kelethin in the trees, a sand giant, "Train to Zone!!", falling off Kelethion and died, getting an aggro beeline from Kizdean Gix or that goddamn elephant Cracktusk, etc.

It isn't the same now (and unfortunately no EQClassic server would ever really recapture what it was back then), but Happy Anniversary anyhow to make it this far.

Edit: Nostalgia sometimes belongs on the front page  :awesome_for_real:
http://everquest.station.sony.com/eq10th/
http://www.massively.com/photos/eq-10th-anniversary/

EQ was more complicated than quantum physics. I'm not sure what you're talking about.

I meant in a relative way. It was just easier to have fun since the entire genre was new to everyone in 3D. Progress and evolving are inevitable, the leaps in 10 years are just so large in many ways, and yet in other ways the pure fun has become more elusive - probably due to the gamers themselves becomgin more used to things, younger demo, etc.

This video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZCMcJ7yOww) has some interesting popup info, such as "There are over 3,000 items in EQ zones somewhere that no one has ever found."

I wasn't into massive online gaming at EQ's launch, but it hooked me about three years after launch.  Hard to believe it's been that long. 

It's a good thing I wasn't in school when EQ was released otherwise I wouldn't have graduated.

This. A lot.  :grin:

EQ was a very complicated MMO. It created a lot of the UI conventions, so was trying to be stable, playable, AND train up players on how to play both socially and mechanically, all while having no real parallel. AC1 was as different from EQ as EQ was from UO as from AC1.

Nowadays you can expect hotkeys, !, ?, task list management, mail boxes, bank boxes, probably an auction house or at least an established trade channel, 3D graphics and probably some form of mass transit. EQ1 had none of these. Heck, it was easier to get around UOs world, and that game predated EQ1.

It was only "easier" for the same reason "WoW" is easier: at any given time you can expect the vast majority of players in the genre to have played it. So you at least had a common frame of reference.

I miss the new-ness of it, and most notably the feeling of safety I got whenever I heard the Felwithe approach music. Oh, and asking for a teleport from Felwithe to Kelethin  :awesome_for_real: Shit was new then. Nowadays I just look around for the sameness first and then try and eke out whatever is different second.

Sadly I was in high school at the time. I remember more facts/memories/people from UO and EQ than I do my junior and high school. Staying up till 4am doing corpse runs in fear then going to school at 7am... Winner.

Hail fellow catasses! :awesome_for_real:

Wait, you mean you got three hours of sleep? Lucky bastard.  :oh_i_see:

Just one more bubble.. just one more bubble.. just one more bubble..

I remember playing EQ 10 years ago and feeling two things:

1) Awe while looking up at the gates of Felwithe with my high elf paladin.  Ok, I was in awe when I wasn't dying to my trainer and the PoD because I accidentally autoattacked them instead of hailing them.

2) Thinking that MUDs would never be the same after this.  This made me sad after all the days I had spent in MUDs. 

Now that I think of it, there was a third:  Feeling that I was getting to be too old to be playing computer games.  That was 10 years ago... fuck!

Even though its mechanics wouldn't be acceptable today, its pretty hard to deny the sense of wonder we all had first logging in.  I can still remember seeing the dwarf city from the outside for the first time, leaving Felwithe for the first time, and the fun of running around West Karana.  The swamp outside the troll starting city was vast and unexplored, the sand giants and rarely spawning mummies would instagib you, and when you killed Lockjaw at the Oasis docks it felt good. 

UO was revolutionary in its own right, but in terms of 3D visual splendor and finally capturing that feeling of stepping into a world of magic, something us geeks have wanted to do for so long- EQ was the first to nail it.   

I never played EQ, but I was playying MUDs at the time and kept hearing a lot about it through players who went over. I dunno why, but nothing I heard in that way ever tempted me to try it.

I guess it did kill many MUDs in the end, though.

Thank god for EQ1. Or I would've been a catass.

I was putting in major time in UO, roleplaying and shh maybe a little pking in roleplaying clothing....Then EQ came out, got into the beta and made some friends. Hit retail and we knew all the good spots, was in one of two dominant proto-guilds on the server...and we both hit Cazic and rubicite at the same time. Politics, backstabbing, kill-stealing, ninja-looting. Completely broke my 'hardcore' ways, sold off my account.

Went back with Kunark, but never gave a shit about the 'right' way to play mmo, and formed most of my still-held beliefs about the genre.

Some definite great moments, soloing nameds in Guk was probably my favorite. Or hanging out with my rl buddy with our necro/wizard team and his little groupie/girlfriend/whatever Drood who followed us around all the time. Met some nice people who mostly turned into assholes over video game loot. Grow the fuck up.

So....yeah. EQ2 is so much better than the old days.

No doubt.  10 years of shitty database design.   :rimshot:

More like fucked up loot tables, which has been an EQ-tradition since the beginning. I quit EQ for a while after launch cause the runes needed for my Magician to craft new spells just weren't dropping. Came back later when Kunark was released.

Those loot tables were fun, weren't they? Ah Phinny, how I loved you.

I started EQ several months before Kunark. Until then, I was a MUD players. Predominantly sci-fi MUDs. One day on Mudconnect.com I was looking at their small list of "graphical MUDs" and I came across a screenshot of EQ. My eyes lit up. The deep RPG world of a text MUD in 3d!? Holy shit! I thought it was probably really tiny and shitty but I wanted to give it a shot anyhow.

What a great game in it's time. Well, maybe not a great game, but a great world. Such a sense of realness. This was a full fledged fantasy WORLD crafted for escape from the real one. It was amazing. My first character was a barbarian, but I rerolled to a Dwarf warrior before leaving town. With the dwarf, I walked up to a guard and pressed 'a' and quickly found myself out in Butcher Block mountains after respawning. I ran around and killed things for a couple hours, and I was hooked for the next couple years.

Best memory: Discord Server, the temporary hardcore PvP server with death that loses all your gear and drops you to level 1. Not many people were used to taking the OoT boat by this point in EQ because most folks teleported, but on discord, no one was high enough to do that, so traffic on the Butcherblock to Freeport and vice versa routes was pretty heavy. As it turns out, magic casting classes have a good advantage at low level PvP so there was a good deal of them, but because of how the boat was coded way back in 1998, magic cannot be cast on the boat. Physical skills, however, can.

I rolled a dwarf rogue named LongJohnSilvers and proceeded to roleplay a pirate on the boat, hiding in the hull, then running up on deck and fucking up any mages on board. Most of them were forced to jump overboard and sit in the ocean until the next boat came by. YARRRR!

Felwithe was the first music I heard. Man, Jay Barbeau made some really great tunes for EQ. Pretty much everything you heard and remember from the game was created by him.

I'd rest between two of the Kelethin lifts eating a snack, in a good position to watch my early favorite Stupid Player Tricks: people falling like clockwork about once every minute from Kelethin and splatting, and people hitting getting nailed by the PoD for pressing 'A' without being in chat mode.

It was a PvE game with the fear of a PvP game in a lot of ways; travel time was literally like cross-country times, dying hurt and you really tried to avoid it no matter where you went, and there were some crazy trains the likes of which I haven't seen since.

Crushbone, Runneye, Blackburrow were the early ones. CB you could usually avoid or run out in time, but friggin' Blackburrow could get so dense with mobs you thoguht you were looking at a puppy with 40 arms and legs.  The best trains there were when someone would run around screaming and trying to escape the masses up top, only to fall into the pit.

Unrest, oh God, the damn trains from the house! Just hug the wall when you saw it coming best you could. If you saw a hag coming, you knew it was a deep one.

Mistmoore from the castle was also pretty damn impressive. If you got any of the castle vamps to come, chances were you also pulled about 20 other metal-clad guards and some gargs. The graveyard or the far side of the front pool area was about the only safe bet, if the mobs there were cleared.

Paw wasn't too bad unless you went in deep, and then it was so full of doors, narrow walkways over pits and such that you usually didn't make it far when you did pull a big train unless your group(s) were strong enoguh to stand and take it on.

Lower Guk. Train Palace. "TRAIN TO DEAD SIDE!!" If you were anywhere near the bedroom or the hallway leading to it, you tried to get the hell into the water, that side hall near the zoneline (and hope its first few static spawns were cleared) or zone and hope that some idiot didn't also have an Upper Guk train waiting for you. If they did you almost never survived the loading ping pong trying to avoid trains on both sides. I died more than a few times there, often ending up laying in that fire urn for some reason. A really impressive train would have the Hand, ArchMagi or Frenzied and the Lord of some of his guards all in one. If you stopped to look behind you, it would be all over.

SolB. Lava Duct Crawlers and kobolds. Get lost in there, run into one, then run from it and run into 2-3 more, trains were self-making in that maze if you got nervous and ran. I'd always look for that damn guillotine thing as the reference point when I got lost.


Edit: I know some people don't like this sort of hard-edged PvE, but I miss it.

I played from Launch +3 days up until a few weeks ago. The thing that struck me (and still does) is how fecking big the world 'seems'. I think it has to do with the 1st person perspective they used. It tends to be deceiving as to the actual world size. I know there are still places in the old world I've never seen or experienced but hopefully through EQEmu, I'll get to see them at some point. I almost cried when I fired that thing up and saw the old Freeport for the first time in years. It was like coming home again.

There is no way I would dedicate the time I used to in EQ1 today.  Its easier today then it was that long ago but its still largely a time sink game.  I actually opened my account about 2 months ago and played my enchanter a bit but couldnt break back into the game. 

I might have to buy that book. Sounds neat.

God, now that's a TRAIN! I'd love to see the expression on the typical WoW player's face if they looked over their shoulder and saw that the entire zone was bearing down on them and there was no way they were making it to the guards in time!  :drill: EQ mobs never gave up and never surrendered. And I swear that one bastard Iksar monk out near Karnor's Castle always knew when my druid was medding and would sneak up behind me and beat the shit out of me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKj36GJj_i8

Nobody should be reading this thread without that playing in the background.



I wonder if new-to-MMOGs WoW players ever get the feeling of danger EQ was able to generate despite being pve only.

Really, once you understood it, this is no different to some console button masher with quicktime events (though it seems more satisfying to have them triggered by other idiots in zone), or any other sequence where something as to be avoided rather than killed. Somehow this type of risk seems to have become unacceptable in pve mmogs.



But don't get me wrong, corpse runs can suck my balls.

If a WoW player got that "sense of danger" they'd call the game crap and quit. Rightfully so.

I played EQ from release to about 4 years in (GoD expansion, which was an unspeakable mess). I was one of the eeeevvvilllle dark elves, a shadowknight. I still have a soft spot for Neriak. The soothing darkness of the forest and our feckless guards wandering around all over. I also still have a virulent burning hatred for asslings (halflings) to this day, mostly from the experiences in our forest and, later, from the sort of players that gravitated to assling druids.

