EverQuest In Twenty-Five Characters

This year we celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of one of the most influential MMORPGs of all-time: EverQuest. The actual anniversary happened all the way back in March, EQ having originally launched on 16 March 1999, but Daybreak Games, current owner of the IP, which they manage under the auspices of their sub-studio Darkpaw, chose to designate 2024 The Year of Darkpaw, mostly because it's also the twentieth anniversary of EQ's successor, EverQuest II, so I didn't feel there was any need to rush to print about it.

Indeed, I haven't done much to acknowledge the anniversary at all. Both games have been running year-long promotions in-game involving freebies and special events of all kinds but about all I've managed to to do is log in a few times to pick up a hat or a pet here and there. It's not like me to turn down free stuff but somehow I just haven't had it on my radar most months.

I did manage to go see the big tower they put up in the Desert of Ro. I even did the first instance inside. It was fun and all but I haven't been back for more. 

Part of that is because I really haven't been feeling it for Norrath lately, although even that doesn't entirely paint the full picture. I haven't been feeling it for MMORPGs in general. It's not that I don't still enjoy playing. It's more that I can't summon up the enthusiasm for putting in the hours it takes to get anything of substance done in the blasted things, especially the older ones. It does take a lot of commitment to play an MMORPG and I'm not sure I have it in me any more.

Then again, this is the twenty-fifth anniversary w're talking about. Even at my advanced age, that's well over a third of my life. It wouldn't be surprising if my enthusiasm was beginning to wear a little thin.

Really, it's amazing I still have any interest in MMORPGs at all. I've had several equally overriding enthusiasms in my life, things I considered defined me at the time - dancing, going to gigs, hitch-hiking, partying, writing poetry, playing guitar... I don't do any of them any more. Most, I only kept up for a few years. 

Playing EverQuest was once one of those defining obsessions. It isn't now but unlike all the others, it remains something I still do. Not very seriously and not all that often, but I definitely don't not play. (And EQII, which I imagine I'll get around to celebrating properly when its anniversary arrives later in the year, is theoretically my main MMORPG once more. At least, it's the one I'm paying for...)

EverQuest has been some kind of constant in my life for the whole of this millennium. Even if I'm not as connected to it as I once was, it would be very poor manners of me not to acknowledge this very important marker in its storied history. But how to do it?

All the way back at the start of the year, I was thinking about that. At first I assumed I'd do something around the actual date but then it occurred to me I might be better off waiting until the summer. Specifically, Blaugust.

Every year I've done Blaugust it's been both a pleasure and a pressure. Even though it hasn't been the stated purpose of the event for years, I still like to stick to the original concept of a post a day for the whole month. How much fun that's been has varied quite a bit from year to year but by far the least-pressured of all was the time I chose to post my twenty-five favorite albums of the millennium alongside my regular posts.

Those posts had the multiple benefits of being well-defined, relatively concise and re-reassuringly linear. I made the list well in advance, wrote a few of the posts in July, so I had about a week's worth in hand when Blaugust began and then knocked out some more as and when the mood took me, which was pretty often since writing about my favorite music is one of my favorite pastimes.

Twenty-five albums turned out to be more than enough to fill in the days when I was too busy to write a proper post. I was still counting down the top ten well after Blaugust ended and I never did write the final post for my #1 album (Lana del Rey's Norman Fucking Rockwell, of course.), mostly because I wasn't convinced I'd be able to do it justice.

I started to wonder what I could find twenty-five of for EverQuest to do something similar. It seemed like too much of a synchronicity to ignore: Twenty-five posts for twenty-five years. Twenty-five posts about what, though? There had to be a theme.

My first thought was zones but then Wilhelm started his 25th anniversary series for which he re-visited all the starting areas and low-level zones he remembered from his time in the game. I could easily have come up with a different twenty-five zones - there are almost 900 of them after all - but still, it seemed like a bit of a cop-out.

I thought about what might have been the most important things for me in EverQuest over the years. The world and therefore the zones would be right up there at the top, along with the people I met back in the days (Years.) when I did actually meet people in MMORPGs, but ahead of all those would be my characters.

My own characters are the most important factor binding me to any MMORPG I play. Without a connection to them it doesn't much matter how compelling the world is nor how many interesting people I meet (Real or fictional.). My characters stand somewhere between beloved pets, imaginary childhood friends and shards of myself. They aren't me but they're part of me, somehow. If I can find a character that works, I'm likely to stick around longer and come back more often.

More importantly for the purposes I had in mind, my characters also represent slices of time spent in the game. In recent years I've tended to make and play just one character in most MMORPGs, largely because changing fashions in game development have made playing multiple characters increasingly redundant. Back in the day, though, I used to spin up new characters like changing hats.

I was pretty sure I must have at least twenty-five EQ characters about whom I could come up with a few hundred words each for a post. Back in February (That's why there's snow in the background of all the mug shots.) I logged in all my EQ accounts and all my EQ characters to take screenshots and make notes with a view to doing something with the information when Blaugust rolled in.

In total there were fifty-two who seemed notable enough to consider but twenty of those belonged to Mrs Bhagpuss. As I've often explained, we had a confusing history of account-sharing and swapping at one time. That still left me with more than enough of my own. I winnowed them down to the requisite twenty-five by the simple process of checking which I'd played the most, something you can do in game by typing /played.

Once I had twenty-five names, I wasn't sure how to order them. The obvious choice was by how many hours they'd racked up but some of them had been Bazaar traders, left on overnight for weeks or months at a stretch. Others had been played intensely for a short time, making them more interesting to write about than their brief /played record might suggest.

I considered playing favorites as I'd done with the albums, a count-down to my favorite of all time. That might have been fun and it would have worked, too - if I'd known which my favorite was. 

In the end I thought about why I was doing the whole thing in the first place; to celebrate twenty-five years of EverQuest. The most meaningful way to express that through the characters I'd played would surely be to take them in chronological order. That way there might be a chance some kind of historical perspective, even a narrative of sorts, might emerge.

As I finally come to start writing those posts, I think now that might be wishful thinking but I guess we're all about to find out. 

In that spirit, I give you my EverQuest in Twenty-Five Characters and may Tunare help us all!