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EQ1- How were you introduced to the game? How old were you, experiences you had?.
I got introduced to Everquest when i was 15 by a couple friends and their dad. After seeing them play i wanted in. I started a wood elf bard, got a few levels and i was hooked. It was my first time playing an MMORPG and being able to see my friends running around in the same world as me was really fun. The adventures and experiences i had being a lowbie that really sucked me in were things like...
-The unending amount of dungeons i never stopped discovering
-Whole groups being escorted by bard's with selo's accelerado hauling ass and levitating off the ground
-That crazy ass unicorn in ...Lesser faydark? that would one shot me.
-Clan crushbone trains to zone....
-Starting a toon on a pvp server and discovered that being chased and zoning in and out of clan crushbone only worked so many times till i met my inevitable death...
There were so many challenges in the game that made it the game it was. I discovered the game at a perfect time in my life where i could spend hours upon hours playing and camping and discovering new things. I had no maps i had no online resource or walkthroughs. (that i knew of anyways). But it was those things that made it so great for me.
How did you get introduced to EQ1. And how old were you? What were some of your early experiences of the game?
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I was stationed in Washington D.C. and a guy I worked with introduced me to it. We use to have LAN parties at his house to play Battlefield 1942, and he showed me it one day. At first I didn't like it because the controls were foreign to me...but the more I went to his house, the more I found myself playing it until him and my wife built me my own PC to play it at home.
I was 22 or 23.
The experiences are far too many to go into here. But I must say...that it says a lot for it compared to any other MMORPG out that I still remember nearly every zone and the ways to get between them some 14 years later...where as I can barely remember zone names in any other MMORPG I have played since.
I was 11-12 years old when I first started playing it. My brother's friend introduced it to us, and I just remember becoming hooked after awhile. It was just amazing that I could play with sooo many people. As a kid, most of my online gaming revolved around Starcraft, Command and Conquer, and Counter Strike....ah those were fun times. lol.
I still have fun today of course. It's just I have a lot more money to buy games with now
around age 35 when i started back in 1999
never saw any advertising for it - saw the box in an EBGames at the local mall
was very hooked on EQ, was my first time experience with an *immersive* virtual world
had alot of fun teaming up w strangers to tackle wilderness beasts, angry farmers/bandis, and splitpaw dungeon
(back when it was level 12 heh)
EQ2 fan sites
I was following the development of Diablo 2 and the lead designer (Bill Roper?) in an online interview said that his team plays EverQuest in their spare time and he seemed very excited about the game. I gave it a go around 1999 and... DAMN!! I didn't expect to get introduced to such a game!!
I was hooked for years from there on. I was 22 years and it ruined my social life for a few years. :P
I was playing Ultima Online and really trying to enjoy it. The bugs, the cheat programs, and the "player-driven community" the developers were attempting to foster just got to be too much. Three months after quitting UO, I heard about this game called EverQuest that was going to be released soon.
So, I hung out on the alt.games.everquest usenet newsgroups and watched the MMO community (at the time) post thread after thread about how EQ was going to fail, the "pvp switch" would never work, and how it wasn't a real "role-playing game" like UO.
Well, a friend an I bought it on day one, and we played the HELL out of that game (and so did everyone else). We were barbarians in a mammoth group in Everfrost when we all saw the system announcement that there were now 20,000 subscribers!
I was 27 years old at the time.
Id have been 24 or 25 at the time. A former UK games magazine i used to get, PCZone, did a 10 day trial and gave away the base game on a coverdisk. I was keen to give it a try from what I read but didnt really know all that much about the game prior to that. I think the game was just post Velious at the time.
I remember the article gave a break down of the classes, strongly advising picking a druid due to its solo and group friendlyness. Next choice was a ranger and I rather liked the sound of that so I gave that a try. It was all a bit overwhelming and confusing at first and I wasnt really sure. By day three I knew I was going to have to sub to it. I remember the warm safe glow of the torches at newbie lift, my first foray into the very dangerous sounding crushbone, an early adventure with probably my first group set up by some benevolent higher level (shaman?) to Stonefont Mountains to hunt some minotaurs and the time I ended up journeying through butcherblock with a companion, meeting up with a wizard they new and getting ported to who knows where... It turned out to be Qeynos area but it mayaswell have been Luclin. Eventuallly someone took pity on my pitiful questions about how to get back to "the elf forest" and ported me back.