I pulled the plug when the dev team seemed to be going backwards around the time GoD was released. What a disaster. Abashi's post on the shape of SKs at that point just made it easy to cancel (fucker never did have a clue) and I"ve never been back. No desire to, either. What was ironic was the sister console game of EQOA had SKs going in a totally different--and much better-- direction. I simply couldn't believe the shit they were doing in EQ at the same time. Left hand? The right hand never knew it was there.

I tried EQ2, but the magic wasn't there. Of course, this was at release. The game was a nightmare then. I've tried twice since then, but always come back to WoW. Just too much time in WoW and too diffcult to relearn and catch up in EQ2.

I rolled up a DE Necro on the Zek PvP server a week or so ago and remembered why DEs are so nasty and evil. You try navigating that fucking city as a newb.

Personally I never felt EQ's avoidable deaths to trains and similar were a problem.

The idiotic consequences of death were another matter.

I liked the risk of EQ.  Where I think the game fell down was that it lacked a wide range of risk/reward.  All dungeon crawls were high risk regardless of reward. 

If a game today had a dungeon where you could risk losing all of your stuff in order to have access to some pretty nice gear, I'd be willing to risk it with a good group.  The excitment of knowing you could lose it all kept you on top of your game.  The only bad thing is that this would strongly discourage pugs.  I'd never risk it all unless I knew who I was going in there with and knew that they had a solid internet connection.

Some of my best memories in EQ were helping people with corpse recoveries.  Now that I have a life, it may not be as much fun anymore.

My first memories of EQ-

Wow- it is 3d!

Wow- is it ever DARK at night!

Wow- look at that guy casting a spell at night! (coming from UO, this was truly wondrous)

Fuck, it is really dark and I can't find my way back to town.

Fuck, a lion just killed me, and now i can't find my way back to my corpse.

Fuck this, I am rerolling a character with infravision.


Other (later) memories-

Breezing people @ Oasis docks for tips
Running from Sand Giants and banshees
Seeing the Butcherblock chess board for the first time
Seeing Kelethin for the first time
Watching my buddy lead a giant train from Orc hill back to the lift @ Kelethin (god I was laughing hard)
Physically jumping and yelping when running through the forest and having a giant spider spawn/appear right in front of me
Crushbone trains
Getting murdered by the guards outside at the dock in Kunark and having to get a GM to move my body to somewhere recoverable
Saving my party's ass time and again with 1337 mez skilz

My first memories of EQ are magical too. It truly was a different type of game. Sure all mechanics were diku to the core but the 3d world felt alive. Eventually I burned out a bit after Kunark released, and sold my characters for over five thousand dollars. Abashi was my quit trigger too. I hated that fucking guy.

Abashi or Absor?  Shrike references Absor at a time that Abashi (he's the sock puppet.) had moved on and Absor was in his place.  Hard to keep track of all the "A" names, I know.  Abashi, Absor, Aradune...

Halflings were the origin of my burning hatred for gnomes.  Fuck gnomes.

My memories are of sitting in places for long periods of time, waiting on mana to regen.. or mobs to respawn... or mana to regen.. or a group spot to open.  Lots of waiting.  Lots and lots and lots of waiting.

Yeah. No nostalgia here.

I had a lot of fun when I was playing with some local friends and we'd go dungeon romping and the like.  But god there was so much bullshit - room lists in HHK, the oh shit I have no light and can't see so let me crank the contrast on my monitor all the way so I don't run into a mob and die.   The numerous failed attempts of trying to make the run from Freeport to Qeynos.   

I really really enjoyed the stupid game, but god was there a lot wrong with it.

Not hard for me. It was definitely Abashi. Worst community manager ever. I think I would have done a better job.

Rallos Zek, back in the pre-mid-2000 era, was good times.  Me and my younger brother each created level five naked high elf wizards.  Since pvp on Rallos was -4 levels, we could kill level 1s.  We probably spent nine months or so where 90% of our MMO time was just spent killing level 1s and 2s outside the gates of Felwithe (my brother's character in particular was fairly notorious).  Then, Mr. No-fun Mcquaid limited Rallos pvp to level 10 and above.   :cry:

I could look but I imagine someone knows: wasn't there some poll for a new server done recently? What was the outcome? Is there a new server coming and if so is there any special ruleset attached or is it just a blank slate with no transfers?

Damn, I've been clean for years now, and I still got goosebumps hearing the Everquest title music.

I am still in love with the experience I had back then, the sense of wonder never recreated in another MMOG since. But lets face it, nobody would stand for the design flaws anymore. Corpse Runs until three in the morning to not lose your equipment for good? The Plane of Air which you couldn't leave for a few days after you started the raid, jumping form Isle to Isle and never daring to be miss an evening because it wouldn' allow a whole raid to press on (If you were one of the people with the keys)? Rare Lore Items that got destroyed when you opened the corpse and tried to loot them a second time, screwing everybody else over? The ability of others to rob you blind when you consented them dragging your corpse? Rogues actually stealing the loot from under the nose of other players with their pickpocket ability?

I still think most of the love is some perverse variant of the Stockholm syndrome.

Forget the music, this (http://media.urbandictionary.com/sound/ding-16691.mp3) still makes my nipples hard.

Woot Ding Congo Rats!

Let's get this out of the way first: I love EQ for what it was. What it was not, however, was a great game. It had it's revolutionary aspects that are indesputible and place all MMOs in it's debt.

It also had a profoundly positive effect on my life - to the point where it is sad.

Things that resulted from me playing EQ like a fiend:
One of the better jobs I have had
A viable career path
A good part of my life for the last 10 years
My girlfriend, hopefully fiancee soon

So, yes, I am an EQ success story. And yes, that is still so very sad. So. Very. Sad.

The above embarassing personal revelations aside, I feel I must piss on the birthday cake with second hand urine. Let us not forget...
EverQuest: A Retrospective Look At Why I’m So Great And This Game Sucks (http://f13.net/index.php?itemid=622)

I played at launch and after learning to rebind my attack key to something other than a, finding some some decent people to play with, and learning to stop flinching when I got the "you are being examined by xxxx" message it was a lot of fun.  Then two weeks after launch I went away on a two week business trip, I came back and all the people I knew from launch had leveled beyond where they could help me in any meaningful way (cash still being super tight) so I ended up soloing most of the time.  After two months trying to solo level a warrior while trying to fit the game in around my job and family and I was done.

I played this game for five years on and off. I was terrible at it. I never got higher than level 52. It has resulted in me making lots of friends, meeting lots of interesting people, etc etc.

Every time I would quit, I always came back.

What is really sad is that my time in WoW has now eclipsed my time in Everquest, if you count the year I was in the beta. WoW has also had a more profound effect on my life at this point.

I cancelled my EQ account multiple times, but there has never been a time when I was not paying for my WoW account, or when I was not on comped time for the account.

Hi, my name is Mr.Bloodworth, and i did not play EQ1

I remember looking over my friend's shoulders to see what was dragging them away from our tabletop RPG and saw some shitty graphics and shit boring gameplay and thought "WTF?"

I tried it years later, and hated every aspect of the game and thought "WTF?"

Now I just take it on faith that there must be something appealing about the game, since people actually paid money to play it.

But I still go "WTF?"

[/threadcrap]

Meh. Glad you all had good memories. My memory of EQ was SOE fucking up billing me (Australian CC, Canadian Address) and not letting me play but charging me twice. I went from UO --> AC-->Modern Times ^TM. This undoubtedly has coloured my view of 'the scene'.

Stealthing through lower guk to get my rogue the mask of the deceiver (permanent DE illusion mask) when everything was deep red, I didn't actually know how to get out, wasn't sure what could see through invis and hadn't been bright enough to leave my gear in the bank. Scary, intense and atmospheric with lots of roaming undead frogs and roaming players. Also joined a good Aussie guild and made it to plane of time (after which the expansions got quite silly and WoW was in development).

The risk, the unknown (impossible now with sites like wowhead being just so complete) and the sheer immersion of being in a 3d persistent world with other people was amazing. Hard to even remember a time when 3d graphics and internet gameplay seemed novel. And the game did have the feeling of geekish intensity / designers who cared and tried to create a world to explore. Same was true for the players I guess, reputations and guild pride mattered (even the idea of a zone you called home) whereas now the skin is off and people know how the machine works and the most convenient ways to beat it. Lots and lots of really daft mechanics though, and SoE seems to somehow convert all its designers into soulless corporate drones.

Happy I played it, love the fact that time has erased my memory of the tedium that made up so much of the gameplay and still despise SoE.

One thing I miss about EQ is just going to a dungeon, shouting "LFG" and going in. No worrying about finding people with the same quest as you, or on the same part of the quest as you. Just go to the place for your level, find other people of roughly the same level, and go fight things. I know it sucked when you couldn't find a group but quests don't help that.

The areas had a lot of character, as others have said. You got to know those dungeons.

Other people running around was cool. I know almost everyone prefers instances. I like having people running around, looking for groups, begging for resses and talking nonsense.

Right when the game started, I wrote an angry nerdy e-mail to Brad McQuaid about my class being nerfed (they nerfed Whirl Till You Hurl, an enchanter spell). He wrote back replying to what I had said in some detail and thanking me for my e-mail.

Yea, I still remember Crossroads of Britannia, getting into a minor debate with one of the UO devs about how to manage the hyperinflation of Trammel, about 10 months after Renaissance launch. Good times.

But yea, nothing captures trepidation better than the first run across Kithicor, the first time at Unrest, the first time you fell off the boat from Freeport to Qeynos.

I'd be curious to see what analogs there are for people whose first MMO was WoW. Aside from maybe falling off the north side of Teldrassil, what constitutes "hazardous" to a newb these days?

I played a Ranger on Test - I started at launch and played a year, then picked it up again right around Kunark for about another year.  I miss the game and the people I played it with to this day - Test was a much smaller community than the other servers and most everyone knew everyone else.  I tried other servers both before and after that, but the community on EQ Test will probably be the high point of the MMO medium for me.

A few more memories that some of these comments brought back:

Getting my Sense Heading up to finally see:
    You have no idea what direction you are facing.
    You have no idea what direction you are facing.
    You have no idea what direction you are facing.
    You have no idea what direction you are facing.
    You have no idea what direction you are facing.
    You think you are heading East.
(back then we didn't know about compasses or dropped daggers facing N; and you were really lost without SH)

Levitating and running 20 feet above all the Aqua Goblins and rocky terrain across the Cauldron to get to the Unrest entrance.

Porting my wizard into Temple of Cazic Thule, getting whaled on by passing lizards, and begging a higher level group to fight into the maze to get my corpse back.

