Gaming – Page 2 – Castle of Calthaer

EverQuest: Sightseeing

In which I wax poetic about the gorgeous and oft-ignored patina of the world of Norrath

Yes, EverQuest can never truly revisit its glory days. It’s impossible to recapture that original magic or to repeat it.
David Jagneaux, “Rock, Paper, Shotgun“

The bridge between East and North Karana in “EverQuest”

In the last entry in this series, we covered EverQuest’s combat. To briefly review: of EverQuest’s two pillars (classic high fantasy and community dependency), combat and social interaction support community dependency; exploration, crafting, and questing support classic high fantasy. This time, we’ll take a look at exploration, and how the original EverQuest team managed to build a world filled with compelling lore and unique experiences.

There are three or four different things that EverQuest let you explore: locations, lore (NPCs), loot, and leviathans. When I say “leviathans”, I actually mean the monsters in the game…couldn’t resist rounding out that list with a fourth “L” word! These four things combined managed to fill the world of Norrath with life.

A carving on the wall of the chasm leading to Highpass Hold in East Karana

It’s easy today to look at the original EverQuest (at least, as much of it as is available on Project 1999) and see graphics that are incredibly dated. The trees are comprised of a trunk with four panels of jagged pixels for leaves; the water doesn’t undulate; the grass is a flat texture on the ground rather than blades waving in the wind. To me, however, the game looks beautiful – far more beautiful than the bland world of boring (but high-res) areas the existing EverQuest team has plopped out to replace the classic zones of old. I wonder if this is just me – a matter of personal taste, something that can be shared only by those who first saw this game when it launched – when most other games looked about as good as this one. The blocky textures don’t limit my enjoyment, and they’re enough for me to engage the imagination and allow me to immerse myself in the virtual world. I’m guessing that there is a good portion of younger folks who have grown up only on games with “better” graphics who simply couldn’t get over the primitive graphics of the original EverQuest. But I digress. Let’s briefly talk about the four “L”s of EverQuest’s exploration system.

The lore of EverQuest was a little hidden. Aside from choosing a deity at character creation, it’s very easy to waltz through the world of EverQuest and pay absolutely no attention to the game’s story. There are a few books and scrolls scattered about the game, but not many. Most of the game’s story comes through in the form of quests, which we’ll cover separately – and from the NPCs who give them. There’s also the faction system, which is closely tied in with combat (and, to a lesser degree, quests) – there are dozens and dozens of factions, with many NPCs and monsters “allied” with various groups that will like you more or less as you kill things and complete quests. There could have been more to this – the game always hinted at this…but it seemed kind of underdeveloped.

An Evil Eye in the Gorge of King Xorbb

“Leviathans” and loot were closely related. The original EverQuest did a great job of scaling up the foes you faced – not just from the perspective of the combat mechanics (how hard they hit, the abilities the monsters used, the techniques in handling groups of monsters), but just in terms of their visual interest / impressiveness. The game starts you out with humble foes – wolves, fragile skeletons, diminutive spiders. As you level, you start taking on goblins, ghouls, lions…then lizardfolk and evil eyes…then hill giants and vampires…and eventually all the way up to the “raid” level bosses such as dragons and gods.

At each level, not only did the mix of enemies you’d be fighting look completely different, they also dropped increasingly better loot. Rusty swords and tattered armor were eventually supplanted with bronze, then fine steel, and eventually magic armor with unique bonuses. Early on in the game’s history, it was a lot of fun to go around clearing out enemies just to see what cool things you’d get from them. Irrespective of the function of equip-able items, you’d also be able to get armor and weapons that would give your character a certain appearance. “FashionQuest” is the term used to describe players’ endeavors to give their own characters a particular style rather than choosing equipment for function.

A bar, with a window view of a waterfall, in Highpass Hold.

Last and certainly not least: the locations. The original EverQuest team clearly spent a lot of time hand-crafting the places of the game. Cities were large places filled with torch-lit alleys, massive temples, and homey taverns. Dungeons were often labyrinthine caves riddled with twisting passageways, throne rooms, and altars to dark gods. There were sand-swept deserts, snowy tundra, wide-open plains, waterlogged swamps, and mist-shrouded forests. The landscape was littered with ancient monuments and encampments of gathered foes – likely the origin of the usage of the term “camp” to refer to the spawning location of a particular enemy.

