Former EverQuest game designer here. I wrote and implemented the Ranger, Druid, and Paladin epic quests, among other things. Nice video, Vareous. There are a lot of things I don't like about EQ, but I agree that the sense of "MMO", in games like UO and EQ and vanilla WoW, is something that, regrettably, has been lost in modern massive multiplayer games. While it's intimidating, it's also very rewarding.
I remember helping my irl buddy do the shaman epic spear quest. I remember it being pretty lengthy but not impossible. That was when max level was 60. Such a fucking epic game man. I had a warrior first. Than a ranger.
I would rage at you on behalf of all Druids for everything I had to go through for that Scimitar, but the Paladin epic was really fun so... I forgive you. (I still hate those damn Seahorses though.)
I go back to this video every time I wanna feel nostalgic, but I just realized that it's almost 10 years old.... I'm getting to the point where I need retrospectives of my retrospectives.
I met my wife in EQ... I was OBT (Original Beta Tester on CT '99). In '05 I got a random /tell on my Rogue asking if I could help kill the Prince, Queen and King for her Cleric guild mate's Epic Clicky Rezzer. During the fun, she "got" all of my stupid jokes and we clicked. Married 8+ years now. Awesome raiding buddy to this day. :) I was not forced to write this. LOL
+Captain Learjet that's actually pretty cool , I feel like it's harder to meet friendly people online these days. Everybody wants to be a troll. Back them it seems like there was still some internet etiquette.
+-=Sp00k=- Beta tester pride! I was on the RP server with the then-famous bard Jythri. I also ended up being friends with Baelish (We were both in Triton) and got rather drunk with him at the San Francisco Fan Fest. Sooooooo many great nostalgic memories. My friend who I had started playing with (CompUSA employee guild) even ended up marrying another Cleric from our later raiding guild. I know you two are far from the only ones.
+Mo Anderson everyone gets offended so easily in eq2, i'm not even trolling, I just told a few jokes and now I'm a wanted criminal.... sure, the joke was me blowing up new York, but its all just for shits and giggles!
keep your chin up.. play Pantheon Rise of the Fallen when it releases.. and Project 1999 is gunna release a new classic EQ server soon.. and thats as close as youll get to the real experience
I dont think i *want* the everquest experience again... i want a modern version of it though... death penalties, no hand holding, forced grouping unless u were a necro... 5am mornings helping a *stranger* do a corpse ... etc... lol... but thanks - if Pantheon can match the experience ill check it out
+Edward Barlow Pantheon. I cannot wait. I have not been this excited for a game since EQ"Next" (When it was announced originally like 8 or 9 years ago). Oh wait... that never happened though! Daybreak can lick my balls!
I just want to say that I had never played EverQuest until just recently. I'm playing on the Project 1999 server, and I'm having more fun than I've had with any MMO in years. The last time I had a similar gaming experience was when I first started playing WoW in 2006. It feels like I'm playing an MMO for the first time again. Probably has to do with the design philosophy being dramatically different from in modern MMOs. In terms of immersion, modern MMOs are a step above simply giving you a straight line of mobs to kill ad nauseam until you reach the level cap. In EQ you actually have to explore the zones looking for mobs to kill, and there's actually a sense of danger. There's something to be said for the sheer terror of encountering a vengeful lyricist as a lowbie in Everfrost. One of the fundamentals of game design is risk vs reward, and modern MMOs present little if any risk at all; death is never more than a minor inconvenience, whereas in EQ death can be devastating depending on the circumstances. The game is inconvenient, clunky, and dated. And yet somehow that makes it all the more rewarding an experience.
You need the Titanium Edition of the game. Its expensive to come by these days, but there are "other methods" of obtaining it. After you've set up a fresh install, go to the project 1999 website and follow the setup guide.
Best game I've ever played. Had spent easily over 1k hrs online in EQ. Why was it so enjoyable? It was hard. Brutally, unforgivingly hard. You had to join a guild, or at least make many, many friends, in order to progress. Being a cool, friendly, helpfull player was a necessity. Being a dick was a guarantee for social ostracisation and game stagnation. Even though many of the quest, the Lore and backstories, were really beautifully written and crafted, the community WAS the game! So many people loved EQ because the amazing work of the developers allowed so many people from around the world to explore this space and have fun together.
Honestly mate, just listening to the intro and music, seeing the game play - it really brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful experience that was back in the days, folks helping each other, fantastic community - was rushing home every day from work - being in Germany i spent countless hours at night raiding first with an american guild - later on then being a proud member of Mortalis. I have never ever felt that spirit again in any other MMORPG. I still feel sad that this time is over - life goes on - but i will always cherrish the years of fun i had with this game and its people. Simply fantastic :). Thanks so much to you for bringing all these fond memories back to life !
PS: forgot to mention - how i loved and hated the XP-loss when you died - the dreaded corpse runs - the /consent and all your stuff got looted - running blind from Halas through Runnyeye etc etc - countless things - wonderful times :)
Warwiz I got killed on the boat from FP to Butcherblock by one of the damn Erollisi maidens when the boat stopped at that island. The Corpse traveled with the boat and got dumped somewhere. The GM's could not even find it for me. Thankfully I was only level 9, but that was one of my first characters back in the day. That was weeks worth of work!
How about when you had to petition the GM because your corpse was stuck in a wall and you would sit for hours debating whether you could take out a gnoll commander with your fists.
I sighed heavily watching this vid. I came in during Kunark and made a woody ranger. I played this game extensivelt for years. Met my wife in game. Made it through college playing this game. Found out my wife was pregnant during a raid after my guildleader gave us a 10 min break so that my wife (main healer) and I (puller) could talk. I miss the game. I miss the difficulty. I miss the friends I made. Casting SoW by orc lift, donations appreciated..../tear
I still use /(word), like /hug, in text messages and emails. People get what I'm saying but don't understand how ingrained those chat commands are still just stuck in my brain or where they come from. /camp
this is my favorite game of all time. I will never feel the absolute addiction to anything again like I felt to everquest. This game will forever be burned into my memory.
You can't express to people who have never played everquest just how meaningful everquest was. I have memories of all the places and probably still remember my way through dungeon mazes. I remember all those nasty deaths that seemed hopeless, everquest forced you to be social and it forced you to think, you died in the back side of cazic thule maze you had to look for people to help and everyone would! I still have friends I made in everquest and I still talk about things that happened in everquest with fond memories. Thank you for the video it actually brought tears to my eyes.
+John Hoffman agreed. Most fun i've ever had playing a video game came from my EQ days. I had a group of about 6-7 friends that all started playing it together one summer in highschool, when we weren't online playing (usually our parents would make us get out of the house during the day) we were hanging out and talking about EQ, or planning our night's hunt or whatever... DVINN to ZONE!!!
+John Hoffman I logged in about a year ago to run through some favorite dungeons for nostalgia points. I got hopelessly lost in Permafrost Keep trying to find Lady Vox.
+Elle Heilig oh jeeze, I seem to remember that rogues (with a high enough skill) could even pickpocket the rare items that bosses carried during the fight. Unless i'm mistaken I think that got patched pretty quickly, someone please correct me if i'm wrong, as I only leveled my rogue to about 30 or 40. Speaking of which (enter story mode, going off topic here)- that summer I mentioned above, after a while of playing on our original server we all switched to the brand new 'Quellious' server with the idea of leading the front-lines, which we did for the first few months- guild name 'How the Gods Kill'. One of my greatest memories of that time was a GM event in Kalimdor early on in the servers life where as a wood-elf rogue (named 'Dacient') I received the 'Jambiya', which I recall was pretty special at the time due to it having 2-3 points higher in dmg than the dragoon dirk dropped from Dvinn, which meant HUGE BACKSTABS for my level.
Thmbs up! I started in Qeynos. A friend of mine then found out about a quest in Faydwer for some two handed hammer which sells for a lot. Blinded by the riches we killed some dwarf in Qeynos for his head (Stumpy something or rather?) then ran all the way to freeport, then cross the ocean and finally to Kaladim. We were only lowbies then. Died so many times during the entire process including the stupid bandits in Karanas, but that was one of my greatest moments in gaming. I'll never forget that. I can imagine being an old man telling stories about it as if it really did happen in real life.
In the old days I used to love trains when I was playing my chanter. There are few things as fun as camping the zone line in KC as an enchanter. I once derailed 3 trains in a row, that took my group like 10-15 minutes straight to clear with tons of close calls. Just a shame they nerfed the hell out of chanters over the years to the point where you really only need 1 per raid as a buff bot... All of our crowd control was rendered basically useless in nearly all raid encounters starting around the time of SoL or so and we were always crap as damage dealers compared to other int casters. So basically unless you were the chanter with the highest AAs for buff enhancements, there was really no place for you in most raids as a chanter, which killed nearly all of my enjoyment in the game at that point, at least with my main anyhow.
Man back in the day when you had to strategize even regular encounters. Normal fights in EQ were like mini boss fights in games today. Every role mattered. The group pullers, the CC, the tanks, the DPS, the healers. A bad pull could wipe out not only your group but many others around, lmao.
I always come back to this video for the nostalgia. Never hard to find either. Thank you for this! I played EverQuest when it first came out and it will always be the most memorable game I ever played.
I remember trying to buy skin like steel buff from a druid in east commons. He said he couldn't because he was working for this other low lvl person for a silver ruby veil. LoL. I still remember how uber I felt when I finally got gold jasper earrings on my druid. And the first set I sold on my enchanter (which ended up being my main). Charming people during a duel and sending them to die to a sand giant in oasis of mar, or even and deepwater croc, as I ran to zone so the NPC wouldn't come eat me lol. Good times, I miss them.
You can, it is called Project 1999. I played it for some time and it only has 1 expansion (Kunark). If you can handle the lack of goodies that MMO's have nowadays then you will find out how it was really like.
Yeah p99 is nice, but I wish we had at least the map option on the screen. The rest of it is fine by me. I did all of the hard work (printed out all of the maps I needed for what I wanted to do) so I'm just a bit picky when it comes to the maps :) I have a Level 40 Druid on p99, but haven't had the time to play it since moving earlier this year.
Really can not overstate how amazing this video is. Really captures why the game was awesome. Also motivated me to play project 1999 (never played EQ but always wanted to. I am now!)
I'm just happy I was able to play it when I did, waaaaay back at the beginning. Nothing can compare. Things are so much different now, and I'm sad, and I'm growing old.
That was terrific thank you. I was fortunate to have started playing Everquest the first month it came out. That first years was incredible. Everything was so new to everybody and twinks didn't exist yet. Among my memories: 1. After a few days of playing, the excitement I felt the first time I saw a non-barbarian character run through Halas. 2. Struggling to acquire a suit of bronze armor to go with my fine steel sword. 3. Being in a party that stumbled into the Castle Mistmoore zone for the first time. None of us had heard anything about it before and the zone-in was littered with player corpses. What a rush. Real goosebumps. 4. Sand giants! 5. The misery that came from the game growing so quickly and the challenge of finding a place to hunt. It was severely overcrowded for awhile. 6. The first time I ran across a continent, led by someone more experienced, and taking a ship to another one. I was leaving my home city behind and setting out for the unknown. 7. The craziness that came from knowing there was ALWAYS something better to acquire. Whatever I had wasn't good enough. Part of the genius behind this game was that it could never truly be won. There were always things to improve. I finally quit EQ after 5 years. As fun as it was, it was also a terrible addiction. I will never play another MMORPG, because I can't afford to get sucked in like that again.
I'll tell you EXACTLY what you miss about the UI. This game was from a period when UI's were actually game-themed, not all sci-fi/simple boxes that can be dragged all over and made partially transparent. Same goes for runescape's UI.
Hell levels. Corpse runs. "TRAIN TO ZONE!" Buffs that had no timer and could fail in 10 seconds or last an entire evening. Fizzling spells. "BOAT!" Damn I loved this game.
Thank you so much for this video! I played from 1999 to 2009, and now, 5 years after I quit, I still miss the game. Every bloody day. Everquest was hardcore in a way MMORPG players of today could never even fathom.
