Management, not luck.

The two factors which made EQ work, I would suggest were; a) Knowing that they were making it up as they went along, and b) having someone there to say 'no' as loudly and as often as possible.

At the start, you can bet that they were all asking themselves whether each new feature was a good idea and running it by Sony to make sure the publisher was onboard. Every feature they added to the DikuMUD concepts would have been examined and evaluated until they were all happy that it added to rather than took away from the players' experience.

After release, they were tweaking it and the classic expansions (Kunark / Velious) let them respond to the larger issues and to put in the things they cut from the original design to fit the development period. Things like the epic quests were just more of what worked for them in the first place, Kunark and Velious (geography) were based on lessons learned while building the old world zones.

And then they became victims of their own success...

Looking at classic EQ, wouldn't you have trusted Smedley? Given free reign (or at least less oversight) based on their success, they got a little out of hand. They stopped second-guessing, but they also stopped questioning.

They were not the first and they will not be the last; I mean, after leaving Lionhead, the man who gave us Populous and Dungeon Keeper created a 'game' where people paid for tiny pickaxes to break open a virtual box. Genius or not, designers need someone to slap them back down to Earth from time to time.

Pantheon needed to fail, if only to serve as a reminder that Brad McQuaid was human and I suppose maybe EQ Next needs to fail too, so Smedley can learn the same lesson. Maybe they will learn, maybe they will come together, maybe they will even work out where it all started to go wrong and start again with a strong conviction not to let it happen again.

Personally, I think the true spiritual successor to EQ will be made by a pair of developers who don't really know 100% what they are doing, but know what they love to play and want to get it out of their heads and into a virtual space. Maybe it'll be an Oculus Rift game, maybe it'll made use of the Windows 10 HoloLens, but the developers will not really understand what they have done until they are staring at 10-million monthly subscribers.

Everquest's success was never about McQuaid and Smedley, nor Koster and Vogel; it was all about passionate devs who didn't know what they were doing and had the right team to fall back on. The same as Runescape, the same as Minecraft, the same as Elite, the same as Donkey Kong, the same as Pac-Man.

This is a great post!
I must add - pretty much same thing happened to WoW.
They hoped for 500k players (looking at EQ1 at its prime) they got nearly 1mln within first year. And then they screw everything up by the time they hit 10M.

I agree with much of this.

The original devs of EQ were real gamers. They were treading new water with the MMO delivery, but they brought years of real life gaming experience into their management styles. This is one of the reasons why EQ feels so natural to folks who came to it from pen and paper games like dungeons and dragons.

Nowadays, it is all about finding a viable business model and delivering content for consumption. There is hardly as much, if any, effort put into actually "running" the game after launch. In fact, most games today are designed to run themselves after launch with minimal GM interaction with the actual game. If you have real customer service people in-game that is about as much as you can actually hope for; gone are the days of server GMs and real GM events.

The result is that new MMOs are fun, but they have the replay-ability of going on a good roller coaster over and over again. Its fun for a while, but eventually the game loses its meaning. EQ, on the other hand, despite being a tremendously "static" by modern MMO standards can go on much much longer without losing its enjoyability.

Do you think anyone in 10 years is going to crave a classic RIFT or Secret World MMO? The idea is almost laughable.

Funny that you mention this now as there just started up a legitimate classic Darkfall project. I mean your point still stands tall considering Darkfall was made with Ultima Online in mind and largely adhered to the unforgiving characteristics of Gen 1 MMO's. I was just reminded of it when reading your post is all. You make really good points.

there wont be a game like eq. EQ was made in a perfect storm. It made a market more mainstream, didnt have any more successful ventures to compare to ( WoW) and didnt have any meta game to build on ( raiding, grouping, etc) so all the content was a shot in the dark. Hell even if they brought the ideas to someone higher up I doubt there was anyone who would understand it enough to OK it or say NO to it where it would provide much validity. Things were new and experimental then, not so much now.

I agree with mentathiel, the only way something good may come is if new blood make their dream game, not looking for profits, just people looking to make their ideal game without any pressure or peer review. Thats another thing that probably made eq great. It is what it is, parts of it sucked, parts were frustrating, but the combination of those things and the anomalous things that could happen in the game make it great.

seriously, someone make an HD 2d ultima online game with EQ's lore and i'll actually buy the 12 month subscription plan

But these are the AAA, "we have seen the formula and know how to follow it" kind of games. If you want to compare EQ to any game, it needs to be a "we think we know what we are doing here" game like Shards. I might even argue that (while coming from another genre) EVE Online and Elite: Dangerous are better analogies. If it had ever come to fruition, Hero's Journey would have been on my list too.

