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EverQuest's Long, Strange 20-Year Trip Still Has No End in Sight (arstechnica.com) 144

Posted by msmash from the blast-from-the-past dept.
The world has immensely changed since 1999, when a company in Southern California launched an online game called EverQuest that would go on to serve as the model for many more titles to come in the massively multiplayer online RPG (MMORPG) space. And unlike many games that sought to replace it over the years, this one is still going strong. ArsTechnica has a long-form piece on the old game, its journey and what it has evolved into now. An excerpt from the story: This sword-and-sorcery-based game was developed by a small company, 989 Studios, but it eventually reached its pinnacle under Sony Online Entertainment after SOE acquired that studio roughly a year after the game's launch. Today, EQ marches on with a dedicated player base and another developer, Daybreak Games, at the helm. I've been a dedicated player since the early days, and others like me would likely acknowledge the game peaked early. A variety of factors have whittled down the once-mighty player base since: many just simply walked away, either busy with life or quit because it took up too much time. The impact of World of Warcraft over time is also undeniable.

But while it's no longer a leading game in the MMO space by any stretch (WoW does hold that title), today's EQ retains a small but dedicated fanbase whose members complain as much as they praise it. And in an era where most games have a shelf life of four to six months, EQ has officially spanned four presidential administrations largely off that kind of support. [...] The game still has a trickle of new players, according to Longdale, but it's understandably hard to attract a whole new generation of young players to a DirectX 9 game with 15-year-old player models and a broken Z-axis (that's correct, you can't go straight up and down in EQ like in WoW) where solo play is darn near impossible.
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EverQuest's Long, Strange 20-Year Trip Still Has No End in Sight More

EverQuest's Long, Strange 20-Year Trip Still Has No End in Sight

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  • Obviously no 3D graphics experience (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Uhh, up and down is usually referred to as the Y axis. Z is actually towards or away from the "screen", in and out of your monitor.

    • No, it *depends* on the game / camera angle / application.
      i.e. Blueprints are typically looking *down* the Z axis.


      | View ..... | X-axis ... | Y-axis .... | Z-axis |
      +o - - - - o + - - - - - -+ o - - - - o + - - - -+
      | Overhead . | East/West. | North/South | Height |
      | 1st person | Left/Right | Up/Down ... | Depth. |

      Note: Had to use characters other then minus signs due to the idiotic "Lameness filter" and unnecessary "pad" out text with this filler text all to work around shitty slashdot formatting and the edi

      • Why /. is still shit

        Because we keep showing up, so they never have to try doing anything substantively different. Of course, if we stop showing up, they'll just throw up their hands and shut it down...

    • Commonly yes, but some software like 3DSMax uses Z for the vertical axis.

      • It's actually quite common in math to have the Z axis be vertical, as they take the X-Y plane, and lay it down flat, and then the Z axis becomes vertical.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Ailicec ( 755495 )
      Assuming they mean Z=height, I'm not sure what the summary is talking about; you can most assuredly fall straight down (splat). Usually you aren't in a position to fly straight up, but the mechanics would allow it. You can't look completely straight up and possibly straight down; that is, or used to be common in FPS type games. The summary implies it is Doom-like 2.5D, but its true 3D; you can be at various heights and some maps are very 3 dimensional.
      Solo play near impossible? There are spots where its

  • MMOs don't die of old age (Score:3)

    by Chris Mattern ( 191822 ) on Friday June 07, 2019 @10:26AM (#58724954)

    You look at the history of MMOs, and the dead ones were either crap to begin with, or they got backstabbed by their publishers (like City of Heros).

    • From what I can tell it's usually cost (Score:4, Interesting)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:10AM (#58725190)
      that kills them. It's expensive to run the servers for a modern MMO and users expect new content every 3-6 months. It's almost impossible to compete with WoW because it's got so many years of expansions and updates. I'm guessing Everquest is in a better spot being an older game it's likely optimized for much lower end hardware on the server side as well as client. Doesn't hurt that if you want to play an MMO on an cheap integrated GPU (read:Intel) you can run Everquest, even on the lowest of the low end $250 laptop.

      CoH did get screwed over royally though. But they were also fighting off constant legal threats from Marvel & DC which didn't help.

