EverQuest’s long, strange 20-year trip still has no end in sight (2019)

For example, if you died, your corpse was where you died. You reappeared with literally no gear. If that was deep in a dungeon (Sebilis anyone?) then recovering it might be nontrivial. This led to corpse-run ("CR") groups. If you failed to get your corpse within a week it would disappear taking all your stuff.

You also lost XP when you died.

Another example: wood elves started in Kelethin, which was platforms in the trees with no rails. It was a rite of passage to fall off those passages and die. If you were fighting under the city at times you'd often see newbies falling to their deaths.

Travel originally was originally nontrivial too. One continent had a big city on each side (Qeynos and Freeport) and it was almost another rite of passage to do the Qeynos to Freeport run as a low-level (which could take 30-60 minutes IIRC) because you wanted to level somewhere else.

This is a genre I wish there was life in but sadly I think it's time has come and gone. A big part of what drove it was that it was the era before social networks. You met people in MMOs. Now? Everything is so results-oriented. Play a modern MMO and to do a dungeon you just queue, join, kill things off the checklist and then leave. You may never talk to anyone. People may leave mid-dungeon and get replaced without you ever noticing.

It's interesting to see how many small changes players demand ultimately kill the genre. Levelling too slow? Eliminate it. Um, what? That's half the game. Dungeon queueing. Raid queueing. Solo content, which has definite merits also means you rarely have to talk to or cooperate with anyone to get a lot of things done.

[0] https://project1999.com

I remember being involved in the community for an ultimately vaporware MMO. Realms of Torment / Age of Mourning.

Then WoW came and the rest is history.

I think we need a new WoW, and I think it’s going to have to come from FAANG level company. A fully dynamic cloud backed world running AI agents, GPT-3+ storylines, Unreal 5 graphics.

I swear it doesn’t even seem that hard nowadays for those kind of resources.

I had hopes that Amazon’s MMO would show a glimpse of that. It didn’t yet.

I will always cherish the memories from it. Meeting my wife in the Paw dungeon. Taking her to the Temple of the Dragons and going all the way to the top. Camping the Plane of Hate for her epic weapon. Camping the stupid giant in the ocean island for my epic weapon. That one zone without oxygen on Luclin. Making tons of money teleporting people around the world.

Pantheon is the spiritual successor to EverQuest, it has been in development since 2014, supported by private investors and community pledges. https://www.pantheonmmo.com/

Sadly, the founder Brad McQuaid (and co-creator of EQ) passed away in 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_McQuaid

I think in many ways Guild Wars kept the innovation going better than World of Warcraft. They also made it easy to level up doing your preferred activities rather than grinding “kill 5 kobold” quests. The combat is a lot more action-filled as well with the dodge mechanic and spells that don’t need to be channeled.

I think a lot of their ability to add these improvements came from selling the game as free-to-play with one time purchases so there isn’t as much reason to force you to grind every single day for monthly subscriber growth

EVERYONE was freaking out, demanding our blood. His guild was threatening to boot him. A GM even came to talk to us. And after we explained what we had done, he agreed that no rules had been broken.

There were a bunch of game mechanics that we made use of:

- When you die, you lose experience.

- If you lose too much experience, you even lose a level.

- The lower your level compared to the mob you kill, the more experience you get (to a point).

- If your corpse has no items on it, it decays after 3h of in-game time (meaning when you are logged in, the timer counts down). While you are NOT logged in, the timer is 7 days.

And then the mechanism that shot him up to 74:

- There's a special verteran's reward AA "Experient Recovery" that recovers 100% xp from ALL non-expired corpses instantly.

The trick was to delevel him as low as possible, and then gain as much exp as possible within a 3h in-game window so that the expedient recovery would shoot him past his original level 70.

To do that, we first had to delevel him, which is difficult to do quickly since you respawn wherever you are bound. But there was one area with lots of aggro mobs where you could bind: Sanctus Seru. So we bound him there and let the slaughter begin. HUNDREDS, possibly THOUSANDS of corpses, all piled up and slowing down the zone something awful. We let them pile up for 2.5 hours, keeping the last 30 minutes of the first corpse timer in reserve for gathering the XP. I think we ended up deleveling him from level 70 down to level 52 or something.

Then we went to Plane of Disease. In case you don't remember, there's an old sword from the Hole called "Earthshaker", which procs Earthquake (a 90pt AOE). But due to the game mechanics, it had a chance to go off with every swing (in reality it would go off I think 20% of the time? Can't remember 100%). The Warrior's ability "Rampage" causes him to instantly swing his sword at every single creature near him. So if you get enough creatures near him, he'll proc a ton of times from all of the instant swings, generating a massive AOE (everyone called this "Shakerpaging").

Anyway, I'd done a lot of research on mob hitpoints and resistance, and determined that POD was the optimal point, with just the right amount of mob hitpoints that a group of 100 or so of them would cause enough of a shakerpage to kill them all.

So we got to work. Over the next few hours, I'd run around POD with my cleric, gathering up a HUGE army of mobs to the kill zone. Then I'd signal to Splatt to log in, at which point his corpse timer countdowns resume. I'd hit Divine Aura (which makes me completely invulnerable for a short while). Splatt would come into the mass of mobs who are aggroed on me and completely ignore him, then hit rampage. The whole zone would stutter and go wonky from the calculations it had to do. From the outside, you would see the mobs attacking, and then they'd dance some weird looking jig, and all fall over simultaneously, dead.

