My mother’s day present was my son washed and detailed my car 🙂 But I was also left alone to play EverQuest all day.
I took my inky shadow knight from 1-6 in about ten hours of soloing. I got one piece of the newbie quest armor made (this won’t be available on Aradune). Everything else she’s wearing was dropped by some skeleton or other.
Not sure how many times my character has died. Even though this server is only a few months old, those people still in the newbie zones are boxing or severely twinked.
The oddest bit, to me, was how the game kept announcing when guilds would kill bosses. Quarm bit the dust at least three times that I noticed. Vox died; Naggy died twice. Significantly, though, no Vex Thal bosses died while I was playing. Ain’t nobody have time for Vex Thal. All open world bosses (and all those were open world in the original game) now have instanced variants. Probably there’s a lockout to prevent people from farming the bosses.
Lost Dungeons of Norrath was the most recent expansion, I believe, and there were lots of LDoN groups forming. There were even a few low level groups — one group was apparently camping the zone in Unrest. If only I had been a few levels higher…
EQ is still addictive after all these years. This character, though, I won’t play again. I just wanted to get back into the rhythms of EverQuest.
May 27 is when the two new servers come out. General chatter was that the opening of Aradune server will be the death of Mangler, but one person replied that there were still plenty of people who stayed behind on Coirnav when Mangler opened.
Well… that person was on Mangler now, though, so…?
Mangler has been live a little over a year. The Plane of Time is a casual farm raid. I checked the newbie camps throughout Nektulos Forest and the Commonlands — all were empty, or being soloed by twinks or two boxers. The general chat had no questions from new players.
Anecdotal evidence over the couple of days I’ve been playing is that the only people playing on the Mangler server are expert EverQuest players who go from new server to new server trying for server firsts, or nostalgic players like me who just are checking in on an old friend.
MMOs like Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, a hypothetical EverQuest 3 or the still very much a thing EverQuest 2 are all fighting for the same, limited pool of aging gamers who had fun with a particular videogame 21 years ago, and didn’t abandon EQ for World of Warcraft when the vast majority of their friends left.
For a new MMO to really rise from EverQuest’s ashes, it has to die first. And it’s still got a lot of life in it.
There is definitely a fan base that loves the rush of a new server and everybody at level 1 and the newbie zones full of people. It took SOE/Daybreak years to figure out that they could roll out a new server or two every year and still get people to show up.
EQ is lucky too in that it hasn’t changed drastically at the low level end of things. You can squint your eyes and ignore a few new NPCs and that you no longer get spells in a big lump every five levels and feel like you’re back in the early days. Unless you start in Freeport. For whatever reason SOE felt the need to redo Freeport, The Commonlands, and the Desert of Ro. But in Qeynos and the Karanas or over on Faydwer things feel old, with few polygons and the bad linoleum style textures.
I think that after they did those first zones for Prophecy of Ro, the immense blowback shocked and surprised them. They’d talked it up so much — the Freeport they’d wanted to make from the beginning, etc. But they really, really missed the mark there.
The weird thing about EQII that I often get from General Chat there is that a lot of people playing it never played EverQuest at all. Those that did mostly don’t seem to have played it since EQII launched. I have even heard people ask, unironically, if anyone still plays EverQuest. I’m not sure there’s an awful lot of crossover between the two sets of players.
There’s a definite head of steam in EQ2 for Pantheon, though. It gets discussed a lot. Of course, the grass is always greener until you actually get to step on the grass. Then maybe its not. We’ll see, if it ever actually happens.
They will learn how green the grass is when they find out that Pantheon is bringing back required grouping and xp loss on death.
From what I understand, BTW, EQ1 makes way more money than EQ2.