Please do about four more hours on this. Like auto attacking your trainer while typing hail. Or falling off the elevators in Kelethin due to lag. Or the 20 minute boat wait. Jumping off to hit a merchant and hoping you are fast enough to get back on. Mob trains, camp breaking, different race/class combos needing different exp. Some races not seeing in the dark. Mobs being nearly impossible for a level one. Crushridge, Mistmoore. Deleveling and not being able to use the spells you just learned. Mobs actually being hard to kill. Places being scary to walk through. Good times.
"Deleveling" My brother and I used this trick before they fixed it, got to level 40 something then deleveled to 30. So we had the stats of a level 40 but could still attack level 22's. Haha was almost evil. I really miss the small things too like shrinking potions, shadowknights could talk as their pet, illusion spells like you could turn yourself into a torch. Just little things like that made the game so fun.
Yeah, one time me and my party were inside the mansion at Unrest in one of the top floor rooms, when the whole server went down. I logged back in after a few mins to find myself alone, in a fully respawned room with werebats and others right on me. I immediately freaked out and the best I could do as they started wailing on me, was to inch my way to one of the windows and jump out, so that when I died, I would at least have my body outside the house. Lol, and that's what happened. This took place 19 years ago and I still remember it like it was yesterday.
I was from Torvonnilous as well, Darkeowyn played from 2005-2007. I loved this game and still miss it to this day. Most of my friends went to WoW as I did, but Norrath will ALWAYS be my home.
lol made a bard for that reason! i could never get a sow when i needed it, and i was making silver grouping with people to get them through zones at a high rate of speed
Perhaps the most incredible thing about EverQuest was that it created an actual world. Remember waiting for boats to cross continents? An annoyance? A time waste? Yes. But it also helped instill the giant proportions of the world.
I played from launch as a teenager, and I will never love another game as much as I loved Everquest. It was my preferred universe to be in. The game was so difficult, immense, rewarding, and soul-crushing. Sometimes I would quit it for weeks after something terrible happened, but I would always come back. It really was Evercrack. I have a wonderful life now, but I will always pine for those first few years on EQ.
I love this video so much bro, im not gonna lie i watch it and listen to it at work or when im at home, this is the most wonderful put together montage of everquest I've ever seen. Huge props and thank you. I want to save your video so i can show it to my daughter who loves watching me play and kill dragons now with my guild
I had just recently started up what would end up being my "main". A Gnome Mage. He came shortly after leveling to almost 25 as a Gnome Wizard, who I had dumped all of my creation points into STR on, because I wanted to be able to carry ALL the loot! Only to later realize I gimped the hell out of myself, because INT mattered hugely for your mana pool later on. Some Halfling Druid, buffed to the teeth with STR came walking up to me painstakingly slow. He was so encumbered he could barely walk. He opened up the trade chat with me and to my delight he placed a couple hundred platinum in the trade window and hit trade. I gladly accepted his offer! The only issue was, he had converted every bit of it to Copper. Here I was, pockets busting at the seams with back then was enough plat to last you well on into nearly level cap, and I couldn't move. I was within viewing distance of the zone entrance to Ak'Anon. Within about 20 minutes I had collaborated with several other lower level people in the zone. I had promised them a cut of the Plat if they would help me. We all took some of the copper, and slowly but surely made our way to the bank.
Here is why EQ will forwever, in my mind, be the best MMO ever, much like this video alluded to the entire time. It was CHALLENGING. It was difficult at EVERY stage of the game. Hell, you had to develop an actual skill (side-strafe running) to escape fights that went south. Dying was detrimental, spawns were rediculous....and binding next to a rare spawn that you needed to call for friends to help you kill and then falling asleep was the worst of both. (My friend lost 4 levels on his druid because he bound at the spawn). But that is what made it worth it. Yes the epic quest took forever, was tedious and frustrating and arduous. But I swear to god, getting the ragebringer, with the 1 pixel animation was one of the most rewarding feelings I have felt in any game, ever. Hell, at the time (I hadn't done all that much in my life) it was one of the most rewarding feelings of doing ANYTHING ever. It is why we had a call chain that we would use so that if a mob spawned at 3am we could round up enough bleary eyed people, from all walks of life, to group and take down the Council of Twelve, or something. I quit playing sortly after completing planes of power, right after the next endgame expansion came out and sold my account on one of those sites. I went to Miami for spring break with the nearly $2k I made. I turned 21; I drank, and I dated, and I went to college and lived my life. But years later, I wondered, while bored...wonder if y account ever got sold. With some effort I managed to find out that it hadn't, (the mislabelled the stats on the account so it seemed completely outpriced) and I was able to retieve my account. I logged in and went to the Nexus. I did a /who. And one moment later -> /tell Muadd "hey its Geeii, remember me?!" There was this player who played in a "Friends and Family" guild I was in as I was levelling, a player that I helped get HIS epic for long after I had gone on to a raiding guild. And here he was, running the largest guild on the server, 10 years later, and remembered every bit of it. This...This is why EQ is the best MMO ever.
I did the same. I sold my account, got nostalgic and tried to log back in. The guy never even changed my password or moved my characters. All he did was sell my fungal tunic. The character never even moved. He paid $850 for a fungal tunic.
One of the big things i think this video didn't touch enough on is the grouping done in this game. In new Games you solo from level 1 to max level with a few dungeons thrown in. (50+ boring hours) In EQ you solo to maybe level 5 then spent the whole game grouping up with people and talking. This really built a sense of community. You knew or at least had seen a good many of the people on the server as you leveled up. Today most servers are divided into small groups of players who barely know each other if at all and server chats are spammed by the loudest most annoying people....
I know, in EQ1 one of my main chars was an enchanter... I could /ooc ENC LFG and have a group in a matter of seconds. Then again that was the days where strategy was required and crowd control was in high demand. Miss those days :-( I could mez an entire room full of froggies in Seb and keep them under control, until someone did something stupid like an AE nuke and you know who the froggies were mad at right? lol
You actually had a public reputation. If you were crappy at your class it would be well known even mid level. If you ninja looted you'd be instantly blacklisted. People would see you yell for a group, and then they'd yell that you're a thief. You came into the game like a newborn. No cloths, no skills, barely able to defend yourself. As you built your character up you also built up a reputation and a social group. People that had helped you complete quests, or recover a corpse without any real benefit to themselves and vice versa. I remember when I had to get together 30+ people to help complete my epic when they got literally nothing out of the encounter. They spent most of a night playing just to help me get something that I really wanted. These were people with jobs, families, and things they wanted to do. They did that because we had spent a lot of time together and they considered me a friend. I still consider those to be real friendships we'd formed and grown. I was also there when they needed me. I'd stop doing whatever self serving thing I was doing to go spend hours and hours helping them do something they wanted to do. Hell spending hours working out the tactics to how we'd do high end content. Because failure meant no loot, and spending hours on corpse runs. Especially pre cleric epic. The social aspect was incredible. I'm kind of glad no game has recreated it. I spent a lot of time on it. I have to say though, I don't regret a thing. Grouping Plane of Fear. Making mad dashes through Veeshan to Plane of Mischief. Staying there a month to get cards to get resistance flowers. Knowing that if you died you couldn't get back to your corpse. I still value the time I spent playing with my friends. Both the ones I knew in real life and ones I met in Everquest. All those people were equally my friends. Some I still talk to 14 years later.
I completely agree with you, these were real friendships. I actually ended up marrying someone I met in EQ. We have been together 13 years and have 3 children together.
The sense of achievement I felt running Qeynos to Freeport deathless was epic. Remember trying to get through the minotaur maze? Remember getting stomped by random Hill Giants or Sand Giants? I remember getting to a level where I could solo Hill Giants and doing it purely for the revenge and great feeling of doing it - no XP.
Years after I stopped playing my High Elf Paladin on Fennin Ro I started dating a woman who used to live in the upper MidWest of the US while I am in Pennsylvania. As we got to know each other she sheepishly told me that she used to play online MMOs. I perked up and said that I still played some. "Yeah, I was a High Elf Cleric in EverQuest". "No shit! I was a High Elf Paladin. Which server?" "Fennin Ro." "Holy hells! Me too! I was Findulas. Who were you?" She looked at me amazed, "You were Finduilas? I was Kalianna. I remember playing with you a few times." It was a blast.
Just hearing the EQ music makes me emotional. It takes me back to the grand sense of adventure on my bard the first time I ran from Qeynos to High Hold to get my PGT. The danger and excitement of pulling to the ledge in Overthere. The frustration of camping that Froglok supplier in lower guk (or Grachnist the Destroyer... I never did get that fking earring). Anyway, the only game that ever came close to the same sense of wonder was Dark Age of Camelot--and when they released Trials of Atlantis I felt like the game was ruined. Maybe because it was revolutionary in its time, or maybe because of all the memorable friends I made while playing it, no other game quite pulls the heartstrings like EQ. Last year I got on the EQ mac server that's frozen in the POP era and leveled up a new bard to lvl 65; it was still a lot of fun, but I ended up quitting because I couldn't get a group together to take down Trakanon twice to finish my epic... Thanks for sharing, man. Great video.
The sort of nostalgia this game brings about in those who played in the glory days falls somewhere between PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome, lol. While I loved the game, I have so many horror stories of insane time sinks, many of which have remained unfruitful to this day. I used to help organize weekly pick up raids on Naggy and Vox in hopes of one day finally winning a roll on a red scale for my barb war's epic, but after nearly 4 months of weekly raids I lost the rolls every single time. On another occasion I decided to camp Hadden in Qeynos Hills to get myself a fishbone earing, took nearly 21 straight hours of camping, killing him 3 times in a row before the bastard finally dropped the earing. Another time, after spending some time leveling up in the Warrens over on Odus, I decided I would head off to Lake of Ill Omens to level some more, made the couple hour trek by foot and boat and when I finally got to FV I forgot to get bound before leaving the fort and aggroed a couple of those spider girls who managed to root and kill me a few feet from the zone line when the realization that I was still bound in Toxx came crashing down around me... 3 hours later with my longest ever corpse run nearly complete, I made damn sure I was bound before heading out for my body, lol. Had to stop several places along the way to hunt for some temp gear and fruitlessly ooc teleport requests that never got any responses.
Great video! I actually got back into EQ recently, since they changed the All Access membership to work with all SOE titles. My favorite (worst) memory of EQ - was the one time I died in Cobalt Scar, fighting Wyverns, back before you respawned with all of your gear...and I had to walk all the way from Ak'Anon to Cobalt Scar butt-ass naked. Luckily I was a mage and was able to acquire some malachite, so i was able to keep some mobs in Skyshrine occupied...but you try traversing the temple without clothes on...that was insane! People in current-gen MMO's have no idea what we had to go through! lol (AND IT WAS GREAT!)
That was the worst! I remember being on the boat from Faydwer to Antonica. I got too close to the edge and the boat jumped out from underneath me. I started swimming in a direction, completely lost. I never swam because, "I'm a Paladin. They don't swim!" After an hour of swimming and going through my entire food and water store, I end up on the shore of the Cyclops island. Boom. Dead. All that work for a death. At least I didn't die in the water. (And my swimming skill had gained a few levels.) I'll never forget that.
Allen Lake Sad story Allen... You ever get you're body back? I once teleported my 37th lvl druid to an expansion and my parents wouldn't buy it and i lost my main DUDE! I also died in the Wyverns, sucked bad. Was there an amount of time you had to retrieve your corpse in this game or would it just stay there?? I always flipped out and stayed up for hours on end to get my corpse. Fuck school i need my gear lol
I did recover my corpse Kalub. My parents were yelling at my that we had to leave but the corpse stayed there for 7 days, so I had time. The next morning I got up like 3 hours before school and got someone hunting in the zone to help fight off the Cyclops while I looted my body. That sucks about the expansion! Losing your main dude just due to a bad teleport! Ugh!
I remember drowning in the ocean with my Druid had all the money and gear I owned, luckily a higher lvl player came along and i gave her permission to drag my corpse up off the ocean floor. You could give permission for others to drag your corpse to safety or Necromancers to summon your corpse. It was funny to see people running across the zone dragging someone's corpse behind them.
You hit every point on this game: the game was an interactive story. I met so many people on my grind. I remember moments of terror running across the world naked or seeing a new particle effect for the first time would scare the crap out of me. These moments of terror made the game so amazing.
Level 54 Wizard on Prexus server, will never forget this magical world, some of the most fun i've ever had. This kind of thing will never be re-captured in a modern game, players want it to easy these days. I never finished my epic quest, it was damn near impossible, even with a great guild.
