We’ve been told EverQuest Legends will have its own lore, separate from EverQuest.
My immediate reaction was: Wait, EQ has lore?
Yes, I know all about the gods. Killed them all back when I was a raider. But the game does a really poor job of explaining the lore to players while they are in the game. This is something, by the way, that World of Warcraft excels at. There are books lying around all over the place to let you know everything that’s going on.
Take the low level dungeons that Kasul and I have been exploring as we level up our first combos in EQL.
Crushbone: What is Emperor Crush emperor of? Just Crushbone? All orcs? Why are Faydwer orcs blue while Antonica ones are purple? Is Crush emperor of the Antonica orcs as well? If not, do the Antonican orcs have their own emperor? Is this related to Ambassador D’Vinn visiting the emperor?
I wrote an adventure in Neverwinter’s Foundry that explained the actual plot, as I knew it, including the Brenclog story and why the Teir’Dal were sneaking around in the Faydark:
It continues.
There’s several stories in Befallen (and I did a Foundry mission set in Befallen as well that told one of them), but unless you’re actually on one of the quests that go through there, you’re not going to learn anything about how that dungeon came to be there. I do have source books from the EverQuest tabletop role playing game that explains many of these things, but in game? In game, it’s very hard to find this information.
And it’s all changed in EQL! There’s a whole new crew of NPCs who have taken over the dungeon. Who are they? What do they want? I don’t know! (I just logged into EQ Live and went to the basement of Befallen to check, and nope — all those Teir’Dals there are unique to EQL).
Runnyeye looks the same as it does on EQ Live, but I still don’t really know the deal there. There’s goblins on top with one faction, and the goblins below that are on another faction, one that is shared with the goblins in the Beholder Maze. The sporelings seem to have their own thing going on, and there are slime elementals. There’s a story there, but the goblins in the actual game won’t tell it to you. They will tell you how to say “I hate you” in Goblin, as they die, but they won’t tell you why they’re fighting with the other goblins in the place.
Najena’s Lair! (And yes, I also did a Neverwinter Foundry mission set there, see above). Who is she? Why is she there? There’s a whole story behind it! But you can go up and down and through it and the game won’t tell you a word about her history and how she came to be there.
Now as I mentioned, such lore does exist, if you go looking for it out of game. But this is more of a problem with EQ Legends, in that I have not seen one word as to who the Baron is baron of, or why the Teir’Dal have kicked the undead out of a portion of Befallen’s bottom floor… questions.
Anyway, we spent some time in Crushbone, Befallen and Najena’s Lair last night and I hit 21. Kasul is playing EQL right now (while I sit in EQ Live waiting on placeholder respawns in Actual Befallen to see if a Baron ever shows up). I ended the night running through a Runnyeye where the goblins didn’t hate me, due to all the clay and ore farming I had done that morning in the Beholder Maze. Though they stopped liking me quite so much after I killed the Pickclaw Lord for his Blackened Alloy Bastard Sword 😉
Black looks good on me. Every kitty should have a little black dress armor in their closet.
Huh. I just realized that I know basically NOTHING about the lore of EQ, exactly for the reasons you describe – it’s just not in game. You can find it, but you have to actively look to outside resources. Fascinating!
Also completely agree about the black armour.
> This is something, by the way, that World of Warcraft excels at.
Hah, that was a side tangent I cut from my post today. Figured I’d save ruminating on EQL’s pros and cons for when I hit 50.
But yeaaaaaaaah, playing EQ really puts a lot of the feedback I heard about WoW circa 2003 into context. The quest markers, the world feeling like a character, buffing being simpler … whew.
I really have no idea why I’m here or what I’m doing. The novelty of an MMO and making your number go up isn’t the intrinsic motivation that it was in the 1900s.
So I hope they do make an effort to add some quests telling me to do something for a reason!
The lack of explanation for pretty much anything is one of the things I love most about EQ. We used to spend hours speculating about it and that was so much more enjoyable than being told. My favorite lore mystery from Classic EQ are those images of what looks like a youthful king that you see on the ramp up from North Karana to Highpass and also in Everfrost. Those used to get me wondering every time I ran up that never-ending slope.
In EVE Online we tell the joke, “EVE has sound?” because so many people turn it off. (It used to be a huge hit on client performance.)
For EQ I tend to fall into the “EverQuest has lore?” camp. You could prize bits of what was going on out of the game, but it really didn’t want to share or even play nice on that front. But I also liked that because the interesting part of the game was the tales of my friends and our adventures.
I have a spiral bound EQ Atlas that goes into a lot of the lore. However, in game as far as I know you just have to spend a lot of time reading books in the PoK. It is both very cool that the books are there, and slightly baffling that they came up with all that and pretty much buried it. I’m not even 100% sure that all the lore in secondary sources like the Atlas and the TTRPG are even there in the first place.
EQ II was certainly a lot better about giving you backstory to discover from quests. Even EQOA was better about it than EQ. Pretty odd. But then again, also pretty realistic. It’s not as if I get a huge lore dumps very often in my daily life 🙂