Kiting Hill Giants around with a group since they dropped big bucks (to us at the time).

Finding that little fucker Hasten Bootstrutter when I was weighed down with coppers.

Getting my first decent robe, a Flowing Black Robe, from Najena.

Watching some Enchanter with Illusion: Werewolf tear up Aviak City.

Wondering why West Karana was three times longer than any other sane zone with no town or merchants.

My first Qyenos to Freeport run at lvl 5, died in Runnyeye twice solo until a group was in there and cleared it on my third pass.

Worst chain death ever: in Lower Guk live side, died near King with no friends online, no groups around, no necro. I died 6 times and lost 2 levels that night.

"Fucking brownies! ..."

Haha yeah. Putting Sense Heading on a hotkey was the first thing you did on a new character. Start early enough and by level 10 you might have a 50% chance to know the direction you're going!

The cool thing is by level 10 you probably knew the zones by heart anyway because you weren't spoonfed maps and it was before the popularity of gaming/strat sites. EQ Atlas came along eventually but wasn't there right off the bat.

Note: too many high elves in this thread. "Felwithe this" and "Felwithe that" my ass. Nothing was more disgusting than a high elf pali... Or erudite.

Hitler Plays Everquest (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvGGaUyP-FA)

"I gave up grouping with Eva and Herman to camp that shit."  :why_so_serious:

"Even [with] Fabled, he goes down on pulls like Mussolini on spaghetti."

"And who the fuck cast Illusion: Faerie on me? Do I look like Stalin?"

"Albert rolled on those gloves. They were an upgrade for me. NO DROP - he can't even use them. I'll never get my epic."

Lawl, classic! And not far from truth.

I never fell off Kelethin by accident, but it was my favorite place to train up safe fall with my monk. And try to get newbies to cast a heal on me, I'd feign death right as I landed.

I also loved the lowbie nekkid run from Qeynos to FP. And the FP tunnels, and secret rooms in Felwithe.

Unrest was so much fun when it was just our two rival groups camping it because nobody else was high enough level or knew about it or whatever. There was like a week where we were the only two groups there, competing for mobs (in a good way, not like CT later), slowly working our way through to new camp spots, we originally pulled from the basement to the wall! Binding sight as a wizard on the puller and learning the whole house from the safety of outside. Watching newbie groups begin to show up and wipe constantly, which is when we learned how to camp inside the house.

I was a high elf originally :P (wizard)

I still go back to EQ once in a while. It's still fun. I miss downtime. I miss sitting for 10-15 minutes waiting for the boat. I never got that into it though, and still don't. I missed out on the initial release, but I wish I started playing on launch day. I never stick with it too long, though. Just long enough to have some fun, then when it gets boring I quit and hop onto the next MMO I see.

Yeah, you just can't go back to it and recapture the magic. It was a one-shot deal, just like UO was. It's still ok though.

I went back with members of my old 1999 guild for the progression servers a couple of years ago (starts off as original-world EQ give or take a few zones, and you unlock the expansions via achievements). It was amazing how we slotted back into our old well-oiled group routine, lining up mezzed crocs on Oasis beach and keeping the XP rolling with minimal mana/HP available. We got bored after that, but it was a little taste of the old days.

Things I remember:

* I was senior writer with a PC magazine and one of my colleagues had reviewed EverQuest while I was overseas on holiday. I returned, read his review and bought the game. It was July 1999. I rolled a human monk in Freeport and crossed the sea to meet him in Butcherblock, and night fell as I ran through the zone. And I was amazed it actually got dark, the sounds were spooky and I couldn't see a damn thing, and then his elf came running out of the darkness holding a torch and said "Hail". He never played much further, but he experienced the game through my emails and screenshots for the next 3 years, while I got pale, fat, unfit and alone, because I was so obsessed with EQ.

* Helping start the first major Australian MMOG guild, Southern Legion, on a mailing list called EQOZ (it was before web messageboards). I suggested starting fresh on the newest server and a majority voted yes to my suggestion, so if anyone played on The Tribunal you can blame me for all the Aussies (we were Aurora Noctum later).

* Rerolling as a troll warrior and discovering everyone else was good-aligned and based in Qeynos. So at level 7 I ran there KOS to everything, on a fully spawned server where nobody had even reached level 20, across all these zones, got a bind outside the city walls and the sewers merchant became my lifeline.

* Temporarily rerolling for the start of Vallon Zek (PvP Teams) and charging the humans among an army of evil characters (ADRENALINE!). All of us were slaughtered by a levitating higher-level barbarian shaman, who roleplayed the defence of Freeport in a Scottish accent and made us kneel to get our precious loot back.

* Sights and sounds: The beholders in Runnyeye and Gorge of King Xorbb. Sheer terror. The carved walls of the enormous pass that led to Highpass Hold. Sand Giant coming over a dune as I hunted in Ro. The many parts of Solusek A.

* The opportunity to become incredibly powerful, but still face NPC forces many times more dangerous than you. I think that was why the fear/danger worked. You could become the stuff of legend and strike awe in the newbies, but the forces at work in the world, with which you did battle, were more powerful than the admiring newbie at the East Commonlands tunnel could imagine, and you were still really just an ant (but you showed off your shiny armour and weapons anyway, making the most of your precious loot before it was lost forever on a Plane of Fear misadventure).

* The functioning world - the sun rose and set, things came out at night, politics mattered due to the faction system (NPCs could have spontaneous fights with you and with each other), crowd control was an amazing traffic juggling act against deadly odds, good loot was genuinely rare and genuinely made a difference.

Reading this brings back quite a lot of memories!

I remember when I rolled my first character, a female dark elf necro, I was in that newbie forest that I can't remember the name killing skeletons and stuff. At this time, I got so many people giving me stuff because they though I was a real women it was incredible. This char ended when I lended my account to a friend who went and died and never looted back my corpse, I must have been on a break at the time but I remember coming back and my corpse at vanished.. I remember when I got one of the few Necro robe from Plane of Fear that had ever dropped, Blighted Robe on the Boogey man, I was so proud, even more because I won the roll with something ridiculous.

After that I rolled a Gnome Enchanter that guy kicked ass, I was in love with gnomes! I really loved the aoe stun enchanter had, it was all colorful and you felt really powerful being able to crowd control with all the mezzes etc...

I remember doing Nagafen raids for epic cleric weapon till the earliest hour for our lead cleric, that was awesome. Also after months of questing and hours over hours of camping plane of fear for that bitch mob that would be super rare I finally got my epic wand that casted that haste buff !

Quite a lot of memories, I wasted so many hours on this game it is incredible!

2 favorite memories:

1.) The opening of Stonebrunt Mountains. I ran my lil' druid through the Warrens at break neck speed desperatly trying to find the SBM zone entrance. Was thrilled when I found it (was one of the first on my server to find the route). Spent the next 10-20 levels out there farming cool wicker armor.

2.) One of our guild picnics. I was in charge of supplying the bevies. I got some of it from vendors, and some from raping the kobolds in the Warrens for their booze. Got to the picnic (it was near the Wizard Spires in SRo iirc), everybody got really drunk (one guy drank himself to death and had to be rezzed), one guy ran up the spire, lost control and fell to his death, and our guild leader (druid) had a duel with our top wizard. Hilarity ensued when our illustrious leader was buffing herself and forgot to retarget the wiz and dotted herself to death. :D

EQ was a bitch of a game, but the community has never been matched. We played for the social aspects and ignored the grind because we were with good friends having a helluva time.

Asking Prince Thrineeg in Plane of Growth for "the phat lewts"

I play WoW with a bunch of former EQers. I didn't play EQ with them, but they played EQ together and then migrated to WoW. They play WoW the same way they played EQ, not much attention to grind, more socialilzing and just having fun. And, sad to say, it frustrates me because they're doing it so unoptimally. The warrior never taunts, the warlock does the least damage in the group, and in general they just don't know what they're doing. Loot is always free for all, even when questing, stuff like that.

And it's kinda sad to think it frustrates me, because I used to always be about fun first and efficiency second. I guess WoW doesn't allow for that style of play the way EQ does.

Wow does not allow you to play for fun sorry sir

No, your friends are just lousy players. Or have just gotten very relaxed in WoW that allows you slack off and still survive.

A tank that does not taunt, dps that does not dps or CC that do not mez in EQ1 will just get you wiped - and killed painfully with long corpse runs (naked through all the mobs - not a ghost) to your gear. In fact, with harsh death penalties - you have to be constantly on the ball... (like balancing on the ball) when playing the game.

As for my favorite (and long gone) aspect of early EQ1:
A fire beetle says "hit by non-melee damage for 5 pts."

Yeah, they let debugging messages go live - the yellow text was for non-melee damage (spells) IIRC. I think it lasted more than a year until Kunark - spiders, beetles etc. will politely tell you how they got hurt.

WTF?  WoW allows you to be casual as hell about the game and just fuck around and have fun.  Not paying attention and playing Casually in EQ was just a fast way to a corpse run and slow as hell advancement.  EQ was THE anti-casual.

Having said that, I do have fond memories back on the game as well, as much as I like to harp on it.  Was my first graphical MMO, and I loved exploring the world.  I played from release day to a little after Kunark.  Even though everything it does is pretty much unacceptable now, still had a good time since everything was new and amazing.  I didn't have a group of friends who played, so I was stuck mainly pug'ing or playing Solo (which makes the game pure hell), and got burnt out eventually. 

This thread does bring back memories though.  Is there anyway I can just use an uber maxed out char for a week so I can go run around the Ginormous world and see everything I missed?  :awesome_for_real:

Try a player-managed emulated server, maybe? There are a bunch of em.

A friend of mine commented while we were playing EQ that it was probably for the best that we were married before it came out.

Most fun was training the King/Kong Giant Monkey looking thing in Kunark to the gates of the City/noob area.

Most of the noobs there had never seen a mob over level 15 other than a guard. Then they'd see me haulling ass to the city zone line with this HUGE monkey behind me. When I'd zone, the chaos would ensue. Was very very entertaining. Eventually, after it killed 10 or so noobs it would agro the guards and that was a fun fight to watch as well. Man that was funny.

On the topic of slaughtering newbies, I was always fond of charming a mob, and buffing it up with everything an Enchanter had. Then giving it weapons and setting it loose. Good times. Orc pawns killing whole groups was always amusing.

I fought 'til just after Kunark not to play. Then I got in and I was hooked.

For the next six years, I had some great times in EQ.

The first time I saw an ogre player coming out of the low visibility rain in Qeynos, scared the shit out of me, especially since i was a level five ranger that was still having trouble with Fippy.