Great video, and yes it did bring back a lot of good memories for me. I started playing EQ back during Ruins of Kunark and for the longest time, Iksar characters were pretty much all I played. Soooooo many hours in the Field of Bone, sooooo much grinding, but I always look back fondly on it. EQ was in some ways a lot more relaxing to play than a modern MMO, too, because unless you were a bard, you weren't clicking action buttons all the time. Warriors and monks especially, there was a lot of auto-attacking in between using an ability. It was much less of a twitch kinda game and more about strategy and planning -- getting the right stats, the right gear, etc. There just isn't anything like that anymore -- game developers seem very afraid of players getting bored. Anyway, enough blather from me. Great video, thanks for sharing this.
Some memories I had watching the video: 1) Going to Befallen for the first time, falling through the hole in the floor. Was able to hide in a corner while my tiny guild pulled in everyone we had online to come rescue me. 2) Logging on with plans to grind in Frontier Mountains only to discover that my guild had wiped trying to kill a Wyrm (forget the zone name just now). I spent my entire evening dragging people's corpses to them. This general thing happened a number of times, but not usually taking an entire evening. 3) Very early on, taking my guild of all Trolls and trying to run to Neriak, having never been further than South Ro. We didn't get any further than Oasis...and the Sand Giants... Good times.
Something truly wonderful was made in Everquest, and that has been entirely lost in modern MMORPGs. Here is to hoping that Everquest Next can bring back the strength of the genre.. but I doubt it, developers seem to think that in game "hassels", "annoyances", "penalties" are bad for the game because players complain.. when in fact, even though players complain, these things are what make the game a social virtual world that we invest in. Modern MMORPGs are a pale shallow shell compared to this pinnacle, I fear we will never see its like again.
Check out Pantheon:Rise of the Fallen - new game being created by Aradune. Nothing is ever going to re-capture the feel of Everquest, but anything close will probably come from that man!
Jeremy Barnes Thanks for the heads up, however I am already aware of this project. It is at least 3 years away from release, and that is if it even makes it. Given its failed kick starter origins and who is currently helming the project (Brad, who previously drove Vanguard into the ground), I just don't think I can get on board with that game until its more of a reality then a theory you know what I mean? My hopes right now are with Everquest Next, while it won't be what EQ1 was, it is promising to be nothing like what any of the "modern" MMORPGs since EQ1 are like either. Perhaps they will hit a new sweet spot.
The wife and I (we met through the original EQ) decided to re-sub for the original EQ for a few months again due to lack of anything else out there right now. We're having a good deal of fun but it is definitely not the same.
I never got to level 65 back when that was the level cap. And I never reached end game stuff like raids and top tier gear. But I still loved every moment of my EQ experience... Wish the community was still big as it was back then. Super nostalgic from your video! Awesome work.
I would give anything to go back in time and be able to experience this game when it first came out. I've never played Everquest at all but just from the subtle joy in your voice from re-visiting it, i can tell that it must have been something special. I think the 'problems' you outlined make the game all the more unique, something to truly build friendships on. Hopefully something will come along to shake the gaming world up again and i'll be ready to experience it in full. A great overview btw, thank you for this.
Time to die, a_Vareous_bard! My friends and I in high school were OBSESSED with this game. I played an Enchanter. Used to run around newbie areas handing out Clarity buffs so they'd never go out of mana for 20 minutes. Hey, I had to pay it forward after all those Druids ran by giving me Spirit of Wolf so I could run fast. I remember Hell Levels. 35 and every 5 levels until 50 took 3 times as long to grind through, and dying and losing that exp you just spent your whole weekend accumulating was HEARTBREAKING. BUT... it was totally worth it. That sense of accomplishment of getting your punk ass to 50 through 60 was epic and there was no way you could have done it alone. "Massively multiplayer" indeed. P.S. High Elf agnostic Enchanter was easy mode. Need to sell? Far from a neutral or friendly city? ILLUSION: [friendly race] and BOOM, vendors buy your stuff. Just had to hope your illusion buff didn't run out before you could zone back out. P.S.S. INC TRAIN TO DOCKS.
Never played Ever Quest . But when watching how people can overcome some ingame problems on their own and for example make their own Economy Basicly is great and kinda interesting. I think it was far more of a social expierience to play that game . Bacause without everyone you would get nowhere
+Chriss RE You have no idea sir! The entire game was basically run by the players. It was the most sand boxxy MMO even now. We didn't have Dungeons or anything to level. Quests were a joke unless you were doing some class/race/faction specific epic end game thing. Raids were crazy and messy. I mean, you actually had to talk to NPCs. This was my child hood.
Early EQ was truly a Massively Multiplayer game... all the clones after it, while fun for a bit, just don't hold up to it. Just holding a dangerous camp in LGuk with a group of friends was an accomplishment in itself and I have not felt so fulfilled in any other game since EQ.
You made me relive my teenage years. I've tried replaying this, but I can't go back because it's just not the same. I remember tanking Kunark and Velious raids upwards to Planes of Power when I was 13. I really think this game made me have a great imagination, and appreciation for the fantasy genre. It was truly a gem of its time. Good video.
I loved EQ. I had a Dark Elf Enchanter and could never get my faction high enough for the high elves to allow her to finish her epic. And I LOVED Lower Guk. And Sebilis. I have deep dark elven roots...
For whatever reason reading your posted reminded me about the zone Qeynos. I didnt figure out until like 8 years into playing EQ that it was backwards for SonyEQ loll!
I remember the first time I went to my cousins house and he showed me this. I miss this game, I had so many good times with my cousin playing this. Felt like a magical world... because it was!
Doyle Goregutz hell yea me too. i think i was 13 going on 14 when i got my mom to buy it for my bday! I ended up playing EQ off and on for 13 years lol. Nothing compares to classic EQ tho!
Man this video brought back some fuzzy warm feelings from my childhood. There's so many little things I want to just revisit, but there's too many to really write out. Small things I remember: I'm going to refrain from googling and see just how much I can think of Fighting on Orc Hill when I was super low level Unleashing that little gnome magician who lived in the hole in that orc section near the wood elf town Running around in the barbarian ice world with a wood elf who helped show me around for hours Getting stuck in Kithikor woods at night when it all went to shit, and having to hide on the edge of the map Some guy trusting me to transfer like 10 insanely rare items from one of his character to another, and giving me a hammerhead helm Doing the quest for the rangers ivy swords (The name is escaping me for some reason), but then realizing that the root spell overwrote snare and just about no group would let me use them Realizing that we could just use Snare with our druids and absolutely farm the hell out of Dwarf NPCs by kiting them, and then we kind of broke the game by getting rich off selling axes.... I actually remember sharing a spawn with a friend and watching all 3 star wars movies on VHS while doing it. It was key to have 2 people because eventually you'd be encumbered and have to sell all the axes they dropped. We eventually just began to pay someone to drop them off. Crazy.. Not knowing that the hybrid classes has an insane hybrid leveling penalty... Winning Dwarven work boots right before I was going on vacation with my family, and the entire group thinking I was an asshole for leaving One huge moment was an insane battle I had with a group in Cazic thule. We got trained on (remember trains just ruining everything?!), and the entire group just got wrecked, and someone ran. I remember fighting all these mobs with this paladin (Was a ranger), and we were about to die and this guy lay of hands on me, and we somehow barely survived. It was epic. That guy thanked me and said I had courage...it was awesome lol So many weird memories, and I don't know what games really had this many strange memories associated with it, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it was a brand new kind of game, and there wasn't any real hand holding. I mean now, I don't think this mechanic works, but at the time there was a genuine feeling of discovery and mystery to everything. I guess it was addicting and time consuming, but I loved it.
All those or variations on those themes! Add to that - was on the GvE PVP server - so had the added threat of PVP breaking out while you're leveling... nothing like it today.
"Magic" is the word I always use to describe my EverQuest experience. A Friend and I was there in "99" and 4 years after. I wasn't satisfied when EQ2 came about and moved on to other games. but I will never forget the sites, the music, the ambient sounds...The Adventure, Good and Bad.... and even the plastic Slurpee pee cup I kept next to my side when I played EQ.
These "negative" thing you said actually what makes these games fantastic. Nowadays the game itself handles everything for us and takes away all the fun
Well.... You dissed to classic UI of the game. Yes, it was a small area of graphics. Yes, there was no customization at the time. But... this game ran on my Pentium 100 Mhz computer. That is a SOCKET 7 CPU. Which I still have in perfect working condition today........ Regardless, I will state this: The small view area was necessary for the computers of the time and was in fact charming..... YES.. charming... in a world filled with HD megapixel this and that, I will still say that the classic small UI in EQ is charming and with the SPELL BOOK when you MEDITATE taking up the whole VIEW area it added a very special aspect to the game. Pleases Thumbs me up if you agree. - Terethian Corpseraiser, High Elf Cleric from CLASSIC Everquest on Zebuxoruck Server.
I was just using it as an opener to relate to people how modern games have such different UI structure. I then said how much I missed the UI. I preferred and used the classic UI all the way to the point I was forced to change it when they disabled it.
Vareous No, No, I was way off base here. Let it be known I was watching this video drunk and I posted at a pause, if you pause the video when I did it sounds like a straight up dis of the UI. Then... after the negative comment you mention a kind of nostalgia to the UI...... so you are fine, this video is great. But I am a die hard classic fan. One of the crazy people that remembers fantasy from the beginning. So I am 100% classic Ever-quest all the way, Corpse runs, cloth armor,exp loss etc. It all adds character to the game. I apologize to you, formally, for my drunken comments.... which is more than Justin Bieber would offer you.... I promise!
But if I was Justin Bieber I would just spit in your face and claim I was young and still learning about mistakes like this... but... oh wait... I always knew it was wrong to spit in someones face even before I was a kindergartner. ...well... I guess extreme singing skill makes up for common sense?
What a great retrospective, thank you! - I was there from the beginning - It was great seeing these old-time graphics and hearing the music again. The corpse runs, the horrible quests, no maps, sense heading. J-boots, SoW and auctions at East Commons tunnel. Those were truly, the days.
I so completely forgot about calling out “camp check”. This was essential back in 199o-2004. Also, the tunnel - this really was the place to make loads of money. Buy low, sell high - quite easy to do if you did a day or two of observation. But, the tunnel was the place to make big money.
You forgot to mention staring at a book to gain mana, no mounts, dragging corpses, keys for zones in your bags, weight limits, how long it took to make your first kill. I don't remember quest phrases having brackets until later on.
Duuude! Staring at that book! And I'll never forget the first time my character suddenly couldn't move. I had no idea what had happened. Finally figured out I was over my weight limit. Crazy what we put ourselves through, but I'll never forget it and never love anything as much.
This video brought back so many memories, I'm an original beta player, Hadden, LGuk Assassin, J-boots when they used to dropped in Najena. Honestly as good as your video is it only touches the tip of what we had to deal with back in the days. Trains to zone, Hell levels, I also played on RZek so gear bagging was a skill. I remember upgrading my 586 to max ram with a 56k modem and zoning faster than most so in PvP that was an advantage, unless they LD while zoning to avoid death hehe.. Makes me cry thinking of all the friends I made on the game and all the adventures I had. Thank you for the video and the trip down memory lane.
This game was so amazing. I played it from shortly after launch until right after WoW launch. My first real memory of it was being a Wood Elf Druid and running around the Greater Faydark, having no idea what I was doing or where I was going, and (unknowningly outside of Crushbone) coming across a dead orc, looting it and getting a fine cloth bracer. I thought it was so amazing. I died shortly after since I was way too low level for that area. I had no idea that I needed to get back to my body, so obviously I lost my beloved cloth bracer. I discovered this a day or so later and was pretty bummed lol. Those were some great times. This game will always be one of the greats! Thank you for the video and the great walk down memory lane!
So much love for this game. Two things I really hated that they changed though - the character models ugh! - and adding in the Bazaar. EQ tunnel went from the biggest collection of people selling wares and socializing and helping new/low level players out to a ghost town in a matter of weeks. It was truly sad :( Mind you if you played on a PvP server the bazaar was probably a blessing. I started on Rallos PvP and carrying all that plat around wasn't a good idea so there was no real commerce in EC.
