Everquest - Live Servers

I should take pictures of my mini EQ merch collection one day and post it. I doubt it would blow any minds but it would be a trip down memory lane. Which is all EQ is good for these days anyway.

Everquest was a total revolution in gaming at the time. The graphics were amazing at the time, the environments I'd seen better in other games but nothing on the scale of EQ or even close, but the character models and armor was better than any other game and so were the effects. The world was massive and the scope of the game was huge. Just playing with real people was still quite new at the time, but many of us had done it in games like Quake. But to play with that many people and for it to be real time, it blew peoples minds. And the working together really brought people together, it was a really dangerous world in the early days because everyone had shit gear and nobody had mastered how to play it. When I play it now it is a completely different experience. I do 24 boxing, I know every class inside out and what their strengths/weaknesses are, things like managing aggro with casters and tanks, and being careful of heal aggro, adds, etc are all basic things now, but back then nobody knew anything about it. You would see groups made up of a wizard, druid, enchanter, bard. Nobody knew what a group makeup should be, nobody knew the term tank or dps. Everyone just nuked and the Druid would frantically try to heal whoever got the most aggro. People learned how to play the game together, over the course of the first year and beyond. The main thing people found out is that you had to play with people or you were kinda screwed. Nowadays characters in MMO's are all godlike, can all solo easily, and everyone knows exactly how to play the game at least in principle. Tanks tank, healers keep everyone up, and dps blast away. Everyone knows the basics and that's enough to have a really structured game, but early EQ wasn't like that, it was a lot more chaotic. There was only some basic RPG knowledge out there, everything else was learned as you go. Only some classes could solo and even the best solo classes got really slow exp that way and not much loot. The game really brought people together to work together and there was an us vs the mobs spirit. Guilds formed and got their own personalities. People got seriously hooked on the game, and it didn't fade in time either, because months later they were still only level 20 and were still knee deep in Unrest. Then they heard about Cazic Thule and it was a whole other adventure. Then Guk. Then the planes.

As much as I am excited about Pantheon, and I know I'll get some enjoyment out of it, no current or upcoming MMO will ever recreate what EQ did to gamers. It needs something completely out of the blue, something bigger than anyone expected was possible for a game, and with gameplay nobody has seen before. The next EQ will be something like Star Citizen or something after that, something that devours peoples lives because it just so good and so huge. EQ was the beginning and end of that type of game, because WoW came along after it and changed everything. WoW game-ified the MMORPG and ever since then, the industry has only wanted to try to be a part of that by producing their own gamey MMO. But EQ wasn't like a game, it was like a world within your monitor that you got to be a part of and then discovered how incredibly deep and huge it was.

The problem with the games industry is that the modern gamers are conditioned to only appreciate flashy graphics and perfect animations and high production values, and to develop games like that costs huge amounts of money. But nobody is going to put that kind of money down on an idea that is not tried and tested, that is so big it might not succeed etc. So the big budgets only go to clones of other games, another GTA, another Calladoody, another Skyrim, Assassins Creed, etc. and the MMO genre is exactly the same. They spend the big budgets on games like Black Desert, Rift, etc, which are all just descendants of WoW, not EQ. So to get a true EQ like experience today would require a huge budget and somehow for it to be spent on a design that is not tried and tested, and a team that wants to make something new and something massive. The only way I see that happening is with crowd funding. Star Citizen is the only thing I can see that might do something like that, but even that might not quite get there.