Why Boxing is Good: ua-cam.com/video/yyDSChEdv7U/v-deo.html Episode 1 of EverQuest Adventures: ua-cam.com/video/LZbNzmz48sM/v-deo.html Forum Posts I Cite: EverQuest Official Forums: forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/why-did-some-eq-players-dislike-wow.285658/ Project 1999 Forums: www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3510745#post3510745 World of Warcraft Forums: us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/to-the-people-who-left-everquest-for-wow/1027187/4
@Ion Blaze, hey man nice vid but you failed to mention revolutionary reasons besides being the first for EQ. You didn't mention how everyone was required to buy food and drink or would suffer during combat, or how real time day/night cycles were the first of its kind, or how players needed to sell their wares by actually listing the stats and all etc... Yeah I know WoW made everything better but those are just the tip of the iceberg so to speak
Eq taught me patience as a young adolescence. I felt more satisfaction when I got that rare item on a rare enemy after 3 real life days while also competing against other's doing the same. I loved it
Looking back just crazy the time sink that was the game, though having spent yrs on Proj 99, got some server firsts etc, it wasn't just nostalgia. Still healthy playerbase. But toxic as all hell, that's what multiple guilds all capable of holding down most of the raid content leads to ultimately, but also made it so much more satisfying at the same time. Cheers.
Great video! Just to add a little extra tidbit of info here. When WOW initially released, they had no endgame (raid) dungeons except for Onyxia, and they were quickly scrambling to build out the content. They actually hired MANY current (at the time) EQ developers to help build and design Molten Core, the very first proper WOW raid. The EQ team had a lot more experience in high end (large group) dungeons, so they were definitely instrumental in getting Molten core up and running!
Great vid! As far as the pulling/CC classes, I also thought the Haste/Slow aspect was unique. Bard/Sham/Enchanter made fights so much faster with their haste and safer with their mob slows. Monks could pull and do high dps with haste, almost like having two DPS. Enchanters could CC, Haste/Slow and charm a pet for major dps. Shammies could heal well, and with their mob slows, would be safer than a cleric. Now cleric and pally could Rez. Warriors were great at tanking raids, but pally and SK were better in groups due to their spells having more taunt. Rogues appreciated that. Their were so many group configurations and you took who you could get, but it always made the experience unique, even if doing crushbone for the 4th day that week. And if you found good players, you kept in touch bc it made the experience flow better.
For me, there were always 2 factors that kept me from being sucked into WoW like I was EverQuest: one subjective and the other objective. On the subjective level I just never got into the world of WoW the way I did EQ. There’s something about Norrath as a world that calls to me. WoW definitely had the more intricate and visually impressive world space, but I remember being obsessed with the world of EQ. I bought all the guides, read all the lore tidbits we got here and there, and generally set a goal for myself to learn all the lore of the world I could. With WoW I just never found myself caring that much. I suspect it had something to do with the faster pace of the game. I never felt the need to slow down and really investigate the world I was in. The second factor was definitely all the tweaks to WoW’s play style that made it less social. Classes being far more homogeneous, faster and easier soloing, and in general a “less talk more action” vibe really took away from one of my favorite aspects of mmos. To me, a single player experience with other players “around” will never replace the early, party-based gameplay of the first mmos.
I agree about the world, Norrath was home, azeroth is just a game space. In fact, one of my biggest problems with EQ2 was it's total revamp of Norrath to be unrecognizable to the original game. A WoW Cataclysm revamp of the world map would have been much better than whatever they actually did.
Personally I think you should've started with Classic Era instead of Wrath since there's more class identity and difficulty in some ways but Wrath is a happy medium between the jank and grind of vanilla and how single-player and semi-easy retail has been. I went in the opposite order, having played PoTCO and a bunch of other MMOs since 2008, WoW since 2017, and especially Classic since 2019. I dabbled in EQ in early 2019 and got more into it in the past month. So far P99 and Oakwynd are fun for me. I really appreciate these incredible stories and videos.
I think the biggest differences were the focus on being built for PvP and thus the frantic twitchy input. I suspect a lot of such design choices were made for EQ to make it more resilient and playable on the weak internet connections of the day.
One thing I really liked about early EQ was how diverse some classes could be. It allowed the raw skill of a player shine in many circumstances. A person could play a necromancer and be an amazing puller depending on how well that player knew how to FD split. etc... With WoW, and most MMO's that came in after wow, they are much more paint by numbers, the classes were what the classes were and there was little deviation anyone could get away with.
I'm 40 years old now...and I started my mmo experience in EQ. I was one of those people that made fun of my friends that played "that stupid game". I made fun of them because I young and didn't know how great it was. So one night one of best friends in the air force told me the basics and left me at his computer. That was the beginning of the end because I fell in love with EQ. I started as a Necro. Then in 2004 my same friend moved to WoW and I resisted because I loved EQ, however I eventually tried it and fell in love all over again.
I have wanted to get into EQ but the interface is just too much for me to handle. I dislike WoW because of the toxic community and have tried LOTRO but nothing really feels right to me. Have even tried Ragnarok online, D&D, ESO, DaoC, Asheron's Call, and many others but something is always off. I think a lot of the problem for me with EQ is that the chat box is ALWAYS going and it's easy to get lost. I'm bad with directions in real life but in a game it's damn near impossible.
@@Travybear1989 I tried most of those as well. It's hard to suggest a game because everyone is different....but mmo's aside, if you like games you can get lost in, maybe try some single player survival games. The pros - no chat box, no time constraints, and the ui is usually pretty staright forward. Cons - no chat box, can be lonely unless it does have a multiplayer function. Valhiem was an especially addictive game for me or fallout 4 or Grounded. Those are just some but regardless keep looking sometimes the game your looking for is right in front of your face, you just haven't seen it yet.
This comment is a bit late, but one thing I really appreciate about old EQ and the main reason I go back to p99 over modern MMO's is that the game isn't *just* aimed at end game content. The journey to max level is a worthwhile experience and doesn't just feel like you're going through the motions..
WoW had its upsides and downsides. The main downsides for me were how crap the community was because it was much larger, and less personal. Things felt more rushed, especially dungeons. They're closer to an ARPG run than a classic MMO. People didn't talk as much, you can't just pick a camp and grind mobs, questing endlessly is the thing, which makes WORLD of WARcraft and EverQUEST seem... backwards. Think about it lol. EQOA was my first MMO, still my favorite, and for me MMORPG's were a short affair. Oh i still play them off and on, but the real love died around 2008 for me.
I love how you put it. Weird how the game names don't really describe how they actually play. They're the opposite. I never got a chance to try out EQOA. I wonder how it plays relative to EQ1 & EQ2
@@IonBlaze1 It plays a lot like EQ1 but less of a time sink for a lot of things such as downtime between pulls. It was still there but not as crazy. No corpse runs but we had debt. Instead of AA we got MC (Master Class) with class mastery points up to 1500 post max level to keep the end game going. Still crazy hard to level the first few years until exp buffs came in. My first lvl 50 took like a year lol. Epic quests at 49 and 60 for your class. Armor quests every few levels. Hopefully our private server will be up within a year or two. We have one now but it's bare bones. EQ1 fans would get the most out of EQOA, EQ2 fans might not care unless they were original oldschool fans before the WoWification process. I've covered EQOA since 2011 under this name, check out the playlist if you're curious. Such a shame it was shut down.
I was a beta tester for wow and it had some good parts but what really killed it for me was the lack of challenge for anything not group content. I tried playing it a few times, I was talked into raiding in WtLK and actually had a good time, our guild was one of the first dozen or so to down the LK and it felt damn good. When Cata came out the game just died for me for a while, I eventually came back near the end of the expansion to do the deathwing raids and again they were alright. Panda land came out and meh, couldn't get into it, I stayed gone till near the end of BFA and again the raiding was fun but outside of that the game was just meh. I tried shadowlands and again the day to day slog of mindlessly killing boring trash and doing meaningless quests just made me hate life and I quit before even hitting level cap.
