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Is EQ just nostalgia, or was it really that good?
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I suspect a lot of people don't mention corpse runs and xp loss, because even though they were a major inconvenience they brought more than just frustrations to the table. They also brought fear of dying and made you bring friends when you explored. The fear of dying part can't be emulated without the threat of losing something.
That doesn't mean I don't understand why somebody like you only see frustrations and timesinks. You never felt what I and many of my friends felt and vise versa
On another note, something EQ also taught me. I only really care about characters I've worked hard for (as in putting in a substantial amount of time in advancing). I was a lot more attached to my characters in EQ than I ever was in games like WoW. That became apparent when I was hacked in WoW. I simply didn't care about my loss. Even if support couldn't restore what was lost, It would have been easy and fast to replace. That initially sounds like something positive but I found it rather depressing.
soloing was never the most efficient means of getting exp though, even for quad kiting pros.
I think you are misremembering stuff. You could get a Wizard leveled to max in like a week. The only thing that was more efficient were AOE groups with nothing but Wizards and Enchanters.
The AAs made character progression endless. they made it so you were rewarded for helping your friend try to get their spells or whatever they were after. AAs effectively made it so that you didnt really play the game all that differently at max level, unless you were a raider (the minority)
The keying was out of hand, yes. Although I think there is absolutely room for extremely tedious things like Vex Thal keying as kind of a bonus raid. PoP was a bit convoluted, however it would have worked if it the keying was at a guild level.
Again, to go back to WoW...A lot of people are nostalgic for keying and the devs have recently said they think keying isnt necessarily a bad mechanic if the right middle ground is found.
koboldfodder, you nailed it. I loved this game and am still friends with most of the people met in this game. Yes things are dated now if you look back it, but there is so much they did right that most MMO's now don't even touch. I can't count how many times I would have late night runs to Guk just to help random people out or check spawns. Hanging out in EC chatting and buying/selling. As you said, the community in this game is what it was all about. Your name and reputation were important, not just a gamertag that you ran around with. When you helped people out, it helped you get into groups, get into raids, get into guilds.
People now are spoiled and expect everything to be easy and scoff at the idea of making things a challenge. Every level, every item, every faction gained felt earned in Everquest. I wish most MMO's now could capture even half the feeling of that game.
AAs just created more grind. The only thing Everquest was about was mindless character progression if you weren't on a PVP server.
EQ wasn't made by one guy with a vision. It was originally being produced by SISA (a subdivision of sony) after the despised (at least around these parts) Smedley secured the funding for it. Eventually Verant was created and spun off from Sony. Verant was a subsidiary of Sony and Smedley was in charge of the operation from the beginning, He created it for Sony, a company derided for years on this site as one of the greediest and worst in the industry.
Edit: I admittedly haven't looked into the backgrounds of the other games that you mention, but I do have a hard time believing that Turbine started out as one guy in his garage.
It was more than just "camping" for me. It really is a slow and boring game compared to modern MMOs. Obviously my opinion, but I'll state a few reasons here.
1. Meditating - frankly having to wait MINUTES to refill your mana before doing anything. In the original EQ before they changed it (I don't remember exactly when they did) you were staring at your UI with nothing to indicate what was going on and being unable to do anything else while meditating. Worse yet if you didn't have clarity (or a bard) and later flowing thought gear to keep you going.
2. Attack speeds and spell cast times were LONG. Everything is just so slow compared to a modern MMO. I like action combat, and I'm glad we're finally get MMOs with that.
3. Lack of depth in the combat. Many classes boiled down to using a single spell over and over again in the raid such as Clerics and their complete heal rotations. EQ's combat made even other combat simulators with hotkey rotations look bad.
4. Speaking of lack of depth, most raids at least until Planes of Power boiled down to pulling a MOB to a specific spot (usually into a corner somewhere) and tank and spank. Essentially all fights were gear checks either on your tank and healers or on your entire raid requiring resist gear to mitigate damage.
5. Ridiculously long attunement and key quests that were necessary to complete with your entire guild that could months, meanwhile you have all the other content on farm.
6. I still don't think camping should be encouraged. There are ways around this now without instancing that encourage exploration and true dungeon crawling without having groups fight, argue, and ruin each other's experiences.
I too got completely nostalgic once, returning back to EQ for a day during my college years even though EQ2 had just released, WoW was close to releasing, and Guild Wars was in beta. I just couldn't get back into it. It was nostalgia and I realized it.
