Back to Everquest Again

After a week-long Lord of the Rings marathon, I became nostalgic for my old fantasy MMO days.  In my quest to find some new MMO's to play, I decided to download the original MMO that I played from 1999 to 2003.  While Everquest technically wasn't the first MMO, beaten out by Ultima Online and Meridian 59, it was the first such game that presented a true 3-D environment, and set the stage for everything that came after, including, of course, WoW.  And even though I've been playing Neverwinter, one of the newest, shiniest MMOs around, I've also found EQ to be as much fun to play as it ever was.

The things that make EQ unusual (if not unique -- I haven't tried a lot of other MMOs, including EQ2) is the complexity of the game mechanics, and the size of the world.  You can play something like a dozen different races and classes.  You can swim underwater, and drown.  You are weighted down by what you carry.  You can get drunk.  You need food and water to survive, or you grow weak.  Trade skills include brewing, baking, pottery, tinkering, alchemy, jewelcrafting, spell research... basically there are a lot of things that can be found in other games, but I don't think any other game include all of them.  As for the size of the world, it's been around longer than most other MMO's and they keep adding expansions with new zones, planes, and continents.  It would be impossible to build a new MMO today that is anywhere near as large and complex as EQ; even WoW doesn't match that, at least.

Of course, the things that EQ does poorly are still there -- graphics for some zones are ancient, combat is incredibly uninspired, animations are rudimentary and jerky, etc.  Compared to Neverwinter it's an ugly, primitive game.  But I was able to adapt to it easily because I played it for so long, even if that was ten years ago.  I surprised myself by playing EQ most of this past weekend.

I began last week by starting a barb shaman on the Bristlebane server.  The name of my old shaman, Jalia, was taken, so I named her Jellia and entered the tutorial.  EQ's tutorial was new to me, and I'm used to tutorials that only exist to explain the basics to you, so as soon as I thought I had things figured out I left.  The dropped me into Crescent Reach, the only starting zone for free accounts, which disappointed me because I really wanted to explore my old starting zones Halas and Everfrost Peaks.  I was poor and ill-equipped (not really equipped at all)as well.  I logged off after that session, unsure if I wanted to continue.

I discovered online that it was possible to level up to at least 12 in the tutorial, and to get a lot of nice newbie armor and equipment, so the next time I logged on I created a new character -- another shaman, but this time a vah shar (cat person).  I wondered why I hadn't considered doing that before, I'd never played one.  This time I stuck to the tutorial and did all of the quests, and over the course of three days of casual play I got to level 12, finished nearly every quest, made over 100 plat, and then headed out to Crescent Reach.  I explored Crescent Reach a bit and did a little hunting there, then figured out how to make it to the Plane of Knowledge and then to Everfrost Peaks and Halas.

But somehow this didn't feel right.  The whole reason I'd wanted to play EQ again was that I missed my old shaman.  Playing a cat felt different.  I moved Jellia to Halas as well, even though I'd already decided that I made mistakes on her and wanted to start over.  It seemed appropriate that she log out in Halas.  And so, last Saturday, I found a new server that allowed me to use the name Jalia, and I recreated my old barbarian shaman on Firiona Vie, the roleplay server.

This time around I really knew what I wanted to do.  I spent all Saturday working my way through the tutorial, getting to level 12 quickly and finishing nearly every quest again.  I stuck around long enough to kill the one giant beast in the lower tunnels that I hadn't fought before, and to make sure I got the gloomsteel 2 hand staff that I wanted, wound up with over 100 plat again, and headed out to Crescent Reach.

I spent a large part of Sunday morning on crafting -- baking mostly, and some smithing to make a pot -- because that's one of the things I always enjoyed from my old days in EQ.  I even remembered my old account and password for the EQ Trader's web site/forums!  ^_^  But eventually I started hunting in the higher levels of Crescent Reach, and to my complete surprise, experience and levels remained remarkably easy to get.  I hunted crocodiles by the lake, then moved on to gnolls, then skeletal ogres, and finally the high-level ogre skeletons at the back of the zone.  By the end I managed to hit 22.  I went back to the Plane of Knowledge to buy spells, then came back and decided to try hunting in the Blightfire Moors, near Crescent Reach.