Started playing in 2000, after the Kunark expansion. So while I can't say I was there from the very beginning, it was close enough. I rolled a Human Paladin, started in Freeport, and I still remember the sense of dread of the first Griffin that killed me, as well as the framerate drops from the tunnel. I remember camping for the Ghoulbane and the Jboots. And I remember staying at lvl 52 for nearly a year to get the book drops from Wox and Nagafen for my epic quest. In the end, I gave up and moved on, and eventually stopped playing and deleted my character after Planes of Power. Still, the original game had a sense of discovery and danger I haven't felt in any game since. Still remember my first adventure to visit Qeynos at lvl 10. That WAS an adventure.
I still vividly remember my first time in Lower Guk and Cazic Thule. I remember the terror of doing corpse recovery in the Plane of Fear, and the feeling of accomplishment upon assembling a full set of Thorny Vine armor. EQ was such an amazing game! Thanks for the video!
99-2001 player on bristlebane. Best gaming memories. Real communities formed...fav gaming experience still to this day, even after I burned out from running a big guild...thanks for this post!
I realize now just how similar the appeal of Dark Souls/Bloodborne is to Everquest. Both games thrust you into the unknown, amidst enemies that pose a real threat. Everquest did it first of course, and on a far grander scale. EQ had its drawbacks though. I remember mana/hitpoints used to take so long to fully regen, i kept a mini VHS tv next to my pc. So i'd have something to do while i wait. Or how about when your slain and you didn't make it to the corpse in time? And it just decayed, loosing all your $hit? .....This game was the grand-daddy of rage quit. And we loved every second of it.
The drawbacks you mentioned, as annoying as they might have been, were part of what made the game so immersive. You were actually afraid to die because of the consequences, the lost of experience, sometimes even lost of your level, and possible lost of your corpse (and everything in your inventory as well). When I started playing you looked up to high level players, level 50 was impressive, now when you hit level 50 (or even higher) you don't have that feeling of achievement, or at least its not as exciting (at least to me, still fun though), because its so much easier and faster to get there. There was no in map in game either, and I got lost quite a few times lol, but this too was part of the challenges that made the game immersive.
My favorite memory is going to Najena for JBoots right after I finally got the Ice Comet spell. It was a mess, everyone was fighting to outdamage each other. Somehow, on the SECOND spawn, I did enough damage to get kill credit. She dropped the Jboots. Those things used to drop like once every few days.
ShowEQ came in handy there (after they nerfed the drop), running through South Ro so much from druid teleports and heading back to Guk (ie corpse retrieval), the Ancient Cyclops would on occasion just be hanging out waiting for someone to "track" him down . Also got a glowing black stone with it, after someone finally figured out the spawn cycle in Qeynos hills at night, spend the night tracking down and killing his placeholders, eventually the necro dude showed up with the thing (though he didn't always have the stone either!) If you relied on plain luck you could be waiting a very long time
I played this pretty much from the start and stuck around for the first 3-4 expansions before I moved on. Seriously dumped 2 years of my life into this in 1999-2001. That video... wow. Thank you so much. This made me all warm and fuzzy inside. I played many MMOs since then but the sense of awe and magic and fear I have felt in EQ, I have never found in any other MMOs. Wow. I
Man, this game really screwed up my life for afew years - but I regret nothing :) Can't help but wonder how some of my old friends and guildmates are doing in life nowadays~
Oh, you missed a few big parts of the game; crowd controlling/pulling and aggro management. In this game, there were no linked mobs until you got to the very top tier raid bosses. A skilled player (monks and bards usually) could pull 1 mob out of a pack slowly and carefully. This could make or break a raid group, as tanks actually had to protect the squishier members that died very easily, and more than one mob could crush (literally) a tank to death. "Parking" was the most advanced technique and reserved for the badasses of the game. You could pull a pack, run to your groups camp, and start rooting/mesmerizing them in place while the grp killed off 1 mob. This helped for faster kills, more exp, and more loot. I perfected this strat (that was taught to me by the paladin Heavyhands Soze and the bard Ethos) in Karnors Castle, or train central to those in the know. As for aggro management, this game was the king of it. There were no mods to tell you how close to pulling aggro on a mob away from the tank. But, you had to kill fast because the healer was running out of mana almost every pull and you didn't want the healer to go oom midfight, so you had to ride the electric wire of dpsing and aggroing. Further, a group didn't lose aggro by running far enough away. Once you aggrod a mob, that mob didn't reset until you were dead or ran to the next zone (which is called training...because the mobs hit like a train and they would follow a single track if you got a large pack.) To me, these two aspects really made the game challenging and a real rewarding experience to play. You had to be on your A game, every pull, and couldn't mess up. The rewards were that people noticed skilled players and wanted to group with them constantly.
Memory lane indeed. There goes my WHOLE childhood. Who else laughed at the map? Or the EC tunnel clusterfuck? It sucks that I can't still play it, but it's just not the same. It hasn't aged well, and it's unrecognizable from the game I played 12-14 years ago. /EQNanticipationdance
Stumbled across this video by accident. I'm an old fart who once played EQ. I started during The Ruins of Kunark. Your commentary was very relatable. I have since quit ALL mmorpg's but if I were ever to play any again, it would probably be good old EQ. I did try to recover my original SOE account but I was unsuccessful so if I were to try to play again, it would be a long and insane process to try to rebuild my main character, whom I spent so much time on with not only leveling but also raiding and epic quests. And so for this reason, I don't see myself ever playing again. But like many, I have very indelible memories of my time playing this game and meeting folks from around the world.
I started playing it in 2002. I had a Barbarian Warrior named Barudil. I was in a decent guild called The Well of Souls? Anyone remember it? Finally I drifted away and started playing Rift and a lot of Battlefield. But EQ was a good time! And didn't Firiona Vie have the coolest name, lol?
I still play Shards of Dalaya once and a while. Everquest was hands down my favorite MMO and I hope to see it get revitalized in Everquest NEXT as they have promised. Great video!
It's amazing how much of that stuff sticks in your mind through the years. Thank you very much for posting up the video. Hearing that music and seeing the loading screen, wow. Loved Gfay and CB
It's sad to think I can't experience this any more. EQ was before the concept of trolling existed. Can you even imagine a world in which players in chat yelling at you to be quiet for using "/shout" actually meant something and wasn't full of meanless arguments? The world was so harsh that each zone felt like a real world. Hopping on a boat to Velious or Kunark felt like danger; like I was very far from home. Playing an iksar felt like a completely different game.
This! No current game makes you feel as though you are vulnerable, yet free at the same time. Old EQ made you feel like at any minute you could be killed by almost anything, yet, you had the freedom to try almost anything. Current player progression is so stream lined and almost static through out leveling. You progress in certain abilities at almost a mathematical pace. Old EQ was more random. Things were NOT balanced, yet any class could leverage abilities that no other(or very few) classes could duplicate or imitate. It made everything feel special, relevant, and real.
I couldn't agree more with both of you! I remember literally waiting an hour for a boat ride wondering my fate on the other side, or just wondering around the Bazaar. Everquest 1 truly immersed you even with now "lame" graphics. In its time it was truly a masterpiece. Even when the UI took up half the screen. Man, I gotta exit this video, this is making me depressed! Miss those days!
Jackson DeBolt I think too, though, that in games like WoW, everything has a purpose. Every single mob is placed in a certain area to play fodder for a couple of quests, and it's pretty easily regimented. It's not random and ultimately it seems totally calculated. EQ was different in that there wasn't any specific need to kill any particular mob, except those that dropped particular items. I think that led to zones being much more mysterious because the game never led you to investigate every area like it does in WoW. There really isn't anything in WoW you can discover for yourself. Everyone on that faction who's leveled up in that zone is aware of it. Compare that to zones in EQ, with its randomness and nonspecificity, along with, as noted here, the lack of ingame assistance. You could totally believe that there was a Megalodon in Lake Rathetear. There were ape spawns in the Emerald Jungle that probably weren't killed for years. The whole world seemed almost unknowable, that there was always something out there to discover. Compare that to when I played WoW, and when I got a second character to max level, I pretty much knew every single thing there was to know about every zone in the game.
I loved the ropleplay aspect of it as well. Ogres and dwarves talking like ogres and dwarves. So many memories and you are right, the crowd certainly was more mature and intelligent.
Leveling is much faster too, while before, even though it was just a game, you felt like you had achieved something when you leveled up. And dying had consequences, so you were a lot more afraid of dying, which made it more immersive.
So many great memories playing this game. Some of the people I played with are no longer alive and it's really bitter sweet to watch this tribute. I remember playing every Halloween so that I could see what kind of cool monsters Sony would put in. Excellent job on this video!!!
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
I remember luring my brother into the river of nektulos so the fish would eat em. It was awesome.. Thanx for the video.
chad verbus this is one of the best comments I've ever had on any of my videos!
chad verbus holy shit.
Holy shit?
+chad verbus Brothers... The perfect manipulable noob prototype. They trust you all the time.
lmfao
Former EverQuest game designer here. I wrote and implemented the Ranger, Druid, and Paladin epic quests, among other things. Nice video, Vareous. There are a lot of things I don't like about EQ, but I agree that the sense of "MMO", in games like UO and EQ and vanilla WoW, is something that, regrettably, has been lost in modern massive multiplayer games. While it's intimidating, it's also very rewarding.
If you know the name of the guy who wrote and implemented the mage epic, I still owe him a punch to the face over the Quillmane camp.
LOL True that. Mage Epic in general was the roughest.
I remember helping my irl buddy do the shaman epic spear quest. I remember it being pretty lengthy but not impossible. That was when max level was 60. Such a fucking epic game man. I had a warrior first. Than a ranger.
I would rage at you on behalf of all Druids for everything I had to go through for that Scimitar, but the Paladin epic was really fun so... I forgive you. (I still hate those damn Seahorses though.)
The inno drop part for Ranger epic. That was the gate for me. I was OG Ranger from day one, when everyone shunned them. I loved my ranger. RIP bud.
I go back to this video every time I wanna feel nostalgic, but I just realized that it's almost 10 years old.... I'm getting to the point where I need retrospectives of my retrospectives.
hahahaha
I met my wife in EQ... I was OBT (Original Beta Tester on CT '99). In '05 I got a random /tell on my Rogue asking if I could help kill the Prince, Queen and King for her Cleric guild mate's Epic Clicky Rezzer. During the fun, she "got" all of my stupid jokes and we clicked. Married 8+ years now. Awesome raiding buddy to this day. :)
I was not forced to write this. LOL
+Captain Learjet that's actually pretty cool , I feel like it's harder to meet friendly people online these days. Everybody wants to be a troll. Back them it seems like there was still some internet etiquette.
+Mo Anderson "Netiquette"
+-=Sp00k=- Beta tester pride! I was on the RP server with the then-famous bard Jythri.
I also ended up being friends with Baelish (We were both in Triton) and got rather drunk with him at the San Francisco Fan Fest. Sooooooo many great nostalgic memories.
My friend who I had started playing with (CompUSA employee guild) even ended up marrying another Cleric from our later raiding guild. I know you two are far from the only ones.
+-=Sp00k=- now that's what i want in life ;-;
+Mo Anderson everyone gets offended so easily in eq2, i'm not even trolling, I just told a few jokes and now I'm a wanted criminal.... sure, the joke was me blowing up new York, but its all just for shits and giggles!
no MMo will ever feel the same as everquest did if you never played it im sorry..
True, no MMO will feel the same as EQ. But EQ never felt like UO, and UO felt like pure magic in 1998.
keep your chin up.. play Pantheon Rise of the Fallen when it releases.. and Project 1999 is gunna release a new classic EQ server soon.. and thats as close as youll get to the real experience
I dont think i *want* the everquest experience again... i want a modern version of it though... death penalties, no hand holding, forced grouping unless u were a necro... 5am mornings helping a *stranger* do a corpse ... etc... lol... but thanks - if Pantheon can match the experience ill check it out
Aye. UO was where the real magic happened. EQ paled in comparison to UO, especially in the community aspect.
+Edward Barlow
Pantheon. I cannot wait. I have not been this excited for a game since EQ"Next" (When it was announced originally like 8 or 9 years ago). Oh wait... that never happened though! Daybreak can lick my balls!
