The 24 Year News Cycle

It's been a very long time since I last logged into EverQuest but I'm by no means done with the game. I even have a return strategy of sorts.  

Daybreak's free to play offer usually rolls along a few expansions behind the current endgame. Currently it's at 2019's Torment of Velious, which was added last summer. This year, most likely, the F2P package will expand to include 2020's Claws of Veeshan and then in 2024 non-paying players should gain access to 2021's Terror of Luclin, the last expansion to raise the level cap. It went up by five levels to 120. Free access to that expansion would be a natural re-entry point. 

I still enjoy leveling in EQ. It's my main motivation for taking another turn around the Norrathian block, other than making new characters on new servers, which I also still enjoy once in a while. The last time I played for an extended period was when I was raising my Magician to the then-cap of 115. It was quite hard work but I had fun doing it.

Of course, I could just buy the latest expansion, which would include every previous one, but that would require both a degree of commitment and a level of impatience for playing EQ that I simply don't have any more. I don't feel that way about any mmorpg these days, I'm happy to say.  

Wilhelm recently posted his thoughts about the success or otherwise of the genre's move to a broadly free to play model and I commented that, for me at least, the change has been a complete success. One of the things I most appreciate about it has been the way it's reduced my desire to play any one particular game. I feel now that I can move comfortably from one to another at will, always knowing I can drop back in on a whim at any time. It's an approach that fits my mercurial personality a lot more comfortably than the old lock-in ever did.

I'm very happy to wait a year or three to get to content I'm interested in because I have many other options now. I also feel reasonably confident most of the games will still be there when I feel like coming back to them. The flip side of the coin we were tossing around in a recent post on the extraordinary length of time it takes to develop an mmorpg is that once the games are out finally there they tend to stick around. Mmorpgs do go dark all the time but a lot more seem to just keep on going, EverQuest being the prime example.

EverQuest will twenty-four years old this month. There are going to be some celebrations, naturally, although I don't think anyone's going to claim any special significance for the twenty-fourth anniversary. That's going to come next year, when the game turns twenty-five.

A quarter of a century in continuous operation is a real milestone. It's a given that no-one on the team that made the original game had any idea it would last this long. As I remember it, John Smedley himself only gave it three years, with an outside chance of five, which is how we came to have the sequel, EverQuest II as early as 2004. Sony Online Entertainment believed they'd need a follow-up to capitalize on the unexpected success of the original a lot sooner than actually proved to be the case.

EQII itself hits a very significant marker next year, turning twenty years old in December 2024, meaning Daybreak is going to have to celebrate two major anniversaries in one calendar year. The EverQuest Show asked Darkpaw's's Head of Studio Jenn Chan about it in an interview I read yesterday.

When it comes to anything that hasn't already been announced in the 2023 Roadmap, I think it would be fair to say that Jenn is keeping her cards very close to her chest. I've seldom heard anyone stonewall so determinedly, although she really didn't have to try too hard, given the exceptionally gentle and respectful questioning she was facing. That's not to say there was nothing of substance in the interview. On the contrary, if you're the kind of person who revels in technical detail concerning the back-end operations that keep a game built on a decades-old code base viable, there's plenty to hold your interest.

She goes into the backgrounds of both the recent switch to 64-bit, the Direct X 11 port and the upcoming re-write of the UI Engine, explaining why they were deemed necessary and how they'll improve the player experience. It's useful knowledge and as an executive who's arrived in her post via a route involving more of a technician's journey than most, her enthusiasm for revealing the mechanics of the process is plain to see.

Gently pressed to offer up some firm information on either the imminent arrival of new TLP (Time-Locked Progression) and TLE (Time-Locked Expansion) servers for EQ and EQII respectively, she's much less forthcoming. She confirms the TLE server will use a PvP ruleset, with a few tweaks: "it will be a similar experience to Tarinax on Day 1, but with the PVP writs and server specific rewards. So it will be starting from fresh, we’re going back to classic to the Shattered Lands era." Not much there we didn't already know and probably nothing to trouble most EQII players other than the PvP hardcore.