Speaking of Fippy Darkpaw. "You've ruined your lands, you'll not ruin mine!" Seriously, Fippy? Your family lives in a hole that smells like wet dogs and Chuckwagon farts.

The first time I ran from Qeynos to Freeport. Died in highpass twice and expanded my world greatly.

Sand Giant and spec trains to the dock in Oasis.

Breakins to Fear and Hate...

The ring sequence in Velious...

ah, memories.

I had a friend at work who would play EQ on his lunch break. Because you couldn't get much accomplished in a half hour of EQ, this play inevitably turned to griefing - some of the most deliciously enjoyable griefing I have ever seen.

He would take any worthless crap he picked up (bags that sell for 1s, or the like,) and pick the lock on the vault in the Freeport bank. He would then proceed to drop the worthless bag inside the vault. Inevitably a greedy player would run in and try to grab the bag, thinking it was someone's hard earned (and dropped) bank loot. He would then shut the vault door on them, leaving them locked inside.

Good times.

Another good one was the hat from Velious (ulthork hide, I believe) that gave you -30 HP. Worthless, but if you gave it to a level 1 character (HP ~20) they would die. And then SOE changed it so that if you were under level 5 you kept your equipment when you died. DEATH LOOP!

I never did any of this personally, but I will admit that it was fun to watch.

The fuck?

Rolled a human monk on the Tallon Zek server, because that is where a friend was, and hey "this pvp stuff sounds fun" :awesome_for_real:

Every pvp server needs its cannon fodder, and that was me.  Now with that said, I did have a blast in that game up until Kunark.  

1) looting my first loot of off someone I had killed all by my lil ol self.   was probably a +1 str earring or something like that... but Hey! I ganked someone.

2) Blackburrow, I am sure a lot of it is rose tinted memories, but to this day Blackburrow sticks out in my mind as one of the better designed dungeons I have ever played in an MMO.  Not very big, but it had a very clever design.

3) the realization that I was fleeing for my life from a Snow Orc Shaman with a dude from Poland and a dude somewhere in Africa... that was a holy shit moment for me.

I think 3) was one of the biggest things for me.   These days I don't bat an eye when I am in vent with people in California, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, and Japan.  But in EQ that completely blew my mind.

As for the downtime, my hunch for the stronger sense of community ties into the *newness* of it all, and simply put there was a hell of a lot of downtime where all there was to do was simply chat.  Newer games have less and less downtime and as such you don't have as much time to bond over the pixels.

Everquest fails a certain test for me: would I ever play it again? No, under no circumstances could you talk me into playing EQ ever again.  My old roomie and his brother tried this a while ago and failed miserably.  I would not play EQ for free.  I'd rather play whatever joke UO has morphed into than load up this gladly discarded dinosaur.

I played the crap out of EQ.  I'm amazed I was able to marry the my wife who I was dating during much of my EQ time. It's not much of a shock that she doesn't care for me playing MMOs (a certain day long Plane of Sky raid didn't help things).

For every cool moment; there were 10 nut-crushing, punitive ones.  Getting my monk's epic was easily offset by any Planes raid or the time I spent 5 hours trying to recover a corpse and hope I could scrounge up enough sleep to not pass out during a test in less than 2 hours. The novelty of and moments produce by a non-instanced world, were easily washed away by all of the kill stealing and general cockbaggery that went along with it.  Every good dungeon crawling group pales in comparison to the hours sitting on my ass in a dungeon looking for a group or waiting for a camp to open up.

There are some things current MMOs and DIKUs have not done as well as Everquest; mainly creating an environment that felt like a world.  The detail  and care that went into a lot of the zone design is something I don't think anyone has recaptured to the extent that EQ had. Certain games have it spots (other games I haven't played much might do it better).

I'm glad that the industry has mostly forgotten/rejected EQ and has latched onto WoW as its inspiration du jour.  Risk can provide memorable moments and exciting gameplay, but the punishment for failure (and other inconveniences) that goes with it, will forever more be a non starter for any game for me in this genre.  I'm not a college student with almost infinite time to waste anymore, and I'm pretty sure my college self would have appreciated less of his time being spent on activities that were merely gates to having actual fun.

At least it paid for several months of rent. Thank you, Ebay.

Wow, 10 years…

* …I remember that it didn't run very well on my old Toshiba desktop machine and I splurged for a new rig and snazzy graphics card so I could play…

* …starting my first character as a human ranger in Qeynos Hills and dying because it was nighttime and humans had no vision and toon drowned in the lake there… …2nd character fell off the tree city in Kelethin… …after that, had to go with the half-elf…

* …joining a guild (playing on Rallos Zek, then later on race war server) primarily comprised of Age of Empires (and soon to be ex-AoE players as most were consumed by the EQ lure…)…

* …making low level character runs to HH, and SplitPaw (or ?) dungeons…

* …all of the constant server outages, and ire and venom that soon was directed at Verant for people unaccustomed to a subscription based game (in addition to shrinkwrap purchase)…

* …the early days of PvP+ server, full loot, Blackburrow train + caboose, the gankings… …corpse looting…

* …the bugs that never got fixed (like zoning from Qeynos Hills to W. Karana)…  …or the oversights that led some to gain incredible coinage before the "exploitable" snafus were addressed (i.e., a crafted item, a quest in Qeynos that gave a much higher spell than should have been…)

* …enchanters going from the ignored class to overpowered and then nerfed…

* …staring at a spell book for entirely too long, which knocked out my reading list (think I read all of the Robert Jordan novels along with some other SF tidings while "meditating")… …which also caused me to finally unsubscribe, as I couldn't justify paying for/playing a game where I spent such an inordinate amount of time reading a book!

I'll likely get the uberdork title here for this, but maybe there's a couple of people that never saw this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_b9n76F5KQ

It's a goodbye video by a guild that was leaving EQ a few years back.  Decent production quality and the best part:  It's enough of a memory of why I don't need to play again.

Fuck, way to kill the happy. Maybe it was just me but that video was depressing.

And something else - maybe kind of obvious, but even so. For those of us playing in the early days, the gameplay was new and nobody knew what the hell was going on.

A tank who treid to kill things with his sword instead of taunting, or a wizard who blasted away and got attacked by the monster, wasn't an idiot. They were just a player trying to work out how to play the game. Things like aggro or crowd control were new concepts. I don't know if this stuff existed in non-graphical diku muds, but if they did then EQ players didn't seem to know about them (and they were far more likely to be UO refugees than diku refugees after all).

Figuring out the basic gameplay was an adventure in itself, and one that players went through together. You can't get that in most MMOs nowadays because even when something brand new comes out, the chances are that the basic game mechanics - tank gets aggro, mage carefully limits blasting, controller-guy mezzes - will be what we have seen in EQ.

I played from beta and stayed with it for about 18 months before getting burnt out - corpse runs, downtime, kill-stealing, bugs, lag-death... all exasperated by playing from the UK and paying silly money for dial up.

Highlights;

* watching the sunset for the first time over butcherblock mountains with a new friend after a few hours adventuring.
* getting charmed by a beholder and then being used as it's pet to attack fellow players, and subsequently dieing.
* first time getting ganked by a ninja dark elf in home territory.
* watching the naming ceremony of the first few level 20 players by GM's riding in on thunderclouds.
* getting blinded by a minotaur shaman while trying to navigate a maze back to the group.
* the excitement of searching the world to find the answers to quests, rather than using online guides.

The only other similar immersive RPG experience that I've ever come across was playing a virtual reality game called Legend Quest  http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/virtuality.html (http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/virtuality.html). Created back in 1992, it blew my mind and gave a similar gameplay experience as playing eq for the first time.

I've been keeping my eye on VR tech since then, hoping someone would release a commercially successful product. 18 years later and still nothing. My hopes are with Nintendo doing something but it looks like 3D TV will be the next iteration before a fully head tracking VR product makes a break through.

On a happier note:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDkvy9sKuY (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDkvy9sKuY)

Oldie but a goodie.

Yes. Let's not forget that Everquest gave us the holy trinity and mired MMORPG gameplay so badly that nearly every game copies their piss-poor paradigm.  :dead_horse: Ah god, the hate for EQ will keep me warm tonight.

Random memories, good, bad and ugly.

Camp check!

A_Grass_Snake_003 kicks you for 15.

Finding out the mobs have no LOS restrictions while sitting in a hut in E Commonlands when a Griffon flew by.

Staring at that damn spell book for 40 levels.

Being able to tell when something was moving up behind you (while your screen was filled with that stupid spell book) just from the sound of the footsteps.  You could actually tell exactly how close and what direction it was.

Running from Kelethin to Halas and then leading a friend back from there to Kelethin, at like level 8.

Driving 15 minutes each way during lunch to go home from work and play for half an hour.

Celebrating the last night of beta by drinking till my field of view narrowed to about a quarter screen and my character was moving 30 feet from side to side while sitting on the ground, then running from one end of Kelethin to the other several times without ever falling off.  Finally climbed up on top of the roof of the highest hut in the city and jumped, died, then logged out.

Yelling "BONNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGG!!!!!" in guild chat when I leveled up.

Yelling "GGGGGNNNNNNNNNNNNNOB!!!!" in guild chat 15 minutes later when I died and lost the level and two weeks worth of experience.

Running Norrath's original drunken druid taxi service.  Picking from 4 pages of teleport buttons in that damn spellbook while smashed, we didn't always end up where we were supposed to, and occasionally I ended up there alone.  but I never accepted any tips until arrival! LOL

Jawing with a cleric and a necro about setting up a guild named Povar SAR - dedicated to recovering corpses with the least possible loss of exp from anywhere you lost it (except Hate, lol)

Getting dumped into the ocean by the ship when it zoned from butcherblock to Freeport without me.  madly swimming back towards shore trying to get close enough before drowning that I'd still be able to recover my corpse without drowning again.

Drowning as a ghost.

Zoning away from anything resembling a GM-run live event after the first couple when it became obvious that not only was the zone doomed to crash shortly as everyone on the server tried to join in, but the event would largely consist of ridiculously over powered/under conned GMs ganking anyone and everyone level appropriate to wherever they were until "the high levels" got a group in to spank them.

"Loading, please wait..."

Looting a rusty 2-handed sword, and discovering it was a huge upgrade for my girlfriend's ranger who used it for the next 3 or 4 levels.

Fishing while invisible in Crushbone.

Killing Mitty for the 50th time and STILL not getting the Paw of Opalla.

Keeping my GF company while her cleric camped a stupid STUMP in Kithikor forest for a ground spawn required for her epic for a full WEEK of evenings.

I had alot of great times over about 2.5 years in this game and still have some very good friends from my old guild Legacy of Steel.  I never really expect to fall into a game like I did EQ or even WoW for that matter, but when you do, and suddenly start to give a shit about that world and the people in it, it isn't altogether different than the same experience in the real world.  Good times.

