If you chose to be Evil with a capital E you'd pick an Officially Evil race, Troll being the most reviled until the first expansion, Ruins of Kunark, when they had to cede that honor to the Iksar. Ogres came next followed by Dark Elves, who were more your suave, sinister evil masterminds. Or you could pick a good or neutral race and be Necromancer or a Shadowknight, which would mean your career would overwrite your racial heritage, a popular choice for anyone who wanted to be a Bad Gnome.
Most races had a city of their own and there were a lot of races. For maybe the first decade, most MMORPGs came with multiple races, alignments, classes and starting cities. Extensive choice was was one of the defining principles of the genre. If you picked an evil class that had to share space with goody-goodies, you'd get your own secret hideouts within the walls, often underground or in the sewers.
And you'd better have done your homework before you started. Character creation in the early days didn't mean tweaking sliders until you had something you could bear to look at. It meant getting a character you'd be able to play for more than a few sessions before you were forced to re-roll and start over.
It was entirely possible to gimp your character, that being the awkward term in common use back then. If you picked the wrong race/class combo you might not even know anything was wrong until you started to look for groups and found no-one willing to take you on.
The more immediate problem, though, came when you walked past some innocuous-looking guard standing next to a tower along the roadside out in the middle of nowhere, only to find yourself back at your spawn point, when it turned out you were the evil monster he was guarding that tower from.
In EQ, all of that was fixable over time. You might start out evil (Or good.) but you didn't have to stay that way. Every race had Faction and Faction was a Stat and one of the often-forgotten aspects of EverQuest's gameplay is that it includes a whole raft of stats that go up with use. Everyone talks about leveling up in that game but no-one talks about raising skills, even though EQ is as much skills-based as it relies on levels.
Another, mostly uncelebrated, fact about EverQuest is that at the start it was much more of a sandbox than a theme-park. There was no central storyline and questing, even though it was right there in the name, mostly seemed like an afterthought. There was a great deal of setting your own goals and working towards them and one goal a lot of players who'd picked Team Evil at the start liked to set for themselves was Getting Everyone To Like Me.
I did a bit of that. Not as much as some but enough for it to be the main thing I did for a few weeks on certain characters. My Ogre Shadowknight killed scores of corrupt guards until his faction was good enough to let him hand in their helmets for extra credit, then scores more until eventually he could stroll into the bank in North Freeport and get service like a regular citizen.
I did it partly to see if I could, partly because killing guards was great xp, and mostly because otherwise banking was a fucking nightmare. I'd have had to go all the way back to Oggok in the swamps, three or four zones away, or else to the dark elf city of Neriak, a trek to get there only to end up wandering the maze-like corridors for far too long before I figured out where I was going wrong.
Before the second expansion, Scars of Velious, which added the icebound city of Thurgadin, filled with dwarves so cut-off from civilization they'd lost most of their prejudices and would trade with anyone, Evil characters were very restricted in things like where they could bank or shop or find services of any kind. Even traveling on the roads through what looked like open countryside could be fatal. The same thing applied to Good characters in reverse, of course, but somehow it never seemed to inconvenience them nearly as much.
The difficulty was compounded by race, meaning evil humans or gnomes would get a pass in places where Ogres and especially Trolls would be killed on sight. Dark Elves flitted somewhere in the middle, their options often hugely improved by the class choices available to them. There was a very good reason why so many DEs decided to become Enchanters, a class with a whole line of spells designed to let them impersonate other races or fool people into treating them nicely.
Thurgadin was all very well but it was even more inconvenient to get to than the racial starting cities. It wasn't until the third expansion, Shadows of Luclin, opened travel gates that took us to the moon, where no-one knew or cared what your alignment was, that it became practical to stay all evil, all the time.
From then on, alignment and faction gradually lost their power and influence. Well, I say "gradually"... It was more of a landslide.
