Going Home Ag’n

Posted on June 30, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 25 Comments

The new EQ1 (yes, EQ1) servers “The Combine” and “The Sleeper” went up last Wednesday. They’re using a new “classic” ruleset where content from expansions must be unlocked by someone on the server. To open the planes, you have to down Nagafen and Vox, to open Kunark you have to whack Innoruuk, etc. It’s an interesting idea, especially for a game with as much content as EQ1 now has (I think Horizons was the first to have globally unlockable content, if you don’t count abortive attempts such as EQ1′s Waking the Sleeper quest).

What surprises me is how popular these servers are. I just popped on my baby necromancer and there were over 100 people on. Not on the server, in the Nektulos newbie zone. During lunch hour on a Friday. During prime time the newbie zones have been completely unplayable from the crush of people, with over 400 people reported in Greater Faydark alone. And this is the second server that was opened up.

Of course, this won’t last; SOE seems aware of this and is already talking about contingency plans to merge the two Progression servers once things calm down. And playing EQ1 again does remind me pretty fiercely how far the state of the art in make-little-XP-bar-move-from-left-to-right games has progressed; I miss some key innovations in DAOC, much less WOW when dorking around in EQ1. It’s an interesting and I dare say now necessary exercise for a designer.

Still, it’s fun to bop around killing snakes and rats as a necromancer in EQ1 again along with a community of hundreds of others, even if only for a while.

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  • http://www.mmogchart.com SirBruce

    Too bad they recently patched the game so snakes (and other creatures without legs) no longer kick…

    Bruce

  • http://www.nut-shack.com/phpBB2/index.php Kithias

    Wow. I had no idea EQ was still going that strong. Or rather, the strength it could muster. Or both.

    Anyone want to wager a serious guess on when it will be shut down, the last server powered off, the login screen closed once and for all?

  • Fraeg

    “Anyone want to wager a serious guess on when it will be shut down, the last server powered off, the login screen closed once and for all? “

    -as long as there is an interweb, there will be eq1

  • Double D

    I played for 2 days to get that old feeling again. Unfortunatly all I got was an eyefull or horrid graphics. These games have come a long way from EQ days. It’s almost unbearable playing this game with a slick new UI and sub-par poly models.

    Too bad I didn’t get that old school feeling again like when I play Ultima IV over or Bard’s tale remake ‘Devil Whiskey’.

    After tasting DAOC (which IMHO still playable), WOW, Ryzom, etc. I can’t fathom anyone who wants to continue to ‘pay’ for this game. Content or not, it move and looks horrid.

    I guess I like the old UI way better. Who knows.

  • TheAmazin

    Now where’s UO’s pre-UO:R server….? They were the first to hop on the “copying-all-the-other-MMO’s” bandwagon, and now they’re avoiding doing what all the others are doing while they add elves and soulstones and samurais.

  • Pharkas

    Ok, someone mentioned UO, so I’m throwing this one out:

    http://uo.stratics.com/news/GeneralNews.shtml#newsitem1151622998,57561,

    “With the acquisition of Mythic, the UO team will be working with the creative folks who brought us Dark Age of Camelot and are hard at work on the spectacular-looking Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I\’e2\’80\’99m thrilled that the UO team and Mythic will work together to forge Britannia\’e2\’80\’99s future.”

    Where to begin…..?

  • http://ve3d.ign.com/ Apache

    sounds pretty fun and I don’t even play EQ

  • Amaranthar

    I miss the numbers of players around. It’s one of the big draw backs with levelling games, where you get split up.

    I don’t think a large world would neccessarily mean players would split up though, depends on how the game is made and how much community is built in.

  • http://www.eqclerics.org Boanerges

    I play EQ1. It’s not a bad game by any stretch. But EQ1 has largely moved into raiding, the one strength it still has. EQ1 has some fantastic raiding mechanisms that challenge players but not everyone likes to raid.

    Progression servers were not about nostalgia. The nostalgia of being a true newbie again is limited and if you really want it you can play lowbie EQ1 for free (for quite some time in fact). But what I see Progression as is more of a marketing tool. EQ1 for the last few years has had no real lowbie game. Most newbie zones are ghost towns on main servers. The only time you see someone in there is usually by accident, for a quest or they are powerleveling their twinks or friends. Most newbies flock to the biggest and brightest and best where there are other true newbies to play with. In this case it’s WoW but tomorrow it could be Vanguard or SWG II. This is what truly kills MMOGs: attrition. And that attrition comes in when old players retire and new players aren’t there to replace them. By making nostalgia a draw to old players and making newbie zones again bustle with life SOE has undertaken a grand experement: can going back to your roots reinvigorate a dying MMOG? Yes the graphics are dated. Yes the gameplay is clunky at times. Yes, the legacy of The Vision(tm) still lurks in the shadows. But if a few old players meet a few new players and they form new relationships (which are the life blood of an MMOG) then perhaps there may be some new blood (and some recycled old) to reinvigorate a venerable old game.