I just want to say that I had never played EverQuest until just recently. I'm playing on the Project 1999 server, and I'm having more fun than I've had with any MMO in years. The last time I had a similar gaming experience was when I first started playing WoW in 2006. It feels like I'm playing an MMO for the first time again. Probably has to do with the design philosophy being dramatically different from in modern MMOs. In terms of immersion, modern MMOs are a step above simply giving you a straight line of mobs to kill ad nauseam until you reach the level cap. In EQ you actually have to explore the zones looking for mobs to kill, and there's actually a sense of danger. There's something to be said for the sheer terror of encountering a vengeful lyricist as a lowbie in Everfrost. One of the fundamentals of game design is risk vs reward, and modern MMOs present little if any risk at all; death is never more than a minor inconvenience, whereas in EQ death can be devastating depending on the circumstances.
The game is inconvenient, clunky, and dated. And yet somehow that makes it all the more rewarding an experience.
Where do you download project 1999 i have been searching for it for quiet some time now ?
You need the Titanium Edition of the game. Its expensive to come by these days, but there are "other methods" of obtaining it. After you've set up a fresh install, go to the project 1999 website and follow the setup guide.
You can download it at SOE online. www.soe.com/home
It looks exactly like a decaying skeleton.
Never mind, now that the novelty has worn thin, its just a mind-numbing grind.
Best game I've ever played. Had spent easily over 1k hrs online in EQ.
Why was it so enjoyable? It was hard. Brutally, unforgivingly hard. You had to join a guild, or at least make many, many friends, in order to progress. Being a cool, friendly, helpfull player was a necessity. Being a dick was a guarantee for social ostracisation and game stagnation.
Even though many of the quest, the Lore and backstories, were really beautifully written and crafted, the community WAS the game!
So many people loved EQ because the amazing work of the developers allowed so many people from around the world to explore this space and have fun together.
Damn right, ninja loot even one time and you may as well delete your character.
A Snake Kicks you for 5 damage - best attack ever ;)
Honestly mate, just listening to the intro and music, seeing the game play - it really brought tears to my eyes. What a wonderful experience that was back in the days, folks helping each other, fantastic community - was rushing home every day from work - being in Germany i spent countless hours at night raiding first with an american guild - later on then being a proud member of Mortalis. I have never ever felt that spirit again in any other MMORPG. I still feel sad that this time is over - life goes on - but i will always cherrish the years of fun i had with this game and its people. Simply fantastic :). Thanks so much to you for bringing all these fond memories back to life !
PS: forgot to mention - how i loved and hated the XP-loss when you died - the dreaded corpse runs - the /consent and all your stuff got looted - running blind from Halas through Runnyeye etc etc - countless things - wonderful times :)
Warwiz I got killed on the boat from FP to Butcherblock by one of the damn Erollisi maidens when the boat stopped at that island. The Corpse traveled with the boat and got dumped somewhere. The GM's could not even find it for me. Thankfully I was only level 9, but that was one of my first characters back in the day. That was weeks worth of work!
How about when you had to petition the GM because your corpse was stuck in a wall and you would sit for hours debating whether you could take out a gnoll commander with your fists.
Warwiz Good times! Paladin Jarls (Mortalis)
Same here Warwiz, I had so much fun in EQ1!
I sighed heavily watching this vid. I came in during Kunark and made a woody ranger. I played this game extensivelt for years. Met my wife in game. Made it through college playing this game. Found out my wife was pregnant during a raid after my guildleader gave us a 10 min break so that my wife (main healer) and I (puller) could talk.
I miss the game. I miss the difficulty. I miss the friends I made.
Casting SoW by orc lift, donations appreciated..../tear
I miss being a broke ass druid and SoW'ing ppl for free but often being surprised by some high level dude tipping like 60pp.
I still use /(word), like /hug, in text messages and emails. People get what I'm saying but don't understand how ingrained those chat commands are still just stuck in my brain or where they come from.
/camp
@@raywhite9069 Come play on project 1999 green. I'm a broke A druid right now, lol
@@kebonhawk1081 You should come play on p1999 green if you aren't already
Damn talk about some fond memories! My wife turned me on to the game and totally regretted it. I was addicted big time!
this is my favorite game of all time. I will never feel the absolute addiction to anything again like I felt to everquest. This game will forever be burned into my memory.
EverQuest is heroin and we’ve all been chasing the dragon ever since that first high
Just don't listen to the sound track and youll be okay.
You can't express to people who have never played everquest just how meaningful everquest was. I have memories of all the places and probably still remember my way through dungeon mazes. I remember all those nasty deaths that seemed hopeless, everquest forced you to be social and it forced you to think, you died in the back side of cazic thule maze you had to look for people to help and everyone would! I still have friends I made in everquest and I still talk about things that happened in everquest with fond memories. Thank you for the video it actually brought tears to my eyes.
+John Hoffman agreed. Most fun i've ever had playing a video game came from my EQ days. I had a group of about 6-7 friends that all started playing it together one summer in highschool, when we weren't online playing (usually our parents would make us get out of the house during the day) we were hanging out and talking about EQ, or planning our night's hunt or whatever... DVINN to ZONE!!!
+John Hoffman I logged in about a year ago to run through some favorite dungeons for nostalgia points.
I got hopelessly lost in Permafrost Keep trying to find Lady Vox.
+PunkinRB HAhAH Dvinn. Forgot all about him in Crushbone. That bastard killed me so many times when I was a noob. Man, he could hit HARD!
+Zayna Leady I just remember how hilarious it was that rogues could pick pocket his heart.
Kali Ma!
+Elle Heilig oh jeeze, I seem to remember that rogues (with a high enough skill) could even pickpocket the rare items that bosses carried during the fight. Unless i'm mistaken I think that got patched pretty quickly, someone please correct me if i'm wrong, as I only leveled my rogue to about 30 or 40. Speaking of which (enter story mode, going off topic here)- that summer I mentioned above, after a while of playing on our original server we all switched to the brand new 'Quellious' server with the idea of leading the front-lines, which we did for the first few months- guild name 'How the Gods Kill'. One of my greatest memories of that time was a GM event in Kalimdor early on in the servers life where as a wood-elf rogue (named 'Dacient') I received the 'Jambiya', which I recall was pretty special at the time due to it having 2-3 points higher in dmg than the dragoon dirk dropped from Dvinn, which meant HUGE BACKSTABS for my level.
Thmbs up! I started in Qeynos. A friend of mine then found out about a quest in Faydwer for some two handed hammer which sells for a lot. Blinded by the riches we killed some dwarf in Qeynos for his head (Stumpy something or rather?) then ran all the way to freeport, then cross the ocean and finally to Kaladim. We were only lowbies then.
Died so many times during the entire process including the stupid bandits in Karanas, but that was one of my greatest moments in gaming. I'll never forget that. I can imagine being an old man telling stories about it as if it really did happen in real life.
If you have ever been trained, give me a thumbs up! Specially with no heads up!
/shout TRAIN
In the old days I used to love trains when I was playing my chanter. There are few things as fun as camping the zone line in KC as an enchanter. I once derailed 3 trains in a row, that took my group like 10-15 minutes straight to clear with tons of close calls.
Just a shame they nerfed the hell out of chanters over the years to the point where you really only need 1 per raid as a buff bot... All of our crowd control was rendered basically useless in nearly all raid encounters starting around the time of SoL or so and we were always crap as damage dealers compared to other int casters. So basically unless you were the chanter with the highest AAs for buff enhancements, there was really no place for you in most raids as a chanter, which killed nearly all of my enjoyment in the game at that point, at least with my main anyhow.
Man back in the day when you had to strategize even regular encounters. Normal fights in EQ were like mini boss fights in games today. Every role mattered. The group pullers, the CC, the tanks, the DPS, the healers. A bad pull could wipe out not only your group but many others around, lmao.
Most can't type and run at the same time lol
TRAIN TO ZONE! lol
I always come back to this video for the nostalgia. Never hard to find either. Thank you for this! I played EverQuest when it first came out and it will always be the most memorable game I ever played.
Plane of fear pick up raid, which immediately leads to a 10 hour corpse run and a lost level or two. Fun times!
It's been 7 years bro are you alive how's life been are you married yet do you have children
thank you so much for this video.
the nostalgia and magic and enchantment is so real.
also, /ooc WTB Wurmy / Lamy PST
I remember trying to buy skin like steel buff from a druid in east commons. He said he couldn't because he was working for this other low lvl person for a silver ruby veil. LoL. I still remember how uber I felt when I finally got gold jasper earrings on my druid. And the first set I sold on my enchanter (which ended up being my main). Charming people during a duel and sending them to die to a sand giant in oasis of mar, or even and deepwater croc, as I ran to zone so the NPC wouldn't come eat me lol. Good times, I miss them.
TheMagicManSam...Looking for a SOW... HAHAHA
Pugnacious NooBeginnings
LOL! Ah the Oasis. Man this has truly sent me back in a time warp. Those were great times.
bigjyeager02 /em gives you a piggie.
I wish I was born 10 years earlier so I could have played this remarkable game.
You can, it is called Project 1999. I played it for some time and it only has 1 expansion (Kunark). If you can handle the lack of goodies that MMO's have nowadays then you will find out how it was really like.
***** I've just retiered from p99 but hoping to go back once I finish my last year of uni - man p99 is amazing!
Yeah p99 is nice, but I wish we had at least the map option on the screen. The rest of it is fine by me. I did all of the hard work (printed out all of the maps I needed for what I wanted to do) so I'm just a bit picky when it comes to the maps :) I have a Level 40 Druid on p99, but haven't had the time to play it since moving earlier this year.
***** Does P99 progress, and if so is there a locked server you know of?
Ijiki Kazimaru Progress? Not sure what you are talking about. There is only 1 "Live" server and I think a "Test" server, if I remember correctly.
Really can not overstate how amazing this video is. Really captures why the game was awesome. Also motivated me to play project 1999 (never played EQ but always wanted to. I am now!)
TRAIN TO ZONE!!
Yorkshire Yank go left lol
That brings back some horrible stories of corpse runs lol
There would always be someone afk sitting down by the zone while train was heading his way lol poor soul
Train starter!! 😂
god i miss unrest
I'm just happy I was able to play it when I did, waaaaay back at the beginning. Nothing can compare. Things are so much different now, and I'm sad, and I'm growing old.
That was terrific thank you. I was fortunate to have started playing Everquest the first month it came out. That first years was incredible. Everything was so new to everybody and twinks didn't exist yet. Among my memories:
1. After a few days of playing, the excitement I felt the first time I saw a non-barbarian character run through Halas.
2. Struggling to acquire a suit of bronze armor to go with my fine steel sword.
3. Being in a party that stumbled into the Castle Mistmoore zone for the first time. None of us had heard anything about it before and the zone-in was littered with player
corpses. What a rush. Real goosebumps.
4. Sand giants!
5. The misery that came from the game growing so quickly and the challenge of finding a place to hunt. It was severely overcrowded for awhile.
6. The first time I ran across a continent, led by someone more experienced, and taking a ship to another one. I was leaving my home city behind and setting out for the unknown.
7. The craziness that came from knowing there was ALWAYS something better to
acquire. Whatever I had wasn't good enough. Part of the genius behind this game
was that it could never truly be won. There were always things to improve.
I finally quit EQ after 5 years. As fun as it was, it was also a terrible addiction. I will never play another MMORPG, because I can't afford to get sucked in like that again.
I'll tell you EXACTLY what you miss about the UI. This game was from a period when UI's were actually game-themed, not all sci-fi/simple boxes that can be dragged all over and made partially transparent. Same goes for runescape's UI.
I get the feeling that the same guy who made the Ultima Underworld UI must have designed the original Everquest UI. They are very similar.
I love watching this video... I watch it this time every year for about seven years, this is the time of year when I first logged on back in 2000.
nice
I started to play this game in 1999. Best memories ever.
Hell levels. Corpse runs. "TRAIN TO ZONE!" Buffs that had no timer and could fail in 10 seconds or last an entire evening. Fizzling spells. "BOAT!" Damn I loved this game.
"BOAT!".... "OMG, im on the other side of the zone! I have whips to collect!" ....
Thank you so much for this video!
I played from 1999 to 2009, and now, 5 years after I quit, I still miss the game. Every bloody day.
Everquest was hardcore in a way MMORPG players of today could never even fathom.
Please do about four more hours on this.
