Why I believe classic everquest is special
 

You know, I always come back to everquest every so often and play it for a while no matter what other games I play. And every time, there is this "feeling" I get when I make a newbie and go into the newbie area for the first time and start leveling. Even on higher level characters just playing them for a little why there's an experience there... it's not necessarily the same thing as "fun" because it's different from being fun, the combat is actually pretty boring. But the entire experience feels meaningful.

When I see all this about pantheon, I'm afraid it will miss the mark of what made eq good because people always say the challenge is what made the game. But I disagree. I don't think the challenge on its own is what made people love the game, personally I found corpse runs extremely frustrating. To me what always made the game good was the feeling of being in a real world, the mystery of not knowing what will happen next, the feeling of knowing that you can do anything you want and you may discover greatness or be forced into a horrible death with consequences.

When you start a new character, the game does not tell you what to do. You are free to do whatever you want. There is no set way to play the game. No quests, no guidelines, nothing. And I love this. You just go out into the world and start doing whatever you want to do. You go outside and start killing some monsters, maybe die a few times and learn... but you don't know what will come next. Even if you know what's out there because you played before, to your newbie character all of that is dangerous and you can only imagine going out there. You don't know what will come next because the game doesn't tell you what you do next.

Secondly, I think the consequences are not what makes the game but more like the rule enforcers. You have to care about doing things properly because of travel time, monster difficulty, leveling speed, and corpse runs. They force you to play the game properly. When these things are gone, it's too easy to lose immersion because you can bypass all the rules and start finding shortcuts to beat the game. I love being forced to travel, because it gives meaning to my location. Every area gains it's only value and the choice of where you go makes it interesting.


To summarize what I'm trying to say, if a dev wants to make a new eq they need to recapture the freedom, immersion, and mystery of eq. It can't just be oh groups, slow grinding, difficulty, etc. because that's not what made eq good. What made eq good was being put into this game world with some strict game rules but you were free to play it any way you wanted. No one told you how to navigate this world and that's what I think new mmos are lacking.

Yes.

But there will never be game that really recaptures the EQ original experience, because there are no (gaming) people who have never experienced anything like it before.

There will never be another game like EQ, get over it.

And yet you're still on this game playing it after how many years? So obviously the game has something to make people want to come back to it.

Subliminal Manipulation :D

Personally i think you are right, add to that the game mechanics had excellent ways of bringing players together. If you wanted something done you often couldn’t do it alone. The mix of classes meant that utility was spread specifically to each class type.

I don’t think there will be another EQ, because EQ was first, there was nothing like it at the time. But I do believe that next 'experience' like no other will come with the invention of truly immersive game play, VR, Voice activation, motion controllers, Omni treadmills etc. When that all matures, it will be completely new, nothing like it has been before and thus will get that special experience once more.

1500 people is not alot........ we are the mmo minority now. Look at molten wow private servers, they have 4000 people on each server.

WE ARE THE MINORITY.

Community is what can make or break a game. Nowadays you have a plethora of asshat-istic douchbaggery beyond epic proportions which is one of the standing factors that can and has ruined games to this date.

Even at its peak EQ had like 1/10th the number of the subscriptions WoW had after its first year.

I believe this is because first off project 1999 is very hard to set up, and it's a 15 year old game. Not many people know about it. To even get this many number is pretty amazing because that rivals most of the f2p Asian mmos that are out recently and actually supported.

Secondly I think the experience of eq is amazing... when I come back to play it for a little while it's just great. The Feeling as I said is still there. What's bad about eq is how boring combat can be, how boring grinding can be... the frustration of corpse runs... etc. Those things may or may not have shaped the game but they do tend to drive people away including myself.

What I'm getting at is that eq has a lot of bad but there is a feeling to the game that is THERE no matter how many times you come back you know it is, when I play wow or other mmos they may run or play better but there is no feeling of being in some other world or having some special experience. I would just like a game to recapture the experience with some new lands to explore.