EverQuest in Unreal engine (fan project)

[Mortmal]

EverQuest was successful because it was one of the pioneers, although it was just a MUD with a graphic interface. But they hardly added content besides paid expansions, which often didn’t cater to new players and sometimes only catered to the top 1% of raid players, like Planes of Power and its follow-ups. It was clearly not a viable model. Worse, it was completely group-centric, and you couldn’t do anything solo, or you were stuck in very tedious solo spots. A new player starting would find themselves alone and unable to do anything at all. Then there was all the user-unfriendly stuff, like corpse recoveries and such. In retrospect, it was not worth spending so much time on it.

 

[anvi]

I think new players finding nobody to play with is a huge issue with these games. They need to figure something out. A clever method. Vanguard had a good idea, they had a Mentor system where high levels could drop down to a lower level to join a group. It worked well but it's a bit artificial and kinda sucks to lose access to spells that you are used to. EQ didn't know what to do about it, it took them 9 years until they finally added mercenaries which are AI bot characters to play with new people. Terrible solution though, someone joins an MMO and for months they have to play alone with a bot until they even see higher level players. No wonder it died.

They doubled down on bad ideas too. Like they added an option to just pay to go straight to level 80 or something, and be closer to the higher level players. That's terrible too for lots of reasons. The main thing I hated is that they made leveling faster and easier. They hoped it would be easier and more welcoming for new players and help them catch up to old players. But the whole point of the game was that it's brutal and takes ages and you have to chip away at it with help from real people. Making it easy just made it feel stupid. So new players now still have nobody to play with, and now the gameplay is spoon fed at high speed with no challenges to overcome. Like the opposite of what made the game popular to begin with. Pretty soon there were no new players. New players tried WoW and new MMOs. So in a way they destroyed EQ to attract people who never showed up. There were a lot of other problems too. I've never known a game with so many problems lol. But some parts of it were amazing, better than any other RPG by a mile. I think a lot of us assumed there would be a new MMO that would come along and do EQ but better. But 25 years later it never showed up... They all copied WoW instead which is quite different.

 

[Old Hans]

Once better options came out, everquest died out. It was a corpse by like 2004.

which is crazy thinking about it now. EQ wasnt even out for that long before it was considered a dinosaur compared to WoW

 

[anvi]

It aged really quickly but it's complicated. I still like playing it. And I mean it is still alive now, 25 years later, with enough players to fund them pooping out an expansion pack each year. Most games from that era are not still being talked about, but EQ still comes up, not just by me

Looking at Beans's chart, it had a decade with >100,000 people paying a monthly sub, and a lot of that was over 200,000. Rough sums: 100,000 people paying $10 a month = $1 million per month. $12 million for a year. For a decade $120 million. And again that's just subscription money, they made a lot from box sales and expansion packs too. That's based on 100,000 and most of those years were 200,000 so it's at least more like $200. But probably a lot more from the years it was big. All this from a game with a budget of $3m that they thought would be forgotten about a few years later.

It did age quickly though. Those early days of 3D things were advancing fast. EQ looked much better than Quake from a few years earlier. But then GTA3 looks a lot better than EQ just a few years later again.

Quake

EverQuest

GTA 3

My memory of the graphics in 1999 are that the environment looked low tech, even at that time, crazy polygon ground. Although the textures were good and the art style was awesome. I loved the Scooby Doo trees. But characters models looked realistic and the armor was mind blowing. Each piece of armor was a unique item so if you got different sleeves or bracers leggings or whatever, they looked different. And the detail and texturing was amazing. I followed a guy with chainmail armor just to watch the armor. It looked so good, and there was something about seeing it on a CRT monitor that made it look even better. It felt like VR when I looked at things up close. (Even the sound was better back then, something about the Awe32 sound card really boosted the sounds and music.)

 

[Beans00]

It aged really quickly but it's complicated. I still like playing it. And I mean it is still alive now, 25 years later, with enough players to fund them pooping out an expansion pack each year. Most games from that era are not still being talked about, but EQ still comes up, not just by me

Looking at Beans's chart, it had a decade with >100,000 people paying a monthly sub, and a lot of that was over 200,000. Rough sums: 100,000 people paying $10 a month = $1 million per month. $12 million for a year. For a decade $120 million. And again that's just subscription money, they made a lot from box sales and expansion packs too. That's based on 100,000 and most of those years were 200,000 so it's at least more like $200. But probably a lot more from the years it was big. All this from a game with a budget of $3m that they thought would be forgotten about a few years later.

