My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.
One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.
EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.
Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.
Crazy times.
[addendum]
Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)
The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.
Kelly Flock threw the project I was leading under the bus with Sony Pictures on his way out the door when they fired him. I barely saved it.
Brad McQuaid, as CEO of Sigil famously didn’t even show up for the meeting where the whole Vanguard team was told the company had failed and they had no jobs, and no severance.
The games industry definitely has its heroes, but they ain’t it.
I was an EQ “junkie” as a teenager and played it pretty obsessively for a few years. It was a potent drug. I had an friend at the university, and she discovered the game, and stopped going to class. Basically, sacrificing her university education because of an mmo addiction.
I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate.
Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would want to play today now that I have real life obligations.
It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.
In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.
I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.
I too formed memories by playing EQ in a way that was, in retrospect, dumb, and learning from the experience.
e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Monsters of an appropriate level were spread out and often hard to find. A troll NPC roamed the forest and randomly killed players. I spent many hours getting lost (and killed) there before leaving the island, only to discover the comparatively easy newbie zone that stood outside Qeynos, a short, safe, free, ship voyage away.
The game was full of stuff like this. If you wanted to do something, there was usually a very bad way to go about it and other ways that were much better. Finding those gave you a sense of accomplishment that was far sweeter than mere levels.
Modern games tend to be more balanced so you can be assured that, however you're doing something, there probably isn't another way to do it that is vastly easier unless you're doing something really weird. This "wastes" less of your time, but somehow feels less realistic. In real life, different strategies for doing things are seldom equal.
The only way the world could continuously change is via procedural generation, but for those games, the base mechanics remain the same. Minecraft comes to mind, where the 'golden path' is to gear up, find certain items, go through a portal and kill the boss. The levels are generated different every time, but the base steps are the same. I'm afraid it'd be the same with a procedurally generated MMO.
If it's hand generated, realistically they could only do a new map once every period, and the first guides would be online within hours of release. I believe Fortnite does or used to do this, making big map changes every season.
I've made an effort in recent years to actively avoid researching wikis and guides on games as I play them. I've come to think that a lot of the joy in gaming is the discovery and unraveling the systems that make the game tick. Finding the optimal ways to level or complete some mission through exploration and experimentation is always so much more fulfilling than finding the first result the comes up in google where the answer is already there for you.
Admittedly, it does take a degree of willpower and sometimes I will still do some online research when a game gets particularly frustrating. The biggest obstacle to my approach of avoiding online information is that some games feel like they're designed with that in mind and don't provide enough information in the games for an isolated player to really figure everything out.
100% agreed with games being designed for online aids. Some of the quests in Oldschool Runescape make me wonder if I'd ever have completed them without guides - it's like they're designed to be a challenge for the whole community upon release, rather than for individual players.
I try to play through these games without a guide first, but especially with Elden Ring, there's a high chance you miss half the game then. Which is a shame.
To figure out all of ER, you'd need to play through it multiple times, comb through everything, do things in a different order, etc etc. There was a post on Reddit the other day, someone said they found Jarburg after playing for more than 900 hours. I know of it, but in two playthroughs I don't believe I actually went there yet.
I wonder if they collect analytics and they can at one point say which areas, questlines, gear items, etc are discovered the least.
There was a cheat program that kinda did this called ShowEQ. It analysed the EverQuest network traffic and was able to draw a map of the zone, and showed called the NPCs and players. The best part was that it even showed what loot was on each enemy. The barrier to entry was a bit high. It required a hub, and a second PC running Linux. Eventually it became a cat and mouse game with SOE changing the network traffic/adding encryption/etc. It was fun while it lasted!
You have to make the world big and uncharted enough that it can't be picked over quickly. I have some hope that Light No Fire might pull it off.
Probably an uncommon experience, but I felt something similar playing Final Fantasy XV. The semi-realistic scale and emptiness of the world map that people complained about actually contributed to the consistent feeling of being out in the wilderness, stumbling on dungeons and whanot. Most open-world games feel like theme parks, Eos felt like a national park. I'm told RDR2 and Death Stranding carry similar vibes.
I'd like devs to get a bit more bold about real-world scaling environments. Let a long-ass walk between towns be a long-ass walk between towns. And no mini-maps.
XV was very much "on rails" IMO, especially at first when the car could only go on pre-programmed roads; there's very little content outside of what the developers intended, and exploring isn't really rewarded. Same with XVI, which was better, but still a mostly empty overworld, little incentives to go exploring or hunting because while there is a crafting system, it's shallow and a very linear progression from one weapon to the next, usually involving taking down a hunt mark.
RDR2 is very enjoyable to go out and just explore, you definitely feel out in the wilderness sometimes there. Another one would be Kingdom Come 1 / 2, especially 2 (it's a bit 'fuller') where you can just decide to go for a hike in the forest and go hunt or find some bandits or an easter egg. It's got long-ass walks (or horse rides) between towns; when I played the first one I barely used fast travel.
Death Stranding, again not so much; the only interesting things there are the actual destinations you have to go to / from. Great scenery and experience though, and the long-ass walk is core gameplay.
Unfortunately as an early NMS player with hundreds of hours, I have seen nothing that gives me hope that LNF will have the depth that is needed for the world to feel like that. Mile wide, inch deep.
What made EQ an experience was those areas were static and took real skill to uncover how to do things.
Another aspect that differs from many of today's game is just how long it took to progress. Every upgrade felt earned. Today, rewards are tossed at players.
Interesting that progression was massively eased in later versions.
It depends on how it's earned though, I think the brainless grinding is no longer fun or rewarding. FFIX removed, solved, or hid a lot of the tedium of a lot of MMOs.
The game meta/knowledge spreads through realtime video and incidental entertainment instead of through slow message boards only frequented by power users who would do something as lame as spend time on a 2005 message board.
It's amazing how deeply knowledgable everyone is about every game because of it.
I guess it's not good or bad. It's nice that gaming is mainstream instead of being a stereotypical loser activity it was when I was in high school.
> I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.
How about a simple NDA to prevent players sharing this kind of info?
Noita is the last thing that comment suggests he wants. Most of Noita's content can only be learned by consulting the wiki, which I assume is an intentional legacy of the designers' love of Nethack. And the world is the same every time.
I feel like the same "most" of the content which lives on the wiki is very secondary to the gameloop and that the designers did a wonderful job at not letting the player optimize the fun out of the game.
The game teaches you nothing and is very cryptic, but the gameloop is simple (go down, don't die). You naturally learn how the sandbox interact (i'm on fire but I have a water flask, water clear up sludge) and the randomized (and shuffle) wands expose you to spell interactions.
You can easily spend multi hundred hours just learning through the sandbox and trying to break the game.
The cryptic stuff (34 orbs, impressing the gods, the messages) is also very cool and I think motivating to keep playing with the sandbox even after having "mastered" the mechanics of the game. (As in you never know what you could manage to find if you try to break the game)
I don't think people play noita with a guide on a second monitor.
Hit the nail on the head (note: you can even look at long-running MMOs like WoW or Runescape and compare how they were played in 2004 and how they are played now, to see this in action). The data-mining and hyperoptimisation and looking everything up on the wiki means the _exploration and wonder_ that did make the MMO experience so unique is gone. Even chatting is not done in-game, at the same location in the physical world, but just on a discord chat you alt-tab to...
At this point, even if a good MMO were to come out (incredibly, this has not happened for close on two decades), recreating that experience is entirely on the player. It's on the player to forgo looking things up, or to forgo using external tools to chat, find groups, trade items, calculate strategies, etc. But since players doing that will be at a disadvantage, that is unlikely to happen in an online game...
Oh my, that long journey is one of my fondest memories of the game as well. Absolutely terrifying as a low level with barely any information on how to pull it off, having to ask strangers for help. The fear of losing all of your stuff on the way and having to run all the way back. Magical. I was just a humble human paladin on the Mithaniel Marr server.
I agree with everybody else commenting here, it was a truly unique experience that I would love to be able to re-live, but our expectations as players have moved on a long while back, you can no longer capture that magic because it's now all rote and routine. In 1999 it was the first time many of us had ever experienced anything like it, it flooded the senses and it felt like a world full of interesting people and epic adventures. It was the frontier at the time.
The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.
I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.
As another commenter pointed out, Death Stranding focuses on the travel experience, where you have to plan your route according to how much 'effort' and risk you want to take.
