Fifteen: EverQuest II

Sometime round about now, approximately, give or take a day, marks the fifteenth anniversary for EverQuest II. As Wilhelm explains, the exact date is in mild dispute.

I've been playing the game a little longer even than that, although once again I can't give an exact date. Mrs Bhagpuss and I decamped from EverQuest to join the EQII beta in either late August or early September of 2004 along with several friends from the guild we were in at that time.

We stuck it out there until launch, playing the beta "as live" through numerous changes, some of them major, not all of them wise. It was probably then that I came to believe, as I still do now, that many MMORPGs reveal a version of their best selves in beta.

Not that there weren't technical issues. In very late beta, no more than a week or two before launch, the game suffered rubber-banding so bad as to render it virtually unplayable. And yet we still played. We were that much in love with what we imagined it could become.

I've played a number of astonishingly broken MMORPG betas, where the promise was that a "miracle patch" at launch would somehow fix everything. The original FFXIV was the poster child for that. In all those years the only time I've ever seen such a patch actually happen was EQII.

The game was very far from perfect when it launched but all of that was down to a series of misguided design choices. The technical problems that bedevilled late beta right up to the moment the sun went dark vanished when the game went Live.

Although the game ran well enough, the first year was still very rough. Coming off a five year run as creators of the West's best-selling and most successful MMORPG, a game that had already lasted longer than they ever expected and which showed little sign of slowing down, Sony Online Entertainment attempted to do two things with their sequel. They tried to build in safeguards to prevent all of the customer service issues that had so dogged the original and they tried to future-proof the look of the new game so it wouldn't date as quickly and badly as its ancestor.

The result was a game that handcuffed players to a series of protective procedures that made gameplay stilted and frustrating. It also ran badly and looked worse on anything less than a state-of-the-art gaming PC. My modest rig struggled any time I was grouped and overheated and crashed if I was crazy enough to take on a dungeon run.

Still, Mrs Bhagpuss and I carried on playing, even though in the end we were almost the only members of our EQ guild who made the transition. The handful of players who came with us lasted no more than a few weeks before drifting back to EQ or on to the recently-released new sensation, World of Warcraft.

We joined a new guild and for a while things were lively as we explored the new lands and became enmeshed in the game's exceptionally needy and co-dependent tradeskill system. The pressure of having to spend hours at the crafting tables, churning out interim widgets for other crafters, drove several people to quit but the guild stuttered along into the early spring, until one Sunday afternoon, in the middle of a guild event, our guild leader announced he'd had enough.

He quit on the spot, logged out and we never saw or heard of him again. In a very short time the guild was dead and within a few more weeks there was barely anyone left playing that we knew at all. Mrs Bhagpuss and I hung on a little longer, until the final person left on either of our friends lists anounced he was moving on. Then we, too, left.

And that might have been that, had it not been for Scott Hartsman, riding in on his charger, sweeping away much of the clutter, dismantling the barricades that prevented EQII from flourishing, giving the game a second chance. It wasn't quite the spectacular re-invention Square Enix funded for FFXIV but it wasn't that far from it.

The EverQuest II that Scott rebuilt was scarcely the same game. Out went much of the forced grouping and most of the nannying restraints. In came solo content and choice. Players were able to interact socially and practically because they chose to, not because the game made them.

Best of all, the passive-aggressive crafting system got an extreme makeover that laid down the foundations that would eventually turn EQII's tradeskill offer into a gold standard for the genre. Few MMOPRPGs get a Hail Mary pass the way EQII did but even fewer catch that ball and run with it the way EQII has.

Fifteen years later, EverQuest II has grown into one of the broadest, deepest, richest gaming experiences you could wish for. It has so much quality content for adventures, explorers, crafters and decorators it would take literally years to do justice to it all. There's been talk around the blogosphere lately of playing just five games in a year: with EQII you could realistically play just one game for five years.

EverQuest II had a very unfortunate start. Not only did its developers make a number of deeply flawed decisions over the design, it also managed to launch directly on top of what would turn out to be a paradigm shift for the genre. WoW, Blizzard's cultural juggernaut, changed the MMOPRG landscape for a decade. It was more than most games could do to compete. EQII did well just to survive.

There have been plenty of times when I thought the game was on the verge of going under, moments when I wondered if it had another six months left in it. That it still remains popular and successful enough to justify annual expansions and to be considering holding fan festivals again is nothing short of astounding.

And yet here we are, celebrating fifteen years with a great in-game event that, yesterday, was drawing enough players to pop additional zones even on my low population server, Skyfire. More about that in another post. Next month (guaranteed to arrive before the 31st of December, according to the pre-order promo) we get the sixteenth expansion, Blood of Luclin. I wouldn't bet against a seventeenth next year. Indeed, I'd bet on it.

Even I can't imagine EQII lasting another fifteen years but perhaps, if we're very lucky, we might see the game hit twenty to match EQ's achievement earlier this year. Fingers crossed for five more years!



(IntPiPoMo count 47)