Yeah I know daybreak basically shut down the private server version of this before releasing their own but at least the P99 devs got paid to do it I guess.
First of all I am not playing this for nostalgia, I have never played EverQuest before but have always been curious and turned away at the thought of needing a group to do basically anything. When I heard this game allowed for solo playing everything including raids I had to jump in.
So one thing this game does great is eliminate the feeling of fomo i get with anything WoW derivative due to the fact that its a bunch of tickbox content and I can barely survive open world games let alone an MMO with thousands of boxes to tick. In EverQuest you aren’t really given a goal any grander than hit max level and get gear, the world is then the sandbox in which you can choose how to achieve such a goal with the idea being to have fun doing it.
I went with a warrior paladin to start, i always play human warrior cos I like to be boring and self healing sounded like a nifty bonus. The goal is to add wizard as my third class with the idea being I can have buffs, healing, casting and tanking all covered as a classic party setup.
I’ve spent around 25 hours in the game so far levelling very slowly, dying a lot, completing quests, grinding dungeons and rep and honestly the fact that there’s no exclamation marks anywhere, no real need for be anywhere other than “i fancy doing this today” has been so very refreshing. And the thing I learned was that an MMO where nobody is forced to play together is actually the exact environment which spurns jolly cooperation. I have had players buff me, trade me loads of gear and money for no reason at all or help me in dungeons which arent instanced unless you choose them to be. General chat is pleasant with people mostly helping each other with the game or discussing experiences. It made me feel like I was playing runescape for the first time back in 2008, chatting to people while mining or just picking some random f2p quest to do.
Like everything blizzard does which is kill entire genres it appears they also killed the mmo by making something tailored entirely towards playing with toxic horrid people for number go up gear progression that felt like a job, oh no i didnt accept the hours of my zero hour contract guild job now ill be on the bench forever. Not that I play wow anymore other than my azerothcore server with bots so I can at least enjoy the lore and dungeons at my own pace without being rushed.
So it seems the best mmo isnt what i said before where the world is static and unchanging but instead one where all content is equal and cooperation is optional for the enjoyment of cooperation, not because half the games content is locked behind interacting with gamer chuds.
Oh and the main joy is it feels like me vs the game. Build crafting at its finest with hundreds of combinations to beat the content, and the content doesn’t seem too easy you have to actually think about your build a little to succeed and there definitely are some poor choices to be made.
Downtime and boredom are actually key to MMO community. Waiting for spawns, or for people to get here, or to decide what to do etc are actually when you have enough free attention to socialise.
Constant stimulation is a better game and a worse social experience.
I love such interstitial moments in Rust as well, lots of good memories
rust
good memories
I’ll believe you but thousands wouldn’t
WoW started off alot closer to EQ than what it is now.
I don’t think that killing the genre is explicitly Blizzards fault. It should be fairly evident at this point that we’re having a much larger movement where people are moving away from interacting or even talking to each other largely.
Blizzard, being a capitalist enterprise, was simply adjusting to try to keep their subscriber numbers up while stifling the competition.
I cannot stand what WoW became. It is like a parasite that lived on after devouring its host. But I can’t blame it for wanting to live.
I dont think people want to interact less i see it as games or maybe just capitalism making the medium of interaction more toxic across the board. There’s a stark difference between a shared world and shared enjoyment over say ultra competitive grindfest. I find games somehow made it so that other people are your barriers to progress but in the same game you will be forced to interact creating a scenario where players hate the interaction and turn it off.
I have noticed in many games where interaction is opt in then it just kinda happens magically.
- arc raiders, dayz do it kind of through the desire of role playing
- OSRS and EverQuest legends through group puzzle or just downtime camping a respawn, afk farming etc
I can’t actually think of other examples but I think if games focused more on a design that means interaction results in a better experience but the core already exists to enjoy without that then people become more willing to speak.
There’s a huge difference between an IRC chat with a game attached and someone ruining your limited evening griefing in some competitive ladder game, they don’t even need to grief they could just be bad at the game. Also companies don’t moderate their game chats which really doesnt help.