    Hey, it worked for Nintendo. People still shell out for Super Mario Bros and Zelda. Why not SOE and EQ1?

  • Freakazoid

    This new server thing got me thinking, I wonder if there’s room in the MMORPG market for resettable servers? I think there’s an underlieing desire for newcomers late in the game to want a fair start, and a server that resets (shuffles all the toons to a permanent world server) like every 6-12 months would give them that chance. I’m not sure why someone who’s been through it all once would want to do it again, but if it were a fun enough game that would be a good enough reason in itself.

  • Evangolis

    It’s all about illusion, the illusion that you can keep up. But it’s a lie. The rich get richer and the poor poorer, as first adopters hit the higher end content sooner, and pull further away from the pack, which gives them exclusive access to further high end content. I can see the process beginning even a few das in.

    I’m in a ‘casual’ raiding guild, which is no oxymoron to a veteran of the Race to the Mainland of Shadowbane beta. Even though my guild is falling behind the power curve already, doing WC while the Karanas are full already, I’m still trailing the guild mean, even though I’ve put in long sessions every night. I’ll continue to drop behind, even though I’ll play all the long weekend. When my guild gathers on the 5th, I know there will be people twice and even three times my level, and we will be far behind in the race. But the illusion is strong. It won’t be until Kunark opens with staggerring speed that the population will realy wake up and start to fall off.

    But for that time, it is nice to run through a world full of people again.

    Now excuse me, but I have a toon to level. Sigh.

  • Evangolis

    PS Yes, I’ve been going to work, and taking showers, and eating meals at the table, and even looking at non-EQ wedsites. Just a few of the reasons I’m falling behind. I’m just not really hardcore.

  • http://www.slydesblog.com Slyde

    i know what you mean about it being nice to go home again. Many has been the time when i have come close to reinstating UO on my computer. I’ll never do it, but my fond memories remain.

  • Evangolis

    It is just like old times. First I lost the internet due to a router crash at my ISP. When I log back on, I find that The Combine server is down, with no ETA.

  • http://www.theworldtakes.com damijin

    Discord server was better :D

    Well… except for people with ShowEQ finding my level 6 as soon as I dinged in butcherblock and chasing me down to send be back to humble level 1.

    But man, I tore up Ocean of Tears with my rogue LongJohnSilvers. Silly mages can’t cast on the boat! :D

  • http://hgamer.blogspot.com Heartless Gamer

    I just noticed someone added pcitures to the upper right corner of his articles.

  • http://cnn.com ubvman

    Progression servers = Dead cat bounce.

    By the way, as is normal with all EQ1 patches; the changes they made to accomodate the progression servers are breaking the content of the “regular live” servers. Typical SOE FUBARs, nothing to write about much – hardcore EQ1 players eat shit like that everyday and still keep on playing.

    The game will last like forever but it’s heyday is over. Playing a cutting edge game like Oblivion (different genre I know but its related somewhat) and comparing it to EQ1 proves just how dated it is.

  • Ghiest

    I went and played with a friend (he mentioned to me a while ago about it), and was pleasently suprised with the progression servers. But the first ‘pleaseant’ part wore of pretty quickly after the first few days when I was toodling around on my lvl 6 and see’ing lvl 15-20′s already and thinking … not again.

    There will always be people who are more dedicated and ‘hardcore’ at playing non-stop to be ‘the first’ at doing something, it’s just not going to be me. As someone else posted I can’t take the graphics at all in the game anymore, it just feels clunky and just not smooth compared to what I’m now used to. The revamped UI is really nice but it just doesn’t fit with the game.

    Overall it was a waste of time, my ‘nostalgia’ is just that …. I have very fond memories of playing EQ but I could never go back to it, and I would never spend that helish amount of time leveling again.

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    EQ 1 is gone.

    The spoiler sites. The Farmers. The exploits. The community goes to work destroying your creation the first and every chance they get.

    When a person pours their heart and soul in to a RPG and the player base plays thus, “Go to spoiler site X, Y, or Z and buy stuff for cash at A, B, or C.” Your game sucks, not because of you but because of the people playing it.

    You know what I’m hating more and more every day? When I ask the people I play these games about a quest or an item and the response 99% of the time is go to website X… Well, the funs gone.

  • http://www.eqclerics.org Boanerges

    I sometimes marvel at the perspective of people after they have “moved on”. I can understand not wanting to grind to 70 again but comparing EQ1 to Oblivion (which is a single player game) or saying “I can’t enjoy it because there’s fansites” is absurd. Does WoW suddenly suck because of it’s lower res graphics? Are there no WoW spoiler sites? Does WoW have no people who are jerks and will tell you to visit site X for spoilers because they can’t be bothered to explain something?