      • It seems like the "big boys" these days are World of Warcraft, because it's still active, and still a good game regardless of what the BFA-haters say. Everquest seems to be making a nice nostalgia-fueled comeback. Final Fantasy XIV has been getting more active again and is a nice example of a bad game that went through a major retooling to make it a good game (rather like Diablo 3 in that regard). City of Heroes always had a devoted fan-base, and lives on in the private server land.

        • but if you start playing WoW it's going to be years and years before you burn through all their content, even if you're an obsessive gamer. It's just too much of a head start. The only way to compete is to draw players away to a whole new game, which is what PUBG & Fortenite seem to have done. Changing setting didn't seem to work for the sci-fi MMOs...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by nmb3000 ( 741169 )

            but if you start playing WoW it's going to be years and years before you burn through all their content

            This actually isn't true (at least in WoW). The way they've designed the game, all content outside of the current expansion is irrelevant outside of the leveling experience (which takes about a week for most people). All the old quests and stories and dungeons and raids and loot doesn't really matter to a new player.

            This design decision has pros and cons, but one benefit is that a new player can pretty much ignore everything released from 2004 to 2018. This is especially true if they buy a "boost" to sta

        • Final Fantasy XIV has been getting more active again

          Hell, did you know that Final Fantasy XI is still out there? So is Dark Age of Camelot. Admittedly, not many people play them any more, but the servers are still running. These things just don't die.

    • Not the only game NCSoft killed off. Tabula Rasa, despite all its flaws (not least Garriot himself) it was a unique game.

      We players got a voucher for Aion. I don't know anyone who used it, if we wanted to play a WoW clone we'd probably just play WoW.

      • if we wanted to play a WoW clone we'd probably just play WoW.

        No joke, it's why I could never get into Final Fantasy 12. A totally single-player came, but the combat system was basically Wow with AI party members. It was too klunky for me to enjoy at the time, so I ended up just wishing I was playing WoW instead. I think I'd be more open-minded/appreciative these days if I tried it again.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kaenneth ( 82978 )

          I loved Final Fantasy 12's combat system, while at the same time knowing the majority of people would hate it.

  • Been gaming since the end of the 1970's and I consider this the best Franchise of all time, with EQ2 being the best game of all time.. At least in the first few years. It's a shadow of it's former self.
    • I could copy/paste your sentence and replace your subject matter with the Final Fantasy franchise.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        If you're saying what I think you're saying, I absolutely agree.

        This is going to absolutely scream "get off my lawn," but (EARLY) FFXI was probably the best MMO ever, and probably the best we'll ever see if current trends continue. It was brutal and unforgiving: outside of specialized cases (BST or RDM/NIN) solo play was an exercise in futility (PSA: the second "M" stands for "multiplayer"), death had real -- sometimes catastrophic -- costs (didn't have enough of an EXP buffer before you entered Dynamis? Co

        • Yes FFXI, I played when released in NA and came back not long ago for a while and what an experience that I have never replicated in any other game.

          That first walk to Jeuno without fast travel, the sense of accomplishment completing something, mobs not despawning and chasing you till you managed to zone in time, death meaning something, the community, etc.

          I still get the itch to play, even ran my own private server for a bit, ah the memories.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Megane ( 129182 )
            I played FFXI from about 2008 to 2015, and I try to play during every Return to Vanadiel free return week, twice a year. But last month I just couldn't get back into it because I had discovered the free-to-play mode of LOTRO (only following the main "epic" quest line after finishing all the initial areas), which was sufficiently hardcore to keep my interest. The game has (in my opinion) a lot of technical design flaws, and after level 30 it's almost impossible to get decent XP without giving them money... e

    • EQ1 and EQ2 had some pretty retarded game design principles:

      * De-leveling because you died is fucking stupid. /Oblg. "Now you have TWO problems."

      * Having to "schedule" raids because the bosses spawn on a timer is also fucking stupid.

      • Oh but it forces people to be a part of the community and learn to rely on each other

        Which means waiting in line and developing co-dependant relationships. Both were fun games, but seriously the Evangelical Group Up And Join a Guild and Live The Game types were frequently as bad as Evangelicals in meat-space.

