Everquest Archives - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Doubling Down

February 12, 2015 by Belghast

Still Frustrated

Yesterday I broke my self appointed rules and made two posts because I felt the news warranted it. I said my peace but the problem is… I am still frustrated this morning. At the time of posting yesterdays blog piece I really only knew about a few of the people who were let go. As last night wound its way onwards, more names trickled out and at this point I am absolutely shocked by the scope. While I am not sure about the numbers, it feels like roughly half of the folks I was aware of over there were let go. Granted the actual numbers could be anywhere, but I am basing it simply on the faces that have shown up on twitter saying they were no longer Daybreak employees, versus the ones that have said they still are. In any case this will be a massive blow to Everquest, Everquest II, Everquest Landmark and whether or not we will ever actually get Everquest Next. For awhile on Aggrochat we have joked about Next being vaporware, and that we would only ever get Landmark… but now I am starting to really wonder if that is closer to the truth.

Everquest will always hold a special place in my heart because it was my first footsteps into the MMO world. Similarly I am drawn to Everquest II in ways that I cannot quite understand, and while I go for large swaths of time without playing, I often return to it was the gaming equivalent of “comfort food”. It is this strange mix of a world that I am absolutely in love with, and a combat system that I hate beyond words. If I had to create a list of “favorite games that I am not playing” I would put Everquest II at the top of that list… so I guess I ultimately am part of the problem. I love this world but I am not inhabiting it on a nightly basis, and as such not giving it money to grow. I’ve bought into Landmark and H1Z1 but I am not really playing those either. I remember feeling the same way when City of Heroes closed its doors, that I had so many fond memories… but that I had also ultimately moved past that game as well. I guess we want the things we once loved and enjoyed to stay protected in a bubble forever, never to change… but when we move on are we not also ultimately to blame?

Doubling Down

Before the events of yesterday I had a topic kicking around in my head about the worlds that we play. I am not sure how the events of yesterday feed into the narrative, but I am going with it in any case. I feel as though the era of the “new mmorpg” is all but over. There will of course be new games that identify with the “mmo” ideals, but they won’t be quite the same as the worlds we have had had in the past. I feel like we are going to see a lot more games like Destiny, that is “mmo-lite” or another genre with mmo features. I feel like the worlds that were crafted during the golden age of massively multiplayer online role-playing game launches, are the worlds we will have to live with for better or worse. When Blizzard cancelled Project Titan, we can look at that in so many different ways. We could say that it was a sign that MMOs were dying, and that they no longer believed in the genre. We could however take that as a sign that they believed that the worlds we had already were worth saving.

So many of the games that we love are not broken toys, at least not yet. Each of them if given the devotion and the development resources could be transformed into a truly magical place. I am looking at the transformation of Final Fantasy XIV from 1.0 awkwardness to 2.0 and beyond splendor as proof that a game can change for the better. I’ve played each of the major MMOs for some length of time, and have experienced that each have exactly the same problem. How do they keep the player engaged on a daily basis, rather than in bursts of activity each time new content is released? I feel the problem is that games right now are mired in the construct of expansion releases, pooling up major features until they can sell another box of the game. This means the best features tend to either get bottled up for years time, or never actually make it into the game at all.

The episodic construct is a bit better, but you have to be careful that you are not adding “expiring” content into your game, making players feel rushed to somehow grind through it all before the next patch hits. The problem I had with the Living Story in Guild Wars 2 was that when I fell behind, I didn’t feel like there was a point to actually try and catch up… since I had missed so much already. The fact that the content was expiring made it feel less “real” to me… that they weren’t permanently improving the game, but instead running a series of limited time events. I feel like the shift needs to be moved away from both of these constructs and instead the focus placed on fleshing out the world. Do you know how frustrating it is to me in World of Warcraft that there are five portals below Wyrmrest Temple but only two of them go anywhere? Each world we play is littered with these forgotten expansion ideas, and all I really want is for a game world to quit teasing us and start living up to its full potential. Now is the time for these companies to double down on the content they have, fix the issues with their game systems… and try and make their games worth our copious time and devotion.

A Simple Night

Because of the news yesterday, and because of other events leading me to question myself and my connection to other people… I was not in the best of places emotionally last night when I got home. I have to say my mood was improved by hanging out with my extremely awesome free company in Final Fantasy XIV. For a few nights I had promised to help my friend Solaria work on knocking out some stuff, since she was fairly new to 50 and in doing so also spent a good deal of time running dungeons with Thalen and Asha. I have not had a night where we tore through multiple dungeons in a night, and I have to say it was good for the soul. Granted I felt a bit wobbly, since I have not really tanked much of anything other than our raids, and dungeon tanking ends up so drastically different. That said we managed to unlock a few dungeons for both Thalen and Solaria, and in the process get some Tomestones of Soldiery and Poetics.