    I’m no EQ1 fanboi but if you’re going to criticize EQ1 then come up with something good to gripe about instead of these absurd arguments that cannot be applied equally. If EQ1 is dead for these reasons then so is WoW and the numbers don’t agree with that assessment.

  • http://www.thisisnotacommunity.org D-0ne

    “can\’e2\’80\’99t enjoy it because there\’e2\’80\’99s fansites\’e2\’80\’9d is absurd.”

    The game, all games are reduced in enjoyment by spoiler sites. Even if I chose not to use them others do and hence all accomplishments are less.
    There will always be some assclown who takes pride in accomplishing a task that was designed to take 20 hours and using a spoiler does it in 2 and then feels he has the Gawd given right to make every person who didn’t use the spoiler to feel like shit for doing it right.

    “Are there no WoW spoiler sites?”

    There are and the game is all the less for it.

    “Does WoW have no people who are jerks and will tell you to visit site X for spoilers because they can\’e2\’80\’99t be bothered to explain something?”

    Yes. It isn’t the explaining it’s the death nail to social interaction.

    It’s about passion and purity VS overly competitive win at all costs assholes.

    Personally I don’t care about EQ any more or less than any other MMRPG.

  • http://www.4thfg.com No.6

    Someone wrote: “exclusive access”

    As a minor point of fact, when an expansion is unlocked, it’s unlocked for everyone. This isn’t a ‘flagging’ type situation where only a few will be able to explore Kunark while the rest of us queue up for our chance to kill Naggy before we can make Iskars.

    However … this whole thing will be stunningly limited in its popularity. In every area the ongoing chatter is how people will go back to (whatever they were doing before) as soon as PoP is unlocked and people no longer meet at Torch 1 for sales, no longer run from place to place but use the PoK portals. Makes sense; once the things that distinguish the Progression servers from the rest are gone, what’s the point?

    In the meantime, as usual with EQ, there are always a few broken things that are allowing people who like that sort of play to jump ahead. In the present case it’s apparently inappropriate gear (FS and bronze) dropping from level 1 skeletons in Innothule. Personally I have more entertaining things to do than fight with 13-year-olds about KSing a decaying skeleton.

  • Ashlian

    Well, for me it WAS about nostalgia, and bonding. I play EQ2, having left EQ1 after nearly six years of it. My little brother and niece still play EQ1, but they started long after I did, and never enjoyed that early rat and bat and running from Tovax Vmar phase with me. It’s been fun to experience that with them without the temptation of power leveling them just a little…..or giving them plat ….or twinking…..like camping them in Umbral Plains so they wake up on Christmas morning in a full suit of Elysian (done that! damn, that bp was a bitch, too!)

    If you’re fighting with 13-year olds, find something else to do, the world’s not that small. Even with 120 people in the Qeynos Hills, it wasn’t that tough to find something to do. It certainly wasn’t remarkably different from what I remember about fighting with the ORIGINAL 13-year old ks-er’s for decaying skeletons in 1999…..times haven’t changed that much. Idiots still KS while polite people still yell camp check and respond to requests for information with more than “check teh internet”.

    The point for me, and I think a lot of the other people, with the exception, I’m sure, of Fires of Heaven, was not to get ahead….it’s just to once again enjoy a game we devoted vast amounts of time to. Most of us were already ahead when we quit. Or are still ahead on other servers now.

  • Glug

    I am on the Sleeper server also. My wife and I have been looking for a game to play since leaving EQII a few months back. We decided to try the progression server until some of the newer MMOG’s come out later this year.

    What surprised both of us was how much fun we are having. EQ1 was both of our first online game and the memories that we have had are brought back again over the last week. We also know it will never last but the fun of running around at our old leveling grounds is pretty high right now.

    It has brought us to what makes a game fun? Why did we like EQ1 and the new progressions erver so much but really didn’t get into EQII, WOW or the slew of other online games that have come by? Those games lasted only a few months to a year while we continue to have fun in EQ.

    Some of the things we are having fun doing are things we previously complained about when we left EQ1. Camping mobs, twinking low level characters and sitting in one spot and consistantly leveling. I think that games that try to reinvent EQ sometimes miss the mark and try and fix things that are not really broken. Who knows. We are going to do our best to enjoy the feeling of fun in an online game again while it lasts.

  • Xanthippe

    Playing a new server is fun. Playing an old game on a new server is fun. Playing a new game on a new server is even more fun. There’s just something about everybody being little. Or something. Whatever I was going to say is lost.