Home › Game Forums › Everquest
Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Brilliance + Unmatched Majesty - What Makes EQ 1 Great?
declaredemer
Member Posts: 2,698
in Everquest
Theories are have been propounded how this title, Everquest, changed MMORPGs forever.
Some suggest it was timing, others suggest it was features, some would even propose raiding (raiding, as an original EQ member, was not a focus of my gameplay until years after release).
What do you suppose made EQ such a timeless classic? What do you love about it?
Comments
For me, it was the immersion. Feeling like your in a real world. I huge living world where your actions had consequences. There were so many areas in the world to progress your character.
The way EQ let the player decide where to "camp" and such was just awesome. Most games now decide what mobs and where you will kill them either by shortage of selection or through linear quests.
The community was awesome because it was interdependant. Not so much through tradeskills but the need to progress. Encouraging grouping made the game so much more dynamic and exciting. Knowing you were in a group and taking care of each other because you needed to was satisfying. The wrong idea is to group up just because you know you'll gain exp faster. Having that cleric there while your taking a beating and knowing he's got your back is great. Theres a difference in EQ groups saying "INC to group, help me out!" And MMO's recently where you can pull so many mobs and destroy them all in little effort. I know i feel a lot more immersed in a game if i know im actually helping the group instead of turning on auto attack and watching mobs drop like flies.
about ten years ago - some guy comes up to me and says, "Hey - there is this game, it's online. If you drop something, like a bag... ANOTHER player can come behind you and pick it up?"
me - "Another player?"
them - "Yea. And you can talk to them - well, type to them while they are playing."
me - "Wow."
i couldn't even IMAGINE the high tech wizardry this guy was talking about.... needless to say, i bought EQ, ran a guild for 3+ years... hated it. loved it. played EVERY MMORPG since...
Favorite EQ Memory : actually being SCARED in RL when i did my first solo run from Freeport to Qeynos.
good times.
when I played it, it was unlike any game I played before. It had distinct classes, distinct races, diverse zones, 'grouping', dungeons, appealling items, and a nice whole fantasy style to the game. You also could be a trader or participate in non-levelling aspects of the game like RP(which really did fit the game at one stage)
Yes. Ha! Ha! Ha! I hate and love EQ. It is strange. I am getting a copy of WAR today, and we will see if I will continue with EQ. Everyone I know in real-life from EQ is quitting, today, and joining WAR.
The real-life immersion was intense at times when you really felt afraid, scared, and excited at the same time; you almost felt you were in these dungeons and exploring. The sense of fear, exploration, adventure, and excitement has not been that well replicated, unfortunately, in many other games; and it is a feature that made EQ so much fun.
As others said, I think community; pick-up groups. Meeting people. I think the developers, most of whom ended-up listening to, joining, or forming "raid" guilds never understood that. People, community matters, and raiding undermines that rather than enhances it. Raiding... people join raid guilds, dollar for donuts, to raid and get gear. The community aspect in raid guilds, having run and joined them, is lacking.
It is unfortunate, but I think EQ is dead... and someone will say, duh! It was dead four years ago. Lately, at least on my server, a low population seems to be getting worse.
SOE, will you merge the Combine with another server? And let us enter zones w/o flags/keys.
I might keep one account active for Halloween content, then I might have to, for the twelth time, give-up on EQ for some time.
I think being emotionally tied to the game/characters is a huge reason pople feel the way they do about EQ. No other game has made me have such an array of feelings for a GAME.
I remember waaay back in the day i was playing my enchanter and my friend had his bard. He pulled a shadowed man and i actually got an adrenaline rush because i had never taken on anything that big before.
Running through Kithicor staying as high up on the wall as i could. I didnt even know what was down there but i remember feeling afraid. Not in game but in REAL LIFE. Being afraid of knowing something was down there that wanted to kill me.
