Man is by nature a social animal…Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.

Aristotle, Politics

In the late 1990s, we were all still discovering the radical effect that the Internet was going to have on society. Amazon was changing commerce to become “e-commerce”, e-mail was replacing the postal service, and in gaming we were just discovering that it was a lot of fun to game with other people from the comfort of your own home office.

To be sure, multiplayer gaming had existed before. The technorati were playing games like “Airflight” (a multiplayer flight simulator) on mainframes as far back as the 1970s. Home video game consoles (the Atari 2600, the Nintendo Entertainment System) allowed up to four players to game together from the comfort of your couch. In the early 1990s, a little PC game called Doom swept the country, bringing university computer networks to their knees because the multiplayer “deathmatch” games were so thrilling.

Although there had been “massively” multiplayer games prior to the late 1990s, they were typically limited to expensive, closed networks (e.g., Gemstone on the GEnie network or Neverwinter Nights on AOL). Ultima Online, and then EverQuest, brought multiplayer to the masses – and were the first games to allow not just hundreds, but thousands of players to inhabit the same, persistent, virtual world. It was easier than ever to connect your computer to the Internet, and it was easier than ever for people to game together in real time.

It’s important to remember that these were the days before the dark and seedy side of the Internet was widely known. The Internet grew up, after all, within the environs of government research – and employment within that small community was the de facto gateway for admission. There were no safeguards, and there was no identify verification, built into the network itself – a “feature” that some exploited (e.g., Markus Hess, one of the first well-known individuals exploiting the Internet’s anonymity for espionage). It was an age of naiveté – an age before malicious cybercrimes, one when it simply didn’t occur to people that computers could be used for mischief and mayhem…although by the 1990s people were starting to get a clue.

It didn’t take long for things to go off the rails in the first MMOGs. The most famous incident in MMOG history happened before Ultima Online even launched – the assassination of Lord British. EverQuest might have learned that particular lesson (no one ever killed Aradune, for example), but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of other ways for people to cause grief. EverQuest was nothing if not a large amusement park, with each zone, area, or monster a different “ride” that someone could enjoy (read: kill). There was only so much content to go around, and competition for that content could be fierce – especially when the “prize” at the end of the ride was a unique and valuable piece of loot that could carry your character forwards in their progression of power.

At EverQuest’s most advanced levels, where players are taking on “raid” mosters that require the cooperation of dozens, only a select few players typically experienced that content (by design, according to Holly Windstalker, famous for saying “Casuals shouldn’t be allowed to fight Nagafen“). While this could sometimes lead to player strife, it was also the cause of some of the greatest cooperation in the game, in the form of “guilds” – player-made associations for communicating and coordinating efforts. At launch, EverQuest’s guilds typically allowed chatting together and…that’s about it. Later iterations of the game allowed for shared banking (among other things), but the main feature of the guild was to facilitate the sharing of knowledge and to make it easier to find friends to group with.

Of course, given that individuals spent so much time in EverQuest, the social aspects of coordination and cooperation sometimes tended to lead to other socializing that was less directly connected to the game’s content. Players found friendship, confiding the personal details of their lives – or even finding romance and having in-game weddings. For some folks, the relationships they find and forge online have more history and weight than those they find out in the real world.

While writing this post, I logged in to the live EverQuest servers and discovered the menu that would allow me to view the Silver Circle guild that I left long ago. Starrhawk – probably my best virtual friend from that time long ago – was no longer a member; she’d moved on to other guilds and I’m sure had an immensely successful EverQuest career. Mungalung is a guild leader. None of the others I recognized…and almost none of them had logged in for the past 15 years, most so long ago that it didn’t even display when. I certainly wish I could contact most of these folks, but I haven’t a clue how to do so – we’ve certainly lost touch over the years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them didn’t even remember me.

All that to say, suppose, that this pillar of EverQuest’s “game” design worked. It did allow folks to get together, to meet each other, to socialize. The combat was fun; the virtual world was fun…but I really don’t feel as strongly about those as I do about the relationships I had with folks. I was miles from home at the time, off at college, in a dreary city where I didn’t know a ton of folks. In many ways I was adrift – the world had suddenly opened up and I am not sure I had quite been prepared for it. EverQuest allowed me to meet a need for interacting with people (a need I am not sure I was quite mature enough to realize I had) in a way that didn’t feel quite as chaotic.

To summarize: the early MMOGs allowed people to interact virtually in a way that had never been done before. You could meet and “spend time with” folks all over the world. Sometimes that could be a bad experience, as some used the relative anonymity of the Internet to make mischief. But for many, it became a great experience. EverQuest’s great gameplay might have been the lure, but the social aspects – that was the real hook that kept people engaged.

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“

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.