Category: Video Games

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.

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.

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.

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.