Our 'First Time Playing Everquest' Stories

[Evia]

I think we've done this before a few years back... but I don't remember....anyway, I'd love to read how everyone came to find and love this game for the first time!


The year was 2000 and I was 13 iirc and I just moved back to live with my Mom and Brother after having been living with my aunt for a few years (mom was dealing with some problems for a bit)
and we were celebrating my younger brothers 12th birthday and he was gifted a copy of this computer game called 'Everquest' and upon install he called me into his room to his PC to have me 'check it out.'
So I begrudgingly walk over to his desk, anticipating being annoyed or overwhelmed with nerdy geeky fantasy hooha. He begins explaining to me that he gets to choose his 'race' and 'class' and is asking me what he should do. He starts cycling through the races and I remember I was immediately intrigued. I start asking him 'whats a Ranger?' and 'why are the ogres so fat?'

So my brother ended up creating a Wood Elf...idr the class...and he pops into Kelethin. I'm watching him roam around the tree city and I'm thinking this has to be the best graphics evaaar!!
I see a bunch of blue named people running around him and my brother shouts 'dude! these are other players! this guys talking to me about bags!'
this was it. this was the moment. insert the mindblown.gif right here. THESE WERE OTHER IRL PLAYERS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD?! PLAYING WITH ME IN A TREEHOUSE ELVEN WORLD?!
The immersion was soooo real. Very few experiences in my life have been as ground breaking as the realization of an online persistent virtual world as awesome as Norrath.

I shoved my brother off the computer shortly after this and created my own character...a High Elf Paladin! I remember loading him into the world and having great dreams of being a Noble Knight but inevitably fell victim to alt-o-holicism and just made new character after new character after new character. Never really getting anything higher than 14 or 15 in the early years.
Then shortly after this Luclin was announced I would go to eq.castersrealm and allakazams and read up on all the new graphics and changes coming feeling intense euphoria. I'd regularly rush home from school to log into the world of Norrath!

When luclin finally launched, we ended up going through our neighborhood mowing lawns to get enough money to afford a copy of it when it released. I begged my grandpa to drive me to Best Buy the day it released and bought that shit with my hard earned money! When I got home I ripped the plastic off and proceeded to install the game while frantically flipping through the instruction manual hoping to find some tidbits of info I didnt already know from my website searches.
When the game finally loaded, we clicked all the new models and it took us over an hr to load into the game! i'm not joking LOL. We couldnt even move once we got into the world because the lag was soooo bad. So we started just using 1 new model for the character we were playing.
After a few months though, like most people, I realized Luclin was trash, and the new models sucked, so I went back to the old ones. It also was nice that my pc ran better with them off.

My brother and I continued playing for a while and shared a pc/account from 2000-2003? right before PoP came out. Then I got my own pc and account and we started playing together and that really amped up the fun factor. No more 2hr sessions before having to swap! This was when I finally really stuck it out with one character and I left my brother behind in levels. I got my Dwarf Rogue up to lvl 52 before finally taking major breaks in EQ to play the various MMORPGS of the mid 2000s like Daoc, Swg, Vanguard, EQ2, LotrO, GW, WoW, Warhammer, ect.

...but none of those games left the same impact that Everquest did.

Eventually I found p99 around 2012 and have casually played EQ since. All while reminiscing of the 'good ol days' and wondering why nobody is capable of making a good MMO anymore. I guess this is getting old.
Ah, I miss those early years!

So lets hear your first EQ stories!!


ps. we didnt know how to open doors for the first week or so of playing....HAHA. when my brother realized how to do it, it was like another mindblown.gif moment! Lol!