@@hasteau4917 I was one of the early day folks with a second computer and EQ disc (I actually 2 boxed the day Sol Temple launched, our whole guild saw the patch notes before server went down and we kept everyone but our friends blocked out of the zone for the first 48 or so hours). I used to have a second character in the EC tunnel that I traded to for selling/buying. He never got past level 10, yet had nearly 2 years played time on him when I stopped playing at the end of PoP :D. I also had an ISDN connection when 99% of players were on dialup in the early days, so I would leave him online for entire 168 hours between resets where he would get booted off. No gaming experience has ever even been close to the first year or so of EverQuest for me.
If I recall correctly (and that's a gamble), the bazaar you're talking about was on Luclin, and wasn't related to the PoK. I recall that Shadows of Luclin expansion would let you use spires on a long timer to portal to Luclin and there were then other spires to portal back to alternate continents, or you could walk to the bazaar on Luclin. I *think* those spires were already used by wizards (only) to portal directly from continent to continent before that. My ranger was stuck taking a long boat ride. But the PoK wasn't added as a travel hub until much later I think - I know there were at least three expansions (Kunark, Luclin, something ice-themed) before that.
@@AdrianGell Right. The original Bazaar was on Luclin, accessible via the Nexus. But it is attached to the Plane of Knowledge. This also included a zone revamp for the Bazaar. EQ's original trilogy was: Launch, Ruins of Kunark, Scars of Velious (ice-themed). Then Shadows of Luclin was launched, with the original Bazaar. (I don't remember if it was available at launch or shortly after.) Later it was built off of the PoK.
4:14 The EQ trailer is still so magical to me. It completely sucked me into Norrath and I fell in love with EQ back then. What I wouldn't give to feel that magic and wonder again...
I played the hell out of EQ in 99! My boyfriend bought me a computer specifically to be able to play the game with him and his friends. My parents would get so upset that the phone line was busy all day and night long, lol
Nice video! I started EQ in Dec '99 and played regularly until Nov 22, 2004 when I parked my Paladin in a favorite zone and "retired." To this day, I still have more fond memories of my time in Norrath than I have for any other game.
Started EQ back in the fall of '99, on the Veeshan server, I miss those days. I remember buying graph paper and having to draw out my own maps and having notebooks to write notes in.
This was my first MMO and also the best one that I've ever played. In the early stages being an enchanter was so much fun. You had the power to charm NPC guards for a few seconds. The benefit of that would be to command them to attack other people. This was great if I was ever in town dealing with a griefer. I would just sick the guards on them. Or you could charm a person. And do commands on their body like make them sit down. I've had people a couple of levels higher than me that I would charm and make them sit down to bring them to my level of height since I was a short gnome. I would then command a guard to attack them. Or if I wanted to do my own briefing as an enchanter I could transform into objects around me such as a tree. In the forest along the path in the form of a tree I could root someone in place and start casting on them. Or even more fun I would stand next to a bridge over a small stream full of piranhas. And turn into a non-tangible duplicate bridge. When the noobs would try to cross me not knowing which one was the real one, they would fall into the stream of piranhas. The losses were big as well. I still remember gaining a oracle's robe at some point. This was a robe that most magic casters wanted, because of its stat boosting. I remember getting killed in my robe getting stolen along with my money and everything else. Rallos Zek was my server. This is and always will be the best PVP. After that I would say Shadowbane. Not many people know about that one either. Good times.
I was 13 in 1999 and it was a great time to be alive where you worked to learn the new technology but got to enjoy it greatly. I never played EQ but was hooked on asherons call. I'm glad I didn't get into eq because while there are benefits I notice a lot of eq players to be more educated, but I was definately of the easily addicted genre of players. Thanks for sharing your experience and it's enjoyable to see the theme of entertainment perspective from an era that truly was a blessing to experience.
Got SOW? Conjuration, Subjegaton, Divination, ugh... everything about EQ was better than any other game, still. This game, more than any other game, literally gave me inspiration in life. It was a magical time. East Commons was the best part of my life. I'd /ooc in that place for days and lounge around and it felt like Tatuini. Best time of my life. I played on my Dad's 386 while he used a 486. How I want to return to that time. His druid, Kahlil Gibran, was playing in the Planes of Terror while and my Wood Elf Ranger, Rygel Fidelis, couldn't even get past KC Castle. I had homework. He stayed home all day. My Mom worked for everyone to be a nerd. She's always been the provider, a rare woman indeed. My Godfather, whom like my Dad was also a Vietnam vet, my Dad the combat Vet, David Moe was the logistics base vet, he got my Dad and I onto Diablo AND Everyquest. Both those men are long gone. Every time I play either game (I just finished a crusade on Diablo not a year ago) I am brought back to my youth. This is why I love video games more than any other digital media. Sidenote: The original HUD UI is the best HUD of all HUDS ever.
"Ignorance and innocents go hand in hand". I think of this quote often nearly 26 years later. It was chilly outside but sunny and the warmth came through the window while I made my first character on launch day. I had gotten my reserved copy from electronics botiqe formerly Walden software.