      • EQ1 and EQ2 had some pretty retarded game design principles:

        * De-leveling because you died is fucking stupid. /Oblg. "Now you have TWO problems."

        Never played FFXI, but I have despised this mechanic in other games, particularly Diablo II. Usually not much of a problem since it doesn't delevel you, just takes away the experience you got since the last level-up, but once your character got to level 80 or so, the levels are so infrequent that this became a big thing.

        * Having to "schedule" raids because the bosses spawn on a timer is also fucking stupid.

        Yeah. World of Warcraft's solution of that was to create "instances." It's hard for to imagine now that that used to be a selling point, but WoW was designed by ex-Everquesters who had a big

        • > but once your character got to level 80 or so, the levels are so infrequent that this became a big thing.

          Yeah, sadly a lot of ARPGs do that. Diablo 2, Grim Dawn, Path of Exile.

          Having non-linear XP levels is part of the problem.

      • You never 'lost' exp or de-leveled in eq2.

        Initially when you died you'd drop a 'spirit shard'; and respawn with gear intact, exp debt, and a loss in stats (which would cumulatively add up on each death). Recovering your shard wiped away some of that exp debt, and restored your stats. Overtime the exp debt would fade away, so if you logged out over night, the next morning it would most likely be gone. (Unless the raid went completely sideways)

        Also speaking of raids; before tinkering became a thing, a raid

  • Ultima Online is still kicking as well (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Danathar ( 267989 ) on Friday June 07, 2019 @10:35AM (#58724996) Journal
    UO is older still (and Muds even older) and still kicking.. uo.com

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Bring back precasting, biotch!

  • If the last time you played was pre-Warcraft, you are in for a shock.

    The biggest diference is, in the old days, you needed a full team to struggle through 1 or 2 even white yard trash. Now solo players easily chump multiple reds, and rocket up in levels.

    Also everyone gets a sidekick pet who is tougher than a necro or magician pet.

    • Keys, resses, and CRs are not a big thing anymore either. Get your corpse summoned at the guild hall, go to PoK, grab a cleric merc, get your res, grab your stuff and go back to what you were doing. Your 65 necro which would get one-shotted by trash in pofire now can toe-to-toe them with a healer merc and not worry about dying. Sitting and medding is not an issue, because of the combat state mechanic added a few years back.

      I would say that if someone wants to play EQ, go try it. It is a LOT more solo fr

  • Everquest made me the person I am today (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2019 @10:48AM (#58725050)

    Like many people who plays games like this online, social life is not a priority. Sports teams were fun but fighting dragons with 50+ other people... that was where the fun was at.

    Everquest was the first MMO where the 3D aspect REALLY made you feel in the game. Even that tiny screen that loaded by default was amazing. I learned to be a leader, I learned true friendship, I learned love, pain, hardship, tenacity, determination, and developed that raw grit you need in life sometimes. Those skills let me become the highly successful, outgoing person I am today.

    I think we might all have fond memories and regrets from that game... but the only one I had was how I left some people behind. Kalladin and Kahlu on the Cazic-Thule server. Should anyone ever hear of them... let them know Ratskeller says hi. I go by the name Codepwned now.

  • Or you could have a *real* life... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I love games, don't get me wrong.

    But I don't understand the appeal to use them to run away from your real life. Won't that only make things worse? Resulting in a death spiral.

    And in the end, you die, and have achieved nothing in your real life. To me, that does not even qualify as a life at all. No offense. To me it feels like suicide without having the strenght to actually do it, and hence suffering the horror of realizing what you have become, whenever you lie down, alone, without any distraction.
    Which, t

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In a thousand years, no one will remember your name, your actions, your accomplishments. Nothing you do will ever be a lasting achievement, not really. Not through the sands of time. Likely not even for a moment on a Global Scale, much less a Galactic Scale. So it distills down to: do what you enjoy, what you *think* matters...to you.

      Alternatively: we all live in a simulation, nothing is 'real'. Take the blue pill, the red pill is just grief.

      Or you're all 'a fiction designed to account for the discrep

    • Most people will never achieve anything in their real life. That's the sad truth. You live, you do stuff, you die, and except for a select few that happened to have some sort of relationship with you, nobody will even notice.