There was a lot of fun to be had just wandering around the world and looking at all of this – cautiously, of course. Sadly, most players simply didn’t. Most of the effort the team did to create an evocative world filled with story and substance went to waste, largely because these unique and visually arresting locations weren’t tied to any of the other systems in the game. Apart from pure socializing, there just wasn’t any reason for players to gather in a tavern or congregate around a bazaar. Cities far away from locations with a high risk / reward ratio (where you could kill monsters that gave lots of experience and great loot in relative safety) became ghost towns.

It’s clear that more was planned in this area. Rogues and Bards, for example, have skills to sense and disarm traps – but there are only three locations anywhere in the game where they can be used. Today, it’s easy to see why: with non-randomized content, every player would simply look up the location of a zone’s traps on a wiki page. The same goes for loot – it might have been a joy to discover useful items at the game’s launch, but sites eventually divulged the exact location of each item in the game, allowing you to skip exploring and go right for the gold. Back in 1999, however, online hint guides like GameFAQs were in their infancy and most game walkthroughs came in the form of printed, magazine-like booklets. EverQuest might be an online game, but there are some things that showed that the designers couldn’t quite escape the trappings of the off-line era so recently in the rear-view mirror.

“Exploration” in EverQuest simply couldn’t involve “discovering something new” in the way that the designers clearly had in mind. Unlike in single-player games, where you could reload a save and retain most of your progress, losing your way in EverQuest entailed dying and losing many hours of gameplay – on top of the fact that simply recovering your corpse from a pretty (but dangerous) location could be painful in and of itself. The stark realities of survival in a persistent world meant that wandering around and looking at the scenery simply wasn’t a compelling experience. You had to constantly look out for danger and couldn’t really stop and smell the roses – roses that the design team had clearly taken the time to scatter throughout the landscape. The original magic of seeing things for the first time (hinted at in Jagneaux’s quote at the start of this article) quickly lost its luster when coupled with the fact that the world of Norrath – albeit bright and beautiful – was also brutal and deadly for the unprepared.

In the wrap-up to this series, I’ll cover several “what-if” ideas – alternate paths that EverQuest might have taken that would have built upon the core principles of the original rather than ruining it, which in my view they’ve done. Writing these takes a bit of thought and time, however – and in the case of this one, logging in and grabbing some screenshots. Hopefully there will be a bit less of a lag between now and my next entry. It’s looking like my time in Project 1999 is about to come to an end for now – I’ll likely be a “hibernating” player, at least after I finish this series, for a period of a year or two.

EverQuest: Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting

In which I talk about the massively multiplayer game that’s all about fighting monsters with friends.

Galtar and his friends lay the smackdown on an orc legionnaire in Crushbone on Project1999

By all accounts, Brad McQuaid, John Smedley, and the rest of the folks who made EverQuest the runaway success of 1999 were doing their best just to get their fledgling game off the ground when it launched. Smedley tried to covertly get his game funded while hiding it from the higher-ups, the team struggled with crude software to build the game world, and the game ate up a city’s worth of bandwidth when it launched.

It’s inevitable that the game would have to cut corners – simply having that many players online at once was an accomplishment in itself, so there was obviously a lot of focus on technical issues during development. It’s no wonder, then, that some systems – like crafting – were barely functional at launch. The other key thing to keep in mind is that EverQuest, as the love-child of DikuMUD with a 3D game engine (let’s say Quake, to be contemporaneous), borrowed heavily from DikuMUD’s extensive history of development and design. Key features such as class-based combat roles, mob “aggro” control (which player the monster was trying to attack), and monsters as the source of gear (or “loot”) were all pioneered in the text-based DikuMUD environment. EverQuest therefore benefited from the flowering of dozens of gardens that preceded it – each MUD an experiment, with various folks trying new and different innovations to improve the core combat engine.

I spoke last time about how combat was the preeminent of four major systems in the game (the others being Exploration, Social Interaction, and Crafting / Questing). These other activities – which we’ll explore in subsequent posts – had rough frameworks put in place, but were not thoroughly developed and tested. After all, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do in the original EverQuest. Unlike other MMOs that followed it, you can’t gather resources (like mining in EVE), collect things (like achievements in WoW), or buy property and decorate it (the original Ultima Online or Second Life). You couldn’t advance in EverQuest without fighting – quests gave minimal experience to help you level, crafting couldn’t make gear that was as helpful as the ones you could loot (and you often needed to kill monsters just to get the raw materials to craft), and having lots of friends – while beneficial – wouldn’t get you very far. Sooner or later you had to start whacking monsters.

I didn’t actually understand this when I first played EverQuest in 1999. I had played both computer and pen-and-paper RPGs, and I suppose I had hoped that, with the presence of other people would give the game a more imaginative feel, with more people playing “make-believe” in the fantasy world. Alas, it was not the case – the game became a fantasy combat simulator, and not much more.

