Arden
Blackwing Lair Raider
Yeah, I've seen the "well, actually, EQ wasn't that difficult" trend over the last few years. I strongly suspect half the people trying to retcon EQ into an "actually not that difficult" game either didn't play 1999-2000 EQ or don't remember what it was like. People jump on P99 or some other emu now and play EQ and think, "hey, EQ isn't that hard," without realizing that they are employing 20+ years worth of game knowledge/strategies/practices that most people back in 1999 and 2000 didn't know and weren't using.
You could even break it down and acknowledge, yeah, sure, there were ways to make the game much less "difficult," even in the early years. You could primarily XP in groups (as opposed to solo or duo) and you could stay at the ZL and farm trash mobs, like Fogel said. I guess you could say playing that style wasn't technically "difficult" in that there was a relatively low chance of death, but progressing in the game like that took forever. And in EQ everything, including difficulty, was measured in time.
Progress was difficult in EQ. It took a long time to get levels and cool items, especially in the early years. You could lose 8 hours worth of XP on one bad death and a few failed corpse runs. You could lose your entire corpse and all your items in the Plane of Fear. The best EQ players were the most efficient ones. I'm not just talking about how much time you could dedicate to playing, but how much progress you could make in the time you spent online.
I get that some people want to define "difficulty" in some narrow, twitchy, button pushing combo way. That's definitely one type of difficulty, but it's not the only one. EQ was always you vs. the clock rather than you vs. the NPCs.
You could even break it down and acknowledge, yeah, sure, there were ways to make the game much less "difficult," even in the early years. You could primarily XP in groups (as opposed to solo or duo) and you could stay at the ZL and farm trash mobs, like Fogel said. I guess you could say playing that style wasn't technically "difficult" in that there was a relatively low chance of death, but progressing in the game like that took forever. And in EQ everything, including difficulty, was measured in time.
Progress was difficult in EQ. It took a long time to get levels and cool items, especially in the early years. You could lose 8 hours worth of XP on one bad death and a few failed corpse runs. You could lose your entire corpse and all your items in the Plane of Fear. The best EQ players were the most efficient ones. I'm not just talking about how much time you could dedicate to playing, but how much progress you could make in the time you spent online.
I get that some people want to define "difficulty" in some narrow, twitchy, button pushing combo way. That's definitely one type of difficulty, but it's not the only one. EQ was always you vs. the clock rather than you vs. the NPCs.
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