Everquest

From 2000 to 2001 I played Everquest. I started when the first expansion Ruins of Kunark came out, and stopped shortly after intensely disliking the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin. If I remember correctly, I played EQ for 19 months (free month plus three 6-month subscriptions), making EQ the MMORPG I played the longest. No other game has captured me for even a year since. And I still don't know why I stuck to it that long.

EQ was not even my first MMORPG, I had played Ultima Online before, but EQ was my first 3D MMORPG. I played EQ quite a lot. My main character had over 1000 hours played, and I guess adding up all the alts gives me another 1000 hours of playtime. That is 100 hours per month, over 3 hours per day, way beyond what you could really call casual gaming. Nevertheless my highest character level was only 42, out of possible 60 at that time, and I never reached that high-level content EQ is famous for. You could probably say I "suX0r", but I simply wasn't all that interested in gaining levels in EQ, which was a terrible treadmill. I was far too busy with other occupations: I had a successful taxi business teleporting people for money, and another business buying bear skins, transforming them into large bags, and selling the bags with a good profit. I did several tradeskills. I did all the quests I could find. I spent a lot of time collecting faction points. I played around with some good friends, a nice guild, chatted, and was generally having fun.

But if you ask me if EQ is any good, I wouldn't recommend it. Most things in the gameplay of EQ seem to have been designed with the whole purpose of annoying the players:

• 
  When you died you were teleported back to your bind point naked, your equipment stayed on your corpse at the feet of the monster that killed you. Your bind point was often far away, as you could only bind in cities (and non-casters couldn't even bind themselves). So you had to do a naked "corpse run", trying to get your equipment back. During that corpse run you often died again, suffering from the harsh death penalty, sometimes even losing a level. If you ultimately failed to reach your corpse, all of your equipment was gone.
• Due to the danger of losing your corpse, fighting at a hard to get to place like a dungeon was unadvisable. Most dungeons were utterly deserted, except for people being many levels above the monster level in those dungeons, and those were just there to "farm" items.
• Many quests and desirable items involved "camping" a monster that either spawned very rarely, or spawned a bit more often but then only rarely dropped the item you needed. For example a mid-level cleric/druid/shaman quest for a book to raise your wisdom involved killing an NPC that only spawned every 8 hours. And getting myself a "mammoth cloak" involved killing a certain ice goblin every 23 minutes, until he dropped the cloak after a grand total of 16 hours.
• You spent much of your time doing nothing, the dreaded "downtime". For example at level 42, when my druid was out of mana, and did not have an enchanter to enhance his mana regeneration, it took him a full 15 minutes of rest before his mana was full again. If you missed a boat, you had to wait 20 minutes for the next one.
• Most character classes were utterly unable to solo anything once they were not low levels any more. The hardest monster they could kill all alone, would give 0 xp, and the easiest monster that would give them any xp would rip them apart.
• More than 20% of the players, including me, played druids as their main character, because that character class avoided travel downtime with teleports, and was able to solo monsters with a very special technique called quad-kiting (which was fun).
• The difficulty level of EQ was very high. You needed a group with just the right composition, and if somebody goofed, you often all died. That lead to even more downtime, trying to assemble a good group. Gaining levels took forever, and mainly involved killing the same monster over and over.
• Customer service was often abysmally bad. For example there was an official policy, posted on the EQ website, that if you reported that your account had been hacked, you would be banned. Thats right, not the hacker, but the victim. The reason given for that was that if you got hacked, you must have given your password to somebody else, which was against the EULA, so you got banned.
• Items neither decayed, nor had level restrictions. Many low level characters were equipped with high-level equipment they could never have reached themselves, the so-called "twinks". Twinking slowly turned from being rampant to being necessary, as un-twinked characters had difficulties finding a group.
• Tradeskills were not very good, requiring lots of repetitive clicking. Reaching a decent skill level cost a fortune, as the components cost a lot more than what you were producing. And many components were only available as loot drops from monsters. Even wood was only available from killing a treant, and for many of the better ores you needed to kill high-level goblins.

And with all these short-comings, Everquest was highly addictive, and kept you glued to the screen. In 2000 it was the MMORPG with the best graphics, enjoying a near-monopoly of the market. Money kept flowing in, and was re-invested into creating new content. Every zone was distinctive, and usually very well done, not just some random monsters on a random landscape. People still use the term "crushbone factor" to describe interesting content (or the lack thereof), based on the excellent EQ zone Crushbone. The game was hard, and punishing, but up to a certain point that challenge just added to the fun.

And because the game itself was so much against them, the players worked closer together, just to beat it. The game forced you to rely on other people, just to survive, and undergoing that common hardship forged stronger bonds of friendship than in any other game. Many people played on, even when they already hated the game, just because of their friends.

I wonder if I will ever be able to recapture that fascination that I had with EQ playing another game. Does a game HAVE to be player-unfriendly, to ultimately bind people with social bonds, and would I be willing to play such an unfriendly game now? Did I just play EQ that long because it was a first of its kind, and that initial magic is something that is gone forever? I visited EQ some time ago, part of a free trial come-back offer from SOE, and of course the graphics now seem horribly dated, the friends have all gone, and there was nothing left to keep me there except nostalgia, so I left after a day.

EQ2 is supposed to come out in two months time (well, take release dates with a grain of salt), and I am going to play it, come what may. It is possible that I won't like it and throw it into a corner before the free month is over. But the lure of the word "Everquest" is still so strong that I'm willing to pre-order it without waiting for the reviews. And I guess there will be many people like me. What a strange love-hate relationship.

- posted by Tobold @ 12:40 PM Permanent Link