Back when there was Morrowind, which didn't have map markers and whose in-game map had to slowly be uncovered. You get a description and that's it. The game did come with a paper map, which was stuck to my wall for years and frequently consulted.
A modern one would be Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2; when you turn on hardcore mode (which was only added after release, but the game was designed with it in mind), you don't get your position on the map, compass, or map markers; every quest involving a location has the NPCs give you a description (and at least in normal mode, your character making a remark when you've reached a landmark). It's not so much about planning your route though.
Based on my experiences playing FFXIV, there's an entire generation of gamers now that get completely despirited by experiences like that and give up on the first sign of a wipe, even though these days there's no penalty for even dying...
IX is probably the most accessible "traditional" MMO there is, but it's still very intimidating because it throws a lot of information and a complex UI at you right away. If you've never played an MMO before, it's a lot.
For me, I made a high elf, didn't know page up/page down were needed to control swimming, and died in the water by the bridge leaving Felwithe, I didn't even get beyond the city gate.
I hated EQ for me the reason was it was not UO nor was it even trying to recreate the vibrancy & real world that UO's designers had gone for. *BUT* I also recognized that EQ represented a game that was much more aligned to what a normal gamer would want, one could already see that path being forged in UO as time went on. And then of course WoW came along and perfected the art.
I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.
It's legitimately insane that perhaps the best MMO, or at least the one which came closer to fulfill the MMO's promise of a shared, persistent, virtual world, was also the first. How come in three decades of technological and creative development did nobody do it better?
Because the real world isn't "fun" and video games became more commercially successful when they realised that theme parks are more accessible than simulations.
Gaming was more ambitious and experimental then. The FFXI documentary [0] made me reflect on how much games have changed since. FFXI was heavily inspired by EQ so more credit to EQ but games today are so much more bland and engineered by design. That's how they achieve universal appeal and commercial success - by engineering its engagement. Reminds me of how packaged foods are engineered to be the most addictive by empirically finding the bliss point [1]. In games it will essentially be dopamine per minute and now mainstream games will never do something as crazy as crafting experiences as random and lumpy as real life. Instead every engagement is crafted to never be too frustrating and to give just enough rewards to keep the gamer on that hamster wheel, with the next engagement never being too far away.
Original Soulsborne games felt fresh because FromSoftware put friction and obscurity back in the spotlight.
Both of these games are still going. Atlantic has a huge player base. It’s not the cutthroat game it once was but it’s still very much exciting. You can still die and all your shit poof. Housing on Atlantic is still in demand and hard to get if that gives an idea how healthy it is.
Eq has of course had some major server merges but your old account will still be on both UO and EQ.
To me UO is a breath of fresh air after 20 years of trash games except for a stand out few. Seeing my old wood elf ranger with swift wind and lupine dagger still glowing was magical. Almost as magical as re-exploring kelethin.
i remember doing the staff of the wheel quest as a newbie level 16 wizard who had barely seen any of the world
i met so many people who helped me get into some really scary places (lguk at 16 is terrifying) as i wondered in all sorts of climates and places, what a fantastic place!
looking back the world felt so different and huge and alive with life
Totally, me and my friend used to share an EQ account in school. His parents paid for it so he got to play during the day, and I would play at night from midnight until 6am, then I'd go to school. It was profoundly unhealthy, which is why that game earned the name "Evercrack".
Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried forward all the terrible parts of EQ.
Just the amount of sitting around waiting that you have to do in EQ that I had forgotten about is incredible. Managing your water and food levels, having to go find your corpse when you die and it taking 5 hours just to get there, pitch black nights so you're forced to walk around with a lantern, camping a spawn with 100 other people trying to get the same items as you to complete the same inane quests, broken quests that you can't even complete to progress the game forward...
And yeah, one weekend was enough. I got real shit to do, I have time for nonsense, but not THAT kind of time.
There's a musician named Richie Truxillo who made so many comedy songs about EQ back in the day, but your comment just reminded me of "Has Anybody Seen My Corpse." I haven't thought about corpse runs and dragging folks' corpses back to them in ages!
For me it feels like it was the perfect storm of games like this releasing at a time when a generation of gamers' attentions weren't saturated.
I didn't play EQ but on FFXI airships ran on a 15min schedule and if you missed it you would have to sit and wait, not dissimilar to real life. This kind of friction added a charm and immersion to the game but would never fly in a game today [pardon the pun].
Nowadays a lot of the enjoyment I seek out of games is mechanical difficulty and adrenaline because most the other aspects can be fulfilled away from the screen...
Never played EQ, but spent my fair share of time in WoW. And then, many many other MMOs. What was aleays great is jumping into a random new game and not knowing what to do or where to go - just figuring it out on the fly. A few times in recent history I've tried to jump into the latest MMOs only to find that they hold your hand every step of the way, forcing you to walk through lengthy tutorials. If I wanted to play a game I'd just load up Doom. I want a WORLD to explore! Until MMOs learn to provide a rich and compelling world again, the genre is dead in my eyes.
Early EverQuest required groups to progress because trash mobs were hard, the environment was vast, dungeons had traps, there was no auction house and players hung out in tunnels shouting their wares.
26 years later, the nostalgia hits me every so often and I spin up Project Quarm or Project 1999 where it still plays the same, and it’s fun for awhile but I’m not enjoying it as much as I enjoyed the memories.
I enjoy the luxuries afforded by modern games, with three kids and a busy job, I wonder how anyone found the time to play as long as EverQuest required.
Oh man those tunnels. I remember a tunnel scam where a seller would close the trade window and quickly reopen it with a lesser item that used the same icon. Not sure if the GMs did anything about it but I always made sure to carefully inspect the item I was buying.
> players hung out in tunnels shouting their wares.
The Luclin bazaar from EQ is still one of the coolest/most unique game features I have ever seen. Park your character to open up a shop with selected items from your inventory. Browse everybody's wares by walking around and clicking them to see their shops!
In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime.
I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated anywhere.
World of Warcraft had this in Booty Bay. There was a hilarious achievement where you first got your reputation to max with the Booty Bay guards by killing the nearby pirates, then the other half was to kill the guards until the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction exalted you; a 2.5x reputation grind that took weeks. And when you were done you couldn’t enter Booty Bay anymore because the guards killed you on sight.
This randomly reminded me of when I grinded dwarf reputation in World of Warcraft so that at level 40, I was the only human riding a goat/ram (dwarf mount) instead of the horse.
I remember killing endless crocodiles in STV so I could turn in their heavy leather I think during the event where the realm works together to open the AQ gate.
I'll see a 13yo gardener here in Mexico and wish he could be doing that instead of working. :(
I haven't played retail in the last few years so I'm not sure if that rep has changed, but on my main I never bothered to regain the Booty Bay rep and was still KOS to them. Hilarious.
Nowadays it probably takes 20 hours if you really grind. Repairing rep on the pirates was soul-destroying but so was getting all those lockboxes for Ravenholdt rep.
EverQuest was my first real brush with agency. I was still a teenager but I loved researching strategies and game mechanics to figure out how my guild and I could play more effectively, and it paid off. We were never world first, but we got closer than we should have for the small server we were on. The feeling that the work I was doing was contributing to the success of an entire organization of people, and that this group of adults was happy to defer to me as long as my work ethic and ideas were good, was so much more powerful and motivating than anything I'd experienced in school. I don't think I felt that empowered again for another ~decade, well into my "real" career.
> Gijsbert van der Wal’s famous 2014 photograph of Dutch teenagers ignoring a Rembrandt masterpiece in favor of staring at their phones has become for many psychologists, social theorists, and concerned ordinary folks a portrait of our current Age of Digital Addiction in a nutshell.
While a great photo, to me it looks like the kids are just doing some kind of school / field trip assignment.
It could be anything, but it resonates with people for a very good reason. Many people feel the negatives of technology and social media and miss the time before it. I know how sentiment will skew here, and I know it's easy to take for granted the advantages of having a fully capable pocket computer. But I also understand what we have given up for it.
I remember playing Ultima Online and really enjoying that game when I heard about a new first-person MMORPG in development called EverQuest.
I ran a couple of popular game sites back then and had industry connections so I got early beta test access to try out EverQuest.
