EverQuest

The Good
In 1999 the concept of an MMO was still brand new. This was the first widely released game that incorporated the "ability" to play with thousands of other players in a huge gaming world. The "potential" for player to player interaction in this game was immense. In addition, for the day, the graphics were unbelievable, considering the scope of the game.

The Bad
Instead of leading the gaming industry into a new renaissance, this game literally destroyed the entire industry.

Why? It's complicated, but I will try to break it down.

1) The development team of this game released an absurdly unfinished product. Yet people played it anyway. I tried it in April of 1999, and dropped it by May 1999 because of how bad it was. Unfortunately I was in the vast minority.

This gave developers the green light to release games that were essentially still in BETA and have players actually fund their development. This problem still persists today!

2) While this game gave players the "ability" to play with other people, it was designed to be played by SINGLE player. Thus it was one of the first SINGLE PLAYER ONLINE GAMES. Why on earth would you pay a monthly fee for a game, when comparative single player games exist that do not require a monthly fee? Developers noticed how players didn't seem to care! Quite frankly it goes to show you just how stupid many of us are. :(

This gave developers the green light to build massive SINGLE player games, and yet charge a monthly fee for them.

3) The game itself is utterly dull and vapid. Even in 1999 people lamented that in Everquest all you could do was kill brown rats, to move onto white rats, to move onto black rats. After black rats you moved onto big brown spiders, then big red spiders, and then the cycle repeats.

I knew people who played this game while watching TV. One of my friends actually would watch TV, eat food, and play ANOTHER GAME, yet still play Everquest because it was so simple!

Not only that, but people would play these games for 12+ hours a day! Why would you do that to yourself?!

The game developers noticed how quite a few people responded to this completely boring design and thus started making every other MMO in exactly the same manner. Innovation was scrapped for blatant copying of an older boring design.

4) Everquest made huge amounts of money, and that is the single element of this game that killed the gaming industry as a whole. Previous to the release of Everquest MMO type games had existed (IE UO did well, just not this well). But this is the first one to REALLY cash in. At its peak this game was bringing in tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollars a month, in addition to the CD sales! Compared to most games that relied entirely off of someone just buying a CD.

In the years previous to 1999 a new gaming genre was released just about every 3-4 years. These new genres were almost always a breath of fresh air. Just to name a few: side scrollers, 4x strategy, real time strategy, first person shooter, online first person shooter, clicking role playing games, etc, etc, etc...

But after 1999 there hasn't been a major new genre created. Realize the impact of that statement! In almost 13 years we haven't seen a new video game genre. That would be as if in 1999 we were all still playing ONLY side scrollers like Super Mario Bros!

Why did this game kill innovation in the gaming industry? Because everyone saw how much more money the subscription based online games were making and everyone in the industry dropped what they were doing to make them. So many flooded the market that the asking price for a subscription dropped to ZERO. Countless studios shutdown simply due to their greed and inability to manage programs of this scope. And countless more shutdown because they released "cookie cutter" MMOs that bored the tears out of the people who played them.

Instead of innovating, these companies simply copied a very expensive genre and it killed the entire industry.

Most of the companies left in the gaming industry do not make new games, they simply re-create games made AT LEAST 13 years ago.

The Bottom Line
Everquest was a blatant slot machine game that was easiest played by yourself. Players would kill red creatures until they leveled, then they would kill black creatures, then white, then purple. Once completed they would kill another creature in the red color and start the cycle all over again. This pattern would repeat for possibly 300-400 hours (or more in some cases). Some of us hated this type of game, but millions apparently loved this style of game.

This game made so much money that it killed the video gaming industry in the later 90's and early 2000's. Just about everyone in the industry dropped their innovative projects (because of greed) and tried to copy it's design. The vast majority failed miserably. And because of it we haven't seen a new gaming genre released in almost 13 years.

Welcome to the Dark Ages of gaming.

The Good
Where to begin? EverQuest was such an immersive, expansive experience -- it's essentially like a whole other world that players would routinely sink themselves into for three, six, ten, perhaps even twenty hours at a time. Of course it isn't nearly the phenomenon today as it was in for its first few years (1999-2002), in fact you might even call it irrelevant, but the fact that we've seen a dozen or more expansions demonstrates the enduring popularity of the game.

First and foremost, EverQuest was a grand social experiment. It was a compelling game that, when facing a horde of strong enemies, demanded cohesive teamwork, constant communication, and a deep understanding of your chosen class. You could muddle through if you don't know quite what you're doing, but experience will not flow in smoothly, and you will be going on plenty of corpse runs -- a sobering experience when your body is at the bottom of dungeon.

The game world of Norrath, and its associated moon and alternate elemental planes, are, in a word, vast.. It boasts over four hundred zones, and most of them take a player at least a couple of minutes to run across. This is profoundly large game world, and yet there is no lack of rich detail. You can tell that the creators of EQ really knew their fantasy inside out, from the creatures that populate Norrath to the massive array of magical spells to the 'phat lewts' that dominate the focus of the game for a lot of players.

