Our 'First Time Playing Everquest' Stories

[Evia]

I think we've done this before a few years back... but I don't remember....anyway, I'd love to read how everyone came to find and love this game for the first time!


The year was 2000 and I was 13 iirc and I just moved back to live with my Mom and Brother after having been living with my aunt for a few years (mom was dealing with some problems for a bit)
and we were celebrating my younger brothers 12th birthday and he was gifted a copy of this computer game called 'Everquest' and upon install he called me into his room to his PC to have me 'check it out.'
So I begrudgingly walk over to his desk, anticipating being annoyed or overwhelmed with nerdy geeky fantasy hooha. He begins explaining to me that he gets to choose his 'race' and 'class' and is asking me what he should do. He starts cycling through the races and I remember I was immediately intrigued. I start asking him 'whats a Ranger?' and 'why are the ogres so fat?'

So my brother ended up creating a Wood Elf...idr the class...and he pops into Kelethin. I'm watching him roam around the tree city and I'm thinking this has to be the best graphics evaaar!!
I see a bunch of blue named people running around him and my brother shouts 'dude! these are other players! this guys talking to me about bags!'
this was it. this was the moment. insert the mindblown.gif right here. THESE WERE OTHER IRL PLAYERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD?! PLAYING WITH ME IN A TREEHOUSE ELVEN WORLD?!
The immersion was soooo real. Very few experiences in my life have been as ground breaking as the realization of an online persistent virtual world as awesome as Norrath.

I shoved my brother off the computer shortly after this and created my own character...a High Elf Paladin! I remember loading him into the world and having great dreams of being a Noble Knight but inevitably fell victim to alt-o-holicism and just made new character after new character after new character. Never really getting anything higher than 14 or 15 in the early years.
Then shortly after this Luclin was announced I would go to eq.castersrealm and allakazams and read up on all the new graphics and changes coming feeling intense euphoria. I'd regularly rush home from school to log into the world of Norrath!

When luclin finally launched, we ended up going through our neighborhood mowing lawns to get enough money to afford a copy of it when it released. I begged my grandpa to drive me to Best Buy the day it released and bought that shit with my hard earned money! When I got home I ripped the plastic off and proceeded to install the game while frantically flipping through the instruction manual hoping to find some tidbits of info I didnt already know from my website searches.
When the game finally loaded, we clicked all the new models and it took us over an hr to load into the game! i'm not joking LOL. We couldnt even move once we got into the world because the lag was soooo bad. So we started just using 1 new model for the character we were playing.
After a few months though, like most people, I realized Luclin was trash, and the new models sucked, so I went back to the old ones. It also was nice that my pc ran better with them off.

My brother and I continued playing for a while and shared a pc/account from 2000-2003? right before PoP came out. Then I got my own pc and account and we started playing together and that really amped up the fun factor. No more 2hr sessions before having to swap! This was when I finally really stuck it out with one character and I left my brother behind in levels. I got my Dwarf Rogue up to lvl 52 before finally taking major breaks in EQ to play the various MMORPGS of the mid 2000s like Daoc, Swg, Vanguard, EQ2, LotrO, GW, WoW, Warhammer, ect.

...but none of those games left the same impact that Everquest did.

Eventually I found p99 around 2012 and have casually played EQ since. All while reminiscing of the 'good ol days' and wondering why nobody is capable of making a good MMO anymore. I guess this is getting old.
Ah, I miss those early years!

So lets hear your first EQ stories!!


ps. we didnt know how to open doors for the first week or so of playing....HAHA. when my brother realized how to do it, it was like another mindblown.gif moment! Lol!

[White Ranger Resurrection]

I leveled up a bard to 65 and then sold the account to someone at school and then bought a Fender Stratocaster. A few months later I used password recovery and sold the account again.

[Smoofers]

Imagine not min-maxxing right off the bat in 2000

[Jibartik]

I camped the Jboots for 25 hours straight it was an epic moment in my life.

The big line was so cool, coming from final fantasy and mario, to see players in a videogame world all line up and wait their turns like real people.

then I quit like 3 days later.

