More on EverQuest and gaming

EverQuest (EQ) is celebrating its 7th year as of March 16, 2006. I've been playing for about 4.5 years. How many games have you played that have held your attention for that long? Granted, they release expansions about every six months now, so they are always adding something new. For some people (like me), that pace is too fast. I don't play often enough to keep up with all the new cities and dungeons (otherwise known as "zones").

There was the original release, then came Ruins of Kunark (RoK), Scars of Velious (SoV), Shadows of Luclin (SoL), Planes of Power (PoP), Legacy of Ykesha (LoY), Lost Dungeon of Norrath (LDoN) [Norrath being the name of the EQ world], Gates of Discord (GoD), Omens of War (OoW), Dragons of Norrath (DoN), Depths of Darkhallow (DoD), and finally Prophecy of Ro (PoR). I started somewhere between SoV and SoL. [No jokes about what else SOL stands for.]

So you can see how it's hard to keep up with all that unless you're a college student or something, and have 20+ hours a week to play.

I'm currently in a guild that's going through old content from PoP. There's a series of progressions you go through; roughly 4 tiers with 3 or 4 paths each. The fourth tiers are the elemental planes (Air, Earth, Water, and Fire). When you complete the quest in these zones you gain access to the Plane of Time. In order to complete the quests in these zones, you need to coordinate 50-70 people in a raid to kill certain monsters (and even the gods of EQ themselves).

There are numerous web sites to help you keep track of all this information. EQAtlas.com for maps was very handy until EQ added maps inside the game. There are sites for each class (warrior, cleric, rogue, ranger, magician, wizard, monk, paladin, druid, necromancer, shadow knight, shaman, bard, enchanter, beastlord, and berserker). There are also sites to look up information on the thousands of quests and items available.

In combination with your class, you choose what race you want to be when you first create your character (human, dwarf, high elf, wood elf, half-elf, gnome, ogre, troll, dark elf, barbarian, iksar (lizard-like), vah shir (cat-like), and froglok (take a guess). Not every race has access to each class. For example, there's no such thing as a troll monk or dwarf necromancer. Some races are good, some races are evil, and some have a mix of both.

Once you have your race and class you can start the game. There's really no way to win at EverQuest -- you just keep trying to better yourself. If you get bored with your current set up you can always start a new character and try it out.

One way to better yourself (the main way really) is to gain levels. You do this by getting experience points (XP). When EQ was first released you could only get to level 50, but later expansions increased the limit to 60, then 65, and now 70.

You can set other goals for yourself, like doing trade skills (smithing, fletching (bows & arrows), tailoring, pottery, jewel craft, baking, brewing, and tinkering if you're a gnome, alchemy if you're a shaman, and poison making if you're a rogue). A great site for trade skills is EQTraders.com.

Anyway, last night my guild gathered 60+ people and took on "Coirnav, the Avatar of Water" in the Plane of Water. You have less than 15 minutes to take out three waves of average-toughness creatures, three "boss monsters" that are very tough, and then Coirnav himself (itself?). We've tried 7 seven times and hadn't won, but last night we finally did.

It's interesting that you can get more than 60 people together from all over the world - people who have never met and will likely never meet - and coordinate them into a raid like this. It takes timing and cooperation.

So that's your brief (heh) introduction to EverQuest.


More later,
-- C.
PS: Here are some screen shots on my flickr site. I'll add some screenshots from last night soon.