Unfortunately, I made a bad choice when I chose to make a Human character, which was night-blind. On top of that, it seemed like every time I logged in it was night time and the game was nearly unplayable away from lights, fires and torches for that character.
To make matters worse, I started in Freeport which had several invisible zone walls so on top of not being able to see, I constantly kept zoning which constantly interrupted the game.
As you can imagine, I lost interest rather quickly and went back to UO. I gave my beta account to a gamer friend of mine, who had a much better experience than I had during beta.
When EverQuest eventually launched, several friends of mine bought it so I decided to buy it as well. By then I had learned to make elven characters because they had infravision/ultravision that allowed them to see at night.
It was fun for a little while, but then bad game design concepts led to another problem. They arbitrarily decided to assign some of the classes with experience penalties, including the one I played which had a 40% experience reduction, which was ridiculous.
The problem was that at that time, that information was not well known so I all I noticed was all of my friends were outleveling me because none of their classes had penalties.
Eventually by around level 12 (which took a while back then), I was too low to group with them, despite playing the same amount of time they did, and I could no longer gain experience in their groups.
Since EverQuest was heavily group-focused, I decided to go back to Ultimate Online.
A few months later, I decided to give it another try and made a bard. Suddenly, everyone was inviting me to group and that made the game a lot more fun and led to a lot of great memories.
A few years ago I tried to go back and play it but, either due to age or having less free time, it was just too slow and difficult to play after all of these years.
While I don't play it any more, I am really glad that it is still online and even if it shuts down, there is another player-run (and licensed) rogue server available.
I met so many good friends in that game, including one of my best friends to this day, so I will always have fond memories of it.
I loved EverQuest. I still have some great memories of it. My friends and I still go back to playing it every once in a while. EverQuest also gave me some fantastic typing skills (from having to type in a significant amount of things for activating quests and for chatting) that have turned out to be well worth all the time I invested.
I can nearly single-handedly credit EverQuest with my career. I got my start in the ShowEQ and eqemu sphere, first building little PHP apps to manage servers and such, then reverse-engineering -- I learned x86 and then C++ all to get the lifts in Kelethin working. Hell, nearly 25 years later, any time I work on some new graphics API or game engine, I end up writing an EverQuest zone renderer.
Not my favorite game of all time, but certainly the one with the biggest impact!
Edit to add: also, huge props to that community for both humbling me and teaching me more than I could've imagined. Went from a dumbass 13 year old saying "ROT13? Isn't that some unbreakable encryption?" In the ShowEQ IRC channel because she couldn't imagine saying she didn't know something, to a competent reverse-engineer. I cannot imagine how insufferable I was haha.
Likewise. My first introduction to scripting was automating EverQuest. I learned the basics of path resolution writing a script to grind misty thicket picnics. I wrote my own HUD-style UI overlay to replace most of the default windows. And I learned about pointers and disassembly and jumps disassembling hack plugins from shady sites.
I credit ShowEQ with learning Linux and getting everything to work correctly. I remember absolutely trashing my PC a few years earlier trying to install Debian from a Boot magazine CD. Glad I didn’t break my monitor with bad XFree86 settings.
Everquest was my first warning about game addiction. Every teenage kid by the year 2000 had spent too much time in front of a game, of course.
But not like this.
I was sitting with a friend of mine at a computer café. This was more prevalent at the time, since a capable computer with all the modern games on it was still somewhat pricey.
So my friend starts taking to our side guy, who is playing EQ. Nice fellow.
"Hey guys, I gotta stop playing. Been here 24h straight. If I don't go to work they'll fire me."
My friend and I leave for the night.
My friend comes back to the café one night later. Our buddy is there, in the same seat.
"Shit dude, they fired me. I haven't been able to get up and go to work. This game, man."
"Sorry to hear it, what was your work?"
"I'm an attendant at a computer café."
"WTF, which one? Why didn't you just sit there and play?"
"The one across the street. Because I couldn't stop."
> Everquest was my first warning about game addiction.
I didn't play EQ, but got started on Dark Age of Camelot right when it was released. There was a confluence of life events that caused me to start playing. Three years later, multiple accounts, and who knows how much game time, it had ruined my health and a wonderful long term relationship.
The upside is that the loss caused me to quit by giving away my accounts. I literally never played again. I remember some fun times while playing, but do sometimes regret the time spent that I could have been doing something else. I also learned about myself that it's not the game that gave me issues, but the social pressure of other people relying on me.
Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day (say specially during workweek). Even if you really have no job, at that point I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.
I myself really enjoyed a game (Tibia, very popular here in Brazil) during my childhood, and, living in a large metropolis (and at the time quite violent too) and with limited opportunities for play, it was a saving grace in some ways. It really served as a playground analogue to the real world, where I could talk to people from other cultures all over the world, practice a foreign language (english), practice commerce, planning, and lots of really nice things I think it's fair to say. I think excesses of gaming were already in common consciousness at the time, and the occasional warning from my parents (in no way prohibitive) was a great reminder -- me and my older brother did check whether we were getting something good out of the experience. Specially as the dial-up internet cost was very large! (later replaced by broadband to the relief of my father). I'm also glad it didn't overwhelm my childhood.
That game has since added soft limits (already in 2006 according to the wiki), which I think are better than nothing, but probably there should be some hard limits as well (even if you're really conservative about limits... surely at least something like 8 hours a day could be universally agreed upon).
There are valid objections to those kinds of limits because there are all sorts of exceptions: bedridden people that need an activity, people that just use the game as a chatroom (quite common) to keep in touch with friends, etc.. I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.
It's also probably unlikely that those limits are going to be voluntarily enforced by all companies. I think regulation in this area is important -- in a way, those limits are actually good for the medium: they allow a minimally healthy baseline to exist and the market not be dominated by the worst, most damaging grindfests. But also probably just regulation has limits, and it's important for individual/collective conscience, education and cultural awareness to exist, so people pay attention that each activity is adding, to their lives, being meaningful (this includes social media usage, all sorts of games, etc. -- but could apply to doing anything too much like watching TV or talking to friends even). Boredom is the instinctive response that encourages taking other activities, but unfortunately adversarial design and dark patterns (and even just too captivating activities) have found ways to override this response simply to generate profit.
Moreover, as a game designer, we should be really be thinking about bringing worthwhile experiences into this world, things that teach (in all sorts of ways), move, challenge, captivate, inspire and connect us. Here's a heuristic I like: take your favorite memories and feelings and try to replicate, extend and generalize them in various ways for others.
> Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day
Because I am the master of my time. If I wish to not play for three months, and then I decide I want to spend an entire Saturday playing, that is my choice, not yours.
> I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.
I'm not interested in what you think is/is not good for my well being. That is a decision for me to make.
> I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.
Game addiction hits the same part of the brain as gambling does. In fact, it’s my understanding that gambling addicts and video game addicts have nearly identical similarities in terms of how the addiction progresses and “sets in” as it where.
As an aside, and really I am sorry for this tangent, and I have no issue believing any of this, but this comment somehow feels LLM (ChatGPT) generated to me and I can’t put my finger on it, as I like to default to being wrong about such things.
I know it’s an aside but it has become such a big issue on many forums now.
Game addiction isn’t the same anymore. Games used to be primarily about telling stories, establishing atmosphere, and fulfilling fantastic roles. The writers and designers of yesteryear had centuries of unexploited sci-fi to draw from. Designers today don’t have that mountain of material to pull from, not just because no one reads anymore.
It is interesting that Everquest 1 and 2 are still around. Apparently enough people are still paying for these and other MMOs to keep the company in business https://www.daybreakgames.com/home
Still holds the most hours spent in a single game for me, and it was 100% worth it. Met a ton of cool people, improved my communication and learned useful skills leading a guild, that I later applied in my career.
I worked for a very successful “dot com” back in the day. EverQuest was like the crack pipe for the tech crowd, people actually got divorced over addictions to it.
My (girlfriend at the time, later wife) gave me a "it's me or WoW" ultimatum at the peak of my raiding obsession. I picked her. We had moved across the country for grad school and had no friends and I was using the game as a crutch rather than like, actually meeting people. I joined a softball team with some people from her program and made a bunch of lifelong friends.
More power to everyone who can play MMO's in a way that doesn't resemble a crippling drug addiction. I've learned that I cannot, lol. And my point isn't to disparage gaming friendships or relationships, it just was not ultimately for me.
