In the meantime, here’s another nostalgia screenshot from the days of yore.

–Wolfen

Sony is celebrating this anniversary with special events, media, and stories.  You can see what they are offering at the official 10th anniversary site.  Check it out if you feel the need for some good ol’ nostalgia.  As a bonus, here are a few old school Everquest screenshots of my own.  Click the thumbnails for a larger version.

I have a level 37 Champion on the Windfola server, but I decided to start fresh, so I rolled up a human Guardian that I named Strongg.  I wanted to try out a class in the game that I had not played yet and Guardian was one of them.  Humans start in the Archet area, so my game introduction had me escaping from a cell and then helping a Ranger named Amdir to rescue some kidnapped hobbits.

Once the introduction is complete, I found myself in the town of Archet, eager to find some quests and get to work.  I didn’t have far to go.  Amdir was wounded in the battle, so I had to help him with defense of the town.  The first few are you typical newbie quests that have you go out and kill wolves and boars so that the town’s sheep are kept safe.  Once those are done, I was sent to a hunter’s lodge where some things needed to be done.  Seeing this lodge brought pangs of nostalgia to my heart because the lodge reminded me of my beloved Everquest’s Surefall Glade and the lodge that can be found there.

One of the farmers outside of Archet had a boar problem that he wanted me to help him with.  A boar named Old Bloodtusk needed to be killed.  I remembered this boar from the time that LOTRO first went live.  There was a line of people waiting to kill this boar and each time he appeared it was a general free-for-all contest.  This time, however, there was not another player in sight and he was waiting for me when I arrived.

After running several other quests, none of which were very challenging, I came to the last quest in the “game introduction” line.  Brigands were attacking Archet and I had to help Amdir defend it.  The town was in flames when I arrived and it was filled with battle.  I worked my way through the town, finally arriving at the final showdown, which culminated in a fight with Eogan, a servant of Angmar who was responsible for all the problems in the area.  I dispatched him with ease and ended the quest line.

My World of Warcraft subscription is still active, even though it is not being used right now.  The easy road says to go back to playing it, but I am getting urges to play other games.  I have a lifetime subscription to Lord of the Rings Online, a game I have not logged into for a long time.  The urge to play LOTRO has been heightened lately by the fact that I have been listening to the LOTR audiobooks again.  I do this every couple of years because I love the books so much.  My only complaint with LOTRO is that I grew weary with all the quests, but if you are not questing, you are wasting your time.  The experience gained from grinding mobs is a pittance compared to what you receive from a quest.

Another option is the Sony Station Pass.  As you probably know, the $30 a month Station Pass allows you to play any of Sony’s MMO’s that you own the software to.  Everquest will ever be my first MMO love.  I played Everquest 2 for awhile, but none of my friends followed me there, so I gave it up.  I also played Pirates of the Burning Sea for a short while.  It grew stale fast.  Star Wars Galaxies is another that I played from launch, but the game destroying NGE update had me running for the exits.  I tried Vanguard again, but as I mentioned on this blog earlier, it still is way too buggy for me.

It could be because I am older now, but nothing in the MMO space gets me very excited these days.  After playing so many of them, it all seems like I’ve been there, done that.  I don’t see much innovation anymore.  Are all the great ideas used up?  I don’t think so, but you can’t tell that from the latest crop of games to be released.  Conan, Warhammer, and Darkfall are more of the same tired ideas that have been used over and over again. The only thing that sets Darkfall apart is the fact that it is so hardcore that most people will never want to play it.

So what is a veteran noob supposed to do?  I think I will start from scratch in LOTRO and see how it goes.  I still need to decide if I stay with WoW or go with the Station Pass.  My computer isn’t due for another couple of weeks, so I have plenty of time to decide.

There is not a single game out there that has it right.  That is not to say that some don’t try, but their attempts have been half ass and weak.  You will see announcements from companies stating that they care about player-run events and that they fully support them, but those good wishes disappear after a couple of weeks and things fall back down to the status quo.

Now Sony has decided to help support player-run events.  This comes about 10 years too late, but what can you do?  I saw this post from Massively, which points to the official announcement, that tells players to run more events and they will come up with more ways to support them.  This probably sounds great to guilds who like to do such things, but I have no doubt that just like in the past, these things will fade away with nothing of substance coming from the game developers.

