Everquest going f2p

[HaemishM]

As I remember, Vox was the first dragon downed and it was much much earlier than Brad McQuaid expected. Plane of Fear was not initially open on release. It was a few weeks or a month or so after release that it opened up. I remember it because it was a really big deal, with my wife and my friends all making level 1 ogres because they were the closest starting race point to the zone-in point. We'd try to run through the Feerott and survive the mobs who were 10-15 levels above us, then make it through the level 30-40's Spectres guarding the hidden tunnel to get to the actual portal, then RUN into the portal to zone into Fear. There were dozens of naked ogre corpses littering the place. My wife actually made it inside the zone and died at the portal. It was a day or so after that that McQuaid announced they'd level-gated the zone so only level 46 and up players could zone in, bending knee to mass of whining douchebag l33t raider types whose cocks he would slobber throughout the remainder of his reign in EQ.

The Plane of Hate opened months later, and Sky after that, each one progressively harder to get into, much less survive. I will say that clearing one of the planes or beating one of the dragons was a really amazing experience, and at first, I LOVED leading raids. My first Vox kill, I lead a multi-guild non-allied set of raiders (had members from something like 15 different guilds) and I was only 37 at the time (level 40 was considered the minimum level to take down Vox). This was in the days when there were NO custom chat channels. If you weren't all in the same guild, you had to do what I did - use a zone-wide chat channel like /shout or /ooc to coordinate the raid, with rosters written on paper, no voice chat programs, nothing.

You young whippersnappers got it easy these days. 

[Special J]

Why did we do this? Because we had to progress that way.  Even though we had the new expansions and were at the new level caps, gear was still the master.  Well.. gear and ability to field a large raid, levels made up for the last one but not the first.   You HAD to do VP->Luclin->PoP, there was no "gear reset"  WoW introduced that, along with instanced raiding. (Which is yet another reason to laugh when people say WoW didn't innovate or move the genre forward.)

Well luckily you didn't HAVE to do Luclin.  Outside some of the easier targets, my guild pretty much skipped the dick-punching grindy stuff and were able to go on to PoP on mostly Velious gear.  But Pre-pop, yeah that was the top-end content, and yeeech.

[fuser]

When I joined around the end of the Luclin era they were just getting in to VP and the Ice Giant bosses because Elitists/ Vagrants and the others had moved-on and we were able to kill them during our weekend raid times because they were finally around at those times.   As Planes opened-up we were able to move on to Luclin and as they moved on to the higher planes, we were able to get in to the lower ones like POI and we went back and did the Ssra temple grind as well.

(Hey, think it sucks grinding rep in WoW?  Imagine having to grind faction at 1-3 points per mob just to be able to raid a zone.  Each aggressiveness level was at least as long as Revered->exalted in WOW and the mobs that gave it spawned less frequently.  I remember spending about 4 weeks of 4+ hours a night just killing the same room of mobs.  )(

Played a Mage so I remember the faction grind so much. Grind those stupid giants for an insane time to be able to CoH behind Klandicar. That and constantly /logout at 10% health left not to take a faction hit.

After grinding factions I could CoH to a lot of epic spawns and got paid handsomely by others

Plane of Sky was the worst, getting a raid up there to the 7th island for Mage epic was payback for all the grinding.

[Kageru]

Reading this makes me very glad I played UO instead of EQ.  That's a lot of free time down the drain over a period of years.  (update, btw: glad I did the 14 day free trial instead of the f2p, I was able to roll my halfling druid and promptly quit and uninstall after the first kill-ten-rats quest)

It was a different time. Finding an area with level appropriate mobs and killing thousands of them was considered prime game-play. If they gave interesting faction or drops that was a bonus. It's partly why WoW with its rich quest directed leveling was just so much more accessible and why players would probably never put up with it again.

... UO was that much less grindy? I messed with it a little bit when it was well and dead and getting skills to mastery wasn't exactly fast either. And of course it was considered a PK haven so was happy to be in EQ. Plus 3D beat isometric.

