Everquest Thread

Wyrmrest Accord
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Many of us are engaging in nostalgia since it is WoW’s anniversary. But what about that older game with a pale elf with a cool ponytail dressed like princess jasmine on the box?

I don’t actually know, like, anything about Everquest, other than the appearance of the box art lady. But I got an ad today proudly announcing their new expansion The Outer Brood, available now for $34.99 ($134.99 for premium!). Indeed, Everquest is still making expansions in 2024, which is sort of neat I guess.

Not only do I not know anything about Everquest, I don’t know anyone who ever played it. So I ask you, good Accordians, did you ever play this game?

From its new expansion announcement I see it proudly declare that Dark Elf Rangers will be playable at long last

https://i.imgur.com/Hcf1lZJ.png

So I guess they are similar to us in doling out race/class combos slowly. But I am surprised that Dark Elves wouldn’t have Rangers back in the 90s, because wasn’t Drizzt a Ranger or something? Or at least, fighty man who hangs out with a tiger? I don’t know a lot about Drizzt either to be frank. Maybe Everquest had some alternative wise forest warrior for Dark Elves. Please post your favorite Drizzt facts in the replies.

They also advertise a new land to explore, Hodstock Hills, characterized by a low polygon lighthouse and a very retro draw distance

https://i.imgur.com/kllSyKU.png

Far be it from me to criticize games for being old and crusty. But it does impress me to learn that everquest has never apparently upgraded its visual look. I guess they did it for Everquest 2 and then nobody played that?

Finally, here is an image from their promotional trailer for the new expansion

https://i.imgur.com/7EooCV8.jpeg

Which, I must admit, intrigued me. It has all the hallmarks of good fantasy. In this one image I see skeletons. I see a fiery explosion. I see a runed longsword which certainly has good stats. I see a large goth woman. I see a skunk.

This tantalizing scene is followed by the daring question: will you lead the charge to save Norrath? I am left to concude that Norrath is the fantasy realm this game takes place in, and without my help, its defense will be left to goth women and skunks. Frankly the goth woman appears to have the situation under control, but perhaps I should take up arms to relieve the skunk of this solemn duty.

Bonus question: Wasn’t there, like, an everquest minecraft at some point. Fill me in on that lore. Would you play a world of warcraft minecraft?

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I played it for quite awhile. I still fondly remember it and wish I could remember how to play it so I could dabble in it again. Bertoxxulous server represent!

Also that goth woman is probably a Barbarian shaman.

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Brell Serilis!

I was too busy to play exactly when it launched, but I picked it up in July (I think??) of 1999 and played until 9/11 happened. I got deployed. Life changed. I picked it up a few times years later, but not much came of it. Such a time sink. Started playing Warcraft and that was that.

I do regret not getting back into it. I loved it. I often debate about picking it up again, but I have such good memories I don’t want them spoiled if it’s changed that much.

I played a Dwarf Warrior. I don’t know if it’s still a similar playing style since I haven’t played in 20 (OMFG?) years, but a Warrior in EQ was much different than a Warrior in WoW. You were a tank/shield for a group. The End. You were built for being the tank, and that was that. In WoW, I play solo Warriors all the time and love TF out of it. I am grateful for the difference.

You can play free, I believe. Never hurts to try it.

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I actually was playing it before I decided to come back to the World (of Warcraft). It was fun to run around on the first MMO that I played way back in the day. It is free to play if you don’t want to sub up, though there are some things you can’t do (like have an auction house vendor). Otherwise, you should try it! You might enjoy it! Brell was my server.

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Last time I logged in, my main toon was still there too! Cleric with the two cleric legendaries, the mace and the shield. I was proud of those.

I also had some of my most proud moments in an MMO in EQ. I was part of and even leading the guild healing team through complete heal rotations during raids. Making sure those heals went off exactly on time non-stop through the entire fight to keep the tank alive was one of my MMO crowning achievements lol.

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Camp check.

Some tidbits I remember:

I could pull the entire Blackborrow dungeon by standing on a rock at one of the bottom levels but the mobs couldn’t path to me so they would continuously make a horrible murder train that pathed from the bottom to the entrance.

Being mean and buffing/equipping the Orc camps.

Pulling Sgt. Slade(?) to the auction tunnels

Playing a monk and being so over-encumbered that stairs kill you.

Snakes kicking you

Disarming the boat as a rogue to make it go fast. Boats basically had an invisible inventory with a invisible weighted item to slow their speed.

Fansy the Bard (https://www.notacult.com/fansythefamous.htm)

I once fell down a well in one of the lower level dungeons and I sat at the entrance naked for hours till someone was nice enough to go get my corpse for me.

I was a half-elf druid so I was permanently gimped with lower wisdom than the other druid options.

The server organization and sense of community were outstanding. I remember there was a long list of people who had to wait in line to get the cleric legendary. If you dared to jump ahead, you became an absolute pariah.

The quest to get your class legendary was looong and required weeks/months of work. I think for the druid one I had to raid the Plane of Fear with a raid?

There were no maps. You had a sense direction skill that you also had to skill up. I got lost constantly

You could learn other race languages by having others spam you with macros

Hell levels. Some levels required much more exp in order to level…it could take days of camping mobs to get through a level.

Also, there were very few “quests” to earn exp you just killed stuff but a lot of the good exp required a group so you would find a “camp” spot with friends or people looking for more and just kill the same mobs over and over. Usually, you would have a designated puller like a Monk or Bard. Groups usually had a puller, tank, healer, enchanters were good for mana regen and CC IIRC

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Huge coincidence: i’ve been contemplating giving EQ a try. I’ve been messing around with a few other MMOs like DDO (So much fun) and Neverwinter (meh)

I watched a little video EQ featured on their instagram made by some dude (forgot who it is) who interviewed them and showed how they still make content for the game. It’s very cool. I think the EQ style is ugly as hell but I am in a bit of a sword and sorcery old computer game thing right now so it’s something I’ll likely pick up.

