Monsters and Memories (Project_N) - Old School Indie MMO

Koushirou said:

Back in the day, I absolutely was, mostly because I’d never seen anything like it. I was visiting an old friend of mine who’d moved halfway through high school and she showed it to me. I was definitely blown away, first thing I did when I got home was ask for EQ, telling my parents how cool it was because the world was so big, there were other people, etc.

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The size/scope of the game was pretty damn impressive, I'll grant you that. And being in a game world at the same time as thousands of other people was totally new to me (I never played UO) and awesome.

But what I meant was the visuals/gameplay. Compared to other games I was playing in 1999, EQ just didn't look or feel very impressive at first. I made a dwarf rogue as my first character, ran around a bit, couldn't kill anything and almost quit. My room mate convinced me to keep playing. He had a higher level character and promised me if I just got the hang of it, I'd love it. I rerolled a gnome wiz and floundered my way to level 8 or so and then figured out how to do bootleg kiting. I was suddenly able to kill even cons and even the occasional yellow. What a great feeling that was. The rest was history.

But no one these days will be blown away by the size of the world or the fact that M&M is an mmo. It's also going to look relatively primitive compared to modern games. So I guess my point is that EQ was great because of gameplay more than anything else, so if M&M gets that part right, the rest won't matter much.

Kharzette said:

I've spent the entire day on the starting elementalist quest

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I started one of those last stress test, but the lag and the vagueness of it made me give up. I definitely would like to do a mage, but that pinwheel quest will have to wait till i have some serious time to wander around the town. Ended up derping around on a ranger this go.

Arden said:

TBH I don't know anyone personally who was immediately blown away on logging into EQ for the first time. The game's fun TRAUMA kind of crept up on you if you were patient enough to give it a chance.

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ftfy

One of my friends came in one day saying lots of crazy stuff about this new game. All I remember from that conversation is him insisting that you could lose your corpse, which was the worst thing ever. I argued since that sounded retarded to me. "Why wouldn't you just go back to where you died? What do you mean you don't know where it was? No fucking way the game is big enough that you can't find where you were just fighting. You're just shitty at games."

3 hours into Nektulos and Chill...

"oh fuck..."

...
EQ was EQ because no game before or since has been able to impart quite the same level of "oh fuck-ness".

Koushirou said:

While I was playing at said friend’s house after first being introduced to the game, I took my little level 4 Iksar monk out to SoNH, proceeded to immediately get lost and died. I was devastated. I had 4 whole plat on that corpse and there was no way in fuck I was going to be able to find it. Looking back on it, I probably just died on the first island lol.

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Some random lv12 had just given me a cracked staff. like tears in the rain...

bolok said:

I started one of those last stress test, but the lag and the vagueness of it made me give up. I definitely would like to do a mage, but that pinwheel quest will have to wait till i have some serious time to wander around the town. Ended up derping around on a ranger this go.

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I found 3 of them! The water one is rough. There's a good description from the trainer but most of what sprang to mind were outside the city. I'll look some more if it is still up but I think I covered nearly every inch of the city.

Control said:

ftfy

One of my friends came in one day saying lots of crazy stuff about this new game. All I remember from that conversation is him insisting that you could lose your corpse, which was the worst thing ever. I argued since that sounded retarded to me. "Why wouldn't you just go back to where you died? What do you mean you don't know where it was? No fucking way the game is big enough that you can't find where you were just fighting. You're just shitty at games."

3 hours into Nektulos and Chill...

"oh fuck..."

...
EQ was EQ because no game before or since has been able to impart quite the same level of "oh fuck-ness".

Click to expand...

For sure, but the trauma was part of the fun. Victory only tasted so sweet because failure was so fucking awful.

Found it!

My noob loss story was harsh… i still feel its pain.

I was a human SK in Freeport- self made patchwork armor and tarnished 2h sword… the world was mine for the taking.

My friend made a dwarf, and was telling me in school the wonders of butcher block and it seemed so cool vs the noob field by the gate in Freeport.

I hop on the boat, take 10 years to load, wonder at the ocean and we stop at a dock. This elf lady npc turns and one shots me for like 300, poof back at Freeport.

I get back on the boat and spam /corpse no good, the elf punts me again…

Back then the boat didn’t keep you from being attacked and your corpse road on it until it zoned and then dropped your body off at the zone line into the deep.

Only corpses i ever let rot and lost…

Koushirou said:

While I was playing at said friend’s house after first being introduced to the game, I took my little level 4 Iksar monk out to SoNH, proceeded to immediately get lost and died. I was devastated. I had 4 whole plat on that corpse and there was no way in fuck I was going to be able to find it. Looking back on it, I probably just died on the first island lol.

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I traded a bunch of Magic and Pokemon cards for a ton of twink items (like 30k in 1999) from some guy at the card shop. I ran to him on a half elf to gfay and got all the items. I then fell from the spires and proceeded to lose it all because level 1 corpses rotted in 30 minutes.

The magic and pokemon cards I traded would be worth probably $1mil now if I kept them instead of trading them for eq items I lost immediately.

Locnar said:

Were you there in 1999? I was and logging into Ak'Anon with all the ticking clockwork sounds and the glows and the hustle and bustle was jaw dropping.

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Yeah I have the opposite experience as that person. Everyone I know was immediately blown away in 1999. It wasn't something that "crept up on you." All of us were hooked like it was heroin from the first 10 minutes of logging on.

I came from The Realm, and going into EQ was insane, and me and my crew at HS played through WoW

Locnar said:

Were you there in 1999? I was and logging into Ak'Anon with all the ticking clockwork sounds and the glows and the hustle and bustle was jaw dropping.

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Ya, June or July 99. I missed the first few months. Definitely wasn't blown away. None of the small group of RL friends I played with were. But like I said it was my first mmo. I was coming from single player games that all looked and played as good (in some cases better) than EQ.

If you'd like more sacrilege, I recall also thinking that the original game box cover art was pretty dumb (though I liked Kunark and Velious when they came out).

Shit, I played Shadows of Yserbius long before EQ came out, and then NWN on AOL. I'd been doing MMOs for years. I was blown away by EQ.

That and Quake 3 were game changers for me.

Kind of funny hearing how many people were blown away. I've been sitting here for 25 years assuming everyone had the same "meh" experience that I did when it came to the initial look/feel of EQ. Now I'm going to have to go back and talk to my friends to see if maybe I'm misremembering and they were blown away and it's just me that wasn't lol.

Edit:

My progression into the EQ abyss was pretty much:

First day- meh, looks ok and plays ok but not super impressive. Also how the fuck do I get out of this city.

After a few days- still not very impressed with the looks/gameplay. I kept dying and I wasn't getting anywhere (solo dwarf rogue). But i began to appreciate the size and scope of the game. That WAS impressive.

Few more days switched classes and began to get the feel of combat. Explored even more and started realizing just how much depth there was to not jut the world, but the gameplay. Also really started grouping and realizing what an mmo meant.

By the end of the first week or so I was totally hooked and wouldn't come up for air until 2004.

Couple things that may have contributed to my early experience: I started in Kaladim/BB which isn't a particularly impressive starting area. Also my graphics card was awful so I definitely wasn't seeing the game in full glory.