That being said, the combat in EverQuest was a compelling game experience. I categorized combat as a “social” activity in the game, and to a large extent that is true. Although you can take on foes yourself in the early levels, it becomes prohibitively difficult to do so later on. Eventually, you’ll be able to tackle only monsters whose level is slightly lower than you, and then only those that are much lower level than you are. Some classes can get around this through various tricks and tactics, most of which involve you damaging monsters from a safe distance. Tactics include “kiting” (running faster than the monster and damaging from a distance), “rooting” (preventing the monster from moving with a spell), or having a pet do melee damage while you “nuke” (cast damage spells) from afar.

In general, however, group-based combat is best. Typically, a group “camps” in a location where groups of monsters spawn, and then proceeds to pull in monsters from an area and dispatch them. The difference between classes is generally defined through their role in combat, from “tanks” (melee classes with high hit points and the ability to go toe-to-toe with monsters) to healers (clerics and druids) and other utility players. EverQuest as launch did an excellent job of balancing these classes such that most combinations of heroes that included a tank and a healer were viable.

Once a group gets in a “rhythm” of engaging and dispatching monsters, the game really hits its stride. Dungeons are particularly dangerous, as the walls restrict movement, making retreat more difficult…but they are balanced out by the fact that experience rewards in such locations are higher to compensate. The tension – combined with the high cost of death (all equipment stays on your corpse, which – if you died in a dangerous location – can be difficult to retrieve) – give the game risk. Skilled players know how to play their character’s group role, and contribute meaningfully to the survival and efficiency of the adventuring party.

The down-side of group-based combat is that it can sometimes be a challenge to find both a group and a rewarding area to find enemies to fight. Popular areas are “camped” frequently, sometimes with lines forming like an amusement park for people to get in. It can be difficult to collect enough individuals close to your level to form a viable group outside of the most popular areas, leading to large times of game “play” where you have to travel and / or message other players to find group members.

This makes group-based combat EverQuest’s greatest strength and weakness: either you’re having a lot of fun with other players, or you’re spending all your time trying to find other players…which is not so fun. I’m sure the developers had no issue with the latter, since they had a ready-made group at all times. For the average player sitting behind a computer screen at home, however, the effort required to coordinate fun could be a heavy tax on your game time.

This has lead to the game, since its founding, to abrogate the need for a group with “mercenaries” (computer-controlled characters that you can “hire”) and other difficulty adjustments. In my view, however, this solves the problem by undermining the game’s core purpose – you can “play” the game today, but it’s not the same game that you started with. At the end of this series of posts, I’ll bring out some ideas for alternatives for addressing the “coordination tax”. But next, we’ll move on to exploration, and how EverQuest projected the compelling illusion of a high-fantasy world with its evocative environments.

EverQuest: 20 Years of Cruft

In which I begin to reflect on EverQuest’s launch and the key elements that made it fun.

Calthaer, wood elf bard, in front of the new and ugly Freeport on the current Tunare Everquest server (left) and in front of the classic, beautiful Freeport on Project 1999 Blue (right).

But that is where you end up when you take a hard look at what made a game what it was. You start back down the path of the original features and have to examine things like corpse runs and instancing and the like.
–Wilhelm Arcturus, the Ancient Gaming Noob

I’ve posted recently about playing two EverQuests: one, the recreation of “classic” EverQuest that is presented by Project 1999, and the other a return to my character on the “live” EverQuest server as it exists today (I had stopped playing just before Kunark came out in 2000). I prefer Project 1999 for a lot of reasons, and figured I’d write a brief series of posts that compare and contrast the old and the new EverQuest, especially in terms of how well it is hitting what Holly Longdale has said are its twin pillars: “classic high fantasy and community dependency.” I’m going to argue that the layer upon layer of features and content added to EverQuest over the past 20 years has not improved the game.

To begin with, let me outline what I believe some of the key elements of EverQuest were at launch – four systems through which the game delivered compelling fun. They’re not the features or ludemes – those individual pieces all played in to these overarching systems. These four systems should give us a good basis for discussing whether or not the features that have been added or altered in the past 20 years have made the game better.

