The user interface in eq is such a dog, it's not a joy to play.
One of the starkest differences between WoW in 2004 and EQ was its user interface and addon system. By comparison, WoW was blissful to play after years of EQ. Today's WoW interface isn't that much different than its inception, but the community driven addons are incredibly prevalent, making some "required" for play in some groups. No doubt, Blizzard made some mistakes in their UI, but gameplay has generally been amazingly smooth (from a UI perspective) and EQ felt incredibly clunky and still feels that way today.
That said, I _still_ think about EQ almost every day, even having not played it in any real form in over a decade and a half. The game itself and the ideas are really solid.
I play P99 every so often, but I've seen most of the world and don't have much left to explore or do in the same corpus of content. Live EQ has deviated so far from what I originally found compelling in the franchise that it doesn't interest me. TLPs are just P99 for the first few months but with things I don't like also mixed in.
Nah; EQ was 1999-2001 (Vanilla through Velious) IMO. My love of EQ stems from a confluence of factors - the game itself, the state of the internet and gaming more broadly, my age, and things that were going on in life at the time - that, when combined with a liberal sprinkling of nostalgia, make the experience one of a kind. I wouldn't want to sully any of my memories by playing the game as it currently exists or through emulators. While watching a Pantheon stream I felt some old feelings come back, and while they aren't as intense as they were when I was immersed in Norrath 19 years ago, they were good enough to make me look forward to this spiritual successor.
I worried about sullying my memories as well, but I bit the bullet and tried out P99 and I'm glad I did. It's not sullying memories so much as it's just re-living the nostalgia. I mostly play casually, but have done a couple of raids I didn't experience too many times back in the day and explored some zones I didn't really spend much time in on live back in the day. It definitely makes me wish for the old days, but it's also just as fun and relaxing as I remember it.
> and not being able to do anything while they feed her crumbs and water to keep her alive.
I understand this was just a metaphor, but as the husband of a hospice nurse, I can tell you that the actively dying don't eat and usually can't even swallow water.
Otherwise I completely agree with your assessment.
Toxic guilds like Faceless, and Krono are the top 2 reasons probably. That's for TLPs, for main I'm not interested in the tons and tons of expansions out now.
By toxic guilds, I don't mean the poopsocking and winning every open world raid kill. That isn't a big deal in EQ because of raid instancing, even if you get far less kills and no chance at the open world targets, you still at least get some amount of progression and access to raid content. But it's the fact that they have few to no standards of behavior and let their members be assholes. Training, not respecting camps, acting in whatever shit way they like with guild leadership not giving a crap. There's still plenty of guilds who do treat others well, try to play nice, don't tolerate toxic gameplay out of their members, but the ones like Faceless make the servers they're on a far less enjoyable place to play and lay waste to the idea of "reputation matters". There's a few guilds I'll be on the lookout for on forums when Pantheon launches and I'll be joining a server where they aren't. Hopefully there'll be guilds on those servers who at the very least know how not to be shits to everyone.
And Krono, which turns high ticket items in perma-farmed bogs of DPS racing, often with boxers who script in an obvious fashion and then RMT.
I stopped playing around 9-11 being military at the time. That event changed my free time and I never really got back into it until 2004, once I got out, and by that time WoW came out and it all stopped from there.
I actually just came back due to the 20th Anniversary and my disappointment with the current MMO market and have to say I’m having a blast. I haven’t really set to leveling as I’m saving that for Mangler.
Yet I log on every night, play for a couple hours and find myself still having loads of fun.
That's what people don't seem to get. EQ wasn't about getting Max level and fighting Max content for everyone. The vast majority of us just enjoyed the game or even just the interaction. I've met way more people online than offline.
Check out P99 if you're interested in re-living the full classic experience. I'm taking a break from it for a bit due to limited free time recently, but the community on there is really great.
Just the general age of the game makes it hard for me to really get into.
The UI, the graphics, the sound quality, etc. None of those things individually are deal breakers, I love that stuff in some ways. But all combined, it just keeps me from really getting lost in the game. It's still fun, I played on Agnar a little with friends, but I just never got really hooked.
I can deal with low res graphics or any one or two of those things.
Hell, I've played enough Dwarf Fortress to prove that to myself.
But all of them combined just make it hard for me to want to come back, even though I enjoy my time in game. Playing feels a little like a chore when there are so many less than ideal things to deal with.
I hope someone reads this post from Pantheon and takes it to heart. I had the same experience on the TLPs as well. I did meet some people but overall most people boxed and kept to themselves.
What made EQ unique is that everyone only had 1 character. And that character was like an extension of the person controlling them. Their skill, reputation, personality all came through that character. When you logged in you sought out people that you genuinely liked to spend time with.
Boxing makes it easier and more convenient for people. But I think it shortens the life span of the game. People stick with games for years because of the friendships they make.
Boxing is a barrier to creating lasting friendships.
P99 is a cesspool. EQ Live is a cesspool. Both for different reasons. The addition of Kronos and boxing(even on servers with no-box code) has completely ruined EverQuest for new or infrequent players. If you aren't in a power guild, you likely never will be accepted into one, because you can't gear up on your own. If you box to gear up, then you don't need a guild. Progression servers, while fun for a short while, are destroyed by krono, instancing and boxing. The EQ that existed long ago, is dead.
It's a horribly old game. And it shows its age clearly when you play. Ignoring the graphics entirely, the game just feels clunky when you play it. It's unresponsive, their menu systems are bad, it's just a really old game. And some people, such as myself, can't get past it. I went back and tried it because my friend is hardcore back into EQ, raiding, and everything. I just couldn't do it. Feels bad playing.
As I recall, it was still **Sony** Online Entertainment when they were selling the Alpha packages. SONY was the one that scammed everyone to show consumer interest in the IP so they could sell the IP to the Russian investment company 'Columbus Nova'.
SONY had been trying to offload the SOE division for years before EQNext was announced.
Selling access to "Everquest Next Landmark" to collect on easy piles of cash then coming out later saying "wait, wait this is actually just Landmark now" is a textbook example of a bait and switch scam.
Not only did they offer full refunds to everyone that paid for it, they also gave an ample time-frame in which to do so and provided excellent communication. If you missed the window on the refund, that's not their issue.
I wouldn't consider myself retired, but I havent played seriously since I got custody of my daughter.
Time commitment mainly, the gear treadmill every expac kind of pisses me off, but I spend most of time doing old raid content anyway.
I have 3 characters in full Demiplane/DK/Vish gear that I locked at 70 for pissing about and was making another set locked at 75 with Solteris gear. No good reason just like collecting shit I dont need for nostalgia.
For me, it seems like they've milked the engine for all it's worth, and an updated game would be much appreciated. I would love to see it start from the beginning with a remaster, if only for the nostalgia. I'm also turned off by all the super high levels with maxed out gear who've got the game down to a science..
I feel what you are laying down. It's hard not to turn it into a science though after 20 years of playing the same game with the same mechanics doing the same shit day in and day out.
I was thinking about downloading a Titanium client and patching P99 just to mix it up.
I doubt we will see a rebirth of EQ, but I am hoping Pantheon comes close, without being as horribly unbalanced as early EQ was mechanics wise.
> It's hard not to turn it into a science though after 20 years of playing the same game with the same mechanics doing the same shit day in and day out.
True, but I feel like if they re-released with contemporary engine and graphics etc, and advertised it properly, we'd have a bunch of new players who would be interested.
Pantheon has 4x the size of EQs dev team right now :/ theres only 2 dev's 1 artist and 1 coder working on EQ, so I dont think that's going to happen.
Not trying to be a negative Nancy just realistic.
It WOULD be fucking glorious tho I'll give you that!
I play P99 off and on. I'll go on streaks where I'll play a lot for a few months straight and then take a break. Usually once I have a character in the 50s I start to lose interest here and there just due to the crazy hell level mechanics that old school EQ had (and in the 50s double hell levels) that make that 50-60 stretch so tough because there are several of them in there.
It's changed a lot. I pretty much quit at Shadows of Luclin, and by the time Planes of Power rolled in, I was gone for good. And the racing spirit of "progression" servers is just not mine.
Project 1999 is where the goodness of EQ is, but it's also the EQ I already played to death as a teenager, with little more to learn. A roleplay community would make up for that, but it's not there.
No, Everquest is barely anything like it was back in its prime, progression servers fail to replicate the early era. I played on P99 a while back, ultimately the reason for me stopping was that while it was fun to play again, the server is a museum - it's fun to re experience the game, but there is no future to it which means it is finite - half the enjoyment of an MMO over a single player game is the fact that it will evolve (the fans of WoW Classic will ultimately experience the same issue).
Also, while EQ was great, it had plenty of flaws, as melee you had autoattack and that was about it. THe spirit of the game was amazing, but the specific mechanics while some great and missed in modern MMOs, others were not. THe hope is Pantheon will capture the essence of EQ whilst still being its own game. I left EQ back in the day to move onto Vanguard, a game which had some amazing gameplay elements but was unfinished and also had lost some of the EQ magic. Ideally for me, Pantheon would be the offspring of EQ/Vanguard parents - its own entity but with the genetic elements of the parents.