I knew a WoW widow in college. Her boyfriend got completely hooked on the game, even to the point that he didn't want to have sex with her any more! She desperately tried to get his attention back but couldn't do it, and ultimately broke up with him. She was (understandably) very bitter about the game after that and wouldn't remotely consider dating someone else who played.
Thankfully as far as I'm aware the dude eventually got control of himself again and is living a pleasant family life these days. But the addiction is real for some people.
One random story I have...I remember there was a legit riot on the Prexus EQ forums I was on because SOE decided to drop Windows 95 support for Everquest. I believe it was because Win95 wouldn't support DirectX 6 or something. I was good to go though...I had Win 98 and a Geforce MX 240 I purchased at Best Buy.
Hehe, a little upsetting that I only see one former UO player in these comments right now. I loved the anarchy and never stopped missing it through FFXI, WoW, and other MMO's.
There was a rivalry between EQ and UO and no one I knew including myself had the time to play both.
I was a freshman in high school when UO came out. I distinctly remember getting accepted into the beta test and frantically checking the mailbox every day until the CD finally showed up. I had played Gemstone III (a text MUD on AOL) and Sierra's The Realm so I wasn't totally new to the concept, but the vision and scale of UO had my excited out of my mind.
I did have fun with it but ultimately I think I was too young and innocent to appreciate the game. Every time I felt like I was getting my feet under me, someone would murder me and steal all my shit. I think at one point I even got my own house... until someone murdered me and stole the key, leaving me penniless. It was a very griefer friendly game, and if you weren't one of the griefers, look out.
Eventually I got involved in the UO emulation scene and became the maintainer of a popular emulator for a year or two, and ran a private server with some Canadian tech bro (not that we had that term in the 90s) who had a bunch of money and hardware to spare. That was some of the most fun I've ever had in gaming.
Is it a coincidence that this shows up as John Smedley launches a new MMO (yesterday)?
As much as I loved EverQuest, it has informed my view that the world is full of addictive substances. And most people probably need a disinterested third party who loves them and helps them manage the addiction. Until they build their own defenses.
I never played because I saw my friends get addicted. I'm not judging that as "bad". People are free to spend their lives however they want. But, ... just to pass on...
My friends had a company. Then they got into EverQuest. I don't know what percent of "work time" they spent playing. Maybe zero. But, they would stay at the office after work to play. I visited one day and saw playtime in the corner of the screen of one friend at ~36 days. My first thought was "what could they have done with over 5 months of "work time". If you work 40 hours a week then 36 days of game time = 846hrs = 21.6 weeks = ~5 months or work. Note: I use tons of time in my own life in ways that others would not (like spending time on HN) so again, not judging, just obsverving, though I often wish I did more productive things that would / would have lead to more future freedom.
In any case, one of those friends encouraged me to give it a try saying it reminded them of when we used to play D&D in high-school. That friend had also spent time becoming a fletcher (maker of arrows). If I understand correctly, the ability to make bows and arrows from materials was a skill. You gathered the materials, then picked "make" and you had a random and relatively low chance of succeeding. If you did succeed though, your "skill" at making bows and arrows increased. Once you passed some threshold you could always succeed. This made you a "fletcher" and people who needed bows and arrows would seek you out to buy them from you. I thought it was amazing that my friend effectively had a 2nd job. I'm guessing that's common a game mechanic in games since then?
Another of those friends also played at home on top of at the office even though they had a spouse and 3 kids under 10. After a while, their spouse demanded they stop. They visibly deleted their character but then made a new one back at work and of course all the "overtime" for the last several months had actually been "game time". 3 months later the spouse found out and said "quit or I'm leaving". My friend quit.
When World of Warcraft came out and blew past EverQuest in its reach that friend told me if I wanted to check it out be sure not to make any friends or join any guilds. They said it's the social obligation that's the addiction. Like joining a sports team, if you're not there your group can't achieve their goals so you feel obligated to participate and that's the addiction. I've never tried WoW either, having seen people spend so much time in it.
Also another random thing, another aquaintaince moved to Thailand and setup an EverQuest farm for a year or two which at the time was a new thing, making a living selling stuff in game. In which games is that common now?
> that friend told me if I wanted to check it out be sure not to make any friends or join any guilds. They said it's the social obligation that's the addiction.
I mentioned in another comment this is what got me in DAoC. I actually played a little WoW just fine because I soloed and only joined groups with randoms. It was a normal game time experience.
Oh EverQuest... funny to see this even posted here. I still occasionally log into P99 for a few hours here and there to play around at the low levels. 1 to around 24-30 is peak MMOPRG before it slows down and turns into that raid grind...
Yeah, I never understood why that was necessary. I get diminishing rewards as an addiction mechanic, but they all switch gameplay dramatically from adventure and exploration (and combat) quest based character growth to raid fueled gear treadmills. Some people live for the latter it seems like? But there were never any that focused on character growth all the way. It wasn't like they weren't adding content continuously anyway. It would have been possible. Or turn it rogue alike with top levels earning benefits or unlocking other options for additional playthroughs. With the number of mmorpgs made one of them would have tried it if it would jave worked I guess?
Project Lazarus (lazaruseq.com) and Project 1999 for the win. One of the best gaming communities out there still alive and kicking today. And one of the best gaming experiences.
I liked the game before Luclin and the bazaar the most. It started to lose its organic appeal for me after that. Stuff like everyone just choosing to hawk goods in the commonlands was so charming.
As a younger people who didn't live those days, I wish there was a modern game that felt at least close if not as good as classic world of warcraft but that was as in-depth as everquest...
My only nit to pick with this article is their definition of PvE. They said it stands for “player vs enemy” where I’ve always heard it defined as “player vs environment” where environment explicitly means not-other-players.
I was there.
My first pay stub had Verant on it, I joined shortly before the SOE transition.
One thing maybe not well known outside of the company was that the MMO subscription revenue enabled a hotbed of experimentation. There was an MMO RTS which never shipped, and several other takes on “can we make genre X an MMO?” that I can’t remember. And then SWG, obviously.
EQ2 had all kinds of interesting people on it as a result - Ken Perlin did the lip sync work (driving facial animations from dialog), Brian Hook worked on the rendered for a while. I’m sure there were others.
Then there’s all the things we didn’t do. I read the complete Harry Potter series specifically because we were in talks with JK Rowling to do a HP MMO, but negotiations failed.
Crazy times.
[addendum] Several of the people in the article are no longer with us (Brad McQuaid, and Kelly Flock at least)
The office park that SOE was located in on Terman Court was also demolished years ago. I remember standing at the door to my office on my last day, looking out the window at the eucalyptus trees and thinking I was never going to see the place again.
I was right.
Comments like this is why I love HN. Thanks for sharing. And RIP to your former colleagues.
Thanks, but trust me - they were no saints.
Kelly Flock threw the project I was leading under the bus with Sony Pictures on his way out the door when they fired him. I barely saved it.
Brad McQuaid, as CEO of Sigil famously didn’t even show up for the meeting where the whole Vanguard team was told the company had failed and they had no jobs, and no severance.
The games industry definitely has its heroes, but they ain’t it.
Thanks for the work you did on that! EQ really got me into gaming and "what we could make tech do". It was definitely transformative at the time!
I had such amazing times in the SWG beta.. it's a shame it never found its footing. It's ambition did it in.
Thank you!
I was an EQ “junkie” as a teenager and played it pretty obsessively for a few years. It was a potent drug. I had an friend at the university, and she discovered the game, and stopped going to class. Basically, sacrificing her university education because of an mmo addiction.
I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate.
Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would want to play today now that I have real life obligations.
It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.
In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.
I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.
I too formed memories by playing EQ in a way that was, in retrospect, dumb, and learning from the experience.
e.g. I created an Erudite wizard (who could not see in the dark) and insisted on leveling up in Toxxulia forest, the default "newbie" zone for Erudites. It was dark there, even during the day, and pitch black at night. I kept my monitor at the calibrated brightness level because I didn't want to "cheat". Monsters of an appropriate level were spread out and often hard to find. A troll NPC roamed the forest and randomly killed players. I spent many hours getting lost (and killed) there before leaving the island, only to discover the comparatively easy newbie zone that stood outside Qeynos, a short, safe, free, ship voyage away.
The game was full of stuff like this. If you wanted to do something, there was usually a very bad way to go about it and other ways that were much better. Finding those gave you a sense of accomplishment that was far sweeter than mere levels.