The game was rather meaningless outside of the endgame is what you're saying? I heard asmon say something to the effect that Blizzard doesn't cater to casual grouping that much.
@@IonBlaze1 The game currently is a giant slog even at endgame, the only thing thats worthwhile is progressing through the mythic+ dungeon system and raiding. The content that would be for casuals just isn't there.
Good video! Very interesting to see an Everquest player go over the differences between the games and share his first impressions. I want to add to the two objections you made however: how WoW is more into the singleplayer experience, and how WoW lacked specialization and roles in their class design. Firstly, it is true that WoW can be played solo and generally degraded the need for group play. However there were a lot of elements in WoW that tried to encourage group play. In almost every zone there are elite quests and monsters that you cannot complete by yourself under normal circumstances. These quests and monsters give the best rewards and you always see people try to group up in order to complete them. Secondly, you said yourself in this video how you had problems at lvl 14 in Westfall. You looked for help and people advised going to other areas. But what more commonly happened was that people also grouped to solve this. Solo leveling while possible, was dangerous (especially on PvP servers!) and slow, so grouping always had major benefits. Then on to your second point. Keep in mind, you are playing the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which was released 4 years after vanilla WoW, and implemented a lot of changes in class design that made every class super strong. In the original form in 2004, WoW classes were a lot more unique and niche, exactly with the kind of pulling and crowd control abilities you favored in Everquest. Only warlocks could summon party members to far away places or make soulstones to save from a wipe. Hunters could kite mobs and tank with their pets in emergencies, rogues could sap (but only humanoids), priests could shackle (but only undead), druids could hibernate (but only beasts). There were three hybrid classes who's versatility was their strong suit. Not to mention all the specific buffs classes would have that made them all bring something unique to the party. So as you see, and other comments also have pointed out: there was a lot of the spirit of Everquest that made it over to WoW. And this is because many of the devs were Everquest players. like the lead developer Rob Pardo. I feel that is actually pretty well known, which is the reason why I stumbled on this video, when I was looking for comparisons between the two, in the first place.
I played EQ when it first came out for a couple of years. I played it a lot those two years. To me when I played WoW for the first time it was like the developers had played a lot of EQ and made a game that improved upon many aspects of it to make it more fun, similar to what you say in this video. Thank you for trying out the game instead of just hating it. There are things that I still think EQ had them beat on, though, like class/race diversity, cities and the grouping aspects to name a few. As always, appreciate your video.
When I played WoW, I really missed AA's and numerous buffs from other players. They really dropped the ball on buffs IMO, but AAs would probably screw up dungeons and raids hehe, I still miss em tho, getting high level buffs rocked back in the day.
Pulling / CC was huge in World of Warcraft especially when they introduced Heroic Dungeons in The Burning Crusade, Mages had sheep, other classes like hunters had stings that would put enemies to sleep, druids could put certain things to sleep, and root was huge because some of the heroic dungeon pulls in Hellfire Citadel for sure had sets of mobs that would come in 5's that would just destroy any regular geared group so we actually used markers in game on pulls to determine who was sheeping who was frost trapping etc. The CC could be pre'marked before the pull with the markers they have in game so each class knew what they were doing and which order to kill things in. As far as having someone pull, I used to have to pull on raids as a hunter just in case the pull went bad I could feign death if it went bad. The game difficulty did go way down hill after Wrath of the Lich King but if you played on the classic server during when they made Burning Crusade and even in WoTLK in any heroic dungeons you would see how important the cc/pull role actually is in the game.
One of the big difference I never see addressed is the gear. EQ gear is just more interesting with procs affects and clickable abilities. I had a whole toolbox of things sitting in my bags I could pull out when needed. No slower in group, out comes my sword with a slow affect then swap to better dps weapons. Gear from previous raids could still be relevant an xpac or more, think there was a flowing thought mana regen earring in luclin that was still bis for a long time in PoP. Also related to gear, it wasn't all soulbound, so I could pass down older gear to lower level players among other ways higher level players could interact with and build ties with newer player, offering buffs, out of party healing. So many things about EQ beyond the slow paced grind a spot grouping facilitated social interactions between players.
You have been pumping content these days! Good job love these quick vids. I no longer play EQ but still logging to get my monthly db cash, since im subbed for life.
Being a WoW player for more than a decade who tried out EQ only some years ago I've become somewhat disenchanted with the former. So many WoW's ideas and mechanics that felt fresh and immersive at its release turned out to be remnants of something more complicated and deep (reputation/faction standing system as an example). I've also grown to appreciate the group play oriented approach of EQ more than the counter-social ("anti-social" sounds too harsh in my opinion) adopted by WoW and the genre as a whole after its wake. The free-roam world design also appealed to me much more than the WoW-clones' questing railroad one. Don't get me wrong, I find Classic and TBC WoW a very fun, engaging and addictive game still. But now I can't help but see it as a copy of something much more ambitious and compelling that was made to look pretty outside but is made rather meager and shallow inside. EQ is not an ideal game of course. Even a "worse" one than WoW in many aspects. Especially given its age, accrued feature and content creep. But its highs more than cover its lows for me. I never expected the game to captivate me as it did but here I am. As of now, I had been exploring EQ's history on a TLP server grouping, progressing and raiding with a certain guild for more than 2 years already. And I'm glad I decided to give this game a go, one of the best gaming-related decisions I've made in my life.
Good explaination. During the earlier years chat was more exciting, with WoW it wasn't... it's easy to forget it wasn't that it just wore off, like all cool things do, but the game mechanics helped to kill that social interaction without a doubt.
Ironically, I've been trying to go back and give EQ2 another chance but one of the issues I'm having is that I feel like -it looks significantly worse- its presentation is worse than WoW's and I know they released around the same time so I guess I wasn't expecting a noticeable gap there. I definitely remember thinking EQ2 looked good in 2004 To me, the movement and animations in EQ2 just feel very... stiff? Combined with the audio, It never feels like any of my abilities or attacks have any weight to them. Maybe that eventually changes.
The Developers of EverQuest 2 was in a hurry to beat World of Warcraft and some of them wish they took their time and done better. EQN was suppose to be an lets do it better and they failed. issue is they were to much in a hurry and should of waited a year after WoW came out and then Release because a month after EQ2 Release World of Warcraft got popular and hurt EQ1 & 2.
Grouping, you're so correct, I found myself becoming (annoyed) when I'd communicate with people in WOW. I didn't need them, they only felt like slowing me down. When I'd group with people, no effort was made to get to know the person. In EQ we felt the trama together, we hurt together, we died, together, this is why people helped people in EQ.... You knew karma was a real thing in EQ!!
Good stuff as always, Ion. You could look into Brad McQuaids Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and "soon" to be Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen as well, as he very much made EQ into what it was, and Pantheons classes and abilities are almost a copy/paste of EQs (back to more than just tank, healer and dps).
Not too optimistic about Pantheon but I definitely heard good things about Vanguard before it shut down. Someone said Vanguard's bard was the best bard class ever made.
@@IonBlaze1 Aye, Vanguard definitely had a lot of very interesting and different approaches never seen before or after anywhere else. It's actually got an emu-server as well, which is sadly lacking mob abilities (except autoattack for the most part), but otherwise it's quite nice, as one can experience most of the rest of the game as it was. It did have more than the "trinity" as well, as mess was still a huge factor, the Enchanter (called the Psionicist) was almost too powerful, though, and other classes (mostly melee dps) could mess/stun one mob for longer periods as well to some extend.
