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MMOs Worth Playing – Everquest II

November 13, 2015 by Belghast

Perforated Week

This week was a strange one, because it essentially consisted of two Mondays and two Fridays since I was off Wednesday due to Veterans day. This week also pretty much was completely lost to Fallout 4. So I contemplated just doing another post about that and skipping the MWP feature for a week. That said I decided to fall back on an “oldie but goodie” that I could write about without much prep work. Once again the MMOs Worth Playing section by intent is to highlight some of the awesome games out there, that maybe don’t get as much love as I feel they should. This has been the pattern other than last week when I did a special BlizzCon edition, and this week we are continuing that pattern with some talk about Everquest 2.

Launching Against a Juggernaut

When it comes to underdog games… it would be near impossible to find one that more fits that title than Everquest II. Back in 2004 there were two games vying for everyone’s attention… the sequel of sorts to the wildly popular Everquest and the newcomer with a strong pedigree World of Warcraft. By the time we got to November of that year… there was quite literally one game on everyone’s minds… and it wasn’t the return to a calamity stricken Norrath. EQ2 had the misfortunate of launching sixteen days before the game that would for the most part change the landscape of MMOs. I was pretty torn as to which game I would end up playing, and I even pre-ordered Everquest II and spent a good deal of time in the alpha and beta processes. However when it came time to launch… there were a few people from my EQ1 days that were going to be playing… but the vast majority of my friends were simply waiting for World of Warcraft. So since money was very much a thing back then… I simply didn’t pick up my EQ2 pre-order and waited for the coming of Azeroth.

Roughly six months into that experience however I got a patch of wanderlust like I always do and drug a group of friends over into Norrath and found that I really liked the game. Just as I know eventually I will be playing World of Warcraft again, I will also be doing the same for Everquest II. The sort of experience it provides is just different than you would find in most games. For me at least the magic is the setting. Norrath is world I am deeply nostalgic of, and with it comes little references to the good times I had in Everquest. I realize for many at launch this was a huge problem… because instead of continuing where Everquest left off they chose to reboot the world of sorts and bringing the players in after the moon Luclin had exploded raining down shards around the world. This event sundered the world causing it to break apart into small islands, and much of the theme of Everquest 2 has been one of exploration and rediscovery.

Unearthing Greatness

The players are helping to recover the lost grandeur of the past, and with that we are uncovering locations that I remember extremely well in the original Everquest. The big thing that spoke to me about the game however was the epic scale. These zones are huge… so huge that often times they are made up of several distinct sub zones that all exist together in one seamless area. What makes them work so well is the fact that they are really content dense, with all sorts of hidden treasures and events stowed in between what would normally be something you simply rode past. One of the things that made EQ interesting was their construct called a “Ring Event”, which involved fighting certain mobs… which would spawn other mobs… which would ultimately culminate in a boss. So as you wander the world, you never quite know what thing you are killing might lead to something far more interesting spawning. I remember one of these particular in Nektulos Forest, that ultimately lead to a rare named boss that was used for a quest.

Another aspect of the game that I have always loved that follows this exploration and recovery feeling, is the Heritage quest. These are truly epic quest chains that tend to require twenty or so discreet steps to complete and often involve you spending a considerably about of time crawling through dungeons and catacombs to find bits. Each of them represents the attempt to uncover an item of fabled power from the old world, and as a former Everquest player… I know almost every single item referenced by heart. What makes them even cooler is that they function dual fold when you complete one. For starters you get a really nice piece of gear that at the level you can get it serves to be some of quite literally the best gear you can get. However when you out level it, you can turn it into a trophy item that you can then put in your player housing to remember your journey. So it feels really cool to walk into your house and see all of these past accomplishments displayed in physical form. Each item you hang on your wall or stash on a shelf is a memory of an event that you did in game, which makes the whole thing feel more important than simply earning points or titles.

Rich Systems

Everquest II is this impossible game, because quite literally I don’t think it could have ever been created in today’s climate. So much time was spent on systems that feel casual and exploratory gameplay, that enrich the player… but don’t really make up much of an “endgame” in the traditional sense. I just mentioned housing and that is absolutely a crucial one. Dark Age of Camelot was the first time I had experienced player housing, and I knew that I was absolutely hooked. The problem there is it took up large tracts of physical real estate in the world. That meant a limited number of players could ever have housing, because there were a limited number of deeds available. EQ2 went in a completely different direction, and at first I was not terribly certain of it… and later I have come to realize it was a stroke of genius. Instead of making housing exclusive… they simply made it part of the base gameplay experience by giving you an Inn Room that serves as your first house while going through the early levels. From there the player gets used to the notion of checking into their room periodically and quests giving them items that they might want to display there.

