Ten Years of EverQuest

Eurogamer reflects back upon the first ten years of EverQuest, from the “unforgiving difficulty” we endured during the early days to what changes have been made to keep the MMORPG from falling into obscurity.

In fact, the beauty of “Old World EverQuest” (referring to either the very first release of the game, or said world combined with the Ruins of Kunark and Scars of Velious expansions) was that most of the game – and I really mean almost everything – was left unexplained. After ‘hailing’ an NPC (pressing H or typing “Hail”) players would have to communicate with them – typing in random words and names, or handing over particular items in the hope that it would unlock the next step of the quest. This was at times aided by particular words being in square [brackets], signifying what word to type, but many times it was left up to the whimsy of the player to work out what to say. Much like the average player’s conversation with a woman.

Many of these quests didn’t reward experience, and for the most part you were left to grind – a negative term in the industry nowadays – all the way to level 50, then 60, then 70, then 80. The idea of moving to specific areas and completing quests was an alien concept – players did what they could to score as much experience as possible, and always in a group (as going solo was eventually suicidal). Some classes – for example Druids, Necromancers, and (during the Planes of Power expansion) Enchanters – would ‘kite’ enemies in circles, chipping away at their health bars with damage-over-time spells and keeping themselves as far away as possible, hoping that their prey would die before they got too close.

As aggravating as it was at times, I loved EverQuest during its first year. There was a true sense of accomplishment when killing a giant for the first time, surviving an Unrest train, stumbling upon a rare spawn, or finding a piece of loot after spending 12+ hours in the Plane of Fear. Good times.