People gotta stop dick riding Brad because everything he's done in the past 20 years has been bad. Pantheon is just cashing in on your nostalgia for EQ but ultimately is an unmitigated disaster. Don't get scammed by that trash.
@@Saiku If you had actually played his games from launch and experienced them while they were alive and fresh, I bet your perspective would be very different. Either way, our opinions differ. Vanguard was a fantastic game, so was EverQuest, and I bet Pantheon will be as well. If that style of game is not for you, so be it.
EQ was awesome because it required sacrifice and had large consequences. A sacrifice from you personally in the form of time, patience, social discipline + the risk of huge consequences was literally EQ's game design. You cant have a sense of value without sacrifice. The larger the sacrifice, the more sense of value you gain. The slow grind that is baked into EQ, with gear progression, exp, aa, tradeskills and personal + guild reputation is what made it so awesome. It's why I will always have a desire to go back to the original. To re live the feelings of accomplishment I had while hanging out with friends + relying on each other whilst simultaneously having tons of fun with the gameplay.
You should check out the vanilla wow private server everlook which launches on the 11th. I recently started playing p99 for the first time from being a mainly vanilla wow player and love both games a lot. Vanilla wow is a lot closer to eq than wrath, when wrath launched it took me about a week to hit level cap and get near best in slot gear, vanilla I was playing for months before I got any good gear and entering the molten core for the first time was an experience I will never forget. Really hope they come out with a new p99 server in the future, would love to be there on launch
The thing about vanilla WOW quests is that they weren't mandatory, they gave decent rewards and more importantly, gave players direction. When I was playing vanilla in 2005 the fastest I leveled was actually leveling tradeskills, specifically cooking and alchemy, which required me to kill mobs for meat and clear my way to herb nodes, all on one of the slowest leveling classes in the game, the warrior where I got to 50 in 3 days of casual play.
Great video! I usually don't comment on UA-cam video, but am feeling compelled as this is an area that hold some special meaning to me. I played EQ from Sept, 2000 until I got married in June 2004, pretty much non-stop. Then off and on in different ways (prog servers, E99, etc) up until a couple years ago. I played in parts of the closed beta for WoW in around April 2004. I didn't actually play retail until Burning Crusade came out, again, because I had just gotten married and games were largely put on the backburner at that time. This is just to set up some context for my next comments. As far as people hating on WoW. You have to remember something. For nearly all of EQ's early life, every MMO that came out was termed "EQ Killer" by people who didn't like EQ, or who were fans of the upcoming game. And every time, it failed to make an impact on EQ's playerbase for more than a couple weeks. It was a meme (though, we wouldn't call them that back then) about EQ killers. So there was already some animosity towards the game. But, the reality is, it was only a small vocal minority that truly hated WoW, and I think you hit on it, they were mostly baseless things. The reality is, most people were either pretty neutral or excited about WoW back then. There might be some jokes made about the cartoony look (though, the thought of an EQ player making fun of any games graphics is hilarious to me looking back) or how "easy" it was perceived to be. I think most people understood that something new, and potentially better would come along at some point. The fact that so many people left EQ for good shortly after WoW came out speaks volumes about what EQ players really thought about WoW. You did hit the nail on the head about the social aspect of the game though. The interesting part though, old school WoW was far more social than most MMO's (even WoW today) now are. The LFG tool's didn't exist like they do now. You weren't magically ported to dungeons like you are now, you had to run to the entrances. Raids required a lot more coordination than most EQ raids even. The home cities, especially Stormwind and Orgrimmar were filled with players and interaction. But nothing like EQ. Everything you mentioned about why WoW is potentially a better game is 100% true. Though, like you, I like EQ more than WoW, I just don't have the time to devote to a game like EQ. I actually don't play WoW anymore either because the game just isn't as good as it used to be, and, well, let's just say the contraversies with Blizzard. My game of choice now is Guild Wars 2 (Free to play and on Steam if you want to give it a go....it is not as social as either EQ or WoW though) and I'm pretty happy with how that game operates. The last thing I wanted to hit on was the "holy trinity" thing. The idea of the holy trinity (the name came much later) has been around as long as RPGs have been around. You see primordial versions of it in old D&D books. The thing is, WoW popularised the whole "Tank, DPS, Healer" as class roles, but EQ had them too. The reality is, we should be replacing "healer" with "support." You mentioned "Puller, Crowd Control & Support" in your video. But really, pulling is just a type of Crowd Control. And, what is the purpose of crowd control? It's to prevent damage to the party. This is probably controversial, but, in essence, crowd control is just a sort of pre-emptive healing. Support roles, in general, tend to directly make either Tanking, DPS, or Healing more effective. EQ's roles were a little bit more obscure, and not baked into the system, like WoW, but they most certainly existed. Interesting thing to note, the first time I heard the term "holy trinity" was actually in EQ ibn probably 2001 or 2002. It didn't refer to the class roles above. Instead, it referred to certain classes, specifically Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter. The idea was, if you had these three classes, your other group slots didn't matter. Those three could handle any single group content in the game (though without some damage dealing, they would be long fights). In early EQ, no one could touch a Warrior for tanking. Sure, Paladin and SK could hold aggro better, but they couldn't take damage nearly as well. No one could touch a cleric for healing and HP buffs. Yep, Shaman and Druid had both healing and HP buffs, but without complete heal, they were extremely inefficient healers, and their HP buffs weren't as good as a cleric's (well, druids was as good as one of clerics, but no symbol for druids). And enchanters literally filled all the rest of the holes. They had the best haste buffs. They had slows that were, for all intents and purposes, just as good as a shaman. They had the clarity line. And they could CC. That was EQ's holy trinity, and even that one shows some version of the current holy trinity, just missing DPS. All this to say that I largely disagree that EQ doesn't have "The Holy Trinity." But it does still have class roles that can pretty easily fall into those categories.
I've played both for long periods of time and I think your video is a good 90% on target. I think with WoW the 60+ game requires more teamwork and grouping though. I never thought of WoW as a pvp game with pre added in until I watched your video. I think you may be on to something. As I tend to be a more casual player (12 hours/week tops) WoW is more friendlier to me. I remember a friend once saying around 2002 when we were playing EQ hardcore, "As much time as it took me to reach smithing grand master, I could have learned it in real life!" ... LOL that comment puts the game comparison into perspective. But I still miss EQ and sometimes consider going back and playing it. --Belegir, Wood Elf Ranger, Solusek Ro/Druzzil Ro/Stromm.
I hated WoW when it came out and for years afterwards because, all other new MMOs after that point copied WoW's format. I was bitter about WoW not because I didn't like it but because it was so successful that all the MMOs that were in development that I was excited for were either cancelled or changed to copy WoW such Middle-Earth Online changing to Lord of the Rings Online. And WoW's popularity killed Star Wars Galaxies by making those devs release the "new game enhancements" that turned SWG from an individual skill based game to a cookie cutter class based game just like WoW. I also didn't like the fact that they made it much easier to play as a Jedi. I liked the idea that finding player Jedi was rare because that was lore friendly for that time period in the Star Wars universe. I'm just happy that now there are finally 2 MMOs in mid-stage development that aren't WoW clones: Ashes of Creation and Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, both of which have promising funding sources.
What I disliked about the newer RPGs is they try to make you feel like a badass right from the getgo, Questbosses at lv 2 are already armored hellknights or something you take down by simply autoattacking. But then you struggle soloing a lv 5 wolf, it doesn't feel coherent at all. In EQ you started hunting vermin and when you were able to take on orcs, dervs, guards you felt how much stronger you had become, your own powerlevel in relation to the world made sense and felt coherent, and when you were able to kill a badass SK NPC after months of getting stronger it felt earned.