For EQ's new TLP server, due in May, there seems to be something a lot more significant yet to be revealed: "it’s going to be an experimental year. We’re trying something that we’ve never really done before, and if it works out, we may introduce some of it to live servers. But that’s all I’m going to tell you right now until we released the big article with all the details." It's an announcement of an announcement. Wake me up when we get there.

As for the plans for next year's big anniversaries, Jenn has little to offer beyond a commitment to make it worth the wait:

EQ Show: That’s a big year. Are you guys planning to celebrate this big milestone?

JCHAN:
YES.

EQ Show:
That’s all you’re going to give me?

JCHAN:
That’s all I’m going to give you for now.

EQ Show:
Is it a big plan or a little plan?

JCHAN:
There are big plans.

After that, it's the usual retrenchment into praise for what the franchise is really all about (Spoiler - it's "The Community". It's always "The Community" with some people, isn't it?) and some stuff about the long-delayed EQII Swag Store, of all things. I'm guessing that's a community thing too. It's certainly nothing I've ever given a moment's thought.

Finally, Fading, the EverQuest Show's interviewer, gets around to asking Chan the question we've all been waiting for; the question everyone wants a real answer to but which no-one ever gets: “What are the plans to expand the franchise?” Do we get a meaningful answer for once?

Do we hell. 

CHAN:
So we’re definitely always talking about expanding the franchise, expanding the IP. But we’re just not ready to announce anything just yet. But definitely some serious conversations going on right now.

I guess it's better than no conversations going on right now, eh? Or frivolous ones about things that are never going to happen in a million years. It's not like that's ever happened before, right?

Anyway, there's the interview, for what it's worth. I confess I only read the transcript. I didn't watch the video. I don't have time for that. I'm not Tobold, ffs! So if anything's revealed in the nuances of conversation, I'll have missed it.

The whole thing did have one effect on me, other than to create a sense of generalized, non-specific anticipation; it made feel like logging into EverQuest again.I guess we can chalk that up as another win for Jenn Chan. She may not tell us much but what she does, she sells better than most.

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 Seven Ages of Norrath

I stole the graphic at the top of this post from The EverQuest Show, where there's an excellent post breaking down EverQuest into a sequence of developmental phases. I found myself in broad agreement with most of the commentary there and I thought it might be interesting (to me!) to count down all the expansions from a personal perspective.

Classical Age:

Classic - It's funny how we don't have a proper name for the initial release of any MMORPG. "Vanilla" and "Classic" seem to be the accepted terminology but of course no-one playing at the time would ever have dreamed of calling the game anything of the kind. I only barely scrape in to the true "Classic" period, not having started until November 1999, by which time the game had been running for six months.

To listen to people talk now you'd think it was a prelapsarian paradise but by the time I arrived "Bored 50s" was already a meme. Down in the newbie trenches where I was, "twinking" was considered a major social issue, along with the overcrowding that sometimes made it hard even to find mobs to kill, far less grind. The main reason I moved to the Test server within weeks of starting was because I'd heard it was much quieter there and had double xp. From a safe distance we may romanticize the slow gameplay of the early days but at the time many players were willing to do just about anything to speed things up.

It can't have been that bad, though, because I was hooked. It was the virtual world I'd been imagining for a couple of decades, a place to immerse myself in a new and magical life. Did I know it was going to last for decades? If I had, would I have been delighted or terrified?

Ruins of Kunark - When RoK appeared I'd been playing for almost six months. Mrs. Bhagpuss and I had individual accounts and even a PC each to play on. No more taking turns, looking over each other's shoulders, backseat driving.

I had characters on a bunch of servers but with Kunark I made an Iksar Shadowknight on yet another. I really enjoyed the whole Iksar experience. The race was incredibly well documented compared to anything I'd seen in EverQuest before. They also had four full size zones as starting areas and a vast, confusing, labyrinthine city, Cabilis. Just playing an Iksar was like a whole new game.

I think my Iksar got to about level twelve before it all just got too difficult. Everyone hated him. It was wearing. I was also playing my Druid, who was in the mid-teens, and pretty soon she was my focus character. I spent a lot of time with her in Lake of Ill Omen, where I learned to group properly at last. Fun times at the Sarnak fort. I still miss those Saturday mornings.

