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#2
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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. Quote:
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. Quote:
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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. Quote:
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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. | |||||||
Last edited by greatdane; 09-09-2023 at 10:03 PM..
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#3
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#4
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DIKUMUD / EVERQUEST Quote:
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#5
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No it wasn't. DIKU is not a game, it's a codebase. It's like a game engine. You use it as a framework on which to build a MUD. Calling Sojourn a copy of DIKU is like accusing Borderlands of plagiarizing the Unreal Engine. It doesn't even make technical sense. Every MUD is built on a codebase, just as any video game is built on an engine. There's a number of different MUD codebases, the most popular at the time being DIKU, ROM, Circle, and some others. The DIKU codebase does come with some stock features, but Sojourn/Toril was highly customized and bore no meaningful resemblance to the stock attributes of the DIKU codebase. Technically, the DIKU codebase does sort of come with a playable game. If you install the stock engine, it has a very primitive framework for classes, spells, skills, and basic areas. Any MUD worth its salt would customize these heavily. There has never been any such thing as a popular MUD that resembled the stock version of its codebase. No such game would ever have become popular in the first place. The stock version of DIKU is about as interesting as Everquest's original offline tutorial, the one where you meet Soandso. Sojourn was built on the DIKU codebase but plagiarized literally nothing whatsoever from that codebase's stock features. Even if it had, the DIKU license prohibits monetization of any game built upon the engine, so there's no basis for plagiarism. The old EQ vs DIKU controversy stems from the fact that EQ had used a select few text strings (specifically the text shown when you use socials like /grin) from DIKU, which prohibits using any of its properties for commercial ventures. Since so little was used, there was no real case to be made. Think of it like EQEmu's stock installation. You can set that up and it comes with a playable game, but you can then change everything. Sojourn kept virtually nothing from the original stock installation. No classes, skills, spells, areas, items or anything like that. Every possible aspect of that game was wholly unique, it was just built on the mechanical foundation of the DIKU codebase. Meanwhile, Everquest stole wholesale from Sojourn and directly copied many of that game's unique concepts. Classes, races, area concepts, quite a few items, etc. Since SojournMUD was a hobby game run by amateurs with a playerbase of a few hundred people, no action was taken. If it had been a commercial game, it would have been a slam-dunk win in a plagiarism case against EQ. Everquest really is pretty much a direct port of Sojourn onto a graphical engine, just scrubbed of names that belong to the Forgotten Realms IP. | |||
Last edited by greatdane; 09-15-2023 at 10:50 PM..
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#6
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Notice that Sojourn never filed a complaint. | |||
#7
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Nearly every mechanical aspect is lifted directly from that MUD. There are some exceptions, such as mana instead of traditional D&D's "Vancian magic" system where you memorize x 1st level spells, y 2nd level spells, etc. But all in all, Everquest is a shameless copycat job of Sojourn, so much so that if that MUD was a commercial product with its own IP, it would have automatically won a lawsuit against EQ. But since it wasn't, there was no basis for it. Still, the fact remains that old Brad and his crew were not quite the creative geniuses that some suppose. He basically just grabbed a game he had played and translated it to a different engine. It was only ever legal because the game he plagiarized had no commercial rights of its own, due to the fact that the DIKU license expressly prohibits this. Still, the consternation over Everquest's genesis did have some merit, given how it all went down. It's just that since SojournMUD had a few hundred players, their grievances were pretty meaningless. | |||
Last edited by greatdane; 10-01-2023 at 11:55 PM..
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#8
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Pager-based mmo's were a thing too.
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go go go
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#9
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Different source altogether but most, if not all, of those IRC conversations can actually be found in the link below. These were some of the other/extended beta answers from McQuaid, as well as Trost...
https://web.archive.org/web/19990209...splace.com/eq/ Brad McQuaid Quote:
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Last edited by Ennewi; 09-13-2023 at 03:59 PM..
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#10
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Enjoyed the read. Thanks for posting.
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