Lords of EverQuest: First Impressions

I am not a Real Time Strategy gamer. I haven’t played Warcraft, or Starcraft, or Dune or even Total Annihilation. So, I really have nothing to which to compare Lords of EverQuest, a game developed by Rapid Eye Entertainment for SOE to tie into the MMO way back in the day.

It has the word “EverQuest” in it, though, so when it came out in that far ago time, I wanted to play it, but money was tight and I was already playing the actual game and besides, it would probably be around for awhile…

But no, it came and went with little fanfare. There were never any LoE e-sports tournaments, and nobody with a name like De4thKn!ght666 got famous hawking computer fans with their handle pasted all over it because they were good at the game.

GameFaqs has no strategy guide, and there are only three messages in their forums, one of which starts out, “Not a single soul plays this game…”. This is a game that has been forgotten by the world.

…but not by me. I’d played the demo for the game when it came out, and though I am not an RTS gamer now, back in the day I also was not an RTS gamer and I understood this was not a game targeted to me.

A couple of years back, I ran an EverQuest RPG pencil-and-paper campaign based around Freeport and the Commonlands. For some reason, that reminded me of Lords of EverQuest, and I found a pretty reasonbly-priced and complete copy on eBay, bought it, played it for a minute, and put it aside.

But, since I’ve been going back through games I bought but never played, I thought I’d give Lords of EverQuest another try.

Lords of EverQuest is set in a time before the PC games, before Solusek Ro burnt the empire of the Takish-Hiz into the Desert of Ro, when Halflings had not yet built the walls around Riverdale, and when the Teir’Dal and the Koada’Dal — the dark and the high elves — could still find common cause and sometimes work together.

(I’m not sure where this timeline falls in relation to the PlayStation 2 games, which were also set before the PC games).

There are three different campaigns available — the Shadowrealm, featuring dark elves, Iksar (did Kunark have contact with Tunaria back then?), Ogres and Trolls. The Dawn Brotherhood features dwarfs, Kerrans, Erudites and humans. Lastly, the Elddar Alliance brings high elves, half elves, wood elves, frogloks and halflings together.

Once you have chosen your campaign, you choose a named hero to lead your forces. These heroes have unique abilities and can power up friendly units near them. The campaign sets its difficulty based on your hero (or perhaps your hero is just more powerful). For my first playthrough, I chose Lady Tlak, a Teir’Dal rogue, who is a “medium”-strength hero of the Shadowrealm.

After the first, introductory mission, subsequent missions start with you choosing what units to carry over from the previous mission. NPCs who joined you along the way will not be available, unfortunately. You’re given points to spend on the units, and those points won’t allow you to bring many units over.

It is important to bring over what units you can, as they level up with experience (as does your lord), and once they reach level 6, they can become “knighted” and become more powerful units. Your units are thus not entirely expendable and you may find yourself needing to retreat at times rather than risk a high level unit.

Once you’ve transferred what troops you can, you’re brought to your base in the new map, where you’re given the mission description and then left with a scattering of units and buildings.

Just after I took this screenshot, a horde of barbarians and some clockwork crossbow carts came in and killed everyone, including my lord, and then went to town destroying my structures.

This is pretty typical. You don’t have any idea what’s about to happen — and why would you? But it does make for gameplay where you spend the first couple of tries of a new map trying to figure out what’s going on before you can figure out a strategy.

The previous map, for instance, had goblins in balloons flying in and destroying everything. I only had one unit I could make — an iksar defiler — that could even touch them, and if I made just two or three, the goblins would kill them. I had to make bunches of them in order to secure the base, leaving me with a much smaller army with which to complete the actual mission objectives. (Clear the map starting at the SW corner, continuing counter-clockwise, and ending at the NE corner, btw. You’re welcome. Also, have a thief in your army.)

Campaign aside, this might be pretty typical for RTS campaigns. But the real meat of any RTS game is the PvP matchups.

And for that — I don’t have any idea. Lords of EverQuest comes with a fully-featured level editor that can be used to make custom maps with full scripting, cinematics support and NPCs with custom factions and alliances — it seems really nice. Unfortunately, there is no documentation for it on disk or online that I could find.

Potential PvP players once could meet up via SOEGames.Net, but that service no longer is active. Players can also play via a LAN connection, but I doubt I’ll have a chance to try that out.

We’re left with the three single-player campaigns. They are challenging, largely because, as I’ve noted, you don’t have any idea what’s coming or what you’re to be building or preparing for before you do some scouting, at which point it is too late. The video above is my third try at “The Burning Thicket”, once a few failures had told me everything I would need to do.

Will I continue? To be honest, I don’t know. It’s clear a lot of work was put into this game. The voice talent is top-notch, with a lot of famous names in the cast. The character models are amazing. The music is great. There’s a familiar “DING!!!!” when a unit levels.

But I would rather the game had been set in the same time as the MMO, with the heroes with which we were already familiar, and were able to replay some of the battles like Bloody Kithicor, or go up against Nagafen or something. Or do the wars in Kunark, or the Erudites vs the necromancers before they blew them to Luclin, or the Shissar empire on that moon, or the Combine wars… there was so much lore right there that seems to have been a perfect opportunity to present in the form of an RTS that was overlooked in order to make something far more generic.

Iksar and gnomes in Tunaria? Dark elves working with Ogres and not Orcs? Wouldn’t this be before the Greenmist turned Ogres into idiots?

From a lore standpoint — the game really doesn’t hold together. As a RTS — I am not qualified to judge. I’ll definitely continue through the campaign I started, but I don’t know if I’ll continue with the others, or attempt to figure out the level editor.