I can repost things I loved about EQ and things I hated, which I posted in one of the EQ Next threads here if people like. MOB level variety and danger in zones was one of the positives I loved about EQ that I wish more games would have adopted (and I posted that). I also enjoyed it in WoW with the Fel Reavers, but as you mentioned it was all too rare there.
Wizards didnt even get the AoE snare spell until level 29. And it wasnt that efficient. You could only do a few quads on one mana bar and then had to med. It really wasnt that efficient compared to a solid group. You are the one who is misremembering.
AC was miles ahead of EQ in every category. DAoC was miles ahead as far as community.
EQ's one thing was interdependency. It forced us to need one another. I love how people try to talk about EQs community. You mean the killstealing and spawn camping that went on constantly? The childish banter in /ooc and /shout? EQ was the genre's WoW in its heyday.
AC and DAoC crushed EQ in terms of community and gameplay.
While there was always some of that kind of stuff in games, for the most part that was not my experience, at least not in the first few years of EQs lifespan, perhaps later as more expansions came out and the game got more saturated with players that became more of an issue, but I didn't see it that way. Though your servers mileage may vary as well...
What a silly thing to say.
I can easily come up with stories of how friendships and guilds were formed, based on great chance encounters in dungeons where you save the lives of 5 tired old gamers finally making it down to the bottom of the dungeon after hours of wipes just to explain how amazing everything was.
It would be as pointless as the point you are trying to make because neither paints the picture of how the game was. It's just anecdotal stories which happened from time to time. You can pretty much do this with any online game in history. Pull out some bad experiences and present is as "this is how it really was"
I pretty much agree with all this.
What's so silly about it? You have your opinion I have mine. EQ was a fine game to get started on MMOs with. I quickly found better in AC and DAoC.
Quad Kiting in Plane of Fire was far more effective than most groups (aside from AoE groups, which Wizards were one of 4 exclusive classes for too). I think you might be the one misremembering. I could solo on my Magician (Seb, Temple of Shissar Basement, Bastion of Thunder) faster than most groups, especially if I could manage to find other soloers in a zone and group with them for bonus EXP - since you could EXP with them in the same zone while they were out of EXP credit range and still get bonus EXP allied to you. Still, I don't know how a Wizard ever hit max in a week, in fact I don't know anyone who could hit max level that quickly without being powerleveled and even with powerleveling it took longer than a week.
Also AAs weren't endless. We had several people with maxed out AA points (including myself on Magician) by late Planes of Power. Sure you could earn more, but they weren't doing anything till a new expansion would introduce more AAs. Bards could easily hit max AA solo at the rate they could solo by PoP too. Kiting 100+ MOBs solo as a Bard in Halls of Honor would net 400AA a day till they fixed it, and a few guilds took advantage of this and had bards powerlevel their AAs.
It's not really an opinion as it is "spin" to suit an argument. As I said, with any online game in history, you can pull a bad experience and present is as "this is how the game truly was". I played the game from launch and four years in. So did a lot of my friends. It's funny we don't share the same view if this is how it truly was all the time. Do you honestly believe EQ would have survived back in the day if people were griefed from the moment they logged in? Think about it
I'm not doubting you experiences and you are allowed your opinion even if you do misrepresent things to suit your arguments. Your representation was hardly the norm. If it was then the game wouldn't have been very popular
A week is an exaggeration, but it was damn quick being completely twinked out.
1. agreed. i think later EQ was closer to a sweet spot with this. Mana management should be important, but you are correct that EQ went overboard with it.
2. Slow, yes. But action combat is *way* too far in the other extreme. I dislike it *very* strongly for long play sessions. There are enough short session MMOs for an action combat fix now, no need to put in an EQ game.
3. The depth was in the interactions with others. However you arent wrong either. In PoP playing a ranger was mostly hitting your auto fire. However while leveling, and in later expansions, it was much more involved...especially with knowing how to manage your aggro. EQ was good in that design, where tanks couldnt out aggro DPS going all out, DPS had to manage aggro. Also some classes, like ranger and necro, really shined when shit hit the fan and you had to use your roots, snares, off tank ability (flame lick aggro ftw) and even some healing. But yes, rogues didnt have that kind of depth to their class that rangers did. And much of this applies to post-PoP era EQ when the classes were much better rounded out (Rangers were more than warriors with druid spells)
4. 100% correct. The early raid bosses were bad mechanics wise. they certainly made up for this in PoP
5. As I said earlier, i dont have a huge problem with Vex Thal. thats a small fraction of the population. As a side note about why EQ rocked, I was in a guild that did Vex Thal during GoD era, two expansions after it was current. And the gear was still relevant to a guild of our power. EQ1 had a great risk vs reward for its middle years, where easily obtained group gear wouldnt be better than end game raids from the last expansion, or even the last two expansions.