Scars of Velious - Velious was an unusual expansion in that it had a clear starting point in the mid levels. Most expansions either begin at the bottom or the top; for SoV you needed to be about level thirty. The six months between Kunark and Velious hadn't quite been enough to get my druid that far. She'd done about a dozen levels by then. A level every couple of weeks was about my average, playing forty-plus hours a week. Different times.

At level twenty-eight she was just about able to get groups in Iceclad Ocean although she wasn't anyone's first pick. I spent many happy hours in pick-up groups outside The Tower of Frozen Shadows but it would be some time before I ventured inside (on an infamous Guild Raid that barely managed to get to the third floor. Come to think of it, we might have wiped on the second...).

Mostly I soloed. I spent a lot of time making runs to the dwarven ice city of Thurgadin, where I bought velium weapons, which I then hawked around South Karana for considerable profit. I also liked to take brand new starting characters on a wanderjahr all the way to Thurgadin just to prove I could do it. Some of them may still be there.

Shadows of Luclin - I wasn't around for the launch of SoL, which may have been just as well. It was rocky, or so I heard. I was off playing Dark Age of Camelot but when the novelty of that wore off (quite fast) I drifted back, followed by Mrs Bhagpuss, and we re-invested ourselves on the moon.

If Kunark was Lake of Ill Omen, Luclin was Paludal Caverns. In those days there always seemed to be a ghetto zone, where the dregs of society gathered to sop up what was believed to be the best xp for the least risk. I'd loved LoIO but I loathed PC. It was dark, dank, ugly and loud. My prevailing memory isn't of the gameplay or even the appaling behavior of the players - it's those endlessly looped, yelping sound samples.

After a while, when we'd levelled some more, Paludal gave way to Dawnshroud Peaks, a wide-open, sunlit savannah where I spent an inordinate amount of time. I hunted rockhoppers and zelniaks and lived in wolf form because that way half the wildlife ignored me.

The other defining trope of SoL was The Bazaar. It was supposed to be part of the expansion at launch but it was months before EverQuest's trading post/broker system worked properly. It hadn't even gotten started by the time I came back to the fold. Once it was up and running, though, it all but took over my life. There was a point when I spent almost all my time scouring NPC vendors for things to buy for pennies and resell on my Bazaar trader at huge profit. Mrs Bhagpuss and I both left our PCs on 24/7 for months (years, probably), our traders bringing the money in overnight before we logged on and went out to re-stock them in the day. An odd way to play an MMORPG.

Golden Age

Planes of Power - When the books on their stone pillars began to appear all over Norrath in the run-up to PoP there was widespread speculation on what it might mean. The end of life in Norrath as we'd known it, it turned out. Shadows of Luclin had introduced a form of "fast" travel with the Wizard Spires and The Nexus but there weren't that many of them and they only fired up once every fifteen minutes. There was a PoP book in almost every zone and all you had to do was click it to find yourself transported to the Plane of Knowledge.

Luclin had already changed the way the game was played with the introduction of Shadowhaven and The Bazaar, zones where NPCs were universally racially tolerant, meaning good and evil characters alike could trade and mingle without fear or restriction. PoP took that to the next level, creating an entirely safe, instantly accessible zone where players could find all possible services, along with plenty of space to socialize.

For many years everything began in Plane of Knowledge. Even today it's the game's social center. By this time I was running with both a guild and a custom channel crew and PoK was where we met up and decided what to do before we headed out. Over time it would also become the place we bought KEI and Temp and all the other player-cast buffs without which half the population of EverQuest came to consider combat unthinkable.

For many EQ players, Planes of Power recalls the heyday of raiding. Not for me, although it is where I draw much of my minimal personal knowledge of the raid experience, because it was also the era of pick-up raids. I chain-healed a few of those and it was... well, something I'm glad I can say I've done but would be happy never to have to do again.

No, my overriding memory of Planes of Power is the shopping. The endless round, every blasted day, of all those hundreds of NPC vendors in PoK and Plane of Tranquility, hunting for stock for my Bazaar trader. I made a lot of money but in the end it wore me out.

Legacy of Ykesha - LoY was the first of EQ's mini-expansions. Sony Online Entertainment didn't even call it an "expansion". It was, officially, an "extension", although that nomenclature never caught on.