Combat: primarily player-vs-environment, group-based monster slaying. I would argue that this is EverQuest’s “core” system, the one which was most well-developed at launch and which to a large extent defines the game. Just about everything in EverQuest is tied to how well your character(s) can kill monsters in the world.
Exploration: seeing new parts of the world. Norrath used to be a beautiful place, with “hallmark” locations that were fun just to look at and poke around. The world has gotten larger since launch – for better or worse – and some of the locations have been revised considerably (here’s looking at you, Freeport).
Social Interaction: the way that players grouped, talked, played together. This system is the key differentiating factor for EverQuest, as there are other games that do these other three systems as well or better – but without large numbers of other players to do it with.
Crafting and Questing: making new items yourself or getting them from NPCs. These are arguably two distinct systems, but I’m combining them into one, at least for purposes of this series. These two systems weren’t very robust when EverQuest was launched – there were few quests, and crafting was difficult to understand and practice. Both crafting and questing have seen dramatic changes over time as various patches and expansions have accreted mechanics on top of one another to try to “fix” or enhance these two elements of the game.

These are what I consider to be the four key systems in EverQuest. I’m going to posit that Combat and Social Interaction play more strongly to the “community dependency” pillar; Exploration, Crafting, and Questing play more strongly to the “classic high fantasy” pillar. In the next four posts in this series, I’ll cover each element in some detail, describing what I think the original EverQuest did right, what needed to be improved at launch, briefly look at changes they made to effect those improvements (and whether they did the trick), and a few alternative ideas they could have considered to conserve what was great about the original while adding things that were new.

From the outset, I’d also like to acknowledge the fact that this is all “armchair designer” talk. Some of what I’m going to talk about may be idealistic and far removed from the realities that the EverQuest team has likely faced over the years with the pressure to “publish or perish” to retain the user base, typically with a fairly short time window. I am sympathetic, to a degree – but this is my blog, so I’ll write it like I see it. Expect an article on EverQuest’s combat soon.

EverQuest: The Return

In which I return to the realm of EverQuest and waddle like a duck.

Calthaer in Kelethin — Calthaer the Bard, sole surviving member of the Silver Circle guild, sitting all by himself in Kelethin with his shiny new Tranquilsong Helm.

In a recent post, I said that I no longer play MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games). So…shortly after I wrote that…I logged back in to Project 1999. For those who are unfamiliar with P99, it’s an attempt by a group of fans to re-create “classic” EverQuest, prior to the Shadows of Luclin expansion in 2001.

Project 1999 is enjoying something of a renaissance, with nearly 1,800 players on the server on a regular basis – definitely up from the ~800 people on the server that it had two years ago when I first tried it. With more people comes some of the traditional flame wars and whatnot on the forums, but also more opportunity for fun.

In the throes of nostalgia, I also decided to see if I could recover my old EverQuest account. With the 20th anniversary of the launch of the game, I saw stories of folks who were able to get into accounts they hadn’t used in over a decade…and I figured: why not try for 19 years? I’m pretty sure I hadn’t logged in to EverQuest since early 2000, as I left the game shortly before the Kunark expansion launched.

Lo and behold, the great staff at Daybreak Games were able to connect me with my account. It had been tied to my college email address, which of course I no longer access. After a bit of a download to get the current version of the game, I logged in to Calthaer – the wood elf bard I created upon launch back in 1999.

The first thing I noticed was that he was naked, and was swaying on his feet – drunk. It all came back to me – sitting in the West Freeport gate, giving away my armor and weapons (except for a Spiked Collar – clearly a prized possession I was loathe to part with), getting “drunk” on Dwarven Ale, and saying goodbye to friends – Starrhawk, Mungalung (an Ogre warrior…his name just came back to me as I was typing this), and others whose names I can’t recall. I was even still a member of the Silver Circle – the guild I used to belong to. Of course, saying “Hello?” in guild chat yielded no response – I am sure I must be the only surviving member of the guild.

The other thing I noticed was that I was ugly. I know it’s debatable whether the new character models are better or not…put me firmly in the camp that hates them. My wood elf bard had disproportionate limbs and waddled like a duck when he ran.

In addition, West Freeport was radically altered. In place of the white and red brick walls and dusty streets was a drab, brown fortress with no distinguishing features. It almost looked like someone decided to imitate an Imperial town from Oblivion, but without any of the sense of style that the Elder Scrolls games manage to inject into their fantasy world. The map at least helped me get around, but – what a disappointment.

Armor and a weapon were going to be essential for survival, so I checked the rest of my inventory. Besides some Dwarven Ale, I had a fishing pole and bait, a few gold pieces, and some sewing and smithing items (I was trying to build up my skill and make studded leather prior to my departure – trade skills were very difficult in the original EverQuest). First I went to the docks and did some fishing until I found a rusty dagger. Then I went out to the Commons (no more east and west) and started hunting some wolves to make small patchwork leather armor.