    • Why see games as something separate from real life, and why would you think people who are passionate about them are running away from something? Why is playing a round of 5-a-side with the neighborhood kids better than slaying a dragon together with 23 friends? Sure, there's the aspect of physical exercise, but other than that?

      In MMOs, the social aspect can play a rather large part of the game. People have founded towns and kingdoms in these games, fought wars, explored unknown lands... It may be a

  • DAoC (Score:1)

    by RAHH ( 5900166 )
    Dark Age of Camelot was my favorite and offered awesome PvP experiences.

    • DAoC had the by some margin best PvP ever. I will always remember a fight that waged over a castle with all three factions battling over it (with perpetually shifting alliances and a lot of backstabbing going on) long enough that I had to go before we captured it. Came back from work the next day, asked who won the castle and got to hear "currently it's ours".

      How many games do you know where PvP battles run for days?

  • MMORPGs are simply not what they used to be (Score:3)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday June 07, 2019 @11:42AM (#58725362)

    Ah, Evercrack. How I hated you. How I hated the corpse runs, the trains and the endless days of farming. And how I miss them now.

    I have been playing MMORPGs even long before they had that name. And if you told me back then that I'd be longing for the times when death was unforgiving and that I'd miss the panicky "CLERICS LOGOFF!" yells, I'd probably have called you crazy. But here we are. About 20 years later and at the point where MMORPGs simply have zero appeal left for me.

    Anything in MMORPGs has become utterly meaningless.

    Not that any of the shit you did in an MMO had any higher meaning or purpose in life, mind you. But it was still something you enjoyed looking at and at least pretending that it means something. I have it, and few others do. Reaching levelcap used to mean something, at the very least it meant that you had at least a general idea how to play your character. I do remember DAoC and how getting past level 20 pretty much meant that you did know how to group, and the size of the playerbase also meant that if you got past 40, that people knew and remembered you, and that getting higher meant that you probably don't fuck up too much and ain't the main reason for a wipe, at least most of the time.

    This changed with WoW. Now getting to max was a matter of time investment. Every class could solo to some degree (some better, some worse, but none of them was group dependent), so the multiplayer aspect that pretty much meant everything earlier got into the background, at least until the higher levels. Which basically mostly meant that the learning phase got more expensive... But in the end, there was still the matter of top level gear that you had to get with a group of other players, and that in turn meant that at least that was something you could tack a player's ability and understanding of his class' abilities to.

    But since everyone has to be a winner and since it would be unfair to those that use their head as the main input extremity, even that has by now been replaced by gaining your epics via braindead daily quests.

    I'm fairly sure the next stage is that you get them for being logged in a certain amount of time every day.

    The point is, and thank you for listening to an old player ramble, that games, no matter what kind of game it is, have to present a sensible challenge. How much fun is playing a game that comes with the "I-win" button handed to you with purchase? How satisfying would it be to just watch all the cutscenes in a Final Fantasy game without "having to" play the game in between?

    I have to ask, is that seriously what people want when they play an MMO? Getting everything handed to you that playing the game doesn't matter anymore?

    • There's a weird tightrope MMORPGs have to walk. On the one hand, you can make in-game things difficult to acquire or to keep. If you do that, you alienate casual players who can't invest enough time. But those who perform difficult feats feel accomplished and love being able to do some well-deserved bragging. On the other hand, you could make things easy to acquire and keep. If you do that, you need to create content faster and the experience will leave players (hardcore or casual) feeling like the who

      • But the way MMOs go down can't please either group. Neither the hardcore raiders that want to do the covetted server-first kills nor the casual that can only play about 1-2 hours after the kids are in bed. What we have today is a daily grind mill of doing mindless busywork over and over for hours on end. That's neither interesting for the person who wants to spend hours perfecting his gear to get those 0.5% more DPS out of it, nor is it possible for the family person who can maybe play 10 hours a week, if t

  • I never got into Everquest, but did play SWG for quite a bit of time and know how well (or poorly) SOE was about things like customer support, listening to the player base, and improving their product. I still have fond memories of SWG largely from the community and the in-game interactions. I'm sure EQ suffered in a lot of the same ways of not being developed to its true potential and having shoddy patches and pissed off its players. Hopefully, things have gotten better in the 15 or so years since I las

