91–100 of 166 posts
There WERE goblin butts in EQ; I think the models that frequented the "other side of the wall" in the Halfling starting zone, at least.
But that one looks like WoW.
EQ's were like this: https://zam.zamimg.com/images/i/d/id6571.png
Earlier quoted context omitted.
UO had such a huge influence on me. It was amazing.
It's legitimately insane that perhaps the best MMO, or at least the one which came closer to fulfill the MMO's promise of a shared, persistent, virtual world , was also the first. How come in three decades of technological and creative development did nobody do it better?
Gaming was more ambitious and experimental then. The FFXI documentary [0] made me reflect on how much games have changed since. FFXI was heavily inspired by EQ so more credit to EQ but games today are so much more bland and engineered by design. That's how they achieve universal appeal and commercial success - by engineering its engagement. Reminds me of how packaged foods are engineered to be the most addictive by empirically finding the bliss point [1]. In games it will essentially be dopamine per minute and now mainstream games will never do something as crazy as crafting experiences as random and lumpy as real life. Instead every engagement is crafted to never be too frustrating and to give just enough rewards to keep the gamer on that hamster wheel, with the next engagement never being too far away.
Original Soulsborne games felt fresh because FromSoftware put friction and obscurity back in the spotlight.
I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate. Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would wa…
My first memory of EverQuest was leaving the tutorial quest, running along a road at night, and being eaten by a lion. I had no idea what I was doing but I was hooked on figuring out.
I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate. Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would wa…
Totally, me and my friend used to share an EQ account in school. His parents paid for it so he got to play during the day, and I would play at night from midnight until 6am, then I'd go to school. It was profoundly unhealthy, which is why that game earned the name "Evercrack". Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried…
I didn't play EQ but on FFXI airships ran on a 15min schedule and if you missed it you would have to sit and wait, not dissimilar to real life. This kind of friction added a charm and immersion to the game but would never fly in a game today [pardon the pun].
Nowadays a lot of the enjoyment I seek out of games is mechanical difficulty and adrenaline because most the other aspects can be fulfilled away from the screen...
I worked for a very successful “dot com” back in the day. EverQuest was like the crack pipe for the tech crowd, people actually got divorced over addictions to it.
My (girlfriend at the time, later wife) gave me a "it's me or WoW" ultimatum at the peak of my raiding obsession. I picked her. We had moved across the country for grad school and had no friends and I was using the game as a crutch rather than like, actually meeting people. I joined a softball team with some people from her program and made a bunch of lifelong friends. More power to everyone who can play MMO's in a w…
I 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…
Everquest 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…
Because I am the master of my time. If I wish to not play for three months, and then I decide I want to spend an entire Saturday playing, that is my choice, not yours.
> I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.
I'm not interested in what you think is/is not good for my well being. That is a decision for me to make.
> I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.
Please see the above.
I ran a couple of popular game sites back then and had industry connections so I got early beta test access to try out EverQuest.
Unfortunately, I made a bad choice when I chose to make a Human character, which was night-blind. On top of that, it seemed like every time I logged in it was night time and the game was nearly unplayable away from lights, fires and torches for that character.
To make matters worse, I started in Freeport which had several invisible zone walls so on top of not being able to see, I constantly kept zoning which constantly interrupted the game.
As you can imagine, I lost interest rather quickly and went back to UO. I gave my beta account to a gamer friend of mine, who had a much better experience than I had during beta.
When EverQuest eventually launched, several friends of mine bought it so I decided to buy it as well. By then I had learned to make elven characters because they had infravision/ultravision that allowed them to see at night.
It was fun for a little while, but then bad game design concepts led to another problem. They arbitrarily decided to assign some of the classes with experience penalties, including the one I played which had a 40% experience reduction, which was ridiculous.
The problem was that at that time, that information was not well known so I all I noticed was all of my friends were outleveling me because none of their classes had penalties.
Eventually by around level 12 (which took a while back then), I was too low to group with them, despite playing the same amount of time they did, and I could no longer gain experience in their groups.
Since EverQuest was heavily group-focused, I decided to go back to Ultimate Online.
A few months later, I decided to give it another try and made a bard. Suddenly, everyone was inviting me to group and that made the game a lot more fun and led to a lot of great memories.
A few years ago I tried to go back and play it but, either due to age or having less free time, it was just too slow and difficult to play after all of these years.
While I don't play it any more, I am really glad that it is still online and even if it shuts down, there is another player-run (and licensed) rogue server available.
I met so many good friends in that game, including one of my best friends to this day, so I will always have fond memories of it.
I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate. Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would wa…
It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game. In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain…
One random story I have...I remember there was a legit riot on the Prexus EQ forums I was on because SOE decided to drop Windows 95 support for Everquest. I believe it was because Win95 wouldn't support DirectX 6 or something. I was good to go though...I had Win 98 and a Geforce MX 240 I purchased at Best Buy.