I started playing just before Kunark was released. It was so much fun and alive. I remember creating a bard in Freeport and was amazed at how vibrant and teeming with people who were also playing the game. The city resembled a real city; there were hundreds of people moving about, talking, questing, selling and buying, and just living life. You had to use your entire computer with the original client. For example, I had a druid that would have to open the book to meditate and regain mana. I would pull with a snare, cast a dot, run just far enough to keep aggro and then sit down and meditate by opening the spell book, which took up the entire screen. I would then have to listen to the footsteps of the mob as it approached and guess when the best time would be to stand up and cast again. It was definitely trial and error. I remember meeting my first friend, Ben, and his wife, while grouping in Befallen. We died a horrible death by falling down the well and it took hours to get our corpses and gear back. Eventually, a large "raid" team of high levels (back then, they were 25-30ish) had to go down and retrieve not only our corpses, but the corpses of level 20-25s that tried to help us; there were a couple dozen of us waiting for our corpses. Our group received a stern talking to about being responsible and that next time, people might not help. I definitely have lost a bit of gear over the years. You could buff not only players, but random mobs. Just for fun, in the East Commonlands, we would buff a low-level skeleton with level 30+ cleric buffs and watch it tear through people. Inevitably, a player would run into the tunnel where people were selling and the skeleton, now uber buffed, would tear through a bunch of players before being killed. Also, you could drop coin on the ground and people could pick it up. This lead us to drop like 10,000 copper on the ground, which would make it almost impossible to move without strength and/or speed buffs. Some low level character would pick it up and be stuck as the mobs got closer. You would hear panicked shouts asking for help, which most people would, but a lot of times not in time. We also used coins to draw arrows in dungeons to mark where we had been or mark the way for group members who would join us. We had to be creative without maps. Good memories!
I love the video....and i definitely remember the bazzar and i also remember that drinking was a skill that you could get better at. Maybe not better at, but your tolerance got better.
That is the best way to describe first playing this game on launch. Having played NWN on AoL, I was already into the 'social aspect' of the game, but actually being in there, it felt like I was in another world.
Bazaar came much later after release. Originally, everyone gathered in the tunnel of west commons (or was it east commons?) and just shouted out what they were selling.
The official Bazaar came with the fourth expansion, Shadows of Luclin, and was accessed via The Nexus zone. Prior to that it was just players selling stuff from their inventory. The East Commonlands tunnel and city of Kelethin in Greater Faydark were the go-to locations for this.
Who cares about console game history? PC gaming goes back to first PCs in early 80s, like Atari 400, then C64, Amiga, early MSDOS and WfW. I played this progression right into Everquest in 1999. Few realized how pioneering Everquest was. It demonstrated how connectivity could be used to create virtual communities and economies. An early example of a Metaverse! Today's metaverse efforts would do well to study the history of the development and dynamics of Everquest.
Wow, this brings back some memories. Addiction to EQ pretty much killed my college grades. I was kinda "on the scene" doing a lot of stuff back then with MMO's. They were "the next big thing". Personally, I think MMO's really started with Meridian59. It was made/published by 3DO interactive I think. I don't remember how I got into it, but it was a pretty brutal game. It wasn't true 3D, most of a simulated 3D with sprites, kinda like Doom. But, it had servers, guilds, zones, shops, and intergrated PVP system, which made it brutal. You hand random PK's (player killers), it was an interesting dynamic cause they were usually hunted down and killed enough to force them to reroll. EQ came after this. Alot of the people I met playing M59, went to EQ. As I recall, I think I played on Povar. I had a wood elf ranger, and we all played pretty much from launch. The launch itself was ugly in terms of server performance. Having been there from the beginning, EVERYTHING was new. It was like being an explorer in a new frontier. I was, I think, one of the first people to start pulling Mistmore, (aka "Trainmore"). I figured out how to pull it without causing a train. In hindsight, EQ was hideous in it's rare spawn/rare drop form of gameplay. Whichever character class you were playing needed specific items in order to improve. Said items only existed on a mob that rarely spawned, so you had to sit there, and camp the area that mob spawned in. For every 1 time that mob spawned, you probably had to kill 50 place holders. I remember we had the spawn cycle timed. It could be every 20 minutes i think, or 30, i forget. And for every 10 times that mob spawned, it might have the item you wanted, just one of those times. No sir, I've not the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia on this one. I think my /played time was probably 300+ or so DAYs, i think, pretty sure it wasn't measured in hours. No, EQ can be buried in the dustheap of history. I'll never get back the time I wasted on it. Did I mention it killed my grades in college?
Thankfully I didn't have to use dial-up internet for EQ back then, I had already gotten a cable modem with a whopping 300kb download at most. It was kinda interesting how I found out about EQ. I had been playing mostly Delta Force and Half-Life 1 since 1998 but after playing a ton of different mods for half life I tried out one called Master Sword; it was an rpg mod kinda similar to... fable? Anyway, one of my friends that I played with said that he knew of a game that was even better than the mod, a whole world to explore instead of just a few maps. Man, talk about an eye opening experience. I was blown away at what they created back then. I got so into the game that I had managed to buy some kind of EQ guidebook and would study it during class, lol.
Made so many good friends. I always look back and have some of my best of memories ever. I was lucky enough to meet many of those people in Vegas before hanging things up. From being a "casual' all the way to hearing that magic word "RAIDTIME" (some of you may know what that means) it truly was an amazing time.
I was in Vegas for about 7 years. We never did anything cool like that for the old eq guild, but we did have a get-together for our wow guild back in tbc. I honestly think I was too young to realize how special eq was until it was almost over. It was like a haze I was in and until eq2 was launched I played almost religiously.
I remember it was year 2001 or 2002 when the new expansion Shadow of Luclin was out, I was spent many days in my University library doing online research for EverQuest, while everyone busy working on their school project :)
I could give you real gameplay in any zone from the original 1999 client from disk. I have an old version of EQEmulator that was modified to support it. Then, you could see all the fantastic bugs in the client we used to exploit as well back then. I used to GM rez, port, haste, and heal as a level 4 magician, it was glorious.
Choosing a class like the magician or necro at launch was so broken lol (pets did INSANE dps!), i remember farming dwarves in butcher block, they dropped axes that sold for 25 plat each, and you could get them so quickly. But as quickly as you could get them, eventually SOE nerfed it, but still, good times.
