Book Review: Everquest Companion

The Everquest Companion by Robert B. Marks is an interesting, if outdated, book on the Everquest game series. It tells the history from the ancestors of computer games, via Everquest, to Everquest II. Having been published in September 2003 it obviously misses the information on how MMORPG went mainstream with City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and Guild Wars.

What the book does offer is insights into the development process of the Everquest games. It also has tons of concept artwork, plus some photos of Everquest developers and fans. The book doesn't shy away from discussing public relations disasters, and difficult issues like player killing, and player ownership of virtual items. Again, being dated, the book claims that SOE is against trading virtual items, a position that has significantly changed since. The book also discussion "addiction", including Everquest-related suicides that have caused controversy in the past.

While it is good that controversial issues are discussed in the book, the author is putting a very Verant/SOE-friendly spin to things. He has obviously been paid for by SOE, John Smedley is writing the introduction, and the author got all his information from SOE themselves. So you get to see the whole history of Everquest from the point of view of SOE. Some of the opinions on game design are put as if they were absolute truths, and I don't agree with all of them. And then there is a constant "Everquest is the greatest" theme underlying the whole book, argumented with their "huge" subscriber numbers of over 400,000. Which kind of pales against Blizzard's latest news of 3.5 million subscribers, just having gained 1.5 million chinese players.

Don't get me wrong, Everquest was a very important step in the development of MMORPG. It paved the way for the things to come. But on this foundation much greater things have been built since, and the Everquest Companion was written two years too early to get that point.
- posted by Tobold @ 10:50 AM Permanent Link