After making a few pieces of armor, I headed out to Rivervale, where I knew there was a lady in Misty Thicket who sold patterns. After tooling around for a while finishing up my patchwork set (and even making myself a pair of studded leather leggings), I saw the book that lead to the Plane of Knowledge, the new “hub” for the game – and I went there.

After exploring the place for a bit, I saw a guy called V’Lynn Renloe with a tag for “armor quests”. Thinking to myself that I needed armor, I hailed him – and got a quest line in a window for Misty Thicket. I returned to the woods, killed a bunch of stuff, and was rewarded with a “Note about your fourth trial.” With the instruction to hand that in to my guildmaster, I go to the bard guildmaster in the Plane of Knowledge – who doesn’t accept the note. Since I came from the Greater Faydark, I head there – that guildmaster won’t accept it, either. It looks like I just wasted my time – I’m sure this note goes to somebody, but I have no idea who.

After checking online, I do see that this guildmaster will hand out quests for “newbie armor”. I start in on this, which involves killing a bunch of low-level monsters in Greater Faydark (where I am also completely alone – no one’s in Crushbone, either). After collecting a bunch of stuff and combining it in the forge, presto – I have a Tranquilsong Helm.

It’s the best piece of armor I’ve ever owned in EverQuest – decent protection and a very hefty addition to my skills (+6 Stamina, +5 Charisma). In the original game, you didn’t start getting armor that could buff your attributes until level 15-20, and even then it was doled out in +1s and +2s. I wonder to myself why I just spent time putting together of patchwork armor when this quest gives a much better reward…moreover, I wonder why patchwork armor is still in the game, with these quests around. It’s clear, upon reading a few guides, that there’s a lot more to tailoring now as well – there are clearly a few competing “systems” of tradeskills, with monsters dropping a variety of pelts and silks, none of which are compatible or convertible from one system to the other.

It’s clear that EverQuest is…well, just what it is: a program from the 1990s that has been haphazardly “patched up” in an effort to stay relevant and retain its user base. The game has player housing, “mercenaries” (NPCs you can hire so that you don’t have to group up with other players), hub zones, and elaborate quests. While some of this is an improvement over the original game, much of it is not – especially when the sum total of its pieces is considered together.

The conclusion of all this is that I won’t be continuing in the “live” version of EverQuest. Every zone I went to – all mainstays of the original game, each one populated with a lot of players in Project 1999 – was completely empty. It didn’t seem like a “massively multiplayer” game any more; it was just a virtual world that you could explore all by your lonesome. I’ll write a few more posts about the game mechanics that have fed in to this situation over the next few weeks. For now, though, I’ll log back in to Project 1999 and try to make a few platinum.

Bit by Bit: Thea – The Awakening

In which I tell the tale of my journey through the world of Thea: The Awakening

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and a large reason for that is the fact that I’ve devoured Thea: The Awakening. That, and the fact that I’ve been really busy at work – someone’s out on maternity leave, and the rest of us are picking up the work. When I’m really tired like that, I tend to grab on to a compelling game and play it to death, which is what I did with Thea.

It’s a little overwhelming at first: there are a ton of options for upgrades, you have a huge world, and the challenges revolve around a card game that takes a little while to figure out. It begins to pick up steam quickly, though – you get a few resources, a few crafting recipes, and you get better at the strategy required for the card game. The reviews all stress that it’s not a “4x” game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), largely because you can’t Expand – your first settlement will be your only settlement. It does have the trademark effect of 4x gameplay, though – you are always saying to yourself “Just one more turn”, and then end up playing for hours.

I started out with a great placement: some wicker was right on top of my base. This resource is key in making the first essential piece of equipment, which is baskets to improve the gathering skill of your townspeople. Gathering is a core task in Thea: you have to send out expeditions to grab more and better materials as the game progresses, or you’re going to be overwhelmed by the wandering enemies.

A world map from Thea: The Awakening — The five-skull raider’s fort that blocked me from the good stuff to the east and south.

In what felt like a very short amount of time, I had a “five-skull” (the highest level of basic challenges) Raider’s Lair plopped right along a narrow isthmus leading to most of the good resources – like ancient wood. I couldn’t quite get past it yet, so I had to spend some time training up my townsfolk. While all challenges in Thea are resolved with a card game, the challenges take on different forms. If not combat, then they’re Social, Hex (magical), Strength, and so forth, representing different approaches to solving a problem. I believe I defeated the raiders with Social – I walked up to them and had my townsfolk convince them that they’d be better served picking up and going elsewhere.