[Trippy]

Plane of Sky was the worst, getting a raid up there to the 7th island for Mage epic was payback for all the grinding.

Yes it was though that place had one of my favorite moments in the game. My guild had a full raid going doing the various quests and we just about wiped on the fricking Bzzazzts. I can't remember the details of how things got screwed up (somebody probably broke the Enchanters' mezzes) but somehow my Bard was the only one left standing with a mez and I managed to keep the two remaining Bzzazzts mezzed until the rest of the raid was able to rez and regroup which took quite a while. Our guild's main Shammy was also there keeping me healed so I didn't have to try to twist in my regen when my mez would fail and a Bzzazzts would break free and beat on me until I was able to get a mez to stick.

[Merusk]

Reading this makes me very glad I played UO instead of EQ.  That's a lot of free time down the drain over a period of years.  (update, btw: glad I did the 14 day free trial instead of the f2p, I was able to roll my halfling druid and promptly quit and uninstall after the first kill-ten-rats quest)

It was a different time. Finding an area with level appropriate mobs and killing thousands of them was considered prime game-play. If they gave interesting faction or drops that was a bonus. It's partly why WoW with its rich quest directed leveling was just so much more accessible and why players would probably never put up with it again.

... UO was that much less grindy? I messed with it a little bit when it was well and dead and getting skills to mastery wasn't exactly fast either. And of course it was considered a PK haven so was happy to be in EQ. Plus 3D beat isometric.

From what I've read UO was no less grindy if you actually played it the way you had to play EQ.  The thing is nobody actually PLAYED UO.. they macro'd skills until endgame status then played.

[Sky]

UO wasn't bad except for the few instances it was horribad, when it came to raising skills.

I really enjoyed Siege Perilous, though. 7x GM without macroing, and it all came from regular gameplay. And no combat skills (stealth/thief).

[Phred]

As I remember, Vox was the first dragon downed and it was much much earlier than Brad McQuaid expected. Plane of Fear was not initially open on release. It was a few weeks or a month or so after release that it opened up. I remember it because it was a really big deal, with my wife and my friends all making level 1 ogres because they were the closest starting race point to the zone-in point. We'd try to run through the Feerott and survive the mobs who were 10-15 levels above us, then make it through the level 30-40's Spectres guarding the hidden tunnel to get to the actual portal, then RUN into the portal to zone into Fear. There were dozens of naked ogre corpses littering the place. My wife actually made it inside the zone and died at the portal. It was a day or so after that that McQuaid announced they'd level-gated the zone so only level 46 and up players could zone in, bending knee to mass of whining douchebag l33t raider types whose cocks he would slobber throughout the remainder of his reign in EQ.

Ya it was totally cool training the ubers with throwaway alts while they tried to break Fear. And even better, if you died you just left your corpse there, cause there was no /hidecorpse so people zoning in would crash from all the corpses they tried to load. Good times. Fuck that turd McQuaid for ruining it.

[Azazel]

Awesome! It's like the old days repeating themselves. 

[Tale]

I was on the same server as Tale and remember it the same way he's relating. (People's Front of Norrath/  Mithril Heart Brigade, here.)  MHB wasn't one of the 'cutting edge' guilds.  We came in after everyone had moved on and were doing old content because it was finally available. (World spawns, remember)

I really liked MHB - you were a great guild, the principled kind that tried to combine fun and roleplaying with the raiding stuff. I remember the first leader - a female dwarf cleric, can't remember the name, sometimes grouped with her. The pain of trying to lead an organically grown guild on raids led her to join The Elitists, but she was still cool.

I played a troll warrior called Grozzer, an officer of Southern Legion, the biggest Aussie/NZ guild in the first year of EQ. We began as a gathering point for the sparse population in our time zone, but EQ boomed and we soon had 200+ members and chaotic guildchat. I got us into The Alliance, but politics between low-level and raid-level players caused a split that formed Aurora Noctum, the first Aussie hardcore raiding guild, and I went to AN. SL continued as a social guild and had raiding struggles similar to MHB. AN was more disciplined, lasted many years in EQ and has been through AO, DAoC, SWG, several stints in WoW and EQ2, LotRO, Rift and currently SWTOR. I haven't really played anything since WoW.

