Lost In Daydreams, Forgotten By Time : EverQuest

And so we come to what might be the more intriguing part of the tale. We've all heard war stories from EverQuest's early days and its meteoric rise, when it became, briefly, the most popular and celebrated MMORPG of its day, until hubris, incompetence and implacable fate dragged it down to an ignominious and devastating fall. But all of that spans less than a quarter of the twenty-one years the game has stuck around.

We hear far less about what happened after the collapse. I saw some of it, in flashes as a lightning storm, but most is as dark to me as anyone. Just a few, glowing fragments, scattered across those long, quiet years.


The Lost Age

Dragons of Norrath 

When DoN launched in February 2005 I was deep in the slough of EverQuest II's despond. It would be a few months before Mrs Bhagpuss and I returned to the cradle. When we did we found Norrath much changed.

Looking back, it's difficult to see why we bothered. Everyone we knew, pretty much without exception, had jumped ship on both games. I never found out where most of them went because, by and large, I'd kept all my relationships on a strictly in-game footing. I didn't collect real names or email addresses. When people stopped playing they stopped existing.

I had no shots of DoN at all. I had to log in my druid to go take some.

I'm happy with that decision. It was a conscious choice and, I feel even now, a necessary one. Even with a degree of distancing, those were years filled with very considerable personal drama, much of which overspilled the game into what we amusingly liked to think of as "real life".

Before we'd left for the EQII beta I'd had a spectacular falling-out with one of the key movers in our extended social circle. Mrs Bhagpuss was not on speaking terms with another. There were all kinds of complications with any number of individuals. Guild drama was a way of life back then and we had a tangled skein of inter and extra guild relationships to contend with as well.

Things in EQII hadn't been quite so extreme but drama followed us there, too. Our guild leader had a blowout in the middle of a status run one Sunday afternoon and very publicly quit the game, never to be seen again. The guild faltered on with no active leadership, bleeding membership to other guilds but mainly to other games. We struggled on until early summer, then one day the last person either of us knew in EQII announced he was quitting and we decided we might as well call it a day, too.

I don't recall whether we went straight back to EverQuest or if we tried something else first. There wouldn't have been a lot of choice in 2005. We did, however, have a choice to make on our return to EQ.

Back in May 2003, in the days when EverQuest new servers were popping up like mushrooms, a Brand New, No Transfers, Fresh, Start server called Stromm arrived. For about three months Mrs Bhagpuss and I abandoned our friends on Antonia Bayle and made a whole new set on Stromm.

Of course it was night when she got there. Possibly the darkest in-game night I have ever seen. And this at 6pm game-time...

When the time came to return to EverQuest once again, in the summer of 2005, we still had the sour taste of the previous summer our mouths. Back then, we'd taken the opportunity of a free character move Sony Online Entertainment  were offering to transfer all our characters from Ant. Bayle to Saryrn, but we knew no-one there and had no affection for the place.

It was a time when server pride and community were both very real. We'd had a very good few months on Stromm. There were no bad memories. It had been a lively yet laid-back place, full of the enthusiasm of people starting a fresh, new life with a clean slate. That's where we decided to go.

The thing was, there'd been a level cap increase and our characters hadn't reached the last one before we stopped. Dragons of Norrath was the current expansion but most of it was a long way out of our reach.

I can't remember much about what we did to level up but I do know we barely touched anything DoN had to offer. I do recall doing some faction work in the opening zone, accessed via tunnel from Lavastorm, itself revamped for the expansion. There were some instanced missions of some kind that I may have spent a little time on at some point. I definitely did enough to earn quite a lot of one of the expansion currencies, Radiant Crystals, because there were some augments I wanted.

Here's the same shot, auto-levelled to remove all the effects. Which would you rather see when you're exploring a zone where everything wants to kill you and is perfectly capable of doing it?

Some of that probably happened on a later run. It's all more than a bit vague. I do know that, by the time the next expansion arrived, we were just about ready for its opening zone, Corathus Creep, which was meant for character levels 45 to 55.

Depths of Darkhollow

I have quite a soft spot for DoD, something I doubt you'd be likely to hear from many EQ players. The aesthetic of the zones, all of which lurk in some nebulous and ill-explained subterranean nest of caverns beneath Nektulos Forest, is pearlescent and overripe, by Giger out of Lovecraft. There are gnomes because in Norrath there are always gnomes behind everything. I can still hear the relentless clockwork theme of Corathus Creep in my head.

