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EverQuest
141–150 of 166 posts
Re: EverQuest
#142I was there. My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition. One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously. EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a…
I had such amazing times in the SWG beta.. it's a shame it never found its footing. It's ambition did it in. Thank you!
I’m glad you enjoyed it, though I personally really only contributed shared code - SOE ended up using my UI library from Planetside across all their titles at the time.
From where I sat (St Louis, then San Diego), it looked like the SWG team (Austin) worked incredibly hard on the title, and explored ideas that were really groundbreaking for the time.
The Star Wars universe is a hard one to make into an MMO - the way Jedi work in the universe combined with what players want for themselves is very hard to solve for. I recall Raph wrote about it, maybe more than once.
Re: EverQuest
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
I too formed memories by playing EQ in a way that was, in retrospect, dumb, and learning from the experience. e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Mons…
I can top this. The Erudite zone was literally built around a massive chasm. Early on in the game I unlocked "levitate" - and naturally levitated down into the big chasm. A little way down a loading screen hits for a zone called "The Hole"; a high level raid zone. My levitate was removed by the loading screen, and retrieving my body would require a team of high level players - thus lose (meaning ALL my gear and inven…
the magic of old computer games stems from a combination of a sense of the unknown, inconsistent difficulty curves, and freedom ... these did come at the price of a buggier experience compared to modern guardrailed polished titles ...
Re: EverQuest
#144Everquest was my first warning about game addiction. Every teenage kid by the year 2000 had spent too much time in front of a game, of course. But not like this. I was sitting with a friend of mine at a computer café. This was more prevalent at the time, since a capable computer with all the modern games on it was still somewhat pricey. So my friend starts taking to our side guy, who is playing EQ. Nice fellow. "Hey…
Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day (say specially during workweek). Even if you really have no job, at that point I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing. I myself really enjoyed a game (Tibia, very popular here in Brazil) during my childhood, and, living in a large metropolis (and at the time quite violent too) an…
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Re: EverQuest
#145In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime. I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated…
World of Warcraft had this in Booty Bay. There was a hilarious achievement where you first got your reputation to max with the Booty Bay guards by killing the nearby pirates, then the other half was to kill the guards until the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction exalted you; a 2.5x reputation grind that took weeks. And when you were done you couldn’t enter Booty Bay anymore because the guards killed you on sight. The thing…
WoW was amazing back when it first launched, I tried it again a year ago and everything felt on guardrails now. There was a linear set of quests that led you down an unmissable road to level up and get gear. You never were stuck with missing or low level items, each quest gave you the pieces you were missing and you get purple gear for doing the right steps in the right order, not for taking risks and getting lucky.
I remember first playing and feeling totally lost as I wandered from place to place hoping not to stumble into something with a skull that would murder me. Any item you lucked into was a godsend and people were equipped with a jumble of gear that was the best they could get. If you got your hands on an epic you wore it forever. Maybe it is just nostalgia but it really didn't feel great for it to be so straightforward now.
Re: EverQuest
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, again, there is a reason these things resonate with people. They aren't mad that people aren't communicating with each other. They are reflecting on their own smartphone consumption and feeling that it had substantial negative effects. Something virtually no people feel about newspapers
Every generation that had that big new thing had an enormous group claiming it was terrible and would destroy everything. Smartphones are worse because corporations are allowed to be more evil while receiving more praise (and in that axis everything is worse). Don't scapegoat the platform here. If all we had was newspapers today they'd fuck you in very similar ways. Some executive would make sure of it.
Ah, how lucky we were to have such benevolant benefactors as William Randolph Hearst and Robert Maxwell running those organs of old ;)
Re: EverQuest
#147In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime. I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated…
Corrupt Qeynos Guards -- Qeynos is SonyEQ spelled backwards. And, depending on your race / class, it didn't even take that much to make them hate you.
Killing the corrupt guards, often one at a guard tower in the Plains of Karanas west of town, and turning in their bracelets to a non-corrupt guard at the bridge to South Karanas, was great XP for quite a few levels in the midgame. And it is possible to repair the corrupt guard XP (slowly) with low-level quests.
Re: EverQuest
#148Never played EQ, but spent my fair share of time in WoW. And then, many many other MMOs. What was aleays great is jumping into a random new game and not knowing what to do or where to go - just figuring it out on the fly. A few times in recent history I've tried to jump into the latest MMOs only to find that they hold your hand every step of the way, forcing you to walk through lengthy tutorials. If I wanted to play…
So many games, not only MMOs, lose my interest in the intro/tutorial due to this. Let me play the game, or at least a way to skip / a shortcut. I can’t remember what game it was, but almost an hour in and I’m still locked in the tutorial house and I just put it down forever.
Re: EverQuest
#149In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime. I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated…
Corrupt Qeynos Guards -- Qeynos is SonyEQ spelled backwards. And, depending on your race / class, it didn't even take that much to make them hate you. Killing the corrupt guards, often one at a guard tower in the Plains of Karanas west of town, and turning in their bracelets to a non-corrupt guard at the bridge to South Karanas, was great XP for quite a few levels in the midgame. And it is possible to repair the corr…
Yeah that was it. I always figured I could have regained reputation with the corrupt guards by doing evil things, but by that time I was ready to move on to Dark Age of Camelot.
Re: EverQuest
#150I was there. My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition. One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously. EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a…
Thanks for the work you did on that! EQ really got me into gaming and "what we could make tech do". It was definitely transformative at the time!
“What we could make tech do” is so true! Working on MMOs definitely pushed the boundaries of what was possible, and continues to inform what I expect from the machine.
What did you end up doing?