I liked LoY a lot. I made a froglok on a fresh server even though I was one of the many absolutely outraged by the eviction of the trolls from Grobb. I may even have signed a petition. I hated the way the frogloks blurp and blorp and do backflips so that character never got played much. I can't even remember what class it was, let alone the name. LoY also introduced the first non-horse mount, the peculiar Drogmor, which everyone had to have. I got one for my necromancer but all my other characters stuck with their ponies.

LoY was another mid-level expansion, the new zones beginning at around level thirty and going steadily up to the cap from there. The Wikipedia entry is very negative on that content, saying the new zones "were generally received as very uninspired and added little to the lore of Norrath". I'd strongly dispute that. While it's true that the Gulf of Gunthak and the rest may not have gone down particularly well at the start, over time they became busy, popular levelling zones. I spent a great deal of time there, on the boats, down the tunnels, battling pirates and Lovecraftian fishmen. Some very good times indeed, and pretty darned scary, too.

Lost Dungeons of Norrath - If I had to pick one favorite out of all EQ's expansions I think it would have to be LDoN. It was EQ in concentrated form, possibly the most formalized and directed expansion the game ever had (The Serpent's Spine runs it a close second).

The aptly-named expansion consists entirely of instanced dungeons. It ought to have been one of my least favorite but instead of fighting the concept I went with the flow and found a whole new way of playing. LDoN is famous as the expansion that taught casuals how to group effectively. In some ways it was one vast tutorial. I learned more about playing my class well in a group in six months of LDoN than I learned in all the years before or since.

What's more, I watched many other players develop and change from nervous, hesitant, low-skill performers into confident, competent colleagues anyone would be happy to have in their group. I can't really say why those particular dungeons were so efficient at turning solipsistic soloists into team players but that's what they did.
 
Discord Age

Gates of Discord - And then it all fell apart. Gates of Discord is quite possibly the most destructive expansion ever unleashed on any MMORPG (although World of Warcraft's Cataclysm might want to dispute that honor).

2004 was always going to be a tough year for EverQuest, what with the upcoming EverQuest II scheduled to split the playerbase and Blizzard's as-yet untested competitor waiting in the wings, but there was no need to worry about any of that; the EQ team was perfectly capable of shooting itself in the foot without any outside help. In fact, all the "help" needed was very much coming from the inside as various factions wrestled for control, all at the expense of the game and its players.

The version of Gates of Discord we got was horrifically difficult. It was years before we found out why; it was originally meant to come with a ten level cap increase. Without those extra ten levels much of the content verged on the impossible and almost none of it was fun. Guilds broke themselves against it and broke up with many top-tier raiding guilds leaving the game altogether for the more fruitful fields of WoW's beta.

Strangely, I quite liked GoD. Yes, it was terrifyingly difficult but for a while I was one of the handful of people trying to cajole friends and guildies into making a push into the lower foothills. We all died. A lot. Many of us just trying to get there. I still quite enjoyed it.

Omens of War - By the time the delayed OOW arrived in mid-September it was too late for me and many of my in-game friends. Most were considerably less committed to EQ than they had been; some had given up and weren't logging in at all.

A few, myself and Mrs Bhagpuss among them, had received invites to the EQII beta by then. When Omens of War launched I don't believe I even bought it. EQII beta was buggy, the gameplay was grindy and slow, my PC struggled to run it. It was still ten times more fun than Gates of Discord so we stayed.

I didn't get to see Omens of War until a year or so later, when EQII had proved itself to be no kind of substitute for the real thing and absolutely every single person, without exception, we'd known or met there had given up and gone elsewhere in search of a game that might actually be fun to play.

I don't really have any very clear memories of OOW from that time. I vaguely recall spending quite a few hours in the first zone, Dranik's Scar and the next, Nobles' Causeway. That was probably all I saw until much later, when Mrs Bhagpuss and I came back to Norrath yet again and spent several months going around all the places we'd missed the first time, gleefully trashing them with our higher-level characters and their mercenaries.

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All the above barely even qualifies as jotted notes towards an introductory essay. The moment I start to write about EverQuest the memories just come flooding back. I could write a series of posts on each and every expansion I've mentioned so far.