Does anyone have a copy of that Everquest: Offline Avatars PR fluff piece they released? I remember it happened after the one player killed himself, and it was all over the news.
when I first started out on Ralos Zek PVP server - the enchanters were able to charm other players - - they had me attacking my friends - lol - it was pretty cut throat - - Player killers running trains on people in Black Burrow - - it sucked but it was awesome - you really had to keep your wits about you - - sadly these days the Quenos Hills are mostly abandoned by all but Fippy Darkpaw
Ralos Zek gaming was unlike anything that ever came before or after it died out... that and EQ2 PVP before they killed it were my favorite times EVER playing video games - some of the best times of my life actually. I still have a ranger and monk on ZEK......literally right now. That server is so dead though I can play for 3 days straight without seeing another player. On current free server and OG server Antonius Bale - I see people everywhere still :)
Oh yes. I also belong to the lucky few who had the opportunity to play EQ at a few days after release. The feeling of coming into Norrath for the first time cannot be described and I have never experienced something like this in the 25 years that followed. There have been a few nice games I played since that time but today forgot almost everything about them. EQ I still remember almost everything - Kelethin, Befallen, Commonlands and Karanas, deaths by Hill Giants and Grifawns, horrible Blackburrow, days spent in Crushbone ...
I got to Beta test EQ I remember getting on my uncles PC when he went to his friends for Dnd night. and I played all night till he came home in the morning
In France we played with pentium 3 500 / 256 or 512 mega ram was the reference with ati rage fury 128 or 3dfx., we had aol too and ontel for unlimited 56k - we were essentially on karana and Morel Thule. The french community stopped at lLuclin and a lot of us went to DAoC for the pvp/rvr
I visited my cousin in the Summer of 99, he had the game and I needed it, I was 17. I went home and talked my Mom into selling my instruments to get a PC to play this game. Bad choices were made.
The Bazar was not around at launch. You had hubs in different zones where you would find people gathered. They would be casting buffs to practice and shouting their wares. The Bazar wasn’t introduced till Luclin came out.
Man, I have a conflicted feeling about one aspect of the classic eq... quests you had to hail all the NPC you see and talk to them and type in specific phrases in order to get and details if the quests and lores which I miss but find it PITA but now (i quit playing(again) 6 years ago, everything is automated meaning the NPC is already labled as a quest/task giver
the era of MMOs that included EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, and Dark Age of Camelot, was absolutely magical. unfortunately, MMOs seem to have gotten worse as time progressed, instead of better.
Man, life in the 90s was so good. Great video covering my childhood! Also, where did you get such clear footage of the Everquest trailer?! All the ones I've seen on youtube are blurry.
I actually did alot of research for this video and digging for footage. The clear footage of the game with early up was hard to get clear too. Not exactly sure where I got it
Well you could technically sell anywhere if you wanted to trade and sell that way instead of leaving your toon as a shop, so the zone everyone used was really specific to the server and people.
Love EQ, and I played from 99-03. Monk. Fennin Ro. I remember I dropped 3000$, on a new custom gameing PC so I could run EQ like a king. Much time was wasted. Loved every second of it.
No other game since has captured that same sense of immersion and adventure. They all just went the way of number go up, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. Time = more number go up, dopamine.
Slight correction to your video, the first online 3d game to play online with other players was Meridan 59 (a straight pvp game that had massive penalties when you died first off you lost stats on your character across the board and if that wasn't enough you dropped everything your caring and wearing but was a great 4 years), Than EQ came out and than 2 years later came Dark Age of Camelot (Still to this day the best PVP mechanics/system of them all) and than a few years after that World of Warcraft and everyone quit everything they were playing for that grinder of a game. But had a blast playing all of them, I still remember downloading a patch on Meridian 59 that took every bit of 14 hours to do on that dial-up connection. Between being disconnected from AOL or losing server connection I wanted to smash the computer a billion times. But once that loading screen popped up I was like a fat kid in a candy store.
EQ wasn't the first 3D MMORPG though, that was Meridian 59, beat EQ out by just a couple years, 1996. Successful, yes but not as successful as Everquest by a long margin.
This is true, and EQ took what they had and made everything scaled up for the servers etc and truly created an MMO that was global and had everything...
Any southern country bumpkins finding the timeline off? Living where I do we were always behind on everything. Luckily I had a computer since 1998 so I played plenty of games on it. Sadly I had no idea what the internet was until 2004. I was unimpressed until I found game websites. Then shortly found out about RuneScape classic launching runescape 2 and also world of warcraft. I dived into both of them and life changed forever. Sadly I didn't know about other games like EverQuest. I wasn't using search engines yet. I only knew how to type in websites I already knew about. I'm sure making up for it now. It's been a blast diving into it. Been playing A lot of Meridian 59 as well.
@@ashtonx nwn was originally a goldbox mmo on dial up 56k baud modems. Released in 1991. Look it up. Bioware used the name in 2002. I was a teen in 91 lived it first hand.
@@EQ_EnchantX @ashtonx nwn was originally a goldbox mmo on dial up56k. Released in 1991. Look it up. Bioware used the name in 2002 for their nwn. I was a teen in 91 lived it first hand. Nwn1 came out near Ultima 7/8.
the last third of your video, you are talking about a lot of things that wasn't at launch, POK, the Bazaar, that wasn't there at launch. I played it from launch till months after the first expansion and those things didn't exist that whole time. there was a Bazaar but it wasnt a zone, we met at east commonlands in this tunnel and there weren't vendors, people just shouted out what they had , you contacted them and did a trade and hopped that you didn't get ripped off. the only way to get ported anywhere was to have a wizard or druid port you using spells, there was no stones you click on to port around.
