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.