As you progress you can keep getting cooler homes with significantly more expensive weekly upkeep costs. While player housing is awesome… where the game really shines is the introduction of Guild Housing. In each guild I have been in, the house became a hub of activity for its members. Due to the ability to place crafting machines, bankers and brokers all in the hall… it means that there will be a constant flow of players coming in and out as they do their business around the game world. While it might seem silly… because we already have an always on guild chat… but seeing players in their physical avatar form just feels different and almost magical. There are tons of people in the game world that I might talk to on a nightly basis… but it could be weeks before I actually cross paths with their characters in game. Having this nexus meant that the guilds were actually more communicative that they might have been were it just left to text only conversation. There was also always the added benefit of having some shared goal that the guild as a whole could work towards. I remember doing all sorts of things that could grant “status” in the guild, which then could be spent as a currency to help pay the expenses of owning the guild hall. Contributing status made it feel like I was helping… even though what I was actually earning was just a drip in the bucket comparatively.

Overwhelming Content

I could literally write one of these posts a week, for the next few months and not have scratched the surface of talking about everything in this game. The game is nearing the launch of expansion number Twelve Terrors of Thalumbra. In the same time World of Warcraft has had six expansions, and this is not counting the mini adventure packs, which I believe there have been four or five of at this point. The amount of content of all types that is available is just completely mind boggling, and at any given level you usually have multiple paths that you can take to get to your goal. My favorite part about the game is that they still have public dungeons. This is the aspect that made the original Everquest feel so vibrant to me, was that you could go into these super dangerous areas with your friends… that were huge NPC warrens that felt like working areas. If you went into the kitchen, then you found a chef… if you went into the dungeon… then you found a jailer or a warden. It felt like we were actually raiding bases, rather than taking a theme park ride where at the end we got loot for our trouble.

These big public dungeons were places you could just go and hang out with your friends… where the difficulty level was enough to make bringing friends along for the fun worth while. All of which made it all the more enjoyable when you finally reached a level of gear where you could actually go into these places and survive by yourself. I remember the amazement the first time I saw a friend soloing Sebilis for example in Everquest… and then was shocked when I reached the point where I could solo tough mobs like the Sand Giants in the Oasis of Marr. Everquest even in its more modern version is really good at setting up these goals that you want to go back and achieve later. If you can’t take on this monster now… then you will likely go back later and get revenge on it when you can. I’ve talked before about how fear is missing from games… and wandering these public dungeons brought it back. That if you were able to keep up with the spawn rate, you could stay in there in a tentative state of safety… however if one thing went wrong… you were running back in after a death. That era in games seems to be all but extinct at this point.

Dated But Good

At this point Everquest 2 is feeling its age, and with recent Daybreak mess… it is unlikely that this is going to change at any point in the near future. The engine is old, and has not had the benefit of having frequent face lifts in the same fashion that World of Warcraft has. As a result the model detail is a little off, and the world building itself can feel a little cludgy in the early zones. There however is an amazing artistry as each time they release an expansion they push this old engine beyond its limits and find new ways to keep this game interesting. This is absolutely a game that I would suggest everyone play at least once, but in doing so you have to go into it knowing that you are essentially playing an artifact of a bygone era. They simply do not make games like this one any more, and to some extent I am regretful of this fact. The amount of detail that can be found between its cracks is enough to drive you completely mad if you try and assimilate it all. If you do start an new character I highly suggest you either roll in the Neriak/Darklight Woods starting zone or Kelethin/Greater Faydark… because as the game went on they got significantly better at doing the starter experience. If you do end up trying the game, I would love to hear your own impressions.

Better Faction Systems

September 29, 2015 by Belghast

Loss of Nuance

I had this topic that I wanted to talk about this morning, and jotted it down so that I would not forget. Then last night I suffered from a bout of insomnia. So my hope is that even without much sleep I can still make this topic work, and devote the amount of attention it deserves. For years I have talked about my dislike of the faction wall system that was first popularized by Dark Age of Camelot, and then carried forth into the modern genre of MMOs thanks to World of Warcraft adopting it. For many players they know nothing different than picking a red versus blue faction and living their entire gaming life’s within the confines of it. I think I struggle against this concept because I remember a time when this wasn’t necessarily the case. Lately I have been spending a lot of time playing my smuggler in Star Wars the Old Republic, and yes I realize that game is a very faction locked experience. However if you think of the Smuggler itself in the Star Wars mythos, it has always been a character that skirted the lines trying to exist in Republic, Imperial and Hutt space at the same time, carving their own path balancing between them all.