Fun times. My only regret was playing my ranger so much really. Played him almost exclusively as my main right through to the Omens of War expansion where I quit the game due to lack of progression options (for me being a resolutely non guilded groupcentric player). I went back when Fippy Darkpaw server opened and played a chanter and did pretty damn well at it and found it a whole heap of fun. Thinking about it - that was with all my subsequent years of mmo experience, I doubt it would have went so well rolling an enchanter fresh.
r.i.p. c!
I think I was like 21 at the time. I had just bought my first PC. After buying a couple of cheap games for it and wanting more I picked up a copy of PCgamer magazine. There was an ad for EQ in it(it had just been released) and it looked interesting. So I ran out and bought EQ at an Electronics Boutique(now gamestop). Got home and realized it wouldnt really fit on my 3.2gb hard drive. I deleted any bit of windows 95 I didnt need and BARELY managed to squeeze EQ on it. It was then I discovered I couldnt play it because I didnt have a "Video Accelerator card"......back to Electronics Boutique to buy a Voodoo2 1000 12mb video add on card(major wife agro...). Finally I connected to the internet with the good old dialup modem music and entered EQ. Mind blown. I've been hooked on MMOs ever since
One funny thing was I almost gave up on EQ after a few weeks. The graphics screen was so small it was giving me a headache. I was playing on a 15" monitor(1024x768 maybe?) and didnt know there was a "full screen view". I had been playing with that screen where the character class graphic took up the left side of the screen and some other menus took up the other side. The actual graphics only on about 1/4 of the screen. I happened to see someone mention "taking a screenshot" in chat. And while attempting it I accidentally hit the wrong F-key and went into full screen view. Wow, amazing graphics!
I went to the store back around 2002 to buy my first "MMORPG." I had finally gotten a cable modem and felt I was ready to join the online world. (although the idea of playing games with random strangers wasn't terrirbly appealing)
They had 2 trials on the counter, EQ1 and Lineage 1, so instead of buying anything I took both demo's home.
Had heard more about EQ1 (besides, the chick on the box was begging me to play) so I loaded that first. Well I didn't realize it at the time, but back then these games only ran on certain video cards, and I had an incompatible one (Hercules as I recall) so when I entered the game world, the performance was hideous, and I could hardly move or function. I quickly blamed the crap game and uninstalled.
Then I loaded up Lineage 1 which being far more simple graphically ran perfectly fine, so I spent the next 6 months playing it instead.
I then gave DAOC a try and ran into the same poor video performance, but called support this time and they pointed me to the 10 or 12 approved video cards that worked with the game, so once I installed one, everything was great.
I did reconsider playing EQ1 after that, but was listening to a co-worker excitedly describe how her guild camped some world boss for days or weeks at a time hoping for it to spawn was to reminicent of Lineage 1 boss mob camping (15 hours one time I waited, only to lose it to another group who walked up within 2 hrs of the spawn) so I decided to pass. (DAOC had nothing really like that)
I regret not playing EQ1 however, same with AC1, SWG, and UO back in their prime. I suspect all were pretty enjoyable titles that I would have liked, but there just wasn't enough time to try them all.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I was 38 at the time. A friend I had met in Active Worlds said my husband and I should try this game out she'd been playing.
My first experiences: I first started a Barbarian, fell off the raft transport and couldn't figure out how to swim, so drowned. Deleted that character, tried something in Freeport. The flat sandy area wasn't grabbing me. Tried a wood elf druid in Kelethin. Loved the place, and that was my character for the next few years. We were leveling so slowly, it was a full year before we even left the continent to explore new lands.
Found it in '99 on the shelf of my local game shop while I was just scanning for something to play... Random chance. At that time I didn't even go online to read websites, let alone chat. All my game info came from magazines and word of mouth.
P266, 56k modem, and a 1p a minute internet sub... and yet I still played.
The experience? Mainly the experience of not having a frikin clue what was going on for three days but notheless being sucked so deeply into it.
First introduced to it in 2000 at age 27. I couldn't play it very often due to frequent deployments and an absolutely horrible interne (lived on an island). Then at the end of 2002 I started getting into it hardcore. I played it until EQ2 came out then half our guild moved over to it.
I miss the death penalty, all except the XP loss. I seemed to have the bad luck of dying shortly after I would ding and would have to re-level. My main was an Iksar monk and I loved pulling. It was always fun to train groups that tried moving in our camps. I had a lot of fun playing EQ and haven't found a game since that hooked me like EQ. I used to get up early to check spawns, leave the computer running so I could sell stuff while I slept, and the quests could be epic.