I’ve missed logging in, getting pulled into a group and then spending the rest of the night tromping through dungeons. It is like connecting with my most basic instincts of trying to make sure everything in the dungeon hates me equally. I really enjoy the pace of Final Fantasy XIV, and its particular brand of tanking. The Warrior just “feels” right, and I am hoping I will be equally at home with the Dark Knight. If nothing else I will always have the Warrior to fall back on if the Dark Knight ends up not being the class I have wanted all along. I know Thalen has several more dungeons yet to unlock to qualify for high level roulette, so I am going to try and force myself to build groups more often. I get stuck in my own little world, and spend most of my time soloing… but I know when I do group content I feel so much better at the end of the night. While last night did not cure me completely… it did make me feel significantly better.

Night Falls

February 11, 2015February 11, 2015 by Belghast

Unfortunate Bonus Round

This is going to be a bit of an oddity for me, I am breaking my normal one post per day rule. I feel like the gravity of the situation warrants it, because right now I am feeling so many different emotions at the same time. By now most of you will have heard the news that I believe first broke over on the newly erected Massively OP website. Today Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment has chosen to make some sweeping cuts to staff. Among the individuals caught in this madness were none other than Dave “Smokejumper” Georgeson and and Linda “Brasse” Carlson. I cannot fathom a chain of consequences that would lead to this happening, but I will get into that later. For me and many others these two individuals along with Scott Hartsman before he left to join Trion… were the face of the Everquest franchise. They were the spirit of the game, and the lifeblood that kept the player base constantly engaged, because never once did you question their sincerity or devotion to making the game world awesome.

Last Tuesday when the news broke that SOE was to be no more, and they would be taking up the new name of Daybreak Game Studio I tried to keep things in stride. After all I had gotten used to Everquest transitioning from Verant to being called Sony Online Entertainment hadn’t I? When I found out they had been purchased by what seemed to be a cold and faceless financial holdings company, I tried to keep a positive tone in that it seemed that they were holding most of the companies rather than chopping them up into pieces. I held in the back of my mind the possibility that the future was in fact going to be positive, that maybe out from under Sony they could reach previously locked off markets like the Xbox One. After all this same company owned both Rhapsody and Fiverr, surely they knew what they were doing right?

Night Falls

Today it seems that my worst fears have been realized, and that things really can’t stay the same. As online gamers we get lost in the worlds created by the games that we love to play. Part of that world are the names and faces of the individuals who act as the conduit between our normal mundane lives, and the magical realms we spent our free time in. At least in a small part they act as civil servants to the virtual cities we inhabit. As we watch public presentations and read patch notes and press releases, it is amazing just how quickly we can rattle off the names of the key players that are relaying the information to us. Even though we may never know them, we develop an almost personal relationship as they take the stage to give us tidbits of information about the future state of “our” game.

The problem is… we get extremely close to these personalities, so that when one leaves either by their own hand, or by circumstances the shock waves reverberate through the community. Today a mighty shock wave happened, and I am still not quite sure how to talk about it with any intelligence. For many years, Brasse has been the public face of the Everquest community team, and Smokejumper the face of the future of that franchise. It was impossible to watch either of them and not see just how excited they were to be representing this game that they too loved. I find it exceptionally hard to try and imagine a future that does not involve them, and I have to say a lot of my faith that there will even be an Everquest going forward is more than a little tarnished.

The Survivors

This has been the month of senseless corporate action. First with AOL killing off their blogs, and now the selling of of Sony Online Entertainment. I am deeply concerned about the future of these games, in part because the gravitas of Sony… allowed for SOE to be a little “funky”. They devoted time to building a lot of unique and quirky features that we were not likely to see come out of any other company. Do you think that any other company would have given us something truly strange like SOEmote? Sure I never used it, but I thought the tech was extremely cool especially for the roleplaying community. The tools that I did love, like the robust housing system and the dungeon builder… likely would not have come to fruition in a company not quite so willing to chase rabbit trails.

All of this said… I think it is important to also think about the people who were left behind. They are reeling from the layoffs, and seeing their friends gone. Having been through more than one layoff, it completely changes the feel of the office. Every action becomes questioned, and every motive suspicious, making it almost impossible to focus on doing the excellent job that the “citizens” are expecting you to do. It is easy to say you are done with the Everquest franchise, because of these rather rash actions… but in truth you are just going to punish the people who are still there, still trying to create the game worlds you love. Hopefully we can all take a deep breath, grieve the loss, and try and figure out how to move on without being bitter. I really hope this next week gives us some really good news, because this month so far has turned out to be a fairly tragic one.