I'm currently playing on the free Zek shard using EQEMU and it's a pleasant diversion so far. It's actually quite soothing with all the old textures and models. Kinda like dancing with that old flame at the high school reunion. And not one mouth breathing retard in sight. WoW is fun but let's face it. It's the AOL of MMO's. Sometimes it's nice to game with grownups who appreciate a fine vintage wine.

That sounds pretty cool, I didn't even know free EQ shards existed.  I'm actually playing on a free UO shard, but if you could post some info, that would rock.

Only ever played any character in EQ up to the mid teens because it got insanely boring after that point and I pretty much only played trolls and halflings because I got lost/dead in most every other starting city.

What I liked the most was the real feeling of there being a world there and that it was BIG and SCARY. I'm sure that other games since then have had bigger worlds, but I haven't had another other PvE game in which I felt actually terrified while doing something in it or so happy that I just survived after running for my life.

But as a game, not fun at all. Horrific time sinks and messed up risk vs. reward.

Hah yeah, I just realized what a wacky contradiction that was. Maybe because any deviation from the norm in EQ is certain death, they think as long as they're in for a penny, they're in for a pound.

Now I wonder what their EQ sessions were like. Dying is fun?

Probably members of a zerg guild and rarely if ever had to pull their own weight even in single groups.

http://www.eqemulator.net (http://www.eqemulator.net) for those looking to take a stroll down memory lane. You'll need to get EQ Titanium Edition to be able to play on the free shards and you may have to patch some of the zones (Nektulos is one of the usual suspects). Instructions are all there on how to set things up. Word of warning: The site and login server are kinda spotty. Sometimes it's up, sometimes it's down.

Just any old golden shower? Why not a fine one? If you're going to half ass your efforts, nobody is going to take you up on your offer.

EQ1 makes every game since easy mode. 

You want quest bublbes to show you where to go?  Screw you, find it yourself.  In fact, I wont even have a quest flag over my head, if you want to do quests you can just run to every NPC and /h

Oh look its getting dark, not just dark but Fing DARK.  Not being able to see where you're going is hardcore

Rezz at the spirit healer....Lol..puss!  We corpse run here baby!  Oh you died in Plane of Fear, enjoy your 6 hour corpse recovery. 

Instances are for girls, real men SHARE the zone.  Karnors...TRAIN TO ZONE!  Thats a man zone. 

Lalala im a level 12 killing crocs...BOOM HEADSHOT...Im a Sand Giant beatch and I look like Saddam Hussein!

EQ proved otherwise.

Shatter's post... if it's sarcasm, it's beautifully done.

EQ was at least a fine golden shower in the context of it's day. Perhaps even exhilarating.

BOAT. BOAT.

target me and type /d

I dug up the old Allakhazam fashion table, and my original Erudite wizard's screenshot of his SMR from LGuk on Veeshan is still there. It was somewhat the rage back then to be the first of your particular race/gender/item combo to post your ss. I think it was around late Spring '99.

Old Fashion Table (http://everquest.allakhazam.com/equipment/fashion/SMR_Erudite_Male.html)

1. The silly hair. I figured the only thing uglier than a big bald forehead was bangs.
2. The silly name.
3. I was in that little building in the Mistmoore graveyard as we were sneaking into the castle the sekrit way to camp some item for someone.
4. Note the original manastone. I sold it much later for $$ well after it stopped dropping from the Evil Eye but before The Great Nerf Bat for using it only in Old World zones.

It's odd.  EQ was certainly anti-casual in the sense that it required enormous amounts of contiguous time to actually do anything.  But the actual gameplay was more casual in the sense that it was much less demanding than WoW by far.  In a WoW dungeon, you are constantly moving, constantly spamming multi-skill rotations, dealing with gimmicks.  There's basically zero time to talk on vent, and certainly not to talk by typing.

Compare to a classic EQ dungeon.  Once you break the camp (if you had to, and you usually didn't in the old days since everything was camped), you didn't move for hours.  The actual combat was extremely slow, required little button-mashing, and was punctuated with regular downtime.  The game was all about shooting the breeze with your group, your guild, and/or /ooc trolls.  In EQ, you could basically watch tv, read a book, or interact with RL people and still play. You could alt-tab or afk a while, and it usually didn't matter. 

As I've said before, EQ was more like a fishing trip than a video game. The game was just an excuse to chat and a source of things to chat about.  Once in a blue moon, you get an overpull or a nibble on your line, and there's some excitement in the activity.  But we all really know you are our fishing as an excuse to drink a couple beers and bullshit.

Typical sessions for me:
EQ - 5 hours of being semi-afk
WoW - 1.5 hours of staring intently at the screen, spamming at least 3 buttons every 1.5 seconds while strafe-sliding around to get out of teh firez while not exposing my unshielded ass to a mob.

I'd never go back to old EQ, but there was a sense in which it was more casual friendly than WoW is (WoW is much more casual-friendly overall, of course).

EQ also had a lot more "emergent gameplay" than WoW.  The shit you could pull off with charm, the countless types of shit bards could pull off, the utterly insane pulls that creative uses of faction and/or pets allowed, ect.  None of it intended by EQ's creators, but it was fun.  You'll never see shit like that allowed in a game again.

What made EQ1 less casual was the result of your action.  It was far worse to do something or not do something in EQ1 then any game Ive played since, there were consequences. 

Leveling, you could lose levels if you die and you definitely lost xp if you died.  Death, you had to go find your corpse...HAD TO.  If you didnt you lost everything, there was no grace in this. 

If you died in a bad location you had to get help to get your corpse back.  You couldnt go AFK in alot of places cause you always stood the chance of being trained and killed(see corpse recovery).  No one went AFK inside Karnors lol. 

Epic quests took months to complete.  You had to compete with 20 other people over contested spawns in planes and other zones.  It took me > 8 months to get my Enchanter snake staff. 

Contested raid zones.  You didnt get a fresh new instance for your raid, you and every other raid guild had to compete.  I remember many times racing another guild inside a zone to tag the bosses first, hoping they wipe or them hoping you wipe.  You could if you chose to screw with their battle and make them lose. 

In EQ1 if you were in a raiding guild you couldnt just stand around, you had to be on top of mob spawns, zones, etc.  IN WOW you show up 8pm for your scheduled raid time and you're good to go.  IN EQ1 you raided when mobs spawned so be ready starting at 7pm until midnight for anything that might pop, and be ready meant race to zone to beat the other guilds there. 

I was joking about this with a friend recently.  My EQ wizard would solo for two minutes and then sit for ten to regen mana.  I'd always find a place to park and lift weights irl in my downtime.  Can't do that with wow, hehe. 

I'm going to have to check if my account has run out yet. The one thing I promised myself I would do if I ever quit for good was take my highest level into Qeynos Hills and repeatedly MurderDeathKill Holly Windstalker, the She Devil who would never let me defend myself against rabid wolves.

edited because She Bitch was redundant and made no sence.

How true.

This thread inspired me.  I torrented a copy of Titanium edition, which has the 10 first expansions and is what the emulation servers run.  Then I found an emulation server that has x4 experience gain, and an item vendor that gives you your epic weapon for free, along with with other armor and items for free which make you regen health and mana at a very fast rate.  Also items that instantly give you SoW, Levitate, and Complete Heal on Demand.  And the special zone which has all these vendors also has a person who will teleport you to any zone in the game.  And a vendor that will instantly scibe all spells possible for you to learn at your level to your spell book.

In a few hours of fucking around last night, exploring randomly around the world with my Wizard, I already hit level 24.  I'm actually having a lot of fun!  I'm going to run around and explore all the places I never had a chance to, plus see all the new crap that was added in after.

Amazing what being able to tank several reds at once in my cloth armor, and having every 3-4 reds I kill makes me ding a level, does to the fun factor of the game! (that and instant travel to everywhere I want to go)

Yeah, can't spell either. Sense!!

WoW actually does emulate this 'fishing' gameplay with some of the rare spawn monsters. I spent a few days doing it oldskool, camping General Fangferror in Azshara. 12-24 hour spawn rate, and he had a 1/3 chance of dropping a blue sword that was decent for a level 40ish.
But it's not WoW's focus. You can get better stuff by zipping up to level cap and raiding.

WoW when I played it was actually a horrendous timesink that made me work hard. It feels casual-friendly because of the more light-hearted world, but swallows people's lives just as much as EverQuest.

Add up the time you spend doing stuff to get enough gold (which you consume at an alarming level), acquiring materials and crafting them for you or your guild's needs, running around doing millions more quests than you ever did in the ironically-named EverQuest, and it's an enormous commitment. I found the amount of information to absorb and inventory to manage more time-consuming than they were in EQ.

In EQ your character could be penniless, do no crafting, do no quests, and you could still login 15 minutes before the raid and help. In WoW if you keep doing that, you'll run out of required inventory items from gold to potions to reagents - all of which were consumed in EQ, but not on the scale that WoW churns through.

Sure, you had all the buffing and preparation time, corpse recovery timesinks on failure, and the actual EQ raid took longer, achieving less than in WoW. But you didn't need to micro-manage your character's life every day in order to keep playing.

The end result was I found them pretty much the same as timesinks, and quit both because they made me sit at a PC for longer than I wanted to commit to.

This. My starting post meant 'casual' in this way.

If you were a sociializer, enjoyed the need to combine forces to stay safe or get things done, or liked the danger immersion EQ rocked; if you just wanted to solo it sucked.

A big part of the nostalgia for those who played EQ early was the social aspect that you could not avoid, and the shared experience that we were all thrust into this huge, unfamiliar world together (as others have said, it was before regular map sites, wide-spread game rules or nuances were known or shared). You were more likley by far to ask a question in game or get a friendly tip than on a website at first. I felt like I knew a lot more players a lot better in EQ than I ever did in WoW, even before Roger Wilco, TS or Vent came along. That is why pound for pound you see forum quotes and youtube commemorations always refering to EQ in a very fond social way more than any other game.

The only other game I got that feeling and depth of knowing one player from another was DAoC's first 1-2 years.

Brad McQuaid pops up on EQ forums. (http://forums.station.sony.com/eq/posts/list.m?topic_id=148446)

Oh God, the return of Aradune. Now they just need Furor to post some FoH trash talk.

Interesting little fact: if you bought the original EverQuest and reinstall it today with no expansions, you cannot play. You cannot patch it. It can't connect to whatever the original connection server was back then. You need a later version.

This is true of DAOC also, I believe.

To anyone who gets nostalgic and tries EQ again: you'll be spending some money :)

They have given old accounts every expansion free of charge, except for the most recent one, so at first it sounds like a great offer. But the key feature of the most recent expansion is Mercenaries. You can hire an NPC mercenary (tank or healer, as powerful as you) to group with you, enabling every class to solo effectively. If you don't buy this, you're comparatively gimped at soloing and you can only offer a group your own character, not yourself +1.