Saw a random guy wearing a EverQuest shirt today and it reminded me of this drama. I never actually played either game (was a console bro shooter/sports gamer back then) but these 2 guys I worked with were always talking about their EQ stuff. I asked one day how long they’d been playing World of Warcraft and they completely flipped out! “We play EverQuest!!!! It’s a far superior game!” It became my running gag to get them fired up every few weeks acting like I had completely forgot there were 2 games. Wonder if they ever joined the dark side….
I was on the Seventh Hammer server the day WoW launched. EQ players were trying to crash the East Commons first before leaving. There must of been over a thousand players in that zone before they left. The players that would raid zones as level 1 gnomes did the same thing when they went to WoW how I remember it.
Death penalty was the biggest difference for me between Wow and EQ. Death in EQ was harsh with corpse runs, EXP loss, and even possibility of losing everything on your character if you couldn't get back to your corpse. WoW made death no big deal with respawn points. I seen a lot of people switch to WoW for this very reason. In fact most all games, full loot PvP excluded, have expanded this idea and make death inconsequential part of the game. Could have saved a lot of quarters if the games in the arcade had endless respawns.
Awesome idea for a vid. I fell in Love with Flatts and Reptox at the start of the pandemic...at the perfect time of a new TLP. I made an iksar monk and followed along with his videos loosely. I watch your stuff just as intently man, keep it coming!
1999,2000- raided for 11 years. and returned several times. I’ve also played other mmo’s WoW, warhammer, guild wars, lord of the rings. Nothing beat Grouping with people from all over the world on Eq for the time it was groundbreaking. But having to keep updating my computer to keep up with the demand of expansions was hard on the wallet. I played WoW classic to get that experience and it did have that community feel to it. I agree WoW has a better aesthetic and for that reason probably won the popularity. EQ still has a place in my heart.
You can tell the people that really played WoW and those that didn't in this comment section. EQ was amazing, but brutal. WoW leant for an even better community in some ways because it was bustling. Vanilla WoW held your hand just enough and was based on an already popular franchise. Instanced dungeons and raids, more accessible mounts. Solo and group content. WoW is the best MMO of all time by a longshot. Everquest is niche and is my personal favorite.
I was big into EQ from 2000 to Planes of Power. I was also big into WoW from Vanilla to the end of Lich King. I love both games, and I agree with what you say about grouping. However, just want to mention WoW changed alot even from vanilla to the second expansion, Lich King. While it is true Lich King is high regarded as possibly the best expansion the game ever had, it was fewer and fewer people going through the original leveling zones 1-60, which meant alot of the quests originally meant for groups were nerfed to be much easier to do solo. Originally, Blizzard designed a few group quests in every zones, with mobs known as "Elites"(marked with dragon icons) being usually too hard for a single player to kill. This is where people grouped, 2-5 people, and where people often bonded and made guilds. I re-experienced this just a few years ago when I played the original Classic(which is kinda weird to say). Each quest line also often ended with a dungeon run, which also required a group, though as each expansion came out, leveling through previous content was made easier each time. Also I do remember running WoW dungeons without the standard tank/healer/3dps setups, without a tank we had to get creative with a hunter/warlock pet tanking with me as a healer paladin offtanking. Going through Maraudon(one of the biggest dungeons the game ever had) in a group setup like that, was always some of my best WoW memories. The game went and streamlined the content even more, current dungeons(last played Battle for Azeroth, previous expansion) is just an AoE-rush to the end with usually none or very simple mechanics nobody cares about, which is something I personally dislike. Given the state the game is in right now with Lich King being the current classic content, and the context of you having never played the game before, I think your arguments are fair, I just wanted to mention the game is and always was changing, and even classic Lich King is not as the game was when it competed against EQ1 and 2 back in 2004/5. Lich King came 4 years later.
Hi Ion. First of: great video. As a player of both EQ classic (i play on Green) and WoW classic (i've been raiding since classic launch up to now), i have something i'd like to point out (in case noone else did) At the moment, as you said, you are playing on the Wrath of the Lich King expansion in classic..which is not really comparable to Vanilla WoW (unfortunately right now most Classic servers have progressed to Wrath). This expansion really deemphasized a good chunk of the social aspect of the game, hence why many people who played at the launch of Classic WoW in 2019, have now gone back to vanilla private servers. Not to mention that, with the expansion out now, the "Old world" is borderline empty of players, as most simply stick to the Northrend continent. Not only that, but Wrath of the Lich king made so many tweaks that..the game simply can't be compared at the moment. Most "elites" in the open world are now just normal mobs, making it less dangerous. Enemies in general in the open world (and many dungeons) are MASSIVELY nerfed, making group questing less desirable. Drop rates of items are massively increased, and scarcity of loot is not a thing anymore. Basically at the moment you are playing in a version of WoW that could be compared to the Luclin/Planes of power expansion in terms of how it regressed in mandatory social interactions. Unfortunately the days of Classic launch in 2019 are kinda gone, when the world was populated 24/7, and people formed groups non stop to quest, dungeon grind and do raids. The sad thing is..there is no real way for you right now (other than a private server) to relive what Classic really was like. Blizzard has some servers that are denoninated as "Classic Era" servers, which are stuck in vanilla..but nobody plays on them unfortunately, and those who do are already max level and simply do Naxxramas runs (which is the latest raid in Vanilla's timeline) or play in nieche comunities for the HC/Ironman challenge. Don't get me wrong...as a player of both i'd never claim that WoW vanilla emphasized mandatory grouping as much as Everquest did. But Wrath of the lich king brought the social dependency to a new low, thus i dont think you can really compare the two : |
Let me keep it 100: I loved EQ, and refused to play WoW for years and often talked trash on it. Even after making friends in college who politely invited me to play WoW, I still declined in favor of EQ -- even though I had been barely playing EQ at that point. Why? Elitism. My MMORPG was first. WoW was just an imitation. There couldn't be another game like mine, so I had to fight it. It's stupid. I play WoW now on Classic and Retail. Even looking at Classic, WoW is the game EQ wishes it was. It's a better game. Smoother. Better interface. More enjoyable to explore world. Easier time getting good equipment drops. More entertaining raids. I regret that I didn't play WoW in 2004. But I still love EQ thought. I play on P99 and TAKP sometimes. I tried my first EQ TLP since 2008 last year. Grouping was fun. New Freeport sucks. Seeing Krono spamming everywhere and bot armies of mages was emotionally crushing. WoW was great and got better. EQ was great and then got worse. I was wrong about WoW.
I think one of the main problems was that EQ2 released too soon. I remember playing EQ, then trying EQ, going back to EQ, but eventually moved to WoW. I saw a dev interview where they say 'that's just how it is those days, you create a sequel. We never thought people would play for years ' My approach was entirely different with WoW though. I had already done the raiding scene in EQ and didn't really want to do that again in another game. I treated WoW very casual in comparison to my EQ days. I ended doing some raids in WoW but never as hsrdcore as in EQ.
First off, I watch most of your videos for almost a year. I’m not attached to eq in anyway honestly. I played it a bit when I was young and decided it wasn’t for me and really couldn’t find my footing. And while many would say WOW was their first, it was final fantasy 11 for me. I’d love to see your take on that one since it was developed before WoW’s influence and took more inspiration I feel from eq in terms of grouping and grinding. Tons of memories there but just like you mention in this video; it’s hard to go back after playing with some newer mmos with quality of life changes.
@@IonBlaze1 the game is still up and going, however the quality of life changes turned die hards away and their are some private servers with their own take on how or when the game was "great". still a subscription fee attached to it tho even after all these years
I played EQ1 2000-2005, EQ2 2004-2005 and WoW 2005-2010. I loved them all. The way you talked about class balance for PvP, you are absolutely right for WotLK and beyond. Classic vanilla WoW was much more unbalanced and maybe that's why I liked it so much. Great video. Thanks.