[Evia]

I leveled up a bard to 65 and then sold the account to someone at school and then bought a Fender Stratocaster. A few months later I used password recovery and sold the account again.

thats savage! haha


but I cant judge too harshly. I got involved with some tunnel questers who would scam peoples accounts and strip all their stuff off. I was a transfer guy who helped them move the stuff in return for phat lewts and I ate a ban for it. Lost my first account that way.

[goblinmob]

What I'm about to tell you is true:
"Oh cool! This looks like Might and Magic!"
Bought the game (probably was 2 months allowance iirc)
Didn't realize there was a subscription!
Parents basically said giving credit card info for the game was just handing over to hackers (idk did it come with a free month? we're we somehow gonna redeem it without CC info? I don't remember)
SADLY played the tutorial over and over.
Still had to fight with sister for PC time (MSN, amirite?)
Probably got over it with the next demo disc that came with "PC Gamer" or whatever... Played Serious Sam or Rune or some shit lol
That's what happened.

[unsunghero]

I can do an in-game story later, don’t have time atm, but I remember my mom angrily telling me that our extended family has not been able to get in touch with us for months

This is because we only had the one phone line, and I was always tying it up with dial up internet playing EQ

[Danth]

The year was 2000 and I was 13 iirc

So many young folks on P1999. It always surprises me. You were still more or less college-age when P1999 opened!

My first time logging on I was kind of quiet about it because the box art looked embarrassingly dorky and I had spent months making fun of a couple of friends of mine for buying EQ. Joke's on me I suppose, I'm still here. The wife didn't join me on EQ until later on, after I had already quit once (she joined when I came back).

Danth

[mcoy]

I worked at Circuit City. We had EQ installed on every demo PC that could run it so we could show each other what we'd found or done the night before at home. The pc dept guy was a barb warrior named Thorgrin, cell phone guy was an enchanter - name escapes me but I do remember when he discovered what "calm" did. Other pc guy was a necro named Mummra. The one manager Steve tried a few chars but he ultimately stayed on Anarchy Online. I was, naturally, a human cleric. Minladar was our druid later on, and I honestly thought his character was a wolf because he somehow managed to never let us see his true form.

Wow it does start coming back - most of the group was in Adventurer's Company:

bu9o21OYS0c

-Mcoy

[Chortles Snortles]

DUDE IS THAT A TALKING WOLF, EPIC!!!!!!!!

[unsunghero]

So my first ever Everquest character back when I was like in middle school was an Ogre Shaman. I remember the first mob I ever tried to fight was a yellow con rat or something, I think it was inside Oggok already. I realized very quickly into the fight that I was going to lose. So I ran. I ran deep into Oggok, ducking down hallway after hallway. I remember thinking "well I am completely lost, but at least I ditched that rat. No way it will find me with all the turns I took". Then less than a minute later, there was the rat, attacking and killing me. I couldn't find my body, so I thought, well fuck that character!

I deleted it and made a human monk starting at queynos. I had more success with this character, and I remember after gaining a few levels I stumbled upon Blackburrow having no idea what it was. I went inside and very cautiously was fighting around near the entrance when I saw a massive gnoll train wiping everyone out. I remember I zoned out to stay alive, and 10 minutes later when I zoned back in all the gnolls were dead and there was just a halfling druid standing there. I didn't realize that he was high level, I just knew that he must have killed all the gnolls. I remember him saying to me "yeah that was a big train, but don't worry I tanked it". At that time, I had no idea what MMO terms were, so I thought that was his personal figure of speech. I remember thinking to myself "hah, tanked like a military tank. That's a cool way of phrasing that", not realizing there were all this MMO terms that I was unaware of

Later on I remember seeing another train at BB, and seeing a troll shadowknight holding it off at the bridge. I remember thinking man, that must be one of the most powerful characters on this entire server, what a boss. I decided I wanted to play one of the large races, stopped playing my monk, and made another ogre shaman

This char I got to much higher level, around 20-something, before switching to an enchanter which I took to around 40ish

Anyway, just some early EQ memories

[unsunghero]

Another memory was when I re-started on the Sullon Zek server, my char was an Iksar shaman. I remember my cousin was staying the night over at my house, and I was showing him EQ