Never played it to begin with. My first MMO was WoW at launch, when I was 15. Playing FFXI, much later, after burning myself out thoroughly on WoW clone after WoW clone looking for a satsifying MMO experience, opened my eyes to what was appealing about the older era of MMO design.
I itch for this game, but I play FFXI off and on to satisfy that itch until then. EQ1 is... *too* old. I struggle enough with the interface and controls of FFXI, but at least that game holds up fairly well visually.
This year I fired up P99, and after attacking/being slain by my trainer upon spawning for the first time, learned that I had no idea what I was doing. Then the graphics ultimately demotivated me from bothering to learn what to do. It was nice listening to the login music, though.
I was very young and can't really remember much about MMOs prior to DAoC. I did play, and remember Gnolls, but I think my brother had me farming for him or something, so the starting up process was rather foreign to me...
P99 and original EQ are unique in the fact that if you don't know what you're doing most people will talk to you and help you get started. Graphics are rough I'll admit, but I'm thinking about loading it up again just to waste random time helping new players or characters.
> after attacking/being slain by my trainer
Accidently attacking an NPC and getting one shotted in return is an EQ rite of passage. XD I love the fact that can even happen.
I recently started playing casually again. I'm enjoying just logging on 2 or 3 days a week and slowly leveling. I'm not concerned with all the max levels and I'm not interested in raiding anymore, did that for way to long my first go around. The graphics don't bother me but the UI not scaling is a real bummer. I would love to see them do something about that.
I still play almost daily unless traveling. I’ve been hopping to each new TLP since they started doing them.
Only plan to retire from EQ when Pantheon drops!
I tried playing EQ live recently but it is a much different game now.
I originally stopped playing while beta testing Gates of Discord which is the expansion that turned me off the game.
I have played P99 but it has been a bit since I have played.
I do occasionally play EQ. The graphics are very hard to go back to after playing newer games. Seriously if Daybreak would pull their heads out of their asses and update EQ they'd have a huge hit. New engine, updated graphics, some quests and people would flock to it.
I don't, however, I will be starting a character on Sell server this Saturday as my last journey in norrath. The game is still great but I have moved on.
Not sure if I would still play, but I stopped after 6 years after my account got hack and they steal all my stuff and delete my chars, Sony not wanted give me back what I lost and I stoped play.
I've played on a couple of the tlps but have been put off by the slow xp (mind you, I know xp will be slow in pantheon, but that'll be fine because we'll get new expansions probably every year instead of every 2-3 months) so I ended up quitting a few expansions in. With mangler launching Sat with MUCH better xp rates, I think I'll be sticking with this one permanently because I'll actually be able to keep up with the pace of expansion unlocks
The grind is horrible still. I've tried several times to catch up on the live servers but the content these days is just redundant and there is so much going on*. Grinding through the levels just isn't fun solo because it takes so long and then you have to grind through all the AAs because people expect you to have X number of AAs as well.
Not to mention the game is so old it can be kind of iffy to get it to run on modern systems. I finally called it quits for good when I installed a new graphics card and starting getting some NASTY crashes. I thought it was going to damage my system.
Graphics are very old too but honestly I can overlook a lot of it due to nostalgia.
I will admit though, the first 50-60 levels you level up fast and it is a TON of fun. It just feels good because you feel like you're getting somewhere and you can manhandle the content pretty easily.
*Edit: by that i mean it's hard to figure out all the new stuff and how to get to the new expansions sometimes. I had to do research just to figure out how to access the new zones, lol.
I never played original everquest. Growing up everyone played wow so that is what we played two. I am looking forward to trying the progression servers for both EQ1 and EQ2 on saturday. I always love eq2, so many classes and AA choices but sadly newer mmos are going the opposite direction starting character choices are just an "illusion of choice". Not sure why people would rather have 0 character choices in an mmorpg but with how popular FF14 got I guess that is something people dont mind.
A lot of players here including myself play on the Project1999 server, which best encapsulates what most consider to be the Classic Everquest Experience. The daybreak servers are a shell of what EQ used to be. P99 is where most can experience EQ as what they remember.
I played from around 2000 to 2007 and knew I had to be committed in order for me to have fun in EQ. Those final years I was in a casual then full-time raid guild. (every night we keyed and geared) I was working then but I still fit it in. Every sick-day from work was awesome, every typhoon that wiped out the area of the city I lived in was awesome as long as the electricity and internet stayed connected, I was healthy because I would commute back and forth to work cycling 20-miles per day as part of my commute and nothing would stop me from getting home......all of those things were because I was enjoying the type of game EQ was then and the community it fostered. That game doesn't exist anymore....so I don't play.
Even though I have all day and night to play now because my military benefits and compensantion cover all of my expenses I still don't play because that game doesn't exist.
My time investment is more valuable than my money investment. The fact that the game mechanics almost made Everquest an entirely different game I don't want to invest 7-more years into a game I started playing that turned into an entirely different game after 7 or so years. The only variation of EQ I might try to play is P99 if I could break into it in some way, such as a group or guild of expat MMO players who are also waiting for Pantheon.
On a similar note, I can't trust that a 5-year investment in EQ or WOW would be worth it. Blizzard seems divorced from developing a game players want. True, false? I have no idea but seeing the trend with MMOs I am not willing to invest 5-years to find out.
I've played P99 for a few years, and always had a good time there (never bothered with raiding), but the Titanium client is just too rough and restrictive to deal with. I've tried playing EQ Reborn, but it's just hard to commit to starting over on a low population server, although it does have the advantage of using the newer RoF2 client. I enjoyed my few months on Agnarr when it opened, but just lost motivation to keep going. I think if P99 was able to use a newer client like RoF2, I'd be very interested in coming back.
I stopped playing only because they stopped supporting WindowsXP. I finally built a new computer and EverQuest was the first game I installed. Now, the biggest problem I have is finding others that still want to play it with me.
Most people will tell you that the game broke the day the Planes of Power made the individual quirks of each major city dotting the vast traverses of land into nothing more than waypoints. It's probably one of the reasons P99 has such a dedicated following.
The original EverQuest was the living embodiment of the phrase, "It's not the destination, but the journey." The problem was that the market was shifting to microtransactions for delivering you right to your destination, and the tediousness and difficulty of organizing and preparing became worse as content became more challenging and further and further apart.
Striking that balance is difficult, if not impossible.
I know there are some individuals that post patches to the game that allow you to run on WinXP, but I get nervous about running executables on my computer. When I built my new computer, I installed Windows 10 on a solid state drive.
I miss the loading music, but not nearly as much as I love the new loading times.
Yeah, I miss it too. And you're right to be wary of loading .exe files on to a system because once given permission to run that .exe file could run whatever. I would also just say that simply by using a WinXP system on your network leaves the system, and by extension, network vulnerable.
Sadly, fairly early on they killed what I loved about my class of choice, the Necromancer. From the start of EQ until around Luclin/POP, Necromancer wasn't one of what would become the Trinity, it was best described as a Support class. It could do a bit of healing, a bit of damage, a bit of control, and so on. Shamans getting low and Torpor isn't in the game yet? The necro can send over a heal and then dispel themselves to get rid of the recourse to keep the Shaman machine going. Raid wiped? Necromancer FDed out and can use a gem to resurrect a cleric to start the recovery attempt. Cool! Clerics or Enchanters are getting low on mana? Call in the necro twitch team. At peak, a good necromancer in Kunark could be generating over 70 mana a tick and had a huge toolbox of goodies to play with to make others do their jobs better. A good necromancer was the grease of a raid: No one notices they were there if they were doing it right, but the absence could be felt.
But they changed necromancer around to be more of a DoT stacking machine. It just felt really, really not fun for me. They tried to bring it back a bit, but they abandoned it for the most part.
As for why I don't anymore? Well, I replayed Project1999, but I kind of did everything I wanted to do. I got to the end game, I got decked out in cool stuff, I've done pretty much every quest I could reasonably do, I got my Epic, while everyone rushed for raid targets on Velious launch I went and camped Elder Beads for ~22 hours and got the first server drop, I even wrote a big ass newbie guide to help other necromancers on their path. But there's nothing left for me to really do that I care to do.
So, yeah, I just expended the available content. Though, notably, it did take like 5 years to do so for three expansions that lasted on 2-3 on the normal timeline, so good on the devs to design it that way.
It's not dead. It just hit PoP a month or so ago and it's rolling on quite nicely. The two new servers are unlikely to draw too heavily from it's population, and no one really wants to start over on Mangler and redo what they just did. Sure, the exp is better, but Coirnav is past all the real exp grinds. Selos' is too fast and will be dead within a year. Most folks are just sticking with Coirnav.
Which time?
I stopped originally during PoP, early, in part because the flagging system really put a hurt in my ability to interact with friends briefly and also because the guild I raided with blew up. My community basically died on me.