Speaking of events, some of the neatest moments in my Everquest career was participating in GM run events.  Some of them that followed the lore and made sense game-wise were great and got people talking.  The problem was that the GM events were few and far between, and just like you would expect, eventually stopped altogether.  GM run events are so rare these days that I wonder if they happen at all.  It is a shame because they added flavor to the game and a neat change to the standard day to day MMO grind.

Giving the players some variety gets them enthused about the game.  GM and player-run events create the sense of a living game world where neat things can happen at any moment.  If Joe MaxLevel is running through the newbie yard on auto-run while watching television, and he suddenly gets attacked by a 100 foot tall rooster who shoots laser beams out its eyes, you can be damn sure that word will spread quickly and draw many players into the fun.  It will create buzz that will keep people talking about the event and they will look forward to the next one.  If the developers follow through with a series of them, ane the players keep talking about it, then you have created something special.

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.

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

This is a very safe camping spot, so not much excitement happened. Our group consisted of level 80 gnome warrior, 76 wizard, 80 mage, 80 cleric, and me with a wimpy 68 ranger. We used the pulling technique we have used for years. The warrior would pull, and if he got multiples, the mage would cast Call of the Hero and pull him back to camp aggro free. This helps split the camp and we get easy solo pulls. We popped Lesson of the Devoted, which gives us 30 minutes of double experience, and got to work.

A common critter we encounter is the blue orc, which comes in several different types. There is the standard warrior orc to start with, and then there’s the rogue, shaman, and necromancer orc. The neat thing about these orcs is that they can change form mid-way through a fight. They start out as one type of orc model and then transform into something different in a flash. Here is an example:

So we took out plenty of the orcs along with black horses with flaming hooves called Nightmares. Experience was good, even for the level 80′s in the group. Loot drops are nothing special, but they do sell to vendors for a decent amount. It wasn’t a flashy, brag about it night, but we all made advancements and had a good time making fun of one another. A nice diversion from Vanguard every now and then.

I think that for a great many people, their reaction would be summed up in two words: Complete Panic. If this were to happen to a large and very popular MMO, you can bet that the online forums and blogs would explode with a wide range of diatribe. Depending on the person, emotions would surely range from outrage, disbelief, sadness, and depression. In a way, a lifestyle would be coming to an end. What would you do to replace it?

I don’t have much of a frame of reference for such a happening. I have played many MMO’s, but none of them has gone offline for good. Several games have gone down the tubes, but I suppose my judgement in what games to play is better than I thought. Asheron’s Call is probably the biggest game that I know of that went under. Motor City Online would be another. I didn’t play either of those.

The only experience I can relate it with would be the end of a beta test. I have had some incredibly good times at the end of a couple of beta’s I was involved with. The end of the Everquest beta was one of the best gaming experiences of my life. It turned out to be very special. Multiple gods attacked all over the Everquest world and most people were too low a level to defeat them. Giant skeletons appeared in my home zone of Qeynos Hills and wreaked havoc. A large army of orcs attacked players at the Crushbone zone. Rumors ran wild with tales of amazing things happening in one zone and then another. Traveling wasn’t very fast back then, so it took some effort to try and see as much of the events as we could. It was an incredible experience.

What made the end of EQ beta so special was what my friends and I did at the very end. Several of us met up at the Freeport docks just before the servers went down. These are friends that I met playing the beta and I still play with or keep in touch with to this day. When the server shutdown timer started to count down, we decided to swim out to sea. We kept ourselves underwater and swam out as far as we could. As the last shutdown timer was announced, we all turned our characters and looked at one another. A couple seconds later the screen went black with a You Have Been Disconnected From The Server message. It was such a surreal moment. Little did I know that EQ would hold me for more than five years.

So what would I do if Sony announced that they would be shutting down Everquest? First, it would make me sad that such a wonderful game that brought me into the MMO world would be going away. I would travel all over the game world, taking screenshots of everything I could, so that I would have a record of my favorite places in the game.

In the end, I would find myself smiling as I recalled all the fun times I had playing the game with great friends. On the last day, when the last seconds are counting down, you can be sure to find me at the Freeport docks. I will jump into the water and swim. I will swim as far as I can. Until the screen fades to black.

–Wolfen

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