Being rewarded for hard work. and i mean HARD WORK. Working on a quest for something like 10 hours. And that wasnt even the Epics. Gear that had stats where +10 str was crazy. All these things make me think of how EQ did such a great job of making people feel like there were really working towards a goal for THEIR character/guild. Not just so they could keep up with the rest of the people.
Excellent point!
People were definitely "attached" to their characters, both emotionally and psychologically. As you said all that HARD work they put into developing their characters made players less inclined to forgo their characters. Moreover, I really do not see many other games out there where players are "attached" to their characters. Character development and customization is really lacking in MMORPGs, and although character customization was somewhat limited in EQ, every one at least seemed different and unique in a variety of ways and for many reasons.
Everyone was seemingly different. Unique.
I would have to say the effort put in as well...anything you put time and effort leaves its mark. The grouping to grind was by far the best way to make online friends you could trust and chat with while playing. Not talking about making RL friends, but have ppl you can depend on when you're trying to accomplish something.
Definitely I don't see much anymore, sadly...
EQ was designed as a world. When I used to play, I was always eager to log into the "world". That it was a game was almost an afterthought.
Norrath is like Middle Earth, in a sense; a place you want to escape into.
These newer games miss the mark in many ways, but mainly in being arenas or theme parks instead of living breathing worlds.
That is it!
I have been looking for a "world" since EQ 1. I did find it in SWG, but it was too late.
I still continue to look. Vanguard has got it, somewhat, but has many and varied flaws to it. EQ's world never felt cookie-cutter. Every area felt, looked unique and alive. It was an intelligent -no, brilliant- world. Fun. Interesting. You wanted to explore. You felt afraid. You felt in awe in some parts. You felt eager. This is what the gaming community needs, wants, and does not get from current MMORPGs.
EQ was only good because of lack of competition, the class design was piss poor and completely devoid of checks and balances of power. Some classes utterly sucked in very early EQ, others got nerf batted inot uselessness, and others have nevver and will never be worth a crap to play, ie Warrior unless you are a lifeless dweeb raider.
there's no doubt Everquest had it's flawed but it did have competition:
UO
Asheron's Call
Anarchy Online
Dark Ages of Camelot
Lineage
Then later:
City of Heroes
Final Fantasy XI
Shadowbane(might have been earlier)
Asheron's Call 2
The world, known as EverQuest, is still unmatched in my thoughts. Every MMORPG has yet to capture the 'heart' of MMORPG play.
The feeling that you were insignificant to the world around you. The drive that forced you to be careful for risk of dieing, loosing experience, and having to make a terrifing corpse run, naked.
Eastern Commonlands, shouting from the cross. "Want to sell, FBSS" - There were no Auction Houses, you actually had to go to a trade zone, and find a buyer.
And the greatest of all.
Bind yourself at Naggys lair, and countlessly charge in, throwing your everything at a seemingly impossible dragon. Loosing experience, and pride... for that greater sence of victory.
To me it was one thing, a community.
To survive in early EQ, you needed to group, from there you needed a guild, to get anywhere fast, you needed a druid, to survive encounters you needed a good mix of players from the holy trinity (fighter, cleric, crack producer) .
Beyond that it was a community, people lived, died, married, divorced, cryed, screamed and wept tears of joy...... over a game. People were actually connected to each other and sometimes it was larger than life.
WoW changed that, groups and guilds became disposable, solo play was the norm and that disease spread to all the games out there today.
To me EQ was special because the game allowed you to become part of something bigger, even if it was online.
QFT
2 words ... death penalty.
It HURT! and it directly led to so many of the things we loved about the game...
You pretty much *had* to group. Soloing was possible (much more easy for some classes), but grouping was always preferrable, and safer, which was important.
It lead to genuine fear in the game. I run around MMORPG's now and don't care if I die. Exploration isn't nearly as exciting as fear!
Other important elements...
Enchanters... they added a whole new dimension to combat. With an enchanter, or playing an enchanter, I had by far my most tense, and interesting fights, way more so than any other MMORPG.
