Initially I wasn’t going to include EverQuest as part of this project. It was never released on a PlayStation console and Sony no longer holds the rights. But I kept thinking about how important this game was not just to Sony’s gaming division, but to the industry and to me, and I decided to include it.
While I’ve predominantly been a World of Warcraft player for the past couple of decades, EQ was my first MMO. It was, prior to WoW, the most successful game in the genre, and the standard-bearer. Which is wild, because EverQuest in its original form was one of the most punishing games ever conceived.
In case you’re not familiar: in the early days, EverQuest punished failure in a multitude of ways. The first was a loss of experience (which remains today part of the game today). At higher levels this could mean hours of progress lost in a single death. Sometimes this could even cause you to go down a level, rendering spells and equipment obsolete. But this was far from the game’s cruelest mechanic: corpse retrieval.
When you die, you would respawn at your bind point (which was possibly very far away), essentially naked. All of your gear remained on your corpse. This was mildly annoying in some ways. For example, maybe you were carrying a torch and now to get back to your corpse you needed to traverse a pitch black cave (I vividly remember cranking the gamma on my monitor in a situation like this). But corpse retrieval was typically more than annoying, it was potentially soul-crushing.
The place where you were killed was likely due to a swarm of enemies more powerful than you. So guess what would happen when you went back there, now gear-less: yup, those same enemies would kill you again. Lose xp. Lose a level. Rinse and repeat, with the sunk cost fallacy overwhelming common sense and further crushing your spirit.
But in early EverQuest this was not a bug, but a feature. A feature meant to force players into grouping, forming bonds, and deepening their connection to the game’s world. Other players could potentially resurrect you on the spot with minimal penalty. Or “drag” your corpse out of danger to you. But at the end of the day, there was strength in numbers, and traveling with a party increased your chance of survival. And survival is really the core of the EverQuest experience.
While most post-EQ MMOs have been more concerned with players growing their power and prestige, for the first few hundred hours of EverQuest you’re just trying to make incremental gains and not die. Kinda like most of us in the real world.
This held a lot of appeal to me in my high school years, but as I got older, I found the real world to be soul-crushing enough, and I welcomed WoW’s more gentle approach. And yet, there are still people who long for the thrill and challenge of the classic EQ experience, and can find it in varying degrees in fan emulation and the official time-locked progression servers.
EQ has been out of Sony’s hands for years, but the current developers, Darkpaw Games, are wonderful stewards for the maintenance and future of the game. They continue to release new content in the form of expansions (there are currently over 30), but also new servers that remix classic content to make it fresh for longtime players. In addition, they have sanded off some of the rough edges of the normal game (adding mercenaries, removing corpse retrieval, and speeding up xp gain), finally making EQ somewhat more approachable for casual and solo players. The UI is an absolute nightmare on modern 4K displays, but it’s not enough to keep me from checking in on the game occasionally.
I love that EQ is still going today, but even if it wasn’t, its influence is still felt in games from Destiny to, obviously, WoW. While EQ never made it to a PlayStation console, it did get a few excellent PS2 spinoffs, like EverQuest Online Adventures and the fantastic Champions of Norrath duology.
I’ll likely never go back to EverQuest “full time,” but I will continue to check in on the free to play version that is pretty much permanently installed on my PC. Truly a forever quest.
All screenshots captured from official servers, via the Steam launcher.
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