Any anons here who play or have played EverQuest? What are your thoughts on it? I’m considering playing on a private server like P99.
Any anons here who play or have played EverQuest? What are your thoughts on it?
Any anons here who play or have played EverQuest? What are your thoughts on it? I’m considering playing on a private server like P99.
It's a tremendous experience to have played, but a terrible game to actually play. Give it a try and see if it's to your taste, but be prepared to spend a ton of time doing nothing, and just spend a ton of time in general
There's a lot of cool things in the game, great setting, cool world if you get immersed in it
Forgot to say
P99 is a good way to play the game as it was back in the early 2000's, poopsockers and all
I don't have much experience with the actual retail game these days, except to say that it's definitely a different game. Numbers on everything are way higher and it's much more solo friendly, but it's come at a cost of sovl.
You'll have to pick your poison
>p99 will never add Frogloks
Believe. One day.
Thank you brother
I have been playing for over two decades. It is simultaneously one of the most excellent and one of the most terrible games ever made. I have the opposing opinion to most here, and otherwise. The later content is actually good, most players are just old and nostalgia-ridden.
the thing that makes EQ EQ is the large scale raids. Its a waste of effort to focus only on when those raids were without notable mechanics.
If you're planning to play something like P99, you have to remember that EQ was well known/notorious for its high time investment. I personally think it's very satisfying especially with the high reliance on grouping but it's not an experience for everyone, especially with how dated the game is and how much knowledge is cataloged for classic EQ.
it had a magic that almost no games have captured since
the world is overwhelming and filled with shit that will murder your lowbie ass
there's no warnings about anything
and when you die it can take literal hours to recover your body, if it is at all possible
the combination of world building, knowledge checks, and danger made it feel as though you were on an actual deadly adventure
that being said it is dated trash and needs a modern dev with the balls to make a game like this again
>it is dated trash and needs a modern dev with the balls to make a game like this again
Dated trash - like everything you described - is what defines it though. A new game couldn't possibly capture its spirit without that dated trash.
I put a few thousand hours into all 3 games. They all have their merits and flaws, but I have a lot of love for the franchise and the world of Norrath.
>3 games
What's the other one besides EQ2?
probably EverQuest Online Adventures (PS2). Took place 500 years prior to EQ1, very different game.
It was simplified, but it still fit the EQ mold. The scale was larger than EQ1, though, and it had a seamless procedurally loaded world.
It sat in the back of my mind full of nostalgia for years, went back to play p99 just to scratch that itch and had somehow forgotten just how horrid a large portion of the game was. Or maybe I just got too used to everything else being dumbed down for modern audiences.
I think i'll just leave it as a comfy childhood memory.
There's a lot of QoL improvements as the game (and series) progressed. A lot of shit was the way it was because nobody knew a better way to do it.
I will never forgive wow for destroying EQ but I can never forgive the unmitigated greed of its developers for basically inventing paid dlc. they were shitting out mini expansions every 6 months that negated all progress made. Guilds lived and died to the stepladder progression. they were killing EQ before wow with its single player game masquerading as a mmo. P99 is as close as you can get to the wonder that was eq.
not sure if im properly grasping this. Yes, Legacy of Ykesha was a pile of shit that sold itself on features rather than content, but most of the 6 month EverQuest era took place after WoW came out, and most of those were not very solo friendly expansions (Gates in particular), unless you wanted to be heavily hamstrung in terms of content.
I’m misremembering the time frame. Up till about planes of power you had a nice progression from original vanilla eq and continuing to pop. Each expansion afterwards just drained the life away from guilds. Prophecy of Ro was the final straw for me and I lived in that game.
Prophecy of Ro is genuinely the worst thing they ever released. There's 3 hours of raid content and a ton of suffering along the way. And the worst zone revamp in video game history.
But if you escape the level 70 era, i genuinely think theres some good to be had.
I loved the concept, because by the time we'd mastered the content in an expansion, we had more rolling out. Give me another 10 levels to grind and new raid mobs.
>wants to solo in a MMO
ngmi
I played it up until I think the third expansion. I sank my life into that shit. Loved it at the time, hate it looking back.
It's a glorified chat room. 90% of your time will be spent sitting down and waiting for health and mana to regenerate. Most of the classes are either bad or extremely specialized. The good classes are especially boring and team-reliant.
If you play I would highly recommend you play a class that can solo level and can easily traverse the map like a druid, shaman or wizard. I am not exaggerating when I say you cannot solo level as half of the classes, so unless you have a group of friends to play with or want to party with a bunch of unironic 50 year old boomers and talk about fox news, do not pick warrior, rogue or cleric.