Modern games tend to be more balanced so you can be assured that, however you're doing something, there probably isn't another way to do it that is vastly easier unless you're doing something really weird. This "wastes" less of your time, but somehow feels less realistic. In real life, different strategies for doing things are seldom equal.
The only way the world could continuously change is via procedural generation, but for those games, the base mechanics remain the same. Minecraft comes to mind, where the 'golden path' is to gear up, find certain items, go through a portal and kill the boss. The levels are generated different every time, but the base steps are the same. I'm afraid it'd be the same with a procedurally generated MMO.
If it's hand generated, realistically they could only do a new map once every period, and the first guides would be online within hours of release. I believe Fortnite does or used to do this, making big map changes every season.
I've made an effort in recent years to actively avoid researching wikis and guides on games as I play them. I've come to think that a lot of the joy in gaming is the discovery and unraveling the systems that make the game tick. Finding the optimal ways to level or complete some mission through exploration and experimentation is always so much more fulfilling than finding the first result the comes up in google where the answer is already there for you.
Admittedly, it does take a degree of willpower and sometimes I will still do some online research when a game gets particularly frustrating. The biggest obstacle to my approach of avoiding online information is that some games feel like they're designed with that in mind and don't provide enough information in the games for an isolated player to really figure everything out.
100% agreed with games being designed for online aids. Some of the quests in Oldschool Runescape make me wonder if I'd ever have completed them without guides - it's like they're designed to be a challenge for the whole community upon release, rather than for individual players.
2007 Quest Cape with no guides is a long-standing childhood dream of mine. One I think I will never complete, but still!
I will always be in awe of the folks that figured out all of Elden ring without a guide. Some of those quests were just bananas.
I try to play through these games without a guide first, but especially with Elden Ring, there's a high chance you miss half the game then. Which is a shame.
To figure out all of ER, you'd need to play through it multiple times, comb through everything, do things in a different order, etc etc. There was a post on Reddit the other day, someone said they found Jarburg after playing for more than 900 hours. I know of it, but in two playthroughs I don't believe I actually went there yet.
I wonder if they collect analytics and they can at one point say which areas, questlines, gear items, etc are discovered the least.
There was a cheat program that kinda did this called ShowEQ. It analysed the EverQuest network traffic and was able to draw a map of the zone, and showed called the NPCs and players. The best part was that it even showed what loot was on each enemy. The barrier to entry was a bit high. It required a hub, and a second PC running Linux. Eventually it became a cat and mouse game with SOE changing the network traffic/adding encryption/etc. It was fun while it lasted!
You have to make the world big and uncharted enough that it can't be picked over quickly. I have some hope that Light No Fire might pull it off.
Probably an uncommon experience, but I felt something similar playing Final Fantasy XV. The semi-realistic scale and emptiness of the world map that people complained about actually contributed to the consistent feeling of being out in the wilderness, stumbling on dungeons and whanot. Most open-world games feel like theme parks, Eos felt like a national park. I'm told RDR2 and Death Stranding carry similar vibes.
I'd like devs to get a bit more bold about real-world scaling environments. Let a long-ass walk between towns be a long-ass walk between towns. And no mini-maps.
XV was very much "on rails" IMO, especially at first when the car could only go on pre-programmed roads; there's very little content outside of what the developers intended, and exploring isn't really rewarded. Same with XVI, which was better, but still a mostly empty overworld, little incentives to go exploring or hunting because while there is a crafting system, it's shallow and a very linear progression from one weapon to the next, usually involving taking down a hunt mark.
RDR2 is very enjoyable to go out and just explore, you definitely feel out in the wilderness sometimes there. Another one would be Kingdom Come 1 / 2, especially 2 (it's a bit 'fuller') where you can just decide to go for a hike in the forest and go hunt or find some bandits or an easter egg. It's got long-ass walks (or horse rides) between towns; when I played the first one I barely used fast travel.
Death Stranding, again not so much; the only interesting things there are the actual destinations you have to go to / from. Great scenery and experience though, and the long-ass walk is core gameplay.
Unfortunately as an early NMS player with hundreds of hours, I have seen nothing that gives me hope that LNF will have the depth that is needed for the world to feel like that. Mile wide, inch deep.
What made EQ an experience was those areas were static and took real skill to uncover how to do things.
There sure isn't much information on Light No Fire online. Hello Games must be keeping the cards close to the chest with this one.
Another aspect that differs from many of today's game is just how long it took to progress. Every upgrade felt earned. Today, rewards are tossed at players.
Interesting that progression was massively eased in later versions.
It depends on how it's earned though, I think the brainless grinding is no longer fun or rewarding. FFIX removed, solved, or hid a lot of the tedium of a lot of MMOs.
Streaming also changed the landscape.
The game meta/knowledge spreads through realtime video and incidental entertainment instead of through slow message boards only frequented by power users who would do something as lame as spend time on a 2005 message board.
It's amazing how deeply knowledgable everyone is about every game because of it.
I guess it's not good or bad. It's nice that gaming is mainstream instead of being a stereotypical loser activity it was when I was in high school.
> I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.
How about a simple NDA to prevent players sharing this kind of info?
The various tank games can’t keep people from violating military secrets laws to post tank diagrams. A game NDA ain’t gonna do shit.
How would you enforce that?
You should look at Noita!
Noita is the last thing that comment suggests he wants. Most of Noita's content can only be learned by consulting the wiki, which I assume is an intentional legacy of the designers' love of Nethack. And the world is the same every time.
I dont know it's the last thing he wants.
I feel like the same "most" of the content which lives on the wiki is very secondary to the gameloop and that the designers did a wonderful job at not letting the player optimize the fun out of the game.
The game teaches you nothing and is very cryptic, but the gameloop is simple (go down, don't die). You naturally learn how the sandbox interact (i'm on fire but I have a water flask, water clear up sludge) and the randomized (and shuffle) wands expose you to spell interactions.
You can easily spend multi hundred hours just learning through the sandbox and trying to break the game.
The cryptic stuff (34 orbs, impressing the gods, the messages) is also very cool and I think motivating to keep playing with the sandbox even after having "mastered" the mechanics of the game. (As in you never know what you could manage to find if you try to break the game)
I don't think people play noita with a guide on a second monitor.
Sorry if poorly worded, tired
> And the world is the same every time.
The overall layout (e.g. the progression of zones) and some set pieces are fixed, but the details are randomized.
Fun fact: the overall layout is configured by a PNG file, with the color of each pixel controlling which "biome" is used.
Hit the nail on the head (note: you can even look at long-running MMOs like WoW or Runescape and compare how they were played in 2004 and how they are played now, to see this in action). The data-mining and hyperoptimisation and looking everything up on the wiki means the _exploration and wonder_ that did make the MMO experience so unique is gone. Even chatting is not done in-game, at the same location in the physical world, but just on a discord chat you alt-tab to...
At this point, even if a good MMO were to come out (incredibly, this has not happened for close on two decades), recreating that experience is entirely on the player. It's on the player to forgo looking things up, or to forgo using external tools to chat, find groups, trade items, calculate strategies, etc. But since players doing that will be at a disadvantage, that is unlikely to happen in an online game...
Oh my, that long journey is one of my fondest memories of the game as well. Absolutely terrifying as a low level with barely any information on how to pull it off, having to ask strangers for help. The fear of losing all of your stuff on the way and having to run all the way back. Magical. I was just a humble human paladin on the Mithaniel Marr server.
I agree with everybody else commenting here, it was a truly unique experience that I would love to be able to re-live, but our expectations as players have moved on a long while back, you can no longer capture that magic because it's now all rote and routine. In 1999 it was the first time many of us had ever experienced anything like it, it flooded the senses and it felt like a world full of interesting people and epic adventures. It was the frontier at the time.
The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.
I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.
As another commenter pointed out, Death Stranding focuses on the travel experience, where you have to plan your route according to how much 'effort' and risk you want to take.
Back when there was Morrowind, which didn't have map markers and whose in-game map had to slowly be uncovered. You get a description and that's it. The game did come with a paper map, which was stuck to my wall for years and frequently consulted.
A modern one would be Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2; when you turn on hardcore mode (which was only added after release, but the game was designed with it in mind), you don't get your position on the map, compass, or map markers; every quest involving a location has the NPCs give you a description (and at least in normal mode, your character making a remark when you've reached a landmark). It's not so much about planning your route though.