[Phred]

I really liked MHB - you were a great guild, the principled kind that tried to combine fun and roleplaying with the raiding stuff. I remember the first leader - a female dwarf cleric, can't remember the name, sometimes grouped with her. The pain of trying to lead an organically grown guild on raids led her to join The Elitists, but she was still cool.

Thistleburr.

edit: fixed quote fail

[Merusk]

That's her!

She was gone by the time I'd joined the guild, but yes they were a great group of folks.  They didn't hold together in WoW, from what I understand.  None of the really strong personalities switched over to take-on a leadership role, so that's probably why.    I'd gone on to do an CST server instead of the PST they planned on rolling and by pure coincidence wound-up on the same one that Eli/Vags chose (Alleria).  I still remember seeing Crush running around Ironforge, though he burnt-out before ever becoming anything of note on the server.   Ha, old man memories.

[Polysorbate80]

Ya it was totally cool training the ubers with throwaway alts while they tried to break Fear. And even better, if you died you just left your corpse there, cause there was no /hidecorpse so people zoning in would crash from all the corpses they tried to load. Good times. Fuck that turd McQuaid for ruining it.

PoFear WTF moments:

When they "fixed" the mobs damage output without telling anyone, very shortly after opening the zone.  That's when the impressive wipe-fests started happening.

Also, my buddy wound up with E'ci's only cryosilk robe (they removed it from the loot table before any more dropped) and he wasn't even high enough level to enter the zone after the level restriction went into effect 

And don't forget the clusterfuck of moving the class gear for the best tanks, two of the three healing classes (including the best ones), and all of the slowing/crowd control classes to Plane of Hate instead.  We wound up having to camp the zone for the week after a successful break, because it was usually too hard to get any of those classes to help break into the zone after that.  I spent a lot of 4am nights as the puller on those camps...

[HaemishM]

One of my favorite things about Plane of Hate were those little imps that would spawn every once in a while at random to hit the party whereever they were. I forget what they were called, but they were little mini demons almost too hard to target because they were cursor sized and they all screamed "BLEARG!" when they died. Which quickly became our guild mantra.

[Redgiant]

Awesome! It's like the old days repeating themselves.

I find it funny that all the 13-years ago detailed memories and nostalgic posts in this thread would never have happened if EQ had been like the over-instanced, insta-travel, queue-ridden, immersion-breaking messes of modern games.

Or does someone have a great much more recent story about how they were once in this 10-minute awesome Flashpoint!, or how they were the top line in the high-score list after a Capture The Flag run! Wheee, how complex! Please share.


I understand the business models and motivations for why games today are built like they are, but that doesn't make them more fun for player interaction or memorable history-building. I didn't use the word 'evolution' on purpose here.

Everquest was historic, and this thread shows part of the reason why.

[Merusk]

Humans evolved to remember painful and hurtful things in detail to better avoid them later.

[Redgiant]

Granted, but you also seem to have 13-year memories with astounding detail. That does count.

[UnSub]

Or does someone have a great much more recent story about how they were once in this 10-minute awesome Flashpoint!, or how they were the top line in the high-score list after a Capture The Flag run! Wheee, how complex! Please share.

MahrinSkel's doing it about Tribes in the other thread. As one example...

Or I could reminisce about City of Heroes beta, or something. The first time is always pretty memorable, as are the extreme highs and lows.

A lot - A LOT - of EQ sucked. That it was the first for a lot of people (as WoW was also the first for a lot of people) makes it stand out.

[Tale]

A lot - A LOT - of EQ sucked. That it was the first for a lot of people (as WoW was also the first for a lot of people) makes it stand out.

It stands out because there had never been a huge 3D accelerated MUD before. It was the first thing of its type, not just the first for a lot of people.