GDI, Tale. That actually makes me want to retry EQ. arrrrrrgh.

I imagine it'd be the case for any game over six or so years old. Which is why I wish more of them would allow client downloads from the main site for old accounts re-upping.

This was always one of my favorite EQ flash animations:

http://home.att.ne.jp/surf/mirage/agent_sinzan_2.html

More gnome clerics than you can shake a stick at.

There was a nostalgia video done by some Korean guild back in the day that was one of the best out there. Even if everyone loathed Korean guilds for no good reason, everyone loved that video. I have no idea how to find it again.

The only one I remember was about a year ago from, err, one of those uber guilds. Don't remember which, nor can find it, but it was done with the Vanessa Mae "I'm a Doun" song as a swan song to that person (or guild?) leaving. The song and sequence of screenshots worked very well together.

I don't remember when it happened, but at some point after my eighth return to EQ1 I finally had had enough. Maybe it was WoW, but more likely it was WoW plus most of my EQ1 friends finally making the jump.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_b9n76F5KQ

I keep wanting to go back for the 10th Anniversary, but not managing to actually motivate myself to.  I've got one friend that still plays, basically, and the last guild I was in is still around, but most of the people I liked aren't there anymore.  EQ isn't that much fun without a good number of good friends there.

A lot of the stuff people have mentioned is stuff I miss from EQ.  The feeling that doing something - even something as "simple" as crossing a continent - was significant.  My first trip across Antonica as a level 6 Wood Elf Ranger still sticks in my mind.  I had moved to Freeport from Greater Faydark, and when I felt like I needed to train, I decided to go train at Surefall Glade instead of going back to Kelethin.  All I knew about the route was: Go West.  Somehow with luck and a little help from friendly people I ran into along the way, I made it.  And, considering this was back in the first week or two of release, when someone with a last name was 'wow...uber', that was pretty amazing.  I still remember certain moments from that trip, like seeing the Cyclopses in East Karana and the Hill Giants in North Karana for the first time.

But something I really really miss is the ability to discover things.  My most memorable discovery is Innoruuk in the Crypt of Nadox.  Few people knew about his existence at the time, and nobody had posted about him on Allakhazam or any of the sites yet.  I remember my little group was screwing around in there bringing our alts through (since it wasn't a max level area) and we cleared out a room, only to find an unattackable luggald high priest making weird emotes.  Innoruuk spawned on our head while we were trying to figure this out, and killed my entire group.  We took screenshots, logged on our mains and multiboxes, came back, went for round 2, and defeated him.  To this day the Allakhazam picture of Crypt of Nadox Innoruuk is the one I took, and some of the first loot listed is the stuff I sent in (although they have amusingly credited the picture to someone else, although it remains the same one). 

That kind of thing has never ever happened to me in WoW, and I don't imagine it will.  It's partly because of the sheer number of people, but also because they don't seem to put in little out of the way things very much.  Which is something I rarely see in games these days, although I hear LOTRO is actually not too bad for that kind of quirky out of the way 'hey wow, never knew this was here' stuff.  Then again I've never played it past the starting levels so I couldn't say if that's accurate or not.

I miss those odd little things in the corner of the world too.  But I'm not sure if our current "lack" of them is because modern MMOs actually don't include them, or if information is so widespread and so instant that we (as players) spoil all our potential surprises in advance.  Modern games HAVE learned that players get really really pissed at Holly Windstalkerish type situations, and its a bit harder to include those funny little things when you can't fall back on the old "mob 20 levels higher than everyone randomly wandering the zone and slaughtering newbs" standby  :awesome_for_real:

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned the friends in Detroit I made playing EQ1. (Went to two of their weddings, have crashed at their homes on numerous business trips/done extended layovers just to hang out with them). (I live in Seattle).

Anyways they call last month and say, "We're playing EQ1 again." I reply, "That's nice." So a month passes and they are still playing...

Last night I break down and start downloading. Visually the game is such a pile, the interface is as punishing as the game mechanics. (Ok - so naked corpse recovery doesn't happen anymore). But yea... I don't know what I was thinking... I'll give it a few more play sessions before I throw my hands into the air and say forget this because I can't handle 10 year old graphics.

I wonder if that is not because zone designers work to a much more proscribed rule-book... or as part of a larger group. A lot of the early EQ zones showed the signs of either one person or a tightly knit group that would think something was cool and spend a lot of time on it. The later EQ zones tended to not have this and be either open planes sprinkled with mobs or highly tied to the raid / progression goal of the content.

All of the above really.


Nothing is ever "out of the way" when you have 11 million people scouring every inch of the landscape. To say nothing of the entire game is in searchable database form with locations and times and etc.

There's also just a lot less 'wasted' space in WoW. Almost every bit of a zone has SOME relation to a quest or a mob spawn or whatever.


So fewer things to hide and ten times as many people looking.

Heh, I remember having to call a GM when our group started hitting twenty, because a GM had to manually give you the last name. Then silliness ensued in the Unrest front yard as we tried to pick names while dealing with yard trash respawning on us.

That's what bothers me most, I think.  Almost everything has a 'reason' to be there, because it's related to a quest, to the point where if you come across something that is NOT related to a quest, it's very peculiar.  Oldschool WoW had more places that were like that than the expansions do, at least, but even then it was very minimal.  Off-hand Alcaz Island and Purgation Isle are the only places that immediately pop to mind as a spot that originally had nothing leading to it, no quests, etc.  

EQ has a lot of stuff that is there because it is there.  A lot of the time there was lore and background and everything to those places, and nobody knew anything about them because there were no good drops known there, and the exp/time ratio of camping there was bad, so the general populace never passed word of their existence around.  And sometimes those places had interesting things that went undiscovered for months.  I suspect that if places like this existed in WoW, with no quests leading to them and no clear benefit for going to them, any hidden things would remain undiscovered for some time even with 11 million players just because 99% of them simply don't go anywhere they're not told to go.

On another note, another thing I miss about EQ was finding an unusual object, then trying to figure out what it was related to.  That can't happen in WoW and most MMO's I've tried recently because of the annoying (to me, at least) mechanic that quest items do not drop unless you are on the quest.  Again I suspect that if newer MMOG's did put in things like this where there's no obvious sign in your face saying to do this with this, some of these things would take a while to discover, since such a huge portion of the playerbase simply wouldn't try.  Imagine finding a random 'white' item in WoW that seems significant but does not have a 'this begins a quest' on it.  If you talk to the right NPC with it in your inventory, it opens up some dialogue that leads you somewhere else and so on - never actually giving you a quest in your log, just leading you on.  That sort of thing doesn't happen, and I wish it did.

I've had all I can stands, and I can't stands no more.


Translation: SOE couldn't dream of producing enough directed content to push players through the everything in the world, and so you had lots of locations just going to waste. Er, I mean, waiting to be discovered and provide a moment's amusement to some fractional explorer niche of the playerbase.


Yeah, let's obfuscate all the content so that everyone can spend half their playtime with their browser open, trying to figure out what they're supposed to be doing. You can't hide anything from the players, at least not for very long. All you can do is make things more tedious. Shit, at this point Blizzard could go crazy and remove all the "GO HERE NEWBIE" directions from WoW and in no time there would just be an addon to put them all back.

Your words. They ring true.

You blindly stuck with Ultima Online and did not try anything else, because you felt you had the One True Way and Everyone Else Was Wrong.

You became a standing joke for your constant ignorant comments about the EverQuest you knew nothing about. When WoW came along you kept playing UO as well, constantly dissing WoW for being more of the EverQuest you never played.

Then one day, years after it launched, you finally broke down and tried WoW, and after trying so hard to dislike it and posting your ridiculous noob experiences for everyone as if you were somehow special, you became a Blizzard fanboy.

And yet 10 years after the event, you still "can't stand" not commenting about the game you never played. But now it's in the context of "I never played it, but it must be inferior to WoW".


No, they were the first 3D MMO so they made it like a PnP fantasy game, with lots of areas that were just for lore. Because lore is important to fantasy nerds creating an artificial world.


You still have no idea what you're talking about. It's bizarre that you think you're some kind of authority on a 10-year-old game you never touched, to the point that you can't let its actual players celebrate it, even now.

Go fuck yourself, Tale, and take your ridiculous stalkerish "history of WUA and MMO gaming" with you. You've never been anything but a whiny cunt catass-apologist dipshit.


A PnP fantasy game where you stand in the same place killing the same shit as it respawns over and over and over again, right? That is how it played, right? I mean, I don't need to have played to know that, do I? That whole "spawn camping" thing I've heard about isn't some sort of bullshit rumor, is it?

But it doesn't matter, because what they were or were not thinking has no bearing on what I said. Crafting enough directed content to make everything in the world relevant wasn't something that would even occur to SOE (or anyone else in that era) as a realistic design strategy, and so all these places some of you EQ dipshits think are so great because hardly anyone ever went there? They were going to waste BECAUSE NOBODY EVER WENT THERE.

This isn't exactly some minutiae-of-EQ point, is it? I don't need to have shit into a sock nine years ago to think there might be something wrong when people are getting nostalgic about content specifically because it went mostly unused, do I?


What a devastating rebuttal of my point which you quoted, about how obfuscating shit is largely pointless since players will spoilerize everything anyway. Way to go. Oh wait.

Yeah. Again, go fuck yourself.

Heh, a UO vs EQ forum fight. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vgfeLat3RI&feature=related)

I was thinking something more along these lines. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXa9tXcMhXQ)

I know man!  It was like, on this other car board, I was totally ripping this guy for liking the 1915 Model-T Ford.  I mean- no air conditioning, no surround sound fully integrated DvD home theater experience for the kids in back, no regenerative braking system to increase fuel efficiency or mahogany dashboard finish- it fucking SUCKED compared to my 2008 Mercedes S65 AMG!  He tried to mumble some bullshit nonsense defending it (something about how 1915 and 2008 aren't the same year, I dunno I wasn't listening), but I TOTALLY shot him down with my multivarious collection of super cool profane words.  Preach on, brother!

That was one element of a complex game that entertained hundreds of thousands of people and was the largest MMO of its era. Criticism of it was magnified here because that's what this community does - we have fun with the things MMOGs do badly.

Obviously they did some things wrong, they did some things right. But it was a very successful game for its time. The people who made WoW were EQ fans.

You wouldn't know, because YOU'VE NEVER PLAYED IT.


Maybe you could start by admitting that EverQuest did not involve 450,000 people shitting into socks. That was a characterisation that people used in this community about the catass guilds, when you were a child.