Perhaps death stranding and its sequel might be the closest?
Depending on what you do and how you play, Eve Online has a harrowing navigation system.
And part of the joy of Eve Online is that if you want, you can be a reason travel is dangerous.
My first memory of EverQuest was leaving the tutorial quest, running along a road at night, and being eaten by a lion.
I had no idea what I was doing but I was hooked on figuring out.
Based on my experiences playing FFXIV, there's an entire generation of gamers now that get completely despirited by experiences like that and give up on the first sign of a wipe, even though these days there's no penalty for even dying...
IX is probably the most accessible "traditional" MMO there is, but it's still very intimidating because it throws a lot of information and a complex UI at you right away. If you've never played an MMO before, it's a lot.
For me, I made a high elf, didn't know page up/page down were needed to control swimming, and died in the water by the bridge leaving Felwithe, I didn't even get beyond the city gate.
I hated EQ for me the reason was it was not UO nor was it even trying to recreate the vibrancy & real world that UO's designers had gone for. *BUT* I also recognized that EQ represented a game that was much more aligned to what a normal gamer would want, one could already see that path being forged in UO as time went on. And then of course WoW came along and perfected the art.
I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.
UO had such a huge influence on me. It was amazing.
It's legitimately insane that perhaps the best MMO, or at least the one which came closer to fulfill the MMO's promise of a shared, persistent, virtual world, was also the first. How come in three decades of technological and creative development did nobody do it better?
Because the real world isn't "fun" and video games became more commercially successful when they realised that theme parks are more accessible than simulations.
Gaming was more ambitious and experimental then. The FFXI documentary [0] made me reflect on how much games have changed since. FFXI was heavily inspired by EQ so more credit to EQ but games today are so much more bland and engineered by design. That's how they achieve universal appeal and commercial success - by engineering its engagement. Reminds me of how packaged foods are engineered to be the most addictive by empirically finding the bliss point [1]. In games it will essentially be dopamine per minute and now mainstream games will never do something as crazy as crafting experiences as random and lumpy as real life. Instead every engagement is crafted to never be too frustrating and to give just enough rewards to keep the gamer on that hamster wheel, with the next engagement never being too far away.
Original Soulsborne games felt fresh because FromSoftware put friction and obscurity back in the spotlight.
[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MUAJ-cJbOFY
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bliss_point_(food)
Both of these games are still going. Atlantic has a huge player base. It’s not the cutthroat game it once was but it’s still very much exciting. You can still die and all your shit poof. Housing on Atlantic is still in demand and hard to get if that gives an idea how healthy it is.
Eq has of course had some major server merges but your old account will still be on both UO and EQ.
To me UO is a breath of fresh air after 20 years of trash games except for a stand out few. Seeing my old wood elf ranger with swift wind and lupine dagger still glowing was magical. Almost as magical as re-exploring kelethin.
i remember doing the staff of the wheel quest as a newbie level 16 wizard who had barely seen any of the world
i met so many people who helped me get into some really scary places (lguk at 16 is terrifying) as i wondered in all sorts of climates and places, what a fantastic place!
looking back the world felt so different and huge and alive with life
i will never get that experience again
Totally, me and my friend used to share an EQ account in school. His parents paid for it so he got to play during the day, and I would play at night from midnight until 6am, then I'd go to school. It was profoundly unhealthy, which is why that game earned the name "Evercrack".
Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried forward all the terrible parts of EQ.
Just the amount of sitting around waiting that you have to do in EQ that I had forgotten about is incredible. Managing your water and food levels, having to go find your corpse when you die and it taking 5 hours just to get there, pitch black nights so you're forced to walk around with a lantern, camping a spawn with 100 other people trying to get the same items as you to complete the same inane quests, broken quests that you can't even complete to progress the game forward...
And yeah, one weekend was enough. I got real shit to do, I have time for nonsense, but not THAT kind of time.
There's a musician named Richie Truxillo who made so many comedy songs about EQ back in the day, but your comment just reminded me of "Has Anybody Seen My Corpse." I haven't thought about corpse runs and dragging folks' corpses back to them in ages!
ohh if i had a million platinummmm
wow that's a memory i had lost for many years. thanks
For me it feels like it was the perfect storm of games like this releasing at a time when a generation of gamers' attentions weren't saturated.
I didn't play EQ but on FFXI airships ran on a 15min schedule and if you missed it you would have to sit and wait, not dissimilar to real life. This kind of friction added a charm and immersion to the game but would never fly in a game today [pardon the pun].
Nowadays a lot of the enjoyment I seek out of games is mechanical difficulty and adrenaline because most the other aspects can be fulfilled away from the screen...
Your perception of time is profoundly different when you are a kid with no job.
Painful death makes you try hard to avoid it ensuring real stakes.
It makes it more realistic. At this age, it would mean I just quit the game - like my character died for real!
Never played EQ, but spent my fair share of time in WoW. And then, many many other MMOs. What was aleays great is jumping into a random new game and not knowing what to do or where to go - just figuring it out on the fly. A few times in recent history I've tried to jump into the latest MMOs only to find that they hold your hand every step of the way, forcing you to walk through lengthy tutorials. If I wanted to play a game I'd just load up Doom. I want a WORLD to explore! Until MMOs learn to provide a rich and compelling world again, the genre is dead in my eyes.
Early EverQuest required groups to progress because trash mobs were hard, the environment was vast, dungeons had traps, there was no auction house and players hung out in tunnels shouting their wares.
26 years later, the nostalgia hits me every so often and I spin up Project Quarm or Project 1999 where it still plays the same, and it’s fun for awhile but I’m not enjoying it as much as I enjoyed the memories.
I enjoy the luxuries afforded by modern games, with three kids and a busy job, I wonder how anyone found the time to play as long as EverQuest required.
Oh man those tunnels. I remember a tunnel scam where a seller would close the trade window and quickly reopen it with a lesser item that used the same icon. Not sure if the GMs did anything about it but I always made sure to carefully inspect the item I was buying.
> players hung out in tunnels shouting their wares.
The Luclin bazaar from EQ is still one of the coolest/most unique game features I have ever seen. Park your character to open up a shop with selected items from your inventory. Browse everybody's wares by walking around and clicking them to see their shops!
In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime.
I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated anywhere.
World of Warcraft had this in Booty Bay. There was a hilarious achievement where you first got your reputation to max with the Booty Bay guards by killing the nearby pirates, then the other half was to kill the guards until the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction exalted you; a 2.5x reputation grind that took weeks. And when you were done you couldn’t enter Booty Bay anymore because the guards killed you on sight.
The things we do…
This randomly reminded me of when I grinded dwarf reputation in World of Warcraft so that at level 40, I was the only human riding a goat/ram (dwarf mount) instead of the horse.
I remember killing endless crocodiles in STV so I could turn in their heavy leather I think during the event where the realm works together to open the AQ gate.
I'll see a 13yo gardener here in Mexico and wish he could be doing that instead of working. :(
I haven't played retail in the last few years so I'm not sure if that rep has changed, but on my main I never bothered to regain the Booty Bay rep and was still KOS to them. Hilarious.
Insane in the membrane [1].
Nowadays it probably takes 20 hours if you really grind. Repairing rep on the pirates was soul-destroying but so was getting all those lockboxes for Ravenholdt rep.
[1]: https://www.wowhead.com/achievement=2336/insane-in-the-membr...
EverQuest was my first real brush with agency. I was still a teenager but I loved researching strategies and game mechanics to figure out how my guild and I could play more effectively, and it paid off. We were never world first, but we got closer than we should have for the small server we were on. The feeling that the work I was doing was contributing to the success of an entire organization of people, and that this group of adults was happy to defer to me as long as my work ethic and ideas were good, was so much more powerful and motivating than anything I'd experienced in school. I don't think I felt that empowered again for another ~decade, well into my "real" career.
> Gijsbert van der Wal’s famous 2014 photograph of Dutch teenagers ignoring a Rembrandt masterpiece in favor of staring at their phones has become for many psychologists, social theorists, and concerned ordinary folks a portrait of our current Age of Digital Addiction in a nutshell.
While a great photo, to me it looks like the kids are just doing some kind of school / field trip assignment.