I'm old and I forget stuff now. If I made the video back in 2001 I would have been less than half my age now. Try making a video like this and getting everything correct. Its not that easy.
CD's usually just had installation software on it. Usually it wasn't needed, unless it was copy protection. Usually you just move most of the data to hard drive.
I remember... I played when you died you had to run back to your corpse with nothing and loot it and it took time to recover. And you just hoped to god there was a cleric or necromancer around. Now when you die you respawn with all your stuff... kinda lame lol...
I thought I was pretty clear about it being the first 3d virtual world created on that level. - That's literally word for word what I said. And I will stick by that statement.
Nice. Sad I didn't experience it. I got into mmos during eq2. Although I had the pc setup to run it. Seems wsy not hardcore. Also the women looked more like women back then with the low poly models than western studios do today with all the man looking chicks to appease nut jobs and journos. I miss mmos pre 2010(not counting wow as I never played it really).
Bad video is bad. You have information from 2002 in here talking like it was 1999. You skipped over the EC tunnel for selling stuff and went straight to plane of knowledge from 2002. You also didn't mention how they had a beta with max lvl of 6 and people killed emperor crush during it.
Nah I didn't forget it. As I mentioned 5 times in the video eq was the first on a global scale in almost every sense...that's why as soon as eq launched ultima was basically dead.
So many inaccurate statements within the first 4 minutes of the video, had me checking out early. As someone who played EQ the month it released, I appreciate what you attempted to do here. But, you should really try not to make so many broad statements of fact, before verifying them.
@@legendarybloodlines Can't say I'm surprised by your reaction, but if I did actually have something to prove, I would probability start by seeking and accepting criticism, rather than lashing out defensively at the few who offer it. From what I've seen, of your idea of analysis, and community feedback, I can see why you're struggling.
@@Roguedeus im on youtube i get enough criticism, try making a channel and making a video on everquest - im sure you will get everything correct and it will be a huge hit
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
The bazaar as everyone has mentioned, was created in 2001. I'm getting old and didn't script this like usual. Sorry I forgot that 🙂
East commonlands more specifically EC tunnel was the trading spot before bazaar. Becareful of Sgt Slate if you're kill on sight race though xD
@@hasteau4917 I was one of the early day folks with a second computer and EQ disc (I actually 2 boxed the day Sol Temple launched, our whole guild saw the patch notes before server went down and we kept everyone but our friends blocked out of the zone for the first 48 or so hours). I used to have a second character in the EC tunnel that I traded to for selling/buying. He never got past level 10, yet had nearly 2 years played time on him when I stopped playing at the end of PoP :D. I also had an ISDN connection when 99% of players were on dialup in the early days, so I would leave him online for entire 168 hours between resets where he would get booted off. No gaming experience has ever even been close to the first year or so of EverQuest for me.
@@hasteau4917Depends on the server, really.
It was in GFay on a couple of servers, probably because the population leaned so heavily to elf early on.
If I recall correctly (and that's a gamble), the bazaar you're talking about was on Luclin, and wasn't related to the PoK. I recall that Shadows of Luclin expansion would let you use spires on a long timer to portal to Luclin and there were then other spires to portal back to alternate continents, or you could walk to the bazaar on Luclin. I *think* those spires were already used by wizards (only) to portal directly from continent to continent before that. My ranger was stuck taking a long boat ride. But the PoK wasn't added as a travel hub until much later I think - I know there were at least three expansions (Kunark, Luclin, something ice-themed) before that.
@@AdrianGell Right. The original Bazaar was on Luclin, accessible via the Nexus. But it is attached to the Plane of Knowledge. This also included a zone revamp for the Bazaar.
EQ's original trilogy was: Launch, Ruins of Kunark, Scars of Velious (ice-themed).
Then Shadows of Luclin was launched, with the original Bazaar. (I don't remember if it was available at launch or shortly after.) Later it was built off of the PoK.
Man this really brings me back to what I consider to be the best days of my life. Cheers
❤
4:14 The EQ trailer is still so magical to me.
It completely sucked me into Norrath and I fell in love with EQ back then. What I wouldn't give to feel that magic and wonder again...
I played the hell out of EQ in 99! My boyfriend bought me a computer specifically to be able to play the game with him and his friends. My parents would get so upset that the phone line was busy all day and night long, lol
This is a great trip down memory lane! Yep, I was there playing EQ 1999 and rocked in the year 2k on EQ
Hells yeah mate! Glad to see another og !!!
Nice video! I started EQ in Dec '99 and played regularly until Nov 22, 2004 when I parked my Paladin in a favorite zone and "retired." To this day, I still have more fond memories of my time in Norrath than I have for any other game.
What zone?
Plane of mischief?
Started EQ back in the fall of '99, on the Veeshan server, I miss those days. I remember buying graph paper and having to draw out my own maps and having notebooks to write notes in.
This was my first MMO and also the best one that I've ever played. In the early stages being an enchanter was so much fun. You had the power to charm NPC guards for a few seconds. The benefit of that would be to command them to attack other people. This was great if I was ever in town dealing with a griefer. I would just sick the guards on them.
Or you could charm a person. And do commands on their body like make them sit down. I've had people a couple of levels higher than me that I would charm and make them sit down to bring them to my level of height since I was a short gnome. I would then command a guard to attack them.
Or if I wanted to do my own briefing as an enchanter I could transform into objects around me such as a tree. In the forest along the path in the form of a tree I could root someone in place and start casting on them.
Or even more fun I would stand next to a bridge over a small stream full of piranhas. And turn into a non-tangible duplicate bridge. When the noobs would try to cross me not knowing which one was the real one, they would fall into the stream of piranhas.
