The MMO Notebook

Posts Tagged ‘EQ’

Perhaps the most famous and most persistent resident of Qeynos: Fippy Darkpaw

The guild leader gives his troops an encouraging sign while standing next to the North Freeport bank.

Here we are battling a Griffawn in North Karana. We had just journeyed to Freeport and bought full sets of banded armor. We felt very uber! (circa 1999)

–Wolfen

Bash da Bashers!
(Click for larger version)

Look on any online gaming message board and you will always find at least one thread about how good or bad instancing is.  Some players prefer lots of instancing while others would rather play in a world full of static content.  Each style of game has its merits, but I am here to say that both styles suck.

I started my online gaming career in Ultima Online, but Everquest was the game that really hooked me.  EQ had no instancing at all when it launched.  In fact, I don’t think instancing had been invented yet in any form.  In my opinion, this is what made EQ so great.  If you wanted to go adventure in Lower Guk, you had to go to the same zone as every other player.  You didn’t have the entire zone to yourself.  You had no choice but to interact with other players.  This allowed for the making of friendships (and enemies) that lasted for years.  The social and guild drama brought on by no instancing made the community unique and more aware of itself.

The downside of static content is that zones can get overcrowded.  You may be relegated to camping one small area for hours at a time because the zone is full.  Sometimes people would start lists and you had to wait your turn before getting a group.  Doing that, however, caused even more socialization and communication between players.  It also pissed off a great many players.

The addition of instancing greatly changed the social dynamic of online gaming.  If you want to go crawl a popular dungeon you simply went to the zone and entered your very own instance, where the only people in it are your group or guild.  You have run of the place to do exactly as you wish for as long as you wish with no interference from anyone.  This naturally speeds up progression and ease of advancement.  It also prevents the waiting in line for a spot in the zone.

The downside of instancing is that it removes much of the player socialization that you see in non-instanced games.  Players, for the most part, stay within their guilds and rarely to speak to non-guild members.  I found this to be especially true in World of Warcraft.  Unless I was in a group or a guild, I would have sworn that every player was deaf and mute.  It was also much more difficult to find long lasting friendships in games like these.  Most everyone stayed to him or herself because they could. Reliance on others is at a minimum.  I think this greatly diminishes the social possibilities in a game.

So both have good and bad points to them.  Everquest is the greatest example of a game with static content (although later updates added instancing), while World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and others go the instancing route.  As much as I prefer static content, I know that we will never see a full static content game again.  Humans, as a whole, are incredibly lazy, and games that utilize instancing will always draw more customers.  The games are easier, you don’t have to interact with others as often, and let’s face it, most players think everyone else sucks.

For good or ill, instancing is here to stay.  Any game that uses only static content will fail miserably.  There will not be any going back to the good ol’ days where we walked uphill, both ways, with 1000ms lag, to the zone of our choice.

A wedding at the Spires in North Karana.

There is an interesting article over on the West Karana blog that got me to thinking.  It talks about the nostalgia we old gamers sometimes get about the games we used to play.  I agree when it says that you can never get that old feeling back.  Nothing is unknown.  There is no mystery, and that is what made that first game you played so great.  You had no idea what to expect.

The article also asks if it is possible to play just one MMO exclusively for an entire year.  I think that is becoming ever more difficult to do because I think people get bored more quickly with the MMO games that they play.  There are so many options available to the online gamer that if one gets even slightly frustrated or bored, it is easy to move on to the next thing.  Add in the fact that the Sony Station Pass allows you to play many different MMO’s, and the difficulty increases even more.

I played Everquest exclusively for over four and a half years.  Once all my friends and I moved onto Dark Age of Camelot when it released, that was all she wrote when it came to new and mysterious experiences.  Even though DAoC was brand new, we now had a good idea of how these games worked.  We understood the dangers in an MMO game and we knew how to, for the most part, avoid them.  When we moved on to World of Warcraft, we were hardened veterans and very few things surprised us.  Our MMO virginity was long lost.

The article also suggests that people should blog about their gaming experiences.  Since I am blogging about the games I play, I can easily say that I echo those sentiments.  It is fun to write about what I do in-game and I hope others either get some enjoyment or some information from it.

I loved Everquest dearly, but my days of playing a single MMO for a year or more are long gone.  I now bounce from game to game in an attempt to keep boredom a bay.  Vanguard is my main focus, but some friends are going back to Everquest, so I will join them for some adventures every now and then.

So no, the nostalgic feelings I get are only that – feelings.  It is impossible for them to be anything more.  The games have changed, our knowledge of them has greatly increased, and getting older plays a large part in it for me. My nostalgia manifests itself in this blog at times and in the banner graphic of this blog.  It is a shot of Surefall Glade, where my EQ character first came to life.

I will always cherish my early days in Everquest, but those magical times must live on only in my memory, because they can never be re-lived again.

–Wolfen

Hello and Merry Christmas to all!

I suppose it’s a strange day to start a blog, but it is as good a day as any for me. As a bit of introduction, my online gaming name is Wolfen. I am a 38 year-old casual gamer who likes to play MMO’s. This blog will chronicle the playing of certain MMO’s from a casual playing point of view.

For a bit of my history, I started playing online games with Everquest. I played it starting with beta and continued to play it for more than five years. After that, I quit the game, returning rarely to play from time to time. I am currently playing it now. I have played many more online games as well. Those include Dark Age of Camelot, Everquest 2, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, Vanguard, Planetside, and others.

Two games that I will be picking up again will be Everquest 2 and Vanguard. My plan is to report the current-day newbie experience in both games and see what has changed since these games first launched. This may not sound all that exciting to you, but I’m curious to find out how casual friendly these games can be. We all know that World of Warcraft is the god of casual games, but I want to see how these games compare. Should someone even consider starting up with one of these two games? We will see.

I was fartin’ around in Everquest last night and ran across some Frostfell NPC’s in Qeynos. Who knew that Santa was an ogre?

Ol’ Santug gives out a couple of quests. One of them sends you off to kill invisible grimps that drop pieces of his Naughty and Nice list that he lost. The reward given is a single use breastplate that turns your character into an ogre. Seeing my ranger as an ogre was a neat novelty, but having only a single use was disappointing.

So, my first post is done. I will be starting up EQ2 and Vanguard very shortly after the first of the year. I have a new computer on the way that will allow me to run them better than my current machine. This will be especially true for Vanguard, which is high on graphics and low on optimization.

–Wolfen