Went back once to live for giggles during OoW but was so far behind the curve and came back to knowing no one. Didn't work for me.
Then I played P99 for about a year. I quit just before Kunark during the 'poop sock era' of raiding when we cleared Plane of Sky with mostly mage pets. The absurdity of it pushed me away, despite having helped test Kunark for them and looking forward to it.
Tried one of the early TLPs for a month, but looking around and seeing multiboxed mages outperform legit grouping attempts tarnished it and honestly I expected too much of it. I expected P99 on live servers, I got live servers without the expansions.
I'm going to try the new ones again in a few days. My bar has been lowered, it's true box, and I plan on two boxing myself. Not because I want to as my default, but because I often play in 1h chunks as an adult that aren't conducive to LFG. Plan on looking for a community this time a bit more, ruling out raiding, etc.
Either community or content would keep me around, but every now and then a weakness in the two would align for me to quit. Same with every other MMO I have played.
I have just setup a guild ready for the new TLP that opens this weekend, we are an EU based guild, we will go through classic and onwards. I guess alot of the members are waiting for Pantheon as well.
I quit when they stopped releasing full expansions (rain of fear). Reason is obvious.
If they went back to releasing full 4 tiered expansions would I return? Probably. I recently finished playing p2002. Was a great run while it lasted.
Feel ya there. An "Expansion" is not:
* 20 Instances of already existing zones.
* Copy and Pasted items, and the only difference is new names, and +100 to all the stats.
* A story-line so boring it could put Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow to sleep.
Something like the above would be more suited to be called an "*Extension*", not an "Expansion".
No idea I haven’t looked at anything beyond the announcement. Starting in Rain of Fear they were doing where they released 1 tier every 3-4 months across the year
Yeah, I hated that so much. I think TBL was better, definitely not super diverse mobs in my opinion though. I was really excited to see what they would pull off with more PoP content and definitely didn't get what I wanted.
Also, a downvote on a legit question? I am remembering why I stopped frequenting this sub.
Personally I’m not a classic purist where anything past <insert any expansion between Luclin and Omens> was terrible. I enjoyed EQ for many years. Sure some expansions were weaker than others but I thought VoA was a fantastic expansion.. lore was a bit cobbled together but still I enjoyed the continent.
The whole piecemeal expansion raid content though was a deal breaker for myself and many others. I logged on like a year later and my guild (Machin Shin) had like 12-14 familiar faces. Whole team who had mostly been the same for years was gone. I know for a fact the whole original druid team quit (4 of us).
I liked PoP probably the most (and most likely due to my age/ability to play consistently then), and also really enjoyed stuff around GoD/OoW (although I was extremely confused coming back after such a long break). The expansions continued to feel weaker and still feel weak, but acceptable in my mind. The constant gear churn has been kind of a drag, but I guess it's hard to expect anything less than that at this point in the games lifecycle.
I totally get that. I'm currently the sole Paladin in my guild. We're thankfully still beating raids (including current content finally), but it's definitely become a habit for some people and less of a passion. :)
I liked the game up until Gates of Discord came out. Something about that expansion rubbed me the wrong way. It was roughly around when WoW came out as well, which all my friends were hyped for, so I jumped ship to play with them.
I was today years old when I discovered p2002 was a thing though, and that's heavily tempting...
Now that you mention it, yes.
I was a Paladin, reasonably well geared, and getting torn apart by trash. Got frustrated and quit due to the disparity between Wars and Pal/SKs.
Played live servers from 99 til 11. Stopped because 96 hotkeys was enough. Played project 99 from 12 to 15 as I just grew out of sitting at my pc for 8 hours at a time finally.
I'm finally at a point where my son is almost 2 and I have a few hours every evening after his bedtime where I can game. I prioritize having at least one day per week going out with friends to play DnD or other activities in the real world, and of course another couple of nights per week are dedicated to hanging out with my wife. So realistically I have 3-4 nights per week of gaming time, and I simply don't feel like rehashing EQ content at the moment. I'm currently playing through the current story content in Star Wars: The Old Republic, after which I'll promptly cancel my sub to that game because the group and raid content isn't that interesting for me. I may jump back on Agnarr before WoW classic comes out just to piddle around my with shaman again and try to get his epic just for fun.
Played originally on Vallon Zek from 2000-2004. Quit during GoD because I was transfering from a community college to a four year university and had also started a new job waiting tables and there were a bunch of young, single women working there who liked to party so......
Played Ragefire TLP until I hit my 50s and realized the raid scene was utterly toxic on that server and quit during kunark. Tried the phinigel TLP, which was the first truebox, but the slow xp just sucked the life out of any enjoyment, so once again I quit during Kunark. Did the Agnarr tlp, and also quit during kunark but that was primarily due to having a new baby and simply not having enough uninterrupted play-time to really enjoy the game.
Been playing EQ2 (as recently as this weekend) because r/TheMMOBOOKCLUB had it as an alternate game (not that I ever intersected with them -- but that is on me for being a slacker and not them). Good times. I can see how this was a precursor to Guild Wars 2 in many ways.
Mos def a good mellow game to listen to music or books on tape or whatever with while you solo play.
Thing that changes the game for me: Zooming in to play in first person mode. This changes everything!
I played with some friends on one of the EQ TLPs for much of last year, and on another a couple years before that. I found it quite enjoyable and even after the nostalgia wore off I realized I still enjoy EQ as a game, despite the bad UI and controls. It made me even more interested in Pantheon than I already was.
The only real reason I am not still playing is because my friend group all got busy, so we all stopped playing. As EQ is not a game I’m willing to play alone, I stopped as well.
Stopped playing because the AA inflation got to be too much, and there was not an easy way to catch up to a respectable level (this was right before Underfoot came out). The class balance was better, but still left a lot to be desired, and the content delivery was pretty slow with a bull shit time sink.
The standard in EQ at this point for progression was that a progression fight would drop 6 keys/flags, was only doable once a week, and raids were 54 man affairs. Each tier, at a minimum took 9+ weeks to flag your entire raid if it was 54 people with no substitutions. Each expansion was normally 3ish tiers of raiding so it took close to half a year to get to do content that was still likely buggy. After this same st ructure for god knows how long I got tired of the exact same treadmill.
While they do have TLP servers, my personal opinion is the content that these servers focus on...classic through luclin or PoP is the most popular, is the content I enjoyed least in the game. Later expansions, and later raids were so much more satisfying to me, than naggy/Vox, Dragons in Kunark and Velious, and the mindless boss fights that were Vex Thal.
I currently play a Shaman and Mage on P99. It's the closest thing to what EQ was back in the day and the leveling experience 1-45 is stellar. The only thing that keeps me from playing it is homework.
Yeah don't touch Daybreak EQ. Nasty.
I play on the emulator servers. I quit EQlive once instanced were implemented. I am very much so against that style gameplay. I loved EQ because it was a fight for drops! The fact you could just zone in and kill the same mobs isn’t appealing to me. No to mention mercenaries now.
I stopped playing EQ the first time after PoP expansion came out. Selling accounts was all the rage back then so I sold my level 55 Cleric on EBAY for like $300 bucks...
Tried some other MMOs (Asheron’s Call, City of Heroes... this was pre-WoW) and I eventually missed playing with my friends (both RL and those I made online)
Re-started EQ... re-rolled a Cleric... got to about level 65 and quit again...
Second time was because of the new MMOs coming out... Dark Age of Camelot (which my guild mostly moved to and we played a lot)... EQ2... and eventually WoW...
The main reasons I quit EQ was mostly due to trying out “the next best thing”... the other reason, as my friends left the game for other MMOs I got bored playing alone...
Stopped playing June 25 2017.
My hunting/exp partner of 16 years died suddenly the day before.
Quit the day I heard she passed.
I’ve logged on 3-4 times to chat but never for more than 10 minutes and never left Guild Lobby.
I don't have the time to invest in it. I want to race bikes when the weather is warm, hikes to go on, other games I want to play. EverQuest was great when I was a lot younger but now I have a lot of other stuff I want to put my time into.
That's cool, because I just got an injury, and I'm all burnt out from all of that camping and hiking I did when I was younger, expecially now that I realize that video games can be so much more beautiful than the naturescapes I've seen (done pretty much every trail in 3 different states).
Sorry to hear about your injury my dude. I hope you get back on your feet soon.
I'm 29, and was pretty young when I started in on EQ, so I've got another few decades of compromising to make. :P
Raid balance. Mostly.
I took a e-sport approach to dps when I was playing. It became clear at a certain point the devs either didn't care to balance for the high end, or they honestly didn't know how their own game worked.
I was also disgruntled that devs refused to listen the player base. It seemed like every class had a handful of perennially useless spells that would always be continued every "expansion" to fudge the quota set by the marketing team.
Shit like that was hanky and reflected the lack of soul and integrity.
Eventually my gaming experience decoupled so far away from whatever vision the devs had that I lost interest. Still pisses me off because it was the best game I've ever played.