At least you've fessed up: you never played the game. But somehow you "can't stand" not commenting about it, 10 years after the event.

I think ripping SoE for producing undirected content is wrong, but I think 'missing' that sort of thing is just nostalgia talking.

When a bunch of old geezers are reminiscing about how much fun they had in their Model T, that's one thing. When they begin expressing regret that the 2008 Mercedes doesn't have one of those awesome cranks on the front, it's time to call them dipshits.


I like how you've consistently managed to completely avoid even going anywhere in the general vicinity of talking about content consumption, the futility of trying to keep anything obscure, or anything I was actually fucking talking about in the post you decided to take exception to, in favor of your usual tears at the implication of being a catass and more chanting of "But you didn't play it!"


Oh, I'm not ripping on SOE for producing undirected content. Producing enough directed content to fill out an entire game in the manner to which we're now accustomed was, at that time, pretty much unthinkable. I'm specifically ripping the sort of nostalgia that leads one to publicly muse about how swell it would be if WoW didn't have exclamation points and a quest log.

The first few pages of this thread weren't anything I felt compelled to comment upon since EQ as a whole is pretty irrelevant to me. But if someone had come up on this last page and posted "Oh man that's why Vanguard is gonna be awesome!" I would have sworn I had fallen into a time warp.

Oh, as an aside and though I've said it many times before, I'll restate:  If anyone ever makes a game that does for the UO formula what WoW did for the EQ formula, I will never play UO again.

Everything I have ever read from WindUpAethiest has indicated to me that he has zero credibility on every single issue and much like the compass that always points north, his opinions always point wrong.

Who the fuck are you?

Oh yeah, and before this turns into a total "Well... uh... STAR WARS SUCKS!" fit of the typical "WUA trashed something I like but I have no rational rebuttal!" stupidity, allow me to restate my opinions simply. For the slow kids.

1)  That beautifully handcrafted but unheard of and barely-known game location that was obscure because it had no quests, quality drops, or good XP, which you might nonetheless fondly recall "discovering" and spending two hours in, eight years ago? Yeah, the developers probably should have given that place a better reason to exist and be used after having sunk all that work into it.

2)  Pining for a deliberately obfuscatory quest system (essentially any substantially less obvious than WoW, since it is now the standard) not only reeks of Vanguard-style MMO masochism, but is ultimately futile. The mechanisms of spoilerization that were in their infancy during the early prime of EQ are now mature and honed to a science. If an otherwise popular game appeared today with a deliberately vague quest system which expected you to carry around random items and talk to random NPCs hoping to find quests, there would be exhaustive websites and/or third party additions in place pretty much by the end of beta, designed specifically to eliminate that vagueness.

2b)  Those websites and addons would be widely-embraced by the playerbase, to the point that the purist who did without would be essentially regarded as having a broken UI. In the end, the purist wouldn't really have any better experience than if he just wrote a WoW addon to keep him from opening his own quest log.

Disagree with me in some meaningful fashion or STFU.

I have to agree with WindUpAtheist on this for the most part. IMHO, the EQ1 nostalgia is misplaced and whats worse harmful when people start saying stuff like, "I wish WoW had that." Well you know, there is a market for people paying someone to kick them in the balls repeatedly; they may love it but its sure as hell not applicable to 99.999% of the sane people out there. Yeah, I know its a straw man argument - no one is pushing to have pure naked corpse runs in WoW but a lot of the stupid ideas need to stay put in EQ1.
 
As to all the odd nostalgia about EQ1 - well I personally its like how even the most mundane of small pleasures seems like heaven when interspersed in between several hours electroshock therapy. C'mon, when you really think about it, most of the the so called "undirected content" seems to be bad design, abandoned ideas or even bugged unfinished quests. I believe a lot of the early Everquest1 content was designed haphazardly leaving a lot of the dross like that behind.

For example, dungeons like Sol A or the Guks (in fact most of them) have numerous very elaborate rooms tucked away in the middle of nowhere. These rooms tend to be deep inside the dungeons, out of the way of the spawn camps (mobs with loot) or the movement paths. No on has an incentive to go there, no one wants to go there since you need a full group (of 6 people) to get to these rooms. And yet within these rooms - the mobs have have intricate spawn patterns, and there are unique textures decorating the place. Plainly the dungeon/world designer put a lot of time and effort in designing the place - BUT there is no point to it. No one goes out their way to go these place.

My theories:
1) The rooms are "undirected content" that everyone here seems to love. The designer spent several hours designing elaborate spawn patterns and unique textures for all the three people that will actually stumble across it because they got lost trying to find the "room with that haste belt mob"

2) The Brad McQuaid school of design and itemization. Build and design the dungeon - then randomly put mobs with loots in various rooms with no regard whether it makes sense or not that it should be there.  This is pretty credible considering how stupid some of the early spawn camp locations were. The elaborate room just got missed out.

3) The most like theory. Its broken content. There was supposed to be a mob with loot in there or something. But the script is bugged and the original designer/coder left in 2001. Fixing it will break other stuff in the dungeon so may as well just leave it borked and work on the new expansion.

---
About the 10 year retrospect:
You know, I believe Everquest1 may have held back the MMOG industry by 5 years. Nothing in WoW's gameplay would have been impossible back in 1999. Yes, I realize its like comparing a 2008 Mercedes to a 1908 Model T, knowing what we know now we can build a better MMOG bla-bla-bla... etc.

Its just that I wished someone else OTHER than Brad McQuaid came up with the evolutionary idea of wedding DikuMud with a 3D graphics  interface. Everquest may have got some things right, but it also had so many dead end ideas and wrong lessons. SOE's management of the game also taught the industry so many bad habits about abysmal community management, QA (or the supposedly unnecessary lack of)  etc. The Vision (tm) has done more harm to the genre than good.

Streamlined and efficient gameplay means boring and predictable gameplay. I personally am not suggesting we go back to putting our nuts in a vice, but there are days when I'm utterly unenthusiastic about WoW over that fact, and I really wouldn't mind taking off my training wheels for a little while.

I agree with you here. I've often thought that EQ put us in a rut that's going to be difficult to break out of. But then again, progress is usually not a simple linear progression.

No, he's just an asshole.

Welcome to f13?  :why_so_serious:

I get where you're coming from, but removal of the quest log and "HAVE AN ENCHANTING JOURNEY OF DISCOVERY FIGURING OUT WHERE WE PUT THE CONTENT, HEY QUIT READING THOTTBOT" wouldn't be the way to go about dealing with it. Efficiency is not the opposite of predictability. Or to put it another way, if you want an unpredictable game then the game needs to BE unpredictable, not just utterly rote but with a layer of ill-communication and smokescreen to cover it up.


This.

And non-streamlined and inefficient gameplay means annoying and irritating gameplay. Oh shit, sweeping statements!

I would say he's the world's leading philanthropist. Notice how he deftly avoided Triforcer's attempt to troll him? If these two were to cross their streams, the resulting calamity would undoubtedly create an anti-matter storm.

I don't think the nostalgia is misplaced, there are things that EQ did that you can't do anymore and they were really good things. But yes, they were reliant on a lot of bad things and we're past them. You can't have it back, nobody would put up with it. But there was something there that made the game more than just misery.

The people you played with made the game more than just misery. I was very close to laying into WUA but held my tongue. I never got UO (and never will) much the same way he never got EQ (and never will). But I'm fairly sure he would say the people he played with in UO made it the game he loves and remembers and still sometimes goes back to. If I'm putting words in your mouth WUA, sorry. Frankly, solid online commradery is the one thing I find missing from recent MMOs. Everyone is pretty much able to solo and thus don't need to routinely group up and work togethor. I was in a guild called Lords of Drakova in EQ. Part of our 'game' was to go out and actively help others. I guess we were the ultimate carebears but we made a bit of a name for ourselves on Cazic-Thule back in the day. People were always glad to see us come and sorry to see us go. EQ may have been unfinished and rife with undirected content but it made things that much more open for players to do with as they saw fit. Everything nowdays is so 'on the rails'. There's got to be a happy medium between Russian Roulette and Candyland.

/suits up and quietly awaits the backlash.

It's not about UO versus EQ, or even any broader question of Diku versus sandbox. It's about nostalgia causing one to mythologize the cockstab. I love me some UO, but the game is/was full of cockstabs and I've never made any secret of the fact that I'm just waiting for someone to remake it someday, minus the stabs.

You're not going to catch me going "Man remember when the only way to ever own a house in UO was to find one about to collapse and then camp it for hours on end with a bunch of people and hope you were the one who got lucky? Man that sure built a sense of community and acheivement. I wish other games would have non-instanced housing with insufficient housing space for all the players!" Because I don't fucking like being stabbed in the cock, and I've never really been gone from the game for the years on end required to forget that.

Also, I don't get what's supposed to be so bad about Triforcer. Sure he can't resist spontaneously calling us pinko liberal commies from time to time, but getting upset about that is like getting mad at your dog for farting. He's much more civil than I am, at least.

Yeah, I don't mean to crap all over a nice EQ is ten years old thread, but there's quite a few people who hated EQ.  I tried it twice and lasted about 3 hours total.  But I was informed, I'd read lots from EQ players who did nothing but bitch about all the time sinks, staring at books or some shit, sitting chatting, playing a puzzle game, camping, having to click run every single time they logged in.  I still tried EQ twice because with all those faults, they still play, so it must be awesome right?  Zone, zone, zone, loading, heh no.

I remember clearing a dungeon in AC1 from start to finish, doing 3-4 complete runs, having a blast, trying not to heal or slow down as I cut through the place, I kept passing these two guys standing in one room.  Eventually I asked "what you doing?", turns out they were "camping" the single mob in the room waiting for respawn, totally insane, I'd kill 20 mobs in the time it took them to kill one, I was moving and actually playing the game, I didn't even need to ask what game they used to play.

I don't think anyone here is forgetting all the garbage that made us run from EQ to whatever came out for years after. Some people just like to celebrate the positive and not be douchebags. I could tell awesome nostalgic stories about UO, but it was overall a shitty game (and is worse now). But I would rather focus on the fun stuff and not take a big steaming shit on the thread like some people enjoy doing.

I for one am the explorer niche and would rather hang out in a dungeon that has a cool vibe than blindly follow quests to maximize efficiency like most mmodrones. S'why I dislike the new EQ2 starter zones: no dungeons, just a linear quest line to get you to 20 and geared up ASAP. *yawn* Why even bother playing, just start characters rolled at 20 with gear.

I don't think anyone has claimed that EQ was a great game by any modern standards (I certainly haven't.) It surely exists in a class of games that have not aged gracefully: the MMO genre. Other noteworthy entries include UO, and AC (which, sorry Arthur, is a monkey's ass covered in tapioca pudding.) It may not seem like it just yet, but I'm sure that we'll look back at WoW in a few years and think similar thoughts.