No auction house (until luclin). It was fun to hang there and trade for stuff or just interact with people
Breaking spawns... it was tough to get somewhere, it was tough to break and hold a spawn. MOB's behaved much more intelligently in attacking as a group. It also meant you needed a team.
The game had many faults, mostly with it's gameplay, but other things made up for that (MMORPGs are not JUST a game). Now I play WoW which I think has the best gameplay to date (sure to cause a few groans around here), but the world isn't one I feel as attached to as EQ. EQ feels more like traditional fantasy virtual world, whereas Azeroth feels more like a hyper-reality.
I don't think corpse runs, or forced-grouping, or stuff like that really had quite the impact on the game that people like to say. The important stuff was:
1) It took a long time to achieve anything. There are pros and cons to this, cons being grindy and requiring you to sacrifice your social life, pros being it felt less like a game and more like a realistic adventure, like you might expect from an epic novel.
2) The game was unfair. Again, pros and cons to this. There's no perfect way to make an MMORPG, and somewhere down the line a choice between balance and not pissing people off, or being bold and willingly subjecting players to negative emotions has to be made.
In EQ you would have mobs like Grimfeather that were far stronger than the level of the mobs around them, and would often kill unsuspecting players who had no chance to fight back. Even WoW has encounters like this, with the Fel Reaver in Hellfire, but it's fairer because he's absolulely huge and easy to spot, makes loud noises, the ground shakes, and you can see him coming from a mile away.
In EQ on the other hand, you would see 'LOADING, PLEASE WAIT....' before you realized that you'd just been raped by a near silent assassin.
3) It had a mature pretentious community. Pretentious isn't always a bad thing, it means people are worried about their image and are almost roleplaying in terms of how they become a different personality to their offline persona. They can also be annoying uptight assholes. WoW feels much more relaxed, and I don't need to be an unemployed hermit to gain any sort of important social status within the community, but the community itself doesn't take anything seriously and you'll often want to turn off the chat channels. Pros and cons.
4) The user interface is very raw, and I would say that compared to modern MMOs, simply doesn't give you enough information, in a clear enough way, in a pleasing enough manner. Even with custom UIs, the gameplay still depends on invisible statistics such as aggro and extremely difficult to understand statistics like AC.
In WoW I know that my armor is going to mitigate 55% of melee damage, that I will avoid 25 % of all hits, and all of that.
Perhaps EQ has improved in this area recently, but from my time it was too difficult to tell just how important some stats were, without relying on pages of forum posts detailed with parses and observations.
EQ was a game that in its best moments, outshined every other game ever made in the history of history - a fact only an EQ player can ever appreciate - but had so many faults and gameplay shortcomings that you were often forced to grit your teeth and commit yourself to days, weeks and months of doing things you didn't enjoy at all, just so you could get to the good bit. And no, I don't think all of the cons made the good bits seem better, the good bits were good enough on their own.
A very odd game, both good and bad (and not the good sort of bad), that stole a huge portion of my life.
Still waiting for your Holy Grail MMORPG? Interesting...
In my opinion, it was the little stuff, like forced grouping, long cr's, having to actually use a little skill called sense heading, no ingame maps, no little compass to tell you where to go. The fact that the game was actually challenging. It made it feel like less of a game and more of completely different world. You didnt feel like some unstoppable badass hero, you felt like a little person in a big world. and i think the fact that the game was designed around first person really helped with the immersion, for me at least.
