Everquest - Live Servers

I made a post on FOH forums years ago about how they painstakingly went to lengths to mirror the game environment and real life. EQ was ahead of it's time. The immersion was real and purposeful. The list below, in combination with the music throughout the game is what made EQ great to me. No other game since has had the balls to even try half this stuff. Why does EQ stick with you 15 years later? Well, it felt real.

• First person view was the way the game was designed and the way people played. It is a much more personal experience than seeing some cartoon run around in 3rd person.
• Leveling up didn't just give you access to more powerful spells, it actually made your character better in intangible ways. Better resists, mitigation, ability to hit, how hard you hit, more hps, better regeneration rates... Spell particle effects got more vibrant and varied as you leveled up. You could enter some zones you did not have access to at earlier levels. Unlock the ability to request yourself a surname.
• Not only were NPC classified as living, beast, undead for spell purposes, but their behavior changed as well. Beat on a living or social mob and it will start to run for help at 25% health. Undead on the other hand will fight till death. They also didn't care about agro/hate levels, and would mindlessly attack the target closest to them. Try to sit in a fight and the mob is going to come beat on you for max damage in your vulnerable position.
• No artificial leash distances or mobs tied to one another. If you wanted to pull a mob from one side of the zone to the other, technically anything was possible.
• Spells with physical effects like 'gravity flux' to fling you high into the air and come smashing back down to the ground, 'whirl till you hurl' to spin you uncontrollably, blindness to make your screen go completely black, and 'fear' that would make your character run uncontrollably in random directions and distances.
• Diseases might last for hours until a priest would heal you.
  
