Good old Aradune! I once made
a long and boring post about the origins of Everquest and these answers ring so true. To someone who was familiar with the MUD from which Brad McQuaid largely plagiarized Everquest (though through the lens of a grahical engine), it's very clear that his original vision was even closer to SojournMUD (now known as TorilMUD) than even the release version of Everquest was.
Back in the mid/late-nineties, Sojourn was one of the most popular MUDs on the internet. Aradune was one of the game's most prolific players, and one day, he decided to make a game of his own. One that had graphics. That became Everquest. There was actually quite a lot of consternation in the MUD's community at the time, because it was perceived as a threat to the game. Needless to say, EQ's popularity saw Sojourn/Toril's playerbase decline by about 75% in a handful of years, owing to the objectively superior gameplay experience of a graphical game like Everquest. There was no way for a MUD to compete, even if it was entirely free to play.
Yep. On SojournMUD, this spell required a corpse, and the resulting pet's power would be based on the corpse it was animated from. This was the balancing factor of the spell on the MUD that this game was based upon. A necromancer without a pet couldn't easily kill anything that would make for a powerful reanimation, so it took time to work your way up to a strong undead minion.
When Everquest decided alleviate necromancers from the need for a fresh corpse, and simply let them summon a pet anytime, it led to the class being grotesquely overpowered for the first months of the game. It was subsequently nerfed in various ways, including no longer using the delay of whatever weapons you gave to it, a change that was also spread unto other pet classes.
Before this nerf, you could give your pet fine steel daggers and it would get the same attack speed that a player would have had with speed 19 weapons, but with the damage built into their pet level. Until this was nerfed, pets (not just necromancers, although their general versatility compared to magicians made them far superior) would out-damage melee player classes by 50-100%.
On SojournMUD, there was no concept of 'attack speed' as the game was based on D&D and thus worked in turns, so there were fewer balance concerns associated with giving weapons to your pets. The original developers of Everquest did not initially account for this.
Back then, the notion of paying for expansion packs in a game with a subscription fee was rather controversial. While the MMORPG genre was not invented by Everquest, there had been very few such games until then, mainly Ultima Online and niche games like some weird AoL-only thing called Neverwinter Nights that I know nothing about. By and large, the idea of paying each month to play a game *and* also having to buy expansions was controversial, to say the least.
This is an interesting question for reasons that most might not expect. Throughout the first half of the 90s, it was quite common for MUDs (text-based games that are otherwise quite similar to Everquest) to not save your equipment when you logged out. You would log in, search for items to use, and then try to take on the game's challenges. If you had to log out, or if the game crashed or rebooted, you lost everything you owned.
Then some MUDs invented the concept of a bank vault where you could store things for a price (in in-game gold), and this price was based on the character's level. As such, it became logical to make a level 1 character, a 'mule character', with which to store gear. Then when you had to log out, or when the GMs announced an impending reboot, everyone would scramble to store their best shit on a mule so that they could get it back when needed.
In the mid-90s, data was insanely expensive and many MUDs did not have enough space on their sites (usually hosted by some university somewhere) to save players' equipment upon logout. While SojournMUD was big enough to have made this possible, the fact that it was not the norm is why Brad McQuaid was asked this question.
Well, there you go. Aradune was his main character on Sojourn/Toril, and there was actually quite a controversy when he left the MUD to make a graphical game based upon it. Everquest was
very heavily derivative of this MUD, and if both had been commercial products (MUDs were almost always non-profit in those days), Sojourn/Toril would have easily won a plagiarism lawsuit because Everquest copied like 80% of its game mechanics and area concepts wholesale and simply translated them into a graphical engine.
If you're not familiar with MUDs, this question might be more important than you imagine. MUDs were wholly text-based, and the gameworld was a grid of 'rooms' where each could constitute anything from a lavatory to a square mile of forest. A zone like Unrest might have comprised only a dozen rooms: the entrance, the outer courtyard, the main room, the first floor, the upper towers, the basement, etc.
It was notoriously hard to judge space on MUDs because there was no inherent distinction between a closet and a castle's courtyard. That's probably why Brad's answer is so vague. Separating the gameworld into distinctive zones was a relatively new concept; while MUDs had zones on the builder level, there was no actual zoneline or mechanical distinction between one area and the next, nor any load screens or associated borders.
The rest of the questions quoted in OP are from after launch when Everquest had already broken free from its MUD roots, but it very much built itself upon that foundation, and as someone who played Sojourn/Toril before EQ was a thing, it bears saying that a significant portion of EQ was just straight-up stolen from that MUD.
It's only because the DIKU license is strictly non-commercial that there were no legal repercussions; and even then, there was, in fact, an investigation which concluded that while Everquest was derived very heavily from the MUD(s) that it was based upon, the fact that it had a completely different engine and game format meant that it was not liable on any legal basis. But trust me: the original version of EQ is almost wholly plagiarized from Sojourn.
09-10-2023, 09:47 PM
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