Daline is my oldest surviving EverQuest character but she wasn't my first. That, somewhat inevitably, was a Wood Elf Ranger, name long forgotten, who stepped off the platforms in Kelethin a few minutes after I made him and was never seen again. From memory, I believe he may have survived the fall but it was night and I couldn't find the elevator (Or more likely had no idea it existed.) so, after wandering around in the dark for a while, I decided to delete him and start again.
Second time around, I chose a Human Warrior because clearly this new game I'd bought had quite a learning curve and it sounded like I needed to take the simplest option while I learned the ropes. Humans had no weird racial traits to consider, were hated by the fewest other races and all I'd have to do was hit things with a sword. How hard could it be?
At the time Humans could start in Freeport or Qeynos. I have no memory of why I picked Freeport but it was most likely because the name was easier to remember. That was certainly my logic in choosing Prexus as my first server. Most of the server names looked like someone made them up by tossing a bunch of Scrabble letters on the floor. At least I could pronounce Prexus.
I also decided to make my character female, a choice I had no idea would be controversial. Back when I was in a table-top role-playing group, several players chopped and changed between gender as we moved from game to game and no-one ever really even mentioned it. I had no idea playing a character who didn't match my real-life gender was going to be problematic.
Finally, there was the name. EverQuest had a moderately strict naming convention back then, although many players ignored it, until they got reported and found they had to pay attention after all. There were actual GMs online and they would cheerfully rename you to something of their choosing, leaving you to petition to try and get it changed again to something you could live with.
I largely endorsed that bit of petty tyranny, as I think did most players who stuck to the rules, even if right at the beginning I was willing to stretch the rules just a little myself.
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| Daline and a gnome skulking in a tower. |
I named Daline after Darlene Conner from Roseanne, a show I would have been watching at the time. Whether "Darlene" was already taken or I thought it would be too obvious, I can't remember. Maybe I just thought it sounded better, because it definitely does.
A quarter of a century later, I'm watching The Conners on Netflix, Darlene is still on TV and I'm still here, writing about EverQuest. Even playing it once in a while. Nothing changes much, does it?
As will rapidly become apparent in these posts, all my characters below the level cap are wearing whatever gear they happen to have stumbled on in the course of their adventures. I tend not to work on a look until I know it's going to last for a while and for the longest time EQ had no kind of appearance or cosmetic options at all, so most people looked like they'd dressed themselves from a dumpster, in the dark.
The weird triangle in Daline's right hand in the picture at the top of the post isn't some kind of wooden pointer or measuring device. It's a leather whip. She has a sword in the other hand because Warriors can dual wield. She was sword-and-board for a while but soloing a warrior is slow enough without that.
She's level 16 but half of those levels were done much later in her career. I believe her first run took her to about level 6 although honestly I can't remember much about it except that it was really, really slow, which is hardly surprising because I did all of it on my own.
Warriors in EverQuest are meant to group but I didn't really begin grouping until the Ruins of Kunark expansion, by which time Daline was back on the bench. In any case, I was only comfortable grouping as a healer at first. I did end up tanking for groups eventually but as a Shadowknight, not a Warrior.
Daline never did anything especially memorable. Level 16 warriors tend not to. I do have one adventure worth recording from her early days in EQ, though. It started when she would have been maybe Level 3 or 4, killing bats and orc pawns in the little strip of desert just outside Freeport's West Gate.
It was getting dark but visibility was decent there, which was more than I could say for the XP at that level, That was why I decided to take a huge risk and cross the zone line into East Commonlands, something I'd been to nervous to try up to then.
I had no idea what was out there but I didn't expect it to be pitch black.
Humans in EQ have no night vision and back in 1999, night-time in Norrath was dark. As I remember it, I got spooked by something I could hear but not see, ran for the zone line but went the wrong way, panicked and headed for the only source of light I could see, which turned out to be a small hut with a torch outside.
I scuttled into the hut and cowered there while creatures snuffled and scuffled outside. I thought I might make it safely to dawn if I just stayed still... then something attacked me. Through the wall!
I had no idea what it was. I couldn't see it, only hear it. I blindly hacked away in the dark, all the time expecting to die, which made me come out in sweat. Death was A Big Deal to me back then in EQ and remained so for the next several years, at least until they added the afterlife zone where you could go to find your lost corpses. What was that one called?
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| Screenshot taken in North Karana at night, just after it began to get slightly lighter. Human night vision still not a thing. |
After a while the attacks stopped. I'd thought maybe driven the creature off or even killed it. I'm sure there must have been a message telling me what had happened but either I had that channel switched off or I'd been too shaken up to notice.
I carried on cowering inside the hut until it got light although why I thought it would help I can't imagine. Obviously stone walls were no obstacle to these mysterious, mystical, magical creatures, whatever they were.
It worked, anyway. Nothing else came for me. When I ventured outside, I found the corpse of a Black Wolf next to the hut. One of the weakest creatures in the game and completely non-magical. As I would learn, in Norrath not all walls are equal. Some stop mobs from coming in, some don't.
I felt pretty proud of myself for not only surviving the night but killing a wolf. Turned out to be the weakest wolf in the whole of Norrath but again I didn't know thatt yet. I headed straight back to the safety of Freeport and it was a good long time before Daline went anywhere after dark again.
In fact, it wasn't long before she wasn't going anywhere, day or night, because playing a Warrior turned out to be considerably less fun than I'd been hoping. I did manage to learn some of the basics playing her but it wasn't long before I started to look for other options for my EQ future.
Even so, I didn't give up on her entirely. She has managed to rack up two days and four hours, which means I've played her for more than fifty hours altogether. That's how long it took to get her to Level 16, which sounds about right.
Soloing Daline was certainly slow but also kind of zen. I used to get her out last thing of an evening and do a little on her just to relax. That worked until she got into double figures, after which the time it took her to heal up after every fight became too tedious to enjoy.
I seem to recall that healing back to full used to take her over five minutes at Level 10, so she was good for maybe nine or ten fights an hour, which might have gotten her five per cent of a level on a good day. Maybe not as much as that.
Eventually the rules were changed and melee characters healed up in a minute or so out of combat. That's when I picked her up again and got her to where she is now. What the heck she's doing in North Karana, though, I have no idea.
She's probably going to stay there. It's a nice zone. I hope she'll be happy. At least she has the guards to talk to. And the occasional passing gnome.
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Well, that was a very cool first story! Having to wait five minutes to regen health seems insanely slow now. Also, I assume you can check your character creation date in EQ? I was wondering how you were going to know the chronological order of character creation because I wouldn't be able to remember in any of the MMOs I played and none of them have a feature like this.
ReplyDeleteYep, you can type /played and it gives you the date the character was created and how many days and hours you've played. I had to log all 25 in and do that because I could remember the order of the first half dozen or so but not after that. I was surprised by when I'd made some of them - it didn't always tie in with my memory.
DeleteThis is very cool! I love the idea for this.
ReplyDeleteMaking me nostalgic enough to consider something like it for Asheron's Call, although of course none of those characters are now surviving, I do remember what I did for my first one well enough to talk about it.
AC was also the game that taught me that min-maxing was a thing.
The most interesting thing about writing these posts (I'm up to #9 now) is that I barely have to look anything up. It seems I can remember a great deal of detail about my experiences with these characters, considerably more than I can about things I did in real life around the same time. I'm not sure that's a good thing but it certainly says a lot about how intense it all felt back then.
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