It could be anything, but it resonates with people for a very good reason. Many people feel the negatives of technology and social media and miss the time before it. I know how sentiment will skew here, and I know it's easy to take for granted the advantages of having a fully capable pocket computer. But I also understand what we have given up for it.
A similar example I've seen is a photo of a British railway carriage full of commuters staring glumly at their phones.
It makes me laugh because we all just used to stare glumly at our newspapers! It's not like we were discussing philosophy or something...
I remember playing Ultima Online and really enjoying that game when I heard about a new first-person MMORPG in development called EverQuest.
I ran a couple of popular game sites back then and had industry connections so I got early beta test access to try out EverQuest.
Unfortunately, I made a bad choice when I chose to make a Human character, which was night-blind. On top of that, it seemed like every time I logged in it was night time and the game was nearly unplayable away from lights, fires and torches for that character.
To make matters worse, I started in Freeport which had several invisible zone walls so on top of not being able to see, I constantly kept zoning which constantly interrupted the game.
As you can imagine, I lost interest rather quickly and went back to UO. I gave my beta account to a gamer friend of mine, who had a much better experience than I had during beta.
When EverQuest eventually launched, several friends of mine bought it so I decided to buy it as well. By then I had learned to make elven characters because they had infravision/ultravision that allowed them to see at night.
It was fun for a little while, but then bad game design concepts led to another problem. They arbitrarily decided to assign some of the classes with experience penalties, including the one I played which had a 40% experience reduction, which was ridiculous.
The problem was that at that time, that information was not well known so I all I noticed was all of my friends were outleveling me because none of their classes had penalties.
Eventually by around level 12 (which took a while back then), I was too low to group with them, despite playing the same amount of time they did, and I could no longer gain experience in their groups.
Since EverQuest was heavily group-focused, I decided to go back to Ultimate Online.
A few months later, I decided to give it another try and made a bard. Suddenly, everyone was inviting me to group and that made the game a lot more fun and led to a lot of great memories.
A few years ago I tried to go back and play it but, either due to age or having less free time, it was just too slow and difficult to play after all of these years.
While I don't play it any more, I am really glad that it is still online and even if it shuts down, there is another player-run (and licensed) rogue server available.
I met so many good friends in that game, including one of my best friends to this day, so I will always have fond memories of it.
I loved EverQuest. I still have some great memories of it. My friends and I still go back to playing it every once in a while. EverQuest also gave me some fantastic typing skills (from having to type in a significant amount of things for activating quests and for chatting) that have turned out to be well worth all the time I invested.
I can nearly single-handedly credit EverQuest with my career. I got my start in the ShowEQ and eqemu sphere, first building little PHP apps to manage servers and such, then reverse-engineering -- I learned x86 and then C++ all to get the lifts in Kelethin working. Hell, nearly 25 years later, any time I work on some new graphics API or game engine, I end up writing an EverQuest zone renderer.
Not my favorite game of all time, but certainly the one with the biggest impact!
Edit to add: also, huge props to that community for both humbling me and teaching me more than I could've imagined. Went from a dumbass 13 year old saying "ROT13? Isn't that some unbreakable encryption?" In the ShowEQ IRC channel because she couldn't imagine saying she didn't know something, to a competent reverse-engineer. I cannot imagine how insufferable I was haha.
Likewise. My first introduction to scripting was automating EverQuest. I learned the basics of path resolution writing a script to grind misty thicket picnics. I wrote my own HUD-style UI overlay to replace most of the default windows. And I learned about pointers and disassembly and jumps disassembling hack plugins from shady sites.
I credit ShowEQ with learning Linux and getting everything to work correctly. I remember absolutely trashing my PC a few years earlier trying to install Debian from a Boot magazine CD. Glad I didn’t break my monitor with bad XFree86 settings.
Everquest was my first warning about game addiction. Every teenage kid by the year 2000 had spent too much time in front of a game, of course.
But not like this.
I was sitting with a friend of mine at a computer café. This was more prevalent at the time, since a capable computer with all the modern games on it was still somewhat pricey.
So my friend starts taking to our side guy, who is playing EQ. Nice fellow.
"Hey guys, I gotta stop playing. Been here 24h straight. If I don't go to work they'll fire me."
My friend and I leave for the night.
My friend comes back to the café one night later. Our buddy is there, in the same seat.
"Shit dude, they fired me. I haven't been able to get up and go to work. This game, man."
"Sorry to hear it, what was your work?"
"I'm an attendant at a computer café."
"WTF, which one? Why didn't you just sit there and play?"
"The one across the street. Because I couldn't stop."
> Everquest was my first warning about game addiction.
I didn't play EQ, but got started on Dark Age of Camelot right when it was released. There was a confluence of life events that caused me to start playing. Three years later, multiple accounts, and who knows how much game time, it had ruined my health and a wonderful long term relationship.
The upside is that the loss caused me to quit by giving away my accounts. I literally never played again. I remember some fun times while playing, but do sometimes regret the time spent that I could have been doing something else. I also learned about myself that it's not the game that gave me issues, but the social pressure of other people relying on me.
Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day (say specially during workweek). Even if you really have no job, at that point I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.
I myself really enjoyed a game (Tibia, very popular here in Brazil) during my childhood, and, living in a large metropolis (and at the time quite violent too) and with limited opportunities for play, it was a saving grace in some ways. It really served as a playground analogue to the real world, where I could talk to people from other cultures all over the world, practice a foreign language (english), practice commerce, planning, and lots of really nice things I think it's fair to say. I think excesses of gaming were already in common consciousness at the time, and the occasional warning from my parents (in no way prohibitive) was a great reminder -- me and my older brother did check whether we were getting something good out of the experience. Specially as the dial-up internet cost was very large! (later replaced by broadband to the relief of my father). I'm also glad it didn't overwhelm my childhood.
That game has since added soft limits (already in 2006 according to the wiki), which I think are better than nothing, but probably there should be some hard limits as well (even if you're really conservative about limits... surely at least something like 8 hours a day could be universally agreed upon).
There are valid objections to those kinds of limits because there are all sorts of exceptions: bedridden people that need an activity, people that just use the game as a chatroom (quite common) to keep in touch with friends, etc.. I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.
It's also probably unlikely that those limits are going to be voluntarily enforced by all companies. I think regulation in this area is important -- in a way, those limits are actually good for the medium: they allow a minimally healthy baseline to exist and the market not be dominated by the worst, most damaging grindfests. But also probably just regulation has limits, and it's important for individual/collective conscience, education and cultural awareness to exist, so people pay attention that each activity is adding, to their lives, being meaningful (this includes social media usage, all sorts of games, etc. -- but could apply to doing anything too much like watching TV or talking to friends even). Boredom is the instinctive response that encourages taking other activities, but unfortunately adversarial design and dark patterns (and even just too captivating activities) have found ways to override this response simply to generate profit.
Moreover, as a game designer, we should be really be thinking about bringing worthwhile experiences into this world, things that teach (in all sorts of ways), move, challenge, captivate, inspire and connect us. Here's a heuristic I like: take your favorite memories and feelings and try to replicate, extend and generalize them in various ways for others.
> Reflecting a bit, I really see not plausible justification why say one account should be let to be logged in for more than 3 hours/day
Because I am the master of my time. If I wish to not play for three months, and then I decide I want to spend an entire Saturday playing, that is my choice, not yours.
> I don't think it's adding to your wellbeing.
I'm not interested in what you think is/is not good for my well being. That is a decision for me to make.
> I think those people can find other activities and other media to fill their time and chat.
Please see the above.
Game addiction hits the same part of the brain as gambling does. In fact, it’s my understanding that gambling addicts and video game addicts have nearly identical similarities in terms of how the addiction progresses and “sets in” as it where.
As an aside, and really I am sorry for this tangent, and I have no issue believing any of this, but this comment somehow feels LLM (ChatGPT) generated to me and I can’t put my finger on it, as I like to default to being wrong about such things.
I know it’s an aside but it has become such a big issue on many forums now.
Sorry for the tangent!
Fully human generated, but thanks.
Game addiction isn’t the same anymore. Games used to be primarily about telling stories, establishing atmosphere, and fulfilling fantastic roles. The writers and designers of yesteryear had centuries of unexploited sci-fi to draw from. Designers today don’t have that mountain of material to pull from, not just because no one reads anymore.