You are playing the classic wrath of the lich king version which is on the status of the 2nd expansion by which leveling had been made far easier and faster. In vanilla there is a lot more incentive to group up as every zone bar the first two starter zones leads up to an outdoor dungeon filled with elite mobs and quests that requires you to group up. As they made linear progression in their addons they had to squish ep requirements and make the old content solo-able (outside instanced dungeons) as there weren't/ aren't enough players around leveling up and the core emphasis of the gameplay ever since the first addon was put on the endgame
So, my friends got me into EQ1 about a year and a half before WoW launched. I joined to play with them, but they kinda flaked out on me. I tried soloing in EQ1 and it just didn't feel right, once I started to meet people and group the game really changed for me. We'd go to different zones and socialize while waiting for specific quest mobs to respawn and spam languages at each other until we learned them :P Unfortunately for me, by the time I started getting into raiding. Wow was right behind. I don't know if we would have lost the same amount of people in the EQ community if EQ2 would have launched at the same time or earlier, but people were eager to try out the new. I stayed with EQ1 and then went to EQ2 when it launched. The promises of a upgraded crafting system that would ultimately make better gear than what you could quest for or get in dungeons was my draw as in EQ1 I loved the idea of unique items you had to work hard to achieve. The crafting system initially was quite complex so that if you decided to dedicate yourself to crafting and became a master of it, you would reap the benefits. However, they would then dumb down the crafting system because others didn't want to put in the work and they bowed to player pressure. Now crafting in EQ2 is much less complicated, but no were near as click and go as WoW. There was also another issue early on that I felt hurt us badly, I was in one of the first guilds to reach level 10 on our server, but we found up rather quickly that when someone left your guild whatever status they issued to get our guild levels disappeared when they did. One big fight and our guild went from Level 10 to 1 overnight. Some left because of the issue, others abandoned ship because the ship was sinking and if we were losing levels they wanted to go to another guild that wasn't exacerbating the situation. Anywho, when my friends asked me to join them in WoW, I ran into the same problem with them, they'd invite me, then they wouldn't show up to play. I out level them, and then they want me to spend all my time power leveling them just like what happened in EQ1. But, as this video pointed out, soloing is much easier in WoW and they added a lot of other things you could do. Pet battling was a great thing, but I couldn't get into the raiding in WoW or EQ2. Not like I did in EQ1. Those comraderies from the player base in EQ1 was as stated something that was built up. Also, just reminiscing, aside from everyone knowing your name if you earned a reputation as someone who would help or being a top tier raider, the GM's in that game were SOOOOOO much more active then in any game I've ever played. From passing out cookies and milk to new players to running random events. It's something they do in EQ2 as well, but not to the same degree. Anyway, I loved my time in EQ1, but I tried to go back to it at one point and the graphics literally were hurting my eyes and giving me vertigo after so long with updated graphics :P I tried again and just really didn't know where to start. The old school intro quest had me locked in a certain area and I couldn't remember all the commands. I found my old characters even after being away from the game and the servers being merged again and again, but I was not enticed to really get involved because of my unfamiliarity with the old system. I have the info to get back in, but other games have my attention at the moment :) Still, whenever anyone mentions EQ, it brings back fond memories of being in the Unrest spamming languages between respawns. :)
Interesting =) I like that you went to classic for the comparison to try to get into the psychology of the why. I would say to you, if you do have time, check out Dragonflight and how compares to other MMOs -- They brought back older systems on loot distribution and introducing an all new crafting system that brings in aspects of some of my experiences in older MMOs where crafting quality levels on gear and materials was a thing.... Also there are advancements that I think people are gonna love such as skill trees for each profession that enhance or specialize your crafting / give you crafting abilities. Im glad that this expac we are getting upgrades to some of the old systems like talent tree revamp, the new editable UI and professions revamp -- but I also might be biased :D.
@@IonBlaze1 it Is basically a system that makes it so you can make a dungeon for a 5 man group be scaled up in difficulty with random modifiers that can be applied to any of the dungeons to add more of a challenge for the group and also get better gear. It is a nice system that allows for an endgame progression for those who don't like raids and prefer a smaller tight nit group experience
I played EQ for ten years from the day it came out. Made friends around the world, many of whom I am still in contact with via social media. What made me quit? Two factors - guildmates leaving to play WoW and just the general grind of being a guild master. I have recently started playing again but do almost everything solo. I just don't have the hours need to group effectively.
I think what a lot of us touched on is the fact that EQ *was* hard. It was unrelenting in what it demanded of the players, and very unforgiving of mistakes made by them. Heck, it was kinda like a codependency relationship, where you wore your bruises like a badge of honor, to prove you "had what it took" to stick around for love. 😆 At the same time, it helped to filter out the worst and most toxic players. Reputation was everything, and consequences were for everyone, good and bad. People who were in it for the short haul, who didn't mind cutting corners (or throats) to get ahead, quickly found themselves locked out of higher content by way of no one wanting to group with them, or getting banned outright and losing all the time and effort they'd invested to that point. For others who'd only started out down that road, the way negative consequences built up acted to curb their more sociopathic tendencies and teach them how to interact with other humans in a way that benefited all concerned. A moral lesson was unobtrusively woven into every experience. That's really why people fell in love with EQ. Because good people can't remain and be a part of something that even passively condones evil, or bad behavior. You see it in government work all the time: bureaucracies exist for the purpose of shielding its constituent cogs (people) from personal responsibility for the actions they undertake on behalf of the system, and consequently, only people actively looking for that freedom from responsibility join or stay with them. Remember the DMV. 🤷♂️ I think people naturally want to take the quick path of fast advancement and easy loot, but in most of us it leaves a sense of unfulfillment. So while later games, especially mobile games, cater to that by offering micro transactions that can offer much faster advancement for ever-increasing sums of money, we know it's not earned or deserved; that's why none of them have the legs or loyalty EQ does. Hell, even those of us that stopped playing decades ago still sometimes have dreams of being in Lower Guk, or the 3 days in a row we spent camping Drelzna before they made the Jboots a quest-only item. That's a staying power you'll not find in any game since, because now games feel the best way to compete is to race each other to monetization, rather than making the best possible game. Though, I must admit, one of the few videos I have saved on my UA-cam is the Onyxia wipe by that one Guild in WoW that was animated by one of the participants. Whenever I need to put a smile on my face, that's my go-to. 😆
Loved both. Two biggest games from my childhood and teen years. The thing that seperated them, was that WoW could be played solo. (You didn't have to, but you had the option), where as Everquest you basically had to group. Both games were tremendous fun with groups, but EQ just really wasn't fun alone for most people.
God I remember how overtune Gates of Discord was. To the point top guilds literally report a boss broken, and the team kept saying was working as intended until like 6 months later they admitted the fight was indeed broken. EQ hurt itself big time there. Ascent a top raiding guild quit EQ for WoW because of it.
I joined WoW when it first launched from EQ2, the graphics were really what had me like "This just feels weird". I played EQ2 till roughly 08 when I had some out of game drama that left me in a very depressed state where I decided to try WoW as Burning Crusade was out. I still Miss EQ2 (never played 1) but it's just not the same solo, also I really don't want to redo my UI again lol I've tried coming back many times. edit: The more I think about it when it comes to EQ2 Vs WoW for me, WoW is very much a game that I can play almost entirely by myself if I want minus dungeons/raids. I'm often solo (not always by choice...) so being able to solo is VERY important to me these days, I can pickup my Affliction Warlock or my Beast Master hunter and even some elites can be soloed if I don't derp out. That said I miss the camaraderie EQ2 gave me, playing my wizard and dropping massive nukes or playing aggro thief with my Brigand (lol sorry tanks) is something I don't know if I'll ever get to rekindle. In WoW unless you run with a guild, most dungeons are with random people who don't care anything about you beyond "get me loot and get gone". If you talk in a dungeon it's usually met with insults or a vote kick, there's not just no need for lasting bonds there's no desire again outside of raids. Would I go back to EQ2? Maybe, though I will be trying dragon flight, I'll never lose that nostalgia but neither do I know if I can say "I'm going back for good". For all it's things I miss, I'm a different person today than when I started EQ2 almost 20 years ago.
