Everquest - Live Servers

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

RPG-Background Players instead of Vidya Gaem Background Players.

Damn kids and normies ruin everything.

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

Adversity -> Scarcity -> Value

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

Let me sum up how this thread is going to go:

Great things about EverQuest:
1) Long travel times and death penalties
2) Group dungeon crawling and community building
3) Newbies and casuals admiring the Hardcores and their special loot/armor look

Worst things about EverQuest:
1) Long travel times and death penalties
2) Group dungeon crawling and community building
3) Newbies and casuals admiring the Hardcores and their special loot/armor look

See you in 250 pages.

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

all that great quest text they wrote, and they used a spell checker too

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

The part I remember best about EQ in its glory days is that Norrath felt like an actual world with a real history and interesting things happening in it. Then LDON and PoP happened and it started to feel less and less organic and more and more like just another video game with themed maps thrown together with a shitty narrative loosely tying them together. After that they tried to cast the playerbase as actors in some kind of retardedly scripted action/adventure story about an alien invasion or some bullshit. Whatever the hell that was, it didn't feel anything like I was an independent person in a real world any more.

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

Part of what made EQ great is it offered people a lot of stuff to do back when they were in college and didn't have shit to do all day but poopsock rare ass spawns for some sweet pixels. It legitimately offered something for me when I had 8 hours to burn on a random weekday play session in a way that games like WoW don't. Nowadays with a job and shit I would never enjoy EQ the way I did back then, though.

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

Effort, skill, and knowledge produced rewards rather than scripted Dance, Dance Revolution. Limited amount of level restrictions, tradeable items with a player driven economy. Weapon procs, item abilities, vanity illusions and other collectables. Social aspect of grouping and buffing, recognizable gear that signified accomplishments. No instances. Entire continents of added content (even if some of it was unfinished or broken). Varying levels of raiding, actual progression paths that could span multiple expansions that still had desired items years later. Unconventional combat mechanics (fear, kiting, swarming). Defensive resist system that tied into item ability + buff system. Reasons for multiple of X class on raids, uniqueness.

RE: What made Everuqest Great?

The time and effort spent on a character is what made it mean something IMO.

Zero instant gratification, and the scope just seemed epic.  The first trip across the Karanas.  Or looking off the boat and seeing the Cyclops trouncing around their island.  You just felt small.

I also enjoyed that minor things had major meaning depending on level.  Still remember trading a SSB that was given to me by a warrior in the top raiding guild on Innoruuk.  It was from their SSOY farm, and I traded it for my first PGT.  He gave me one to wear and one to sell because he had a pack full of them.  Always ended up with 27 helms and a single sword it seemed.

Sydsloot Halflingpunter, 50 Barbarian Warrior...guy seemed like a god to me as a lo 20's scrub inspecting him to see the best gear available in vanilla.

The competition with other guilds and the secret stats everyone held on to dearly.

The progression that didn't obsolete itself every expansion/patch and the community are my fondest memories. As a guy who hates voice comm in games I also miss useful and entertaining zone/guild/group chat.

fuck everquest everquest 2 all day boi

Everquest was a virtual world rather than a game. That's what made it great.

I still have moments on Vallon Zek seared into my amygdela from when I was 12-14. I don't really have similar experiences from gaming from other games. Middle school me was concerned about getting into the good raid guild 12 prophets => Silent Souls/Vexare. Kids around me were joining gangs, I was trying to join raid guilds.

1999, MMO-naivety, and a much younger Internet made EQ great.

the biggest for me was the community. during vanilla, pretty much everyone over lv 35 knew each other. if you ran into a lv 35+ and you didnt know them? they were usually soloers who would zoom to 50 and then reroll another solo char and repeat til they quit. the others were euro players. i was lucky where my playing time intersected both US and Euro, so in the evening i was in solb camping the king room and after a while they would leave and things would get quiet til west coaster started logging on. then if you were up really late or early the euros would show up. i tried to make friends with the ones who spoke english. if there was somebody who ninja looted jboots or aguk rare, the whole server knew within days and that person was fucked for getting groups and you needed to get a group. this game forced you to work together.

The ability to break the game.

For instance, soloing Fire Giants in Plane of Fire as a fucking shadowknight.

There was actually a community, and your standing in it mattered. Usually. Sometimes.

Class and crafter interdependency

Class uniqueness. Some overlap but none of the modern homogenization

The journey was as important and meaningful as the destination. It wasnt this solo RPG to max level then zerg rush raids for purples with people you didn't give a shit about. You leveled with a bunch of people you didnt give a shit about, to then raid with a bunch of people you didn't give a shit about to zerg rush naggy for a CoF that a fucking wizard won.

I think the pacing was a big part. You had time to socialize and get to know people in a group/zone. We often joked that EQ was a chatroom with a game attached to it.

Risk. Dying fucking sucked in EQ. Running through kithicor at night trying to get to rivervale was fucking terrifying.

Itemization had some major successes. Item relevance and longevity was great for many things, keeping old xpac content relevant without being mandatory. And when they wanted to revitalize old stuff they threw in those fabled events.

I almost exclusively played in first person. It worked and moving the camera out felt odd. Nowadays it feels odd playing first person.

Immersion. I haven't been drawn into a world like I was drawn into EQ since.