Your Turn: Happy Birthday!
Long before World of Warcraft, a game called Everquest introduced hundreds of thousands of players to the wonders of massively multiplayer online worlds.
Screen Play only very briefly dabbled in Everquest’s fantasy worlds, but a visit to Sony Online Entertainment in
San Diego during the game’s heyday made a big impression - the resources necessary to keep Everquest and other online communities active were astonishing.
Earlier this month Everquest celebrated its 10th anniversary, and longtime player and regular Your Turn columnist Anthony Murphy decided to mark the occasion by writing a piece for Screen Play on his early experiences with the game.
Click below for his latest blog, which is in the running for a PlayStation 3 console.
Happy Birthday!
On March 16, 1999, Verant Interactive launched Everquest. Along with Ultima Online it was
one of the very first attempts to create a massively multiplayer online game from the same structure that defined MUDS since the late 1970’s.
Players would log into the game and play a character in a large world that persisted between play sessions. You could meet up with hundreds of other players, trade with them, enter into alliances or simply go exploring together. For the privilege the developer asked a monthly fee to support the game and pay for the network resources it used.
This period between the release of Ultima Online and World of Warcraft is considered the Wild West days of the massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) genre - projects of this type and scale had not been attempted before. Despite all the uncertainty, Everquest must have done something right because it’s still running today, ten years later.
The game systems were primitive and even brutal towards a player on occasions, the death of a player resulted in that character moving backwards along their advancement path; something unthinkable in today’s online games. If the character died their body would lay where fell until they could get close enough to recover it. If the character died in a particularly dangerous area it could take the efforts of many allies to get to it, who in the process may also be killed. If a player did not retrieve their body in a certain amount of time it would be destroyed along with all of the equipment on it.
The developers placed the tools to ease these burdens in the hands of the players. Necromancers and Rogues could aid in recovering your corpse; whilst Wizards and Druids could facilitate crossing the vast lands of Everquest very quickly. This demonstrated a common thread running throughout the early years of the game; rather than fix a problem by removing it, the developers would build a solution into one of the character classes. This meant that the players looked to other players to help solve their problems which fostered a sense of community. Everyone helped everyone else because you didn’t know when you were going to be the one in need.
There was no in-game auction house: players sold their wares by meeting in a common location and advertising their wares to the local area. On my server this was the tunnel in the East Commonlands, it was convenient for all players to get to. No one was rude or attempted to rip anyone off, the server population was too small and a bad name was something you could not afford.
I came by Everquest in a roundabout way. I was a fan of the Ultima series of games from my youth and I was playing Ultima Online at the time. Everyone was talking about the impending release of Everquest, which was considered “the competition”. When the game was released I sat on the fence for a little while before purchasing it from an online store. At the time no games store in Australia had ever heard of it.
Once the software had arrived I created my character, the look and feel of the game was a little primitive, the graphics could be compared to Quake which was then three years old. I quickly came to understand that the game traded graphical quality of large open playable areas. The game had no in game map so I quickly became lost, I wandered out of my starting area into the hills where night had fallen and was attacked by a wolf. I barely managed to kill it and struggled to the top of a hill where I saw my first real time 3D sunrise.
At the time I was playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends, including Cameron
and Chris who also played a MUD called Medievia. One weekend I lugged my Pentium PC over to West Heidelberg in my HQ Kingswood and let them have a go of it. Within a week they’d both bought the game and their first 3D accelerator cards.
This was the start of a journey for the three of us that would continue across many worlds and as many characters. My most enduring memory? Sitting on the beach in South Ro fishing whilst Cameron and Chris jumped in and out of the water trying to scare the fish away. In the end it’s not the awesome loot or the character leveling that you take away from the game, it’s the people you meet along the way.
Happy 10th Birthday Everquest!