[MuffinMan]

I remember following EQ up to it's release thinking it was going to flop because no one had 3d accelerators in their PC's and it was insane to require one.

[Sky]

When it came out I had my 3rd 3d accelerator (and the first good one, the 3dfx Voodoo).

My fond memories were almost due to being young with copious amounts of free time and weed, playing on a LAN with friends. EQ was entirely incidental.

[Simond]

http://www.eqmagetower.com/wiki/ReturningtoEQFAQ

[UnsGub]

Humans evolved to remember painful and hurtful things in detail to better avoid them later.

All I remember after the years are the people.  I spent over year in game with them.  It is where I found my wife.

[Merusk]

After being married for 14 years, I fail to see how that in any way invalidates my point.

[Hawkbit]

I checked it out for a few minutes. 

The upside is that it feels better put together than it did years ago.  It seems to load faster and cleaner. 

But the downside is that there are 'upgrade to gold' ads all over everything.  They pop up all the time. 

I can't see myself putting too much time into this anymore.

[Maledict]

Awesome! It's like the old days repeating themselves.

I find it funny that all the 13-years ago detailed memories and nostalgic posts in this thread would never have happened if EQ had been like the over-instanced, insta-travel, queue-ridden, immersion-breaking messes of modern games.

Or does someone have a great much more recent story about how they were once in this 10-minute awesome Flashpoint!, or how they were the top line in the high-score list after a Capture The Flag run! Wheee, how complex! Please share.


I understand the business models and motivations for why games today are built like they are, but that doesn't make them more fun for player interaction or memorable history-building. I didn't use the word 'evolution' on purpose here.

Everquest was historic, and this thread shows part of the reason why.

Absolutely. I was a hardcore EQ raider through Velios, Luclin and PoP and have some amazing memories, particulary of PoP. We got our first Rallos Zek kill because I screwed up on the final phase and got smacked down to 15% health just as the mobs started to spawn. As a bard I was on every mobs aggro list in the field, and they all instantly turned to kill me. Kited as long as I could, then ran to a corner and hit fading memories to wipe aggro. Rinsed and repeated whilst we burnt rallos down.

Wasn't intentional - we only worked out what had happened after he died because all our enchanters and rangers who were also supposed to be kiting were being completely ignored by the mobs who appeared to be running in wierd circles constantly.

Same thing in the plane of air mini-bosses before xegony. On the spider island we wiped, which normally meant you had to restart a few days later. I survived though, and kited the entire packs of spiders around the top island for 45 minutes whilst the raid resized up, wiped, razzed up, wiped and eventually fought their way back up. My wrists were sore for days afterwards.

I remember learning to swarm kite, grouping for the first time in dungeons - fantastic memories.

Bu I have the same quality of memory from Wow. I was in the first group on our server that completed the quest to kill baron rivendare in Stratholme when everyone raided the place at the time. I remember fighting Ragnaros for the first time and bein amazed - and getting a nickname that stuck with me for 6 years thanks to me saying 'if we last until the sons of ragnaros spawn I'm the pope'.  Damn shamans and their self rezzes!

You can absolutely guarantee there are millions of WoW players out there who have memories of that game just as vivid and important to them as yours are of EQ. It's how people work.

[Simond]

Here, something else useful: http://almarsguides.com/eq/

[Kageru]

You can absolutely guarantee there are millions of WoW players out there who have memories of that game just as vivid and important to them as yours are of EQ. It's how people work.

I agree. Though possibly a little less because there's lots of old veterans and spoiler sites happy to reduce the game to a mechanical process and online gaming is a bit ho-hum now. Combined with the current trend towards a "directed" experience so that you come out of the tutorial with a line of quests you can follow to end-game and challenges carefully balanced to not be too threatening. You really have to go out of your way to have a learning experience.

I was cleaning up some old files and found the "Copic and Etta" series of comics by some Japanese player. And the first panel is managing to drown while exploring the city in the darkness, the second getting lost and the third getting cleaned up by a gnoll immediately outside of the town gates. Not to mention a later panel with a character realizing the cool sounding god "Bertoxxulous" means there's lots of normally friendly NPC's who want to kill you and can easily do so.