6. i really didnt have many groups ruining each others day with exp camping. It happened at times, but its tough to avoid in a non instanced setting really. Raid bosses are a tricky subject and i think some raids really do need to be instanced, but there should always be world bosses as well. i think OoW did very well with this.
While EQs group mechanics are second to none, you are right that individual mechanics were lacking, especially for warriors and rogues. However, I hate GCD-fests like Rift that are too busy with constant button mashing and as a said i loathe action combat for long play sessions. i think the middle ground to be found is reaction type abilities and some movement aspects factored in too (no red circles, please). Maybe some inter-class skill chaining with diminishing returns so you dont repeat the same chains over and over.
But PLEASE keep the aoe-centric crap out of EQNext...mobs should be feared not looked at like speed bumps. Having 3 mobs run at you should make you shit your pants not curse your puller for bringing so few.
If you compare EQ to what was available at the time, taking into consideration single player games and UO, it probably was "that good". They didn't earn the name "EverCrack" for nothing.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
Quad Kiting in Plane of Fire wasnt possible for the average person though, less than 1% of the server were even keyed for it. And quad kiting in other places wasnt as good as people like to say it is. Now where it could get efficient is the fact you didnt have to look for a group and could port right where you needed to go as a wiz. But the actual act of quad kiting any where but PoFire was not as efficient as grouping overall, and in the pre KEI days it really wasn't that close.
Im mostly talking about the average player experience here, not the upper end players. I am aware that some people did indeed max their AAs, but it was a very small number (until the later expansions..this became more common later on in EQ's life) or they were using borderline exploits (swarm kiting)
[mod edit]
Are there things I would change if I could? Yeah, like the stupid hybrid penalties. Would sandbox elements improve the game? You bet - but It's still the most perfect MMO I've ever played.
Some of the things they implemented seem like a work of genius to me. I'm still not sure if it was just an accident or not. How could they get everything so right the first time.
First-person-view which was extremely immersive, Corpse-runs and experience loss to make you fear death, dungeons which were shared by multiple groups, long travel times which made travel seem like an adventure by its self, forced group mechanics and no way to sell other than /auction to help establish a community, con system with no levels above the mobs head means you never knew what you were getting into, no in-game maps, lots of little secret places to explore, hidden quests, the harsh faction systems which made you KOS for certain characters.
Everquest was a fucking adventure with a crazy amount of emergent gameplay. No MMO since has come close to recreating the sense of adventure in EQ.
I can see why someone who never played EQ back in the early days would think those things sound shitty. I'll admit if I didn't play the game back then I probably would think those things sound pretty terrible and while they can suck in the moment you need those things to have a world that truly seems real. Vanilla warcraft was a fun game, but it never came close to being a virtual world.
I don't get why people think those things are outdated and no one would want to play them. Are you sure? Considering no game has been very much like EQ since, I'm not sure I believe that.
Hopefully they will make a couple of "hardcore" servers for EQ next along with the regular ones. That way we all win. Who knows, maybe some of the people who hate the idea of what the original EQ was will find out that it's more about the sum of its parts and you need those things for a virtual adventure.
I think what you mean rather than nostalgic was that EQ was sensational and unique. There was nothing else to compare EQ to, so that would rule out nostalgia.
Everquest was "sensational" in part because it was the first, sure, but it was much more than that. It was sensational, because it was immersive and had an addictive system of progression.
Just a disclaimer: when I refer to Everquest, I refer to EQ classic - velious. After that, they gradually betrayed the things that made EQ great. RIP Verant.
Its hard to pin down exactly what it was, but many of the lists already posted contain parts of the formula that made EQ so transporting and amazing.