I remember telling him "This sullon zek server has no rules, so I can do whatever I want". Right after that, an Iksar necromancer had attacked a mob that I wanted to kill. So I told my cousin "watch, I'm going to ruin this guy's night". So I got a SoW and then went all over the zone looking for the highest level skeleton I could find. I aggro'd it and ran it past the necro doing a /say "Help! Help!". It aggro'd and killed the necro. I then ran around in circles until I saw him come back and start looting his body. So I ran the skeleton over to him again and did another /say "Help me please!". The skeleton killed him again. He sent me a /tell "Hey fucker that thing is too high for me to help you, stop killing me!". I ran around with my skeleton friend until he went back to his body and gave him another drive by doing /say "Help me! please!" And he died again. My cousin was crying from laughing so hard. He thought it was the funniest thing

I then said "you should see the trains in this Kurn's Tower place". There were monks that would go to the bottom of the zone, aggro'ing everything, then run it all to the entrance to massacre everyone. There were so many corpses the entire zone was lagged out

[Homesteaded]

Two kids I played hockey with, one ended up being my best man and I was his, were talking about some game in the locker room. Asked them about it, found out about it. Ended up going over to their houses and just watching them play until I was finally able to get my own PC. The rest is history.

[magnetaress]

i never made it past lvl 5 for the first year

[Jibartik]

I said with confidence, first im gonna get to 12, then im gonna go to the bottom of befalen and get that white robe, then im gonna I can't remember the rest but it was a lifetime before I ever got to the bottom of befalen.

[Toxigen]

December 2014 - P99

RL bud convinced me to try out the game. I asked him what the hardest class to play was. He said enchanter.

Created char, entered world, was like "wtf is this crap?" Felt totally alien, I was as green as green could be. Zero clue about mechanics, had to use the wiki constantly, etc.

I didn't know AoE mez and level 4 mez could be used interchangeably until my 40s.

Don't play much at all these days but it was a good 7-8 year run.

[MrSparkle001]

I was already in my mid 20s when it came out in 1999 but I loved the idea of it. A 3D first person online multiplayer game like that? Sounded totally epic. I was playing MUDs in the 90s and now it's 3D, wow.

Went out and bought the game and a strategy guide. Read the guide front to back at work.

Decided I wanted to play a high elf enchanter. Sounded different and interesting. Dialed my modem connection on MCI Worldcom with my phone, set aside like an hour to play that night because back then you had to pay extra if you were online for more than a few hours per week, and proceeded to get lost in Gfay and Kelethin with my newbie enchanter.

But man was it immersive.

Eventually heard about this stein of mogguk quest enchanters could do and decided maybe it was time to explore the rest of the world. My play experience was basically Crushbone at this point with a few excursions into some parts of Butcherblock. I made to I think level 12, ran through Butcherblock, took the boat that I finally saw to a strange foreign land full of players I'd never seen before, and then had probably the most epic experience I've ever had in a game making my way to Erudin. Each area had their own community. Gfay was one group of people, Freeport and the Commonlands another, Qeynos had entirely different players talking in chat about things I'd never heard of like Blackburrow, and Erudin was basically empty lol. The trek was dangerous, and even more dangerous in my mind as I wasn't conning everything and just assumed everything was hostile like the giant spiders in the Commonlands, so the journey took forever as I dodged and avoided everything.

Will never be able to recapture those feelings.

[Infectious]

I can do an in-game story later, don’t have time atm, but I remember my mom angrily telling me that our extended family has not been able to get in touch with us for months

This is because we only had the one phone line, and I was always tying it up with dial up internet playing EQ

Don't forget, when they would call it would LD you, on EarthLink atleast. That and the 100' long phone wire I had running from my room to the kitchen phone. Good old times

[Ooloo]

Bought the game the first day it was available at Software Etc. in the local mall. March 99, rolled a human wizard in freeport. Wandered into the commonlands and got killed by a puma. Went back to playing ultima online until about July and gave EQ another shot, rolled a barb shaman and that time it stuck. Ended up selling my ultima account on ebay for a cool grand, which is a ton of money for a 15 year old. Bought a bass guitar with it, which I still have and still play!