It did age quickly though. Those early days of 3D things were advancing fast. EQ looked much better than Quake from a few years earlier. But then GTA3 looks a lot better than EQ just a few years later again.

Quake

EverQuest

GTA 3

My memory of the graphics in 1999 are that the environment looked low tech, even at that time, crazy polygon ground. Although the textures were good and the art style was awesome. I loved the Scooby Doo trees. But characters models looked realistic and the armor was mind blowing. Each piece of armor was a unique item so if you got different sleeves or bracers leggings or whatever, they looked different. And the detail and texturing was amazing. I followed a guy with chainmail armor just to watch the armor. It looked so good, and there was something about seeing it on a CRT monitor that made it look even better. It felt like VR when I looked at things up close. (Even the sound was better back then, something about the Awe32 sound card really boosted the sounds and music.)

EQ and EQ2(and probably dozens of other dead mmos) aren't 'alive' in that sense. They are kept alive by whales that pay thousands of dollars each per year.

I saw an estimate that the average EQ2 player spends 2500 per year(that game is much more dead than ever eq1).

 

[anvi]

Probably but it's 25 year old now. There's not much from the 90s people still play or pay for. It had a good run and made fortunes.

 

[Beastro]

They were nice people too. I didn't see any conflict until about a year later when all the riff raff had joined in large numbers. The conflict was good in a way, made the game more interesting. Guilds would cockblock each other by dominating an area. I was never interested in the epeen measuring. I was more interested in where it could go in terms of gameplay. They had already talked about having wars between guilds. If you are a guild leader you could target another guild and type /guildwar or something and it would set your entire guild into PVP mode against that other guild. I don't think it ever became a reality though. Maybe on PVP servers but they came and went sadly.

But I pictured future games with a huge interesting world and people working together as guilds to hold areas against others. The only thing I've seen like this is in WoW they have that kind of thing, but it's more simplistic than I want to see. Darkfall had a lot of good ideas on paper but ended up a jankfest.

Guild culture on EQ is a big topic to go into.

It was very varied and interesting until raid culture and content consumption killed them all.

 

[Beastro]

"Other games" (plural) didn't kill EQ. DAoC, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, etc., were small potatoes. WoW killed EQ. Hardly surprising as that was exactly how it was designed: as a non-hardcore EQ. You no longer had to stay up an extra two hours on a work-night to arrange a corpse-run, and so on.

No, EQ was already in trouble nearly a year before WoW came out.

They fucked up with Gates of Discord in early 2004 which caused a lot of problems. Even before then, there was discontent in the community about the direction that the expansions were going in, such as Luclin having alien looking mobs to fight that was moving away from a more DnD-like fantasy setting.

This was the time when they were inviting the major figures in the leading raiding guilds to talk about what needed changing.

It was during all this trouble that WoW emerged on the horizon and people tired of Everquest began to look to it as a better prospect. Fires of Heaven and some other major guilds were upfront in abandoning EQ for WoW because of it's issuesband WoWs promising development.

The issue with EQ was it wasn't built to grow in the direction that it later went into with raid content. When Everquest came out, even the devs had no idea about raiding and had very weird ideas around how early raid targets would be handled, and indeed, how group encounters would be, too.

Splitting groups of mobs with Monk FD was originally seen as an exploit and was punished because it was a player developed tactic the devs never considered. It was later a concession that they went along with that resulted in Monks becoming the main pull class when originally they were simple DPS.

Crowd control wasn't an original idea, either. Enchanters were originally to be the pullers and do so with mez. Clerics too with their lull line of spells and an added reason for them being a plate class to soak up damage from aggroing. Using mez to lock down mobs in fights was something players, again, came up with.

For raids, CH heal routines were never considered. CH was designed as a between fights heal to top players off, not one players would use in battle, much less chaining Clerics together to keep a Main Tank with it, which is why it never had a successor spell once players HP went above it's 10k heal max. Verant seriously expected non-CH healing to be used for fighting the first dragons and gods.

Everquest created MMO raiding.

The issue with that is the itemization and growth in stats wasn't made for that in the beginning and it peaked with Velious before becoming ludicrous by Luclin. The itemization growth curve and raiding ruined the PvP servers and ultimately ruined the entire game because it destroyed the culture the community had created.

WoW was made with a more clear idea of what it would grow into and came with EQs lessons built into it mixed with a wider vision ariund it's scope and growth potential.

 

[Beastro]

Then there was all the user-unfriendly stuff, like corpse recoveries and such. In retrospect, it was not worth spending so much time on it.

But those were the reason ls why it was worth spending time on.

Every day was an adventure, and some days went VERY bad and saw you up late night just happy to have recovered your corpse and only lost a goof chunk of a level all due to one bad pull or one bored idiot convincing the group to exp in a new, little known dungeon he'd heard of.

EQ was designed before "content consumption", but it slowly was built tp cater to it, which resulted in the unsustainable cycle of expansions that grew the game world too much and left empty zones anywhere and they tried to keep up with the raiders.

A good example of how different the design philosophy that EQ was made from can be seen in the game's quest and how they were distributed and itemized. A game now built with WoW as a model would never be so terrible, but grabbing loot wasn't the main tatget, it was the adventure.

EQ genuinely was made to be a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game with how you created your own story as you went about the world and interacted with one another, not what came later that misused the term RPG.

 

[Mortmal]

Then there was all the user-unfriendly stuff, like corpse recoveries and such. In retrospect, it was not worth spending so much time on it.

But those were the reason ls why it was worth spending time on.

Every day was an adventure, and some days went VERY bad and saw you up late night just happy to have recovered your corpse and only lost a goof chunk of a level all due to one bad pull or one bored idiot convincing the group to exp in a new, little known dungeon he'd heard of.

EQ was designed before "content consumption", but it slowly was built tp cater to it, which resulted in the unsustainable cycle of expansions that grew the game world too much and left empty zones anywhere and they tried to keep up with the raiders.

A good example of how different the design philosophy that EQ was made from can be seen in the game's quest and how they were distributed and itemized. A game now built with WoW as a model would never be so terrible, but grabbing loot wasn't the main tatget, it was the adventure.

EQ genuinely was made to be a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game with how you created your own story as you went about the world and interacted with one another, not what came later that misused the term RPG.

On paper, that was the idea. In reality, overcrowded spots and people training each other for the few worthwhile areas made adventuring impossible. Instead, it was a grind with a demented amount of repetitive tasks just to gain one level. The development team never listened to the community, leaving certain classes useless for a long time — hybrids, necromancers, shamans, mages. Content became obsolete quickly, and you couldn’t do anything without a tank and a cleric. You’d expect them to have added AI-controlled mercenaries by now, but what I see is that you can only buy a level 80 character and use the mercs at level 80, which means everything before that is basically trash content. The game also focused heavily on raids, which were the pinnacle of frustration — long hours for rewards that became worthless compared to trash loot from the next expansion. And all of this while playing with a team of 50 people who made codexers look like friendly extroverts.

 

[anvi]

"Other games" (plural) didn't kill EQ. DAoC, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, etc., were small potatoes. WoW killed EQ. Hardly surprising as that was exactly how it was designed: as a non-hardcore EQ. You no longer had to stay up an extra two hours on a work-night to arrange a corpse-run, and so on.

No, EQ was already in trouble nearly a year before WoW came out.

They fucked up with Gates of Discord in early 2004 which caused a lot of problems. Even before then, there was discontent in the community about the direction that the expansions were going in, such as Luclin having alien looking mobs to fight that was moving away from a more DnD-like fantasy setting.

This was the time when they were inviting the major figures in the leading raiding guilds to talk about what needed changing.

It was during all this trouble that WoW emerged on the horizon and people tired of Everquest began to look to it as a better prospect. Fires of Heaven and some other major guilds were upfront in abandoning EQ for WoW because of it's issuesband WoWs promising development.

The issue with EQ was it wasn't built to grow in the direction that it later went into with raid content. When Everquest came out, even the devs had no idea about raiding and had very weird ideas around how early raid targets would be handled, and indeed, how group encounters would be, too.

