Everquest AMA Answered!
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Why? I had a lot of fun back in those days. It was awful too in some ways, but that was the mechanics of the game.. We didn't really know any better. Honestly, my FAVORITE memory ever in EQ, was when we ported into TOV to the TOM portal, and proceeded to wipe out every dragon in TOV with 35 ppl while Mythic Legion kept dying over and over to Aary with over 100. I especially remember the accidental agro of FEEESH too.. I took agro on him, with Tharkis, that always sleeping Shammy (can't remember his name), and a cleric held him off while you guys killed the other dragon. Then the guild finished off Fish. All the while ML was petitioning GMs because they KNEW we were exploiting somehow. GM's showed up, saw nothing wrong, and left. Was pretty damned funny that by the time ML finally beat Aary, we had killed everything except Vulak, and ported out already.
Well.. that and releasing The Sleeper, and the angry tells I got FOR YEARS afterwards about it.. LOL
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We were also all alone in Plane of Time, clearing it for well over a year before another guild ever got in there.. Hoss straight up dominated Druzzil Ro for years..
EQ, for all of its shortcomings, and terrible game mechanics (by today's standards), built REAL friendships.. I still talk to a lot of people from Hoss and Seekers even today. Ironically, Holly Longdale was in Mythic Legion for a long time as were several other SOE employees.. and they got straight up owned by us in their own game!!
EQ, for all of its shortcomings, and terrible game mechanics (by today's standards), built REAL friendships.. I still talk to a lot of people from Hoss and Seekers even today. Ironically, Holly Longdale was in Mythic Legion for a long time as were several other SOE employees.. and they got straight up owned by us in their own game!!
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Utnayan
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^^ Yep. I became really good friends with one IRL.
Funniest moment for me was in Unrest back when Kunark was about 3 months in. We played in a guild called Excelsior at the time on Mith Marr and my buddy Wolvinsbane started working on his epic. So me and Dextor (Kaubel in EJ for WoW) went to Unrest to look for some special bat wing or something I forget what it was. Thinking we would get it right away (Mistake), and after about 20 minutes, we went and cleared down to Rucksif.
Now back in the day, remember all the fancy macros we did for incoming in group chat? Usually something like ---
INCOMING ##---... Well... Wolv never used more than 3 letters, which were always acronyms or abbreviations.
So, as dex and I sat there we just saw a "brb" in group chat from wolv. He was gone for about 5-6 minutes and we wondered if he had to go AFK or something and didn't tell us.
All of a sudden.
"Inc"
Now imagine we are in that little cave enclosure where Rucksif spawns, and if you remember, that area where you would come flying down the spiral staircase area, jump over the gap, and head straight into the cave. Now imagine what had to be 103 flailing mummies, skeletons, hags, named, you name it chasing Wolv right into our cave and then... they kept coming. It was such a ridiculous thing to watch we could barely play we were laughing so hard. I had my necro pet up and was trying everything I could do to DOT each one with something, Dex was a druid so he was trying to heal and AE and he also threw thorns on us. For the next 2 minutes it was complete carnage. Finally everything died. And wolv got to looting. And whatever he needed didn't drop. And then while we are all almost dead, Rucksif spawns...
We didn't have any chance to reset, med up, heal... anything. And we die to Rucksif when he was at about 4% health remaining.
Wolvinsbane tells the group, "rly".
But damn good times. I wonder where some of those people went sometimes. You would join a group somewhere whether it was KC, Lguk, Unrest basement in vanilla leveling up, etc - and hung out with 5 others just sitting there getting to know whoeever was playing for 8-10 hours. Once you got a good group you didn't dare leave it, for fear of 1) Group suck. 2) You didn't want to sit at zone in on a list to go somewhere else.
People definitely made the place in that game.
Funniest moment for me was in Unrest back when Kunark was about 3 months in. We played in a guild called Excelsior at the time on Mith Marr and my buddy Wolvinsbane started working on his epic. So me and Dextor (Kaubel in EJ for WoW) went to Unrest to look for some special bat wing or something I forget what it was. Thinking we would get it right away (Mistake), and after about 20 minutes, we went and cleared down to Rucksif.
Now back in the day, remember all the fancy macros we did for incoming in group chat? Usually something like ---
INCOMING ##---... Well... Wolv never used more than 3 letters, which were always acronyms or abbreviations.So, as dex and I sat there we just saw a "brb" in group chat from wolv. He was gone for about 5-6 minutes and we wondered if he had to go AFK or something and didn't tell us.
All of a sudden.
