Dude! Eye of the Beholder Rocked! I would still play this game if I could. I played it on my Amiga 500 way back in the day. Truly a great dungeon crawl.

The biggest problem with any RPG these days is that people want that instant grativication. The dumbed down D&D to the point that anyone can play it with out thinking about it. There is no more thought required to play the game. They took away everything that really made it great. I was all in favor of streamlining the rules so it made a little more since. Thac0 was a pain to say the vary least. But in doing so they created game balance issues so now everyone just bitches about it. There was a reason why wizards had to gain so much more exp than every other class.

With MMOs all I see is Everquest and Diablo clones. WoW is a perfect example of this. Its everything that EQ was but with that Diablo instant gratification for loot and levels. No one wants to work for it. D&D really is a simple game. You only get out of it what you put into it. If you want instant statisfaction then your rewards will be hollow and unfullfilling. They really need to make MMOs a little harder to advance in as a charater. Make players work for it.

The problem is that most MMOs are either EverQuest clones or Diablo clones or a combination of the two. These companys just want you to grind away while paying your monthly fee. Blisfully ignorant of the fact that nothing you do in their game ever really changes anything. Critters just continue to spawn and playes continue to collect "loot". Borning!

Just because you dont see alot of MMOs with voices does not mean that other games dont have them. Morrowwind has voices on many of the NPCs you encounter. Granted, they repeat alot and there is not may different voices, but they do have them. I recall the guards in the capital city calling me scum every time I passed them. Nice touch.

You really would not need as many voice actors/actresses as you might think. I am sure that the dev team could come up with a good many of them. Heck! I'd volenteer my meager voice for an NPC or two. That'd be fun.

I do agree with the origenal statment about sound and music. It can really make or break a game these days. Movies too. Everquest had some awsome sound tracks. Really added alot to the game.

I like stealth and I like invisibilty spells. However, I dont like it when they are both treated as being the same thing. Stealth is a skill that requires you to know what your doing and how to stay out of sight. Invisiblity is a spell that cloaks you so you dont need any skill to stay unseen.

In other games that I have played, both stealth and invisibility are treated as if they are the same. "Hey, I have see invis spell on me so I can see that theif sneaking around." That is such BS. Stealth is more than not being seen with the naked eye. Its ducking shadows and generally staying out of plain sight.

Please treat stealth and invisible spells like the two sperate things they are. A detection spell would be able to spot someone with an invisiblity spell but not someone who is simply hidden from sight.

They never should have played around with the games graphics in the first place. They were not that horrible to begin with. Even if it was a tutorial area, it was nothing what I recalled the game being like, nothing. The sound was off, the partical effects were going crazy, the charater models looked horrible. Why change something that does not need to be changed? If its not broken, dont fix it!

Tutorial zone? I didnt like the tutorial zone in EQII, why the hell would I want them to muck it up in EQI? Idiots!

Jamesd129,

If it has been a number of years since you played last, then do yourself the favor and log onto the station account web page, station.com There is a free trial menue that you can get a 14 day pass to play EverQuest: Escape to Norrath. It is free of charge and you can advance up to lvl 10, if you so choise.

I just got done wasting the last hour and a half of my life finding out just how bad they have crapped up the game. The User Interface is for total crap now. The graphics have completely gone down hill. I could barely move around. Couldnt even make it down a hall way without bouncing off all the walls. Damn, I am so glade I found thatout before I decided to give the game another try. It brind back to memorie all the reasons why I quit in the first place. Every time they tried to improve the game they just made it worse.

I so wish I could play again back in the days when the game was fun. Sadly, those golden days are long past.

Unfortunetly, the only reason why I would go back to playing EQ again would be to start over at 1st lvl and even then, only on a pvp server. PvP was the only reason why I kept playing for 4 years in the fist place.

Well, I have to say that all this is rather entertaining.

I never played WoW. I did play EQ, EQII, Ashrons Call, Shadowbane, Dungeons and Dragons Online, World War II Online, Eve Online, Pirates of the Burning Sea and a few other games here and there. I even played EQ and AC at the same time. I liked them both but for different reasons.

I preferred to play on the PvP servers. The simple reason is this; when things got boring, and they always did, I could rely on the Pvp aspect to keep things alive.

There has been a lot of talk about the woes of what caused EQ to fail. I can say that they are all rather true. EQ failed because the game changed so much from what it originally was that it was no longer the same game after a few years from its release. The game suffered from too many expansions that did not add any serious content to the game but merely mucked up the game with adding more loot that over balanced the game. After the 3rd expansion came out, people could come back to the "old world" and dominate with their new gear. That is why the game "got" easy. In the beginning, it was not so easy. I started playing the day the Valllon Zek server came online. The game was not easy back then.

EQ has always suffered from "balance" issues. The game was made for the sole purpose to have players group. Soloing was not in the agenda. Only a few classes could solo very well, and some classes could not solo at all. The classes where balanced with each other only in terms of what each class could do with each other in a group. When you take a full group of 6 and assess each class in that group, they all worked well together. However, if you take them apart from the group and assess them, you find many flaws. The melee classes had it the worst.

As stated before, a lot of the "gear" that was offered in quests, just was not up to speed with what was being dropped by the latest greatest mob in the latest greatest dungeon. Even before the expansions, a lot of the quest gear was not really that great at all. The rogues Burning Rapier comes to mind. Only a decent weapon for mid teens to low twenties but by the time you got the damn thing you where nearly lvl 30. I did not get my rapier till I was lvl 36. The exp dinged me the lvl.

I have always hated raids and being forced to group.

From a hardcore gamers point of view, that race would be disastrous. You never want anything bad to happen. However, from a hardcore role players view, Awesome! Bring it on. Personally, I don’t like losing and or when things go bad, but the concept is very intriguing. I may well be inclined to give it a try.