The fights were tough but the xp was good. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I duoed there a lot for the first few weeks. We pushed as far as the next zone, Undershore, but it was too much for us. Then the rot set in. And how.

A quiet day on the beach at Undershore.

All expansions have their unique features. There's a post to be written about that and I may well get around to writing it some day. There are features that the game was waiting for, which change the way we play forever and there are features that barely get used at all. DoD had one that started out as the first and ended up as the second.

There were three major new features in total: Evolving Items, Shrouds and Monster Missions. I'll save the first two for that post, should it ever happen. The one that concerns us today is Monster Missions.

I've ranted about this before so I'll keep it short. There comes a time in every developers life when it seems like a good idea to stop players playing the classes and characters they've chosen and instead stuff them into the pantomime costume of someone or something else. It can be a fun diversion or, more commonly, a total pain in the butt.

Monster Missions should absolutely have counted as the latter. Not only did they turn entire groups into nondescript NPCs, they imposed onerous movement restrictions and provided minimal combat abilities. I never heard anyone even pretend to find them fun. It would have been just another failed and forgotten feature to stack alongside so many more had it not been for the xp.

Those don't look hallucinogenic at all...

Somehow, Monster Missions gave more xp for the time they took than anything else in the game. Literally anything. Once word on that got out, almost no-one wanted to do anything else. If you wanted a group you'd better be ready to give up playing your character because it was go monster or go solo.

Since we were only duoing or soloing, it shouldn't have mattered but it did. These things always do. A rancid stench of discontent and entitlement permeated the air. In MMORPGs, if you make something easy and accessible and give it great xp or rewards, countless players will feel they have to do it.

Some of them will be fine with that but many won't. And yet they'll do it anyway. And hate what they're doing. And hate themselves for doing it. And tell everyone who'll listen just how bad it feels and how much they hate whoever made them feel that way, which is never themselves, even though it always is.

Things went that way and we put up with it for a while and then we couldn't any more so we left. Again. Where we went I don't recall. I can only think it must have been back to EQII, although the dates don't seem to fit. Whatever, wherever, we were gone.

Lovecraft's influence is strong. Still, better him than Tolkein.

Of course, we came back, eventually. I always come back although Mrs. Bhagpuss has finally shaken herself free.

SoE nerfed the missions hard then harder until people stopped doing them. Things went back to normal. Most people just wanted an excuse to stop. The monster missions are probably still there but no-one cares. It's a vast game with a thousand dusty corners. What's one more?

Darkhollow itself, I have revisited, several times. I've done some levels on at least three characters, most recently my old Shadowknight, who did a level in Undershore a couple of years ago. I even wrote about it. I may well go there again. As I said, I'm quite fond of the place.

Prophecy of Ro

I know nothing about this expansion other than it destroyed Freeport. I wasn't there when it launched and when I came back it was already forgotten. How it was received, what people did while it was new, whether it was considered good, bad or indifferent, I have not the least idea.

What's more, I've never really taken the trouble to go look at it since. One of the huge delights of EverQuest is the way your character becomes much more powerful with levels while Norrath remains the same. It's still surprisingly possible to get out of your depth in older content but on the right class and particularly in the post-mercenary era it's possible to play tourist in places that once meant instant death.

Look! It's another Roger Dean album cover!

I have some screenshots taken in one of the zones so I must have been there at least once but I remember absoluterly nothing about it. Maybe I'll go and take a look with my Magician when she dings 100. It should be fairly safe by then.

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So much for the Lost Age. It really does live up to its name. If it hadn't been for the happy hours I spent in Corathus Creep I'd barely know it ever happened.

Next up is what the EverQuest Show calls "The Renaissance". It features two more expansions for which Mrs Bhagpuss and I returned, yet again, for one more run. Mrs Bhagpuss finally bowed out after 2007's Secrets of Faydwer and hasn't been back since. I keep plugging on although I think about the last new content I actually saw first-hand must have been in 2010's House of Thule.

Next time should see us all the way through to the end. It's two-thirds of the lifetime of the game and about as much of the content but most of it remains as mysterious to me as the dark side of Drinal, Norrath's other moon.