The problem is, other than the original Everquest no game really supports this notion. You cannot live between the faction lines making your own choices, instead you are asked to choose an allegiance that is about the most impersonal experience imaginable. The problem is that I feel no personal responsibility for choosing Horde or Alliance or in many cases Red or Blue. They don’t represent me as a person, and as such I have no real loyalty tied to them. However in Everquest you were assigned essentially a default template of allegiances based on your racial choice… but from that point on you could blur the lines at will. I remember spending copious amounts of time hunting Kobolds in the Warrens off of Toxxulia Forest, for the purpose of gaining faction in the otherwise aggressive city of Paineel. Why did I do this? Honestly for no real reason other than I could, and that I thought the city of Paineel was extremely cool in its layout. Sure I could have simply banked and quested at the far end of Toxxulia Forest in the already friendly city of Erudin, but instead I made the conscious choice to hang out with the Necromancers.

Sapping Creative Expression

The problem with the faction wall system is that it forces all of the players to essentially be the same person. Later games started throwing in optional faction grinds, but those grinds are always connected to “things”. Gain this much reputation with this faction and you will get a nifty sword, or a pretty mount… but otherwise once the current expansion is over they will be utterly meaningless from that point on. The problem here is that these tertiary faction choices don’t actually effect the players game experience. They don’t unlock new areas of the world, or more so close off other areas that the player did have access to. Granted in the early days of World of Warcraft they did manage to create a few of these Factions that did actually do interesting things. Namely I am talking about the back and forth seesaw of the Bloodsail Buccaneers and the assorted Goblin factions. If you were truly insane you could skirt a thin line between gaining faction with the Bloodsails but also doing faction repair work with the Goblins to make sure you were not ever hitting “Kill On Sight” status.

The problem here is… this was an isolated example that granted players access to a handful of boats in the ass end of the world. This area was made immediately irrelevant as soon as the Burning Crusade and subsequent expansions released. Instead as an Alliance player I always wanted to figure out a way to gain factions with the Tauren. They were the only Horde race that seemed to cling to any ideals I could get behind, and I thought it would have been so interesting to be able to gain faction in a way that would allow you to enter the town and do commerce there. Things are never completely black and white, and even in the lore there are characters that skirt the lines managing to be friendly to two different groups at the same time. The entire World of Warcraft experience would have been so much richer if it allowed players through sheer will to grind out their own niche that lay somewhere between the predetermined choices. I think it would have been interesting to allow players to create the ultimate “diplomat” that was friendly to essentially ALL of the races.

Fear for the Future

The problem with games being iterative is that once a feature set becomes common, it essentially stays there forever. This past weekend when we talked about Tron 2.0 in our AggroChat Game Club show, one of the lines of discussion was how the cultural norms for shooters have changed over the years. What used to be representative of most of the shooters that were out in 2003, is no longer recognizable through the lens of the basic feature set that we now have come to expect. World of Warcraft borrowed heavily from the games that came before it, and since it chose to go with a walled off faction system, games that have borrowed from it have essentially followed that mold. Red and Blue factions with their own walled off areas of play have become the template for how to build a game, and right now the only real evolution has been a return to three factions instead of just two. Sure games like Rift have torn down the wall and made faction into “fiction” but they have not really gone anywhere in the struggle of making faction a personal choice.

Now going back to the original thing that spurred this topic, Star Wars the Old Republic. How much more rich would the smuggler have been if you quite literally could have been a freelancer in action and not just name. The game does a decent job of making you feel like you live somewhere between the red and blue lines, and then when the second chapter happens it essentially rips all of that forcing you to align to the Republic faction. Sure you can still play a dark side Smuggler, but these aren’t “real” decisions with any sense of “real” lasting consequences. You can’t decide to say screw the republic and opt to live entirely in Hutt space or Imperial space. You can’t decide to say on Alderaan or Balmorra and improve your faction with one of the leaders, opening up new questing opportunities that are unavailable to the average player. Everquest is a game that I could never really play again, because I just can’t handle the essentially “primative” game client. There however are still things that the game got right, that no other game that I have played have really tried to copy. The problem is… right now I cannot see a game adopting a more real world faction system, without somehow turning it into a marketing focus and losing sight of all of the other things that have to be in place to make a game enjoyable. Essentially I want real factions… but still be able to keep all of the things that I have come to expect from an MMO to this point. Unfortunately I fear that the era of MMO experimental-ism is over… and at this point our feature set is locked in place just like the feature set of shooter is locked as well. In the meantime however… I will still carry a rose colored torch for this features that I wish I could have in modern games.