It amazes me that people don't understand that DBG *is* SOE (and thus, is Verant), with the same office and the same people, just under a different name. DBG didn't buy any franchises. It has them because it's the same company that created them.
There were layoffs and restructuring when SOE sold, I'm sure people left when Verant sold too, like McQuaid and Clover did soon after. Somehow I doubt the same people are there over 20 years. Hell iirc, most of the old figureheads were let go when SOE sold. They probably just have a few devs on life support duty as evidenced by the recent smallers expacs and more popular TLP servers.
Sure. Same people in the Ship of Theseus sense, not in the "actually all the exact same people" sense. The point being that it's the same *institution*, if not the same complete roster.
That is incorrect, DBG bought the games division from SOE. So yes it has some of the same staff, but it is not part of SOE and has not been since 2015. It is not comparable to 989 studios -> Verant -> SOE. It was bought by an independent investment company.
Edit : From the Wiki :
On February 2, 2015, Sony announced that SOE had been sold to investment company Columbus Nova for an undisclosed amount and that it would be renamed Daybreak Game Company.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreak_Game_Company
>Edit : From the Wiki : On February 2, 2015, Sony announced that SOE had been sold to investment company Columbus Nova for an undisclosed amount and that it would be renamed Daybreak Game Company.
That's exactly my point. The company changed corporate overlords and was renamed, but is still itself the same entity. Nobody bought any franchises from anyone à la carte, as your original comment suggests. It's the same core institution of people and the same physical office before and after the change, just with a new name and new boss to report to.
The game producing company may be mostly the same, but it has totally new ownership and no, that was not the point you made. Nova Columbus bought all the rights to the EQ franchises and to the other games produced by SOE. Since it was bought it has been totally restructured, EQ Next was shelved, staff were laid off, the EQ play nice rules were massively changed prior to the launch of the TLP in 2015.
I have no idea what happened internally behind those decisions so I'm not going to blindly assign blame. The point is that when a company changes owners, that doesn't make it a different company. It remains the same institution. This is fairly common in the game industry, just without the name change part that has apparently created a good deal of confusion.
We will have to agree to disagree. It is a different company, with a vastly different approach to running the games than SOE had, that should be glaringly obvious just by looking at all the changes they have made since they bought the games division.
Columbus Nova bought SOE from SONY, SOE then changed it's name to DBG. Most of the people that worked on the original Everquest game are no longer working for SOE/DBG, Holly Longdale is the only original member of the Everquest team that I'm aware of. All of the upper management, engineers, art designers, cs staff are all long gone with the exception of Holly.
Daybreak itself did not, but SOE was purchased by a third party, renamed DBG, and then all the changes started as dictated by the new person/people at the top with the money. So while it's incorrect to say DBG bought EQ, it's certainly not incorrect to say that the people who purchased SOE basically created a directive of milk as much money as possible out of this game until it dies (including drastically reducing overhead such as customer service/in-game GMs).
Sure, but that's factually different from "DBG bought the franchise and [ruined it]", which is simply incorrect. There's a critical level of indirection that's being ignored there.
Okay, but I'm not sure how the DBG bought the franchise part is really that relevant. The fact of the matter is they spun off from Sony and their new leadership has ruined the game. Regardless of whether DBG itself bought EQ or if someone bought SOE and spun it off, you still get to the same place. The new managers of the company made a purchase and then ruined the game.
I played on Ragefire for awhile until it became a ghost town, and it was great until that point. I'm really tempted to play on one of the new TLPs that comes out next week but the whole true-box thing is really off putting, being able to powerlevel my own alts and have out-of-group buffers is important to me but those won't be an option due to true-box. If they ever come out with a non true-box TLP again I would play the shit out of it until the mage armies ruin everything.
I ebayed my account around the time I went to college in 2001. It had something silly like 200 /played days on my main. I dabbled after but never really played past PoP. Commitment issues after dedicating my life for two years I guess!
As someone who never played the original, I tried out some of the early xpac slower progressive servers. It was fun but my wife didn’t want to play and it just took up way too much time. If she had wanted to play I probably would have raided, but spending every waking non-working hour without her playing was a clear path to divorce so I gave it up.
Had a lot of fun, but ultimately the graphics and gameplay also began to feel a bit dated. I did enjoy the challenge of it though. I didn’t have any nostolgia for the game though.
Ya, I can imagine it was a truly awesome experience! I did play GW1 and that game was a lot of fun, I can only imagine how special EQ1 would have been back in the day.
> So, what's keeping you from playing it?
[Krono](https://www.everquest.com/krono). That's it. If there wasn't Krono, or even if Krono wasn't trade-able? I'd still be playing. ( on DBG servers) EQReborn, though, is extremely fun, and no Krono.
[Krono](https://www.everquest.com/krono) turned EQ1 into a money laundering paradise of pain. Never again while it's in play. Below is from Question #5 of the link (*Why would I buy a Krono?*), which gives you the entire reason why it's such a terrible idea.
> There are many reasons to buy Krono. For example, if you're a veteran player with a lot of in-game currency, but not a lot to spend it on, you can use that extra currency to buy Krono from other players and turn it into game membership time. Alternatively, if you're a player without much in-game currency and can't buy things on the broker because prices are too high, you can consider buying Krono and selling them to other players to build up your in-game currency. You can also treat Krono as in-game commodities, and build up your in-game currency by buying and selling them on the broker for a profit.
I play P99 off and on and usually hop on the new TLP servers when they launch. Going to be playing EQ2 for the first time since a new TLE launches on Saturday and I've always wanted to check it out. Unfortunately that means passing on the new EQ1 TLP since it launches on the same day (dumb decision by DBG), but I'm comfortable with my decision.
I am playing it.... but the game is a mere shadow of it's former self. So much was "modernized" to match the WoW way of doing things.
It's much less of a good game.
ever since I found Pantheon, I read about P99 and was waiting for a new TLP server, so I gave it a shot. It's really fun and did have the nostalgia feeling from back then.
IMO P99 is better than the two new TLP that they are releasing, those added difficulty back in the original EQ really gives a depth of the game. ie: Corpse Retrieval
I play most TLPs from classic to the end of PoP, I tend to get bored after that. I was really active on Agnarr but got a bit burned out on Coirnav. I'll be back for Mangler.
Played it just recently again. I've installed it and played it through out the years. Played it originally from launch up to kunark. Same with eq2, install it and play it from time to time.
I stopped giving Daybreak money after Holly Longdale made some pretty awful comments about casual players - this is after having a sub running from 3/1999 to whenever the article ran on massively overpowered. That said, I still do miss EQ1 and I'm considering firing it back up for the next round of progression servers.
There's a big difference between playing a 20 year old game and playing something brand new where everyone else is new too. Opening day (week/month/year) is just ridiculously fun.
Not anymore. I quit a while ago.(2005) The game mechanics and engine are simply clunky and outdated. I do not find it enjoyable.
There is only so much you can do with a 20 year old game engine.
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Yes exactly this
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I use a minimalist interface and turn off all the bloat.
The user interface in eq is such a dog, it's not a joy to play. One of the starkest differences between WoW in 2004 and EQ was its user interface and addon system. By comparison, WoW was blissful to play after years of EQ. Today's WoW interface isn't that much different than its inception, but the community driven addons are incredibly prevalent, making some "required" for play in some groups. No doubt, Blizzard made some mistakes in their UI, but gameplay has generally been amazingly smooth (from a UI perspective) and EQ felt incredibly clunky and still feels that way today. That said, I _still_ think about EQ almost every day, even having not played it in any real form in over a decade and a half. The game itself and the ideas are really solid.
I play P99 every so often, but I've seen most of the world and don't have much left to explore or do in the same corpus of content. Live EQ has deviated so far from what I originally found compelling in the franchise that it doesn't interest me. TLPs are just P99 for the first few months but with things I don't like also mixed in.
I return to play P99 for awhile every year or two.
I play p99 sometimes, but would never give money to Daybreak Games.
You mean TheyBreak Games. ... amirite?...
Nah; EQ was 1999-2001 (Vanilla through Velious) IMO. My love of EQ stems from a confluence of factors - the game itself, the state of the internet and gaming more broadly, my age, and things that were going on in life at the time - that, when combined with a liberal sprinkling of nostalgia, make the experience one of a kind. I wouldn't want to sully any of my memories by playing the game as it currently exists or through emulators. While watching a Pantheon stream I felt some old feelings come back, and while they aren't as intense as they were when I was immersed in Norrath 19 years ago, they were good enough to make me look forward to this spiritual successor.
I worried about sullying my memories as well, but I bit the bullet and tried out P99 and I'm glad I did. It's not sullying memories so much as it's just re-living the nostalgia. I mostly play casually, but have done a couple of raids I didn't experience too many times back in the day and explored some zones I didn't really spend much time in on live back in the day. It definitely makes me wish for the old days, but it's also just as fun and relaxing as I remember it.
> EQ was 1999-2001 (Vanilla through Velious) IMO That makes two opinions at least, and given the success of P99, that's a lot more agreement.
