But since a lot of things that made EQ great were the things it omitted rather than what it committed, there's better than even odds that Pantheon won't rise to the same level. I am excited about Pantheon, from the guy who originally designed EQ (remember The Vision?). And the Plane of Knowledge expansion, which was live on Al'Kabor, killed a lot of the mystique and turned the world into a too-easy proto-WoW. All the newb and intermediate zones are deserted.
And that's if you're lucky: most of the time the camp would be taken by some poopsock who's been there for 12 hours already.Īll in all, I couldn't really get back into. Kill him in 30 seconds, then wait 5:30, and repeat 1000-5000 times.
In many cases the best way to solo advance your character was to camp a single mob on a 6-minute spawn timer. (For certain raiding encounters, Warriors were important, but the inconvenience of playing a non-caster was so extreme that I can't imagine why anyone would do it). If you weren't an Enchanter, Druid, a Cleric, then you were a chump. In particular, I remember the grind, and the absurd imbalances between classes. Difficulty of advancement: there was always something mysterious to discover in the future.įor funsies I started up again on the Al'Kabor server (the official one), but had the bad fortune to do so about 6 months before SE shut down the server forever.ĮQ was also one of worst games I've ever played as well. Punishing death: you felt actual fear if the monsters had you on the ropes.ĥ. For example, EQ didn't provide TL DR lists of objectives: reading the text that the quest givers emitted was often the best way to learn what the questgiver wanted.Ĥ. No automatic in-game spoilers meant that the best form of information was often in-game discovery. Relatively undeveloped 3rd-party websites, so it's hard to spoil the quest lines, lore, and zones. Compare to running with your mount across the burning crusade with the minimap open the whole time.ģ.
Even if you did download and print a zone map, it wouldn't have a pin with your location, so you must continually refer back to the 3d viewport to locate yourself relative to landmarks. This causes you stare into the 3d viewport the entire time. In general, zones were confusing and not self explanatory, and you had to "learn" a zone through repeated (and risky) exploration.Ģ. No way to skip higher level zones in order to get between lower-level zones. Monsters roam on long and non-obvious routes, attacked from further away, run faster than you, and can usually kill you if you haven't set up the fight and initiated it correctly. Ultimately I've identified a few mechanics which I think made EQ so damn immersive.ġ. I felt immersed in the world of EQ in a way that no other game has even approached. I was something around 13-15 years old for EQ in its prime, and although I never achieved max level (which was hard to do), I sunk a lot of hours into it. And it's still made the greatest impact on me of any game. Since you posted about it, I'll say that EQ is still, in many ways, the best game I've ever played. When I was playing a year ago on Al'Kabor, it was kind of a ghost town.
I don't know if the free servers are experiencing a resurgence, but that'd be cool if they were.
Totally free, native mac client, which is a huge plus for me, but they also have a more popular PC client as well.
I've been playing on the emulated EQ for Mac server, The Al’kabor Project. Second, if you are intrigued, I would love to see some Arsians join in on the old-school fun.
Is there a revival going on or is this just me projecting? Are there more people joining these nostalgia EQ servers? Will we see a modern game that tries to emulate the more "hardcore" aspects of EQ notably the very early forced socialization and community? But on the whole, I've been massively entertained once again. Yes, some of the mechanics feel outright punitive to the modern gamer. Obviously the graphic quality is a decade out of date. But the level of satisfaction provided by achieving things in this game, for me, has been (and continues to be) far beyond any other I've played. Surely I have been reminded that its not a game for the fickle gamer. Given that I was quite taken with the game 12ish years ago, and that I left with an overall positive impression of the experience, I decided to give it a try once again after all, now its free. I seem to be hearing more and more about classic Everquest. I'm curious if there's something of a revival going on lately.
Many may be aware of the emulation servers that are available, most notably Project 99. I'm sure that most who decided to view this thread have some kind of past connection to the game.