The moment you knew...

[hedbonker]

That Everquest was going to be something special - Something different...

I had never played an MMO before EQ. Some folks at work started telling me about it and raving about it. So I bought it and it sat on the shelf for a month or so until one saturday I was bored and decided to install it and try it out.

After installing the base game and Kunark (that came with the base pack), I went in and created a character. I made a high elf Wizard. I chose Wizard because it sounded powerful. No other reason. I put most of my points into CHA since in previous single player RPGs, CHA got you better prices from merchants.

So, I log in and start checking my character out and see that I have a note to turn in to my guild master. After doing a bit of checking and wandering around, I give up trying to find the guy and OOC for some help (after trying to ask some NPCs where the GM was, in true newbie fashion)...

Another caster comes up and tells me to follow them and I do and they take me to the GM. I remember thinking, how in the hell did you figure out where this guy was???

So once I get all set and I have my new robe, I head out into Gfay. Looking around I remember thinking that the graphics were pretty crappy... So I kill a few bats, a few wasps and get owned by an Orc Pawn. The next encounter I manage to kill the pawn and he says that the legions of Crushbone Orcs will be after me now and I am like "Holy crap!" so I run over and hang out by the guards until it dawns on me that it was a hollow threat...

While I wait for the Orc army to arrive and slaughter me, I am looking at my skills and see that I have bind wound among other things. And I notice that people are asking for a bind in OOC. So I OOC that I can bind and that I am at the Felwithe gates.

So some human comes over and asks me for the bind and I start binding wound on him - I won't repeat what he said here, suffice it to say that he was neither pleased nor amused at my naivete.

About this time I am thinking the game is kinda meh. Nothing special. So I decide to follow the path out of the Felwithe newbie area and see where it leads me. So I am running along and then finally I crest this hill and I see Kelethin in the trees in all it's glory. I see a ton of players all over the place with particle effects going off all over and all kinds of activities going on.

It is at this moment that it dawns on me that this Everquest is something special. That it is a vibrant, living breathing world. And it is at this moment that I am hooked.

What's your story?

[Dac321]

I remember the day.

My brother had friends in the neighborhood that started to talk about this "online game" they started and how hard it was. We went over to his house and watched his father start playing it. The graphics were intense. At the time I was 13 years old living with my Dad. My brother and I had to convince our parents to actually pay a subsription for a game. Anyway, we finally agreed we would do chores to activiate it.

My very first character was a dwarf paladin on Rallos Zek, all i remember is grouping with characters and pvping other level 1 characters. I got an entire set of cloth armor and felt like I was leet. The game to this day, 10 years later (this server) gives me that same feeling.

The only way I can describe the feeling this game gives me is crazy excitement and the fact I can't wait to get home and log on after a long day.

[tinidas]

many many such moments but I think the first was simply watching the sunrise in qeynos hills from the hill near the lake after a 'night' of hunting skels and rats [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

[Messianic]

I played a text-based MMO, Gemstone III, before I played EQ, so I had some background.

I remember creating like 40 characters (many deleted) before I settled into a monk. I started out thinking I would play a Barb warrior and was absolutely enthralled by Everfrost, and at the time, those graphics were pretty awesome.

After deciding that warrior was boring, I messed around with a few other classes - I got a wizard to like 4-8, paladin/bard/sk...then my wizard some more...had a few friends give me some plat, and twinked a monk with a few really good weapons (KD's), and leveled incredibly fast. Monk stuck to me, not least because the class was really strong, but because I NEVER died. I'd bet that I didn't die once between 19-35 (curse those lguk casters), seldom until 60, and a few times on dragon raids. I learned pathing and as many FD/Sneak tricks as I could, practiced by intentionally going deep into the most dangerous areas and figuring a way out on my own, i'd piss off really strong mobs or casters and learn how to shake them by LoS or other tricks...

After my wizard is max-leveled and kunark comes out, i plan to do an iksar monk this time (I was previously human). There's nothing like twink monk soloability + awesome survivability.

[Anaiyah]

I made a Barbarian Warrior first, and spent the first couple of hours walking around halas.

Someone came up and said "Click run", and suddenly I was able to travel much faster, and was hooked for life. True story.

[Onadan]

Funny enough, when I got hooked was when I first ran over to Kelethin and saw the huge tree city.

[Slayde]

I played UO a little bit and some old school MUDs so I was already familiar with the concept. But when I heard about a 3D MMO I just had to play it. For a long time I would sit in my high school computer class and read Everlore.com. Then me and a good friend at the time got into the beta. I still have some SS of it lol. That's all it took. I knew EQ would be the start of something new and amazing. The day of release I got a copy and made a human ranger. Running around Qeynos Hills for what seemed like forever, trying my damnedest to get lvl 9. lol

[Dunes]

I remember it well.

It was early October 1999, and I was a freshman in college. I had played several MMO's before EQ, starting with "The Realm", followed by Ultima Online, so I knew a bit about the structure and thought I knew what I was in for. So I rolled over to Best Buy, picked up a shiny new copy of EQ, rushed back to the dorm, and installed it. I guess I knew I was in for a different experience when I saw the elaborate CGI intro for the game, but it didnt really sink in at the time.

So, I rolled a barbarian shaman and journeyed out into the snow drifts of Everfrost Peaks. I found myself blinded by the snow and dark, and wandered, lost, far into the canyons around Halas (only to die to a malicious skeleton). The 3D and atmosphere was amazing, and unlike anything I had ever seen before.

So I rolled an Erudite Wizard next, and made my way to Qeynos to meet up with some friends. Eventually I found myself sitting in a group, in the Qeynos catacombs, with 4 other casters and thats when it sank in - this is something different.

Fast Forward almost 11 years, and I have played many, many MMO's over the years. Yet always, EQ has been there, lingering and beckoning me to come back and relive the challenges of early EQ. Project 1999 has given us all precisly that opportunity, and I can honestly not thank the devs and administrators enough. Thanks for all that you do guys.

[ChubbyBubbles]

It was my second day in the Everquest world. I was a druid on Vallonzek.
There was another druid that I was learning the ropes from, some random person I had made friends with in the big world. On that fateful day she gave me my first 'cracked staff' and told me I would need it where we were going. She called it a 'vacation' from the Tree city. So she invited me to group and ported us both to one of the Karanas ( i cant remember which) Just being whisked away to a completely new area did it for me. I was completely hooked. We killed some mobs and then she left and I spent the rest of the day trying to find out how to get back to gfay.


Also the day I first saw Maverness Highness on Vallonzek. The first high level magician I had ever seen. She/he absolutely demolished blackburrow to help me retrieve a corpse I had lost.

[eqdruid76]

Additional fanciful, albeit untrue antecdote.