I remember the first time I saw EverQuest. I saw it at compUSA. This was back when PC game boxes used to be as big a cereal boxes. Anyways, my dad and I always liked to play adventure games. We grabbed the box, read the back, and saw that required a monthly subscription. We both laughed out loud and said, "Who the heck is going to waste money on this crap."
3-4 years later....
My uncle wanted me to get SWG. I found out about the subscription fee. I laughed again. He was so certain that I would like that he had purchased the game for me. I was obligated to give it a shot. I was blown away. The biggest game I played before this was Diablo 2 / Unreal Tournament.
Been buying / subbing / playing MMOs ever since...
There isn't a "right" or "wrong" way to play, if you want to use a screwdriver to put nails into wood, have at it, simply don't complain when the guy next to you with the hammer is doing it much better and easier. - Allein
"Graphics are often supplied by Engines that (some) MMORPG's are built in" - Spuffyre
Well back in 99 i was 17 just got my first real full time job in tech support after leaving college... anyway a couple of the guys there had picked it up so i thought i would give it a shot as well..
I was a Barbarian warrior if I remember right... anyway only played until i was about level 25 as I was emigrating from the UK to spain.
After living a few months in the sotuh of spain I came accross a job add in the local paper looking for people who had played EQ.. anyway before i knew it i was working for IGE and Broke Pierce.. i soon learned how to multibox 6 characters and there was an office with about 5 of us just playing EQ all day.. waht a job living in the sunny south of spain and playing games for a living LOL.. It was not until I had moved back to the UK when I actually fonud out who Broke Pierce actually was LOL. I guess we where the first gold farmers LOL..
That kind of killed EQ for me..
Well, lessee, I was 36 on the game's opening day, soooo...must've been around 39 or 40, plus or minus?
I did not greatly enjoy Norrath, nor could I spare it much time (I was working two jobs: regular full time + scripting for GS).
SOE began, shortly after making the serious blunders (splitting their own player base in three parts--the ones that stayed in EQ1, the ones that went to EQ2, and the ones headed out to other games). At the same time, that was the height of "mothers against evercrack", so they must've been doing some things right. :shrug:
Self-pity imprisons us in the walls of our own self-absorption. The whole world shrinks down to the size of our problem, and the more we dwell on it, the smaller we are and the larger the problem seems to grow.
I was 19 and a sophomore in college. A few weeks before it came out, my friends mentioned that they had been reading up on Everquest and that everyone should get a copy ASAP and all play together. For my first character, I made a Human Monk. I remember that my justification for this was that only Humans could be Monks, and I had a habit of deliberately choosing questionable race/class combinations in MUDs. So for this game, since we were all going to play for a long time, I wanted to make sure that I had a viable character.
I remember that there was an /ooc channel and pretty much everyone could be counted on to use it for out-of-character conversations. I would correct people if they used /shout to ask about game mechanics, and I wasn't alone in doing so. I also remember being disproportionately upset about people making new characters and outfitting them with high level equipment. To me, this was no less cheating than using a hack program or a dupe bug, since there's no legitimate way that character could have gotten that weapon themselves.
I was a senior in high school and a friend introduced me to it and Neverwinter Nights, which were my first roleplaying experiences. I was sucked in by the classic adventure feel and the charming music. My friend played a Druid and I started a Mage, which I realized wasn't the best choice. I love the seemlessness of the game and the feel of the world and its people. Overall, it set the stage for my love of MMOs and roleplaying games in general.
I started playing October 1999, but didn't really get heavily into the game until just after Kunark was released. I had a wood elf warrior at the time, and was ridiculed heavily because thats when stats for your race mattered haha. It would turn out to not be a big deal later, but I caught so much flack for that tanking for groups.
I was about 15-16 years old at the time. My mom's new fiance at the time introduced me to the game, and I remember my very first character was a human warrior and I ran around freeport for hours killing rats and beetles before I realized I could leave to the commonlands. Then I tried a wood elf druid, and ended up with the wood elf warrior. One of the best guilds I have ever had in any game was the first one I had in EQ on Emarr. I remember the most excited I got was when I finished my full crafted set and had an ssoy and lammy on my warrior. Gods I was uber for the time period, at least that's what I told myself
Currently Playing: ESO and FFXIV
Have played: You name it
If you mention rose tinted glasses, you better be referring to Mitch Hedberg.
I was 37 years old. Not sure where i saw the game at. I lost years of my life to it tho. Was the 1st 3d virtual world for me. I had bein playing several MUDs on AOL at the time.
Me and my son, who was 11, played it for nights on end. Good times!