My parent's also played EQ1, but instead of following them to that game, I played WoW when it released (as a young starry eyed and bushy tailed elementary schooler). I dedicated myself to MMOs all the way until highschool, where I finally got burned out of FFXIV which I felt was kind of the quintessential evolution of all of WoW's problems, it was a deeply anti-social game from the perspective of leveling, which was heavily gated by a long and drawn out main story quest which you could NOT do with your friends. If following the main quest requires you to go into cutscenes or fights that force you to leave your party, you are not playing an MMO. Its more like you are playing a game like Genshin Impact or Elden Ring, where you are playing a Solo RPG where you can occasionally group up to do boss fights. It made me feel super nostalgic for Classic WoW, and I played a bunch of it on release, but even then it still felt like it was naturally destined to go down the path it always had, which is convenience over social ability. I wished there was a modern style EQ game to try, because I really craved that more social interaction, but simply put, I don't have the nostalgia for EQ to pull me through how much of a dinosaur it is. I heard there was a game called Evercraft (And it is actually having its free pre-alpha this weekend) that is trying to recreate and modernize Everquest a bit, but with a minecraft voxel artstyle, and it actually looks really good. I would love to hear your thoughts on Evercraft if you end up giving that game a try and seeing a video on it. I greatly enjoyed this video as well :)
I played eq up until 2003, but when wow came out, myself and the majority of my old eq guild started playing it. I don't remember eq players hating it to be honest, a lot of them played wow for a little while, got bored and went back to eq.
Crowd control in WoW varied a lot over time - some expansions & dungeons made it essential -others made it irrelevant. On my mage I considered CC (sheep) my most important priority for numerous dungeons and I really enjoyed that, but different dungeons required different classes to have any CC - Dire Maul needed druid CC, Karazhan needed Priest (Shackle) - so no one class could always CC, so the role got more ignored and eventually became irrelevant as the designers couldnt assume a specific CC (due to the spread of CC between different classes) was available so they stopped designing for it - which I considered a big mistake.
As an EQ guildleader, I resented WoW for the first few years it was out because we were constantly gearing up players, who once they were geared up, would start playing WoW, so we had to recruit more players, who then needed to be geared up, so then your older raiders got bored of the same raids over and over, so they leave to go play WoW. The constant treadmill of gearing up folks to have them leave is what spurned it. I retired at some point and joined some of my old guild mates in WoW Lich King expansion.
i miss EQ a lot. It IS the most influential game of my entire life. I wish i had the time to play again, but I am having almost as much fun watching you do it for me. the nostalgia factor you cultivate is incredibly satisfying.
@IonBlazeGaming Do you know where I can buy a digital copy of Everquest Titanium so I can play on Project 1999? I can't find any online that aren't the physical disks. Thank you!
Ion, absolutely love your videos and content. One critique ... your videos end so abruptly. Maybe a 3 to 5 second outro. It would just make the video feel more polished and professional. Either way, thanks for the video.
By the time WoW came out, SoE had shot themselves in the foot with EQ. One thing I remember the most is the new expansions taking away the "career" path of druids etc. Portals everywhere put a lot of people in places they had no business being in without knowing how to play their class. By trying to dumb EQ down, they drove off the players that had come to really appreciate the fact what they had, they EARNED. A lot of people were forced to deal with the "carebears" or raiding which was a whole nother level all together with the amount of sheer time required to be in a end game raiding guild.
I played both, Project 1999 is for me since that is when I started. I played till the game was unrecognizable and then tried WoW. It was so easy that I literally soloed my way to level 60. Insane and didnt even take long. Totally Impossible in EQ1 unless you twinked yourself and knew exactly what class to play and where to level.
as a long time WoW player i can see many of these points i know its an 4 month old video at this point however i'd like to point out that back in Vanilla WoW you still needed a guild to succeed or get stuff done some bosses/content were impossible without a group even in classic to this day, wrath however the one you said you were playing was when the game was turning into a much more noob friendly/newplayer friendly game as it introduced the dungeon finder and stopped people from having to communicate to find a group as you could now just press a button and queue up for a specific dungeon i can see that being a turn off for a lot of players at the time
I had a lot of fun in WoW. Questing was okay and engaging at first but then I moved on to battlegrounds and that was addicting! When I pop in from time to time I end up back in the battlegrounds living up the excitment of PvP. BUT...EQ is still my first love and nothing gives me the feels the way EQ does.
@@IonBlaze1 The last I played there were 10V10 up to 40V40 and inbetween. I'm not sure what they have these days. I never thought I would enjoy PVP but WoW proved me wrong :).
I would say that both EQ and WoW was a "right time and the right place" kind of deal. Ultima Online had shown the world and game devs that MMOs was a viable business model, and when EQ launched with it's classic fantasy (elf, dwarf, wizards) it was a hit, and it was in 3D. There is a good reason why EQ got the nickname Ever Crack, because people got so addicted to the game. I remember seeing a news bit on TV at the time, about a guy getting divorced because he played EQ too much. I played the lesser known MMO called Asheron's Call, it launched the same year as EQ, played for a few years, and when WoW launched my guild pretty much died overnight. So I tried it out, and hated it. Too casual, too much hand holding I thought at the time. Pretty much everyone that stayed with Asheron's Call called WoW the Care Bear game. It was not until the first WoW expansion pack, The Burning Crusade that I fell in love with the game, and started my journey in WoW. You mention at 17:25 in the video that EQ never gets the credit it deserves, and I have to agree. But at Blizz-Con one year, Chris Metzen senior vice president at the time, went on stage and did his "Geek Is" speech, and in that speech he did mention EQ and how big an impact it had on WoW. I did try EQ2 also when it launched. Besides the point you had to have a NASA super computer to run it, it also had some odd design choices. If I remember correct, if you played in a group and one member died, all members lost XP and thus killing the grouping aspect of the game. I might recall that wrong but I'm sure someone will correct me. Looking back on my time with MMO games I would say I have a Love/Hate relationship with WoW. I have a lot of fond memories playing the game, and the people I've met in game, but I hate what it did to the MMO genre. Every game studio looked at WOW and tried to make the next WoW clone/killer, instead of making just a good game. They got blinded by crazy amount of cash WoW pulled in. As for the original EQ, I have tried it a few times, and it's a hard game to get into if you do not have any nostalgia or prior experience with the game. I don't mind the graphics, but the UI and the clucky feel of moving and interacting with the world makes for a rough experience, but I'm glad it's still around for people to play.
I played WoW for about a month when it was first released, then quit and never went back to it. The biggest turn off for me was the cartoony graphics. It also felt very easy mode after playing EQ1 for two years.
TBH I haven't paid much attention to Pantheon as I mostly play single player games. At 56, and working full time, MMOs just require too much of a time investment, in too large "chunks". EQ1 was they only MMO I ever played "seriously". I still load it up occasionally, but I just 2 box.
