I think I’ve mentioned that I played Everquest for nearly 6 years, haven’t I?

I quit for a variety of reasons, and I tried other MMORPGs, but I didn’t find anything that came close to my experience with Everquest. Over the last year, I’ve toyed with playing it again. [Because I first played it over 10 years ago, I guess this might qualify as retro gaming.] As it turned out, some of my original guild and a couple of my fellow D&D game pals were thinking along the same lines. So, about 5 weeks ago, we met, talked about the classes we’d like to play, and set some ground rules to play it casually [1-2 times a week].

Coming back to the game, I found that much had changed [which didn't include the dreadful interface]. I bought into the original vision of Everquest, that forced grouping allowed them to create a difficult game with extreme risk and reward. It was one of the handful of games where I feared dying, that I put myself at risk even trying to go from one zone to another. Yet, when we took those risks, we found great reward in accomplishing what we did.

Yet, returning to the game, I found much that made me think that the Everquest I loved was gone. In sum, I thought the game had itself turned into a World of Warcraft clone, where levels came easily and fast and where everyone could solo. But then I discovered how much deeper the game is than I thought all these years.

easy like sunday morning

At level 10, my paladin had equipment that exceeded anything my old warrior had when he was in his mid and late 20s.

Money came easily. Again, by level 10, my paladin had 7000 plat. [Actually, I made most of that money in about 6 hours. I looted the crates scattered throughout the tutorial to build up to 40plat and used that speculate in the bazaar.] My level 57 warrior had 10,000 plat to his name.

Experience comes fast, whether it’s in the tutorial zone or in the ‘hot zones’ for high levels. Before our guild disbanded the first time, we thought it was good night if we got 1/2 to 3/4 of a level. Now, it’s not uncommon for our starting and high-level characters to level once or twice in an evening.

Players can now rent mercenaries, which they use to solo or to enhance their group. The mercs seem to be overpowered. For example, when our high-level characters had a couple of mercs, including a cleric, they rarely worried about mana levels and hit points for the mercs.

the epiphany

So, I began to think that this return wasn’t going to be as fun as I hoped. But two things changed my opinion.

First, last week, our very balanced group of 5 went out in search of some tough creatures. When possible, we ignored creatures that conned white or lower. We moved along, clearing out a building of its redundantly named undead creatures. Then we went out further, and I thought that we had found a good pull spot. So, we settled in, pulling yellow and red con creatures. The monk and I settled into a groove of chain pulling.

At this point, I realized how we had somewhat tired of the game . . . endlessly pulling and fighting like clockwork. It was too smooth, too monotonous. Someone suggested that we cross a bridge near us and make our way to some caves.

As we crossed, we drew the attention of a tough mob. Once on the other side of the bridge, we parked and fought it, only to find that another creature attacked. And then another. At one point, we had the original creature and 4 adds, which our enchanter was trying to mesmerize. To make it worse, our cleric had a critical phone call that he had to take. Our group was not wiped, but one character died as the rest of us ran for relative safety.

Even without the phone call, we probably wouldn’t have succeeded. In fact, it might have been worse. The key, tough, is that how the game changed dramatically just by moving a few yards in the game.

Second, over the weekend, a couple of the group played their level 60 characters along with two mercs. I won’t go into detail about their weekend-long adventures, but they did things, visited places, and fought creatures that we had never taken on with our characters before. In short, it opened a new aspect of the game.

When we first played the game, we rarely took on named NPCs, especially as we levelled up. The named ones were often too tough for our group, so we tended to fight by finding a safe pull spot and chain pulling what we could. Sometimes, we went into dungeons, but we rarely took on so many red cons. We found back then, that blue and white creatures were often enough of a challenge.

In both of these experiences, though, the key is that while parts of the game were easier, it was still a game of risk. Even with the mercs, the players found many, many close calls, even running for the zone in a couple of instances. The game still had its risks.

What I realized is the original game could be significantly tougher and, thus, riskier if they forced gamers to play in groups and [later, in multi-group raids], allowing them to create significantly tougher monsters than games before had. Yet, 10 years of improved equipment, a vibrant game economy, and various changes to the gamers allowed them to face even tougher challenges. The game now makes the player more powerful, but the player, especially those long in the tooth like my group, has to change, to go beyond the comfortable. Go now and try to clear the Plane of Justice. Those unexpected and exciting back-and-forth fights are what made the game, and they are still there. You can solo to an extent in the game, but you still need mercs, which you have to pay for and which are limited to one per person.

