Monsters & Memories is not EverQuest

There’s a few MMOs coming out in the next few years that try to evoke the feeling EverQuest gave new players the first time they played it. An MMO where going alone was almost always a prescription for death. Where dying meant losing everything you had on you, unless you could make it safely back to where you died — and back home again. An MMO where every level was fought for, and could be lost (along with all your stuff) at your next death. An MMO where night was dark. An MMO without any quest hubs, without glowing arrows, without maps, without any in game tutorials, without anything, except for the friends you made, without whom the game would be unplayable.

It was such a punishing game that most everyone who ever tried EverQuest — quit. Fast. But those who stayed, who made those important social connections, who persevered and worked and put in the time, who spent the three or four hours a night looking for groups, getting to where those groups were, and hoping that at the end of the night, they’d have gained more experience than they had lost — those rare, special people all left en masse when World of Warcraft rewrote the rules of the MMO and said that, you know, maybe you could go it alone, after all. You could keep your stuff when you died. You didn’t lose experience. You’d never lose your corpse. There were hundreds of quests and they were easy to find. Raids were more than standing in one spot for an hour.

But a tiny, tiny fraction of those people thought that those early, brutal days of EverQuest was the best damn gaming they’d ever done. And it’s for those masochistic few that Monsters & Memories is making the game of their dreams.

Monsters & Masochists had an open stress test today. They crammed a few hundred people into the same zone (although some explorers did break through to other dungeons and zones, I saw while watching other streams).

The game is — nostalgia overload. My first EQ character was an Erudite wizard who was blinder than a bat at night. Bats at least have sonar to help them find their way around. All I had were the occasional flash of fire light, and that same thing was true here.

I found out later that you can add night vision to your character. So let’s talk about that.

M&M will offer a dozen character races and a dozen and a half potential classes. I don’t know if they will ship with all of those. EverQuest II opted to provide as many classes by first allowing players to settle on a single role — tank, heals, physical damage, magical damage. At tenth level, you’d branch out a little, and at twentieth, you’d get your final class. This helped players focus on their roles within a group before being walloped with the full complexity of the game. Players hated it, and they don’t do it like that anymore.

M&M isn’t going to tell you how an Archer differs from a Ranger, or how a Cleric handles heals differently than a Druid. In fact, it doesn’t tell you anything. This is very EverQuest. EQ itself has done a lot over the years to move away from this sort of opaqueness. In M&M, it is on full display.

Once your race and class are chosen, you can distribute a few stat points (these were incredibly important in early EQ; in modern EQ, your starting stats don’t matter). You have some appearance options, not too many, but enough. You can choose from a selection of starting skills that affect, for example, your starting equipment, boosts to certain skills, or mandatory character passive effects such as being able to see in the dark. (To balance this, they have a corresponding skill that makes it hard for you to see in the daylight. I don’t know how this is useful.) I suspect that these skills will be attached to specific races and classes at some point.

I made three characters in the stress test. I died and lost all my possessions and couldn’t find the corpse again, three times. I am really hoping that they let you keep your equipped gear when you die. I know they are looking to emulate that OTHER game, but, come on. It’s the kind of thing that makes people quit the game.

Your character enters the game not knowing any skills, spells, or anything else. Your starting gear — depending on your choices in character creation — are equipped, but you can’t use them. And I mean you literally can’t. All your skills with weapons, hitting, being hit, etc are at zero. There is no autoattack key. There are no skills.

The very first thing you must do is open your inventory, see some spell scrolls, open up your spell book / ability book / passive skills book and drag those skills into slots, and then drag those scribed skills into your action bar. I eventually made macro buttons that would turn on auto attack. You can also do that with ‘Q’, but I liked having it on my skill bar.

I joined a group not knowing about auto attack, and was just plinking away whenever the “Quick Shot” skill came of cooldown. Then, I finally figured it out. My first character has the “Ninja Warrior” skill that allowed throwing shurikens. I had a bunch of the suckers, but never figured out how to use them.

Also in your inventory is a note for your guild master. EQ currently places you directly in front of the person who takes that note; in M&M, you are given some vague directions. It took me easily half an hour — and a death — before I found the guild master for my second character, a rogue. The guild master staggered backward in disbelief, and then handed me a list of NPCs to threaten to prove my bona fides. I had zero desire to spend another hour looking for people inside the huge city.

Back in the old days, EQ didn’t have maps, so every player made their own. Then EQ Atlas, Allakhazam and other sites took away that mystery. EQ today provides full maps for all starting zones.

Migraines & Memories takes twenty five years of MMO advances and tosses them in the bin. You are a nobody in a world that wants you dead. If you survive, if you thrive, you will become something better, something new, something the world has never seen before… level two.

To be serious for a bit — I had a blast in my time in game. It really did seem like the old, old EverQuest. Losing three characters’ worth of gear sucked. I didn’t lose any experience when I died, but that might just be because they don’t allow you to get to negative XP. This was just a very, very early stress test, and the developers are in no way claiming the game is in a playable state. Anything and everything can and most likely will change.

When it does… I really hope they dial the difficulty back just a hair. But I will definitely be playing it next month during their weekend test. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out where my corpse is.