The "goblin butt" looks more like a WoW screenshot - can anyone confirm?
There WERE goblin butts in EQ; I think the models that frequented the "other side of the wall" in the Halfling starting zone, at least.
But that one looks like WoW.
EQ's were like this: https://zam.zamimg.com/images/i/d/id6571.png
I was 9 when I first played EverQuest - I'm now 35. That game taught me how to type on a keyboard.
Probably the game that influenced my life the most. RIP Brad, and shout out to the team.
It is interesting that Everquest 1 and 2 are still around. Apparently enough people are still paying for these and other MMOs to keep the company in business https://www.daybreakgames.com/home
Still holds the most hours spent in a single game for me, and it was 100% worth it. Met a ton of cool people, improved my communication and learned useful skills leading a guild, that I later applied in my career.
I guess I'm a little younger. For me it was Runescape and Maplestory. Played heavily in the summers from 2007-2009.
I played Runescape back when it was just Falador and Varrock, and it all started because I saw a kid at the public library playing it.
And not long after that I was waking up at 2am to mine or grind some skill before I had to go to football practice at 5:30am.
I wonder what kind of permanent damage that did.
I worked for a very successful “dot com” back in the day. EverQuest was like the crack pipe for the tech crowd, people actually got divorced over addictions to it.
My (girlfriend at the time, later wife) gave me a "it's me or WoW" ultimatum at the peak of my raiding obsession. I picked her. We had moved across the country for grad school and had no friends and I was using the game as a crutch rather than like, actually meeting people. I joined a softball team with some people from her program and made a bunch of lifelong friends.
More power to everyone who can play MMO's in a way that doesn't resemble a crippling drug addiction. I've learned that I cannot, lol. And my point isn't to disparage gaming friendships or relationships, it just was not ultimately for me.
A coworker years ago told me she was a WoW Widow.
I knew a WoW widow in college. Her boyfriend got completely hooked on the game, even to the point that he didn't want to have sex with her any more! She desperately tried to get his attention back but couldn't do it, and ultimately broke up with him. She was (understandably) very bitter about the game after that and wouldn't remotely consider dating someone else who played.
Thankfully as far as I'm aware the dude eventually got control of himself again and is living a pleasant family life these days. But the addiction is real for some people.
One random story I have...I remember there was a legit riot on the Prexus EQ forums I was on because SOE decided to drop Windows 95 support for Everquest. I believe it was because Win95 wouldn't support DirectX 6 or something. I was good to go though...I had Win 98 and a Geforce MX 240 I purchased at Best Buy.
I think W95 supported up to DirectX 7-8a.
Hehe, a little upsetting that I only see one former UO player in these comments right now. I loved the anarchy and never stopped missing it through FFXI, WoW, and other MMO's.
There was a rivalry between EQ and UO and no one I knew including myself had the time to play both.
I was a freshman in high school when UO came out. I distinctly remember getting accepted into the beta test and frantically checking the mailbox every day until the CD finally showed up. I had played Gemstone III (a text MUD on AOL) and Sierra's The Realm so I wasn't totally new to the concept, but the vision and scale of UO had my excited out of my mind.
I did have fun with it but ultimately I think I was too young and innocent to appreciate the game. Every time I felt like I was getting my feet under me, someone would murder me and steal all my shit. I think at one point I even got my own house... until someone murdered me and stole the key, leaving me penniless. It was a very griefer friendly game, and if you weren't one of the griefers, look out.
Eventually I got involved in the UO emulation scene and became the maintainer of a popular emulator for a year or two, and ran a private server with some Canadian tech bro (not that we had that term in the 90s) who had a bunch of money and hardware to spare. That was some of the most fun I've ever had in gaming.
Is it a coincidence that this shows up as John Smedley launches a new MMO (yesterday)?
As much as I loved EverQuest, it has informed my view that the world is full of addictive substances. And most people probably need a disinterested third party who loves them and helps them manage the addiction. Until they build their own defenses.
I never played because I saw my friends get addicted. I'm not judging that as "bad". People are free to spend their lives however they want. But, ... just to pass on...
My friends had a company. Then they got into EverQuest. I don't know what percent of "work time" they spent playing. Maybe zero. But, they would stay at the office after work to play. I visited one day and saw playtime in the corner of the screen of one friend at ~36 days. My first thought was "what could they have done with over 5 months of "work time". If you work 40 hours a week then 36 days of game time = 846hrs = 21.6 weeks = ~5 months or work. Note: I use tons of time in my own life in ways that others would not (like spending time on HN) so again, not judging, just obsverving, though I often wish I did more productive things that would / would have lead to more future freedom.
In any case, one of those friends encouraged me to give it a try saying it reminded them of when we used to play D&D in high-school. That friend had also spent time becoming a fletcher (maker of arrows). If I understand correctly, the ability to make bows and arrows from materials was a skill. You gathered the materials, then picked "make" and you had a random and relatively low chance of succeeding. If you did succeed though, your "skill" at making bows and arrows increased. Once you passed some threshold you could always succeed. This made you a "fletcher" and people who needed bows and arrows would seek you out to buy them from you. I thought it was amazing that my friend effectively had a 2nd job. I'm guessing that's common a game mechanic in games since then?
Another of those friends also played at home on top of at the office even though they had a spouse and 3 kids under 10. After a while, their spouse demanded they stop. They visibly deleted their character but then made a new one back at work and of course all the "overtime" for the last several months had actually been "game time". 3 months later the spouse found out and said "quit or I'm leaving". My friend quit.
When World of Warcraft came out and blew past EverQuest in its reach that friend told me if I wanted to check it out be sure not to make any friends or join any guilds. They said it's the social obligation that's the addiction. Like joining a sports team, if you're not there your group can't achieve their goals so you feel obligated to participate and that's the addiction. I've never tried WoW either, having seen people spend so much time in it.
Also another random thing, another aquaintaince moved to Thailand and setup an EverQuest farm for a year or two which at the time was a new thing, making a living selling stuff in game. In which games is that common now?
> that friend told me if I wanted to check it out be sure not to make any friends or join any guilds. They said it's the social obligation that's the addiction.
I mentioned in another comment this is what got me in DAoC. I actually played a little WoW just fine because I soloed and only joined groups with randoms. It was a normal game time experience.
The box art by Keith Parkinson is a classic:
https://www.keithparkinson.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/EQ...
This seems to be entirely hand drawn (acrylic painting?) with a lot of skill.
A Google Image search for "Keith Parkinson" shows more of his great paintings. Unfortunately he died in 2005.
Oh EverQuest... funny to see this even posted here. I still occasionally log into P99 for a few hours here and there to play around at the low levels. 1 to around 24-30 is peak MMOPRG before it slows down and turns into that raid grind...
Yeah, people should know that https://project1999.com/ exists.
Doesn't hit the same when you're over 30.
Sadly not. This EQ server in a box is more my speed these days, hah:
https://github.com/Akkadius/akk-stack
Thanks for sharing this.
Yeah, I never understood why that was necessary. I get diminishing rewards as an addiction mechanic, but they all switch gameplay dramatically from adventure and exploration (and combat) quest based character growth to raid fueled gear treadmills. Some people live for the latter it seems like? But there were never any that focused on character growth all the way. It wasn't like they weren't adding content continuously anyway. It would have been possible. Or turn it rogue alike with top levels earning benefits or unlocking other options for additional playthroughs. With the number of mmorpgs made one of them would have tried it if it would jave worked I guess?
Project Lazarus (lazaruseq.com) and Project 1999 for the win. One of the best gaming communities out there still alive and kicking today. And one of the best gaming experiences.
I've got fond memories of Rallos Zek where I spent way too many hours and met my wife.
I liked the game before Luclin and the bazaar the most. It started to lose its organic appeal for me after that. Stuff like everyone just choosing to hawk goods in the commonlands was so charming.
Wow, incredible read!
As a younger people who didn't live those days, I wish there was a modern game that felt at least close if not as good as classic world of warcraft but that was as in-depth as everquest...
I like how natural the woman in the opening picture looks.
Kind of refreshing compared to all those literally overblown body parts in modern day game graphics.
My only nit to pick with this article is their definition of PvE. They said it stands for “player vs enemy” where I’ve always heard it defined as “player vs environment” where environment explicitly means not-other-players.
Player vs environment is indeed the normal definition of PvE [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_environment