EverQuest

https://www.filfre.net/2025/07/everquest/

84•dmazin•3h ago

Comments

mike1o1•2h ago

I absolutely loved EverQuest and it’s still probably holds some of my fondest gaming memories. My favorite feeling about it is that it felt like a real world first, gameplay second. It had a real sense of danger and wonder that I think will be almost impossible to recreate.

Going from Qeynos to Freeport, or crossing the ocean on a boat felt absolutely epic and dangerous. It was wonderful, but not something I would want to play today now that I have real life obligations.

ModernMech•1h ago

Totally, me and my friend used to share an EQ account in school. His parents paid for it so he got to play during the day, and I would play at night from midnight until 6am, then I'd go to school. It was profoundly unhealthy, which is why that game earned the name "Evercrack".

Last weekend I played a beta game called "Monsters and Memories" that's trying to be an EQ clone, and it's very faithful in that it's carried forward all the terrible parts of EQ.

Just the amount of sitting around waiting that you have to do in EQ that I had forgotten about is incredible. Managing your water and food levels, having to go find your corpse when you die and it taking 5 hours just to get there, pitch black nights so you're forced to walk around with a lantern, camping a spawn with 100 other people trying to get the same items as you to complete the same inane quests, broken quests that you can't even complete to progress the game forward...

And yeah, one weekend was enough. I got real shit to do, I have time for nonsense, but not THAT kind of time.

daeken•1h ago

There's a musician named Richie Truxillo who made so many comedy songs about EQ back in the day, but your comment just reminded me of "Has Anybody Seen My Corpse." I haven't thought about corpse runs and dragging folks' corpses back to them in ages!

Tokumei-no-hito•34m ago

ohh if i had a million platinummmm

wow that's a memory i had lost for many years. thanks

michaelmrose•1h ago

Your perception of time is profoundly different when you are a kid with no job.

Painful death makes you try hard to avoid it ensuring real stakes.

nkrisc•14m ago

It makes it more realistic. At this age, it would mean I just quit the game - like my character died for real!

thegrim33•44m ago

It was also at the perfect moment in time where you couldn't just pull up the game's wiki on a second monitor and have fully detailed maps and quest details on hand. You actually had to learn things for yourself by exploration and trial and error. You had to learn things from other people by talking to them in game.

In my mind back then, I was in awe of people that even had the knowledge of how to get across certain zones safely. You know it took effort/skill for them to gain that knowledge. You couldn't just look it up.

I've been thinking how you could possibly replicate a similar thing nowadays, but unless the world constantly randomly changes over time, rendering any created guides/maps/etc moot, I think that window has closed.

dmbche•14m ago

You should look at Noita!

jghn•36m ago

I hated EQ for me the reason was it was not UO nor was it even trying to recreate the vibrancy & real world that UO's designers had gone for. *BUT* I also recognized that EQ represented a game that was much more aligned to what a normal gamer would want, one could already see that path being forged in UO as time went on. And then of course WoW came along and perfected the art.

I still lament how UO played out. It quickly became apparent that most players binned into one of two categories, and neither category really fit in with the original UO vision. And of course, one of those two categories drove away the customers in the second category. The rest is history.

blueblimp•32m ago

The inter-city travel was my favorite part of EverQuest. (The rest of the game, I didn't find too interesting.) The level of challenge was about right: if you looked at maps and planned your route, you could generally get to where you wanted to go, but it was hazardous.

I wonder if there's a game that focuses on that sort of travel experience.

aspenmayer•25m ago

Depending on what you do and how you play, Eve Online has a harrowing navigation system.

smogcutter•7m ago

And part of the joy of Eve Online is that if you want, you can be a reason travel is dangerous.

eatonphil•2h ago

I guess I'm a little younger. For me it was Runescape and Maplestory. Played heavily in the summers from 2007-2009.

dgfitz•2h ago

My only nit to pick with this article is their definition of PvE. They said it stands for “player vs enemy” where I’ve always heard it defined as “player vs environment” where environment explicitly means not-other-players.

tzs•46m ago

Player vs environment is indeed the normal definition of PvE [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_versus_environment

daeken•1h ago

I can nearly single-handedly credit EverQuest with my career. I got my start in the ShowEQ and eqemu sphere, first building little PHP apps to manage servers and such, then reverse-engineering -- I learned x86 and then C++ all to get the lifts in Kelethin working. Hell, nearly 25 years later, any time I work on some new graphics API or game engine, I end up writing an EverQuest zone renderer.

Not my favorite game of all time, but certainly the one with the biggest impact!

Edit to add: also, huge props to that community for both humbling me and teaching me more than I could've imagined. Went from a dumbass 13 year old saying "ROT13? Isn't that some unbreakable encryption?" In the ShowEQ IRC channel because she couldn't imagine saying she didn't know something, to a competent reverse-engineer. I cannot imagine how insufferable I was haha.

numinix•1h ago

> Gijsbert van der Wal’s famous 2014 photograph of Dutch teenagers ignoring a Rembrandt masterpiece in favor of staring at their phones has become for many psychologists, social theorists, and concerned ordinary folks a portrait of our current Age of Digital Addiction in a nutshell.