Like auto attacking your trainer while typing hail. Or falling off the elevators in Kelethin due to lag. Or the 20 minute boat wait. Jumping off to hit a merchant and hoping you are fast enough to get back on.
Mob trains, camp breaking, different race/class combos needing different exp. Some races not seeing in the dark. Mobs being nearly impossible for a level one.
Crushridge, Mistmoore. Deleveling and not being able to use the spells you just learned. Mobs actually being hard to kill. Places being scary to walk through.
Good times.
I agree at least 4 more hours!
"Deleveling"
My brother and I used this trick before they fixed it, got to level 40 something then deleveled to 30. So we had the stats of a level 40 but could still attack level 22's. Haha was almost evil.
I really miss the small things too like shrinking potions, shadowknights could talk as their pet, illusion spells like you could turn yourself into a torch. Just little things like that made the game so fun.
Crushbone
Yeah, one time me and my party were inside the mansion at Unrest in one of the top floor rooms, when the whole server went down. I logged back in after a few mins to find myself alone, in a fully respawned room with werebats and others right on me. I immediately freaked out and the best I could do as they started wailing on me, was to inch my way to one of the windows and jump out, so that when I died, I would at least have my body outside the house. Lol, and that's what happened. This took place 19 years ago and I still remember it like it was yesterday.
@@X-Prime123 loved that story!
I was from Torvonnilous as well, Darkeowyn played from 2005-2007. I loved this game and still miss it to this day. Most of my friends went to WoW as I did, but Norrath will ALWAYS be my home.
I was on Torv too, you joined as I left
"Can I get a SOW please?" ... Haha Thank you for the trip back in memory lane.
lol made a bard for that reason! i could never get a sow when i needed it, and i was making silver grouping with people to get them through zones at a high rate of speed
Spirit of the wolf was a must! Otherwise, took for ever to run across the plains. 🤦♂️
Perhaps the most incredible thing about EverQuest was that it created an actual world. Remember waiting for boats to cross continents? An annoyance? A time waste? Yes. But it also helped instill the giant proportions of the world.
I played from launch as a teenager, and I will never love another game as much as I loved Everquest. It was my preferred universe to be in. The game was so difficult, immense, rewarding, and soul-crushing. Sometimes I would quit it for weeks after something terrible happened, but I would always come back. It really was Evercrack.
I have a wonderful life now, but I will always pine for those first few years on EQ.
I laughed at the 'spamming sense heading'. So very true.
I love this video so much bro, im not gonna lie i watch it and listen to it at work or when im at home, this is the most wonderful put together montage of everquest I've ever seen.
Huge props and thank you. I want to save your video so i can show it to my daughter who loves watching me play and kill dragons now with my guild
I had just recently started up what would end up being my "main". A Gnome Mage. He came shortly after leveling to almost 25 as a Gnome Wizard, who I had dumped all of my creation points into STR on, because I wanted to be able to carry ALL the loot! Only to later realize I gimped the hell out of myself, because INT mattered hugely for your mana pool later on.
Some Halfling Druid, buffed to the teeth with STR came walking up to me painstakingly slow. He was so encumbered he could barely walk. He opened up the trade chat with me and to my delight he placed a couple hundred platinum in the trade window and hit trade. I gladly accepted his offer!
The only issue was, he had converted every bit of it to Copper. Here I was, pockets busting at the seams with back then was enough plat to last you well on into nearly level cap, and I couldn't move. I was within viewing distance of the zone entrance to Ak'Anon.
Within about 20 minutes I had collaborated with several other lower level people in the zone. I had promised them a cut of the Plat if they would help me. We all took some of the copper, and slowly but surely made our way to the bank.
Here is why EQ will forwever, in my mind, be the best MMO ever, much like this video alluded to the entire time. It was CHALLENGING. It was difficult at EVERY stage of the game. Hell, you had to develop an actual skill (side-strafe running) to escape fights that went south. Dying was detrimental, spawns were rediculous....and binding next to a rare spawn that you needed to call for friends to help you kill and then falling asleep was the worst of both. (My friend lost 4 levels on his druid because he bound at the spawn).
But that is what made it worth it. Yes the epic quest took forever, was tedious and frustrating and arduous. But I swear to god, getting the ragebringer, with the 1 pixel animation was one of the most rewarding feelings I have felt in any game, ever. Hell, at the time (I hadn't done all that much in my life) it was one of the most rewarding feelings of doing ANYTHING ever. It is why we had a call chain that we would use so that if a mob spawned at 3am we could round up enough bleary eyed people, from all walks of life, to group and take down the Council of Twelve, or something.
I quit playing sortly after completing planes of power, right after the next endgame expansion came out and sold my account on one of those sites. I went to Miami for spring break with the nearly $2k I made. I turned 21; I drank, and I dated, and I went to college and lived my life. But years later, I wondered, while bored...wonder if y account ever got sold. With some effort I managed to find out that it hadn't, (the mislabelled the stats on the account so it seemed completely outpriced) and I was able to retieve my account. I logged in and went to the Nexus. I did a /who. And one moment later -> /tell Muadd "hey its Geeii, remember me?!"
There was this player who played in a "Friends and Family" guild I was in as I was levelling, a player that I helped get HIS epic for long after I had gone on to a raiding guild. And here he was, running the largest guild on the server, 10 years later, and remembered every bit of it.
This...This is why EQ is the best MMO ever.
That's is truly an amazing story. Now you've got me thinking about my old EQ friends lol. Haven't thought about them in a long time.
I did the same. I sold my account, got nostalgic and tried to log back in. The guy never even changed my password or moved my characters. All he did was sell my fungal tunic. The character never even moved. He paid $850 for a fungal tunic.
This was the greatest game of all-time. I have so many amazing memories and I have used my rogues game name ever since.
One of the big things i think this video didn't touch enough on is the grouping done in this game. In new Games you solo from level 1 to max level with a few dungeons thrown in. (50+ boring hours) In EQ you solo to maybe level 5 then spent the whole game grouping up with people and talking. This really built a sense of community. You knew or at least had seen a good many of the people on the server as you leveled up. Today most servers are divided into small groups of players who barely know each other if at all and server chats are spammed by the loudest most annoying people....
I know, in EQ1 one of my main chars was an enchanter... I could /ooc ENC LFG and have a group in a matter of seconds. Then again that was the days where strategy was required and crowd control was in high demand. Miss those days :-( I could mez an entire room full of froggies in Seb and keep them under control, until someone did something stupid like an AE nuke and you know who the froggies were mad at right? lol
+Bob Dageek Ohh man, the good memories of the chanter getting the aggro when a mistake was made. Loved this damn game...
You actually had a public reputation. If you were crappy at your class it would be well known even mid level. If you ninja looted you'd be instantly blacklisted. People would see you yell for a group, and then they'd yell that you're a thief. You came into the game like a newborn. No cloths, no skills, barely able to defend yourself. As you built your character up you also built up a reputation and a social group. People that had helped you complete quests, or recover a corpse without any real benefit to themselves and vice versa. I remember when I had to get together 30+ people to help complete my epic when they got literally nothing out of the encounter. They spent most of a night playing just to help me get something that I really wanted. These were people with jobs, families, and things they wanted to do. They did that because we had spent a lot of time together and they considered me a friend. I still consider those to be real friendships we'd formed and grown. I was also there when they needed me. I'd stop doing whatever self serving thing I was doing to go spend hours and hours helping them do something they wanted to do. Hell spending hours working out the tactics to how we'd do high end content. Because failure meant no loot, and spending hours on corpse runs. Especially pre cleric epic. The social aspect was incredible. I'm kind of glad no game has recreated it. I spent a lot of time on it. I have to say though, I don't regret a thing. Grouping Plane of Fear. Making mad dashes through Veeshan to Plane of Mischief. Staying there a month to get cards to get resistance flowers. Knowing that if you died you couldn't get back to your corpse. I still value the time I spent playing with my friends. Both the ones I knew in real life and ones I met in Everquest. All those people were equally my friends. Some I still talk to 14 years later.
I completely agree with you, these were real friendships. I actually ended up marrying someone I met in EQ. We have been together 13 years and have 3 children together.
The sense of achievement I felt running Qeynos to Freeport deathless was epic. Remember trying to get through the minotaur maze? Remember getting stomped by random Hill Giants or Sand Giants? I remember getting to a level where I could solo Hill Giants and doing it purely for the revenge and great feeling of doing it - no XP.
Years after I stopped playing my High Elf Paladin on Fennin Ro I started dating a woman who used to live in the upper MidWest of the US while I am in Pennsylvania. As we got to know each other she sheepishly told me that she used to play online MMOs. I perked up and said that I still played some. "Yeah, I was a High Elf Cleric in EverQuest". "No shit! I was a High Elf Paladin. Which server?" "Fennin Ro." "Holy hells! Me too! I was Findulas. Who were you?" She looked at me amazed, "You were Finduilas? I was Kalianna. I remember playing with you a few times."
It was a blast.
Just hearing the EQ music makes me emotional. It takes me back to the grand sense of adventure on my bard the first time I ran from Qeynos to High Hold to get my PGT. The danger and excitement of pulling to the ledge in Overthere. The frustration of camping that Froglok supplier in lower guk (or Grachnist the Destroyer... I never did get that fking earring). Anyway, the only game that ever came close to the same sense of wonder was Dark Age of Camelot--and when they released Trials of Atlantis I felt like the game was ruined.
Maybe because it was revolutionary in its time, or maybe because of all the memorable friends I made while playing it, no other game quite pulls the heartstrings like EQ. Last year I got on the EQ mac server that's frozen in the POP era and leveled up a new bard to lvl 65; it was still a lot of fun, but I ended up quitting because I couldn't get a group together to take down Trakanon twice to finish my epic... Thanks for sharing, man. Great video.
The sort of nostalgia this game brings about in those who played in the glory days falls somewhere between PTSD and Stockholm Syndrome, lol. While I loved the game, I have so many horror stories of insane time sinks, many of which have remained unfruitful to this day. I used to help organize weekly pick up raids on Naggy and Vox in hopes of one day finally winning a roll on a red scale for my barb war's epic, but after nearly 4 months of weekly raids I lost the rolls every single time. On another occasion I decided to camp Hadden in Qeynos Hills to get myself a fishbone earing, took nearly 21 straight hours of camping, killing him 3 times in a row before the bastard finally dropped the earing. Another time, after spending some time leveling up in the Warrens over on Odus, I decided I would head off to Lake of Ill Omens to level some more, made the couple hour trek by foot and boat and when I finally got to FV I forgot to get bound before leaving the fort and aggroed a couple of those spider girls who managed to root and kill me a few feet from the zone line when the realization that I was still bound in Toxx came crashing down around me... 3 hours later with my longest ever corpse run nearly complete, I made damn sure I was bound before heading out for my body, lol. Had to stop several places along the way to hunt for some temp gear and fruitlessly ooc teleport requests that never got any responses.
Great video! I actually got back into EQ recently, since they changed the All Access membership to work with all SOE titles. My favorite (worst) memory of EQ - was the one time I died in Cobalt Scar, fighting Wyverns, back before you respawned with all of your gear...and I had to walk all the way from Ak'Anon to Cobalt Scar butt-ass naked. Luckily I was a mage and was able to acquire some malachite, so i was able to keep some mobs in Skyshrine occupied...but you try traversing the temple without clothes on...that was insane! People in current-gen MMO's have no idea what we had to go through! lol (AND IT WAS GREAT!)
Lol, I remember keeping a little extra gear in the bank just in case I died and had to go get my corpse
That was the worst! I remember being on the boat from Faydwer to Antonica. I got too close to the edge and the boat jumped out from underneath me. I started swimming in a direction, completely lost. I never swam because, "I'm a Paladin. They don't swim!" After an hour of swimming and going through my entire food and water store, I end up on the shore of the Cyclops island. Boom. Dead. All that work for a death. At least I didn't die in the water. (And my swimming skill had gained a few levels.) I'll never forget that.
Allen Lake Sad story Allen... You ever get you're body back? I once teleported my 37th lvl druid to an expansion and my parents wouldn't buy it and i lost my main DUDE! I also died in the Wyverns, sucked bad. Was there an amount of time you had to retrieve your corpse in this game or would it just stay there?? I always flipped out and stayed up for hours on end to get my corpse. Fuck school i need my gear lol
I did recover my corpse Kalub. My parents were yelling at my that we had to leave but the corpse stayed there for 7 days, so I had time. The next morning I got up like 3 hours before school and got someone hunting in the zone to help fight off the Cyclops while I looted my body.