• Some mobs might path back to their spawns after defeating a player, while others would stand over their fallen victim for long periods of time... almost as if basking in the glory of victory. Some mobs could be tricked with feign death, manipulating their spawns and pulls.
• Language. Every race and a lot of the NPC's had their own racial languages. You could learn them and you could teach them to other players.
• Dynamic weather that changed zone to zone. Rain, snow. It rained all the time in the Karana's, while it hardly ever rained in the deserts of Ro. Druids could cast spells to control the in-game weather for the zone.
• Your character needed food/drink to survive. Some food might just be a snack and sustain you for a few minutes while other food was a feast and could last all day. Without food, you would stop regenerating health, mana, and stamina. Some food could provide stat bonuses.
• There were no in game maps. Only a clunky sense heading skill to know which direction you were facing.
• Almost all items had hidden lore text. With the help of a caster's Identify skill, you might find out more about and items origin or purpose.
• Faction system for every NPC and character in the game. Religion, quests, race, and who you killed all had an effect on whether an NPC loved or hated you. You could cast illusion spells to trick NPC's or modify your faction with them. Just about every faction and therefore every NPC could be your friend or foe, depending on the work you wanted to put in to raising/lowering said faction.
• To cross the ocean, you had to jump on a boat, see some great views, deal with getting a bit sea sick, and hope nobody would train a Krakken, Giant or Godzilla lizard onto the boat mid-route.
• There were in-game row boats that could be piloted by those without sufficient swimming skill or the assist of a levitation spell to walk over the water.
• In some bars and inn's, there were in game message boards where you could leave messages for other players.
• The gnomes had mechanical guides that would show you around towns and give you tours when prompted with in-game text.
• Your character could jump, duck, swim, walk, run. These different actions had game impact too, whether it be squeezing your character into a cavern/doorway, or adding a jump/run to evade a train of pursuing mobs.
• Your charisma stat drastically effected the price, both buying and selling, to NPC characters. Some much so, that it was worth it for Trolls and Ogres to hand off the goods to more charming players and have them sell their dungeon haul for them.
• The ability to grow or shrink player size through potions and player cast spells.
• Character races were important, for the racial bonuses/penalties they provided. Some leveled faster/slower, some had the ability to see at night others were blind, some could regenerate their health at an increased rate, and some could forge the ground to find food/water or other items.
• Chosen religions drastically changed faction standings and the ability to do quests or even enter entire sections of zones.
• Players could cast illusions on themselves to blend in with the environment. Maybe become a tree or a chair.... you would never know unless you clicked on them.
• There were environmental traps and hidden passageways/doors in just about every zone. Pits to fall into, secret entrances to find, back alleyways/sewers for the evil races to sneak into town.
• The zones often times had long, winding pathways to give a sense of distance between other places. They had random points of interest that might relate to the gods or lore. Sections of zones controlled by one faction of mobs or another. Mobs that might spawn in intervals and attack other NPCs. It felt like a living breathing world.
• Combat sound-effects based upon HP level. The lower your/their health got, the more intense the bone crunching sounds got and the slower you would move if you decided it was time to tuck-tail and run.
• Vision, movement speed, speech clarity, and sobriety all effect in drastic ways by alcohol consumption.
• Drowned in water, suffocate in zones without air, slide on ice, burn in lava.
• Locked doors required keys or someone that could pick the locks. This might be a meaningless door in a town or an important door to get to the depths of a dungeon.
• Certain classes mastered spells and abilities sooner than other classes. So, even though two classes might share the exact some spell for lore purposes, many times one class was considered the primary.
• Certain types of magical enemies could only be damaged with spells or magic imbued weapons.
• Your position in relation to enemies made a difference. Rogues could backstab from behind. Melees could riposte attacks from the front, canceling them and returning an attack back.
• Giants would have ground shaking sounds when they walked or ran nearby your characters.
• Player collision detection. Yes, you could block doorways with a well placed fat ass ogre.
• When you put a piece of gear on, you could see it on that part of your body. Most all pieces of gear had a unique look/color to them.
• When you dropped an item, a single coin, or anything really it showed up on the ground.
• Fall damage was fatal and a real danger depending on the terrain.
• Environment sounds and triggers depending on the situation. Combat music, tavern music, creepy dungeon music triggers, mischievous music while ducking.
• Weight and run speed. Yes, you had weight limits and going over that might bring your character to a walk, crawl, or even stop them in their tracks completely. Try running for a zone line to save your life, being weighted down with phat lewtz, all the while your throwing rusty weapons on the ground to try and speed up. Money and coin had weight, making transactions for expensive items challenging.
• Monks would lose agility the more weight they carried.
• Rogues could pick the pockets of mobs, actually removing items and coin from their inventory and drop pool at the expense of their group or other players.
• Anyone could beg from NPC's with a chance to gain their coin, but also with a chance to anger the NPC and have them attack them.
• Vision was a huge thing. People would avoid being Humans, Barbarians and Erudite's purely on the basis that they were blind at night, in dungeons and tunnels. Infravision, with a slight red hue at night is how most people played the game, but the lucky few Dark Elf's were treated to a purple world of bliss at all hours. For the unlucky blind folks, they could buy and equip torches or kill willow wisps for their light-stones to get them through a dark area. There were even spells that could modify vision temporarily, giving enhanced-telescopic vision.
• Spells would fizzle and burn mana unless you were adept at casting them. Attacks would miss unless you were skilled in the weapon type you were using.
• When you threw a throwing knife, you could see it leave your hand and fly towards the mob. Bows and arrows obeyed the laws of sight line and elevation.
• Mobs shared the same inventory slots that players did. Meaning, they could use the items in their inventory. For instance, the Frenzied Ghoul would attack faster when he had the Flowing Black Silk Sash. You could hand NPC items and they would equip them. Weapons would be visible on NPC's because they would we using and benefiting from them.

Well shit. Looks like im logging back into EQ again after a 2.5 year break. Thanks Fight!

i cant even count the times i fell asleep while having my char autorun somewhere only to wake up with my char naked at his bind point. then playing perry mason with my chat to find out what killed me. it was usually a fucking lion or gnoll in s karana or just plain old drowning. this continued to happen later on in game too. here i am in end game zones dead asleep and i hear my guildes telling me how i stayed behind til a room fully popped. luckily they were good guildies and most of the time when i conked out at 3 or 4am in a group they would translocate me back home or to the zoneline. one time i got up for a saturday 8am PoG raid and as soon as we zoned in and i buffed everyone fell right to sleep. i woke up hours later and i hear. TUNARE INCOMING! SLOW THIS BITCH! CHUK! and i hustled my ass over to our pull spot and slowed her down pretending like i was there all along. they knew damn well though.

