Everquest. Just, Everquest. In my opinion it is the worst MMORPG I have ever played. It took sixteen hours just to complete the tutorial and then three hours to realize that it is the most cryptic and vague piece of garbage I have ever had the displeasure of associating myself with. This game should be made illegal save in situations of war where we must torture people for information. This game made me want to kill myself because of how painful and horrible it is. I think I now know how the Angry Video Game Nerd feels as a result and may perhaps start drinking because of those feelings. God fucking damn it all to Hell I hate Everquest.
Ha!
When it came out, it was the most magical thing ever. The last, to me, of games that required you to know anything, read anything or pay attention to anything. Now EQ went too far plenty of times. Even diehard fans will admit that. And yet, at least among all the geezers on another board I frequent, our best memories are getting lost in Freeport. Picking fights with random NPCs because the game would let us punch a shop keeper as easily as a skeleton. Being lost in an unfamiliar places in near pitch darkness of midnight, surrounded by bears and the horrible cackling of skeletons that you can hear but you can't see....yet. Praying for dawn, or even someone to run by so you can find the road again.
EQ was made in a time before WoW, before highly structured rules of play, efficiency, balance, all the bells and whistles and highly accurate spoiler sites. (At least, people were less inclined to take guides at face value because of the "mystery" of the game.)
EQ (along with the other MMOs of that era) were making the mistakes that today's games avoid like the plague. Yet there was a freedom to game play that was no one really does now. Dungeons? Everyone played in the same one. Bosses? Not locked for the most part to group or guild, not until way later in the game's life. Instances? The point was to play with anyone, everyone, at the same time. It was almost like a sandbox, rather than a game sometimes. Trains of mobs murdering people in the zone was a study in Chaos, and it was awesome. I can't tell you how nerve wracking and yet thrilling it was to sit invisible as a rogue while 50 or more things that could pancake me a few hits would go tearing through the zone, obliterating everyone who didn't flee for their lives. A chattering, living zone full of players snuffed out in 3 minutes, crowds of people at the other side of the zone in rating the train on how bad ass it was. The shouts and /ooc's on those days...priceless.
I mean, I get it. There's reasons why it doesn't work today, no one has that high of a pain threshold anymore. (The entire game being a public, shared space, corpse retrieval, corpse decay, concepts that are completely gone from MMOs today.) But it was, by far, the most immersed I have ever been in a game, any game. The sheer terror of dying in an unfamiliar place, with no one to help you out, and running naked back across the world, praying you could reach your corpse so it didn't rot away to NOTHING as you were offline in defeat. I didn't PvP, my freaking heart couldn't take it.
EQ came as close to making me feel real terror as any video game ever has. Granted, it was due to some really, really, REALLY hardcore rules with potentially subscription-ending consequences...but I've never found its like since. The elation at succeeding in an environment like that.....is also a high I've never found in any other game since. It's a game that had actual consequences, and it was amazing what it did to your mindset, how it affected the way you played and felt. There weren't many flat out terrible players in EQ. Even the dimmest and dopiest of them all learned something by the time they were high level. They had to. You couldn't hack it in EQ if you didn't want to really be there, there was just too much. Enemies deadly for far too long after you'd out level'd them, too many penalties for dying, no in-game maps, tons of traveling by foot, too many mobs that are too tough to solo (read as: damn near everything for many classes). It was a game without a quest log and without an emphasis on quests, so you actually EXPLORED! You grouped with other people out of necessity, and like war survivors, you formed pretty close bonds. Closer than the "wham bam thank you maam" grouping that's popular in MMOs today, at any rate. As a melee, your life was measured in seconds without a healer, a minute tops. You needed people, and they needed you. (Except Wizards and Druids, the fuckers.) The people that bought high level accounts stuck out like a sore thumb because of what they didn't know.
The grind was hellacious by today's standards, unthinkable. Weeks spent in one spot, LFG, pulling mobs because that was the best place to level. Not everyone played that way, but most people did. Usually those without some high level wizard friend helping them clean out content. And even then....but it was cool. You got to know people because you spent a lot of time around them, both in group and in zone. Raids were fun and terrifying at the same time; it was like just pulling mobs except with a really huge group and the stakes much much higher. You'd clear sections of these really interestingly laid out zones and try and make your way to the boss. And the chaos of those places.....delicious. Panic. Madness. Death. Recovery. Victory. I suppose raids today are flat out better in terms of mechanics and flow....but they tend to take place in very sterile environments to reduce friction and possibilities. Corridors and flat spaces with few visual or pathing obstructions. And then you had to deal with other players, too. My favorite raid quote ever: "Oh god, the Japanese are here. We're fucked."
I mean, this is a game where it took WEEKS to find a new weapon, a new piece of armor. Between drop rates, how and when things scaled and just plain old opportunity, when you got a new piece of gear to use, it freaking meant something. It wasn't like Diablo or WoW or even a game like Borderlands where you're just having rewards spewed at you constantly, until they become a din. By contrast, I used a goddamn Slime-Coated Harpoon for probably a year straight in EQ, because it was just flat out the best weapon I could use given what I was likely to see drop at that point in time. Even trading could be thrilling. It was all player run for the longest time, shouts and tells, haggling, both sides wondering if the other is going to try to screw them over. Going to the trading hub of a server was truly like a bazaar, you just never knew who would log on that day to sell their hard-earned treasures, or what was going to happen when they did.
I can't make any real excuses for EQ's gameplay. It's just not possible in today's world. But when it was new, and playing by a completely different set of rules than games today, it was truly amazing despite how much as we all hated the grind, and the corpse retrievals, and the LFG and the mortal terror of corpse decay. Which is why the game will never really recapture that wonderment for me. I've changed along with the rest of the world. But EQ gave me some of the best video game-related memories of my life. It's literally Nintendo/Sega games --> Everquest --> The rest of my life.
So yeah. Hate away, I hear you. But something pretty amazing and special happened in EQ, that I see happening much less often and in much less interesting ways today.