The losses were big as well. I still remember gaining a oracle's robe at some point. This was a robe that most magic casters wanted, because of its stat boosting.
I remember getting killed in my robe getting stolen along with my money and everything else.
Rallos Zek was my server.
This is and always will be the best PVP. After that I would say Shadowbane. Not many people know about that one either.
Good times.
Legit oldschool player 💪
Great review! I was there on day 1 also. Still play EQ to this day!
Thank you!
I was 13 in 1999 and it was a great time to be alive where you worked to learn the new technology but got to enjoy it greatly. I never played EQ but was hooked on asherons call. I'm glad I didn't get into eq because while there are benefits I notice a lot of eq players to be more educated, but I was definately of the easily addicted genre of players. Thanks for sharing your experience and it's enjoyable to see the theme of entertainment perspective from an era that truly was a blessing to experience.
Got SOW? Conjuration, Subjegaton, Divination, ugh... everything about EQ was better than any other game, still. This game, more than any other game, literally gave me inspiration in life. It was a magical time. East Commons was the best part of my life. I'd /ooc in that place for days and lounge around and it felt like Tatuini. Best time of my life. I played on my Dad's 386 while he used a 486. How I want to return to that time. His druid, Kahlil Gibran, was playing in the Planes of Terror while and my Wood Elf Ranger, Rygel Fidelis, couldn't even get past KC Castle. I had homework. He stayed home all day. My Mom worked for everyone to be a nerd. She's always been the provider, a rare woman indeed. My Godfather, whom like my Dad was also a Vietnam vet, my Dad the combat Vet, David Moe was the logistics base vet, he got my Dad and I onto Diablo AND Everyquest. Both those men are long gone. Every time I play either game (I just finished a crusade on Diablo not a year ago) I am brought back to my youth. This is why I love video games more than any other digital media. Sidenote: The original HUD UI is the best HUD of all HUDS ever.
Join p1999
I remember thinking. Omg i got a whole platinum. Im not joking it took me like a week to gain one! Lol great videos great nostalgia!
@@SMOGDOGG949 yeah that sense of accomplishment was hard earned back then. It was part of the magic! I remember the same exact feeling 🙂
I was a baby at the time but I have thoroughly enjoyed my time on Oakwynd, P99, and PQ in the past year.
Glad to see the next generation enjoying this timeless classic ❤
"Ignorance and innocents go hand in hand". I think of this quote often nearly 26 years later. It was chilly outside but sunny and the warmth came through the window while I made my first character on launch day. I had gotten my reserved copy from electronics botiqe formerly Walden software.
I started playing just before Kunark was released. It was so much fun and alive. I remember creating a bard in Freeport and was amazed at how vibrant and teeming with people who were also playing the game. The city resembled a real city; there were hundreds of people moving about, talking, questing, selling and buying, and just living life.
You had to use your entire computer with the original client. For example, I had a druid that would have to open the book to meditate and regain mana. I would pull with a snare, cast a dot, run just far enough to keep aggro and then sit down and meditate by opening the spell book, which took up the entire screen. I would then have to listen to the footsteps of the mob as it approached and guess when the best time would be to stand up and cast again. It was definitely trial and error.
I remember meeting my first friend, Ben, and his wife, while grouping in Befallen. We died a horrible death by falling down the well and it took hours to get our corpses and gear back. Eventually, a large "raid" team of high levels (back then, they were 25-30ish) had to go down and retrieve not only our corpses, but the corpses of level 20-25s that tried to help us; there were a couple dozen of us waiting for our corpses. Our group received a stern talking to about being responsible and that next time, people might not help. I definitely have lost a bit of gear over the years.
You could buff not only players, but random mobs. Just for fun, in the East Commonlands, we would buff a low-level skeleton with level 30+ cleric buffs and watch it tear through people. Inevitably, a player would run into the tunnel where people were selling and the skeleton, now uber buffed, would tear through a bunch of players before being killed.
Also, you could drop coin on the ground and people could pick it up. This lead us to drop like 10,000 copper on the ground, which would make it almost impossible to move without strength and/or speed buffs. Some low level character would pick it up and be stuck as the mobs got closer. You would hear panicked shouts asking for help, which most people would, but a lot of times not in time. We also used coins to draw arrows in dungeons to mark where we had been or mark the way for group members who would join us. We had to be creative without maps.
Good memories!
🙏
Super rad history and video ! Keep it up !
Lost a lot of sleep playing EQ.
Literally became an insomniac heh
Playing EQ back in the day felt exactly like watching LOTR for the first time.
was it also worse than the book? what do you mean?
I love the video....and i definitely remember the bazzar and i also remember that drinking was a skill that you could get better at. Maybe not better at, but your tolerance got better.
That is the best way to describe first playing this game on launch. Having played NWN on AoL, I was already into the 'social aspect' of the game, but actually being in there, it felt like I was in another world.
You are a true OG - hello and nice to meet ya :D
Bazaar came much later after release. Originally, everyone gathered in the tunnel of west commons (or was it east commons?) and just shouted out what they were selling.
It was anywhere you could shout actually...
But the bazaar was awesome...
The official Bazaar came with the fourth expansion, Shadows of Luclin, and was accessed via The Nexus zone. Prior to that it was just players selling stuff from their inventory. The East Commonlands tunnel and city of Kelethin in Greater Faydark were the go-to locations for this.
IIRC some servers used Greater Fay as a selling spot. /Auction Meet at the elevator!
E commons tunnels!! "5 Bags at T2!"
The bazaar? Old schoolers did the East Common tunnel. Pre- PoK. Only way of getting around was a Druid/Wizard teleport.
Pretty sure we've covered that a TON of times. Try reading the comments it's in there a bunch at this point.