The fourth expansion, Planes of Power, didn't just add a completely neutral city, it filled that city with every conceivable service and facility, making it by far the most appealing place to set your bind spot, particularly since the expansion also came with the game's first instant, on-demand travel service. Granted, you still had to get to a physical object in the game-world, a "Book", and click on it, but there were Books outside every starting city and in plenty of other places, too, so that wasn't much of a problem.
That was, to most intents and purposes, the end of Good and Evil as a limiting factor in the game. There was and still is a residual effect - try rolling up a High Elf and strolling into Oggok and see how far it gets you - but for almost all practical purposes, it makes no difference any more. We're all murder hobos together and every newly discovered continent or plane or dimension can't tell us apart.
Planes of Power came out in 2002, a couple of years before EverQuest II appeared. You might have thought the experience the dev team had garnered by then might have led them to the understanding that, while some players quite enjoyed the challenge of a faction grind, most preferred to be able to play the game without having to prep first.
Not a bit of it. EQII launched with a hard-coded Good/Evil split that made even Classic EQ look like Hello Kitty Online. Everyone had to be either GOOD or EVIL. The big difference from the elder game was that your alignment was no longer tied to your race. You could be a good troll or an evil high elf. Unlike before, though, you couldn't be a neutral anything.
That was because in EQII your alignment was decided not by anything so crass as what you looked like. What mattered was where you lived. When you reached the end of the introduction on the Isle of Refuge, you had to choose to take ship either to Freeport or Qeynos. Going to Freeport meant you were evil. If you went to Qeynos you were good.
And don't think it wasn't going to matter much in the long run, either. Years after EverQuest had made it seamless for all races and alignments to work together, EQII decided it would be great if it wasn't only the characters who couldn't mix. How about if the players couldn't, either?
You could be in the same guild together but to form the guild everyone had to be of the same alignment and the guild hall would be in that alignment's city so good luck to anyone from the other side who joined later, trying to use the facilities. There was no mailing items to the opposition and quest credit and guild status had some sort of blocks on them, too, as I recall. Shared guild missions were supposed to be a big content driver but apparently no-one in the dev team had thought about that.
You didn't have to do that. In both PvP and PvE there was a long and complicated process you could undertake to switch sides. If you were really bloody-minded abut it, you could pause in the middle and become de facto neutral, but that only meant everyone hated you.
Was it popular? Maybe for PvP. On the PvE side of the divide, hell, no, it was not! Everyone hated it, surprise, surprise. Faction restrictions were some of the earliest to be revised and eventually removed. Even before the whole game was revamped by Scott Hartsman a year or so after launch, most of the alignment restrictions for PvE players had already melted away.
A residue remains, all the same. The two cities still nominally retain their alignments although these days there are plenty of other starting cities to pick if you want to be free of the worst of it. Those tend to lean towards one side or the other, even so.
Perhaps the greatest legacy of those bad, old days are the two mighty starting zones, Antonica and Commonlands, the former stretching out from the gates of Qeynos to the Thundering Steppes, the latter from Freeport to Nektulos Forest. Together with the cluster of very low-level zones attached to each city, these vast stretches of land kept most adventurers both busy and apart for the first twenty levels or so.
Back in 2004, I found the whole thing confusing and counter-intuitive. By inclination, I prefer to play neutral or good-leaning characters but Qeynos lagged so badly at launch I couldn't stand to be there. As I remember it, which may not be strictly accurate, Mrs. Bhagpuss and I started off trying to play in Qeynos but had to re-roll because it was just untenable. Freeport had its problems but at least it was a lot easier to move around.
That we'd also both preferred Freeport to Qeynos in EQ was probably a factor. In EQ, Freeport was more like a neutral city than an evil one. Trolls and Ogres weren't tolerated but Dark Elves and evil classes could move safely through the parts of the city not controlled by the religious factions. Qeynos was a lot less sanguine about that sort of thing and felt a lot more restrictive.
That was how we ended up playing multiple characters on both side of the ideological divide, especially once the lag got sorted out and I'd upgraded my PC. It meant I got to know both Antonica and Commonlands pretty well.
Maybe next time I'll even get around to talking about one of them.
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