Originally posted by Mardukk

I've never felt such a feeling of wide spectrum of love and hate since EQ. 

 

Indeed. What a lot don't understand is that lows are required to emphasis the highs, and without them all you have is a middle ground 'meh'.

On a side note,how sad is it what happens to these guy over the years? Look at Smed and EA in general... compare what they started out being to the money grubbing cash whores they ended up becoming. All passion and vision for the product gone, onlylove for the bottomline left.

I am sure they are all a lot richer, but I wonder if what they sold was worth it.

Best game ever.

Interesting read. Missed the article when it first came out. Wish I was in on EQ when it arrived. Always wanted to be, but I was a kid with limited funds and couldn't build a computer to handle it back then. 

EQ1 was lovely and ugly. I loved it and hated it. Divine and evil. Sublime and ridiculas. A harsh and dangerous world. You didn't need open PvP because the world was the ganker.

Sometimes to get your stuff from your corpse after dying you'd need the help of a group or someone with special skills to retrieve your corpse or lose all items due to the time limit on retrieving your corpse.

I've not seen another like it and that's both good and bad. At the height of it's popularity they had gotten really arrogant. Anyone remember the slogan "You're in Our world Now!"

People fell in love and got married in the game and out of the game too. Some got divorced.

People committed suicide playing the game. Support groups sprang up because of the game. It wasn't called EverCrack for nothing.  

It had the best and the worst of everything.

Eventually because of competition they had to ease up on how hard the game was.
Somehow or another I ended up playing on the test server where it was easier to play. I remember one night there was a food bug and I made endless fun of the bug in serverwide chat and pissed off some devs. Who knows how high up the chain that went.

They pretty much hounded me after that. lol. If I told you all that went down I'd bet you wouldn't believe me. Every once in a while I get the bug to go back and play and if they discover it's me they start the hounding again.

I suspect the only way there could be another Everquest of old is if it has some new technology that few have so there's little in the way of competition. That being said EQ will always have a hardcore fan base because no one else is offering the blend of immersiveness that they have.

There's a very fine line between certain qualities and some of the people who made EQ know how to use them effectively in making a MMO but in my opinion they need special circumstances to be successful  if they stick with extremes as before.

EQ came at just the right time to be successful. Few would go for an EQ if they had plentiful easier options as exists today.

I mean who would prefer a horse and buggy to a modern car today, but in it's heyday a horse and buggy was way better than walking and to have the benefit of the horse you had to take care of it, feed, wash, brush, trim hair and saddle. Manage how much, when and where you rode, in other words forced immersion which is ok if you want the benefit.

Likewise who would drive in a car from southern Mexico to northern Canada when you can get on a plane and be there a lot faster.

And so to stay up and running, EQ has adapted and survived at the expense of some immersion and because of flexible computer technology they can keep up with popular trends within some limits like graphics.

I think going forward if they can moderate extremes and fix the ghost town effect from too many zones they may have another winner on their hands with EQNext, EQ3 or whatever it will be called.

One last note. 3D gaming is just over the horizon and is the next big opportunity for EQ1 style extremes and if SOE was one of the first to 3D MMORPG gaming then they just might be able to resurrect the dead slogan "You're in Our World Now!" at least for a while till new competition catches up.

  

Love these historical articles!  Nice job.

 

My personal experiance with EQ was through watching friends play and thinking 'This game sucks.'  EQ (along with UO) kept me from playing MMOs for years.   But different strokes and all...

     I was glad I got to see EQ in its heyday....I have alot of memories and made alot of friends there before I left in 2005.....I got to see what it was liek ot to group with other players often and how to work together (both the good and bad of that but mainly good)......I got to see what a good death penalty was like and how much fun it was to have a little fear of the world around me... Unfortunately there will never be another MMO like it again.....The times have changed and people just dont want this type of game anymore(even EQ doesnt want that kind of game anymore)....Fans of WoW can thank EQ for alot of WoWs success as they took what was in EQ and dumbed it down so everyone could play.

Everquest is and always will be the game that got me and keeps me looking for the next better game that NEVER  shows up after 10 years. Yes they are prettier and thinking about the games that came after I have a tear in my eye from a eye latch, not cuase they ruined the genre. You kids will never know what you missed but that's ok...it's part of life. You will never hear  "train to zone" in mistmoore and see all the dead players that didint make it out of the zone or the dead that came in at as bad time. The cost to die hurt that made your palms sweat when traveling alone in the DARK night in new zones and the surprizing high level monsters that lived in lower leverl zones. If only they would redo Everquest 1 with todays graphics us old guys and you spoiled ass kids would get to enjoy what online games were meant to be like. BTW I just deleted GW2 like the rest of the crap since EQ1. It was so boring and is great for the kiddeis. World of Tanks has me for now till I dont know when. EQ2 didn't work for me, maybe EQ3?

This shit brought a tear to my eye.  Fuck i miss it so much.

example (im drunk ) your a rogue and your intire cllan just got wiped. Your job is to invis and try to drag all the corpses to a safe rezzing area. Some creatures do see thru your stealth and you need to know which do so yo udont die in one hit that will cost you 2 hours of leveling and your clan having to spend 20 minutes and gold trying to get back to that high level instance. ok, Keep the great new graphics but go back to the old rules that hurt when you messed up ...its been 10 years so I dont believe in my lifetime I will see anything better, sad times but WOT will keep me busy til the kiddie games end at least. 1st year of WOW tried but turned to shit real fast. Vanguard wtf  could have been the best.

EQ really was something else...

 

It wasn't my favorite game of the Golden Age of MMOs, that goes to Dark Age of Camelot, but it had so many amazing fluff features that made people work together and made the world feel real.

I wish WoW had copied the good features of EQ instead of the bad ones.

      Whats funny about EQ is that there is usually one expansion that ended it for most players......19 expansions later Im surprised the game is still alive.....ITs still a fun game in doses but now the players are so OP that alot of the fear factor has to be gone.

I always thought  Everquest : this is soo awesome.  Now every game is going to be like this but better. 

 

Guess what .  never happened :(  they got worse and worse.

 

So I still play classic Everquest on mac [mod edit] or progression servers.

 

New games = instas,  quest hubs to level , item Requirements.   NOTHING LIKE classic Everquest.

Originally posted by Nethermancer

I feel like the only MMO fan that has bad memeories of how tedious and horrible EQ1 was........i was 16 when it came out though so maybe i needed to be younger to appreciate it?

just different tastes - i dont think it has anything to do w age

 

i was 37 when I first played EQ in 1999 and loved the game