Some mobs would survive, of course. I'd aggro and drag them away, he'd sit down, camp out, and quit. Corpse timer would stop.

Rinse and repeat until we'd used up almost all of the corpse timer (we kept a spy in Seru to keep watch on the first corpse). We got him back up to the mid 60s. At that point the mobs were green and gave very little xp.

Then after the system upgrade, he simply logged on and clicked expedient recovery. Boom, level 74.

Next patch after that, they changed rampage to only issue one "swing" for the purposes of procs.

I was also the first to one-group OMM (got a Triton invite for that). Even at lv 75 you do NOT want to miss a mask click on him! But that's a story for another day.

^ Still do, even just to hear the Kelethin music or to run from Kelethin to Erudin. I may just do that this weekend…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Gaz8oxzJ4

I never got into hardcore raiding in any of the games I chased, but I definitely experienced the "magic" as others have discussed here and in other places.

Things like running around Ak'Anon for the first time ever, taking down a tough dungeon with a great group, the first 200 person pvp bane and destroying another guilds tree of life -- what are the modern-day equivalents?

For me, beyond the things like being in my teens (freetime), the novelty of a networked online world, and being able to arbitrage real-world-dollars for in-game items, what fascinated me was always seeing players and guilds do unbelievable things. Each game had their own version of Furor Planedefiler who I would essentially idolize and strive to become.

Everyone seemed to be switching to WoW when it came out and for some reason (life/age/drugs/lack of a real guild or fellowship affiliation) I fell off the mmorpg gaming bandwagon and haven't really been back since.

Mincecraft & games like Fornite are the successors to WoW for the next generation -> and they don't really follow the dungeons and dragons format used in the MMORPG's of our early years.

The success of minecraft & roblox style games made me realize I don't think I can predict what the next generation of "mmorpg-like" games will actually be. However, surely the "next thing" will need something MORE than just an improvement in technology to be successful.

Tanarus was eventually what got me into EQ, then later into WoW and still have very fond (if not rose colored) memories of those days!

In the early days, the game was unapologetic in letting you get in over your head. In fact, it was designed to kill you. Lower level zones often had high-level wandering menaces like Sand Giants that would squash the unwary. The aggro system and Z-axis bugs made delving deeply into dungeons (e.g. Lower Guk) hazardous with a disciplined group and foolhardy with a band of strangers. Just seeing some corners of the game took an incredible amount of perseverance. Some of my stand-out memories of the game were from when my friends and I got into areas we really weren't ready for, but somehow still made it work. Modern MMO's usually hold your hand and either warn or outright block you from content you're too low level or poorly equipped for. Everquest gleefully murdered you.

It really is amazing how the way people play MMO's crystallized in this era though. Everquest was a group game, so I played with a group of real life friends who were all in voice chat together. That coordination and the fact that they were some pretty smart people let us do some amazing things. Once some of us left, it was inevitable that all of us would. Playing the game without the full group felt like playing with an arm tied behind your back.

Everquest had an interesting design philosophy. A modern MMO, like FFXIV, carefully balances and playtests content so that it's challenging but just possible with known tactics performed completely without error, then easier for mere mortals once people get better gear. SonyEQ designed encounters that were flat-out impossible and waited for uberguilds to find a way that often involved an exploit that would not be fixed but, rather, become a long-standing key mechanic.

e.g. In the Scars of velious expansion, there was a frost giant world boss that was unusually hard-hitting. If you put a main tank on him, sooner or later he'd get blasted with more health than was in his entire bar and die. Then the giant would chew through half your guild in less time than it would take to get heals rolling on a new tank. The solution was a spell that healed your tank to full health when his health was reduced to zero. That spell was probabilistic. Normally, it failed with a high enough probability that tanks died reliably, and hence this frost giant baddy remained unkilled. Then somebody figured out that the spell's success rate increased to 100% if the tank had enough charisma. Uber-guilds that discovered this secret guarded it jealously, since that meant other uberguilds would fail when they tried to take on the giant and then the task (and ph4t l3wts) would fall to a guild that knew the secret.

This sort of thing happened over and over, and good guilds invariably had players who messed around with all the game's systems to find helpful tricks. Some called them "exploits", but SonyEQ never fixed them or punished players for using them. They designed impossible content and players found a way to do it. Heck, high level raids came to be entirely based upon the skilled exploitation of the Monk's feign death ability. Without a monk who knew what he was doing you simply couldn't do raid content.

EQ was a wild and wooly arms race between players and developers. Most MMO's are are lot more civilized these days.

Over time, however, I started getting less out of the game and started getting more hooked. EQ tracked how many hours you are spending in world and there was a menu somewhere (unobvious) that would show you your accumulated total. I looked at it one day and realized that over the previous 6 or 9 months I had spent the equivalent of many weeks in world. WTF I thought, even reading crappy novels or watching silly movies gives you some insight into human behavior, while this experience was leaving me with nothing but cranky hands.

And that's when I realized that the inherent asymmetry between me as an individual and a company bent on producing the most addictive experience possible wasn't going to end well for me or anyone else who wasn't a stockholder or executive. I quit EQ the next day and changed careers in the next couple of months.

Of course, massively multiplayer online games weren't really the fully mature form-that was later assumed by Facebook etc. But the dynamic at play, I think, was the same and I'm thankful I was able to learn about it by experimenting with the less virulent form as embodied in EQ.