Fear of the Unknown

May 23, 2015 by Belghast

MMO Nostalgia

One of the interesting subtexts this week that we will likely talk about on tonight’s AggroChat is Kodra and Pathfinder Online. He has begun the descent into this game and been trying to drum up a certain measure of interest from the rest of us to join him. The problem is that as I listen to him talk about the game I realize that I have already played this. In fact I gave three years of my life to Everquest, and everything about Pathfinder Online feels like a nostalgic throwback to that era. I am sure it is a perfectly awesome game, but while I miss the sense of community we had back then there are many things I don’t miss about it. This is all the more relevant since right now the Ragefire server is open in Everquest and folks are flocking there for their own hit from the nostalgia pipe.

The thing that I don’t miss about that era is the way I felt chained to the computer. Every time I set foot in the world I had a tangible fear of losing everything that I had worked so hard to attain to that point. There was always the fear that you might take a death in a place where you could not recover your body. Over time the items on your body started to decay and disappear, and eventually there was a point where things were simply no longer recoverable. The problem is when you took a death your entire mission in life became about getting that body back. I’ve known people that skipped major events in their life all because they were in the middle of trying to get back their virtual items. I’ve personally gotten calls on the middle of a Sunday afternoon begging me to go home and log in and go find them so that I could resurrect their body and give them back some of the lost experience.

Fear of the Unknown

So while I don’t miss any of that bullshit, I do the constant and tangible sense of fear. The problem being that the modern games seem to have missed the boat in what exactly caused this fear. Right now so many of these sandbox games take the cheap route and make every player afraid of every other player. The problem with this is that it is counter productive to building a community. You want your players to band together, rather than avoid each other like the plague. What caused the fear was that the world was this scary and unknown place. There were no in game maps, there were no mob statistics… and it was the lack of information that made the world frightening. We didn’t know what we didn’t know… and often times our imaginations invented a far scarier scenario than the game servers were possible of creating at the time. We imagined complex plans within plans… and that the server was quite literally out to get us.

There were situations like Kithicor Forest in Everquest, where during the day it was a friendly low level hunting zone, but at night all manner of maximum level undead spawned and started roaming. The truth of Kithicor is that there were far fewer undead spawning than we realized and that we were never in as much danger as we actually thought we were. In all the times I ran through the zone at night, I never once died to the undead… but I was constantly in fear of it. I “knew” death waited around every corner and because of it I tiptoed my way out into the world constantly aware of my surroundings and constantly afraid that at any moment the server would reach out and smite me for my impudence. The fact that it never actually happened, didn’t really matter… because I lacked the data mined information to tell me exactly what the spawn rates were and where the roaming paths were located at.

Players Together, Not Against

We are quite literally overloaded with information about the games we play. Knowing the amount of hit points a given mob has is just expected now, along with knowing every other intimate piece of information about the game. We know the attacks a creature is capable of making, and how exactly to counter them… before we even see said creature take a swing. Where this modern incarnation of Everquest nostalgia falls short is understanding that it was our lack of knowledge that made us afraid to venture into the world. It was not necessarily the harsh death penalties, and it most definitely was not that we were afraid of other players… it was that the world was cruel and unknown. The focus on PVP as a way of providing cheap content always seems to miss the point of why the original games worked. Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot worked more than anything because it caused players to be willing to look for help from anyone who would offer it.

When you expect the world to strike you down at any moment, you are willing to accept assistance from anyone willing to lend it. Especially in Everquest it felt like every player in the game was on the same team, that it was us versus the world. Sure there were territorial squabbles over spawn camps and the like, but more often than not each server had its own hard and fast rules for dealing with this sort of thing. We the players made order out of the chaos, and there was protection in numbers. There were many zones that you didn’t go to because you knew there were not likely to be other players to help you out if something went wrong. By the same token these untouched zones became the perfect place for a group of friends to go off exploring on their own. This is what we need in the current crop of nostalgic games, a sense of why exactly the first games worked and a certain measure of ignorance to make us all fear the darkness.

The Guide Program

March 21, 2015 by Belghast

There are many stories that at the time were frustrating but become more humorous through the lens of nostalgia. I think we as gamers all have thousands of such tales in us, and with this new feature my goal is to try and devote some time to committing these to paper. Nostalgia is a powerful force, but one that is fun to wallow in every now and then.