Ever since eq1 i have had the hardest time dedicating myself to another mmo, i feel like i owe it to myself to KEEP playing eq1, after all i did spend 7 years playing it, 10+ hours a day EASILY. But alas, the population has dwindled and the game is more about raiding nowadays, which i have no interest in anymore. Hell i remember during the first year they brought the fabled creatures in for the anniversery, i spent 36 hours straight on one character... passed out on my keyboard while it was my turn... woke up at the back of the list, stayed up another 36 hours, got my item... logged into my other character and did it all over again... i had my tv next to my monitor, with my xbox and my playstation lol... good times, i miss u eq
Fully agree
I admit I like the improved solo play of WOW but that comes at the cost of community
I no longer play Everquest but I'll never forget the memories and friends I made while playing
EQ2 fan sites
I think a lot of the sentimentality assosciated with Everquest occured because it was the first mainstream MMORPG. Sure there was UO and other smaller scale specialized games but EQ came out in 1998 when the world of computers was advancing in leaps and bounds. By 2000 almost everyone had a computer and everyone from the cyber punk leetspeakers to retired people were playing EQ. I bought it on a whim and it changed my gaming life. I remember the day I saw the newly released Kunark expansion at an mall game shop and I asked the clerk if he knew anything about it. He said he heard it was pretty cool so I bought it. I didn't even know that you had to pay a monthly fee to play it at first lol.
I remember rolling my first toon in an MMO that day: A Wood Elf Warrior.
I remember thinking Intelligence is good to have, especially because it allows me to increase my skills faster. I maxxed INT and a few other points in STR I think.
I remember hitting level 13 after a couple days and getting a broadsword from the vendor and being absolutely elated when I could finally dual wield.
I remember most of the good times I had over the next couple of years and all of the bad ones.
I don't remember most of the loot and special moments I experienced raiding in WoW, LoTRO or even AoC a few months ago. Games are no longer sentimental. I never once went on the EQ forums to find out what the uber guilds were doing and how to progress at the fastest possible rate to the endgame like I do now. The world was big and open and besides the hints and tips I got from whatever ubergamer crossed my path, I explored the world myself. If I got an invite to tank in Cazic Thule or either one of the Sols, I didn't know what to expect and the challenge and fun was my reward. Any loot that happend to drop was a bonus. The sad reality is that many people will always hav the best experiences in theirfirst MMORPG and every other attempt to migrate to another game will eventually end in disappointment.
A heroine addict once told me that the only reason he became addicted to heroine was that he was always trying to emulate the first high he got, and his endeavors were in vain.
Indeed.
(1) The game, Everquest, was more than a memory. It was a reality. As you said, a "big and open" world.
(2) You, and me, and the majority of the core EQ players, never (never once) bothered with self-described "uber and raid" guilds. Though I was told the Guild I ran in WoW was, at one time, the second most powerful raid guild. Besdies knowing little about raiding (my officers did), I never bothered to check. Today, and yesterday, I never cared for raiding. The raiding market is small. The world market is huge. Aside: I have had businessmen/investors ask me, in real-life, knowing I game, understanding the bull market, what the next "big" thing is. I have offered my suggestions.
(3) Loot. I never cared about loot. As you said, it was a "bonus," not a reward. WE raided, when we did, for fun with friends. Today there is this linear element in the style of gaming that is revolting; predictable; and not fun. You do it, and it is like - next. What is next?
Innovation will save this industry, and match, exceed, WoW's numbers. Aside: I admire Blizzard, think they are consumer focused, and, as far as I know, do not try to ripp people off. I play Warcraft III Frozen Throne, today, for enjoyment. Nevertheless, this company has enormous, and deep, vulnerabilities for competitors. The consolidation of this industry is no cure for the lack of innovation. Milking titles such as Sims is no cure either. Innovation, I believe, is crucial; and in the MMORPG area of things, world plus innovation is, ironically, the new, and old, things consumers want.
For me, it was the run from Ak'anon to High Hold Keep.
Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain and most fools do.
Benjamin Franklin
I'm not certain EQ changed the MMORPG industry as much as it started it.
It wasn't the first, but it was the first of it's kind.
UO, Meridian 59, NWN on AoL, other non-graphical MuDs all had their place, but EQ was king of the hill for its time.
Hard to believe that very soon, some people will have been playing for ten years (if there is anyone left from beta, then that may have already happened)
I loved every minute of it.
_____________________________
"Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit"