The Glade 4.0

Holy crap....



I spent some time in DN hunting Vaniki (mostly on my way to kill Zlandicar) on my most recent EQ Adventures. I had no idea how obnoxious this spawn was.

Corpse runs!

Getting a cool piece of armor as a hand out from someone, then wandering around in Faydark and getting killed. By the time I found someone with Locate Corpse, it was gone.

I have screenshots going back to my first or second kill. I also have some from the second anniversary celebration, I think, when they unveiled a bunch of beta screenshots. Talk about ancient. I'll post them if I can put my hands on them.

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This cold and dark tormented hell
Is all I`ll ever know
So when you get to heaven
May the devil be the judge

Did anyone else ever kill "Pain and Suffering"? I kited it to death one time in Lavastorm, but there were handful of other zones where it was possible to aggro it as well.

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Sail forth! steer for the deep waters only!
Reckless, O soul, exploring, I with thee, and thou with me;
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all.

The greatest memory I have of any MMO is summarized in the following pictures. No achievement or event I have ever been a part of, in any MMO period, has come even a *fraction* of the way close to the excitement and adrenaline I had from this pay-off as the result of a three-day weekend of hardcore camping. I've been a part of several server-frists in WoW, and still..... not even close. I will say that the very thing that made EQ a pain, was also the thing that made it most pleasurable. Double-edged sword.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

I remember....

Getting Swiftwind, finally.

Selling "SoW" for gold in Oasis, and watching trains of specters at the dock.

Fighting over spawn points. Spire 1 camped! Hand room camped!

Having to have a beetle eye in my bag to cast flame lick.

Trading gold/plat for silver/copper to make a little cash, or selling arrows way out in South Karana

Learning how to break spawns, and solo Qeynos catacombs.

Long *** boat rides, followed by long *** runs. "oops, I died in MM, and my bind point was set to Erudin......holy hell"

Which leads to begging for a "bind" to another city, and only being able to "bind" to a city. Not fun at late hours, when none was around to sell/give you a bind to a new area.

Trying to figure how to get out of the damn cave in Surefall as a human. I mean really.....blind, tunnel, level 2? how am I supposed to weave my way thru a dark tunnel that long, with that many turns? Somehow I did.

Sitting and medding, with the book, hoping nothing came by. Sitting and waiting on my health to recover. Sitting a LOT.

EC tunnel on a Saturday morning........sell, sell, sell!

Getting feared in Kith at night.....wheeeee! Incoming 8 ghouls!

Having to have my Pull hotkey and my Train hotkey, for pulling. Harmony if it's outside, pull, run like a bat out of hell.....

Aggroing something and it following me until I zoned.......like, all the way across the zone.

Wolf form aggroing guards.

Implementation of the "Bazaar", and having to go around and find the player that had something out of the hundreds standing there. People leaving their player in game, PC on, just so their "vendor" would stay up and sell a few things. Talk about crazy.....

Arenas!

Fishbone earring.

Resist gear.

Weight reduction bags.

Druids being able to stop the rain.

I think my favorite part of EQ was that I enjoyed just sitting around and chatting... Messing around in Gfay, or Oasis, or any of the cities...

Random roleplaying, random questing, meeting new people- it never felt like a grind to me.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Still going strong.

I hope another game can replicate its community again, but I'm not sure its possible. People want too many conveniences and comforts now.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I really miss playing. I honestly just don't feel strongly enough to buy a PC just to play EQ...

It sucks not being able to just log on and mess around every once in a while.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

Getting the last piece of ivy...

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In time, this too shall pass.

Ranger protest!

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Hokanu
Duty is a magnificent blessing because it is the sign of trust from the universe.
END OF LINE.

Looks like more of a spear or halberd to me...

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This is the only EQ pic I still have, and its pretty small. It's my old sig from my guild in Planes of Power-era.

Wow, that brought back memories. Thanks for the post Lex. I spent time going through my EQ diary and the few pics I have. There were some good times.

Remember ninja looting?

A lot of my memories about EQ are outside of the world. I was really struck by how much people complained and ***** about a game. Wasn't there a guy (forsaken?) on the original Glade who wanted to bring a lawsuit against Sony after Kunark?

I thought I played a lot at 10-12 hours/week and then that study came out and people were playing 80-100 hours. That totally blew me away.

For me EQ turned the internet from being infrastructure for email and downloading Anna Kournikova pictures to a social medium. The incredible amount of EQ presence (the Glade being foremost!) was amazing to me. All for a game!

Has WoW created the same kind of passion?

WoW has done something similar, but I don't think "passion" is the word I would use.

There are a great deal of similarities, especially if someone started WoW as their first MMO. Certainly you have the same sort of raiding and guild communities, enhanced in many ways by voice chat being standard within guilds and sometimes even outside. I'm sure plenty of people are skipping classes same as they were for EQ. People still spend years ***** about the game they've been paying $15/month for. I can go on and on.

I'd say there are two major differences, however.

WoW has, more and more over time, sacrificed community in exchange for convenience. I find it hard to blame them as it seems to be the way the MMO market is going, but it makes for a big loss of something special. EQ communities were smaller and more.... meshed together. You'd spend hours sitting in one room in Guk with more or less the same people throughout the whole night. They're people you've seen around before, heard them in /ooc, and will run into again in the future. WoW, on the other hand, focuses more on the admittedly much more entertaining instance runs... and for the past 1.5 years or so you don't even do them with people on the same server unless you invite individuals specifically ahead of time. No one does this outside of guilds or specific non-guild friends since it's so much faster to use this random group finder. Then once you get in the instance, you're busy moving from the start to the end, often with no downtime where you're forced to strike up conversation.

I don't do these pickup groups all that often but I estimate the number of lines of conversation to be around 10 or less. You probably won't see those people again, either. In short, the sense of community is almost nonexistant. I know my guildies, and we have had some great times over the years, but if you don't share a guildtag with me I most likely haven't spoken to you. EQ was a lot better at this, but in a way that comes at a cost of subscribers.

Secondly, the whole experience seems... not sure how to word it exactly, but... mainstreamed? EQ was rough around the edges, but it gave it a sort of charm. Everything about WoW is well-documented. It goes beyond that even to being designed in a simple way. This doesn't mean that it's too easy or shallow or anything, just that it lacks any sense of mystery in any way. I don't really think the MMO community at large can go back to the EQ way of doing things, though. Again, there are all sorts of good reasons why Blizzard would make these changes, but it still loses a bit of special something in doing so.

But all in all I'd probably say WoW has the same magic, provided it's your first MMO. I think that is the biggest part of what most of here loved about EQ -- it wasn't EQ itself, but their first involvement in a MMO. This world that exists out there that you join for all sorts of exploration and, especially, community. Memories of fun times with guildies are just as prevalent in WoW as in EQ, but for a lot of people on this board there just won't be anything as special as your first. :p

Hey Noggel, thanks for the write-up. I can see what you mean about "convenience". In the beginning EQ had a lot of things about game play that didn't end up working very well (like having to take the boat through Ocean of Tears; once or twice was kinda' cool but after that it was a PITA). But that meant that EQ made some decisions for atmosphere or RP which deepened your initial experience, even if it pissed you off later.

Definitely. It plays a bit into the risk vs reward argument that was always brought up by EQ devs, in a sense. Take travel, for instance. I remember the trip to get to Temple of Veeshan very well.. if you were lucky enough to get a port, you still had to swim through the deadly Siren's Grotto then cross the deadly-to-people-bad-at-Frogger Western Wastelands to the dungeon on the other side. No port and you could add quite a ways to your trip. It felt really, really far away because you had to invest travel time to get there.

"Invest travel time" is a bad, bad phrase for MMOs today, so developers nix it and get/keep more subs as a result. Can't argue with that, even if I liked excessive travel. But as a result, your game lacks a feeling of distance. Will we see a new successful MMO that makes things actually feel distant in the future, or is that idea of a genuinely long journey with genuinely significant risk* something no players new to MMOs will experience?

*see my 1.5 hour trip halfway across pre-Kunark EQ on page 1... dying 1 hour into that would've meant that whole 1 hour up in smoke.

Compared to current day MMO's, just about everything about EQ was "Epic". Even simple 'group for exp' nights could turn into epic adventures that you still reminisce about 10 years later.

I've been playing Rift the last few nights. I think my Rogue/Ranger/Marksman is level 11 or so. I've been through three sets of weapons, and various pieces of armor in just about every slot (all quested 'on rails'), and I couldn't tell you the first thing about any of them (except the obnoxious rifle I won as a quest reward that makes the most gawdaful racket.. HATED that thing). However, I could, with only a small amount of effort, tell you just about every weapon my EQ Ranger used in either hand for just about his entire career. Same with a lot of the armor. I remember finishing the Ivy Etched Armor quest... Not because it was better than what I was wearing. It took so long that I had better items in many slots by then, but I still worked at it, got it, wore it (if for just screen shots and showing off) and kept it in the bank (I may still have it).

It's difficult (for me anyway) to explain this in words.I'm not sure I completely understand it myself. I remember complaining about how slow and painful leveling was, and how much of a pain in the *** corpse runs, or even travel in general was, but now, for whatever reason, I look back on that experience fondly, and wish to somehow find it again in another game, even though I know it will never happen.

Rift is a pretty good game BTW. If for no other reason than it adds new elements of adventure with the Rift and Invasion stuff, but I am not feeling the pull, or the attachment to my characters.

The closest I've come to that experience was the 30 levels or so of Vanguard I played, although I struggled with the class roles and skills (for the Ranger, although after some experimenting, I started really having fun playing my Raki Pscionicist :p). I really enjoyed the world, the game play, and even the community. It's really sad that game got so screwed up by the bean counters. It had a lot of potential.

Wow never did anything for me. I couldn't get past the visuals (just did not appeal to me AT.ALL) and the community really sucked.

I played a whole lot of Everquest, but by the end it simply got tiresome and tedious. The "community" we all ostensibly remember disappeared somewhere around Shadows of Luclin, if not before then. It was certainly gone by the time we got to Planes of Power.

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I think this is because the game started drawing different kinds of people, due to changes in game mechanics. The game was made much more accessible, and in exchange for a greater population draw, we lost the things that come with having a small, tight-knit community. In a small community you have a greater chance of player-enforcement of things like Roleplay (since let's face it, there isn't an online gaming system where the GMs or the game itself can enforce decent RP). With faster gameplay, you lose the aspect of the game where people interact with one another.

By Planes of Power, the death penalty was greatly reduced (to what, a quarter of what it was on release day?)

Lose your corpse somewhere really bad? No problem, go find a necromancer to summon it.

Get separated from your raid, or arrive late? Get a summon.

Want to get somewhere on the other side of the world really fast? Use the Nexus... or worse, click on the books in PoK.

Not to mention the armor dyeing thing. There weren't but eight armor textures in the game, the only difference being that if you had the bright red chainmail BP, everyone knew you killed Nagafen! Once dyes came around, it took away a lot of that prestige.

Later on they put in those instanced dungeons, that's when I left the game.

There are a lot more, but then the logical extension of this was when WoW came out... and even that game has continued to boil down to its most basic components, a quick-click instant gratification system where other people in the game might as well be NPCs. I can log in, queue, complete a dungeon / BG, get my phat lewtz, and log out without ever leaving a city or talking to another person. And hey, if I have to leave the city for something, I can take comfort in the fact that there will be giant glowing arrows and blinkies guiding my way to where I need to go.

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I completely agree on this one. Vanguard is the only thing I've seen in the last 10 years that had a decent shot at bringing back the feel as day one of EQ.

(Then they sold out to Sony, combined servers, reset all the Server- first achievements, took away our plots of land that we had spent resources on... and now those bastards will never see another dime from me.)

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I completely agree. I remember a strong sense of foreboding about Luclin before it came out. I think it's safe to say that Scars of Velious was the last good expansion (for me anyway). SoL just didn't feel right, and it was Planes of Power that finally sealed the deal for me.

Echoing everything Midgen and most of what Noggel and Vlad have said.

In fact, I used the "I could probably tell you at least 75% of the equipment upgrades I got in EQ between levels 10 and 40" line when discussing my dislike of the quests on rails MMO paradigm.

I also lay the blame of the failings of MMO community at the feet of pacing decisions. The only thing that's had anything near a pace that could encourage community building that I've played since 2003 has been Pirates of the Burning Sea. 10 minute encounters with 15-30 seconds between attack/ability keypresses was pretty radical, and you could actually type to talk strategy and such. "Moving for a block." "URR on the Herc Heavy." "Tack in 5.." And pickup groups actually would.

I, too, miss the days when you'd spend a week or two in the same general area, seeing the same faces. Now, you level through quests and spend maybe an hour in an area before its content is tapped out and you've moved beyond it.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

I highly doubt that folks memories around EQ are driven because the community was to great or even that the game was so well designed.

It was because it was the first of it's kind and an event. We don't remember the loot we get today in MMOs because the process isn't anything new and has stopped being remarkable.

Yeah. You only look back fondly because it was the first. I can look back and see what EQ was for what it was. And that was a **** horrible game. Everything about it was just **** terrible. Sitting in one spot for hours killing the same 5 spawns over and over just to see your exp bar not actually move even though you were basically killing non-stop? Or waiting around for a mob to spawn for 19 hours so that you might get a drop that is only slightly better than what you got 29 levels ago? There was no real sense of progression unless you were raiding. And that was even **** worse. Racing to a boss because 9 other guilds were racing to the exact same boss only to get trained by the other group **** you over because nothing was instanced. Yeah. **** old school EQ.

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Los Angeles Kings 2014 Stanley Cup Champions

"I love this **** team right here."
-Jonathan Quick

I disagree with this. That might be a small part of it, but it's not entirely it.

I think it's partly because I valued different things then than I don't now. There were other games out at the time (and even prior). DAoC, etc... they just weren't even close to the same thing.

If EQ then looked like WoW does now, I wouldn't have liked it as much. If it had started out with the SoL Moon/Martian crap, I wouldn't have liked it as much. I think part of the fondness looking back is that the game was fscking HARD.. or at least it took a LOT of work to obtain even small amounts of progress. And almost nothing was soloable. You had to find people to work with. People who were dependable, and weren't complete asshats/duchebags . When you did manage to acquire some upgrade, or ding a level, or finish some hellacious quest, you felt like you had accomplished something. Jump-up-out-of-the-chair-and-dance-around-the-room type stuff... There were no 'rails', especially early on when there wasn't even a lot of (reliable) info on the spoiler sites like Allah's etc..

My expectations have certainly changed. If I were to encounter a game like that now, I would probably not get too involved with it. I'm older, I don't have the time or the energy, and I don't think a game like that would be very popular, so the chances of finding a decent community would be extremely low. So, I'm content to play whats out there, try things that are fresh and new, complain about it, and reminisce about the 'good old days'.

Games today are prettier (graphics wise), probably less buggy, and are certainly a LOT easier in every way than EQ was, but no one will ever convince me that they are 'better' in any way other than the technology.

There is probably a name for such nostalgic fondness. I know my Father would never agree that modern cars are better than the old cars he used to drive in his youth. Even though every single thing about them (except probably ease of maintenance) is 'better' (comfort, safety, reliability, etc..) you couldn't convince him of that. It's the same kind of thing...

It's really just the MMO version of "I'm Getting Old", or 'GET OFF MY LAWN!!' :p