Splitting groups of mobs with Monk FD was originally seen as an exploit and was punished because it was a player developed tactic the devs never considered. It was later a concession that they went along with that resulted in Monks becoming the main pull class when originally they were simple DPS.

Crowd control wasn't an original idea, either. Enchanters were originally to be the pullers and do so with mez. Clerics too with their lull line of spells and an added reason for them being a plate class to soak up damage from aggroing. Using mez to lock down mobs in fights was something players, again, came up with.

For raids, CH heal routines were never considered. CH was designed as a between fights heal to top players off, not one players would use in battle, much less chaining Clerics together to keep a Main Tank with it, which is why it never had a successor spell once players HP went above it's 10k heal max. Verant seriously expected non-CH healing to be used for fighting the first dragons and gods.

Everquest created MMO raiding.

The issue with that is the itemization and growth in stats wasn't made for that in the beginning and it peaked with Velious before becoming ludicrous by Luclin. The itemization growth curve and raiding ruined the PvP servers and ultimately ruined the entire game because it destroyed the culture the community had created.

WoW was made with a more clear idea of what it would grow into and came with EQs lessons built into it mixed with a wider vision ariund it's scope and growth potential.

I always felt like the devs didn't really understand the players or the game very well. Raiding was such a chore and I hated how artificial it was to get huge batches of loot to distribute. The game was so good when groups or small groups would do dungeons, they should have done more of that. The raid gear harmed all this too because the group content was not as challenging when you are wearing a bunch of raid gear. It wasn't so bad at first when people had 1 raid item or so, but when it was expected that everyone had BIS (Best In Slot...) every item being a raid item, it made me hate the game. I actually quit a year in when Kunark came out. I busted my balls to get gear from the Planes for a month or so before Kunark. I was fascinated by Plane of Fear and Hate. Very hard work but fun. Then when I saw better gear being dropped all over Kunark in group and even solo spots, it just made think it was a dumb endless treadmill. And they would always keep moving the goal posts no matter what you do and what you get, a year later you'll have to spend another $30 for the privilege of making everything obsolete because there's a new copy paste world with +50 on everything.

They also did things like turn Cazic Thule into a high level dungeon. It was one of the most popular places in the game back in the day... They didn't know what they had with places like that, and Unrest and Mistmoore and Guk etc. Those dungeons are what made the game so popular. I can't believe they did cat aliens on the moon when they could have just focused on classic zones people loved. And as soon as people go beyond 50, they never see any of the classic game again. It always seemed bad design to me to take people away from what was popular to begin with. I wished the expansion was done to the existing world, adding to existing zones or growing them or something. They also needed to keep the old world populated so new players don't find an empty game. There are things they could have done but didn't. Like add some Prestige classes, that would encourage everyone to start the game again with a new class and that would help new players.

I moved to Winter's Roar which was an emulator server that had lots of great ideas that improved the game mostly. EQ should have done that instead of pumping out expansions... Like the Treasure Maps idea which was awesome. The maps were a random loot that you got if you were lucky. You click the map and it gives you coordinates in an old zone. Then you get a group or raid together and go to that location in the old zone and dig and waves of enemies appear. It was really good... And I liked that newbies would see action packed battles in their zones sometimes. They also had a really good trading idea long before the Bazaar came along. It was kind of like the Bazaar but built into the original cities. So you go to Freeport or Qeynos or whatever and there would be traders there. They later added a broker. And there was an auction channel and people actually did auctions which was awesome because you got more for your items. The real EQ did none of these things, just pumped out more raid content for that niche. It's a shame.

p.s. Winters Roar also focused on group content and made more dungeons for groups with some advanced boss mechanics and stuff. To me that's what the game should have focused on, it was so good.

 

[anvi]

They were nice people too. I didn't see any conflict until about a year later when all the riff raff had joined in large numbers. The conflict was good in a way, made the game more interesting. Guilds would cockblock each other by dominating an area. I was never interested in the epeen measuring. I was more interested in where it could go in terms of gameplay. They had already talked about having wars between guilds. If you are a guild leader you could target another guild and type /guildwar or something and it would set your entire guild into PVP mode against that other guild. I don't think it ever became a reality though. Maybe on PVP servers but they came and went sadly.