[Ooloo]

The first really epic feeling thing I did on my barb sham was figuring out how to get to the freeport area, cause that's where my friend started (he made a human warrior). That was so damn cool. I remember passing through the big gorge in EK for the first time, and once you got up to the top the client (at the time) couldn't even render the draw distance down to the bottom, so if you peered over the ledge all you saw was fog. I always think about that to this day when I run through that gorge.

[Chortles Snortles]

running to firepots on my late 20s wiz invis seeing epic druids (lol) quad kiting raptors was one of the first epic things i remember doing and then staff of the wheel quest

i just remembered i had a babby iks nec and was blown away by the swaying trees in warslik woods, exploring the gorge with the huge iksar statues by the bridge was memorable at low levels

[magnetaress]

I see u had a fast computer.

Butt yeah those trees where fricken cool.

[Ooloo]

I remember the kunark trees being controversial when kunark first dropped, because people thought they were responsible for the lower framerates in kunark zones rather than just the increase in polygon counts overall. The devs had to repeatedly explain that the swaying branches have next to no impact on framerate, because angry nerds were demanding an option to disable the sway.

[Jibartik]

The kunark trees friggen suck!

that was like, I was like WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA??!

i rmeember people gas lighting me saying "its a wild continent, overgrown thats why you cant see shit and your framerate is 1 per second"

not becuase these trees are like really ugly giant pieces of poop

always was and always will be an angry nerd and proud

[WokeCat]

I was in high school. All of us played Tribes and Starcraft together online. One day one of our friends got a game called EverQuest, and he made this big deal out of it, he literally pre-ordered it, and I didn't even know what it was. Once he got it, he wasn't in school for a week afterwards.

He finally came back to school telling me how amazing this game was, so I spent the night at his house, and I remember being dumb-founded by how stupid this game looked. He's literally wandering around a swamp killing tadpoles repeatedly for hours on end, and I'm like, how can anyone actually think this is fun? Isn't the point of online games so you can play with other people???

He ends up passing out, and I get on his computer and decide to give it a try. I get to the character selection screen, and I've never even heard of a "Dark Elf" or 90% of the races it listed. I finally decide I'm going to be a gnome, I don't even remember why, but then the classes confused me.

Like what the hell is a Cleric? What the hell is a Druid? I don't really remember what happened, but I basically got addicted. Within 2-3 months every kid who rode my school bus was playing the game. It really was the Fortnite of our day, for those of us who were fortunate enough to own PCs capable of gaming, and who had parents who were cool enough to let us use their credit cards to play (using your credit card online was still taboo back then).

[Jibartik]

Tribes :o

[Ooloo]

The kunark trees friggen suck!


Haha I admit sometimes they are annoying as shit, like in burning wood trying to find the god damn DL zoneline. Still though the first time I got to emerald jungle (from fob) looking out over the canopy from up on top of the cliff area was pretty god damn cool. And the enormous horrifying mosquito mobs just.. fuck man I wish I had a time machine.

[Chortles Snortles]

i too spent those first FULL days (maybe weeks) getting owned by wasps in gfay wondering why the hell are all my friends playing this ish

probably clicked when i saw kelethin and crushbone

[Jibartik]

Haha I admit sometimes they are annoying as shit, like in burning wood trying to find the god damn DL zoneline.

I like when folks lay corpses lined up to it for when they pulling ixi and slowing it tho :p

https://i.imgur.com/tByiXRS.gif

[Yinaltin]

worked and hang out most of the time in an internet cafe / games store. was 13 or 14 at the time. could use the pc´s and internet from time to time. all were playing starsiege tribes and starcraft. several dudes did played eq. i was watching and got hooked. was allowed to use an account from a pal. made a dwarf war. got killed by goblins. deleted that char. got my own account and made a mage gnome . leveld up to max level and played until pop. sold my char for big money. worst thing to do . still miss him . one of the best feelings was getting my jboots in sro. i jumped out of joy . great memories. learned english as a second language by eq.

[Neno]

I was playing Sierra's The Realm in like 97-98 when I heard from a few people I played with about a beta they were in for a game called EverQuest. I ended up looking it up and spent an entire night reading all about the game on Casters Realm or EverLore or whatever one the first big EQ site was back during beta. There was an announcement on the site about how there was going to be some big meet up in IRC with the EQ devs to talk about the game. The chat was packed and Brad McQuaid himself was there talking about all the features the team wanted to implement.