And, looking ahead, there are at least five more expansions where I could do the same. I did think that by the time I got to the Lost Age I'd be able to speed up but maybe not quite yet.

Let's reconvene for part two in a while.

On With The Show

Last year The EverQuest Show ran a story about a visit to Daybreak Games' San Diego offices, where they interviewed then franchise producer Holly Windstalker Longdale and other members of the teams behind both games.

The lengthy interview with Holly was posted back in October but since then we haven't heard a lot from The EQ Show and I was beginning to wonder if the whole project had gone the way of so many others, into oblivion. Happily that turns out not to be the case.

Episode 8, just released, features interviews with the new producer of the EQ games, Jennifer Chan, as well as several members of the EQII team.

It's a highly professional production, better than some promotional videos from studios themselves. Fading, who put it together, apologizes for the long delay between episodes, saying "they do take a lot of time to edit because I like to have the quality there". It's there, no worries about that.

There are no great revelations in the thirteen minute video but there are a couple of very strong data points on that perennial topic, "how well are the games doing?". Fading mentions in passing that the EQII team is smaller than the EverQuest crew, which shouldn't be a surprise but kind of is anyway.

I know there are delusional EQII players who believe it's their game that carries not only the new Darkpaw division but the whole company. You see them chime in on the forums now and then, questioning who would want to play an ancient game like EverQuest.

A lot of people, apparently. We already knew from comments Holly Longdale made last year that EQ's population has been growing over the last few years. Now we learn that EQII's has as well.

In general the game is "doing great". In fact "we're doing better than we were years ago". There are a couple of references to the current server populations in EQII in which we learn they are "pretty strong" on every server, even "a little overpopulated" on some of the special rulesets.

It wasn't always that way. Several comments from the EQII team make it clear they went through some dark days not too long ago, when they thought they might not be able to keep on making expansions simply because they didn't have the resources. They also acknowledge the dispiriting effect of multiple rounds of layoffs.

Their claim that the smaller team is more effective may sound like wishful thinking or making the best of a difficult situation but it's entirely borne out by my experience as a player. I know there have been issues with testing and quality control and some players aren't happy with certain design decisions but my feeling is that recent expansions have been some of the best for many years.

It was also very surprising to learn that all of the music in EQII for the last few expansions has been done by one developer, unpaid and working in his spare time. They lost the budget for production of new music so Mark McBride began composing and recording it himself, together with input from the whole team, as a "passion project".

Which would be very sweet and rather sad if it wasn't for the plain fact that the music in EQII has improved almost out of recognition! I love the whole, new gothic style he's brought to the soundscape of the game and particularly the performing NPC bands and orchestras that pop up in the hub cities. You might want to try experimenting with a major chord once in a while, Mark, but other than that - good job!

I recommend the EQ Show video. It's a very interesting - and reassuring - watch for anyone who plays or follows the franchise.

My other public service announcement today is an in-game tip. Everyone probably already knows this but it was news to me.

I was puzzled when I got my free flying horse recently and found it had gone directly into the Mount tab of the character who'd opened the pack. I was sure it had been flagged Heirloom, meaning any character on the account could use it, but I couldn't see how that could happen if it was just an icon on a list belonging to a single character.

So I asked in general chat and someone said I should be able to pull it out and put it in the shared bank. You can turn any mount into a house item, they said. It's the same as that.

And so you can. I'd forgotten all about mounts being convertible to house items. I don't believe I've ever done it.

Having sorted that out, I happened to look at my currency tab, which once again is individualized for every character. I wondered if the same trick would work there, too, and it does.

You can drag and drop currency stacks from the tab into your bags to transfer them between characters. No more having to do the same holiday content twice because you're working on a different character, even though you have a stack of the currency left over on the first one.

I thought I'd share because although this is probably old news to most players, the very fact that I've gone fifteen years without noticing suggests it's quite easy to miss. At least, that's what I'm telling myself.

And if anyone has any more tips on similar obscurities, don't be shy - share with the group!

Don't Start Me Talking... : EverQuest, EverQuest II

Yesterday, as Wilhelm pointed out in the comments, I magnificently managed to miss the post-hook I'd been waiting on for weeks. Instead I chose to witter on about how I had nothing to write about. Comedy gold.