That sucks about the expansion! Losing your main dude just due to a bad teleport! Ugh!
I remember drowning in the ocean with my Druid had all the money and gear I owned, luckily a higher lvl player came along and i gave her permission to drag my corpse up off the ocean floor. You could give permission for others to drag your corpse to safety or Necromancers to summon your corpse. It was funny to see people running across the zone dragging someone's corpse behind them.
You hit every point on this game: the game was an interactive story. I met so many people on my grind. I remember moments of terror running across the world naked or seeing a new particle effect for the first time would scare the crap out of me. These moments of terror made the game so amazing.
Level 54 Wizard on Prexus server, will never forget this magical world, some of the most fun i've ever had. This kind of thing will never be re-captured in a modern game, players want it to easy these days. I never finished my epic quest, it was damn near impossible, even with a great guild.
Well done. Really enjoyed this trip down memory lane.
What a trip down memory lane indeed! Awesome!
Great video! It brings back so many memories. My wife and I played for 7 or 8 years.
Great video, and yes it did bring back a lot of good memories for me. I started playing EQ back during Ruins of Kunark and for the longest time, Iksar characters were pretty much all I played. Soooooo many hours in the Field of Bone, sooooo much grinding, but I always look back fondly on it.
EQ was in some ways a lot more relaxing to play than a modern MMO, too, because unless you were a bard, you weren't clicking action buttons all the time. Warriors and monks especially, there was a lot of auto-attacking in between using an ability. It was much less of a twitch kinda game and more about strategy and planning -- getting the right stats, the right gear, etc. There just isn't anything like that anymore -- game developers seem very afraid of players getting bored.
Anyway, enough blather from me. Great video, thanks for sharing this.
Some memories I had watching the video:
1) Going to Befallen for the first time, falling through the hole in the floor. Was able to hide in a corner while my tiny guild pulled in everyone we had online to come rescue me.
2) Logging on with plans to grind in Frontier Mountains only to discover that my guild had wiped trying to kill a Wyrm (forget the zone name just now). I spent my entire evening dragging people's corpses to them. This general thing happened a number of times, but not usually taking an entire evening.
3) Very early on, taking my guild of all Trolls and trying to run to Neriak, having never been further than South Ro. We didn't get any further than Oasis...and the Sand Giants...
Good times.
My first 5 min in EQ in 1999 was trying to hail a guard, and instead, hit the attack button.
Many people did this to the priest of discord as well, or accidentally turned in the book without knowing and stuck in pvp.
Something truly wonderful was made in Everquest, and that has been entirely lost in modern MMORPGs. Here is to hoping that Everquest Next can bring back the strength of the genre.. but I doubt it, developers seem to think that in game "hassels", "annoyances", "penalties" are bad for the game because players complain.. when in fact, even though players complain, these things are what make the game a social virtual world that we invest in. Modern MMORPGs are a pale shallow shell compared to this pinnacle, I fear we will never see its like again.
Check out Pantheon:Rise of the Fallen - new game being created by Aradune. Nothing is ever going to re-capture the feel of Everquest, but anything close will probably come from that man!
Jeremy Barnes Thanks for the heads up, however I am already aware of this project. It is at least 3 years away from release, and that is if it even makes it. Given its failed kick starter origins and who is currently helming the project (Brad, who previously drove Vanguard into the ground), I just don't think I can get on board with that game until its more of a reality then a theory you know what I mean?
My hopes right now are with Everquest Next, while it won't be what EQ1 was, it is promising to be nothing like what any of the "modern" MMORPGs since EQ1 are like either. Perhaps they will hit a new sweet spot.
The wife and I (we met through the original EQ) decided to re-sub for the original EQ for a few months again due to lack of anything else out there right now. We're having a good deal of fun but it is definitely not the same.
Jeremy Barnes
Project 1999 is currently in the Kunark expansion.
MrTechFox Sony had more to do with driving Vangaurd into the ground than any other reason or person.
I met my wife on EQ over 20 years ago so it's still my favorite game ever. :)
aw thats lovely.
if only i could do the same : (
I never got to level 65 back when that was the level cap. And I never reached end game stuff like raids and top tier gear. But I still loved every moment of my EQ experience... Wish the community was still big as it was back then. Super nostalgic from your video! Awesome work.
I would give anything to go back in time and be able to experience this game when it first came out. I've never played Everquest at all but just from the subtle joy in your voice from re-visiting it, i can tell that it must have been something special. I think the 'problems' you outlined make the game all the more unique, something to truly build friendships on. Hopefully something will come along to shake the gaming world up again and i'll be ready to experience it in full. A great overview btw, thank you for this.
Time to die, a_Vareous_bard!
My friends and I in high school were OBSESSED with this game. I played an Enchanter. Used to run around newbie areas handing out Clarity buffs so they'd never go out of mana for 20 minutes. Hey, I had to pay it forward after all those Druids ran by giving me Spirit of Wolf so I could run fast.
I remember Hell Levels. 35 and every 5 levels until 50 took 3 times as long to grind through, and dying and losing that exp you just spent your whole weekend accumulating was HEARTBREAKING. BUT... it was totally worth it. That sense of accomplishment of getting your punk ass to 50 through 60 was epic and there was no way you could have done it alone. "Massively multiplayer" indeed.
P.S. High Elf agnostic Enchanter was easy mode. Need to sell? Far from a neutral or friendly city? ILLUSION: [friendly race] and BOOM, vendors buy your stuff. Just had to hope your illusion buff didn't run out before you could zone back out.
P.S.S. INC TRAIN TO DOCKS.
For me? Its agnostic human enchanter (Freeport starting city)
@@Cynidecia but... high elves have more Charisma!
@@lunayoshi but they're elves.
Never played Ever Quest . But when watching how people can overcome some ingame problems on their own and for example make their own Economy Basicly is great and kinda interesting. I think it was far more of a social expierience to play that game . Bacause without everyone you would get nowhere
+Chriss RE You have no idea sir! The entire game was basically run by the players. It was the most sand boxxy MMO even now. We didn't have Dungeons or anything to level. Quests were a joke unless you were doing some class/race/faction specific epic end game thing. Raids were crazy and messy. I mean, you actually had to talk to NPCs. This was my child hood.
Early EQ was truly a Massively Multiplayer game... all the clones after it, while fun for a bit, just don't hold up to it. Just holding a dangerous camp in LGuk with a group of friends was an accomplishment in itself and I have not felt so fulfilled in any other game since EQ.
You made me relive my teenage years.
I've tried replaying this, but I can't go back because it's just not the same. I remember tanking Kunark and Velious raids upwards to Planes of Power when I was 13. I really think this game made me have a great imagination, and appreciation for the fantasy genre. It was truly a gem of its time.
Good video.
What a trip down memory lane. Thank you for posting this. I really loved revisiting the best gaming memories of my life.
I loved EQ. I had a Dark Elf Enchanter and could never get my faction high enough for the high elves to allow her to finish her epic. And I LOVED Lower Guk. And Sebilis. I have deep dark elven roots...
*****
If you have a deity its useless. Main reason ENC always were agnostic..
For whatever reason reading your posted reminded me about the zone Qeynos. I didnt figure out until like 8 years into playing EQ that it was backwards for SonyEQ loll!
Jeff Mastio
Tunare >nature ;)
I remember the first time I went to my cousins house and he showed me this. I miss this game, I had so many good times with my cousin playing this. Felt like a magical world... because it was!
I had the exact same experience when I was 14. this game rocked
Doyle Goregutz hell yea me too. i think i was 13 going on 14 when i got my mom to buy it for my bday! I ended up playing EQ off and on for 13 years lol. Nothing compares to classic EQ tho!
"Felt like a magical world" is spot on!
Man this video brought back some fuzzy warm feelings from my childhood. There's so many little things I want to just revisit, but there's too many to really write out. Small things I remember:
I'm going to refrain from googling and see just how much I can think of
Fighting on Orc Hill when I was super low level
Unleashing that little gnome magician who lived in the hole in that orc section near the wood elf town
Running around in the barbarian ice world with a wood elf who helped show me around for hours
Getting stuck in Kithikor woods at night when it all went to shit, and having to hide on the edge of the map
Some guy trusting me to transfer like 10 insanely rare items from one of his character to another, and giving me a hammerhead helm
Doing the quest for the rangers ivy swords (The name is escaping me for some reason), but then realizing that the root spell overwrote snare and just about no group would let me use them
Realizing that we could just use Snare with our druids and absolutely farm the hell out of Dwarf NPCs by kiting them, and then we kind of broke the game by getting rich off selling axes.... I actually remember sharing a spawn with a friend and watching all 3 star wars movies on VHS while doing it. It was key to have 2 people because eventually you'd be encumbered and have to sell all the axes they dropped. We eventually just began to pay someone to drop them off. Crazy..
Not knowing that the hybrid classes has an insane hybrid leveling penalty...
Winning Dwarven work boots right before I was going on vacation with my family, and the entire group thinking I was an asshole for leaving
One huge moment was an insane battle I had with a group in Cazic thule. We got trained on (remember trains just ruining everything?!), and the entire group just got wrecked, and someone ran. I remember fighting all these mobs with this paladin (Was a ranger), and we were about to die and this guy lay of hands on me, and we somehow barely survived. It was epic. That guy thanked me and said I had courage...it was awesome lol
So many weird memories, and I don't know what games really had this many strange memories associated with it, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that it was a brand new kind of game, and there wasn't any real hand holding. I mean now, I don't think this mechanic works, but at the time there was a genuine feeling of discovery and mystery to everything. I guess it was addicting and time consuming, but I loved it.
All those or variations on those themes! Add to that - was on the GvE PVP server - so had the added threat of PVP breaking out while you're leveling... nothing like it today.
This really makes you appreciate how far MMOs have come over the years and that EverQuest kind of paved the way. Great video.
"Magic" is the word I always use to describe my EverQuest experience. A Friend and I was there in "99" and 4 years after. I wasn't satisfied when EQ2 came about and moved on to other games. but I will never forget the sites, the music, the ambient sounds...The Adventure, Good and Bad.... and even the plastic Slurpee pee cup I kept next to my side when I played EQ.
These "negative" thing you said actually what makes these games fantastic. Nowadays the game itself handles everything for us and takes away all the fun
True.
Everyone who misses (or missed) this game needs to checkout Project 1999
Well.... You dissed to classic UI of the game. Yes, it was a small area of graphics. Yes, there was no customization at the time. But... this game ran on my Pentium 100 Mhz computer. That is a SOCKET 7 CPU. Which I still have in perfect working condition today........ Regardless, I will state this: The small view area was necessary for the computers of the time and was in fact charming..... YES.. charming... in a world filled with HD megapixel this and that, I will still say that the classic small UI in EQ is charming and with the SPELL BOOK when you MEDITATE taking up the whole VIEW area it added a very special aspect to the game.
Pleases Thumbs me up if you agree.
- Terethian Corpseraiser, High Elf Cleric from CLASSIC Everquest on Zebuxoruck Server.
I was just using it as an opener to relate to people how modern games have such different UI structure. I then said how much I missed the UI. I preferred and used the classic UI all the way to the point I was forced to change it when they disabled it.
Vareous No, No, I was way off base here. Let it be known I was watching this video drunk and I posted at a pause, if you pause the video when I did it sounds like a straight up dis of the UI. Then... after the negative comment you mention a kind of nostalgia to the UI...... so you are fine, this video is great. But I am a die hard classic fan. One of the crazy people that remembers fantasy from the beginning. So I am 100% classic Ever-quest all the way, Corpse runs, cloth armor,exp loss etc. It all adds character to the game. I apologize to you, formally, for my drunken comments.... which is more than Justin Bieber would offer you.... I promise!
But if I was Justin Bieber I would just spit in your face and claim I was young and still learning about mistakes like this... but... oh wait... I always knew it was wrong to spit in someones face even before I was a kindergartner. ...well... I guess extreme singing skill makes up for common sense?
What a great retrospective, thank you! - I was there from the beginning - It was great seeing these old-time graphics and hearing the music again. The corpse runs, the horrible quests, no maps, sense heading. J-boots, SoW and auctions at East Commons tunnel. Those were truly, the days.
