The Rampant Coyote has a new article were he replays the orginal EverQuest, and gives his thoughts from then and now. If you're interested the links are here and here.
More information.So a few weeks ago, I did the unthinkable. After nearly a decade, I reinstalled EverQuest. The original.
Well, “reinstalled” is perhaps the wrong term. My original discs were not used. As the game has gone “free to play,” I just installed the new client. I doubt that my old account is available anymore (any attempts to access it were met with failure), so I started over fresh. Brand new characters in an old, familiar world.
It was weird, man.
By way of backstory – I started playing EverQuest only a few days after it launched (although technically, one of the Sony producers had me goofing around in the beta days before it launched). I played it a lot. I eventually quit simply because I had just started “going indie” and realized that I couldn’t keep up with the necessity to do big raids on a nightly basis and make any productive effort towards my games. I’d played in MUDs before (years before), and I’ve played several MMOs since, but EverQuest will always be the MMO for me – as crude and painfully designed as it was.
After hearing that it’s a lot easier to solo, now, I figured I’d start up a character or two and play for a few hours and see how it panned out.
I’ll go into the mechanics of the changes in part 2. From a game design perspective, it’s been fascinating to see how the game has evolved – to going free-to-play, to intense competition from more modern MMOs, to dealing with having a really huge world and not a lot of players to fill it. Suffice to say that from a gameplay perspective, the absolutely “free” experience is in almost every way superior to the one I paid hundreds and hundreds of dollars for back in 1999-2004. The astonishing thing to me is that the game is still “live.” Whereas other, newer MMOs have come and gone, shutting off the servers for good, Norrath is still around.