The Bad
It's clearly past its prime. I haven't seriously played EverQuest since 2002, and that's a good thing. It used to be on the leading edge of social gaming, but then we had the banal, dumbed-down World of Warcraft to supercede it in 2004.

The Bottom Line
A majestic and very fun experience that has possibly entertained more people for a greater length of time than any other game in history.

The Good
It is now impossible to write a solid, comprehensive review about Everquest. The game has changed by so much that it's unrecognizable from when it launched, with radical differences morphing the product all along the way. Write a review for the state of the game now, and those that played only five years ago would have no idea that they're reading about the same game. Write a review five years ago, and the people before and after your time will question if your review is even in the right section.

Most MMORPG games evolve to a degree, but most of that evolvement comes in the form of altering character functions. To the contrary, Everquest has largely evolved around the player classes, with their roles and functions remaining mostly the same since launch. These changes have been seen in the form of new zones, new quests, new item drops, new interface features, and even a new graphical engine and models at times.

What has eventually driven me away from most MMORPGs is that they end up changing the abilities of the class I play to the point where I don't want to be that class anymore. With EQ, they changed the game itself so much that one could revisit it every couple of years and aside from the aforementioned class functions, feel like they're playing a new game, relatively speaking.

Enough of the generalizations for now, as I'll try to focus on specific positive and negative aspects of this game. Bear in mind this will be a hodgepodge of reflections, some relevant to the launch in 1999, some relevant to today's game as it is in 2011. There is just no other way to faithfully examine this monster of a game at this point in time.

And a monster it is, with 17 expansions, Everquest bills itself as having the "most content of any MMO". This, taken at face value, is absolutely true. No other game can hold a candle to this one which has had active and ongoing development for the past 12 years! But if we look a little deeper, we start to see that this is largely an irrelevant notion. The reason I say this is because much of the "new" content invalidates the old.

Before we go down that road, let me point out however that Everquest is (or was) a very difficult game. As a matter of fact, it is probably the most difficult game I have ever played; online or off. To be successful is even more difficult. Whereas with most MMO games it comes down to how much time one puts in, EQ requires that and so much more. There is a need for a high level of skill in playing one's class with maximum efficiency and effectiveness, whilst being surrounding by others doing the same, to get things done. The game was difficult in every aspect whether it's taking down worthy opponents or building one's skills, to group management, merchant interactions, and the like. The game was difficult in every possible way.

Take for instance, deaths. At one point if you died not only would you lose experience gained towards the next level, but you also had to go and retrieve your corpse. Your, "corpse" contained all of your items and any money not in the bank (btw, money has weight to it and you cannot carry around large sums or you will be encumbered and lose movement speed). So after death, you come back to the world completely naked and devoid of any gear. Now you've got to go where your corpse is located and loot your items, perhaps fighting monsters along the way, all without your gear. Die again, lose more experience. This is no minor penalty. At some point the amount of experience lost could be an amount that literally took days to acquire. If you fail to retrieve your corpse, in a certain amount of time it would, "rot". Your corpse would be gone, along with all of your gear. You are now destitute.

This concept of dying makes the player extremely careful in where they go, what they do, and the risks they take. Dying in other games (such as Rift) is largely inconsequential. This means one can freely experiment and when they fail, it's really no big deal. Not the case with EQ.

Now extrapolate that kind of gameplay to every other aspect of the game be it tradeskills, leveling up, even the language which you speak. Anything you want to do is extremely arduous and ridiculously time consuming. But this is both good and bad. When you meet players in the game displaying their accomplishments, or when you have some of your own to show, there is a certain amount of respect that goes along with that. Anyone with a mount, or an epic weapon, or some bling, or a craftsman of two or three trades that speaks several languages has painstakingly bothered to develop each of these skills, and put in an insane amount of time doing so. This isn't like other MMO games where someone has a mount at level 20 or a nice weapon that they ran one instance to get. Far from it.

In light of this, let's go back to the content. As the game has evolved, it has become more user friendly. In many regards, this was needed. Accidentally selling your best weapon to a vendor means that it was completely gone with no way to retrieve. This is a hardship that we could all do without. However, beyond the technical annoyances such as these, the rest of the game as it stands today is much easier in every regard. Leveling up is fast and easy. To reach level 60 today may take a few days or a couple of weeks, whereas in times past it was on the order of months or even years, real time. The type of items that people may devote a full time job to acquiring on the order of hundreds of hours, have been invalidated by common drops that can be found anywhere that have triple the benefit of the old items. As such, much of the content has been rendered obsolete by new expansions. So, while it might have the most content of any MMO, the amount of relevant content has largely stayed the same over the years.