I think the game has some of the old issues as well as some new ones, but I have to credit the developers for building a more resilient, deeper game than I originally thought. And my friends, being who they are, continue to provide good fun themselves.

As a note, we were amazed to see that the changes include the destruction of a city by giants–the very interesting city of Firiona Vie, with its catapult defenses, is no more.

photo by a6u571n

Michael Abbott has an excellent post about his students playing Fallout 1 and 2, describing how they came to appreciate the game for all the games’ unfriendliness. And then he talked about why RPGs appealed to so many players, which came down to creativity and character development. I can’t disagree because I enjoy the idea of creating a character and playing the game developing that character and staying true to his or her core.

My brother and I talked about RPGs in general and Fallout 3 in particular as he tried to explain to me why he thought it was probably the best RPG he’s played in a long time. And for him, it came down to the difficulty of the game. Ammo is not plentiful, and neither is money. And the consequences of decisions and actions aren’t always immediate, but they’re there. RPGs are games of choice, and when you choose a strength, you invariably choose a weakness as well, especially in more strict class RPGs [as opposed to RPGs with hybrids]. In some games, like System Shock 2, choosing a skill and not another meant that you wouldn’t see some parts of the game. Or, more classic, you choose the strength and hit points of a warrior but an inability to heal yourself with spells as well as a weakness towards magic. Choose a spell caster, and you have great power, but you are physically weak.

To riff on Uncle Ben, with great power comes great weakness.

This weakness helped define characters and presented players with the challenge of playing around or through their weaknesses. One way is to group with others, which MMOs like Everquest play off of. In fact, it was difficult for any class to solo in the early Everquest.

But the thing that many RPGs are missing, as I realized when I played Final Fantasy III last year or Etrian Odyssey is that these blockbuster RPGs like Mass Effect, Fallout 3, and especially action RPGs like Fable II don’t penalize failure. If you die, it’s a slap on the wrist effectively. No signficant loss of experience or gold. No loss of progress.

But I’m interested in penalties because I’ve got a masochistic streak. It’s because when you combine that fear of loss with the ability to create a character, it makes the game all the more enjoyable, particularly when you succeed. Some group RPGs require the optimum group to succeed in a quest, but in some, you can put together a less than optimal group but still manage to succeed if you adjust to both your strengths and weaknesses. That doesn’t mean you play with just any old group, like say 4 white mages. But you can play a less than perfect group and succeed.

But there’s another aspect of severe penalties, one that might be very difficult to see in anything other than an MMO or multiplayer game. When I played Everquest with my friends, we didn’t have the optimum group–we had a druid instead of the much better healing cleric. And we had a magician instead of an enchanter or a powerful wizard. And the ranger was an average DPS class, followed by a warrior. Two great experiences came from such imperfection.

1. We failed and died a lot. In those days, not only did you lose your stuff, which all remained on your corpse, but you lost experience, a lot, which might mean you lost a really valuable skill or even the ability to wear some piece of armor. It wasn’t uncommon for corpse retreival to be the focus of the night rather than the original quest. Yet, those were among the most enjoyable experiences because the loss was real and it was imperative that we help our mate get his or her stuf before quitting for the night. Dying made us cautious but not afraid. Well, not so much that we couldn’t be talked into going somewhere that we shouldn’t.
2. Through perseverance and strategy, we accomplished a lot that was very difficult for our regular group. Success became glorious and appreciated, never taken for granted.

Through the weaknesses and strengths of our characters, we approached the challenges and risks of the game in our own ways, which seems to me a greater depth of character than just choosing a faction or a backstory. Even more significant and perhaps the most elusive in a single-player or single-character RPG is that we learned to trust each other.

I remember many a fight as my warrior’s health dropped while my druid friend healed to the best of her abilities. There were times I could have run, but I didn’t because I believed in my friend. Certainly, you could say that I the gamer trusted my real-life friend, which is partially true. But I played my character, a fiercely loyal character that would rather die himself than run and let his weaker friends die, because it might mean the druid lost a level and couldn’t use the upgraded healing spell. That particular part of my warrior character was not something I could have developed in real life . . . it was something only possible in that game, only possible where characters are weak as well as strong, and where death is something to dread.

Great RPGs like Oblivion and Knights of the Old Republic do not come close to giving me that kind of experience, even with all the openness, choices, character development, and creativity that they offer. They are certainly enjoyable games, but I think there’s a certain type of relationship that can only develop and even flourish in the shadow of harsh conditions and great risks.