"Inc"
Now imagine we are in that little cave enclosure where Rucksif spawns, and if you remember, that area where you would come flying down the spiral staircase area, jump over the gap, and head straight into the cave. Now imagine what had to be 103 flailing mummies, skeletons, hags, named, you name it chasing Wolv right into our cave and then... they kept coming. It was such a ridiculous thing to watch we could barely play we were laughing so hard. I had my necro pet up and was trying everything I could do to DOT each one with something, Dex was a druid so he was trying to heal and AE and he also threw thorns on us. For the next 2 minutes it was complete carnage. Finally everything died. And wolv got to looting. And whatever he needed didn't drop. And then while we are all almost dead, Rucksif spawns...
We didn't have any chance to reset, med up, heal... anything. And we die to Rucksif when he was at about 4% health remaining.
Wolvinsbane tells the group, "rly".
But damn good times. I wonder where some of those people went sometimes. You would join a group somewhere whether it was KC, Lguk, Unrest basement in vanilla leveling up, etc - and hung out with 5 others just sitting there getting to know whoeever was playing for 8-10 hours. Once you got a good group you didn't dare leave it, for fear of 1) Group suck. 2) You didn't want to sit at zone in on a list to go somewhere else.
People definitely made the place in that game.
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^^^ this
I am sure everyone here has a story of raiding some encounter, but it getting rough, and the mob slowly trickling down to 0%, but not enough DPS left! Aaaaaaaand... that's a wipe.
And yet it was fun, because EQ, for whatever reason, really was about the lulz with friends from all over the world as you tried to kill stuff ded.
I am sure everyone here has a story of raiding some encounter, but it getting rough, and the mob slowly trickling down to 0%, but not enough DPS left! Aaaaaaaand... that's a wipe.
And yet it was fun, because EQ, for whatever reason, really was about the lulz with friends from all over the world as you tried to kill stuff ded.
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Hah, well that was supposed to be a joke because you're roasting coworkers in these threads and I tended to rub people the wrong way in our little touchy-feely yet surprisingly capable guild. (don't get me wrong, I loved Hoss, but sometimes the guild needed the whip, hence the rubbing the wrong way stuff)
Holly was a Mythic Zergling? You deserved better Holly
Hah, well that was supposed to be a joke because you're roasting coworkers in these threads and I tended to rub people the wrong way in our little touchy-feely yet surprisingly capable guild. (don't get me wrong, I loved Hoss, but sometimes the guild needed the whip, hence the rubbing the wrong way stuff)
Holly was a Mythic Zergling? You deserved better Holly
More than just Holly.. Quite a few SOE peeps were in ML.
During my interview at SOE to join the EQ team, she asked me what my favorite moment in EQ was, and I started in on that story.. I wish you could have seen her face when I was going through it.. She stopped me about 1/2 way through and said, "A lot of people quit ML after that night..."
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This is why I've always complained about the name and release strategy of EQ2.
They split up the EQ population, but EQ2 wasn't the same kind of (hardcore) game, so they ended up drawing EQ players into a game that didn't appeal to them for long.
Fight
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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You are exactly right. They cut the legs out from under their own game (EQ1) and franchise with the purposeful strategy they took. If management had ever played either of the games, they would have know it was totally unnecessary because how different they were. It was a sequel only in name. There were not even trying to appeal to the same demographics.
In 2004, they compounded the WoW problem by trying to get their young, competitive male audience to move over to EQ2 that was made for stay-at-home mom's and Soy Boys.
EQ 1 was a game that was dominated by males 14 to 35 years old. It was highly competitive, harsh, but rewarding. It required guilds with a military type structure, with leaders, officers, and grunts. It had a tremendous amount of long-game, incremental progression. It had depth, it had hidden game mechanics, it had layers of abilities and ways to go at any given encounter.
EQ 2 was a casual game that appealed to as many females as it did males. They wanted to play the game in a more alternative fashion, focusing on trade-skills, collections, and filling up a virtual house with more and more pixels. I played EQ2 for a month and I think I ran into mostly role-players that liked the fantasy environment. They were people that came from other games like Second Life or Sims Online. The biggest failing, in my mind, was the mob encounters and game mechanics were stripped down to a predictable, you can win this or you can't. Mobs come in packs, and they leash. There aren't alternate methods to go at encounters. You either have the levels at the right about of damage buttons to smash and win, or you don't. All the classes were over-balanced to the point everyone simply had 3 bars of damage abilities on rotating cool downs. Same shit, different names and sparkling pixels. The whole game was wide as an ocean, shallow as a puddle.
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Utnayan
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Totally agree on the EQ2 front. It also ran like ass because SOE thought that CPU processing power would dominate over the GPU market at the time. We all saw how that panned out.
I still remember the online forum mockery battles of EQ2 Vs WoW. WoW was for kids - EQ2 was a serious game for serious players. Yeah, that didn't pan out well when you have stale mob placement not breathing any life into the world what so ever... Literally just standing there in groups of 6. Rinse and repeat class actions as you talked about, and didn't follow any of the lore except for a few named mobs that had no right being in the area they were in. Combine that with really bad decisions like the group XP Death penalty, Horrible itemization, limited character item progression which was also confusing as hell... At a time and place where the actual market screamed for a more accessible solo market with the option to group. At any rate, don't forget these are also the same "Experts" that thought the MMORPG genre was market capped at 500k, which honestly, only happened due to their own incompetence in knowing their market and worse, too big for their britches with egotistical managed top down dev production. Most of the time I think that was just a scapegoat to tell Sony anyhow as to why it wasn't growing.