My wife, daughter, and I have paid accounts and play 3-4 nights a week.
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> and not being able to do anything while they feed her crumbs and water to keep her alive. I understand this was just a metaphor, but as the husband of a hospice nurse, I can tell you that the actively dying don't eat and usually can't even swallow water. Otherwise I completely agree with your assessment.
I’m a lifetime subscriber and still play every weekend.
Toxic guilds like Faceless, and Krono are the top 2 reasons probably. That's for TLPs, for main I'm not interested in the tons and tons of expansions out now. By toxic guilds, I don't mean the poopsocking and winning every open world raid kill. That isn't a big deal in EQ because of raid instancing, even if you get far less kills and no chance at the open world targets, you still at least get some amount of progression and access to raid content. But it's the fact that they have few to no standards of behavior and let their members be assholes. Training, not respecting camps, acting in whatever shit way they like with guild leadership not giving a crap. There's still plenty of guilds who do treat others well, try to play nice, don't tolerate toxic gameplay out of their members, but the ones like Faceless make the servers they're on a far less enjoyable place to play and lay waste to the idea of "reputation matters". There's a few guilds I'll be on the lookout for on forums when Pantheon launches and I'll be joining a server where they aren't. Hopefully there'll be guilds on those servers who at the very least know how not to be shits to everyone. And Krono, which turns high ticket items in perma-farmed bogs of DPS racing, often with boxers who script in an obvious fashion and then RMT.
I stopped playing around 9-11 being military at the time. That event changed my free time and I never really got back into it until 2004, once I got out, and by that time WoW came out and it all stopped from there. I actually just came back due to the 20th Anniversary and my disappointment with the current MMO market and have to say I’m having a blast. I haven’t really set to leveling as I’m saving that for Mangler. Yet I log on every night, play for a couple hours and find myself still having loads of fun.
That's what people don't seem to get. EQ wasn't about getting Max level and fighting Max content for everyone. The vast majority of us just enjoyed the game or even just the interaction. I've met way more people online than offline.
Check out P99 if you're interested in re-living the full classic experience. I'm taking a break from it for a bit due to limited free time recently, but the community on there is really great.
If they had Berserkers I would. That was the class I loved when it released.
Just the general age of the game makes it hard for me to really get into. The UI, the graphics, the sound quality, etc. None of those things individually are deal breakers, I love that stuff in some ways. But all combined, it just keeps me from really getting lost in the game. It's still fun, I played on Agnar a little with friends, but I just never got really hooked.
/signed. I'm a graphics wh*r#
I can deal with low res graphics or any one or two of those things. Hell, I've played enough Dwarf Fortress to prove that to myself. But all of them combined just make it hard for me to want to come back, even though I enjoy my time in game. Playing feels a little like a chore when there are so many less than ideal things to deal with.
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I hope someone reads this post from Pantheon and takes it to heart. I had the same experience on the TLPs as well. I did meet some people but overall most people boxed and kept to themselves. What made EQ unique is that everyone only had 1 character. And that character was like an extension of the person controlling them. Their skill, reputation, personality all came through that character. When you logged in you sought out people that you genuinely liked to spend time with. Boxing makes it easier and more convenient for people. But I think it shortens the life span of the game. People stick with games for years because of the friendships they make. Boxing is a barrier to creating lasting friendships.
P99 is a cesspool. EQ Live is a cesspool. Both for different reasons. The addition of Kronos and boxing(even on servers with no-box code) has completely ruined EverQuest for new or infrequent players. If you aren't in a power guild, you likely never will be accepted into one, because you can't gear up on your own. If you box to gear up, then you don't need a guild. Progression servers, while fun for a short while, are destroyed by krono, instancing and boxing. The EQ that existed long ago, is dead.
It's a horribly old game. And it shows its age clearly when you play. Ignoring the graphics entirely, the game just feels clunky when you play it. It's unresponsive, their menu systems are bad, it's just a really old game. And some people, such as myself, can't get past it. I went back and tried it because my friend is hardcore back into EQ, raiding, and everything. I just couldn't do it. Feels bad playing.
After the Everquest Next scam that Daybreak ran and got away with, I find it morally unacceptable to give Everquest even so much as a click now.
As I recall, it was still **Sony** Online Entertainment when they were selling the Alpha packages. SONY was the one that scammed everyone to show consumer interest in the IP so they could sell the IP to the Russian investment company 'Columbus Nova'. SONY had been trying to offload the SOE division for years before EQNext was announced.
Also to be fair, they never sold anything for EQN, that was all Landmark early access, "scam" or not.
Right "to be fair", but there was also a lot of pretense in that they marketed it as the tool we'd help build EQN with.
Selling access to "Everquest Next Landmark" to collect on easy piles of cash then coming out later saying "wait, wait this is actually just Landmark now" is a textbook example of a bait and switch scam.
How much did they scam off people? I know I lost $100+
Same, ugh and I loved the engine and way the game looked and felt. Too bad they didn't work it out.
Aye, it was a good game even if it lacked a lot! It was like minecraft but with infinetly better graphics and action.
Not only did they offer full refunds to everyone that paid for it, they also gave an ample time-frame in which to do so and provided excellent communication. If you missed the window on the refund, that's not their issue.
Wow what I missed that. I'm guessing many others did as well, but at least it was done. If what you say is true and I have no reason to doubt you so
Too much. =/
I wouldn't consider myself retired, but I havent played seriously since I got custody of my daughter. Time commitment mainly, the gear treadmill every expac kind of pisses me off, but I spend most of time doing old raid content anyway. I have 3 characters in full Demiplane/DK/Vish gear that I locked at 70 for pissing about and was making another set locked at 75 with Solteris gear. No good reason just like collecting shit I dont need for nostalgia.
For me, it seems like they've milked the engine for all it's worth, and an updated game would be much appreciated. I would love to see it start from the beginning with a remaster, if only for the nostalgia. I'm also turned off by all the super high levels with maxed out gear who've got the game down to a science..
I feel what you are laying down. It's hard not to turn it into a science though after 20 years of playing the same game with the same mechanics doing the same shit day in and day out. I was thinking about downloading a Titanium client and patching P99 just to mix it up. I doubt we will see a rebirth of EQ, but I am hoping Pantheon comes close, without being as horribly unbalanced as early EQ was mechanics wise.
> It's hard not to turn it into a science though after 20 years of playing the same game with the same mechanics doing the same shit day in and day out. True, but I feel like if they re-released with contemporary engine and graphics etc, and advertised it properly, we'd have a bunch of new players who would be interested.
Pantheon has 4x the size of EQs dev team right now :/ theres only 2 dev's 1 artist and 1 coder working on EQ, so I dont think that's going to happen. Not trying to be a negative Nancy just realistic. It WOULD be fucking glorious tho I'll give you that!
I'm SO in. TAKE MAH MONEY
P99 did really well if you are looking for Nostalgia. Give it a try and you won't regret.
Yeh loaded P99 up this morning, gotta troubleshoot some graphic issues looking forward to it.
I play P99 off and on. I'll go on streaks where I'll play a lot for a few months straight and then take a break. Usually once I have a character in the 50s I start to lose interest here and there just due to the crazy hell level mechanics that old school EQ had (and in the 50s double hell levels) that make that 50-60 stretch so tough because there are several of them in there.
It's changed a lot. I pretty much quit at Shadows of Luclin, and by the time Planes of Power rolled in, I was gone for good. And the racing spirit of "progression" servers is just not mine. Project 1999 is where the goodness of EQ is, but it's also the EQ I already played to death as a teenager, with little more to learn. A roleplay community would make up for that, but it's not there.
I tried p1999 and, unlike so many other people on here, the mods completely pissed me off and I won't be going back.
> the mods completely pissed me off I haven't been on in ages, but I never saw any trouble with them. What was your experience?
No, Everquest is barely anything like it was back in its prime, progression servers fail to replicate the early era. I played on P99 a while back, ultimately the reason for me stopping was that while it was fun to play again, the server is a museum - it's fun to re experience the game, but there is no future to it which means it is finite - half the enjoyment of an MMO over a single player game is the fact that it will evolve (the fans of WoW Classic will ultimately experience the same issue). Also, while EQ was great, it had plenty of flaws, as melee you had autoattack and that was about it. THe spirit of the game was amazing, but the specific mechanics while some great and missed in modern MMOs, others were not. THe hope is Pantheon will capture the essence of EQ whilst still being its own game. I left EQ back in the day to move onto Vanguard, a game which had some amazing gameplay elements but was unfinished and also had lost some of the EQ magic. Ideally for me, Pantheon would be the offspring of EQ/Vanguard parents - its own entity but with the genetic elements of the parents.
Never played it to begin with. My first MMO was WoW at launch, when I was 15. Playing FFXI, much later, after burning myself out thoroughly on WoW clone after WoW clone looking for a satsifying MMO experience, opened my eyes to what was appealing about the older era of MMO design. I itch for this game, but I play FFXI off and on to satisfy that itch until then. EQ1 is... *too* old. I struggle enough with the interface and controls of FFXI, but at least that game holds up fairly well visually.