Something has certainly made the medium more toxic across the board. Communication on the internet is kind of hitting a low spot culturally speaking in my experience. I know some people attribute that to dead internet theory, but people are literally calling for people to just unplug now.
I’m open to it being something else, but I really do think there is a kind of cultural noncommunicative wave that we’re seeing roll out in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Some people are more open to communication, but most of that is in older things (like OSRS and Everquest) where people are more prone to chat via text.
I can’t speak to the experience in Arc Raiders, but I can speak to a similar experience in Fallout 76, where there is proximity voice chat. That game is like a ghost town despite its player count having gone up, that community has just opted out from using voice chat, unlike how it used to be in earlier days. I would assume that Arc Raiders will eventually go the same way.
I do agree that some games have made people be the barrier to progress, and your statement on players hating the interaction. Moderation being handed over to automation is one of the worst things I have ever seen happen in games and certainly hasn’t helped. But I do think that moderation itself can turn into something sinister, like what we have seen Reddit become.
I don’t really have any answers or hard data to back up my assertions, but it has become hard for me to ignore it at this point. I feel like we have crested the hill and are on the way down now.
There’d have been no genre to kill without WoW in the first place the way I see it. The whole situation is a big chain of tragedies, but they made something magical for a moment in time.
I can’t agree. I watched this genre evolve from the tabletop. I was there playing rogue in the earliest days, and I was there to marvel at the connection of one PC to another, and then the BBS, and eventually the internet as we know it. WoW was the biggest wave crashing on the shore, but it wasn’t the only one.
People connecting to play fantasy games together goes far beyond the MMORPG. RPGs are still very popular. Their translation to computing was inevitable.
They did make something magical for a time. The problem is, they didn’t see the magic themselves. They were programming something else. That singular point where there were millions of people obsessed with the same thing was a dragon they didn’t know how to handle.
The tragedies were also real.
But I don’t think there wouldn’t be MMORPGs without them. We had them before WoW, and there would have been many after. MUDs are still running. The hunger for a shared fantasy simulation online is still there.
Stars Reach is the next installment in that legacy I’m hoping is more than just capitalist chafe, but regardless of WoW, there are still minds trying to make it happen out there.
My meaning wasn’t so much that WoW created and killed role playing games. That would be foolishness! I was hyperbolic and I see how you could see me saying that people wouldn’t be playing online together if it wasn’t for WoW
I see RuneScape as the most advanced and famous MUD and it’s succeeding, at least in terms of users and revenue, like never before.
But in terms of the MMORPG as we know it today? The millions and millions of people invested in it? You could never have a serious conversation about it without WoW coming up. It might be a couple paragraphs in a chapter for RPGs as a whole, but as far as I’ve ever seen it you came before WoW, you tried to fill a different niche than WoW, or you tried to be a WoW killer. It was centralizing. The genre was entirely subject to its gravity.
I agree that there’s an eternal hunger for shared fantasy and I hope there’s a good game on the horizon.
I had a look at stars reach and I got everquest next flashbacks
If EQ’s sandbox speaks to you, there’s a good chance you might like Ultima Online. UO takes it even a step further with no levels, no classes, just skills and a world you interact with.
I’ve been meaning to give that a go, any recommendations for servers? EverQuest also scratches the kingsfield/daggerfall itch with its visuals and combat
Two shards I have tried: https://www.uo1998.com/ which is the game as it was at launch preserved in a time capsule. It’s VERY unforgiving and has really no one playing, but as a time capsule it’s great.
https://uoalive.com/ is the opposite, it’s one of the most heavily populated shards online, it’s all the content retail has, just free and lightly customized. It’s got a pretty great community of helpful people, and no pk’ing, so it eliminates toxic players.
oh no i didnt accept the hours of my zero hour contract guild job now ill be on the bench forever
that’s a DKP minus
everquest has always been that way more or less what makes it so charming and “good” is how abrasive it is in just the right way. there is just always some aspect of the game you are rubbing up against to “beat” even if it just figuring out tricks to get around the ui. because ot this the community is there helping each other. showing each other the ropes. sharing their knowledge. or just hanging out and drinking a beer after work while they adventure with friends :)