@@legendarybloodlines Pretty sure you did not cover that in your video. Thanks.
People had Palm Pilots in 1999, but nobody really had cell phones yet. The world really transformed after that.
Yeah, it was sooo different than today...
I miss my palm pilot and my necro on bertoxxulous!
Who cares about console game history? PC gaming goes back to first PCs in early 80s, like Atari 400, then C64, Amiga, early MSDOS and WfW. I played this progression right into Everquest in 1999. Few realized how pioneering Everquest was. It demonstrated how connectivity could be used to create virtual communities and economies. An early example of a Metaverse! Today's metaverse efforts would do well to study the history of the development and dynamics of Everquest.
Wow, this brings back some memories. Addiction to EQ pretty much killed my college grades. I was kinda "on the scene" doing a lot of stuff back then with MMO's. They were "the next big thing". Personally, I think MMO's really started with Meridian59. It was made/published by 3DO interactive I think. I don't remember how I got into it, but it was a pretty brutal game. It wasn't true 3D, most of a simulated 3D with sprites, kinda like Doom. But, it had servers, guilds, zones, shops, and intergrated PVP system, which made it brutal. You hand random PK's (player killers), it was an interesting dynamic cause they were usually hunted down and killed enough to force them to reroll.
EQ came after this. Alot of the people I met playing M59, went to EQ. As I recall, I think I played on Povar. I had a wood elf ranger, and we all played pretty much from launch. The launch itself was ugly in terms of server performance. Having been there from the beginning, EVERYTHING was new. It was like being an explorer in a new frontier. I was, I think, one of the first people to start pulling Mistmore, (aka "Trainmore"). I figured out how to pull it without causing a train.
In hindsight, EQ was hideous in it's rare spawn/rare drop form of gameplay. Whichever character class you were playing needed specific items in order to improve. Said items only existed on a mob that rarely spawned, so you had to sit there, and camp the area that mob spawned in. For every 1 time that mob spawned, you probably had to kill 50 place holders. I remember we had the spawn cycle timed. It could be every 20 minutes i think, or 30, i forget. And for every 10 times that mob spawned, it might have the item you wanted, just one of those times. No sir, I've not the rose tinted glasses of nostalgia on this one. I think my /played time was probably 300+ or so DAYs, i think, pretty sure it wasn't measured in hours.
No, EQ can be buried in the dustheap of history. I'll never get back the time I wasted on it. Did I mention it killed my grades in college?
don't blame the game for your discipline level lol.
Thankfully I didn't have to use dial-up internet for EQ back then, I had already gotten a cable modem with a whopping 300kb download at most. It was kinda interesting how I found out about EQ. I had been playing mostly Delta Force and Half-Life 1 since 1998 but after playing a ton of different mods for half life I tried out one called Master Sword; it was an rpg mod kinda similar to... fable? Anyway, one of my friends that I played with said that he knew of a game that was even better than the mod, a whole world to explore instead of just a few maps. Man, talk about an eye opening experience. I was blown away at what they created back then. I got so into the game that I had managed to buy some kind of EQ guidebook and would study it during class, lol.
Pretty sure we all knew eq better than the accounting classes at UMass lol
Made so many good friends. I always look back and have some of my best of memories ever. I was lucky enough to meet many of those people in Vegas before hanging things up. From being a "casual' all the way to hearing that magic word "RAIDTIME" (some of you may know what that means) it truly was an amazing time.
I was in Vegas for about 7 years. We never did anything cool like that for the old eq guild, but we did have a get-together for our wow guild back in tbc. I honestly think I was too young to realize how special eq was until it was almost over. It was like a haze I was in and until eq2 was launched I played almost religiously.
It is wild how much EQ has actually changed over the years. I have to give it credit, it is doing something right for having been around for 25 years!
I remember it was year 2001 or 2002 when the new expansion Shadow of Luclin was out, I was spent many days in my University library doing online research for EverQuest, while everyone busy working on their school project :)
Liked and subcsribed! Glad I found your channel!
Thank you VERY MUCH :)
The good old days =) I was a barbarian warrior and i remember how cool i felt to just have a set of bronze armor back then lol
Barbs always looked the coolest 👍
I could give you real gameplay in any zone from the original 1999 client from disk. I have an old version of EQEmulator that was modified to support it. Then, you could see all the fantastic bugs in the client we used to exploit as well back then. I used to GM rez, port, haste, and heal as a level 4 magician, it was glorious.
Ahh an OG magician - hello my friend :)
Long story short this game never held your hand they just leave pictures of said hand laying around the world to troll you
This is 100% legit
Choosing a class like the magician or necro at launch was so broken lol (pets did INSANE dps!), i remember farming dwarves in butcher block, they dropped axes that sold for 25 plat each, and you could get them so quickly. But as quickly as you could get them, eventually SOE nerfed it, but still, good times.
my magician was my favorite toon of ALL time....by miles
Does anyone have a copy of that Everquest: Offline Avatars PR fluff piece they released? I remember it happened after the one player killed himself, and it was all over the news.
I'm pretty sure even if you have a copy the servers to connect are dead.
I remember being really excited, my cleric hit 60 about 30 min before 911. Suddenly the whole world changed
Yeah that would certainly create a memorable moment...
when I first started out on Ralos Zek PVP server - the enchanters were able to charm other players - - they had me attacking my friends - lol - it was pretty cut throat - - Player killers running trains on people in Black Burrow - - it sucked but it was awesome - you really had to keep your wits about you - - sadly these days the Quenos Hills are mostly abandoned by all but Fippy Darkpaw
Ralos Zek gaming was unlike anything that ever came before or after it died out... that and EQ2 PVP before they killed it were my favorite times EVER playing video games - some of the best times of my life actually. I still have a ranger and monk on ZEK......literally right now. That server is so dead though I can play for 3 days straight without seeing another player. On current free server and OG server Antonius Bale - I see people everywhere still :)
Were you in a guild on RZ?