One thing I have found in Everquest that I've not seen anywhere else are quests which are simply epic in scale. Take World of Warcraft in comparison by example. Most of the quests are quick and simple fetch and kill missions that award the player with a bit of cash and xp. Do this, move on to the next quest. Rinse, repeat. There is very little with regard to questing which goes beyond this concept. On the other hand, Everquest has quests that can take weeks or even months to complete. A quest may require a combination of tradeskills, rare spawns, groups or even raids, and lots of patience to complete. If quests in other MMOS are like using Windows 7, quests in EQ are like building an operating system from scratch using assembly code. One is simply used, whereas the other is a grand project which must be studied and nurtured. In addition to this, there is nothing guiding you along the way in EQ quests. In World of Warcraft, the little quests kind of steered you in the direction you needed to be, the zones you needed to visit, the people you needed to talk to. In EQ on the other hand, there is nothing guiding you along and only experience or friendly advice can lead to you making the best use of your time.

But it goes beyond the questing. Consider using weapons; you cannot simply switch types of weapons and have the same level of efficiency for each. If at level 30 you've never used a piercing weapon and suddenly acquire one, you must build your skill with that weapon. Every weapon has an associated level of skill that can only be raised by using the weapon, or paying a trainer to raise your skill, the latter of which is cost prohibitive. One hand slashing and two hand slashing, one hand blunt and two hand blunt, piercing, archery... these are all skills independent of one another and each require days or weeks to develop.

Casters are not immune from this either as different spells have different schools of magic. If you never cast divination spells and haven't developed that skill, you won't be able to use your invisibility spell when you get it. Even your ability to dodge an attack or swim are based upon this same system and only by repeated use can one slowly develop any ability.

And while we're on the subject of casters, consider this; you have a finite amount of mana and replenishing it was at one time a lengthy process itself. One only regenerates mana by sitting down, and to fill up your mana to maximum capacity may take sitting and doing nothing but staring at the screen for 15 or 20 minutes at a time. The way EQ is now, mana and health regenerate very quickly. This translates into speedier leveling making the game easier, but has also unbalanced the game in that caster classes can now crank out an insane amount of damage compared to other classes, but in times past people were weary to expend an entire bar of mana on a fight they weren't sure they could win. Again, we see caution and the requirement of planning play a big part in gaming decisions where this isn't the case in other MMOs.

Another aspect of the game's slowness is with that of loot drops. Loot used to be very sparsely distributed. But what offset this was the fact that most (not all) items were not bound to a character. So for example, I could use a weapon for awhile, and when I was done with it I could pass it off to someone else or sell it. This was sorely needed to keep enough items in the game for everyone, especially considering that few to no zones were instanced. That's right, kill a named boss in a dungeon that's on a 72 hour timer and the entire server has to wait 72 hours for it to come back up. This is largely changed now however as there are many instances, but also most items are now bound to characters. Want to raid Karnor's Castle but there is already a raid group there? Well, you'll have to wait until they're done and the monsters respawn. None of this multiple instancing where you could have an entire zone or dungeon to yourself whenever you were ready for it.

At the beginning, I played on a PvP server. Some servers allowed for when you killed another player, that you could loot their corpse and get any money they had on them. Another server allowed you to loot one of their items. In any case, without instancing and on a PvP server, there were often grand battles over important zones within the game for the right to get the better loot. On my server, one large and well equipped guild firmly secured a high level zone and as a result, were able to get the best equipment in the game and prevent their opponents from doing the same. As a matter of fact, this large guild worked in shifts and would protect the zone from anyone coming in. Sometimes people could sneak through, or at others there would be large offensives manned for the purpose of unseating the controlling guild. While this may be a turn off to some as they are effectively barred from some of the game, it created a serverwide dynamic that you cannot find in any other MMO today.

After having stopped playing around 2002, I decided to return in 2010 to relive this game. I've played just about every MMO since and they all lacked real difficulty and failed to challenge or inspire me. But when I returned, the game had been changed so drastically that it resembled other modern MMOs. As mentioned, loot drops were common and powerful. Leveling was much faster, and much of the content that I became familiar with was now a waste of time to go back and explore. I was let down that these experiences were now dead.

That is until, I discovered the Macintosh server. The Mac server has not been updated since 2002 and the game is almost identical to the way it was when I left it. I spent $900 buying second hands macs for no other purpose than to play this game. Maybe I'm different but the fact that I was willing to purchase new equipment should be a testament to what this game has to offer those that want a real challenge or a unique MMO experience.

If you were to consider getting into EQ today, you have the choice of going to the PC side or the Mac side. The PC side has been so overdeveloped that it resembles an unremarkable modern MMO. In my opinion, it's a decent MMO but doesn't really stand out.

But if you go to the Mac side, you've got one of the toughest games around that you can spend thousands of hours with and that's only the tip of the iceberg. I've tried to relive these experiences in other games. But getting a critical heal to save the raid, resurrecting in the middle of a zone while the enemy is hot on our tail, or the drama that plays out as people spend hours on end in competition for one item of trivial value cannot be experienced anywhere else. It's only happening here.

Give the old EQ a try (if you want to play old EQ on the PC, there are emulation servers that have limited content for the purpose of revisiting the old world). You will either drop it like a hot potato, or you will embrace it wholeheartedly for the experiences you cannot find anywhere else.

The Bad
See above

The Bottom Line
12 years of off and on play and thousands of hours. I can't say that about any other game I've ever played. Can you?