Interesting games fell by the way-side; Shadowbane had such potential, the original incarnation of Ryzom was something I could have played for years; but instead of showing people what could be done, they were used as ways to justify hiding from innovation and avoiding risks.

Above all though, I think the issue with modern MMORPGs is the lack of emergence; they have a set of pre-defined storylines (SWTOR is the worst for this, but they embrace it rather than hiding it) which makes every story a carbon copy defined by race and class. In SWTOR, even the race is not relevant; they have one story per class and it never changes. Even the armour and weapons you have (a trend which starts in EQ with the epic quest) will tend to be fixed and based on a very small number of options.

When someone asks my level-60 rogue in EQ3 how she acquired her armour, I want to be able to tell them the story and have the level-60 rogue standing next to her in equivalent armour listen in rapt fascination because it is new and exciting to them. Project 1999 is, to me, about heterogeneity; our stories are all so very different (except for the unfortunates who rushed to level 50 and didn't stop to savour a bottle of Innoruuk's Kiss of Death with a gnome they met on the boat from Faydwer to Freeport or take shelter from the rain in Qeynos with a dark-elf enchanter who has slowly gained the acceptance of the Knights of Thunder) and modern MMOs have robbed us of that.

I remember as a guide in Everquest, I was once tasked with sitting in Felwithe near the water and handing out milk and cookies. They were not even magical, just mundane (summoned from a clicky) milk and cookies talking to newbies. And then players came, higher level players who ate some cookies and drank some milk. They fished, they shared their catch, they told stories. This was not even a roleplay server, it was just the magic of EQ and a guide handing out milk and cookies.

I can't see that happening in WoW or on Live these days. I am not even sure it was meant to happen back then; I think it was just meant to hand out food and drink as a PR thing, but players saw a GM and their expectations created a unique event. All I did was hand out milk and cookies while it all unfolded around me.

So... er... what was the topic again?

so its obvious why everquest has such long term interest. Its because it satisfies existing in a fantasy land. Its one of the only games that does that for me aside from vanguard. It makes you feel like doing little things matter.

In WoW or other games it just seems like they dull your senses when it comes to giving you rewards. Its not really about existing, its about consuming content, getting the best of things. EQ is one of the few games where you can be content without leveling, where you can enjoy a game just as much at the middle as the end. Thats what it was up to the end of luclin, until PoP made the whole game top heavy. People need a reason to exist in these games, not just race to the end.

PC gaming is still big, very big. BUT there's no question it has changed a lot over the years. Game companies are making games now which (more and more) run on PC and Console. More companies are also looking at ways to exploit hte mobile market. And I haven't missed how many websites now adopt a unified layout which is friendly to mobiles. Note how this "unification" impacted PC's because it essentially forces all of the platforms to use the same interface. One of hte biggest signs of how mobile computing affects PCs is Windows 8. It doth not require a genius to understand Microsoft thought a mobile-friendly OS which runs on PC's would make them rich. And even companies which have the PC in mind, it still often makes money sense for them to use the SAME software interface for all their platforms. And despite their best efforts the PC end is going to get some crossover from other platforms just simply because it's using the same framework.

(I'm not saying Windows 8 did great, but don't be a foool and miss my message)

I think it's the TYPE of game which matters increasingly. Which type? SOCIAL. Just as the pursuit of a common programming interface for both PC's and mobiles has caused companies like Microsoft to create Windows 8 and vast numbers of websites to adopt the flat colorful mobile-friendly layout, all genres of gaming will, in some way, adopt conventions of social gaming.

Look here:
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cf...-Your-Dog.html

MMO's after EQ were just so linear. There was basically a set path with an arrow to follow. Do quests in this area .. last quest takes you to the next area etc.

EQ you were just throwing into the world left to figure it out on your own basically. That's what was and still is great about it. You choose your own path that you want to take in a huge world. Venture into an area with nothing but red cons .. probably wise to turn around and go somewheres else heh.

The whole grind and upgrading your armor, looking forward to new spell lines, grouping with folks along the way is what it's all about for me. In EQ there are unique items that everyone wants and only few have. You can identify what people have by the looks of the items and what not.

Once everything became button clicking and following exclamation points to the next area is when it got stale with other mmo's.

It was so awesome when I was watching a friend play kunark era, he was running around in oasis and showing me sand giants from halfway across the map. Then some guys were killing cazel .. it was very exciting to watch.

When I finally made a character, he was like "stick to the trails or you'll get lost!" ( I was a wood elf ranger in kelethin ). Falling off the tree houses to your death was hilarious.