But I pictured future games with a huge interesting world and people working together as guilds to hold areas against others. The only thing I've seen like this is in WoW they have that kind of thing, but it's more simplistic than I want to see. Darkfall had a lot of good ideas on paper but ended up a jankfest.

Guild culture on EQ is a big topic to go into.

It was very varied and interesting until raid culture and content consumption killed them all.

Yeah my god, it was completely changed. I remember at first there were lots of small fun guilds. I never wanted to be part of anything, too anti social, but I ended up in lots of guilds eventually. And some of the guilds I liked the idea of. There was one I never got to join but it was basically one guy who was really good and then a bunch of people who were like his crew. But I liked the idea of one leader who knew a lot and the rest all try to learn from him and impress him. It had a Spartacus feel. He was even called Thelion. The lion. And I liked that it was a small guild. I think it was only about 10 people but they were all good. I just wanted to play the game, I didn't really want to socialise so I didn't like the idea of guilds. But I would have joined that guys guild because it seemed pretty badass. Like a military gang. They even had a cool name, Arch Overseers.

I started the game with real life friends and they dragged me into a guild they met. That was small too, about 15 people. I played with them for a long time but decided I didn't really like them. They had a few noobs who I didn't want to play with and then an elitist group who would get a group of 6 together regularly and do stuff. I rarely got a group with them which sucked. And I think someone stole an item from me which pissed me off. So I left to be a lone wolf, and ended up in lots of other guilds. I really loved some of them. One was a husband and wife from Europe somewhere and they learned English from EQ. They were really good at it and the game. The guy played a Warrior and the wife was a Cleric so together they were the backbone of any group or raid. And then there were a bunch of noobs following around, but it was fun. And I made a friend. Then the leader couple quit suddenly and the guild fell apart which was a great shame. I joined another guild which was hardcore and very good but I hated the leader, he was a bossy douche. I left them to be a lone wolf again and he was banned from the game not long after that.

Then I joined the best guild I was ever in. Truly cool and international. A Russian guy who sounded just like Jack Nicholson because he spent a lot of time in America. He was awesome. A French guy who was too dramatic and panicky, he got called Douchebaguette. But he was really good at the game and a nice guy. An American guy who was a Chad always hitting the bars and dating girls. Very specialist kind of player who knew everything. He left and joined the army irl. Another American guy who was really nice and very good, key to the guild. Several others. And the leader was this Euro guy with an accent, I think Danish or something, and he sounded kind of like viking. And he acted like a viking and ran a tight ship on raids. I never liked discipline but I dislike sloppy raids that take all night even more. So he was good, he got shit done in a couple of hours. They all used TeamSpeak or something to communicate. I listened but didn't talk. I was playing Cleric and Necro. We were really good... It was a dreamteam really. I was lucky to have been part of that guild because it was far better than anything else I've done in gaming like that.

But yeah basically all of these guilds and all other guilds like them, were killed by raiding and the obsession with rushing through content. The huge raid guilds took over with 150 people that could kill all the big beasties and supply everyone with the best loots in the game. My server had 2 huge guilds like that, both racing each other griefing each other to be the best. It always seemed stupid when they could just team up and achieve the same things faster. There was also another guild that was super elite, really small guild like 20 people but all of them were in the best gear and could somehow kill the biggest and hardest content. I had some fun with raiding but damn... It really ruined the game for me. Grouping was so much fun, and even soloing. Raiding was just a drag. Time consuming and goofy and then I didn't like being given the best gear in the game, or rolling a dice for it or being granted it based on attendance or whatever. How lame.

 

[anvi]

Then there was all the user-unfriendly stuff, like corpse recoveries and such. In retrospect, it was not worth spending so much time on it.

But those were the reason ls why it was worth spending time on.

Every day was an adventure, and some days went VERY bad and saw you up late night just happy to have recovered your corpse and only lost a goof chunk of a level all due to one bad pull or one bored idiot convincing the group to exp in a new, little known dungeon he'd heard of.

EQ was designed before "content consumption", but it slowly was built tp cater to it, which resulted in the unsustainable cycle of expansions that grew the game world too much and left empty zones anywhere and they tried to keep up with the raiders.

