It's been a very long time since I added a blog post here - I'm still in Canada, and after 5 years working for BioWare, I'm now working for a fully remote indie game company called Spry Fox (previous games Triple Town, and Cozy Grove, among others). Obligatory plug: check out Spirit Crossing, our new cozy multiplayer life sim on Steam - still in development but coming along well as we head towards launch. Even if you don't play, every add to a wishlist also helps visibility!
In my leisure gaming time (a highly limited resource) I've been playing the beta test for EverQuest Legends. It opened up 4 days ago and I've only had time to play about 3 sessions, but it's been such a flood of memories from the past that I felt like putting some in writing. And in the era of original EverQuest, blogging was the way to go, so here I am digging up this old blog to put down a few thoughts.
EverQuest launched in 1999, the first of what has become many, many first person massively multiplayer games, most of which are heavily inspired by D&D and similar systems of tabletop roleplaying games. Back in 1999, however, I was living in Sao Paulo, Brazil and working in IT support for a multinational entertainment company based in Hollywood. My free time was occupied by learning to speak Portuguese and exploring this new country I found myself in, so it wasn't until I moved to Australia in 2000 that I discovered EverQuest was a thing and began playing it. I almost gave up after couple of false starts trying different races and classes, but then a coworker based in the States suggested I try the roleplay server Firiona Vie, and create an evil character so we could group up together, and so I rolled up a dark elf shadow knight, happened to bump into some members of an evil roleplay guild called the League of Shadows, and my life was quite literally changed forever.
That's not hyperbole or exaggeration. I played EverQuest obsessively for about four years, making friends and acquaintances, many of whom I'm still in touch with over 20 years later. At the time, working as an IT manager, I occasionally had to travel for work; the EverQuest community meant I could almost always show up in whatever city I needed to go to and find a group of acquaintances with common interests happy to join me for dinner and show me around or recommend places to go and things to do, rather than spending a lonely work trip bored in a hotel room. My love of the franchise eventually led me to realize that making games like this was actually a job that some people got to have, and reading up on game design, and eventually with both a lot of work and a lot of luck, led to me getting hired to work directly on the sequel EverQuest II. Which required me to move to California, where I spent the next decade pouring all my love for the franchise back into the game, trying to find ways to give that experience back to others. So EverQuest is the game that redirected my career path from IT support to game design, moved me across continents, and, ultimately, has led me to where I live now and therefore also the friendships I've made in those places for the past nearly 20 years. If I hadn't started playing it back in 2000, would I still be an IT manager? Still in Australia? Who knows? The impact it ended up having on my life cannot be overstated.
That brief summary leaves out so, so many details, but I played the original EverQuest devotedly from 2000-2004, and then its successor EQ2 from 2004 onwards. I tried to play both, but balancing time for both was unsustainable, so I haven't played the original EverQuest since probably 2005. Suffice it to say that when EverQuest Legends was announced this year, I was very excited to hear it's an updated version of the original 1999 game - original graphics and all - but rebalanced with the intention to make the game solo-friendly. I'm a lot older now than I was when I started playing EQ in 2000 (alas!), and I have a lot less free time (and appreciate more sleep). The kind of hours I used to put in then simply aren't realistic for me to spare to any game nowadays. But the idea I could drop in more casually, see the world I used to inhabit near daily, and be able to explore it again on my own limited and intermittent schedule? Irresistible.
EverQuest was a unique phenomenon back in those early days. From 1999-2004 (when EQ2 and WoW launched) there was really nothing else like it; if you wanted to play a graphical interface first-person massively multiplayer RPG, you were in EverQuest, and that was really your only option. As a result you'd see the same names and faces all the time, and it was as much an online community of like-minded friends as it was a game - the game part was often irrelevant. Gamer nerds and early online adopters made up the community (keep in mind that when I started playing EverQuest it was still via modem - broadband internet was still not a widespread thing). So it was also much harder to even get into the game than it is to get into MMOs these days; you needed a certain level of technical know-how and equipment that the average person on the street likely would not have.
EverQuest was made at a time when graphics were blocky and chunky, and oh boy, it certainly shows in those starting levels. Looking at it now, it looks terrible compared to current game graphics; but I remember back at the time being blown away by this 3D world I was able to run around in and be a part of. I remember stopping to take screenshots of landscapes I thought were pretty - and by the standards of the time, they were! It was also pretty much the first game of its kind; there were no established standards and conventions of how things should work, what the UI for a game like that should look like, or anything of the sort. The devs were discovering things they needed to know and deal with for the first time ever, with no precedent and no guidance. The handy quest journal UIs and quest trackers that later games have had not even been dreamed up back in the early days of EverQuest. It made the game extremely complex and difficult to learn - but it also made it feel vastly more complex and, in many ways, more "real" than having a handy little exclamation mark over the head of everyone offering you a quest, and markers on your map telling you exactly where to go. In fact, the concept of "quest" as it exists now wasn't even quite a thing yet.