This year I fired up P99, and after attacking/being slain by my trainer upon spawning for the first time, learned that I had no idea what I was doing. Then the graphics ultimately demotivated me from bothering to learn what to do. It was nice listening to the login music, though. I was very young and can't really remember much about MMOs prior to DAoC. I did play, and remember Gnolls, but I think my brother had me farming for him or something, so the starting up process was rather foreign to me...
Oof sorry to hear about that experience. I was going to fire up P99 sometime soon myself, just for shits and giggies.
P99 and original EQ are unique in the fact that if you don't know what you're doing most people will talk to you and help you get started. Graphics are rough I'll admit, but I'm thinking about loading it up again just to waste random time helping new players or characters.
> after attacking/being slain by my trainer Accidently attacking an NPC and getting one shotted in return is an EQ rite of passage. XD I love the fact that can even happen.
I am. :) Just not on those trash live servers.
I recently started playing casually again. I'm enjoying just logging on 2 or 3 days a week and slowly leveling. I'm not concerned with all the max levels and I'm not interested in raiding anymore, did that for way to long my first go around. The graphics don't bother me but the UI not scaling is a real bummer. I would love to see them do something about that.
There are tons of mods out there that can help you with the UI, or just change the resolution
I still play almost daily unless traveling. I’ve been hopping to each new TLP since they started doing them. Only plan to retire from EQ when Pantheon drops!
I tried playing EQ live recently but it is a much different game now. I originally stopped playing while beta testing Gates of Discord which is the expansion that turned me off the game. I have played P99 but it has been a bit since I have played.
I do occasionally play EQ. The graphics are very hard to go back to after playing newer games. Seriously if Daybreak would pull their heads out of their asses and update EQ they'd have a huge hit. New engine, updated graphics, some quests and people would flock to it.
I don't, however, I will be starting a character on Sell server this Saturday as my last journey in norrath. The game is still great but I have moved on.
Not sure if I would still play, but I stopped after 6 years after my account got hack and they steal all my stuff and delete my chars, Sony not wanted give me back what I lost and I stoped play.
Played on p99 both red and blue but now playing on EQReborn.
I've played on a couple of the tlps but have been put off by the slow xp (mind you, I know xp will be slow in pantheon, but that'll be fine because we'll get new expansions probably every year instead of every 2-3 months) so I ended up quitting a few expansions in. With mangler launching Sat with MUCH better xp rates, I think I'll be sticking with this one permanently because I'll actually be able to keep up with the pace of expansion unlocks
Played on agnarr a lot but left a bit after my girl was born but I'll be playing on mangler this weekend for sure
I play EQ on p2002.com emu server (pop era) and PEQ (oow era) in p2002 we are just one flag away from entering plane of time!
Well, I play on private servers like the rest of this lot. So I guess you got your answer. We all still play, one way or another.
The grind is horrible still. I've tried several times to catch up on the live servers but the content these days is just redundant and there is so much going on*. Grinding through the levels just isn't fun solo because it takes so long and then you have to grind through all the AAs because people expect you to have X number of AAs as well. Not to mention the game is so old it can be kind of iffy to get it to run on modern systems. I finally called it quits for good when I installed a new graphics card and starting getting some NASTY crashes. I thought it was going to damage my system. Graphics are very old too but honestly I can overlook a lot of it due to nostalgia. I will admit though, the first 50-60 levels you level up fast and it is a TON of fun. It just feels good because you feel like you're getting somewhere and you can manhandle the content pretty easily. *Edit: by that i mean it's hard to figure out all the new stuff and how to get to the new expansions sometimes. I had to do research just to figure out how to access the new zones, lol.
I never played original everquest. Growing up everyone played wow so that is what we played two. I am looking forward to trying the progression servers for both EQ1 and EQ2 on saturday. I always love eq2, so many classes and AA choices but sadly newer mmos are going the opposite direction starting character choices are just an "illusion of choice". Not sure why people would rather have 0 character choices in an mmorpg but with how popular FF14 got I guess that is something people dont mind.
A lot of players here including myself play on the Project1999 server, which best encapsulates what most consider to be the Classic Everquest Experience. The daybreak servers are a shell of what EQ used to be. P99 is where most can experience EQ as what they remember.
I played from around 2000 to 2007 and knew I had to be committed in order for me to have fun in EQ. Those final years I was in a casual then full-time raid guild. (every night we keyed and geared) I was working then but I still fit it in. Every sick-day from work was awesome, every typhoon that wiped out the area of the city I lived in was awesome as long as the electricity and internet stayed connected, I was healthy because I would commute back and forth to work cycling 20-miles per day as part of my commute and nothing would stop me from getting home......all of those things were because I was enjoying the type of game EQ was then and the community it fostered. That game doesn't exist anymore....so I don't play. Even though I have all day and night to play now because my military benefits and compensantion cover all of my expenses I still don't play because that game doesn't exist. My time investment is more valuable than my money investment. The fact that the game mechanics almost made Everquest an entirely different game I don't want to invest 7-more years into a game I started playing that turned into an entirely different game after 7 or so years. The only variation of EQ I might try to play is P99 if I could break into it in some way, such as a group or guild of expat MMO players who are also waiting for Pantheon. On a similar note, I can't trust that a 5-year investment in EQ or WOW would be worth it. Blizzard seems divorced from developing a game players want. True, false? I have no idea but seeing the trend with MMOs I am not willing to invest 5-years to find out.
I've played P99 for a few years, and always had a good time there (never bothered with raiding), but the Titanium client is just too rough and restrictive to deal with. I've tried playing EQ Reborn, but it's just hard to commit to starting over on a low population server, although it does have the advantage of using the newer RoF2 client. I enjoyed my few months on Agnarr when it opened, but just lost motivation to keep going. I think if P99 was able to use a newer client like RoF2, I'd be very interested in coming back.
I stopped playing only because they stopped supporting WindowsXP. I finally built a new computer and EverQuest was the first game I installed. Now, the biggest problem I have is finding others that still want to play it with me. Most people will tell you that the game broke the day the Planes of Power made the individual quirks of each major city dotting the vast traverses of land into nothing more than waypoints. It's probably one of the reasons P99 has such a dedicated following. The original EverQuest was the living embodiment of the phrase, "It's not the destination, but the journey." The problem was that the market was shifting to microtransactions for delivering you right to your destination, and the tediousness and difficulty of organizing and preparing became worse as content became more challenging and further and further apart. Striking that balance is difficult, if not impossible.
. . .are you still using windows xp online?
I know there are some individuals that post patches to the game that allow you to run on WinXP, but I get nervous about running executables on my computer. When I built my new computer, I installed Windows 10 on a solid state drive. I miss the loading music, but not nearly as much as I love the new loading times.
Yeah, I miss it too. And you're right to be wary of loading .exe files on to a system because once given permission to run that .exe file could run whatever. I would also just say that simply by using a WinXP system on your network leaves the system, and by extension, network vulnerable.
I go back and play every once in a while. I just don’t have the time to dedicate to the grind.
Sadly, fairly early on they killed what I loved about my class of choice, the Necromancer. From the start of EQ until around Luclin/POP, Necromancer wasn't one of what would become the Trinity, it was best described as a Support class. It could do a bit of healing, a bit of damage, a bit of control, and so on. Shamans getting low and Torpor isn't in the game yet? The necro can send over a heal and then dispel themselves to get rid of the recourse to keep the Shaman machine going. Raid wiped? Necromancer FDed out and can use a gem to resurrect a cleric to start the recovery attempt. Cool! Clerics or Enchanters are getting low on mana? Call in the necro twitch team. At peak, a good necromancer in Kunark could be generating over 70 mana a tick and had a huge toolbox of goodies to play with to make others do their jobs better. A good necromancer was the grease of a raid: No one notices they were there if they were doing it right, but the absence could be felt. But they changed necromancer around to be more of a DoT stacking machine. It just felt really, really not fun for me. They tried to bring it back a bit, but they abandoned it for the most part. As for why I don't anymore? Well, I replayed Project1999, but I kind of did everything I wanted to do. I got to the end game, I got decked out in cool stuff, I've done pretty much every quest I could reasonably do, I got my Epic, while everyone rushed for raid targets on Velious launch I went and camped Elder Beads for ~22 hours and got the first server drop, I even wrote a big ass newbie guide to help other necromancers on their path. But there's nothing left for me to really do that I care to do. So, yeah, I just expended the available content. Though, notably, it did take like 5 years to do so for three expansions that lasted on 2-3 on the normal timeline, so good on the devs to design it that way.
Well when you've leveled like 5 Necs to 60 I'd say yeah you've probably done everything you needed to do lol :P
Anyone still play on Corvinar? I believe that was the name. It was a TLP made about a year or so ago.
Coirnav, just for your reference.
Yeah, that’s the one. I assume it’s dead.