Here comes a long ass post. I may have a different take since I mostly played classes that could solo well in EQ due to at the time college and then afterward work and family commitments. I remember the inability to solo just to get decent xp really frustrating back in the day and basically being forced to play my druid, necro, or wizard just to be able to log on and get something done in short time windows. (At least as far as leveling and then getting AA xp. Getting meaningful loot was never a thing solo.) I still remember logging on and sitting at the Sebilis zone in for a couple hours looking for a group then eventually giving up and just being sad that I didn't actually get to play the game that night. When wow came out it was refreshing to just be able to play the game solo whenever I wanted. Each of the servers had a decent community and you slowly got to know everyone from grouping, raiding and pvp. Old wow still made you socialize to get in a group for dungeons but only needing tank, healer, and 3 dps made it a bit simpler to find groups although it was occasionally still frustrating depending on if you played at primetime hours or not. The pace of the game did definitely make it harder to talk while doing a dungeon but generally they were 30ish minute runs and the socializing was done before or after and occasionally during a bit of downtime after something went wrong. At some point they added the group finder system and you queued up as your preferred role and it would put you in a group with 4 other random people that you've never talked to before. I can't remember if it was the case at the start but at some point these group members stopped having to be from your own server and were just random people from your server cluster (6 or 7 servers grouped together if I remember correct.) This to me was the beginning of the complete douchebag groups that wouldn't ever say anything, would roll need on everything and would leave without a moment's notice if things didn't go their way. At least before that you had to maintain a reputation on your server so people would group with you. Now you were just an anonymous troll on the internet doing speedruns for sweet lootz. A nice feature (getting quick groups without travel time before dungeons) totally ruined by the player base. I feel this was the beginning of the end as far as community outside of your own guild in wow. I still return to EQ every once in a while and play for about a month but I quickly remember that it's still a game where grouping is king and if you don't have a consistent play schedule it can be very difficult to get everything you want out of the game. I may be fooling myself but I feel like if I had much more play time then EQ would be the best game to be into hardcore in terms of community and just an overall rewarding play experience. I'm still annoyed every wow expansion when all the work you did in the previous one is completely invalidated with random gear drops in the first couple zones that are better than raid gear from the previous expansion. (Removed barrier of entry at the cost of invalidating previous work is a bad system in my opinion.) I also return to wow when each expansion comes out but am repeatedly frustrated by the developers constant need to waste player's time. Grinding mindless daily repeatable quests for faction, or eventually enough currency to purchase a slight upgrade gets old pretty fast. Being time gated from certain content because they want you to keep your sub active also sucks. The endless dumbing down of the game to again lower the barrier for entry has made playing many of the classes an exercise in mashing 4 or 5 buttons. These are apparently things they are finally going to remove/minimize in the upcoming expansion but we'll see.
This is a really good comment. Thank you for sharing all that. I didn't know dungeon finder had that much of a negative influence on the game. I didn't know about the grindy aspects too.
Crowd control, and things like buffs and auras are a part of WoW classes. Also if you want smaller content where your actions feel more impactful you've Mythic+ in Retail. I never played EQ however I spent a lot of time in Lineage 2. Like pretty much any Korean MMO there it was very grindy and while some classes could solo the game heavily promoted grouping in order to do must stuff, this like you said promoted the social aspect of the game however talking from my own experience I was a Eva Saint (healer) and couldn't do anything by myself I wasted a lot of time just sitting in the city waiting for my friends, guilds or even trying to get into some random groups to start playing.
I played both for years, the major differences aside, the biggest things I found from EQ to WOW is that in WOW you actually quest for something and it DROPS, not only .02% of the time. Wow you can solo almost all the way up, until you want to raid or do dungeons, nothing is forced you don't have to go anywhere. EQ forces you to work together, or multibox to do content. It also has harder quest to find, nothing just shows up above a head and says HEY TALK TO ME. EQ has be diluted since then with allowing 5 or 6 boxing or more, and having mercs, making challenging content almost trivial.
Interestingly the same thing that old-school players(today Classic) hate about retail WoW = too much accessibility, not a social environment, were saying Everquest players about WoW Vanilla ... How the tables have turned...
I was there for the great migration from EQ to wow, EQ2 failed right out the gate due to stiff animation, bland art work, poor particle effects, floaty movement, and computer requirements being too high. Even EQ1 players in my community wouldn’t drop their heavily invested into characters for EQ2. WoW wasn’t seen as an enemy in any way. It was just seen as an evolution in MMOs. Games just advance, we all knew the day would come when EQ become too old. There was no anger, envy or hatred. It was more like “well, we all played this game to death and it’s time to move on to newer things”. So everyone left. Wow had all the grouping systems that you could want with easier control. But offered something EQ didn’t. Self determination. You had self agency. You want to join a group, sure go ahead. But if you didn’t want to be bothered with other people’s BS and drama (EQ had plenty of drama) then you didn’t have to be. Easier play also lifted a massive barrier to entry for new players. What no one expected was wow to survive on top as long as it did and still thriving with only FFXIV competing with numbers when WoW became massively mired in legal and social controversy. I personally been ready for a while for the next big step in MMOs.
You should really try out Turtle WoW. It's a private server and it's basically Vanilla + It's AMAZING! Instead going the route of future expansions where everything is faster, it instead retains classic wow's feel while adding new zones, dungeons, a new profession that allows you to farm, make torches etc... The community is very tight and there's no annoying gatekeeping. Just talking about it makes me wanna jump in again!
Highly recommend you check out ffxi 75 era servers i feel like it really struck a good balance of grouping vs soloing(depending on your class). Also it has those same feelings of accomplishment that eq has when you get certain items.
I played EQ during beta phase, and I played WoW during the official launch. I liked both for very different reasons, and today I still play both of them, for most of those same reasons. EQ does get neglected when talking about MMO's, honestly though I kind of like it though, because it means those of us who were there during the beginning, are a very exclusive community of people. WoW may currently be the best MMO around, but it will have its sunset as well. EQ will always in my opinion be the grandfather of the 3DMMO genre.
I did try out WoW shortly after release, and was very underwhelmed. The community seemed to be a bunch of kids and the graphics just didn't do it for me. Things were too easy overall. I also played EQ2 for a while, and it was far more similar to WoW than to EQ.
As an EQ2 player, I always hated that EQ2 came out before WoW, but everyone always seems to claim the opposite and say that EQ2 copied WoW. The problem was that EQ2 needed such a high end machine at the time to run well and WoW could run on a potato. This shows all these years later though in that EQ2 still looks pretty good and runs great on todays systems while WoW looks like a 90's cartoon. Gameplay wise, I still think EQ2 is lightyears ahead of WoW. I did try WoW a couple times, but I got bored with it before I even finished the free trial. Here I am 20+ years later and I still go back and play EQ2 from time to time.
I played both and the drastic difference between EQ and WoW to me was much like the initial reactions at the beginning of your vid. It's too dumbed down. It really was, quest here go there kill this, it showed you everything. Everquest was a world in which there wasn't much if any online data. We all had maps drawn out or knew the way without them. There certainly wasn't any NPCs telling us where to go and what to do for exp. It's too easy, it really was. I solo'd a mage to max level pretty quickly. I didn't feel much resistance it was just a quick grind really. And lastly "it's for kids" it was. I seen Barrens chat. I seen all the little kids spewing vitriol everywhere. EQ wasn't absent this kind of stuff either, but it was handled, and handled quickly. Either the person was ignored by everyone, or the GMs stepped in and did something. In WoW other kids would add in or pile on the rhetoric and it was just like playing a game with a bunch of kids. So after reaching max level in early WoW I quit. Never even raided. I wasn't presented with anything of a challenge. Even today, on a TLP server on EQ where it's meant to be much easier....it's still harder than any point in WoW that I ever played. As for later days in WoW I'm sure it got better and things were more challenging. But my foray into the game was not pleasant, fun or challenging.
@@IonBlaze1 They probably aren't nowadays. WoW has gotten a lot harder and more complex over the years. I tried to point out that my experience was only early day wow.