-sigh

Xarpolis said:

I had a pre-nerf guise on my twink warrior. He also had Drelzna dropped JBoots. I remember leveling up as a wizard, when they introduced the crafted armor I was able to solo all of it. So I made a warrior and gave it to him. That's why I had to further the twinking even more with jboots and guise. Then other lower guk drops. He never got a sash, but I scored a RBB from manaburning Gorenaire that I gave him instead. He was my level 52 dragon tank. I also got him twin EBW's while making Mistmoore my farming bitch. There was a thread years ago comparing a SSoY to an EBW, and the EBW was like 1% better over duration, so that's why I got it for him. Plus, no one had those swords. They were much rarer. I flooded the market with Maid & Buttler fangs, though. And Cloak of the Dhampyre. Lots of good shit in Mistmoore that you could easily solo farm.

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Hell yeah EBWs. Took me forever to get the fangs for both of mine but hot damn if I didn't love them.

Wow, 36k health. You could survive a fall anywhere!
Fuck you, falling for 32,000 damage!

PATCH DAY!

Spend all night/day trying to get on and find out all the shit that was broken that would screw up your character and find out what you could exploit.

I loved how you could give mobs items and they would use them and more importantly, drop them upon death. Just one of many things that made EQ more immersive and made it feel more real. There were so few rules. Modern MMOs have SO MANY FUCKING RULES just for the sake of it. No attacking NPC's, no giving items to NPCs/mobs, no dragging a mob more than a few feet away from where its spawn point is, etc etc. Ugggh. I just remembered how I used to go into newbie/lowbie areas and give good items to random mobs near groups of people. Sometimes I did it to fuck with them (like when you'd charm a griffon in West Commons and buff it/equip it and then let it wreck people) or when FoH's necro (god I wish I could remember her name, started with an X, was it Xerxes? hmm) FD'd at Cazic and gave him that 41% haste weapon so we (Celestial Tomb) would get owned. I remember that happened often on Veeshan at least. Guilds giving bosses weapons that would make the boss drastically harder for the competing guild. Tormax was once given a Sword of Skyfire and that 41% haste weapon. He'd proc massive AoE's NONFUCKINGSTOP. Those 3 weapons were the most popular for fucking with other guilds. Skyfire, the self dispel weapon, and the 41% haste weapon.

But anyways, back to my main story. When I was feeling generous, or just wanted to fuck with the minds of newbies, I would equip mobs near them or mobs they were fighting (you used to be able to give items to npcs even if they were in combat, remember?) and then watch as they freak out to find this amazing unexpected loot on the corpse and tell the zone about it. I'd be like /shout ohhh! that's amazing! I heard that these mammoths in Everfrost had a very rare chance to drop Mammoth Hide Cloak! That must be where the goblin alchemist in Permafrost gets them from! You're lucky, grats! I wish my memory was better, I remember doing this to great result several times and it was really fun and I made quite a few people's day doing that. it was way more fun than just giving them charity straight out. It was also fun to just randomly equip a skeleton or something with a unique looking weapon from somewhere else far off, so someone would run into it eventually and be super curious/excited as they wonder what that skeleton could possibly be holding as they head to kill it. I even used this as a transfer method to alts a few times. Although usually I used my super secret spots on roofs. I did lose an item to that fucking gnome in west freeport one time though. Another minute detail that made EQ great. A random gnome that picks up items if you drop them and has dialogue to mock you about how he just took your shit.

