EverQuest’s long, strange 20-year trip still has no end in sight (2019)
I played the original Everquest from 1999 until 2004 or so with some gaps. it really was amazing at the time. WoW killed it of course. There&#x27;s good reason for that but it&#x27;s wild to think of how hard core EQ was at the time.<p>For example, if you died, your corpse was where you died. You reappeared with literally no gear. If that was deep in a dungeon (Sebilis anyone?) then recovering it might be nontrivial. This led to corpse-run (&quot;CR&quot;) groups. If you failed to get your corpse within a week it would disappear taking all your stuff.<p>You also lost XP when you died.<p>Another example: wood elves started in Kelethin, which was platforms in the trees with no rails. It was a rite of passage to fall off those passages and die. If you were fighting under the city at times you&#x27;d often see newbies falling to their deaths.<p>Travel originally was originally nontrivial too. One continent had a big city on each side (Qeynos and Freeport) and it was almost another rite of passage to do the Qeynos to Freeport run as a low-level (which could take 30-60 minutes IIRC) because you wanted to level somewhere else.<p>This is a genre I wish there was life in but sadly I think it&#x27;s time has come and gone. A big part of what drove it was that it was the era before social networks. You met people in MMOs. Now? Everything is so results-oriented. Play a modern MMO and to do a dungeon you just queue, join, kill things off the checklist and then leave. You may never talk to anyone. People may leave mid-dungeon and get replaced without you ever noticing.<p>It&#x27;s interesting to see how many small changes players demand ultimately kill the genre. Levelling too slow? Eliminate it. Um, what? That&#x27;s half the game. Dungeon queueing. Raid queueing. Solo content, which has definite merits also means you rarely have to talk to or cooperate with anyone to get a lot of things done.