I believe first and foremost, that the world of Everquest was amazing because it was challenging and dangerous. Right behind that, was the sense of community that developed to overcome that danger and conquer those challenges. Dying was painful in EQ, but it was also something that you learned quickly not to do. I recall early on players grouping in front of Qeynos or Freeport just to travel together so they didn't die out in the middle of the wilderness. Where is that in modern MMOs? Now, in every new game, you run faster than all of your surroundings and mobs leash after chasing you for only a few seconds. You get to choose when and what you fight, there is no risk, there is no danger. There was no leashing in EQ, and even with run speed buffs, it was not unlikely that a bash or stun in a dangerous area would mean your demise. Today these mechanics are written off as counter-productive and frustrating. Today players feel like they can't be bothered with anything that doesn't provide instant gratification. Not surprisingly, today games also suck and become "played out" within a months time. (literally the longest I've played an MMO since the unfinished Vanguard, was 1-2 months).
Just a few other things that give you an idea of where EQ excelled and other games fail. In EQ, every place in the game meant something. There was a chance of valuable rare drops and rare spawns in every corner of the world. Unlike all other MMOs, there were no pointless places to explore, because you never knew what you would find. Just as importantly, travel and exploration was not trivialized by fast travel and insta-travel mechanics like they are today. That meant players actually had to party up and go traverse the world. We've come a long (sad) way from that to logging in just to instantly funnel into a queue for a dungeon with a random group of strangers while downing mountain dew and watching tv at the same time.
Then there is progression. Items, levels, and abilities. Since EQ, no one, and I mean absolutely no one, has been able to replicate a system of progression as meaningful and as rewarding as that of Everquest's.
Leveling was slow, partly because everyone was a newb, and partly because EQ was made to be slow so you would actually have a chance to experience the game. In contrast, you level so fast in new MMOs, you see only a fraction of the world before you're too powerful and too well equipped to even bother exploring it (not like its worth exploring, its only scenery and redundant collection quests). Totally not the case in EQ. Every zone and every dungeon offered very challenging content and thus crucial upgrades to make your character more powerful. In many cases, upgrades which you used for a long time in different circumstances, especially in the case of resist gear. Remember that dwarven tunic you got in crushbone back at level 10? Ya, you're wearing that fighting dragons at level 50. When is the last time you wore any item in WoW for more than a few levels? And items actually meant something in EQ, upgrading that crude longsword to a magical weapon was serious business. You weren't just showered in green, blues and purples from any random mob, you worked for it.
Speaking of progression, in Everquest you were handicapped if you leveled without equipping yourself properly. Once raids were introduced, you could not hope to raid the next dungeon without gearing out your guild with drops from the previous. Again, in contrast, new expansions of WoW come out and a player completely replaces all his raid armor from the previous expansion with newly offered errand and collection quest rewards. Not only are your old achievements irrelevant, but ever returning to those old dungeons is now pointless because mundane quest rewards trump all previous achievements. There is literally no progression, just pass go and collect your $200, and while you're at it, have a complimentary boardwalk and park place. Every expansion of EQ (even after Velious) required you to have conquered the previous content to advance further into the new stuff.
I could literally go on for ages about this, but I will wrap it up.
Everquest was mysterious and exciting. Surely part of that was because EQ was the first of its kind, but a much larger part was that it was immersive from start to finish. It had a sense of community that transformed the world into a living breathing organism. Much like real life, good players were accepted, jerks were ostracized, and those who devoted the most time lead guilds and were renowned. Verant were the masters of the carrot on a stick, and as such, always had something for everyone to achieve. There was always a reason to play a little longer, and go a little further.
Heres to hoping EQ Next can do the same.
EQ has a feeling like no other associated with it when I think of it. And I only played it for 2 months. I can't even come close to explaining it, but it's one of the best feelings I've ever had from a video game in my life.
It's like.... EQ was a world, not a game.
But it was mostly the lore and the look of it. The gameplay was somewhat boring, but decent, and I could tell there was depth at some point, but the grind was just too much, and even when I had all the time in the world to play it, I didn't like how much time it took grinding the levels and gaining new abilities. Most of my time was spent clicking a button once to attack, and then waiting for the enemy to die.
Combat was fun to a degree, however, because it kept you on the edge of your seat just watching the fight go on a lot of the time. The fights would be so close sometimes, and I always kept saying to myself "Come on, come on, don't die" etc. while wide-eyed and staring intensely at my health bar. lol
This is when death mattered in an MMO.
But yes, at this point it's mainly nostalgia.
I remember playing a cleric and enchanter .
There was a heal which took 10 seconds to land but healed the tank to full health . So you had to time it just right .
Also as playing enchanter was fun as crowd control because single target mez was best so you mez 10 things you needed to refresh mez in the right order to keep everything asleep else everyone got overwhelmed and wiped .