@@crowsbridge "Knights of Norrath" if I recall correctly - I think everyone was pretty much at war with Darkenbane - fun times to be sure
Oh yes. I also belong to the lucky few who had the opportunity to play EQ at a few days after release. The feeling of coming into Norrath for the first time cannot be described and I have never experienced something like this in the 25 years that followed. There have been a few nice games I played since that time but today forgot almost everything about them.
EQ I still remember almost everything - Kelethin, Befallen, Commonlands and Karanas, deaths by Hill Giants and Grifawns, horrible Blackburrow, days spent in Crushbone ...
loved the game, played from release till Depths of Darkhollow (2005)
the Bazaar was released end of 2001 with Shadows of Luclin expansion
Very happy to see you made it that far into the video! Ty for watching!
I was there on day 1, and it was incredible.
I got to Beta test EQ I remember getting on my uncles PC when he went to his friends for Dnd night. and I played all night till he came home in the morning
Magic :)
I remember the beta and spent way too many sleepless nights grinding.
I just remember my grades suddenly plummeted heh
In France we played with pentium 3 500 / 256 or 512 mega ram was the reference with ati rage fury 128 or 3dfx., we had aol too and ontel for unlimited 56k - we were essentially on karana and Morel Thule. The french community stopped at lLuclin and a lot of us went to DAoC for the pvp/rvr
Some of the best days of my life heh
I visited my cousin in the Summer of 99, he had the game and I needed it, I was 17. I went home and talked my Mom into selling my instruments to get a PC to play this game. Bad choices were made.
lol we all made bad choices when EQ launched :D
Damn I miss playing at launch so bad times were great back then
Ain't that the truth dude
The Bazar was not around at launch. You had hubs in different zones where you would find people gathered. They would be casting buffs to practice and shouting their wares. The Bazar wasn’t introduced till Luclin came out.
That's been covered in the comments about a hundred times.
Cupping OG EQ players ears when he repeats “Portal of Knowledge”. 🎉😂
I see you're as old as me 80. We make mistakes when we get old and sometimes forget the exact name of something. Im sure you've been there.
Or maybe you're perfect ifk 😂
I had 4 people on 4 computers over 1 modem connection, worked great.
Lol sounds about right 🤣
Man, I have a conflicted feeling about one aspect of the classic eq... quests you had to hail all the NPC you see and talk to them and type in specific phrases in order to get and details if the quests and lores which I miss but find it PITA but now (i quit playing(again) 6 years ago, everything is automated meaning the NPC is already labled as a quest/task giver
the era of MMOs that included EQ, UO, Asheron's Call, and Dark Age of Camelot, was absolutely magical. unfortunately, MMOs seem to have gotten worse as time progressed, instead of better.
They are major grind fest now but without the social element
North Freeport used to be the main marketplace. I was on Mith Marr in 1999.
I forgot the tunnel in Common Lands had a market also.
I remember getting EQ for Christmas that year, wasn't able to play until some time in January because I spent days and days patching lol
The smell of my new Celeron computer. I bought just to play EQ. The smell of my potted plants in the early sunlight. I got up early to play EQ.
Got up early?! I never went to sleep 😂 lol
Great video, thanks!
Glad you liked it!
Man, life in the 90s was so good. Great video covering my childhood!
Also, where did you get such clear footage of the Everquest trailer?! All the ones I've seen on youtube are blurry.
I actually did alot of research for this video and digging for footage. The clear footage of the game with early up was hard to get clear too. Not exactly sure where I got it
Mith Marr, north Freeport, Xarn fire sales.
Frank I was on Mith Marr, Bikky the cleric.
Why was the trading zone on Xegony server Greater Faydark? Everywhere else it was East Commons. Was it because of "Jiggystuff" selling there?
Well you could technically sell anywhere if you wanted to trade and sell that way instead of leaving your toon as a shop, so the zone everyone used was really specific to the server and people.
Love EQ, and I played from 99-03. Monk. Fennin Ro. I remember I dropped 3000$, on a new custom gameing PC so I could run EQ like a king. Much time was wasted. Loved every second of it.
No other game since has captured that same sense of immersion and adventure. They all just went the way of number go up, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine. Time = more number go up, dopamine.
Slight correction to your video, the first online 3d game to play online with other players was Meridan 59 (a straight pvp game that had massive penalties when you died first off you lost stats on your character across the board and if that wasn't enough you dropped everything your caring and wearing but was a great 4 years), Than EQ came out and than 2 years later came Dark Age of Camelot (Still to this day the best PVP mechanics/system of them all) and than a few years after that World of Warcraft and everyone quit everything they were playing for that grinder of a game. But had a blast playing all of them, I still remember downloading a patch on Meridian 59 that took every bit of 14 hours to do on that dial-up connection. Between being disconnected from AOL or losing server connection I wanted to smash the computer a billion times. But once that loading screen popped up I was like a fat kid in a candy store.
Wasn't Asheron's Call (sp?) out around then too?
EQ wasn't the first 3D MMORPG though, that was Meridian 59, beat EQ out by just a couple years, 1996. Successful, yes but not as successful as Everquest by a long margin.
This is true, and EQ took what they had and made everything scaled up for the servers etc and truly created an MMO that was global and had everything...