The different types of challenge require different skills – and there are a dizzying array of them. Skills like Speech are obviously for a Social challenge, but then you have ones without an obvious use: Folklore, or Sixth Sense. Even though I played the game for hours on end, I am not sure I’d be able to identify which skills do which – they all perform different actions within the card game. Some skills are useful in several types of challenges; others are good only for one.

The card game from Thea: The Awakening — Thea’s card game. In general, your townsfolk are each a different card. You and the AI take turns placing them from left to right, then an automated sequence resolves actions in the same order.

In the end, you’ll have to have your townsfolk specialize in only one or two skills. Eventually, you’ll unlock enough crafting recipes and ingredients to equip them with great gear – and they’ll start taking on significant challenges, like giants (who are not just white-skull challenges, but orange and red skull). Towards the end, I still felt like I was struggling to collect enough resources, but then I waltzed into a series of quests which must have triggered the end game once completed. The game told me I could keep playing, but it had given me a score and I figured it was as good a time to stop as any.

Not sure if I’ll go through another round of this – it’s a long and slow-moving game. But I’m glad I played it through once. Fans of turn-based strategy would do well to pick this one up – it might move a little slow, but it’s a satisfying ride.

Why I no longer play MMOs

In which I recount in brief my history with MMOs, and explain what happened to cause me to abandon them.

Calthaer, a Wood Elf Bard who never got much past level 30, about to board a ship in the original EverQuest, circa 1999. Yes – I’ve kept this screenshot on a hard drive since then!

My first exposure to MMOs began shortly after I arrived at college. I met Mike in one of my introductory classes; we became friends and bonded over computer games. He lived in the area; I was four or five hours from home. We played Warcraft II against each other via the modem – high-speed internet was just being installed throughout America, and in my freshman year few dorms or homes had it.

Mike eventually dropped out of college, but we kept in touch. During one of my visits, he introduced me to this game he was playing: Ultima Online. I watched him play – the idea that thousands of players were all playing together was compelling. It was new, and it was awesome – like nothing I’d seen before. Oh, sure, I’d played BBS games before – but you rarely encountered another player in real-time when you were all running around on a PC in someone’s basement.

Something kept me from jumping on it, though – it might have been the fact that it looked a lot like Ultima VIII, which I had recently played, and which impressed me not at all (not an uncommon sentiment – thanks a lot, EA). It wasn’t until Mike introduced me to his next MMO that I really jumped in with both feet.

He gave me a disk for a “beta test” – the first I’d heard of such a thing – and he gave me his login. It was an MMO, like Ultima Online, but it was in full 3D, like a first-person shooter. I had loved Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and others in the genre, so I had to jump on it, despite the monthly fee. EverQuest was my first MMO, and I was there right at launch.

In general, I loved it. I made friends, joined a guild called “The Silver Circle.” Neither the WoW nor the EQ2 guilds of that name are the same, from what I can tell – whatever primitive guild page or forum we had in those early days of the internet is now long gone, and the only record of a guildmate whose handle I can recall is Starrhawk, listed in this old EverQuest post here.

Eventually, I tired of the grinding. I had always loved exploring and seeing new things; the game barred you from most of that by placing difficult enemies everywhere. On top of that, it was crowded, and resembled an amusement park with long lines to “camp” the best equipment. I moved on to Asheron’s Call, and Earth & Beyond, but by 2002 I realized that I wasn’t having as much fun with these games. The novelty had worn off, they were sucking up a lot of time, and I was missing out on Real Life.

I actually logged in to the “classic” EQ simulator, Project 1999, a few years back, to re-experience the old days. I played it a lot; my wife was getting ticked at how much it occupied my attention. I started to realize, too, that the reason I was playing it was because I was feeling kind of depressed and wanted to “turn back the clock” and relive the late 1990s for a spell.

It made me wonder whether college itself hadn’t made me somewhat depressed – living in a dreary, cloudy city in New England, away from all my high school friends, coming from a private Christian school and living side-by-side for the first time in my life with thousands of hedonists. Maybe I spent so many hours in front of the computer screen because I wasn’t feeling all that great, and MMOs were an easy retreat – a way to forget the things that troubled me.

Today, I view my brief outing with MMOs as a sign that I wasn’t mentally healthy. I’m happy simply reading the occasional article from people that do play them, like Wilhelm Arcturus and Aywren Sojourner, and don’t think I’ll ever go back to playing MMOs again. I’d far rather set up some limited adventures – like a Minecraft server, or playing through the original Baldur’s Gate – with people I know, or want to get to know better. Even better, these days I like to sit around a table and play with folks in real life. Maybe it’s not that way with everyone – I am sure those who still play MMOs enjoy such games responsibly. I simply found it tough to limit my gaming time to prevent it from crowding out the rest of the enjoyable things in life when I was playing them…so for the last 15+ years, I’ve tried to avoid them.

