Where did the EverQuest series go wrong?

Is anyone on this board old enough to recognize this masterpiece? I remember it being one of the first games I played around 1999, when I was about 6 or 7. How come it never blew up like WoW did?

Pic related, Firiona Vie about to be IKSAR'd.

Because it didn't cater to normalfags like WoW did.

Do people still play this? I like to play old MMOs.

EverQuest was an important part in learning how to read and write, for me. It's also the reason I can't stand MMOs these days, because they're all themeparks but I want and expect sandboxes.

There's about 1000-1500 people peak time on Project 1999 if you want the real old fashioned version of EQ. I don't know how populated the live version is.

The cool thing about EQ is the sense of community. I don't think any other MMO can really compare. So if you wanted to try it you could probably easily get people to help you out.

I love EQ but calling it a sandbox is a stretch. Sure you're not lead around via wow-style quests but you're not getting much done unless you stick to your level-appropriate zones.
UO is a sandbox.

It is kinda funny, this game helped my reading and typing ability greatly

The actual game was so bad that the players had to make their own fun with each other.
Internet people then were of a quality that enabled that.

Yes, I was a bard. I was one of the people who flew across the zones, killed several creatures at once running in a figure 8 and twisting songs, and trained mobs into other people. Kind of sucked that I was mostly a mana battery in groups and raids. Though, the skills allowed me to explore many parts of the game that most people did not bother to. The problem with Everquest was that it was too fucking big, drops were infrequent, everything hit way too hard, and everyone already knew where the best items and hunting spots were. Those are the only places you could find people.

What a raging homosex.

It was undoubtedly the biggest MMO sans maybe RuneScape until WoW. Population declined slightly in the anticipation of EQ2, which was a bit of a flop and released the same time as WoW also.


The art for this game was so fucking good. I wish I still had my boxes, they opened up and had cool as fuck art of a bunch of characters fighting on the inside. Firiona Vie is also hot as fuck.


That is what I miss the most. You can play most MMOs released the past decade solo 95% of the time, and it seems like a hassle. Most people assume you know everything because wikis exist. I miss the feeling of having to manage proper communication with a high-intensity activity. And also just hanging with buddies and enjoying the world of the game.

Firiona Vie a QT

I loved EQ, I had 3 accounts and multiple teams with 2 big druids and a ton of other chrs for PL. I played Shards of Dalaya or whatever and Project1999. Both have some faults, but Project1999 is better and bigger and dedicated to original balance style of EQ before it went to PoP. Some days I think about starting up on P99 again, god knows I have a ton of fucking plat and alts to play. IMHO, the only thing "wrong" with p99 is that class balance is a little off as originally druids, paladins, rangers and wizards were more than a tad under powered, while clerics, shamans, warriors, bards, enchanters, rogues are op and necromancers and mages are balanced pretty well. But that was what is was like back in the day before PoP.

I like that you can equip things regardless of level and I think more RPGs should do that. yeah that's about all I have to say.

Doom was alright however, since i was killing the demons.

You can really boil this down to a few vague points, and generally it varies from person to person, but here's the gist of it:

EQ2 was its own mess and was really the start of SOE going down the shitter, but I'll always have fond memories of ordering pizza through an MMO with my father.

truth.

Sony thought they could run two MMOs divided their assets into two teams and dropped the ball on both. EQ2 didn't go anywhere, while EQ1 just pissed people more with each lame expansion.

Hey Delaron

In addition to what others have already said, Everquest dev team fucked up when they started to listen to community too much. In particular, a guild of obnoxious NEETs who were obsessed with raiding, and demanded rapid release of new content. All because they wanted to burn through new content as quick as possible and never had enough.

Interesting. That's one thing that always bothered me about EQ, the obscene amount of expansions they released. Didn't know that was why.

This reminded me, there was a MMO Blizzard was developing, Titan or something I remember hearing it about the time Cataclysm was coming out I think. What happened to that? I don't think I ever heard anything related to it since then

Not only that but one of the leaders of said guild went on to work on WoW which caused "content" and "raids" to become interchangeable. This is essentially what killed the genre.

It was canceled and its assets scrapped and used in SJWatch

When the devs started pandering to Jeffery Kaplan and his guild of hyper-autists.

Also Destiny, allegedly. It was rumored to be a joint work with Bungie.

when all a game has going for it is the community then it really isnt much of a game

Someone needs to repost that strip about how Kikeplan and his guild of elitists neckbeards helped ruin MMOs in general.

Also, every major player in World of Warcraft's development (Rob Pardo, Alex Afrasiabi, etc) was involved with hardcore try-harding in Everquest. That's why vanilla's WoW was so full of stupidities that would only make sense to try-hard elitists neckbeards like those faggots.

I like to believe they were actually part of Blizzard in secret during EQs lifespan and were actively sabotaging the game. Given Blizzard's old strategy of hiring lead designers of competing RTS games and then firing them when the company they used to work for got bought out it wouldn't surprise me.

The new EQ failed because it just wasn't that good. It was nice to see them try new things, and with more time and budget, they may perhaps have been able to make something good from it. Sadly it didn't happen. The combat was likely the biggest problem. It wasn't good enough and didn't improve much over the lifespan of EQ:Landmark. I am sure a bunch of people looked over it and searched for a way to make it fun and active, but failed. And because the game was different from most other MMOs, the combat couldn't be changed too dramatically to still fit in. So they had to abandon the whole plan. Which is really too bad, because MMOs really need something new (or for me, something old, Face of Mankind) to bring new life into the whole genre.

Luclin, the third expansion. They're on their twentysomethingth expansion by now, so it went off the rails a whlie ago.
The truth is nobody has the time to deal with the soul-crushing grind of original EQ. If you had the perfect group composition you could do some really cool stuff – if not, you were going to be sitting by a wall solo-pulling mobs to your group then meditating afterwards.
The game was so slow that "quad-kiting", a technique where you could solo 4 mobs at once, then rest for 15 minutes to get your mana back, was considered borderline broken for how fast it let you level.

yep, that was indeed during luclin. what a shitshow.

Sony sold the development studio to some Russian company and they were all fired the next day.