EverQuest Retrospective

In one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s retrospective “Gaming Made Me” corners, independent game developer and researcher Mitu Khandaker looks back at one of the milestones of the MMO genre: EverQuest. Here’s a sampling:

EverQuest was a game that got under your skin. There was a reason, I suppose, that it was so widely referred to as EverCrack back in the day. EverQuest gave me a place to be. I mean Be. Sometimes, I would run across the length of one of Norrath’s then-five continents just to travel. A kind of virtual dromomania. It seemed impossibly huge, the trek from Freeport, across the Commonlands, through the haunted-at-night Kithicor woods, through High Keep, and Highpass Hold into the twisty gorges of East Karana, and then across the vast plains of the Karanas, North and West. It seemed to take forever, and that was okay. Even that arduous-seeming journey was only just a small section of the world, and that was just brilliant.

Yet, exploration is not always simply about distances often, it is about detail. I remember when, as a still-relatively-new player, I stumbled across a little gap in a wall in East Freeport, and, eventually, found myself in the city’s sewers, which I didn’t even realize existed. That too felt like magic. There were empty houses in North Freeport, with beds upstairs. When I could, I would ‘˜camp’ in one of those, to pretend I was actually boarding there (even though, of course, I didn’t need to).

The curious cultural differences between the races and their habitats made the world seem all the more alive. The wood elves, with their arboreal city of Kelethin, perched at dizzyingly treacherous heights. Halflings, with their little under-hill homes, and warm fanfare whenever you’d enter their town. The Erudites, mysterious, haughty and exotic, somewhere on a distant island. The intrigue in their dealings with one another. This was a world where even the gods held grudges. To gain faction with one race, may reduce your faction with another. Politics is difficult. A Qeynos guard regards you dubiously.