Great Games: Terraria

In which I describe my most-played video game of the past decade, and what makes it fun.

Terraria - Calthaer's Castle — A view from my Terrarian castle.

At the beginning of 2011, an indie computer game began its meteoric rise to fame. The game featured a fully destructible environment: every hill could be leveled, every tree felled, every rock capable of being mined and picked up. You could use the materials you gathered to create a range of equipment, from pickaxes to swords. Enemies spawned during the day and night sequences, and your task was to build yourself shelter while you tried to move up the “tech tree” and gather better resources and equipment.

Minecraft, which had been kicking around for about two years, was the name of this game. Mojang’s exploration game was already popular when Andrew Spinks released Terraria in May of 2011. The comparisons between the two began immediately, with some calling Terraria a Minecraft “clone” – and others declaring that Terraria was a better game, whereas Minecraft was a sandbox.

Having never played Minecraft, I picked up Terraria shortly after its release in 2011 – and was instantly hooked. It had the look of the great platformers of old, but included the addictive resource-gathering and crafting that Minecraft had introduced. It also streamlined that experience – no longer did you need to carefully arrange resources in a grid to conjure your tools, as Terraria let you simply select them if you possessed the proper quantities in your inventory.

Terraria also introduced a progression in the content and world difficulty that Minecraft lacked at the time. Boss monsters punctuated your experience with the world, with each one unlocking more possible content with its defeat. This culminated in a fight with the games ultimate boss, which at release was arguably the Eater of Worlds, who was subsequently outclassed by an ever-increasing series of difficult bosses introduced in the game’s subsequent patches.

I’ve never actually “beaten” Terraria and gotten to the end bosses they’ve added since launch – I have too much fun building castles, creating efficient transportation systems, and even fishing. Over the years, they’ve added dozens of little goals, from crafting rare building materials and furniture to collecting powerful artifacts. Every time I return to the game, it seems I find that they’ve added something new and interesting to discover, prompting me to start a world all over again to experience it fresh.

The long list of goals combined with the classic platforming gameplay is what makes Terraria a great game well worth playing. I’ve enjoyed it for more hours than I care to admit – the combination of combat, crafting, and exploration is something I find calming and compelling. I love the fact that the game creates a new random world with every start – a random world with caves, treasure, and foes spread out at just the right intervals to keep you engaged. You also have the real ability to make your own mark on that world – to shape it according to your own wishes.

Terraria is now a classic, and can routinely be found for between $5 and $10 on Steam or GOG. If you have a computer that acts as a server, grab the dedicated server software (link is at the bottom of the page), configure your Windows firewall and router, and invite your friends to play. Writing about why I love the game has made me want to do just that, in fact…might have to do that sometime.

Getting The Nintendo Entertainment System

In which I describe my long-anticipated purchase of the greatest of classic game consoles.

The NES Challenge Set — My original NES, still in the box, and still with the Electronics Boutique price tag on it.

I’ve explained previously that the interactive screen has always been especially alluring for me. As a kid, the power of interactive entertainment was so magnetic for me that I’d play with single-minded focus, ignoring the rest of the world completely. My parents saw this and decided to put some limits on my gaming time, one of those limits being that we had no Nintendo Entertainment System in the house.

The original Game Boy was actually my first video game system, which I got with some Christmas money around 1990. Prior to that we had the VIC-20, and a bit later an Apple ][ clone (a LASER 128 we got from a now-closed Sears store). The Nintendo, however, was like a drug for me. We’d go to peoples’ houses that had it, and I’d get hyper-focused as I played it – so my parents decided not to get it.

Incidentally, if we had one of these at home I probably wouldn’t have felt like I needed to play the thing any time we visited someone who had it – but I guess that thought didn’t occur to my parents…they probably figured that I would play the thing day and night if we got it. They might have been right – maybe I would have snuck downstairs when everyone else was asleep and turned on the TV to play Nintendo, at least at first. I doubt it would have lasted. The Game Boy was something my parents could feasibly take and hide in a drawer if I got too obsessed, so that was the first “console” I got.

Eventually, once the Game Boy proved not to be detrimental to my grades, I was allowed to get the Nintendo Entertainment System I’d always wanted. By this point it was around 1992, and the NES was on its way out. The Super Nintendo was already in stores, and there were few games for the NES available at the local Electronics Boutique. I bought it with Castlevania III and Wizards & Warriors III, passing by the Contra Force game that was also on the shelf.