During the conversation they had us either msg a bot or do a chat command to get put on a list and then X amount of people were chosen at random to get into Phase 4 of the beta. I won one of the spots and couldn't believe it. Unfortunately though I had to pay for S&H for the CD and I was only like 14 at the time and didn't have a CC or a debit card. I was asking in chat if there was someway I could get the CD sent to me if I sent them a $5 bill in the mail when I got a message from a total stranger. He was some some random dude living in Germany and he offered to pay the $5 USD shipping for me with his card and wanted nothing in return. A few weeks or a month after that the CD came in the mail and Phase 4 started. I faked being sick so I could take a few days off from school and ran around Everfrost getting lost in the maze while hunting wolves, spiders, and goblins as a Barb War.

I still have the CD but have no idea who the person that paid for my S&H was. Never talked to them again after that initial conversation. It was a real bro moment though that I have never forgotten, and over the years I've since done similar things to help people out online as a way to repay the universe.

[Duik]

Started in jan 2000.
Lost corpse of lvl 10 non twinked druid, fighting bandits with Qued and delin, went back down wrong side track towards orc tower at end, died again and again. Thought world was ending, oh noes, i lost my tailored leather and prolly a (gifted) bronze weapon.
Had a mate with mid lvl (30 something) Pal, went to Befallen as a IRL friends group.all lvl appropriate. We all died near bottom somewhere, Pal went down, overestimated toughness and was swarmed and died as well. Good times.

[magnetaress]

I ninja looted some bro i found dead in WK and i sent them a /tell (hey bud i found ur corpse) and they consented, I got like bronze and lightstones

[unsunghero]

I remember what cemented enchanter for me was one time when I was grouping, but I can’t remember where. It was a zone with the floating sperm mouth mobs from Howling Stones, but a lower level version

Anyway, our group had a nasty pull/adds, about 6 mobs total. With all of my mana I was able to rotate around charm and mez, then charming a new thing, until everything was dead. I remember a group mate saying in group “wow you saved us. You’re really good”

And I thought to myself “fuck yea I’m good. I’m probably the best enchanter on this server”

And I vowed to never play another class again.

Until I re-rolled a shaman on Sullon Zek.

Then later a necromancer and mage on live

[Duik]

As a higher lvl druid in oasis or sro, ancient cyclops pops right on me and i knew it was for a quest and a good item so i began kiting dotting & snaring. As a drood does. Then about 4 peeps pop into zone and try to take it. I thought, i got this, I was nearly done!
Chanter mez/memblurs i knew nought about chanters then.
Anywho, you know who won that one. I did about 85% of dam, memblur and a few nukes and melee from the other four and bingo. They get it. Prexus blue server so just had to suck it up.

Edit bit. The term, Floating sperm mouthes will stay with me as i drive my fork around the log yard.
Also dalnir and nurga have those.

[unsunghero]

Also dalnir and nurga have those.

O shit, right! It was def one of those

I never had a great drop (or one stolen) because I hated the idea of camping. But I do remember the first time some stranger ever helped me out as a noob in vanilla EQ

I was running along on my ogre shaman who was in his teen levels. Some high level asked me if it was my first char

When I said yes he gave me an Enameled black mace (https://wiki.project1999.com/Enameled_Black_Mace), made my whole week if I recall

[Tethler]

My very first character was a dark elf warrior. I spent what felt like 2 hours lost in Neriak. I managed to find my guild master and get my newb tunic and then fell in some water and drowned because I didn't know page up key to get out. Couldn't find my body and deleted the character and remade it so I could get back my newb tunic and short sword. I think around hour 3 I found the exit to Nektulos forest.

[magnetaress]

dark elfs are best race i agree and so is neriak best city

tbh if i made my own game it would start with neriak only and then go from there, u would only be able to play dark elf and all the other ppl in the world would be npcs and it would be like about soul searching and finding ur way in a world that hates u butt you are indoctrinated to hate back even harder, some ppl would fail, some ppl would succeed and it would be up to them to determine if they did or not the different end points and journeys would all have their own pros and cons