A good example of how different the design philosophy that EQ was made from can be seen in the game's quest and how they were distributed and itemized. A game now built with WoW as a model would never be so terrible, but grabbing loot wasn't the main tatget, it was the adventure.

EQ genuinely was made to be a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game with how you created your own story as you went about the world and interacted with one another, not what came later that misused the term RPG.

On paper, that was the idea. In reality, overcrowded spots and people training each other for the few worthwhile areas made adventuring impossible. Instead, it was a grind with a demented amount of repetitive tasks just to gain one level. The development team never listened to the community, leaving certain classes useless for a long time — hybrids, necromancers, shamans, mages. Content became obsolete quickly, and you couldn’t do anything without a tank and a cleric. You’d expect them to have added AI-controlled mercenaries by now, but what I see is that you can only buy a level 80 character and use the mercs at level 80, which means everything before that is basically trash content. The game also focused heavily on raids, which were the pinnacle of frustration — long hours for rewards that became worthless compared to trash loot from the next expansion. And all of this while playing with a team of 50 people who made codexers look like friendly extroverts.

I agree with you both. I think it needed to be brutal to be compelling. But it overdid it in parts. And it took too long to do stuff in general. I was happy with it being a long term thing, but at times it felt mean. Also EQ was a victim of its own success with a lot of that. I remember before any expansions it was so busy... Lower Guk had 100 people in it. Every room was camped by a full group and there were people camping stuff in all the hallways and stuff. It was madness. The whole place empty of mobs and as soon as one spawns a bunch of people are trying to snag it for their group. Not only that but in their infinite wisdom they increased spawn time right during this issue. It was orginally about 20 minutes and they increased it to 30.... It felt very anti player.

One of the things that triggered me was idea of randomness with loot. Those the fucking Jboots... I restarted as a Necro and those boots were essential. So a fun little adventure, I'll head to OOT and camp that guy. I set up camp there and was watching TV and eating snacks and enjoying myself. But 10 hours later the thing never showed up once... I repeated it again the next day and the next day. I don't know if people kept getting it once I went to bed or what but the bad luck was ridiculous. I even petitioned GMs to check it wasn't bugged because I didn't see it for days. It probably took me 30+ hours of waiting for that.

There needs to be rarity to items but I didn't like the idea of random spawns and loot chance. Someone can show up and the thing is already spawned, you kill it and get the item in 2 minutes. Or you have bad luck and it could take a week or more. I like camping mobs in one spot but I want to know I'll get it within a day at least... Having things randomy not spawn over and over was no good. I always thought things like that would be much better handled by a little quest. The quest sends you to a few tough mobs to kill, it could take you a day or two to go to all the places and kill a bunch of nameds and then combine the components to get the boots. They could be up 100% of the time so no waiting around doing nothing.

Also the dungeons were far smaller than they should have been, I mean dimensions wise. Especially with huge fat trolls that take up the entire corridoor. That was my feedback back in the day, these places are not made from real stone! Why must L Guk be so narrow everywhere? I loved it but it was better suited to soloing than fitting a group of 6 through there. I think devs appreciated it because Kunark was huge with spacious dungeons. Like I said before I think the modern way is too dumb and easy and instant gratifaction. And I think the original EQ way was too harsh to the other extreme. I always thought the correct way was more moderate in the middle. But I still think being nearer to the original EQ with the harshness and some tedium is important.

This picture says it best:

 

[anvi]

Something else that came to mind thinking of Winter's Roar. He actually changed the game world based on what the players did in huge GM run events. Something the real EQ never did... So like there was a huge undead invasion, a war, and everyone on the server gets emotes about carnage in Greater Faydark. So the players head there to see what's going on and there were Spectres and undead everywhere, attacking everyone and everything. All the guilds on the server came together to fight this big war and in the end the players lost. Greater Faydark was lost to the undead, and the zone became a high level undead filled zone. The same thing happened to Freeport and some other places. I am not sure if the players would have won the battle, would he save the zone and change somewhere else instead? I don't know. But it was cool as hell to see the world change. Now we had to sneak through Freeport whenever we got the boat and there would be raids on the Arena there and stuff.

EQ could have done so many interesting things like this. It's a shame none of it happened and they just focused entirely on mass produced raid content for that audience.