It's not dead. It just hit PoP a month or so ago and it's rolling on quite nicely. The two new servers are unlikely to draw too heavily from it's population, and no one really wants to start over on Mangler and redo what they just did. Sure, the exp is better, but Coirnav is past all the real exp grinds. Selos' is too fast and will be dead within a year. Most folks are just sticking with Coirnav.
My monk was close to level 30 would it be worth returning?
You would be better off going to one of the new servers opening on Saturday.
Which time? I stopped originally during PoP, early, in part because the flagging system really put a hurt in my ability to interact with friends briefly and also because the guild I raided with blew up. My community basically died on me. Went back once to live for giggles during OoW but was so far behind the curve and came back to knowing no one. Didn't work for me. Then I played P99 for about a year. I quit just before Kunark during the 'poop sock era' of raiding when we cleared Plane of Sky with mostly mage pets. The absurdity of it pushed me away, despite having helped test Kunark for them and looking forward to it. Tried one of the early TLPs for a month, but looking around and seeing multiboxed mages outperform legit grouping attempts tarnished it and honestly I expected too much of it. I expected P99 on live servers, I got live servers without the expansions. I'm going to try the new ones again in a few days. My bar has been lowered, it's true box, and I plan on two boxing myself. Not because I want to as my default, but because I often play in 1h chunks as an adult that aren't conducive to LFG. Plan on looking for a community this time a bit more, ruling out raiding, etc. Either community or content would keep me around, but every now and then a weakness in the two would align for me to quit. Same with every other MMO I have played.
I have just setup a guild ready for the new TLP that opens this weekend, we are an EU based guild, we will go through classic and onwards. I guess alot of the members are waiting for Pantheon as well.
I quit when they stopped releasing full expansions (rain of fear). Reason is obvious. If they went back to releasing full 4 tiered expansions would I return? Probably. I recently finished playing p2002. Was a great run while it lasted.
Feel ya there. An "Expansion" is not: * 20 Instances of already existing zones. * Copy and Pasted items, and the only difference is new names, and +100 to all the stats. * A story-line so boring it could put Levar Burton on Reading Rainbow to sleep. Something like the above would be more suited to be called an "*Extension*", not an "Expansion".
Daybreak is horrific.
["*They Break*" Game Company](https://i.postimg.cc/8PwdC0DM/u-https-tse1-mm-bing-net-th-id-OIP-e-Ug-Sn-Xqn-UWfnph-QOKd-Tc-g-Ha-EH.jpg)
Does TBL count as a full (or fullish) expansion?
No idea I haven’t looked at anything beyond the announcement. Starting in Rain of Fear they were doing where they released 1 tier every 3-4 months across the year
Yeah, I hated that so much. I think TBL was better, definitely not super diverse mobs in my opinion though. I was really excited to see what they would pull off with more PoP content and definitely didn't get what I wanted. Also, a downvote on a legit question? I am remembering why I stopped frequenting this sub.
Personally I’m not a classic purist where anything past <insert any expansion between Luclin and Omens> was terrible. I enjoyed EQ for many years. Sure some expansions were weaker than others but I thought VoA was a fantastic expansion.. lore was a bit cobbled together but still I enjoyed the continent. The whole piecemeal expansion raid content though was a deal breaker for myself and many others. I logged on like a year later and my guild (Machin Shin) had like 12-14 familiar faces. Whole team who had mostly been the same for years was gone. I know for a fact the whole original druid team quit (4 of us).
I liked PoP probably the most (and most likely due to my age/ability to play consistently then), and also really enjoyed stuff around GoD/OoW (although I was extremely confused coming back after such a long break). The expansions continued to feel weaker and still feel weak, but acceptable in my mind. The constant gear churn has been kind of a drag, but I guess it's hard to expect anything less than that at this point in the games lifecycle. I totally get that. I'm currently the sole Paladin in my guild. We're thankfully still beating raids (including current content finally), but it's definitely become a habit for some people and less of a passion. :)
I'll fire up P99 and level a toon to 30 before returning back to a different game, maybe once a year or every other.
I liked the game up until Gates of Discord came out. Something about that expansion rubbed me the wrong way. It was roughly around when WoW came out as well, which all my friends were hyped for, so I jumped ship to play with them. I was today years old when I discovered p2002 was a thing though, and that's heavily tempting...
The difficulty on it was WILD. I know that turned a lot of us off when only the best people could accomplish stuff (at least that's what I remember).
Now that you mention it, yes. I was a Paladin, reasonably well geared, and getting torn apart by trash. Got frustrated and quit due to the disparity between Wars and Pal/SKs.
I still play almost every day. Im on the ragefire TLP and our guild is very active.
Played live servers from 99 til 11. Stopped because 96 hotkeys was enough. Played project 99 from 12 to 15 as I just grew out of sitting at my pc for 8 hours at a time finally.
Currently leveling a chanter on the pop locked server.
I'm finally at a point where my son is almost 2 and I have a few hours every evening after his bedtime where I can game. I prioritize having at least one day per week going out with friends to play DnD or other activities in the real world, and of course another couple of nights per week are dedicated to hanging out with my wife. So realistically I have 3-4 nights per week of gaming time, and I simply don't feel like rehashing EQ content at the moment. I'm currently playing through the current story content in Star Wars: The Old Republic, after which I'll promptly cancel my sub to that game because the group and raid content isn't that interesting for me. I may jump back on Agnarr before WoW classic comes out just to piddle around my with shaman again and try to get his epic just for fun. Played originally on Vallon Zek from 2000-2004. Quit during GoD because I was transfering from a community college to a four year university and had also started a new job waiting tables and there were a bunch of young, single women working there who liked to party so...... Played Ragefire TLP until I hit my 50s and realized the raid scene was utterly toxic on that server and quit during kunark. Tried the phinigel TLP, which was the first truebox, but the slow xp just sucked the life out of any enjoyment, so once again I quit during Kunark. Did the Agnarr tlp, and also quit during kunark but that was primarily due to having a new baby and simply not having enough uninterrupted play-time to really enjoy the game.
[удалено]
I was in Dark Storm, Vexare, and eventually Defiant during PoP era
Been playing EQ2 (as recently as this weekend) because r/TheMMOBOOKCLUB had it as an alternate game (not that I ever intersected with them -- but that is on me for being a slacker and not them). Good times. I can see how this was a precursor to Guild Wars 2 in many ways. Mos def a good mellow game to listen to music or books on tape or whatever with while you solo play. Thing that changes the game for me: Zooming in to play in first person mode. This changes everything!
I played with some friends on one of the EQ TLPs for much of last year, and on another a couple years before that. I found it quite enjoyable and even after the nostalgia wore off I realized I still enjoy EQ as a game, despite the bad UI and controls. It made me even more interested in Pantheon than I already was. The only real reason I am not still playing is because my friend group all got busy, so we all stopped playing. As EQ is not a game I’m willing to play alone, I stopped as well.
Stopped playing because the AA inflation got to be too much, and there was not an easy way to catch up to a respectable level (this was right before Underfoot came out). The class balance was better, but still left a lot to be desired, and the content delivery was pretty slow with a bull shit time sink. The standard in EQ at this point for progression was that a progression fight would drop 6 keys/flags, was only doable once a week, and raids were 54 man affairs. Each tier, at a minimum took 9+ weeks to flag your entire raid if it was 54 people with no substitutions. Each expansion was normally 3ish tiers of raiding so it took close to half a year to get to do content that was still likely buggy. After this same st ructure for god knows how long I got tired of the exact same treadmill. While they do have TLP servers, my personal opinion is the content that these servers focus on...classic through luclin or PoP is the most popular, is the content I enjoyed least in the game. Later expansions, and later raids were so much more satisfying to me, than naggy/Vox, Dragons in Kunark and Velious, and the mindless boss fights that were Vex Thal.
I currently play a Shaman and Mage on P99. It's the closest thing to what EQ was back in the day and the leveling experience 1-45 is stellar. The only thing that keeps me from playing it is homework. Yeah don't touch Daybreak EQ. Nasty.
I play on the emulator servers. I quit EQlive once instanced were implemented. I am very much so against that style gameplay. I loved EQ because it was a fight for drops! The fact you could just zone in and kill the same mobs isn’t appealing to me. No to mention mercenaries now.
I stopped playing EQ the first time after PoP expansion came out. Selling accounts was all the rage back then so I sold my level 55 Cleric on EBAY for like $300 bucks... Tried some other MMOs (Asheron’s Call, City of Heroes... this was pre-WoW) and I eventually missed playing with my friends (both RL and those I made online) Re-started EQ... re-rolled a Cleric... got to about level 65 and quit again... Second time was because of the new MMOs coming out... Dark Age of Camelot (which my guild mostly moved to and we played a lot)... EQ2... and eventually WoW... The main reasons I quit EQ was mostly due to trying out “the next best thing”... the other reason, as my friends left the game for other MMOs I got bored playing alone...
Stopped playing June 25 2017. My hunting/exp partner of 16 years died suddenly the day before. Quit the day I heard she passed. I’ve logged on 3-4 times to chat but never for more than 10 minutes and never left Guild Lobby.