If you enjoy socializing with boomers it's great. If you're an anti-social modern MMO kind of guy RUN AWAY. The boomers WILL find you and converse with you and you can't get away.
Also I forgot to mention: If you're a FFXIV kind of guy that likes playing as a pretty girl, DO NOT do that in this game. The boomers will assume you're an irl chick and flirt with you and give you free shit. Or maybe do if you're fine with that and a bit of a gay, but it made me extraordinarily uncomfortable.
There are 3 EverQuest "realms" i would say.
1.) P99. The purists, the ones who live and die by how its "supposed to be". No maps, no revamps, no out of combat regen, no brakes. This game is slow, this game is methodical. This game is run by folks who want things to be orderly to a fault. Raiders have a strict "First to Engage" because while instancing is bad, DPS racing and kill stealing raid bosses is worse.
2.) Live
Massively overwhelming and full of raid mechanics that would require you to take night classes, Live is where about 17 servers rest. Not as huge of a population as say the TLPs or P99 for most servers (except Firiona Vie and its free trade loot), but its also the era that has the most engaging class mechanics. Class balance is a wreck (its basically necroquest from 2015 on) and expansions feel relatively small, but its good for semi-casuals who want to do all their content in a few days then take a break. TON of grinding to catch up though (tens of thousands of AA points, as a start)
3.) Progression Servers. Specialty servers that start with classic or an earlier expansion, but with QoL changes and overhauls from live due to code limitations. You'll have maps and revamps and marginally better spells, but the TLP servers are treated as a cheap buck by the company so balance issues and cheating happen more than we'd like.
These servers are probably the best for new and returning players, because theyre not terribly overwhelming, the players are (mostly) friendly, and theres 11 (soon to be 10) of the bastards, many of whom provide something unique.
Examples:
Mischief: Randomized loot and everything is free trade. Current expansion: Secrets of Faydwer
Vaniki: Challenge server, the level cap is always 10 levels below what the expansion called for
Agnarr: Permanently in LDoN era, enjoy it you PoTime gays.
Theres no real "wrong answer", because everyone at the end of the day will play what they want, but each version of the game has its merits.
Is it possible to run a private server of your own and just explore it with say, GM invincibility?
I like mmo dungeons and world architecture, I dont care much about actually playing the game tbh
Yeah, there are private servers. You can even not spawn enemies.
BARK BARK, The gnolls of Blackburrow will retake the city of Qeynos.
They did a callback and resurrected him in EQ2. 🙁
That's fantastic, the only thing I remember of EQ was grinding mobs in qeynos/sewer/BB
his raid in Underfoot is still a highlight of that expansion for me
Why did EQ2 suck?
It got better and I have the most fond memories of it. Then it got worse when it went F2P.
Kingdom of Sky was when they really started focusing on the high end content, especially contested raids. That was peak EQ2.
in terms of engine functionality? because they bet on the HD-DVD of processor architecture.
Graphically? because they forgot that semi-realism does nothing except age your product
Mechanically? Several things.
It didnt keep it simple. 24 classes in a game with a max raid size of 24 guaranteed that class balance was going to be shot, and the Trivial Loot Code was never an idea that was going to succeed.
It didnt know what it wanted to be. In a desperate effort to get it to be relevant after its unfortunate launch alongside WoW, it tried to be more like WoW rather than being its own thing. This kills the MMO.
Failure to commit to what DID work: The devteam overhauled several mechanics over the years for various reasons, and some of them were actually good. but because people wanted it to be "more like ____" it got sabotaged. Furthermore, when the EQ2 team got pushback on an idea being incredibly stupid (the combat stance changes as part of the tank rework being SHIIIIT) rather than actually listening to feedback, theyd take their ball and go home.
Failure to prune properly: as the game got older, it just became hyperinflated in number of actions and stats. Rather than purge the number of abilities, they purged the spell nomenclature so everything had the same name with a rank on it. Rather than resolve hyperinflation, they opted to purge gear variety and stats.
EQ2's dev team is a master class on how to not run an MMO.
Tradeskill system is good though.
We were getting banned from the EQ2 forums for posting laundry lists of balance issues and bugs. Grimwell was project lead for a while and came to EQ2Flames, but he couldn't handle our anger and quit.
It's a game of it's time. Just like Ultima Online and even maybe Vanilla WoW I guess to a lesser extent, you had to be there. There is just no going back to such a thing. People have different expectations now of community, time sinks, social interactions, travel in the RPG world. The way frickups were punished back then compared to now, modern gamers just won't stand for such a thing.
>Losing 4 hours of grinding mobs because a mob was 20 levels above the considered level.
I don't miss it but it was fun at the time.
Extremely slow leveling.
Extremely dull lategame.
If you feel like you have to "tough it out for a few levels", it never gets better.