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.