The EOF expansion did it right, but that was Hartsman behind that one and from what I have heard, he listened to his developers. Meanwhile, WoW was at over 5 million subs and growing. They were a follower at this point, not a leader.
I always hope Daybreak sells the EQ IP entirely although I doubt it will ever happen. So many better games could be out as a result.
I still remember the online forum mockery battles of EQ2 Vs WoW. WoW was for kids - EQ2 was a serious game for serious players. Yeah, that didn't pan out well when you have stale mob placement not breathing any life into the world what so ever... Literally just standing there in groups of 6. Rinse and repeat class actions as you talked about, and didn't follow any of the lore except for a few named mobs that had no right being in the area they were in. Combine that with really bad decisions like the group XP Death penalty, Horrible itemization, limited character item progression which was also confusing as hell... At a time and place where the actual market screamed for a more accessible solo market with the option to group. At any rate, don't forget these are also the same "Experts" that thought the MMORPG genre was market capped at 500k, which honestly, only happened due to their own incompetence in knowing their market and worse, too big for their britches with egotistical managed top down dev production. Most of the time I think that was just a scapegoat to tell Sony anyhow as to why it wasn't growing.
The EOF expansion did it right, but that was Hartsman behind that one and from what I have heard, he listened to his developers. Meanwhile, WoW was at over 5 million subs and growing. They were a follower at this point, not a leader.
I always hope Daybreak sells the EQ IP entirely although I doubt it will ever happen. So many better games could be out as a result.
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At this point I'm just not sure why they did it.
Didn't they understand the difference between the games, or is it one of the very first examples of a franchise being weakened because they wanted to widen the target audience?
yerm
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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The idea of a game that runs for decades and maintains, let alone grows? Inconceivable. Eq would reach its high point and decline and die, as is the way of all games and especially video game rpgs.
The solution therefore is simple: like other successful games, you franchise it. Final fantasy or zelda, Baldur's Gate or Quest for Glory, even that rts that wants to enter the market Warcraft... they all released a 2, and maybe a 3...
The idea that you could just take one game and beat subs out of it for years and years with endless expansions and without sequel comes with hindsight (and wow doing it). The eq devs lacked that foresight, and the sony suits were looking for a successful game to franchise into a sequel. Their vision likely involved years if eq2 success before a Next sequel in the everquest franchise series.
If wow hadn't run roughshod through the mmo market there would probably be 4+ eqs right now, not to mention the handful of eves and runescapes and lord knows how many cashgrabbing neverwinters.
pharmakos
soʞɐɯɹɐɥd
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This sounds pretty accurate.
The players believed in the possibility of One Game to Play Forever, too bad Sony didn't.
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Seems hard to understand Sony, when you had players as fanatical as a good lot of the forum posters were.
I can't understand how they didn't see the dedication / addiction / sunken cost fallacy players were experiencing.
I mean its 20 years after the fact, and people are paying rappers money to shit talk the opposing raid guild. Classic EQ really is a phenomenon.
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If you think that eq2 was for casuals, you were not in a competitive guild. There was a lot of contested content until they got rid of the avatars. eq2 was brutal in its own way, if you went that route. So saying eq2 was baby mode is just showing you didn't really play that game competitively. Server xfers, worldwide stats, races to be in the first 10 guilds to kill an encounter ded --- I just do not agree it was ez mode.
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pharmakos
soʞɐɯɹɐɥd
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there had never before been a major game that inspired that level of devotion. the designers and whatnot that actually made the game hands on may have been able to see it coming, but certainly the suits that are in charge of the money weren't going to do anything but follow the same old formula. classic failure story of pioneers in any given market -- lack of foresight in adapting economic models for innovative new products/fields.
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yerm
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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This is easy to see in retrospect, but we have hindsight and world of warcraft to help us realize this.
What did they have at the time? Counterstrike would do it, but that is the same age as eq. Halflife 2 had serious life but wasn't out yet. Brood war arguably? Blizzard looked to be about expacs.
More specific to the genre, muds and early form mmo games were repeatedly showing a lifecycle. Every rpg, literally every one, relied on new versions. I rememeber hearing baldurs gate was an inspiration for the early team? They dropped a sequal that one upped the original. All the rpgs were doing it.
The evidence that you could just stick with eq and ride it for decades was forming but far from any sort of evidenced or provable state that a sony suit would accept. Meanwhile, devs wanting a new project to develop could solidly back the validity of making brand new versions of everquest.
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