Oh well, can't recapture more innocent times. And certainly not by going back to whatever they've turned EQ into now.

[shiznitz]

Would any developer ever dare to design the well in Blackburrow again?  The sheer hilarity of having a hole into which a new player could fall and see nothing but black while getting swarmed by gnolls, corpse lost in the first hour and exp debt too!

[Sky]

Would any developer ever dare to design the well in Blackburrow again?  The sheer hilarity of having a hole into which a new player could fall and see nothing but black while getting swarmed by gnolls, corpse lost in the first hour and exp debt too!

l2pf2p

[Kageru]

      "Choice. The problem is choice." ―Neo.

I had a thought that explaining the difference of original EQ (and Eve to an extent) works much better if you split "Fun" and "memorable" into two categories. Because I'm not sure an MMO or game can actually hit both at once.

WoW gameplay in the Cataclysm expansion was miles ahead of EQ. The player has a rich sequence of quests with a lot of variation in interaction (such as controlling vehicles or changing forms / powers) and scripting (such as hero cameos). It was fun in a way that EQ very rarely was because it gives constant direction and rewards for executing. There's relatively few "dead" periods and those are short. But at the same time you have zero investment in the process because it quickly becomes obvious you are following a carefully laid path and there is never any reason not to follow it. As a result it is fun but not memorable because you didn't really make a plan of your own, select a strategy and work towards executing it so no achievement particularly resonates. You can kill demon lords (convenient powered down to become soloable) but that just makes them into a generic mob with an excessive model. Same in the new CoH tutorial where you solo kill a carefully neutered raid mob at level 2 but there's no sense of achievement in doing so and it is instantly forgotten.

EQ basically booted you out into the world after a short tutorial. The only real track is that as a newbie there were vast areas of the game world where the mobs will obliterate you. The main goal was to kill challenging mobs as determined by their level (which gave a forward progression) and drops (which encouraged visiting riskier areas). The gameplay often wasn't fun, lots of grinding, LFG, traveling (since the next set of rewarding mobs to kill might be far away) and waiting for re-spawn or resource recovery. Much of the game was trying to find the fun and for the vast majority of gamers WoW was a massive upgrade. But it did encourage you to make plans for your character, both short and long, and try to carry them out. And if it worked well there was a feeling of achievement because you had invested thought and effort in getting there. It was memorable because in some ways it was your own little story you made. Also the combination of sharing plans, lots of places with mobs too tough or numerous for a solo player and relatively slow gameplay encouraged social interaction (same in Eve fleet chat), whereas most modern instance runs are all speed runs because the optimal path to the goal is known.

Eve is somewhat the same. Insanely boring gameplay but the ability of the players to be part of a larger plan invented by players.

Maybe it even explained why CoH had relatively limited appeal. The instanced missions remove player choice and so quickly become grindy (especially because there's so few maps). EQ LDoN was pretty much the same now I think about it, DDO as well I think.

As the games becomes more guided that freedom inherently vanishes in proportion. So modern WoW quests and MMO raiding in general have a clear progression, expected execution and the challenge is tuned to the point where the execution must be fairly efficient. Which inherently disallows most alternatives as being impractical (or possibly exploits if the designers didn't see it).

I do wonder if it is possible to have a game with the freedom to explore and make your own plans without the "boring" that makes it impossible to compete for the mass market share needed to fund the current development costs.  Also people inherently optimize away that freedom with leveling guides and quest trackers so they can race to end-game. Maybe GW2 will provide some interesting responses to these challenges.

I think it also explains why some of the Asian grinders fail. They generally don't have that much of a guided path but they also don't tend to have a very rich or differentiated world. You can't really make plans or goals if all the zones are just endless plains full of generic mobs. There need to be things you can base plans around like diverse regions or points of interest (like blackburrow was). Which they don't generally bother with because it is understood that the goal is getting to level cap so you can kill other players.