Also, just for shits and giggles, I grabbed a list of noteworthy games released 1 year before and 1 year after EQ. Some certainly hold up better than others, but it does make for some interesting comparison.

1998
March 29 – Parasite Eve (PS)
March 31 – StarCraft (Win)
April 30 - Panzer Dragoon Saga (Sat)
May 6 – Warhammer: Dark Omen (Win)
May 22 – Unreal (Win)
June 29 - Banjo-Kazooie (Nintendo 64)
August 21 – Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six (Win)
August 31 - I-War (Independence War) (Win)
September 3 – Metal Gear Solid (PS)
September 10 - Spyro the Dragon (PS)
September 30 – Fallout 2 (Win)
September 30 – Pokémon Red and Blue (GB)
October 20 – Xenogears (PS)
October 30 – Grim Fandango (Win)
October 31 – Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome Expansion (Win)
October 31 – SiN (Win)
November 20 – Half-Life (Win)
November 21 – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64)
November 30 – StarCraft: Brood War (Win)
November 30 – Starsiege: Tribes (Win)
November 30 – Thief: The Dark Project (Win)
November 30 – Baldur's Gate (Win)
December - - King's Quest: Mask of Eternity (Win)
December 10 – Turok 2: Seeds of Evil (N64)
December 20 – Myth II: Soulblighter (Win)

1999
January 31 - Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (PC)
January 31 - Silent Hill (PS)
February 8 - Mario Party (N64)
February 28 - Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance (PC)
March 16 - EverQuest (PC)
March 31 - RollerCoaster Tycoon (PC)
April 10 - Warzone 2100 (PC)
April 27 - Super Smash Bros. (N64)
April 30 - Baldur's Gate: Tales of the Sword Coast (PC)
April 30 - Star Wars: Episode I Racer (N64, PC)
April 30 - Pokémon Stadium (N64)
June 1 - Heroes of Might and Magic III (PC)
June 14 - Descent³ (PC)
June 18 - Counter-Strike (original PC MOD)
June 30 - Kingpin: Life of Crime (PC)
July 31 - Outcast (PC)
August 11 - System Shock 2 (PC)
August 27 - Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun (PC)
August 31 - Final Fantasy VIII - (PS)
August 31 - Tony Hawk's Pro Skater (PS)
September 7 - Sonic Adventure (DC)
September 8 - Soul Calibur (DC)
September 30 - Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (PC)
October 11 - Jet Force Gemini (N64)
October 31 - Half-Life: Opposing Force (PC)
October 31 - Ultima IX: Ascension (PC)
October 31 - Donkey Kong 64 (N64)
November 9 - RollerCoaster Tycoon: Corkscrew Follies (PC)
November 11 - Medal of Honor (PS)
November 15 - Homeworld (PC)
November 26 - Unreal Tournament (DC, PC, PS2)
December 2 - Quake III Arena (PC)
December 12 - Planescape: Torment (PC)
December 31 - Battlezone II: Combat Commander (PC)

2000
January 31 - The Sims (PC)
February 29 - Resident Evil Code: Veronica (DC)

Jesus fucking christ the gaming industry has gone downhill.

AC was totally different but I'll save that for the AC 10 year thread, a thread which I'm sure will be completely full of positively glowing comments.

I think some of you are attributing things to some grand design, that were simply lack of experience and precedence.

Except for some snazzy 3D polygons, I really don't see evolution in action since this list… …granted, 3D has brought more realism to FPS and exploded the MMORPG genre, but was a regressive development for RTS/TBS games…

Better than EQ ever was.

Somehow I don't think so. EQ was never a particularly well-crafted game, even when it was king of the world. Quality control was laughably awful, external communication openly hostile, no concessions made to casual gamers, and entire low-level mechanics ripped wholesale from diku with no evaluation of their merits in a graphical evolution of the genre. Simply put, EQ was successful because it was first. WoW is successful because it's a great game.

I have never felt the love for WOW like I did EQ.  I miss the EQ burning sensation of that cheese grater being slowly scraped up and down my scrotum, WOW cant offer me that.

Ah, but to a whole lot of people, WoW was the first (or, at least, their first). There's already nostalgia threads on most WoW forums along the lines of "Hey, remember when the top hunter survival talent was a shitty version of Rend? Good times, man" and so on.

WoW was a great game. This year, it will be 5 years old. To anyone who's not still obsessed with WoW, it looks and feels that old. It's gone all mudflated and I got tired of it years ago.

It's holding up because nobody else has made a great game in the genre in five years. But I can't look at 10-year-old EQ and 5-year-old WoW in "then and now" terms. They're both "then". How I wish there was a "now" game.

It's still a great game. They continue to innovate with technology like phasing, vehicles, etc, in the newest expansion, but even vanilla WoW is a superbly balanced, fast-paced, guided, great gaming experience. It all falls apart at max level of course, but leveling from 1-79 is a great game, and (in my opinion) is unsurpassed as far as dikuclones go.

The people who were still playing EQ five years ago said much the same to me when I evangelised WoW.

When/if the next WoW comes out, you may have a point. I don't see anything even on the horizon except for possibly SWTOR, and that's 2011 at best.

Free Realms will soon captivate us with pixie wings.

I know you're all excited, but I have the feeling that Freerealms will appeal to only 2 groups:

8-12 year old  :drillf: s
and  :pedobear: s of all ages

Can we have a  :dead_horse: where the horse is a pink unicorn?

You're broken.

Someday WoW will be replaced by something better and more successful, and at some point thereafter a bunch of guys drunk on nostalgia will post about how they miss all the crap in WoW that turned out to be an evolutionary dead end and which the audience is past tolerating anyway. I will be there to piss on their parade, as well. It's not about the specific mechanics of the game in question.

FIFY


I keenly await the UO 15th anniversary thread.

About the only memory I have from EQ was fighting mobs in that graveyard area with the curved walls.  Those mobs would always fall through the floor and you would have to zone out to get them gone.

That and the annoying trains in the gnoll dungeon are all that I remember from my short time.  I never did get why all my RL friends were so obsessed.  I went back to muds after playing it.

Do you ever get tired of smiting me with the "But you never played EQ/raided/whatever!" attack in a fit of righteous indignation, only to have other people who did play come along and tell you that I'm right anyway? Because it's happened to you at least twice now that I can recall. Oh, and way to continue to ignore the substance of my statements even after I laid them out real simple for you.

But ha ha, WUA plays UO sometimes still! Whoo, that totally makes him a hypocrite! I mean if he wanted that sort of fluff-heavy sandbox MMO experience but WEREN'T a nostalgia-addled fool himself, he'd be playing... uh... er... an emulated SWG server? Fucking Darkfall, maybe? What?

Dipshit.

You fail as a troll.

Hindsight is 20/20 I guess, but I think a lot of people are simply misplacing the timeline of EQ compared to playerbase maturity.

They didn't know that players would camp a particular spot for hours and hours when all of those "out of the way, no reason to go there" stuff was designed and implemented--they were flabbergasted that players didn't actually see dungeons and zones as places to explore fully.

Look at the games that preceded it, such as Ultima Underworld--people didn't farm camps in UO, they explored and experienced new things--and that was what they expected players to do. Spawns didn't respawn so the same players could camp for hours and hours--they re-spawned so that new players would have something to experience.

For those players that both enjoyed exploring, and either were lucky enough to pick a class that could explore (monks or rogues basically), or had a group of friends they could explore with, that aspect was simply amazing. Personally, I absolutely loved exploring areas that most never even knew about, much less had experience with, and the lore stories that were uncovered were pretty damn cool to players like me.

I fully respect that my play style is a minority--most people are achievers or killers, and don't really care about anything but those things...but to me, EQ was Ultima Underworld I and II that never ended just because I finished a single main single player quest.

Did it have many things that sucked? Sure--especially if you were the type of player that just wanted to min/max, or get phat loots. There isn't anything wrong with that at all...but EQ wasn't written specifically for that.

Personally, I think WoW's success was not necessarily in doing things better graphically, or game mechanics wise, but in their research and understanding of the different types of players, and the way they spent hard work attracting as many types as possible. EQ designers in my mind never really grasped that well, but it doesn't change the fact that as Mr Bloodworth stated, there wasn't anything to learn from at that time in the industry.

Hey guys, all that stuff I said about how a deliberately obscure presentation would just be blown by third parties? And that other stuff about how infrequently-used content probably needed more of a reason to be used? And that thinking otherwise is more a function of nostalgia than anything else? Yeah, all of that was totally destroyed by Tale and his insightful, engaging, and on-target debate. I couldn't say a word without him drawing upon his extensive playing experience to deliver a crushingly logical rebuttal in detail. Way to go, Tale.

Oh wait...

Here be flames!

snore...

And if I was a betting man, it'd be something Blizzard produces.

I don't know. All they really did with WoW was take the existing market leader and copy it with more money and less cockstab. Doing new things isn't really their strong suit. It might be a very long time before even Blizzard can beat WoW with something.

I'm on the same page you are, and definitely the minority. Kinda sad, since the result of the majority playstyle is a much less interesting or vibrant game world, but eh. Water long under the bridge.

I'd add necro to your list, corpse summoning ftw.Oooh...good point. Please, Mr. Blizzard, work on Starcraft Online aka Planetside 2  :drill:

I would play it.

I'd play the crap out of that. Sadly, I don't anticipate a good MMO FPS in the near future. Poor old Planetside - underappreciated through and through.

EVE-Online-but-better.

Seriously, when the only other traditional-model MMOG that is still growing subscriptions is run by amateur-hour clownshoes inbred vikings living on a glacier-encrusted volcano...maybe their game has some sort of spark that would be huge if someone halfway professional got hold of it.

A better Planetside and a better Eve are both appealing pitches. Under other circumstances I'd consider both to be too risky for Blizzard, Planetside never having been THAT successful and Eve occupying what is probably a relatively limited niche. But they have to do something, and just copying WoW with Starcraft skins would be almost guaranteed to disappoint.

I'd shit myself laughing if it turned out to be some sort of lightweight social game with RMT. I can just see all the current "We didn't want that business model anyway!" subscription MMO industry refugees swallowing cyanide capsules.

If Blizzard wanted to look at the most successful other MMOs and duplicate but improve Blizzard-ise them, we'll end up with their version of MapleStory. And, although some may scoff, StarCraftStory would probably leave Blizzard with enough money to jumpstart the US economy singlehandedly.

I think you could just add actual gameplay to EVE, you could keep everything else as is and end up with 4 times as many people playing. Of course, who knows if you could actually support that many more people playing at once without the server imploding under the strain.