By this point I was working on the theory (untested) that experience was simply better in these new zones, so I didn't go back to any of the old zones I remember leveling in (such as Everfrost Peaks, or Commonlands).  In any case, Blightfire Moors were clearly designed to be the next step for the newbie who starts off in Crescent Reach, and it was fun exploring a zone I was unfamiliar with.  I stayed close to the zone wall and killed snakes, bog rats, and blightfire witchlamps (wisps by another name).  Surpisingly I got to level 27 doing this, and pretty much called it a night.

Combat is easier because of the mercenary you're allowed to hire, but that doesn't explain my quick experience gain.  I'm fairly certain they've tweaked that at some point since 2003, maybe more than once.  The max level in the game is now about 95, so I'm sure the early levels are much easier to level in but the higher levels may not be.  Crafting was the same -- I was able to buy nearly everything I needed off vendors to get me up to about 70 in baking.  In the old days a big part of crafting was simply tracking down the materials needed.  In the middle of my crafting I had to pause to learn smithing so I could make a pot for my baking, and it turned out that I could level to 50 in smithing for free through quests in Crescent Reach.  Probably could have done that for my baking also, and I think for other trade skills, I'll be sure to check that out when I work on other things -- including alchemy, something shamans can begin at level 25.

Monday night I thought I would easily make it from 27 to at least 29, but I was worried about money and equipment.  I was levelling so fast and there isn't a lot of money in killing snakes and rats.  The wisps I had killed yielded one lightstone and one greater lightstone, which at first had excited me -- in the old days a greater lightstone was worth very good money, about 4.5 plat by itself but if you ran to North Karana and turned it in for a quest you would get a concordance of research, worth almost 10 plat.  You could do this as many times as you liked, and get experience for the quest too.

But on reflection, 10 plat for a GLS didn't seem like such a huge find.  I had started with over 100 plat just out of the tutorial, and built that up to 250 plat before spending much of it on new spells.  I knew in a game this old that ten years of mudflation would have changed the economy significantly, and I was right, many things on the player market sell for thousands or tens of thousands of plat.

After a little research I found that Defiant armor that now dropped randomly off mid-level mobs was much better than anything I'd ever owned in the old days.  I had nearly a full set of Totemic on my old shaman, armor that you got through very tedious quests involving drops from rare mobs.  It was considered very good armor back in the day.  I was still wearing a lot of it at level 50+, and now it seemed like trash compared to the Defiant I could get randomly as drops -- trash that was very difficult to come by, at that.

I went back to the Blightfire Moors and wandered around until I found some of the guys I was looking for -- mushroom people that were known to drop the armor I wanted.  They were blue to me, except for a named one, "Dragoneater", who conned yellow.  I killed them for a while, levelled to 28, and then took down Dragoneater.  He popped up again and I killed him again.  He drops either a magic dagger or a magic mask, and quickly I had both.  You're not allowed to own more than one, so I was broadcasting to the zone that there were daggers on his corpse rotting away if anyone wanted, but nobody replied or showed up.  Eventually I went back to the nearby outpost and sold what I had, and suddenly discovered that the magic mask sold for 47+ plat and the dagger for 57+ plat.

That changed everything.  I switched to killing Dragoneater as often as I could, and running back to the camp to sell as often as needed.  The experience was still very good, so I hit 29, then 30, then 31, and then 32 -- the level that shamans get their first wolf pet.  I can't tell you how long it took me to do that in the old days, it seemed like forever.  By this point the experience was not so great, but Dragoneater was reliably dropping an average of 50 plat or more a kill, so I kept at it until I finally hit 33.  By that point I had 1600 plat and one piece of Rough Defiant Chain arms that I could wear, and a Rough Defiant Plate chest that I could not wear but could probably sell for a couple hundred plat at least.

I made my way to the Plane of Knowledge where I bought new spells. then to the Bazaar where I found that even 1600 plat wouldn't go very far.  I managed to buy some Rough Defiant legs and boots though, so already I feel better equipped.  At this point though, I need to either farm Dragoneater some more, or find a similar named mob in the mid 30's that I can make money off of... it's clear I'm still not as well-funded as I want to be.

But really, level 33 in 3 days with some money to spend -- I feel like I'm doing really well.  The game is certainly a lot easier than it was back in the day.  I'm also still half-tempted to quest for my totemic armor anyway, even if it's pointless.