[Malakili]

I do wonder if it is possible to have a game with the freedom to explore and make your own plans without the "boring" that makes it impossible to compete for the mass market share needed to fund the current development costs.

I think the problem is that the exploration and plan making *is* the "boring" to most people.   Sure, maybe you can minimize the farming materials or something which usually comes with the Sandbox games, but at the end of the day, the vast majority of gamers just want an hour of entertainment.  If they have to explore and make plans, the hour is up before they've actually "played."

The catch is that for someone like me the exploration and the planning is part of the "playing" whereas for many people it is seen as an obstacle to the "playing."  I'm not sure these two play styles can be reconciled.  World War 2 Online did it maybe as well as I can think of off hand by empowering the most dedicated players with the ability to dictate the over arching strategy which involved lots of planning, logistics, etc.  Meanwhile, the other players could log in, see where the action was (without needing to even know about the High Command folks or why they were making the decisions) and just fight over a town or two.

Granted, this was the overhauled version, it wasn't like this at launch.  Not to mention it isn't like WW2O is a poster child for financial success.  Loved the game, but it isn't for everyone.   

[Kageru]

Yeah, but I really wonder if it is possible for people to feel the "memorable sense of achievement" in an MMO without the boring bits. It partly comes from me wondering why some of the ball-breakingly grindy shit I did in EQ has left me with good memories of the game, whereas much more directed stuff like Cataclysm leveling faded into blandness even while I was doing it. Something about humans being broken and "no pain, no gain" come to mind :/

Time investment is certainly part of it. I remember long gaming sessions in EQ because once you'd finally found a group, or started a clear, you were committed. Which I guess the negative side of being "invested" in the game. Eve had this even worse where you would start playing and how long you'd be expected to continue playing was at the convenience of other people with little opportunity to hop-in / hop-out. And if you can only play for an hour you expect to be immediately in the action.

There are certainly ways to get some instant action but I'm not sure they really suit an MMO game. You don't need a "persistent world" if you are just going to log in and kill some shit for 30 minutes. A single player or match based game (with many match based games now offering character persistence) is just much better suited to providing that. With MMO battlegrounds generally being hampered in comparison due to gear and mechanics leaking over from or into PvE and damaging both of them and more problems with ping / server responsiveness. Maybe you could make a hybrid like you say where some do the planning and others are the zerg, and it seems to be what GW2 is after with the zone events, but getting that to provide freedom and challenge so that beating it is rewarding and memorable will not be easy. In general I suspect game and world depth comes at a cost of overhead and efforts to make an action-MMO or story based MMO haven't convinced me there's an easy solution to that conflict.

That said I would consider playing Eve again if I could log in and launch my personal fighter from someone's super-carrier to join in a battle in progress. But 30 gates listening to DBRB dribble on for a fight that might happen and might be balanced isn't worth it. And thanks to the wonders of open-world PvP that's probably happening at the extremes of my timezone anyway... damn, now I want to fly my frigates again :/

I'm actually enjoying LotRO because the "deeds" are probably the closest I've seen to a "go exploring, find stuff" game. I can go wandering around the old forest which was built partly to represent a fictional place rather than just a leveling zone and possibly find hidden things (like the flowers of the entwives, or a hidden spider nest). But even then I'm not sure I could argue the time invested is giving massively rewarding gameplay.

(edit)

I can also understand my MMO malaise. I want the emotional payoff I got in EQ but I don't want to invest that much time, have to invest as much time in finding a guild and meeting their time and effort demands and put up with the boring bits. Which currently is destined to be unsatisfied.

[raydeen]

Well, I logged into one of my old characters and ran around for about an hour trying to remember the geography. It's been so long I have no idea whet I'm doing. So I just loaded up some buffs and heals and babysat a young Iksar in Crushbane for about an hour.

I think I can safely say I will never pay to play this game ever again. Norrath is a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.

[UnSub]

Has it been mentioned that Everquest Adventures is shutting down at the end of March?