Everquest AMA Answered!

EQ1 was based on the Tanarus engine. EQ2 was a whole new engine, so my guess is they figured the game would be so much better looking that it would just draw everyone away from EQ. Of course, like Vanguard, another game I worked on before joining SOE, the PCs required to make EQ2 look really good were $5,000. Turning down the detail to make it run on the same PC that players used for EQ1 made it look absolutely terrible. So they lost their existing playerbase trying to come over to it.

Like most, when EQ2 came out, I tried it, and hated it. People who really didn't play EQ much liked EQ2 much more than EQ players did. I really didn't care for the idea that I had to invest several hours into a class before I could actually play the class I wanted to anyway, only to find out it sucked, and I'd made a mistake. Thankfully, when Scott Hartsman took over EQ2, that all changed and went back to picking your class from the jump. But for me, EQ2 was already not that interesting.. I didn't care for the differences in the world, and game play. Also, I was playing WoW pretty heavily at that point, and it was a MUCH better game at release.

What turned me off EQ2 was the locked encounters and linked mobs. EQ1's mobs were linked only indirectly via the reaction radius, which opened up many tactics of dealing with a camp. Also meant that if you didn't use the right tactics or were just plain unlucky, you could end up with far more mobs than you could deal with.

EQ2 and subsequent games tried to make the encounters more predictable (easier for both the player and the designers) but this also removed some of the depth. EQ1's lack of an in- or out of combat state had a similar effect.

It's an easy trap to fall into: you want to make something better but end up overdesigning things and losing the soul of the original. This genre set out to create online worlds but ended up "improving" them into something inbetween a lobby and a phone game.

I think EQ2 had a time in its middle years where it was decent. I tried it on launch and uninstalled it like 2 days later, but I remember trying it some time in the later 2000s when they were running some kind of promotion and got into it for 5-6 months and actually enjoyed it quite a bit.

It's not a bad game. It just wasn't the game people thought it would be.. and it didn't help that WoW launched the same day.

Just searched for "EQ2 gameplay 2019" jesus this look tedius. Dude has 4 hotbars that are 20 wide. No wonder the main event of the channel is drinking.

Fight said:

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.

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So in 2002-2004 era when EQ2 was being developed almost all games were dominated by that gender/age demo. Obviously there's been a big shift towards gamers being both older and more women playing than 20 years ago. That being said, I don't buy into the narrative that EQ1 was as described. You're talking about Afterlife, Fires of Heaven, Triton, etc. Essentially there was 1 guild like that on each server, and 50+ guilds that were nothing like that on each server. I don't think we have any "hard" numbers on it to compare, but at least in my experience early era EQ1 was actually the oldest, and most female of any games I played at the time.

When EQ1 came out I was just starting High School, my uncle was ~40 at the time and main tank for a hardcore raiding guild. I couldn't make most of the raids outside of summer months, but I kind of got "friends and family" backdoored into the guild, but aside from the raids I could make I spent a lot of my time playing more with casuals. It gave me a decent cross-sectional experience in early EQ, and across the board I felt like most of the core raiders were either like my uncle (middle aged men, usually with unique life/job situations that let them play all day--my uncle retired at age 38), or they were middle aged housewives. In fact the massive amounts of middle aged house wives in EQ back then was a phenomenon I've never seen in gaming before or since.

When I moved to WoW in 2004 I immediately noticed the game was much younger. I was in my early 20s and was about "middle of the pack" age wise compared to everyone I knew in WoW, WoW had way more teenage male players, and far fewer middle aged women and men. Modern WoW has "aged a lot" as the younger generations don't get into it as much but, EQ at least from my experience was way out of the norm with both a lot of females and a lot of older players back in 1999-2004 era.

You can kind of see this phenomenon reflected on live servers to be honest. From what I've seen the typical TLP EQer is very similar to me--we were the young guys (mostly guys), who were playing EQ in HS and early college and are revisiting it out of nostalgia. The core player base back then who were middle aged 20 years ago, the vast majority of them who still play aren't on TLPs, but are on live. If you check out a lot of the live guilds out there they are almost like retirement homes with their average age probably pushing 55+.

Synj said:

I forgot about group death penalty.

Get group together (finally).

Start crawl.

Someone sees shiny, wanders off gets killed.

Everyone takes XP hit.

"Fucking dumbass."

Everyone disbands except you and the dumbass.

"Want me to shout for new group?"

You disband.

You uninstall.

You sell character.

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Added another

Sadre Spinegnawer said:

"Someone sees shiny, wanders off gets killed."

feature. It was one way how you knew the diff b/w who was one of those types of kids from the original Willy Wonka movie and who was not an idiot.

It would be a cool feature if people who wipe raids and groups for the next 24 hours appear as giant blueberries. Devs? Yes?

edit: could be a spell cast by the raid leader. Some wipes are, in classic mechanics, often due to just off-tempo pulls, not blueberry-worthy.

Few are worthy of the berry.

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I wouldn't trust the system. My guild has solid raid leaders and I still don't think they always diagnose whodunit right, at least at first. Even shit like "who keeps pushing the boss" can require scooby doo log detective work.

Example: we did high priest event in txevu, and offtanks kept dropping on trash, and we repeatedly lost tanks after ae (a spell slow that needs curse cure) as healing wasn't keeping up. Unsurprisingly, us healers were being shit on. Turns out... nobody was casting a slow, not for the entire trash clear and 90% of the fight. Your idea would have a whole lotta blueberry priests and only the shaman deserving it. Meanwhile, lord knows how many times on other raids the tanks got blamed for shit when it WAS our fault...

The only thing worse than a group punishment would be a peanut gallery one.

They sound like business people and not gamers. Probably why the game will be milked until it can't be anymore.

Have the Tyen bots bombard them with dick pix.

Elidroth said:

It's not a bad game. It just wasn't the game people thought it would be.. and it didn't help that WoW launched the same day.

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Actually, wasn't it like one week apart or something?

I remember that I was beta testing both WoW and EQ2. Early on, I decided that EQ2 was just horrible, and decided to spend the majority of my time in the WoW beta.

I ended up buying both games, but I spent a lot more time in WoW than EQ2 early on. I was on a pvp server in WoW, and it was just really fun up until they put in pvp stuff. Open world PvP was great in WoW before they made PvP a thing so to speak. We did PvP on our server because first off it was a pvp server, and secondly because that was the theme of the game.... horde vs alliance. So, you naturally went out and attacked the other faction. It's just what we did. There were no rewards for doing it. You got no gear. You got no ranking. You just had fun fighting alongside a crap load of strangers from your faction against the other faction. Then they introduced pvp as a "thing" that had rankings and gear and it went to shit over night. Nobody showed up at Tauren Mill to fight. Everybody was in battlegrounds playing capture the flag. So sad. So pathetic.

But.. I digress...

I eventually did put some real time in to EQ2, but the game just didn't give the same feels as EQ1. I'm not sure what it was, but it just wasn't fun.

ps. The world events to kill everybody before shutting down the beta servers that the GMs did on the last day of WoW beta was epic fun! For anyone who didn't experience it or know what I am talking about, the GMs spawned as raid bosses and started killing everyone as they made their way to the capital cities. When you died, you would respawn IN the capital city you was nearest. Slowly they made their way to the capital cities, and before long everyone was trapped in the cities fighting for their lives until the servers shut down for the last time. It was like a MMORPG Apolcolypse.