If anyone's actually played through any of the last ten years of EverQuest maybe you'd like to tell the class about it. I know I'm curious.

The Medium Was Tedium : EverQuest, EQ2

Wilhelm has a post up in which he asks what better PvE would look like in New Eden. He suggests that the most time/risk/reward efficient of the current options is so "deadly dull" that he "cannot bring [him]self to run more than one or two on any given day".

I can't speak to EVE but in my lengthy experience of fantasy MMOs I can attest that PvE players will put up with almost any degree of boredom and repetition if it means they increment a counter faster. Forget the more exciting, interesting or challenging alternatives.  Efficiency's what matters.

Oh, of course they will complain, bitterly and loudly, that there's no fun in it, no challenge. They'll say that anyone who does do it is lame.

None of that will stop them doing it themselves, even though they will threaten to quit because of it. This content they feel they have to do for reasons of optimum efficiency may be mind-numbingly tedious but it gets the job done and that's what counts.

Then, when the developers belatedly appreciate just how much damage the content they foolishly, thoughtlessly, recklessly or naively created is doing to the game, and decide to nerf it, those same players will threaten to quit again because they aren't allowed to do it any more.

I will cite two examples, one from EQ, one from EQ2:

It appears I have never "progressed" any of my Shrouds. I wonder why?

Monster Missions were added to EQ with Depths of Darkhollow. They were a headline feature of the game's tenth expansion. Players used a "shroud" to change into a creature or race not normally playable. Doing so, they acquired a very limited set of abilities, completely different from anything related to the character's class.

Once transformed they needed to go to a mission zone, often located somewhere inconvenient and awkward. There they would have to find a group and, using those few, very specific abilities and only those, complete a mission. The missions varied but players soon worked out which were the easy ones and which gave the best rewards.

Since Monster Missions offered the best xp/aaxp and also some handy item rewards, soon no-one was doing anything else. It became hard, then impossible to find a group willing to play as themselves. Some people absolutely loved it. Many did not.

Eventually SOE nerfed and then re-nerfed the most unbalanced of the missions. People stopped doing them and returned to playing their characters as they were originally designed to be played.

Too late for Mrs Bhagpuss and me. We were already so fed up with the dearth of regular groups we "quit" EverQuest and went back to EQ2 - which we'd left to come back to EQ only a few months before. Not the last time we pulled that switch, either.

Hall of Fame? Hall of Shame, more like!

EQ2's version of Monster Missions turned out to be the Player-Made "Dungeons" that were introduced with the Age of Discovery expansion in 2011. I really liked the Dungeon Maker. I made several dungeons with it, ran them with my characters for fun and enjoyed seeing other people run them.

There was a ranking system and some very amusing and entertaining dungeons were made by the highly creative EQ2 community. And then there was the other kind.

The dungeons gave no loot per se, only a special currency, but the mobs you killed inside them did give xp. Very good xp. At least, it turned out it was very good if the dungeon-maker stuffed a few rooms with high-value, weak mobs, all piled up to be AE'd.

The most efficient mob slaughterhouses quickly rose to the top of the Dungeon Creator rankings and for the longest time almost all you could hear in /lfg was people forming groups to speed-run them. They had no story, no dialog, no script, no entertainment value of any kind. They were the definition of repetitive tedium but they were efficient so people did them. Over and over and over again.

The real Depths of Darkhollow. Sad thing is, it was one of EQ's best expansions - apart from the Monster Missions.

The developers tweaked them and tried to make them less mindless but players kept doing them. In the end (and it took three years) SOE went for the nuclear option and removed xp from player-made dungeons altogether. After which, no-one ever ran one again.

I could come up with plenty more anecdotes like that from plenty more MMOs. Players are their own worst enemies when it comes to entertaining themselves. They would literally click on a button in an empty room for hour after hour if that gave the most xp or the most tokens. Complaining about it in general chat all the while.

You wouldn't. I wouldn't. They would. I know they would. I've seen them doing it. Often.

And I've seen the developers stopping them, eventually, every time, although rarely fast enough. As Wilhelm observes, people claim they want developers "to make PvE more challenging, dynamic, exciting" but what they actually choose to do for themselves is to make it predictable, consistent and rewarding.

I didn't grind Monster Missions or Dungeon Maker Dungeons but I've done other things just as dumb. I lied when I said I wouldn't. Everyone has his price.

What's yours?