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I have a story despite having never played EQ.

I work with a lot of gamers. One of them was an EQ player before he swapped to ESO. His main was a monk, I believe. There was a monk ability that let them do kind of a charge move over level ground, but there’s almost no level ground to use the ability. Except in one spot, I guess.

So he was doing this speedy move in the one spot when a game admin popped in because my co-worker had been reported for speed hacking. So he explained that no, it was actually this speed ability. But since no one could use it, pretty much no one remembered it existed - including the admin!

He showed the admin. The admin tried it, was like “Huh, ok. Nevermind.” And then he popped out.

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I don’t remember that specific move but I never could get the hang of monks myself and their limit on weight was a huge burden but admins or GMs would show up fairly often and hold “GM events” which were really cool. Usually they would just pop in for a few stories and some milk and cookies but still cool nonetheless.

I have a horrible sense of direction in MMOs and often fall off things. I think it all stems from the horrid Wood Elf city in EQ which was up in the trees on platforms and very confusing for teenage me. Actually my very first WoW character I made I lost due to getting lost on Teldrassil and somehow managing to fall off on to the outside of the tree. Not knowing anything about spirit rezzes I just abandoned him and made a UD rogue

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I’ve got a great sense of direction IRL, but some in-game areas tend to throw me off. Argus was especially awful.

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I tried EQ and EQ2. Not the games for me but I can see why they have appeal.

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Oh yeah that Wood Elf city was something else lol. I also fell off of the platforms there on my little wood elf warrior.

Neriak was crazy confusing to move around in and I remember being so proud of myself and feeling like an elite player when I finally memorized the route to get to the necromancer and shadowknight trainers deep in Neriak.

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My fondest memory was in the Lesser Faydark. I was new to gaming, especially mmo gaming, and I was playing my new shiny high elf cleric to try and level up to join my old college friends on their mains.

EQ zones can get mighty dark and what I remember is that if you didn’t have a light source, you could easily get lost in the dark as you ran around the trunks of the Greater and Lesser Faydark. Well I zoned into the Lesser Faydark as a young elf. I had no idea what this zone was, I had no idea of the level requirement… I was just bumbling around in the dark…

And then I died. It was a blur, I never even saw it! Some dark thing came out of the forest and annihilated me!

In EQ when you die, you leave your body behind with EVERYTHING on it that you were carrying. You respawn and have to run naked to your corpse to gather and re-equip your gear. You also lose some of your Experience points that you’d earned and if you die enough, you can actually de-level.

So here I am naked and running back through the Lesser Faydark to find my corpse. I have no gear to protect me… and then I die again. Something out of the darkness just appeared and murdered me! One shot, never even saw it.

Rinse, repeat… I died a third time.

By this point I was in real tears. I was new to this game, I was losing exp, I was lost, I was naked, it was dark, something high level and horrific was around and I couldn’t find my corpses.

Luckily my friend’s fiance was a shadowknight and could summon bodies. I went to her in tears about the situation and she logged him in and summoned all my bodies so I could loot them. She then guarded me as I fled the zone.

When I got higher level, I learned it was a big mean black horse that had wrecked my world that day. To this day I’m afraid of that dang horse in the Lesser Faydark lol.

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Decided to try it.
Took me 5 minutes how to figure out how to give a key to an NPC.
The camera does not zoom in or out with scroll- only preset distances and one just slowly zooms in in you.

I do not think I can play this game. Tho I do like the races.

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Everquest is a product of its time, for all the good and ill that entails.

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I tried it again once and played on the project 1999 server a while back and just couldn’t do it. WoW is a very very easy game in comparison just with the sheer convenience of quests/flight paths/LFD. I would much rather collect bear butts in some mundane WoW quest than have to camp Orcs for days on end. That is if you can even find a group, an open camp, get to where you need to go, not have a troll purposely train mobs on you, not die and lose precious exp you spent hours earning.

The sense of fear and immersiveness was really really cool though.

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I never played Everquest but I used to go to a hair dresser that was a big Everquest player and we would share MMO stories while I got my hair did.

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Biggest difference is both the time period (late 90s) and playerbase. Most WoW players today can not survive the internet in the 90s. If we 90s kids all started talking at once, WoW will always sound like trade chat on election day…lol

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I played it! Ultima Online was preferred in my household, but we tried them both. Everquest was a lot harder than WoW, but not always in a good way. swim skill comes to mind. I gotta say, there’s a reason WoW took off the way it did. It took a lot of what made Everquest great and made it more accessible to play.

Everquest having a dedicated fanbase still doesn’t surprise me, though. It was an OG, and I still respect it for what it did for MMOs.

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Everquest is pretty much aged out. There are many fine memories from the early 2000’s. Unfortunately, it is not the game or age of software that kills it. The player base does, however! The remaining players are just dead silent and super boring. Sadly, WoW is pretty much almost there too. I am finding the community in WoW to be rather stale and boring. Not to say you guys are bad people. Just me as a player prefer a certain camaraderie in the game world that both EQ and WoW ‘used’ to offer. At one point, like in EQ, I log in, fall asleep after 30 minutes due to boredom, then never sign in again. I am guessing Sadgati will be on for the last time during Midnight or Titans. We are just not getting any new players, instead recycling existing players.