I so completely forgot about calling out “camp check”. This was essential back in 199o-2004. Also, the tunnel - this really was the place to make loads of money. Buy low, sell high - quite easy to do if you did a day or two of observation. But, the tunnel was the place to make big money.
level 63 human shadow knight agnostic...I know kinda lame, but Damn I miss those days...
Need a retrospective to this retrospective
This
You forgot to mention staring at a book to gain mana, no mounts, dragging corpses, keys for zones in your bags, weight limits, how long it took to make your first kill. I don't remember quest phrases having brackets until later on.
Duuude! Staring at that book! And I'll never forget the first time my character suddenly couldn't move. I had no idea what had happened. Finally figured out I was over my weight limit. Crazy what we put ourselves through, but I'll never forget it and never love anything as much.
medding!
This video brought back so many memories, I'm an original beta player, Hadden, LGuk Assassin, J-boots when they used to dropped in Najena. Honestly as good as your video is it only touches the tip of what we had to deal with back in the days. Trains to zone, Hell levels, I also played on RZek so gear bagging was a skill. I remember upgrading my 586 to max ram with a 56k modem and zoning faster than most so in PvP that was an advantage, unless they LD while zoning to avoid death hehe.. Makes me cry thinking of all the friends I made on the game and all the adventures I had. Thank you for the video and the trip down memory lane.
This game was so amazing. I played it from shortly after launch until right after WoW launch. My first real memory of it was being a Wood Elf Druid and running around the Greater Faydark, having no idea what I was doing or where I was going, and (unknowningly outside of Crushbone) coming across a dead orc, looting it and getting a fine cloth bracer. I thought it was so amazing. I died shortly after since I was way too low level for that area. I had no idea that I needed to get back to my body, so obviously I lost my beloved cloth bracer. I discovered this a day or so later and was pretty bummed lol. Those were some great times. This game will always be one of the greats! Thank you for the video and the great walk down memory lane!
So much love for this game. Two things I really hated that they changed though - the character models ugh! - and adding in the Bazaar. EQ tunnel went from the biggest collection of people selling wares and socializing and helping new/low level players out to a ghost town in a matter of weeks. It was truly sad :(
Mind you if you played on a PvP server the bazaar was probably a blessing. I started on Rallos PvP and carrying all that plat around wasn't a good idea so there was no real commerce in EC.
OH! Does anyone else remember the HELL levels? Holy sh*t that was a brutal time!
Started playing in 2000, after the Kunark expansion. So while I can't say I was there from the very beginning, it was close enough.
I rolled a Human Paladin, started in Freeport, and I still remember the sense of dread of the first Griffin that killed me, as well as the framerate drops from the tunnel. I remember camping for the Ghoulbane and the Jboots.
And I remember staying at lvl 52 for nearly a year to get the book drops from Wox and Nagafen for my epic quest. In the end, I gave up and moved on, and eventually stopped playing and deleted my character after Planes of Power.
Still, the original game had a sense of discovery and danger I haven't felt in any game since. Still remember my first adventure to visit Qeynos at lvl 10. That WAS an adventure.
Dadaph i used to Farm the GE boots and FBS for sale.
I still vividly remember my first time in Lower Guk and Cazic Thule. I remember the terror of doing corpse recovery in the Plane of Fear, and the feeling of accomplishment upon assembling a full set of Thorny Vine armor. EQ was such an amazing game! Thanks for the video!
99-2001 player on bristlebane. Best gaming memories. Real communities formed...fav gaming experience still to this day, even after I burned out from running a big guild...thanks for this post!
I spent more time dragging my corpse out of lower guk then anything ... god the was fun
I would get lost down there so many times
I realize now just how similar the appeal of Dark Souls/Bloodborne is to Everquest. Both games thrust you into the unknown, amidst enemies that pose a real threat. Everquest did it first of course, and on a far grander scale.
EQ had its drawbacks though. I remember mana/hitpoints used to take so long to fully regen, i kept a mini VHS tv next to my pc. So i'd have something to do while i wait. Or how about when your slain and you didn't make it to the corpse in time? And it just decayed, loosing all your $hit?
.....This game was the grand-daddy of rage quit. And we loved every second of it.
The drawbacks you mentioned, as annoying as they might have been, were part of what made the game so immersive. You were actually afraid to die because of the consequences, the lost of experience, sometimes even lost of your level, and possible lost of your corpse (and everything in your inventory as well). When I started playing you looked up to high level players, level 50 was impressive, now when you hit level 50 (or even higher) you don't have that feeling of achievement, or at least its not as exciting (at least to me, still fun though), because its so much easier and faster to get there. There was no in map in game either, and I got lost quite a few times lol, but this too was part of the challenges that made the game immersive.
My favorite memory is going to Najena for JBoots right after I finally got the Ice Comet spell. It was a mess, everyone was fighting to outdamage each other. Somehow, on the SECOND spawn, I did enough damage to get kill credit. She dropped the Jboots. Those things used to drop like once every few days.
Ha! The JBoots, I was never as happy to be a druid as when I saw my friends grind for those.
ShowEQ came in handy there (after they nerfed the drop), running through South Ro so much from druid teleports and heading back to Guk (ie corpse retrieval), the Ancient Cyclops would on occasion just be hanging out waiting for someone to "track" him down .
Also got a glowing black stone with it, after someone finally figured out the spawn cycle in Qeynos hills at night, spend the night tracking down and killing his placeholders, eventually the necro dude showed up with the thing (though he didn't always have the stone either!) If you relied on plain luck you could be waiting a very long time
I played this pretty much from the start and stuck around for the first 3-4 expansions before I moved on. Seriously dumped 2 years of my life into this in 1999-2001. That video... wow. Thank you so much. This made me all warm and fuzzy inside. I played many MMOs since then but the sense of awe and magic and fear I have felt in EQ, I have never found in any other MMOs.
Wow. I
Man, this game really screwed up my life for afew years - but I regret nothing :)
Can't help but wonder how some of my old friends and guildmates are doing in life nowadays~
Me too, I've met so many great people in EQ1.
Oh, you missed a few big parts of the game; crowd controlling/pulling and aggro management.
In this game, there were no linked mobs until you got to the very top tier raid bosses. A skilled player (monks and bards usually) could pull 1 mob out of a pack slowly and carefully. This could make or break a raid group, as tanks actually had to protect the squishier members that died very easily, and more than one mob could crush (literally) a tank to death.
"Parking" was the most advanced technique and reserved for the badasses of the game. You could pull a pack, run to your groups camp, and start rooting/mesmerizing them in place while the grp killed off 1 mob. This helped for faster kills, more exp, and more loot. I perfected this strat (that was taught to me by the paladin Heavyhands Soze and the bard Ethos) in Karnors Castle, or train central to those in the know.
As for aggro management, this game was the king of it. There were no mods to tell you how close to pulling aggro on a mob away from the tank. But, you had to kill fast because the healer was running out of mana almost every pull and you didn't want the healer to go oom midfight, so you had to ride the electric wire of dpsing and aggroing. Further, a group didn't lose aggro by running far enough away. Once you aggrod a mob, that mob didn't reset until you were dead or ran to the next zone (which is called training...because the mobs hit like a train and they would follow a single track if you got a large pack.)
To me, these two aspects really made the game challenging and a real rewarding experience to play. You had to be on your A game, every pull, and couldn't mess up. The rewards were that people noticed skilled players and wanted to group with them constantly.
I know this is a very late reply. But as a former main raid pulling monk who is dying of an EQ nostalgia I think you hit the nail on the head.
Luka B
Check out Project 1999. Classic Everquest server. You'll be feeling that feeling again trust me
Memory lane indeed. There goes my WHOLE childhood. Who else laughed at the map? Or the EC tunnel clusterfuck?
It sucks that I can't still play it, but it's just not the same. It hasn't aged well, and it's unrecognizable from the game I played 12-14 years ago.
/EQNanticipationdance
Katy Wiggins download project 1999..
And come back home
Stumbled across this video by accident. I'm an old fart who once played EQ. I started during The Ruins of Kunark. Your commentary was very relatable. I have since quit ALL mmorpg's but if I were ever to play any again, it would probably be good old EQ. I did try to recover my original SOE account but I was unsuccessful so if I were to try to play again, it would be a long and insane process to try to rebuild my main character, whom I spent so much time on with not only leveling but also raiding and epic quests. And so for this reason, I don't see myself ever playing again. But like many, I have very indelible memories of my time playing this game and meeting folks from around the world.
I started playing it in 2002. I had a Barbarian Warrior named Barudil. I was in a decent guild called The Well of Souls? Anyone remember it? Finally I drifted away and started playing Rift and a lot of Battlefield. But EQ was a good time! And didn't Firiona Vie have the coolest name, lol?
This game provided thee best social gaming experiences I ever had.
I remember casting KEI for gold for hours on end
Camped for a Ghoulbane for months. Evergrind indeed.
I still play Shards of Dalaya once and a while. Everquest was hands down my favorite MMO and I hope to see it get revitalized in Everquest NEXT as they have promised. Great video!
It's amazing how much of that stuff sticks in your mind through the years. Thank you very much for posting up the video. Hearing that music and seeing the loading screen, wow. Loved Gfay and CB
It's sad to think I can't experience this any more. EQ was before the concept of trolling existed. Can you even imagine a world in which players in chat yelling at you to be quiet for using "/shout" actually meant something and wasn't full of meanless arguments?
The world was so harsh that each zone felt like a real world. Hopping on a boat to Velious or Kunark felt like danger; like I was very far from home. Playing an iksar felt like a completely different game.
This! No current game makes you feel as though you are vulnerable, yet free at the same time. Old EQ made you feel like at any minute you could be killed by almost anything, yet, you had the freedom to try almost anything.
Current player progression is so stream lined and almost static through out leveling. You progress in certain abilities at almost a mathematical pace. Old EQ was more random. Things were NOT balanced, yet any class could leverage abilities that no other(or very few) classes could duplicate or imitate. It made everything feel special, relevant, and real.
I couldn't agree more with both of you! I remember literally waiting an hour for a boat ride wondering my fate on the other side, or just wondering around the Bazaar. Everquest 1 truly immersed you even with now "lame" graphics. In its time it was truly a masterpiece. Even when the UI took up half the screen. Man, I gotta exit this video, this is making me depressed! Miss those days!
Jackson DeBolt I think too, though, that in games like WoW, everything has a purpose. Every single mob is placed in a certain area to play fodder for a couple of quests, and it's pretty easily regimented. It's not random and ultimately it seems totally calculated. EQ was different in that there wasn't any specific need to kill any particular mob, except those that dropped particular items. I think that led to zones being much more mysterious because the game never led you to investigate every area like it does in WoW. There really isn't anything in WoW you can discover for yourself. Everyone on that faction who's leveled up in that zone is aware of it.
Compare that to zones in EQ, with its randomness and nonspecificity, along with, as noted here, the lack of ingame assistance. You could totally believe that there was a Megalodon in Lake Rathetear. There were ape spawns in the Emerald Jungle that probably weren't killed for years. The whole world seemed almost unknowable, that there was always something out there to discover.
Compare that to when I played WoW, and when I got a second character to max level, I pretty much knew every single thing there was to know about every zone in the game.
I loved the ropleplay aspect of it as well. Ogres and dwarves talking like ogres and dwarves. So many memories and you are right, the crowd certainly was more mature and intelligent.
Leveling is much faster too, while before, even though it was just a game, you felt like you had achieved something when you leveled up. And dying had consequences, so you were a lot more afraid of dying, which made it more immersive.
oh yeah, fond memories of going Link Dead in the middle of a fight and finally coming back naked at your bind point!
Emperor crush still scares me.
Link Dead!! OMG I completely forgot about going LD. Haven't thought about that in a long long time.
our bazzar was greater faydark or Faymart as it was known. hehehe
So many great memories playing this game. Some of the people I played with are no longer alive and it's really bitter sweet to watch this tribute. I remember playing every Halloween so that I could see what kind of cool monsters Sony would put in. Excellent job on this video!!!
That was a beautiful video, i have never played everquest but i witnessed it just now through your eyes. Well done.
i miss this game so much ;_; there are the best experiences i ever had, from this time.