And Going And Going...

Once More into the Fray

The original EverQuest received a new expansion today. Before World of Warcraft came along and made the genre of MMOs accessible for everybody else, EverQuest was the flagship title of the genre and remained solely in the dominion of nerds with too much time on their hands. Original EQ was notoriously difficult; it became almost impossible to level up or accomplish anything really without the help of a group. Forcing players to group together to overcome obstacles created a community that is somehow still going to this day nearly 15 years later.

Later MMOs including WoW would all crib heavily from EQ's example. Jargon like LFG (looking for group), aggro (becoming the target of a monster's aggression), and concepts like tanking (one party member designated to hold the focus of a monster's aggression) all originated here. One of my favorite MMOs, Final Fantasy XI, was inspired by EQ when the president of Square-Enix (Squaresoft at the time) saw EQ being played.

I tried playing the original EQ last year sometime, on a private server named Project1999, which is a time progression server, meaning they play the game as it was originally released and add content to it over time, as opposed to a the official servers hosted by Sony (more specifically, Sony Online Entertainment, or SOE for short) where they include all of the content that has been added since the game was released. I rolled a wizard (terminology that is a throwback to rolling dice to create your character as in D&D), but I couldn't figure out how to cast spells. Despite my background in FFXI I couldn't figure out what I was doing at all. I was whacking a snake with my staff (no innuendo intended; I realize that sounds somewhat dirty), when a guy came up and said "REALLY?" and killed the snake in one hit. I logged out and never logged back in.

EQ had subscription fees up until earlier this year, but you can try it for free now. I'm sure there are benefits to paying a subscription fee, but I'm not sure what they are. Rain of Fear is the 19th EverQuest expansion, and raises the level cap to 100, among with a bunch of other new features. The standard edition retails for $39.99 and the collector's edition retails for $89.99, which features a slew of bonus items over the other version. I don't know enough about them either way to recommend either, but chances are if you're still playing EverQuest at this point you're going to pick this up regardless of what I have to say about it.