Up until this point, I’d only played games at friends’ houses – particularly at my good friend Jeremy’s house down the street. There were lots of games that had looked interesting, but that I had experienced only through advertisements (particularly in comic books, where many NES ads appeared back in the day). I was entering my teenage years at this point, and finally had a system to play these games on. I picked up StarTropics and the sequel at Toys R Us on clearance, along with the original Mega Man and Mega Man 6 – all still new and in stores. It’s tough to recall, but I might have gotten a few others at a local video rental store that was getting rid of their old games.

As I entered high school and had a summer job, everything got easier: Funcoland was in town, and they had loads of old Nintendo games for sale. Several were in boxes, and I had a small paycheck to burn. I recall getting Crystalis, The Legend of Zelda, and a few dozen other games from a store on my way home from school. While my friends were playing Sega Genesis, I still wanted to play those games that I’d always dreamed about and missed back when I was five to ten years younger.

I took my NES with me to college; friends would come over and play. For the past few years it’s been sitting in the box; it’s about time for it to make a comeback, though. We’re cleaning out my grandmother’s house (she’s still alive, but is in a nursing home, and in her 90s…her house itself is probably a post for another time), and I got an old CRT television and VCR that was sitting in the basement. I’m planning on hooking up the old NES and playing some games for old times sake.

Although my parents could have probably relaxed a bit about the Nintendo, I can’t say I feel like I was deprived. If anything, I think the delayed gratification enhanced my experience later. Even playing these games today, I can still summon that child-like anticipation I had, the thrill I felt when I took that system home and finally enjoyed the games I had for years looked forward to playing.

Gaming Through the Backlog

In which I recount my earliest days of computing, and what I am doing with the games I’ve gathered since that digital dawn.

My first computer was a VIC-20. My parents bought it used from a lady back in the mid-1980s…I recall the seller bringing it to our house, and eagerly looking out the window for her arrival. It came with only three games: Raid on Ft. Knox, Adventureland, and Pirates’ Cove. We eventually headed over to the local Toys R Us and snapped up about 10 more titles, all for a few dollars each. At that point, the games were on clearance – no one cared about “the wonder computer of the 1980s” by ’85 or ’86.

I’ve been buying games ever since then. Computer games, video games – it doesn’t matter; I’ve enjoyed them both, even during the days when there was more of a divide between the two. There has always been something magical to me about the idea that you don’t have to just watch things happening on the screen passively – you can influence the images, interact with them. The old VIC-20 eventually stopped working, and I sold the games, but that’s the only one – I’ve kept the Laser 128 (an Apple ][ clone) and its games, the Game Boy, the NES, the PS2…and most games that I bought for those systems.

A few years ago, I started to track my games on Backloggery.com. I realized that there were some games that I had always meant to get back to, to finish…and that I just hadn’t done it. I wanted a way to see where I stood with these. Given the decades of collecting, it was a bit of a job to enter all of them in. Eventually, however, I had gotten most things into the system, and I was finally able to see how many games I had finished – and how many I hadn’t.

My “uncompleted” ranking stood somewhere in the high 60% range. It was an eye-opener, and it accomplished what I had hoped it would do. For years I had snapped up game after game – loads of them, fairly indiscriminately, figuring that I wanted to play it and that I would get around to it eventually. I had over 800 games in my collection, 500 or so that I hadn’t completed – and lots that I hadn’t even played.

The worst offenders in my backlog were the lengthy JRPGs. Back in the 1990s I had read about these in magazines, and always wanted to play them, but I never had a SNES or a PlayStation to do so with. When I finally got a PS2 in 2002, I bought lots of games I had wanted to try: Final Fantasy games, Grandia, Xenosaga, all of that. Several of these were still in the shrink-wrap – I had never even booted them up.

It took me a few years to get there, but over the base 2+ years I’ve begun to sell some of these off. The rarest and most expensive ones were easy – $50-$100 for a game I haven’t played, and probably won’t get to play? Sure. It’s harder to justify letting a game go for $5; given eBay fees, it hardly seems worth it. Still, I’ve cut my collection by quite a bit.

With the new year, plenty of bloggers (like Bhagpuss) have discussed large numbers of games that they want to cover. I’m trying to avoid setting goals like those – if anything, I’m purposing to take a critical eye towards the rest of my collection and figure out what I can sell. I’m also hoping that this blog might give me a way to chronicle my experiences with some games – maybe if I write about it, I’ll feel more ready to part with it.