And back to fucking with other guilds. Oh boy, I have told this story many times. At one time I was one of the best when it comes to fucking with competing guilds when they beat you to your spawn point. After Luclin came out and Bards got Song of Highsun, which gated a mob back to its spawn point, I had soooo much fun. It was a rare spell, rare in that almost nobody knew about it. It wasn't on any common internet sites, and even top bards on Veeshan didn't know about it for a long while. Hell, the highest level GM's didn't know about it. It was sold in Katta on an obscure merchant. When cast on a mob it gave the exact same text that a mob with the gate ability would give off if it had actually cast gate. So you could run around and cast it on mobs people were fighting and make the mob gate, making it gain a huge chunk of HP as a result, and cause everyone to scratch their heads and shout WTF!??? On more than one occasion did a group/guild petition about broken mobs/bosses that were gating when they weren't supposed to be doing so, only for the GM's to come along, take a look and say they didn't understand, and proclaim that it must be a bug and that they will file it. As I'm literally sitting there, 20 feet away, singing this song nobody knows about and laughing my ass off as I see "a sepsis scarab gates" ROFL.

I did it to a Swedish guild that beat us to POTG in ST one morning. I did it over and over and over because I was pissed that enough of my guild didn't answer the batphone and had conceded the spawn. I was next on primal, so I decided I would cause hell. They spent over an hour trying to kill the very first boss in ST, only to have it gate over and over and over once it got to 20% (I almost always waited till the mob was low life, so it looked more genuine). They never suspected me, not their leader, not their bards, nobody. Because lots of people hung out at ST entrance, to contest spawns/check for spawns etc. I was just a bored Bard watching them fight because my guild had lost the race. What could I possibly be doing? Hahahah. I used to do drive by gates all the time as I was on the way somewhere, just for the hell of it. Made me smile every single time. I never once got caught or called out on it. It was just too unknown and rare of a spell and nobody would ever think a fucking Bard could make a mob GATE for fucksake!!

TJT said:

Yes the joys of running through East Wastelands when it was snowing and falling right over that huge pit into the zone in for the Giant City and dying... forget the name at present. Kael'Drak or something?

Velious had a ton of cool shit in it. I absolutely loved the hidden dwarf city in the bottom of Crystal Caverns. Plane of Mischief as just the original zone in was crazy to get to. The whole three way war going on.

Chuk kinda mentioned something similar earlier. But Veeshan's Peak was the most bittersweet raid zone looking back. It was SO badass to get to. But then all I ever saw was that fucking pool room. Zone in... get Call of the Heroed to pool room. Sit there and have shit pulled to you. Yaaawwwwn.

And in that list. I didn't know about the gnome mechanical guides. As I played DE and never went to Ak'Anon and don't remember anyone talking about them. I vaguely recall the gnome that would take your shit in WFP but I also didn't spend much time there.

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Pretty sure there was a patch notes saying that every guard in every town showed you or told you where stuff was located. They added that around PoP i think? Because PoK was confusing at first. Did anyone ever have a hobby of building faction to bank in every town? Yeah i was bored and i thought it was cool as a barb i could bank pretty much anywhere by just doing some faction quests and clicking DE mask. Its a long way back to halas so i wanted to make sure i didnt have to spend a half hour running to and from there if i wanted to venture somewhere like lavastorm. I think i built my faction up so well in neriak i could invis all the way through to the bank npc and drop invis and have no problems even without DE illusion. I think there was a bank in chardok and the hole? I even could bank in oggok or grobb if i wanted to. The iksar bank i never tried because fuck that place.

I used to sit at the Qeynos Bard's guild to listen to the music while I did homework. I knew all the specific spots you needed to be at for certain unique music cues to play. Loved that about EQ so much. I had so many favorites. Little nooks and crannies that had completely unique compositions.

I played EQ for a while, longer than many, less than some. I played primarily in an RP context, and EQ's implementation added value in that way. For the last year or so, I was a Raider in a 2nd tier guild on the same server and although I could still do a little RP with the older friends, raiding ate up much of my play time.

What made EQ great? It was fun, and it was social but I believe that's the wrong question.