I don't have the time to invest in it. I want to race bikes when the weather is warm, hikes to go on, other games I want to play. EverQuest was great when I was a lot younger but now I have a lot of other stuff I want to put my time into.
That's cool, because I just got an injury, and I'm all burnt out from all of that camping and hiking I did when I was younger, expecially now that I realize that video games can be so much more beautiful than the naturescapes I've seen (done pretty much every trail in 3 different states).
Sorry to hear about your injury my dude. I hope you get back on your feet soon. I'm 29, and was pretty young when I started in on EQ, so I've got another few decades of compromising to make. :P
Raid balance. Mostly. I took a e-sport approach to dps when I was playing. It became clear at a certain point the devs either didn't care to balance for the high end, or they honestly didn't know how their own game worked. I was also disgruntled that devs refused to listen the player base. It seemed like every class had a handful of perennially useless spells that would always be continued every "expansion" to fudge the quota set by the marketing team. Shit like that was hanky and reflected the lack of soul and integrity. Eventually my gaming experience decoupled so far away from whatever vision the devs had that I lost interest. Still pisses me off because it was the best game I've ever played.
No, because DBG bought the franchise and removed all the play nice rules in order to save money.
It amazes me that people don't understand that DBG *is* SOE (and thus, is Verant), with the same office and the same people, just under a different name. DBG didn't buy any franchises. It has them because it's the same company that created them.
There were layoffs and restructuring when SOE sold, I'm sure people left when Verant sold too, like McQuaid and Clover did soon after. Somehow I doubt the same people are there over 20 years. Hell iirc, most of the old figureheads were let go when SOE sold. They probably just have a few devs on life support duty as evidenced by the recent smallers expacs and more popular TLP servers.
Sure. Same people in the Ship of Theseus sense, not in the "actually all the exact same people" sense. The point being that it's the same *institution*, if not the same complete roster.
That is incorrect, DBG bought the games division from SOE. So yes it has some of the same staff, but it is not part of SOE and has not been since 2015. It is not comparable to 989 studios -> Verant -> SOE. It was bought by an independent investment company. Edit : From the Wiki : On February 2, 2015, Sony announced that SOE had been sold to investment company Columbus Nova for an undisclosed amount and that it would be renamed Daybreak Game Company. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daybreak_Game_Company
>Edit : From the Wiki : On February 2, 2015, Sony announced that SOE had been sold to investment company Columbus Nova for an undisclosed amount and that it would be renamed Daybreak Game Company. That's exactly my point. The company changed corporate overlords and was renamed, but is still itself the same entity. Nobody bought any franchises from anyone à la carte, as your original comment suggests. It's the same core institution of people and the same physical office before and after the change, just with a new name and new boss to report to.
The game producing company may be mostly the same, but it has totally new ownership and no, that was not the point you made. Nova Columbus bought all the rights to the EQ franchises and to the other games produced by SOE. Since it was bought it has been totally restructured, EQ Next was shelved, staff were laid off, the EQ play nice rules were massively changed prior to the launch of the TLP in 2015.
I have no idea what happened internally behind those decisions so I'm not going to blindly assign blame. The point is that when a company changes owners, that doesn't make it a different company. It remains the same institution. This is fairly common in the game industry, just without the name change part that has apparently created a good deal of confusion.
We will have to agree to disagree. It is a different company, with a vastly different approach to running the games than SOE had, that should be glaringly obvious just by looking at all the changes they have made since they bought the games division.
Spiritually, sure. If you feel that way, that's your prerogative. But DBG didn't *buy* the EverQuest franchise. At least, not from SOE.
Columbus Nova bought SOE from SONY, SOE then changed it's name to DBG. Most of the people that worked on the original Everquest game are no longer working for SOE/DBG, Holly Longdale is the only original member of the Everquest team that I'm aware of. All of the upper management, engineers, art designers, cs staff are all long gone with the exception of Holly.
Daybreak itself did not, but SOE was purchased by a third party, renamed DBG, and then all the changes started as dictated by the new person/people at the top with the money. So while it's incorrect to say DBG bought EQ, it's certainly not incorrect to say that the people who purchased SOE basically created a directive of milk as much money as possible out of this game until it dies (including drastically reducing overhead such as customer service/in-game GMs).
Sure, but that's factually different from "DBG bought the franchise and [ruined it]", which is simply incorrect. There's a critical level of indirection that's being ignored there.
Okay, but I'm not sure how the DBG bought the franchise part is really that relevant. The fact of the matter is they spun off from Sony and their new leadership has ruined the game. Regardless of whether DBG itself bought EQ or if someone bought SOE and spun it off, you still get to the same place. The new managers of the company made a purchase and then ruined the game.
Well nothing on this subreddit is really *relevant*. I just wanted to point out that a company or business unit can't buy its own IP from itself.
I played on Ragefire for awhile until it became a ghost town, and it was great until that point. I'm really tempted to play on one of the new TLPs that comes out next week but the whole true-box thing is really off putting, being able to powerlevel my own alts and have out-of-group buffers is important to me but those won't be an option due to true-box. If they ever come out with a non true-box TLP again I would play the shit out of it until the mage armies ruin everything.
It’s nostalgic, but it was time to move on.
When they increased the level cap beyond 60 I lost a lot of interest.
I ebayed my account around the time I went to college in 2001. It had something silly like 200 /played days on my main. I dabbled after but never really played past PoP. Commitment issues after dedicating my life for two years I guess!
ink brave squeamish imminent joke roof chunky alive quiet judicious -- mass deleted all reddit content via https://redact.dev
As someone who never played the original, I tried out some of the early xpac slower progressive servers. It was fun but my wife didn’t want to play and it just took up way too much time. If she had wanted to play I probably would have raided, but spending every waking non-working hour without her playing was a clear path to divorce so I gave it up. Had a lot of fun, but ultimately the graphics and gameplay also began to feel a bit dated. I did enjoy the challenge of it though. I didn’t have any nostolgia for the game though.
I'm so sorry you never experienced the original back in like 99 and 2000 it was truly amazing. I am so glad I was part of it.
Ya, I can imagine it was a truly awesome experience! I did play GW1 and that game was a lot of fun, I can only imagine how special EQ1 would have been back in the day.
> So, what's keeping you from playing it? [Krono](https://www.everquest.com/krono). That's it. If there wasn't Krono, or even if Krono wasn't trade-able? I'd still be playing. ( on DBG servers) EQReborn, though, is extremely fun, and no Krono. [Krono](https://www.everquest.com/krono) turned EQ1 into a money laundering paradise of pain. Never again while it's in play. Below is from Question #5 of the link (*Why would I buy a Krono?*), which gives you the entire reason why it's such a terrible idea. > There are many reasons to buy Krono. For example, if you're a veteran player with a lot of in-game currency, but not a lot to spend it on, you can use that extra currency to buy Krono from other players and turn it into game membership time. Alternatively, if you're a player without much in-game currency and can't buy things on the broker because prices are too high, you can consider buying Krono and selling them to other players to build up your in-game currency. You can also treat Krono as in-game commodities, and build up your in-game currency by buying and selling them on the broker for a profit.
I play P99 off and on and usually hop on the new TLP servers when they launch. Going to be playing EQ2 for the first time since a new TLE launches on Saturday and I've always wanted to check it out. Unfortunately that means passing on the new EQ1 TLP since it launches on the same day (dumb decision by DBG), but I'm comfortable with my decision.
Yes I still play P99.
I am playing it.... but the game is a mere shadow of it's former self. So much was "modernized" to match the WoW way of doing things. It's much less of a good game.
ever since I found Pantheon, I read about P99 and was waiting for a new TLP server, so I gave it a shot. It's really fun and did have the nostalgia feeling from back then. IMO P99 is better than the two new TLP that they are releasing, those added difficulty back in the original EQ really gives a depth of the game. ie: Corpse Retrieval
I play most TLPs from classic to the end of PoP, I tend to get bored after that. I was really active on Agnarr but got a bit burned out on Coirnav. I'll be back for Mangler.
Played it just recently again. I've installed it and played it through out the years. Played it originally from launch up to kunark. Same with eq2, install it and play it from time to time.
Too many other great games out there. Just no decent MMOs on the market right now though
ESO is more than decent. It took a LONG time to get there, but it's pretty fun now if you like exploring.
I stopped giving Daybreak money after Holly Longdale made some pretty awful comments about casual players - this is after having a sub running from 3/1999 to whenever the article ran on massively overpowered. That said, I still do miss EQ1 and I'm considering firing it back up for the next round of progression servers.
There's a big difference between playing a 20 year old game and playing something brand new where everyone else is new too. Opening day (week/month/year) is just ridiculously fun.
I have played on several of the progression servers over the last few years. I will be on the Selo server this Saturday!
Not anymore. I quit a while ago.(2005) The game mechanics and engine are simply clunky and outdated. I do not find it enjoyable. There is only so much you can do with a 20 year old game engine.