In fact, the game’s title belied the fact that quests weren’t actually a significant part of the EverQuest experience.
There was no main quest line to guide your progression. You got dropped into your starting city with a single weapon and a note to find your guildmaster, who might offer another basic piece of equipment and a low-level quest in or around your area. There was no tutorial no training wheels. You’d think, then, that such a game would at least hold your hand a bit to start off. Your run speed was even slower, and there were no mounts. In-game currency was, until higher levels and even then, painstakingly slow to accumulate. Quality equipment was rare, and the mob you might be hunting for that exciting armor piece might drop it, might not, and might take two hours to show up again. As yet unclaimed corpses, literally, littered the landscape. There was, for the most part, no form of quick travel. Character death was costly: you’d lose experience, be transported back to a single bind point (that could only be changed by a player-character spell!), and need to trek back to your corpse, no matter how far away, in order to recover your equipment. Outside of a few starter areas, zones usually combined lower- and higher-level enemies - most roaming, many aggressive, and a good amount of them bringing nearby friends along to gang up on you. Health and mana took their time to refill. Spells would “fizzle” (meaning fail) at random. In combat, especially at the beginning, you were likely to miss more often than you hit. This is the part where one can’t help but sound like a crotchety, you-kids-today OG (Original Gamer), but here it is: EverQuest was hard. Which is all perfectly fitting, because EQ was a lot of those things too. And it’s inscrutable if you asked me to guess what the sound is based on, inspired by, or how it was created, I wouldn’t know where to start. It’s a harsh, borderline unpleasant, metallic screech that seems to last half a second longer than it should. It’s fucking weird, right? Players came to know it as the “ding” (and leveling up as “dinging”) but it certainly doesn’t call to mind the gentle chime of a bell. I returned to EverQuest, well, because of that level-up sound. That may explain why there’s such an abundance of fan-made/maintained versions or servers of old games, often at a substantial cost of both time and money to these amateur developers who allow countless gamers to experience their favorite classics and make them truly timeless. Though there is something to be said, and perhaps not enough has been, about the exponentially greater nostalgic potential of games on which we may have spent not just two hours as with a movie, but dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of hours. Again, much has been written elsewhere about the power of nostalgia across all artistic media, and one need only look at the often overwhelming number of sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots for evidence. Nor did I return purely for the sake of nostalgia, though it certainly plays a role. (More on that later.) But you can read a more comprehensive account of EQ’s contributions to the video game industry elsewhere that’s not why I returned to the game 18 years later. Its popularity in those first few years - more than 400,000 subscribers, with up to 3,000 per server at peak times - allowed it to fulfill the promise of the genre’s double Ms and made EverQuest probably the finest social gaming experience of its time. Its graphics, laughably polygonal now, were downright impressive in 1999, or at least good enough to allow for a deeper sense of immersion than its few predecessors. It defined the genre, creating many of the gameplay conventions that remain at the core of MMORPGs to this day. EverQuest wasn’t technically the first game of its kind, but for all intents and purposes it was the first one that mattered.
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