What Was and Never Will Be

Everquest kind of makes me sad.  It's a perfect example of a game suffering from mudflation.  Here you have a game where nobody plays at the low levels -- all they do is PL to get to level 65, 75 and up.  Valuable high-end gear sells for 1 million, 2 million plat, an unthinkable fortune in the old days.  Finding a group in the low to mid levels is nearly impossible, and all of the low and mid level zones are empty.

What really makes me sad are all of the zones that they revamped that are completely unused.  When I did the bard mail quests this weekend I saw a lot of them.  Steamfont Mountains has been revamped.  Misty Thicket, Innothule Swamp, Toxxulia Forest, Nektulos Forest, Eastern Commonlands, Freeport, North Ro, all of these zones have been revamped.  Nobody's ever in them.  In the old days these zones were always busy -- the game had 13 newbie starting zones at launch, 16 by the time three years had passed, and they were always busy.  It didn't matter which zone you started in, you'd find other players to group with.  No game will ever be like that again -- no game would ever take the time to create so many starting zones.  Even Everquest knows better; they've created Crescent Reach as a one-size-fits-all starting zone.  Every character, evil, good, whatever, can start there.  In fact, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that everyone will start there and all the other newbie zones will be left unused -- freebie accounts aren't allowed to start anywhere else, but the advantages of Crescent Reach are so many that you really wouldn't want to start anywhere else anyway.

It's sad because the revamped zones are very pretty.  They're comparable to modern MMOs -- not top-of-the-line, surely, but very comparable.  It makes me sad that nobody really uses them, not in the way they were designed to be used in any case.  There are still newbie zones and cities that haven't been revamped -- Feerot, Greater Faydark, Butcherblock Mountains, Everfrost, Qeynos Hills -- but EQ has zero reason to bother fixing those zones at this point.

It bugs me too that the boats are gone.  Mind you, being forced to ride the boats was one of the major problems with the game back in the day, but completely removing them sucks.  I really wanted to take a boat ride again, but all of the docks in the game exist for pretty much no reason now.

I remember "newbie runs" where the goal was to take a level 1 gnome from Ak'Anon to Erudin, crossing two continents through some very scary and dangerous zones and enduring two boat rides to succeed.  With dozens or hundreds of people participating, it was a ton of fun.  You could never get enough people to participate in that today, and even if you did, you simply can't make the run without the boats.

One thing I love about EQ is the depth of the world.  At the bottom of the Crystal Caverns is a Coldain dwarf town, with merchants and a bank and quests givers.  In the Goru'ka Mesa valley is a village of satyrs (Mitholen, I think they're called) with merchants and quest givers.  In one of the old goblin dungeons there was a goblin banker who evil types could bank with.  In the far North of Velious are otter folk with merchants and the like.  Everywhere you go, you find not just enemies to fight, but the communities they live in.  The game didn't just have 16 starting cities, it had dozens of more towns and villages and cities that you could visit, buy or sell at, possibly bank at or get quests at.  The world is vast and detailed.

Anyway, I don't have a point here, just sad at the state of the game today.  Things change, you can never go back to what once was (and in a lot of ways, you wouldn't want to), but there are definitely some things that I miss, that I'm afraid I'll never see in a game again.