Why is eq considered hardcore or oldschool? 

First a little context to this question.

I started playing magestor, ultima online, and some muds and stuff, and then I got into EQ but quit by level 20 because it was easy and boring, and the skill required to get from level 1-20 was the same as 20-50, just longer. For example, people would camp spots for sixteen hours. Why is this considered hardcore or oldschool, and why  is it not  just considered lame and boring.

See what i'm saying? and by the way, I am one of those people who believes there is nothing wrong with wow, or sandbox mmorpgs like darkfall....I am one of those who believes that the industry took a wrong turn towardsa  dead end with eq, and now is finaly finding its way back with wow, darkfall, and other new innovative games on the horizon....

so to make a long story short...again

Why is eq considered hardcore or oldschool? For long camping and travel times? 

Because if you died you could lose everything. and unlike DF the game was based on items, so to lose equip was a huge thing. Some of us, well me at least, actually like the fact that we had to travel to a dungeon and it took time and there was a danger.

There were no quests really to mention, quests were more for lore than anything else. If you wanted to make cash you had to barter! many things made Everquest great to those who loved it friend.

But as for Hardcore...that's just silly there isn't a game out that can be labelled as such.

But for me with Everquest it was the rmoance of it all. the fact that things were a challenge, yes i could have ground out more levels easily, but that's not me. i enjoy the fact that if i put effort in and good tactics then i could achieve something.....was the game easy if i went to castle crushbone at 12? yes very! but if i went at level 6 it was an adventure and dangerous :)

EQ gets it hardcore reputation from the high-end mostly. GoD (Gates of Discord) was an incredibly hard expansion for example, lots of scripted events where everyone needed to pay attention. GoD needed another expansion to get beaten.

Tacvi raid: www.youtube.com/watch Tacvi didn't get beaten until OOW came out, one expansion later.

Recent raid, bmk1: www.youtube.com/watch

Raids in EQ are often without much mercy, if one person messes up this often results in the fail of the entire raid. EQ also still has the biggest scripted PVE raids afaik, 54 player raids. 60+ during PoP. EQ still has the hardest high-end PVE raids, WoW is second imo, L2 isn't that hard.

There are very little spank and tank raids in EQ, most if not all are scripted. It requires coordination.

Another reason is that most EQ raids are heavy on AE and you can't have too many gimps in your raid.

EQ is pretty comparable to WoW at the lower levels nowadays, going to level 20 in EQ is possible by anyone, and doesn't mean anything in EQ. Getting to level 85, getting 2000AA and farming raids is something completely different.

EQ didn't used to be easy either at the low end so I don't know where you got that idea, maybe you played recently but corpse runs didn't used to be a joke, you could loose the entirity of all your items too in some zones.

If you gave up at level 20 already, then EQ isn't really for you. Level 20 is like 1% of EQ's content.

EQ <3

Why EQ is hardcore? Breaking into the Plane of Fear. If you wiped? Look forward to a 4+ hour CR.

All comments are about "old" EQ - I know it has gotten much easier since I left.

First off, if you only played EQ to level 20 you might as well not have played at all. You know *nothing* about how hard the game was or how to play any of the classes.

Now, the bad : Yes there was a large element of "grind" in levelling in old EQ, however combat was at a slower pace and this ment both that people grouped more and that there was more "social" time even when hunting. You could actually chat with people during fights or while recovering between them, unlike many more modern games where you are sooo busy button mashing there is no time for chat.

Why it was hardcore: Two main reasons, risk and teamwork. There was NONE of this "solo content" focus that has crept in and utterly destroyed the community of most MMOs. Nearly anything worth doing required you to make and *work effectively* with large numbers of friends. One of my proudest moments was my guild dragging me through finishing my shaman epic despite every adversity when I would have given up in disgust. You needed people and you needed to be able to rely on them.

The risk: You could lose *everything* on you, an entire set of painstakingly acquired high end raiding gear on a blown raid. It took skill, planning, teamwork and coordination to "break" places such as the Plane of Fear and if you blew it, the potential risk of loss was huge. There was a huge element of actual *pride* in the accomplishment of knowing your guild could break hard targets, could be relied upon to make corpse recoveries, get epic weapon quests done etc.

It's a far far cry from the current days of "round up 20 schmoes and zergling it until we win because dying doesn't matter" which dominates the so-called "raiding" in most newer MMOs.

ok, nm

Its obvious why EQ1 is considered old school. Its over a decade old.

As for hard core. That comes from the fact that leveling (used to) take forever. YOu needed to be in a HUGE guild to do any big raids. And those big raids were the only way to get good equipment. Because bosses only dropped one or two pieces of loot. The big raid party had to do it over and over again as often as they could. This leads to a hardcore mmo

It's considered "old school" because it was the first highly popular true 3-d MMORPG. It's considered hardcore because it was hardcore. From leveling up as a newb to raiding in the planes, the game was very difficult -- hardcore. I've still yet to see a  MMORPG as difficult as EQ1, especially if you picked a difficult race/class combo.

I highly doubt you played the game at all if you think it was easy, unless all you did WAS walk around like a lemming following people who knew what they were doing.

Wow: Failed a raid? Eh...I can wait 10 minutes of this debuff to wear out.

EQ: Failed raid? ARGH! Now I need to either do a 4 hours corpse run to get my raiding gear back or spend 17 hours doing XXX, XxXX and XXXX XX over and over to get new raid gear before I can try raiding X again!!!

It was "hardcore" because the game didn't GIVE you shit. You want to play a race or class that starts across the world from where your buddy starts? Yell for sombody to port you...or start on your 2 hour journey. You actually needed to ask other players for help in EQ1, most of the time it was fun, but it could make you want to throw your PC at the wall too.