Any southern country bumpkins finding the timeline off? Living where I do we were always behind on everything. Luckily I had a computer since 1998 so I played plenty of games on it. Sadly I had no idea what the internet was until 2004. I was unimpressed until I found game websites. Then shortly found out about RuneScape classic launching runescape 2 and also world of warcraft. I dived into both of them and life changed forever. Sadly I didn't know about other games like EverQuest. I wasn't using search engines yet. I only knew how to type in websites I already knew about. I'm sure making up for it now. It's been a blast diving into it. Been playing A lot of Meridian 59 as well.
Modern MMOs place too much emphasis on player convenience. Nothing feels earned anymore.
Sadly this is very accurate
Bazar was Shadows of Luclin, quite a while before Planes of Power and that was way way way after 1999.
Never winter nights was out before eq, and so was Ultima online. Both were 2d though.
nwn was 3d, nwn wasn't an mmo though. UO was 2d indeed, however Meridian59 came even before uo and was 3d
EQ was released March 16,1999...Neverwinter nights was released June 18, 2002
@@ashtonx nwn was originally a goldbox mmo on dial up 56k baud modems. Released in 1991. Look it up. Bioware used the name in 2002. I was a teen in 91 lived it first hand.
@@EQ_EnchantX @ashtonx nwn was originally a goldbox mmo on dial up56k. Released in 1991. Look it up. Bioware used the name in 2002 for their nwn. I was a teen in 91 lived it first hand. Nwn1 came out near Ultima 7/8.
I played in beta in 1998 then after launch loved the game miss it
I played on Rallos Zek, mostly we explored other people's inventory
I was there... EQ was great !
the last third of your video, you are talking about a lot of things that wasn't at launch, POK, the Bazaar, that wasn't there at launch. I played it from launch till months after the first expansion and those things didn't exist that whole time. there was a Bazaar but it wasnt a zone, we met at east commonlands in this tunnel and there weren't vendors, people just shouted out what they had , you contacted them and did a trade and hopped that you didn't get ripped off. the only way to get ported anywhere was to have a wizard or druid port you using spells, there was no stones you click on to port around.
I'm old and I forget stuff now. If I made the video back in 2001 I would have been less than half my age now. Try making a video like this and getting everything correct. Its not that easy.
Plane of knowledge not portal and that wasnt in original eq, neither was the bazaar
selling noted lobs
CD's usually just had installation software on it. Usually it wasn't needed, unless it was copy protection. Usually you just move most of the data to hard drive.
I remember... I played when you died you had to run back to your corpse with nothing and loot it and it took time to recover. And you just hoped to god there was a cleric or necromancer around. Now when you die you respawn with all your stuff... kinda lame lol...
PoK stands for Plane of Knowledge ;D
Indeed
i had a rio in 1999 🤓
TRAIN TO ZONE!!!
FYI there was a virtual world before EQ. The first mmorpg, Meridian 59! Although there will never be a game that got us as excited at the original EQ.
I thought I was pretty clear about it being the first 3d virtual world created on that level. - That's literally word for word what I said. And I will stick by that statement.
Neverwinter Nights is older than Meridian 59.
Yup! Meridian is what got me into MMORGs!
@@AxiomofDiscord
Meridian 59 was released October 7, 1996
EQ was released March 16,1999...
Neverwinter nights was released June 18, 2002
2:03 that hurt
Nice. Sad I didn't experience it. I got into mmos during eq2. Although I had the pc setup to run it. Seems wsy not hardcore.
Also the women looked more like women back then with the low poly models than western studios do today with all the man looking chicks to appease nut jobs and journos. I miss mmos pre 2010(not counting wow as I never played it really).
You might want to check some of the statements... First 3D game? First Online game?
Oh definitely need a fact checker for this one folks
Or you could make your own video covering the same topic but with all the facts you want fixed. That would be too difficult though...am I right?
Modern games are incapable of this kind of immersion.
Considering we've all changed so much, maybe its us too that aren't capable anymore either...just a thought
Bro your audio levels are WAY off... lemme know if you need some help
Yeah dude I need help.
in 1999 i never used a cd 2 connect to the internet dude lived in a diffrent layer then me
Bad video is bad. You have information from 2002 in here talking like it was 1999. You skipped over the EC tunnel for selling stuff and went straight to plane of knowledge from 2002. You also didn't mention how they had a beta with max lvl of 6 and people killed emperor crush during it.
I got my first portable mp3 player in 1998. It had nothing to do with an ipod
nice
your forgetting about Ultima Online released in 1997
Nah I didn't forget it. As I mentioned 5 times in the video eq was the first on a global scale in almost every sense...that's why as soon as eq launched ultima was basically dead.
bazzaar? no w command tunnel
No lie asherons call was 10x better and was released in '99
Lol, the graphics in that 1999 trailer look nothing like the original game.
Gaming was better then. Ironic
Harris Lisa Lee Scott Jones Betty
So many inaccurate statements within the first 4 minutes of the video, had me checking out early.
As someone who played EQ the month it released, I appreciate what you attempted to do here. But, you should really try not to make so many broad statements of fact, before verifying them.
i suggest you make a video then with everything you think i messed up and show the world your vast knowledge of eq and video production skills
@@legendarybloodlines Can't say I'm surprised by your reaction, but if I did actually have something to prove, I would probability start by seeking and accepting criticism, rather than lashing out defensively at the few who offer it.
From what I've seen, of your idea of analysis, and community feedback, I can see why you're struggling.
@@Roguedeus im on youtube i get enough criticism, try making a channel and making a video on everquest - im sure you will get everything correct and it will be a huge hit
Hi can I get a SOW? This game is why I avoid MMORPG today.
Its ok we don't want you.
lol there is so much wrong with this "history" i dont know where to begin
lets see you make a video then...yup exactly
The number of qualifiers at the start of this video to say that EverQuest did anything first makes the head spin.
nice. yeah it was quite innovative for the first 3d mmorpg :P
selln SoW for a plat!