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Ogive17 ( 691899 )
      I quit SWG shortly after the combat upgrade SOE put in. I do think they needed to balance the classes a bit but they went over the top and completely changed the game. The crafting and marketplace in that game far exceeded anything I had played to that point and anything I've played since then. Not to mention being able to create macros to help level.. that was great.
      • I loved the crafting, about having to go out and scan for the best nodes and set down extractors that you'd check up on. It was such a hot competitive space where top players would be competing for the best spots and materials and were well known for their quality. I loved the marketplaces too, setting up shops in houses. You'd walk into some of them and they were exquisitely decorated and fun to go through.
    • The original SWG source leak can be found, like the other guy mentioned, but the swg-source people on github are the most up to date and seem to be adding missing content pieces. Apparently a lot of the SWG source code was used in EQ2...or vice-versa.
  • I played EverQuest up until the 3rd expansion - the Shadows of Luclin. At first it was a fun game, there were things to do and places to explore. Levelling up was relatively simple and there was a thrill in exploring new zones.

    But the 3rd expansion was as buggy as hell. The server would crash. The client would crash. Invisible high level mobs would wander into newbie zones and instakill everyone. Oh and the client sucked - you couldn't even switch away from the game screen while playing.

    Before then most

  • The impact of World of Warcraft over time is also undeniable.

    That "time" was the in the first few weeks of launch. WoW's launch, for those that don't remember, would have been embarrassingly bad...server crashes, connection issues, general lack of ability to get into the game servers.... but the reason was because even with all the hype WoW was generating pre-launch, and the extra resources Blizzard put into it just in case, they still were far short of the servers they needed for the massive rush.

    UO topped out subscribers at ~200,000 (WoW had this the first d

    • I think part of the problem with the modern MMO's though is that the pace of game play is too fast and players aren't forced to work together until they've already formed all the bad habits. EQ is what actually taught me to type. Even in the best areas if your group had the whole zone to yourselves there was plenty of time to chat and socialize with the other players if you could type quickly.

      WoW's huge success was in large part tied to the fact that it was a Blizzard game from a known series of games. Alon

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by meglon ( 1001833 )
        I had this discussion with a small group doing beta for Elder Scrolls (and the length of time it took me to remember which game made me realize i have played way too many damn online games). In old EQ you did have a shit ton of time to chat in group or guild (and most classes both at the same time). You really did form bonds with your group mates and guild mates, and even random people around your level that kept showing up in your pug or vicinity. I didn't have that problem as much playing a chanter...

    • That was called Vanguard, and it didn't do so well (Which is unfortunate, it was actually pretty fun once you got into it)

      His new one will have a similar trajectory -- assuming it even gets launched.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by meglon ( 1001833 )
        Vanguard got Sony'd hard. And there was a lot of us beta-testers saying that would happen, only to be chastised by Brad for suggesting it. Unfortunately, we were right. I loved Vanguards trade skill method concept.

  • EQ helped me learn Linux.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Bluecobra ( 906623 ) on Friday June 07, 2019 @01:00PM (#58725866)

    Funnily enough, EQ helped me learn Linux. There was "cheat" program called ShowEQ that would draw a map of the zone you're in and tell you whats around you and what loot each monster had because it sniffed Everquest's packets. In only ran on Linux so I ended up having to build a whole separate PC from scratch, installing Linux (I think it was Red Hat 7?), and hunting down and figuring out everything it needed to work. Since ShowEQ was passive I had to use a hub to mirror the packets to my Linux PC. Once everything was working, it was amazing. I had a whole dedicated "GPS" box that would tell me everything going on the zone, which was really helped as a solo player. Eventually SOE caught on and started to encrypt their protocol, I'm not sure what happened after that. It would be a fun project to see how the protocol works and see how the traffic encrypted with what we know now (if it hasn't been done already). It might be easy to crack if they never updated bothered to update key stretch/ciphers/etc.

  • ...used to be called EverCrack....

  • Fansy the bard (Score:3)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Friday June 07, 2019 @05:09PM (#58727378) Homepage Journal

    My favorite EQ story.

    https://www.notacult.com/fansy... [notacult.com]

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