Pretty much everyone else covered it very well.

It is all about RiSK vs REWARD.  EQ1 had the best Risk vs Reward system ever in any MMO to date. 

EQ was hardcore because it took teamwork to get anywhere in the game.  Soloing was left to the few classes that could pull it off and even then it took skill to pull it off. 

I will never forget as long as I am a gamer the first time I lost a corpse in EQ1, I fell down the well in befallen. (come on I know you people remember that dam well).  Anyways, I lost everything I had worked for but I got really lucky because a nice druid stopped by and asked my naked dwarf if I needed help. 

EQ1 is old school because its a very old game.  EQ1 is hardcore because only the strong lived.

Most gamers and game makers alike, I believe have lost touch with the concept that having a level 50, 80, 100 (what ever the cap is) is not the main enjoyment of an MMORPG it should be about the fun journey to the level cap. If thats "hardcore" then EQ1 was hardcore and we could use more out there these days.

Because it was one of the first successful MMO's.

In its early days it was one of the biggest MMO's and set the standards for a lot of MMO's that followed.

thanks for the youtube posts, thats pretty cool....

never realized there was so much strategy involved, but I played eq the first week it was out so I didn't give it a chance past its initial launch. I guess at hte time i had 56k dial up too, so i wasn't very engaged because of the lag. Maybe give eq II a chance now....thank you :)

Yeah the 2 hour CR's were a bit hardcore, don't forget the XPerience loss.....ANd if you died a few times trying to get your corpse you lost about a days game play....that can get nasty if you lose your corpse in a bad bad spot.....I remember dying all the time and feeling like I was going nowhere some days...but guess what I MISS IT!! Although we will never have those days back, I hope the new progressive server brings a little memories back.

Originally posted by Isamright33

Why is eq considered hardcore or oldschool? 

First a little context to this question.

I started playing magestor, ultima online, and some muds and stuff, and then I got into EQ but quit by level 20 because it was easy and boring, and the skill required to get from level 1-20 was the same as 20-50, just longer. For example, people would camp spots for sixteen hours. Why is this considered hardcore or oldschool, and why  is it not  just considered lame and boring.

See what i'm saying? and by the way, I am one of those people who believes there is nothing wrong with wow, or sandbox mmorpgs like darkfall....I am one of those who believes that the industry took a wrong turn towardsa  dead end with eq, and now is finaly finding its way back with wow, darkfall, and other new innovative games on the horizon....

 

so to make a long story short...again

Why is eq considered hardcore or oldschool? For long camping and travel times? 

ok i'll bite.

The fact that you sit here and lie to us saying you like innovation in games yet you find yourself going back to WoW. I will point this game out because well where do you think WoW's ideas came from? Sure as poop that is wasn't innovative. It copied every good mmo that came out before it launched. And since you claim you need no skill to play EQ, same can be said for WoW to the tenth power. You have done nothing of value in the EQ world so you have no clue as to what it takes to play EQ. Have fun in WoW Troll.

Was this thread started back in 1999??

Becuase the OP can't really be serious in trying to ask why EQ1 is considered Oldschool and then mention WoW in the same breath.

Games that came after EQ1 slowly got rid of the things that made EQ1 tedious/boring/slow etc etc etc and as such is and should be considered oldschool.

The genre had to move on from what EQ1 was and thankfully it did in most areas, it's a natural progression from later released MMO's to give better graphics, create better content and scripted events, for a better UI, in-game voice comms and the list goes on and on and on.

EQ1 as has been stated was the first popular 3D MMO, it was my first MMO and I still have fond memories of it, still have it fully updated on my PC just incase I want to go back and trawl through 15 expansions (Yes I even have all of them even though I haven' t played in ages) but I have moved on and so have alot of other players to bigger and better things, but you can't deny EQ1 it's glory in helping to define the MMO industry and making games like WoW possible.

I won't touch the Hardcore comment seeing as you left at lvl 20, it's like leaving WoW before your able to do the major instances and the heroics, pointless.

Guess I'm old school. TG for the Druzzil ro/Xev/Combine merge now old friends get to play with new ones and lag is like TGOD.

I just wonder if there will ever be another EQ feeling or type game.  I know the "first MMO" feeling is forever gone but I have to believe something special will come out again.  Like many, I hoped it was Vanguard but that game is a ghost town :(.  Can a game with some of the more hardcore EQ concepts survive in today's market?

Hardcore because...

Death penalty... Death HURT. It made you literally scared to die, and scared to take chances... but you *had* to take those chances. So, the game was simply more *tense*.

Combat... for such  simple combat model, there really was a lot of complexity in executing it well, managing aggro, pulling, crowd control, healing, nuking,...

it FORCED you to know how to play... Level grinding was long and tedious, dungeon crawling very dangerous. You had to learn the capabilities of your character and EVERY other class. The idea was to become as cohesive a unit as possible so you could maximize your efficiency. Being efficicent was everything when it took so much time and effort to get to, set up/break a camp.

I find it hilarious that new MMO's very rarely seem to force you to practice good habits with pulling and fighting in an optimal spot, stopping runners etc.

The bottom line is, MMO's these days, ALL OF THEM, are pathetically easy to grind away solo... and even if by some bizarre chance you are so incompetent that you actually die... who cares, there is no penalty anyway.

To me, Old School refers to the age, and the fact that you had to actually *think* and *learn* to be a good player. Hardcore, refers to the time commitment required the difficulty and the severity of the death penalty.