The news I'd missed was that The EverQuest Show had put up their interview with Holly "Windstalker" Longdale, Executive Producer of the EverQuest franchise. They were also good enough to provide a full transcript, which I've read. I haven't watched the video so anything that's given away by facial expression or body language is going to have to wait until I do.

As Wilhelm says, there aren't any major revelations but there are several tasty morsels of detail and a whacking great hint of something big to come. The whole thing doesn't take long to read but I'll pull out a few of the more interesting quotes anyway:

EQ Show :

How are the games doing?

Holly :     

...since 2015 , since I came on board, breaking all the rules both games have grown. So where we had a trend of the audience trickling off, we’ve now grown and we’ve grown revenue at the same time, so we’ve actually hired some people to fill out the teams...

Well, that's reassuring. And surprising.

It's been my consistent impression as a player and customer that, despite the surrounding intrigue, chaos and conspiracy theories, and notwithstanding the sequential layoffs and downsizings, my playable experience has undergone continual improvement throughout Daybreak Games' curation of the franchise. Even so, I would have guessed that both the audience and revenue for EverQuest II in particular would have decreased over that period. EverQuest, I would have imagined, would have done well to hold steady.

That both games have grown both numbers playing and money taken is fantastic news for those of us who want to see Norrath prosper. As Holly says, after fifteen and twenty years,

"It is staggering that both these games are still profitable ventures..."

Part of the reason for this turnaround is, as we more than suspected, some smart and effective managing of players' nostalgic affection for the franchise and the life experiences it has given them over two decades:

Holly:

...obviously nostalgia is really important to our players. Being able to revisit places we visited 15 years ago. 16, 20 years ago. 

That accounts for the popularity of the Progression servers but there's more to it than that:

...we’re trying to be smart about the content we do do... We don’t want to go too far out... I know we’ve been to the moon and back but you know, we don’t want to go too much farther and too much crazier than that. So we want to go back to those themes and develop those stories.

That's why almost every expansion is some kind of return to versions of the past:  areas, regions, continents or (coming up, we all believe) moons that players know and remember from the core game and from earlier expansions. It's not just a clever re-use of assets, although I believe there's some of that too; it's a key turned in the lock that opens the heart.

It's a policy that means Live players are as entangled in past glories as are those engaged in Progression. They are different audiences and the same all at once:

EQ Show:

How do you balance the TLP players, with the LIVE players, because they seem to be two vastly different groups playing the same game.

 Holly:

They are. But they’re also almost equal to each other now, in numbers.

That's another surprise. Although we all knew the Progression servers were doing well it's only natural to assume the bulk of the game is on the Live side. I imagine an expansion year with level cap increases for both games will unbalance (or balance, if you prefer) the ship a little but clearly the future of the franchise lies in the past.

Or does it?

EQ Show:

...a lot of people have asked, what are you guys going to do with the intellectual property... is there another game in development? 

Holly:

I can’t talk about what’s in development. But I promise you there is a future for EverQuest. I promise you. There’s a lot of work has gone into evaluating our past. We’re in a really unique position where we have more than 20 years worth of data on players and what they like in MMOs and MMOs we’ve made. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that when we craft something new for EverQuest?

Which is about as broad a hint as the PR person, who was confirmed to be in the room making sure nothing got said that shouldn't get said, would allow. I read that as confirmation that DBG are working on another title in the franchise and that, unlike the ill-fated and ill-advised EQNext, it will be squarely aimed at the faithful.

As one of them I can't but be happy to hear it.

There's a lot more in the interview that's worth reading or watching or listening to for any dyed-in-the-wool EverQuest Franchise fan. There's stuff about the dedication of the team and their insistence on doing work on the EverQuest games in their own time; there's confirmation that they've had to learn how to do more with less, something I personally feel has contributed to the improvement in the games that I mentioned at the top; there's aknowledgment of the lag and database issues currently dogging the games and there's even a little squib about the upcoming re-organization of the whole Daybreak portfolio.

I'll leave you with Holly's reply to Fading from the EQ Show's "final" question:

EQ Show:

Final question I’ll ask you. How long is this game going to be around?

Holly:

At least another 10 years.

EQ Show: 

You think so?

Holly: 

Absolutely.

Works for me!