Tried it again. First day I did I pressed a button while playing on my laptop and all the text shrank so that it was illegible. The entire hour I was “playing” I was just trying to fix the issue. I was laughing so hard when I closed it out.
Next day on my desktop the UI is fine, but I have no clue how to hand an item to an NPC. After about 10 minutes, I tried pressing an item instead of press-dragging it. It finally allowed me to start the exchange.
This game man. THIS GAME. Then I finally got some combat on. It’s hilariously slow but I’m starting to finally enjoy myself hahaha.
Hahahaha, this is me every time I try to go back to a game I haven’t played in years. I forget everything! Even how to open the menus. Or it’s on a new computer and the settings bork.
So there I am, pressing E and I and Tab and everything I think might work. Sometimes I get super lazy and find keybindings, then reset everything to the same keys as I’m using in WoW.
I remember in EQ there was the emote “/yell” which made your character yell for help for someone nearby to see. When I started playing WoW I kept trying to yell for help every time I got into trouble but of course it works totally differently so I just ended up typing /yell and hitting enter then confused as to why my character wasn’t moving then finally realizing and just shouting wwwsssaaddadwwws before ultimately dying.
It’s 2024 and there are still times when I’ll die because my bullspit keyboard refused to accept my inputs and then I hit enter and get Vanndrel waxing philosophically:
Players have to make that choice first. In terms of social functions, a full guild system revamp allowing for far less dependance on Discord would be great. I really HATE Discord due to its janxy setup. Guilds could function much like Facebook groups do in-game.
It is with great pleasure that I relay to you, Wyrmrest Accord friend, the announcement that Everquest’s 32nd expansion has been announced: Shattering of Ro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9Ze5rvQyT0
Featuring this candle guy:
https://i.imgur.com/jnRPIhs.png
This expansion apparently involves a burning tree (nothin personnel Everquest but WoW did that already woo we’re so great). And at long last, you can play as a Vah Shir Druid
https://i.imgur.com/TzLMuEu.png
Doesn’t he look cool, with his staff and all?
And that’s not all. You get two additional bank slots, which I’m sure Everquest Enjoyers need to store their everquest items
https://i.imgur.com/BhXSCx4.png
I have still not played Everquest. But I have little doubt in my mind that Shattering of Ro will herald a new, glorious era for this wizened game.
Discussion Questions:
What would you store in your two additional bank slots?
Is Ro a good name for a Drow?
Do Drow get hit with “drizzle” puns a lot?
Does that illustration of a chest look AI-generated to you?
Vah Shir vs. Khajiit vs. Saberon vs. Hrothgar: what MMO-resident cat person is the greatest? (to my knowledge only one of these can be druids, as of Shattering of Ro)
I played the 2nd one I think when it was in beta and for awhile after launch. It was pretty fun and - at the time - looked visually rather impressive. Everquest 2 also had a silly little gimmick for a time where if you’d type /pizza it’d bring up an order menu for Pizza Hut, so you wouldn’t even need to log out to have junkfood delivered and continue gaming.
(And the promo art for the pizza promo had the main badguy elf holding out a pepperoni pizza to the viewer)
The variety in playable races was actually quite impressive, Vanguard: Saga of Heroes had a similar spread of options and came out sometime around the same time.
I don’t think EQ1 would be any kind of draw for me given its sheer age, but I know some of the OG blizzard devs played it a lot.
I’m sorry but I’ve never played EverQuest, all I know of it is the sea shanty song. Though I have been pleasantly surprised once this month by a decades old game that held up very well (VtM Bloodlines), so maybe I should give the grandfather of WoW a shake.
Retail EverQuest is a soulless husk of what it used to be and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. They vomit out several expansions a year but it’s all generic stat increase MUDflation garbage with no meaningful changes to the game.
Tony Stark* built a better game in a cave with a box of scrap but then he was sued into oblivion.
If anyone is at all interested in what made EverQuest good in the first place I suggest they look into the Project Quarm or p99 emulated servers. Both are completely legal with permission from the current IP holders.
Quarm is where I am at now, personally. It’s got some nice quality of life additions like being able to mouse scroll wheel the camera in and out. It’s also got some cool additional game modes like solo self found, hardcore, and NewGame+.
p99 is for the hardcore no-lifers who like getting phone calls at 3am because a juicy raid target just spawned. It brings you back to a time in gaming where we all listened to Nine Inch Nails and have razor scars on our skin just to cope with the fact that we lost our corpses AGAIN. Or the group we spent 2 hours forming had to break up 30 minutes in because the cleric’s mom had to make a phone call.
When I was a wee kid in the very early 2000’s, Everquest was my dad’s MMO of choice before 2004 (in fact he would return to Everquest 2 after it fixed its disastrous launch). There’s something weirdly homely about it: The world is huge, but he had a rather high-quality booklet with all the maps on it, and rather impressive art. Hell, I remember my uncle who also played it getting me a toy which was a Dark Elf that came with a little spider pet lol.
I remember corpse runs were a source of pain. I also seem to remember when someone was repeatedly killing my dad’s character, I almost think in some Bazaar and he reassured me “Oh, she’s putting coin on my corpse” or something. Some deliberate delevelling or farming thing if not a combination of both? I don’t even know.