In old school EverQuest, you can hail any NPC at all, and if they like you enough to talk to you, they will reply. If they have some kind of task you can do for them, they'll have a couple of key words in their sentence which you can repeat back to them to ask for more information. There's nothing that tells you the NPC has a task you can do, there's nothing that records what that task is once you've learned about it or tracks your progress through it, and there's nothing that reminds you who wanted which things if you happen to get them. There's also no guiding UI to turn in the task items; you can choose to give almost any item to almost any NPC, but they may just take it and do nothing if you didn't get it quite right. You can give the items to completely the wrong NPC, and too bad, you lost it all. It's terribly un-user-friendly by today's game standards, but actually in an odd way, rather more realistic to real life. Do you want me to bring you some apples? It's up to me to figure out that you might like some, to write down what you want, to remember to get some apples, and to remember who wanted them and how many. And if you give me anything at all in thanks, you probably won't tell me what it's going to be up front. Maybe you'll just think better of me and give me nothing. That's old school EverQuest's idea of quests, and entire websites grew up helping players track what they could and could not do. Oh yes, and remember - Google the company was only founded in 1998; EverQuest released in 1999. There was no "googling" for any of these answers back in the early days. You learned about helpful websites through word of mouth and discussion forums, and you bookmarked the links so you could find them again. No players understood how the game worked under the hood, so there was myth and wild theory and outright superstition, and there were no direct comparables to help figure it out.
Logging in to play EverQuest for the first time in probably 20 years last week was both very nostalgic and also very confusing, as I've become so used to game UIs providing so much more guidance. I practically lived in the game for 4 years, but that was 2 decades ago, and those memories need some dusting off. Over half the items I looted were marked "quest" but nothing anywhere told me WHAT quest, so it was time to dig up some of the ancient websites to figure out what was safe to keep and what to sell. Slowly, I also remembered how to set up hotkeys and turn off combat spam - high on the quality of life list. And in terms of gameplay itself - remembering tricks such as "kiting," "fear kiting," and "pet pulling". And I created an Iksar necromancer/druid, the first two of which make me persona non grata, killable on sight, in pretty much every city on the continent of Norrath, so I've definitely been remembering the importance of factions in EverQuest. Seems as if every NPC in the game belongs to at least one faction, and which enemies you kill will cause others to like or hate you more.
In fact, NPC factions within EverQuest are so complex that I've yet to see any other game approaching a similar level of complexity in 20 years since. Even within a starter city there are multiple factions, some of which may still try to kill an unsuspecting newbie if they stray into the wrong area. And if you happen to be a race they distrust? You'll be killed on sight, unable to use merchants or bankers, until you manage to raise your faction sufficiently to be tolerated. The intricacies of the faction set ups seem remarkably complex to me now, and I suspect (though I never asked) that it was as much a case of the developers making things up as they went along also. There were no comparable standards to be guided by, and no experience of the outcomes yet, so why not make a single city have 5+ sometimes conflicting factions? Why not make it possible to actually become allies with some of the monsters if you choose to kill enough of those other monsters that they hate? Nobody was to say that was right or wrong at the time, so it was implemented however it made sense to whoever was doing it at the time (I suspect) and the result was often very opaque to players.
In my play session last night, one of the obscure bits of knowledge I found I remembered (somehow) is that undead will tend to fight whoever is standing closest to them, whereas living enemies will be influenced by more complex factors such as who's done the most damage or taunted them. Therefore, if you want the enemy hitting you instead of your friends or your pet, get right up in its face. Who were the players who finally figured that out first, and how?
I've been killing random enemies to level up, which means that by level 3 or 4 I'd got a lot of animal pelts from wolves and such. I'd like to learn tailoring so I can process all these pelts and empty out my inventory a bit (and maybe make myself some useful things), but the first step of processing a pelt requires a skinning knife. (Thank you and bless you to the EQTraders website.) This is a player-crafted item only, and since the game's still in beta and everyone's a newbie, nobody is selling it yet. So in order to learn tailoring, I first have to learn enough blacksmithing to MAKE myself a skinning knife. In order to do that, I need to be able to purchase the hilt and blade molds. Which are only for sale in cities that, see above, want to kill me on sight. So JUST to process these near-worthless newbie animal pelts, I need to:
- raise my faction with the city guards so I'm not kill-on-sight
- raise my smithing skill enough to be able to make a skinning knife
- sneak in to find a smithing merchant whose faction (different from the guards) I've also raised enough that they will sell to me
- buy the components for a skinning knife, and craft it (a process which can fail and lose all the components each time)
This is NOT a simple game. It never was, but back when we were all younger and had more spare time and no other, easier games vying for our attention, it was a communal challenge to figure things out together. Playing it again now, so much random information is slowly returning to my brain which a brand new player would have absolutely no way to know. How would a younger player who's only experienced more modern MMOs even approach this game? Can this degree of obscurity and complexity still be fun to a new player, or is it just frustrating to have to research everything offline?
I'm having a blast so far, but I know most of that is nostalgia and the fun of rediscovering what I didn't know I hadn't forgotten. I'm curious how long the game will keep my interest once it actually launches. Will it be a longer term thing? Will I level up and eventually try soloing or duoing Nagafen and the like? Or will it be a pleasant memory to revisit, but ultimately I'll be unable to overlook the dated graphics and UI? I really can't guess at the moment, so I'm just going to relax and enjoy playing as time permits and see where it takes me.
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