We could ask, "What made EQ great to us?", and that's a bit closer to the right question, but I still think it's off.

The real question is, "Why can't anything live up to what EQ was to us?"

That, my friends, is a complicated question, but I will attempt to answer it by analogy, but first consider a player who never played EQ and had WoW, or DDO, or LotRO as their first. Will they ask the same question(s)? We, the EQ players, may never understand what they saw in their MMO, but they might not see it in ours. (And we know they'll be wrong, but hey...)

"You can never go home again." What does that really mean? Home didn't really change, you did. Your whole world view changed. People didn't just look like you in person. Some flowers don't smell like roses. You don't always look up to people (figuratively and literally) anymore. A chair that once was too big, now fits snugly. Your twin bed that was big enough for you to fall asleep with someone else and get caught in the morning is barely able to contain you alone. The walk to the mailbox is no longer an expansive chore that takes hours to complete, it's just a few steps. I could go on, but I hope my point is made. EQ was our first home. We cut our teeth on it, we learned what an MMO should be, and what makes it fun. Maybe, like moving out for college, we cried a bit when we finally left home.

EQ was probably your cherry-pop MMO. It was, as many have said before, well made for it's time, and immersive to boot. It was thought out and the online world RP'd with us, even if we didn't RP back. When we started playing WoW (or whatever) we fixed the chat colors to green for group, but we were thankful we didn't need to remap 'A' for attack to something else to avoid smacking some wood elf quest giver in a tree. Maybe the 3rd person view is pretty cool, and not having to stare at a book for 5 minutes between fights isn't so bad. And being able to go into a dungeon and know it's just for us, maybe that makes for a bit more fun, instant gratification and all...

We thing EQ was great because it was our home, and for all the greatness other places might have, they'll never be home.

So, what made EQ great for us? Socialization -- Forced socialization. Want to do anything other than solo, you need to socialize. In fact, to solo you need to socialize a little. (Clarity, SoW, taking turns...) And fuck walruses, and raptors, seriously... and I still think they should have made a cloth cap called Dinus's Nutsack.) All the changes that made a game more immediately playable, also made the game worse on a large scale. LFG tools took away the punishment for being a bad group member. Cross server LFG made players unaccountable. Instanced zones made camps and re-spawns unnecessary. A Bazaar zone & market made having to talk to people for trading obsolete for most functions. In short, the game stopped being a world, and became a video game we don't have to invest in. It's just a video game.

I agree, the players made the game great. You always had the feeling that players had to band together vs a dangerous world. Players got to know each other and there was some accountability. In newer games there is little and lots of players tend to behave badly.
As fun as it was, I don't think I could go back to a game like Kunark era EQ. Some things needed fixes, like ninja looting. Man that was annoying.
GM events were exciting. They would even do small scale ones with just a few players involved. Some of the GMs were really creative.

Yeah I like that your reputation among fellow players mattered a great deal.

Haha omg I just remembered something I haven't thought about in ages. Remember that trick you could do where you could type something in /shout or /say or whatever and then use the exact number of spaces? I think I remember counting out it being 131 with something like "Hello" and then you could make it look like a mob was talking? You would say your line, and add a perfect number of spaces, and then type something like:

Sotaris shouts, WTS Dragoon Dirk 35pp
Cazic Thule shouts, Tremble mortals, for I have come to feast on your fear and despair.

I loved doing that. You could get people so hyped up for an "incoming GM event" or unique event of some kind, some kind of unknown trigger that had just been discovered or something, just by cleverly arranging a certain number of spaces after your original text. It worked for a long time, until people caught on. But even then, it was rare to see someone master it, you had to know the number of characters/spaces necessary based on the length of your name, the shout/say, etc to make it look genuine. And since that's how GM's did events and that's how mobs talked, in the say/shout channels like everyone else, it looked just as real. You could also do it in more subtle minor ways just to add some lore/mystery to an area. You hint at something coming from the gem caves in KaladimB when it's only you and one other person down there banking.