Exeteroth Iceforge

I’ve been sitting here for a bit staring at a blank screen, not quite sure what to write for my Storytime Saturday post. Which lead m to start thinking about the things I miss in games. One of the casualties of the whole Daybreak Games debacle was the majority of the in game GM department. From what I have heard they currently have only a single GM per game, which makes me wonder why there is not talk about bringing back the Guide program. For those who are not familiar with the concept, the Guide program was a series of player volunteers that gave up some of their in game time to serve as junior GMs on a server other than their own. These guides took care of a lot of the day to day requests like players stuck in geometry, and minor behavior infractions. The guide system always felt really cool because you knew more than likely you were getting another seasoned player helping you out, and in part you felt more connected to them because of it.

This freed up the GM staff to do some interesting things like live events. It was always extremely awesome when something was going on, and it was amazing how fast word trickled through the community. Players would drop what they were doing to flock to whatever zone something cool was happening in. The unfortunately thing is it has been literally years since I last participated in something like that. Modern games seem to have a GM staff that simply does not come out to play anymore. There was a time when on Xegony in Everquest we knew all of the GMs and guides assigned to our server. There were so many times they would be hanging out in zone with us as we took down a raid boss, cheering us on. The problem is there were tales of GMs doing questionable things to help out some of the top tier guilds. I really hope they were just rumors, because while we might have had GMs in zone with us they never did anything to assist us other than to lend moral support.

Spawn Rights

One of the rights of passage in Everquest was the obtaining of the epic weapon. This was an extremely long process that involved the camping of many rare spawns. I’ve talked in the past about playing a cleric which was actually one of the less annoying epic weapons to obtain. The worst ones relied upon steps in raid instances that were extremely rare spawns. I remember getting home from work, logging in and seeing messages in guild chat that “Pasta” was up, and everyone immediately knew that it meant we were going to the Plane of Hate that night. Magi P’Tasa was a super rare spawn on what I vaguely remember being a two week long spawn cycle buried deep within the Plane of Hate. When it was up… it became a race among all the various raid guilds on the server to see who could field a raid first and clear to it and defeat it. So many times there was a fever pitch battle to try and log people in fast enough, and get us all into Hate in order to grab the spawn rights first.

That was one of the awesome things about Xegony is that for the most part the raid guilds respected each others “spawn rights”. Meaning that if someone was in a zone, it was more or less off limits to any other guild trying to come up and muscle them out of it. So whoever gained a foothold in Hate for example, owned Hate until they were doing farming it. These farm sessions could last days at times, especially on the weekends. This however was not the case on every server. Originally I started on Veeshan, the home of the fabled Fires of Heaven raid guild. They respected no ones “spawn rights” in any form, and there were constantly tales of them steamrolling their way through a zone that someone else was currently farming to muscle through to the spawn they needed. Often times training mobs on the rival guild to keep them busy while they got what they were after. I feel like in part the reason why we have instanced dungeons in World of Warcraft, is in part because of these sort of shenanigans.

Murky Depths

The cool thing is that while all of this was going on, it was not unusual for guides and GMs to be hanging out watching the race for the spawn. I have to say the coolest instance of GM intervention I ever experienced was while I was working on my own epic weapon quest. At the bottom of Lake Rathetear was a particularly annoying step that involved farming a set of Aqua Goblins until a rare named goblin called Lord Bergurgle spawned. Like so many of the spawns in Everquest this on was based on a random chance anytime you killed the placeholder. This often meant spending hour after hour on the bottom of Lake Rathetear which was a slog of a camp because the bottom of the lake was pitch black…. with nothing other than some crumbling ruins to stare at. During one of my sessions down on the bottom of the lake a random GM popped by and spend several hours just keeping me company as we waited on the spawn. It was awesome that she was more than happy to chat away keeping a lonely cleric company while waiting on an annoying spawn.

Basically I miss this sort of interaction between the customer support staff and the player base. During these early days there was so much more cooperation between players and customer service, because it felt like we were in this together. That we were working together to make this game we both loved all the more awesome. I am not saying that CS is not doing an amazing job currently, but I miss this era of manual and personal intervention with the players. The GMs and Guides were physically in the game with you, not connected into it through a chat server in a call center somewhere. In part it was also cool that “guide robes” were something that was instantly recognizable as a person of authority. It was like a uniform that every player immediately recognized and respected. They were the in game security guards and forces of right and good. I keep hoping now that we have these smaller niche games that they will bring back something like the guide program. I think it is good for the community as a whole to have representatives in direct contact with the player base on a regular basis. If nothing else it is fun to fondly remember this era in MMOs, even if I doubt it will ever fully return. I feel like this is probably something that gets harder to support the larger the game gets.