While a great photo, to me it looks like the kids are just doing some kind of school / field trip assignment.

aprilthird2021•1h ago

It could be anything, but it resonates with people for a very good reason. Many people feel the negatives of technology and social media and miss the time before it. I know how sentiment will skew here, and I know it's easy to take for granted the advantages of having a fully capable pocket computer. But I also understand what we have given up for it.

michaelmrose•1h ago

I've got fond memories of Rallos Zek where I spent way too many hours and met my wife.

rudimentary_phy•1h ago

I loved EverQuest. I still have some great memories of it. My friends and I still go back to playing it every once in a while. EverQuest also gave me some fantastic typing skills (from having to type in a significant amount of things for activating quests and for chatting) that have turned out to be well worth all the time I invested.

spacecadet•1h ago

Oh EverQuest... funny to see this even posted here. I still occasionally log into P99 for a few hours here and there to play around at the low levels. 1 to around 24-30 is peak MMOPRG before it slows down and turns into that raid grind...

galangalalgol•1h ago

Yeah, I never understood why that was necessary. I get diminishing rewards as an addiction mechanic, but they all switch gameplay dramatically from adventure and exploration (and combat) quest based character growth to raid fueled gear treadmills. Some people live for the latter it seems like? But there were never any that focused on character growth all the way. It wasn't like they weren't adding content continuously anyway. It would have been possible. Or turn it rogue alike with top levels earning benefits or unlocking other options for additional playthroughs. With the number of mmorpgs made one of them would have tried it if it would jave worked I guess?

kwk1•1h ago

Yeah, people should know that https://project1999.com/ exists.

amelius•1h ago

I like how natural the woman in the opening picture looks.

Kind of refreshing compared to all those literally overblown body parts in modern day game graphics.

lordnacho•56m ago

Everquest was my first warning about game addiction. Every teenage kid by the year 2000 had spent too much time in front of a game, of course.

But not like this.

I was sitting with a friend of mine at a computer café. This was more prevalent at the time, since a capable computer with all the modern games on it was still somewhat pricey.

So my friend starts taking to our side guy, who is playing EQ. Nice fellow.

"Hey guys, I gotta stop playing. Been here 24h straight. If I don't go to work they'll fire me."

My friend and I leave for the night.

My friend comes back to the café one night later. Our buddy is there, in the same seat.

"Shit dude, they fired me. I haven't been able to get up and go to work. This game, man."

"Sorry to hear it, what was your work?"

"I'm an attendant at a computer café."

"WTF, which one? Why didn't you just sit there and play?"

"The one across the street. Because I couldn't stop."

no_wizard•47m ago

Game addiction hits the same part of the brain as gambling does. In fact, it’s my understanding that gambling addicts and video game addicts have nearly identical similarities in terms of how the addiction progresses and “sets in” as it where.

As an aside, and really I am sorry for this tangent, and I have no issue believing any of this, but this comment somehow feels LLM (ChatGPT) generated to me and I can’t put my finger on it, as I like to default to being wrong about such things.

I know it’s an aside but it has become such a big issue on many forums now.

Sorry for the tangent!

lordnacho•20m ago

Fully human generated, but thanks.

jimbob45•4m ago

Game addiction isn’t the same anymore. Games used to be primarily about telling stories, establishing atmosphere, and fulfilling fantastic roles. The writers and designers of yesteryear had centuries of unexploited sci-fi to draw from. Designers today don’t have that mountain of material to pull from, not just because no one reads anymore.

big_toast•46m ago

Is it a coincidence that this shows up as John Smedley launches a new MMO (yesterday)?

As much as I loved EverQuest, it has informed my view that the world is full of addictive substances. And most people probably need a disinterested third party who loves them and helps them manage the addiction. Until they build their own defenses.

j_timberlake•39m ago

In this game, there was a city where I did so many quests for the guards that my reputation with the "corrupt guards" fell low enough that they would kill me on sight. Playing a good-guy character got me killed, and then I couldn't play anymore in the city where I'd spent most of my gametime.

I would have been angry at the unfairness, but it was such a unique quirk to see in a game, and I've never seen it replicated anywhere.

davedx•21m ago

World of Warcraft had this in Booty Bay. There was a hilarious achievement where you first got your reputation to max with the Booty Bay guards by killing the nearby pirates, then the other half was to kill the guards until the Bloodsail Buccaneers faction exalted you; a 2.5x reputation grind that took weeks. And when you were done you couldn’t enter Booty Bay anymore because the guards killed you on sight.

The things we do…

azretd•3m ago

Early EverQuest required groups to progress because trash mobs were hard, the environment was vast, dungeons had traps, there was no auction house and players hung out in tunnels shouting their wares.

26 years later, the nostalgia hits me every so often and I spin up Project Quarm or Project 1999 where it still plays the same, and it’s fun for awhile but I’m not enjoying it as much as I enjoyed the memories.

I enjoy the luxuries afforded by modern games, with three kids and a busy job, I wonder how anyone found the time to play as long as EverQuest required.

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