WOTLK is a great expansion, and many would argue it is peak WoW, but you really need to play vanilla to get the true experience. Don't get me wrong, play WotLK too, it's fantastic. But there's something unique and EQ-like about vanilla compared to any of the xpacs. It's more raw and old-school feeling, far less handholdy and far more challenging than future xpacs, which actually went back and changed/nerfed the vanilla content. For example, in vanilla, almost every zone had an un-instanced "elite" area, which was filled with elite mobs and had a bunch of quests associated with it. These quests were harder, gave better rewards and more importantly YOU NEEDED a group to complete them unless you were drastically over leveled. It was essentially un-instanced dungeons, complete with bosses, that acted as a De facto meeting ground for groups in that zone. Yes, you could probably solo 90% of the zone, but when it came to the elite zones, soloing wasn't an option. Examples include the ogre area in Loch Modan, the Orc Castle in Redridge Mountains and the Syndicate Fortress in Arathi Highlands. When the first expansion came out, Burning Crusade, they went back and nerfed all of these zones, so that all the elite enemies are now much weaker, normal mobs, and only the bosses are elites, which makes them much easier to solo to the point where no one has to group anymore. Another example is Uldaman, it used to be this grand dungeon spanning from content appropriate for levels 36 all the way up to early 50s (the final boss was lvl 47 with tons of high level adds) this means it was entirely possible you and your party would get through a good chunk of the dungeon, but face roadblocks where you suddenly find yourself unprepared, under leveled, and actually wiping a lot and have to choose to keep persevering or give up, get stronger, get more gear (perhaps even use a bit of esoteric cheese you picked up from an experienced player) and come back ready for the challenge. It gave you obstacles and hurdles that you had to work hard to get around. It allowed you to taste failure and defeat instead of giving you a free win. Now the dungeon has been nerfed so nothing, including the last boss is above level 40, so it can be packaged nice and neatly in a more concise level range, around 35-40 instead of 35-50s. Sure this seems like a good change right? It makes sense for a dungeon to not cover so many levels, what's the point of having to go back twice? Well to me, that jank is charm. It's dynamic, unique and exciting. It incentives people to run more than once, and so more groups form and it's easier to find group content. Yes, I have horrible memories of getting to the last boss, just to wipe over and over because his level is red to everyone, including the tank, and we had to pack our bags and go home with a sour taste in our mouths. But it was a damn memorable experience, to the point where I'm still talking about it years later. It was a days long adventure, not a 1 hour in and out dungeon grind. And you bet your ass it was so sweet to come back stronger myself, with a stronger party and finally manage to topple that titanic turd, Archaedas , and uncover the loot, secrets and lore that is contained in the previously inaccessible vaults of Uldaman. Another big example, WOTLK you get your first mount at lvl 20, then fast mounts at lvl 40. In vanilla, it was first mount at 40, fast mount at 60. And they were about 10x more expensive and that's not an exaggeration. Having a mount actually meant something. People would stop and look at you with admiration and congratulate you, because it was a real accomplishment. People would roll paladin and warlock JUST for the "free" mounts. Now, it's easy enough that anyone will have a mount and so no one even looks. For example, you can look up a guide and read everything that's required for a level 60 warlock to get his epic mount in Vanilla. It was a HUGE CHAIN that spanned countless zones, dungeons and NPCs. You have to collect so many items and pay a fair bit of gold, it could easily take days or weeks to complete, but the reward was that sweet sweet fast mount. Now that it's WOTLK, as a warlock, you literally just talk to the trainer and get the mount. They completely made the entire epic chain obsolete, and literally just give it to you now. Now don't get me wrong, there was a lot of QOL stuff I appreciate, and even the mount change I've grown to appreciate more as I have less time to play, and more alts to roll. But there's something to be said about the classic experience that was truly EQ-like that was utterly cut out or gutted from future expansions that I really miss. I strongly implore you to try a vanilla server one day, just to see the differences. I think it would give you a lot of stuff to make videos about! But first, enjoy WOTLK, although it's much more streamlined, I still think it just might be my favorite incarnation of WoW, and it was also my introduction to the game!
I have a 70 war and 61 hunter on Wow classic and play P99 a lot and also played back on EQ live. Biggest difference I felt was the end game vs the journey experience. WoW players say routinely that the game begins at max level. I saw that. People rush to max level as fast as possible and then stay there to gear grind. This means a casual player like me grinds to max level in a mostly empty, groupless Azeroth. It is the biggest problem I had with that game. EQ, people are enjoying the journey to 60, because EQ 60 experience is not so great. So as a casual player, I enjoy EQs journey to max level more than WoW
I've always felt the main feature of WoW vs Everquest is that WoW respects your time (possibility to quest alone - never required to group) while EQ fosters community so much better which in the end comes from the focus of forced grouping to clear content. Both are great in the end, and WoW owe a lot to Everquest for the success it gained, but so does Everquest from all other MMOs before it (even though non 3D ones). They all stood on the shoulders of giants that came before them.
Turtle WoW has been so much fun, it's a WoW vanilla plus cross faction server. Cross faction is a huge positive in my opinion. Still play EQ from time to time as well for nostalgia fix.
@@Anonymous-ru2wk You’re telling me… I spent the majority of the past few days just trying to find the Partisan NPCs in the NoS beta. I’ve never respected the people who do the quest/mission write-ups more than I do now. 😂
In the current retail version of wow, Horde and Alliance can team up to do all sorts of content. I play with friends from the opposite faction. I have characters in both.
I love the aesthetic of EQ. The sound track and musical score are amazing. The day night cycle, the stars, the ocean at sunrise. One of the most powerful and customizable UI's ever made. Forward slash commands and macros are fascinating and an excellent minigame in themselves. However, EQ has a deep undercurrent of nerd elitism. I think some of the animosity towards WoW comes from the small part of the EQ player base that need to stand on top of the player pyramid. That pyramid was made drastically smaller by players leaving for other games, Wow in particular.
You might have seen by now, but Josh Strife Hayes likes Everquest and did begin reviewing the live server. So far he's given it a fair a chance, and really likes the tutorial. He hasn't played in a minute, but I'm sure some of that audience will at least come find this content and learn mmo history.
This last expansion for EQ is underwhelming. Mostly soloable by several classes, I play a shaman and soloed almost all the quests and named mobs with my pet tanking. Not the group missions and raids of course, but all the rest of it. Prior expansions, I could usually solo a lot of the content, but always had to find others to help with parts of it.
My brother played EQ in late 99 just a few months after it released and I was really into Diablo 2 at the time. So, paying for a subscription was not going to happen. In mid 2000, we started working at a new job and 30+ people played EQ. So, I jumped in and gave it a try and loved it. We all were in the same guild, tons of grouping, raiding, we would plow through entire zones looking for names and helped each other with their Epics. The plant closed in 2004 and we mostly went our separate ways as life changed. Some jumped to WoW for the single player aspect and some of us still continued to play EQ. The friends and community is why i love EQ. I played Wow for a month and for me, it seemed like a bunch of kids were playing it. No maturity, filthy mouths and the disrespect of the WoW players turned me off. I hit max level in 3 weeks and felt it was far too easy and everything was just handed to you. I felt as though it wasn't earned. I don't play EQ as much as I did. I do get on from time to time to grind some exp. Mostly box some lower levels because I know how and where to farm lower level exp. I didn't like EQ2 much and I never found a game that could replace EQ. I just can't get into modern games that cater to the people that like instant gratification. I really hoped New World would have been that game, but we all know how that turned out!
Why Boxing is Good: ua-cam.com/video/yyDSChEdv7U/v-deo.html
Episode 1 of EverQuest Adventures: ua-cam.com/video/LZbNzmz48sM/v-deo.html
Forum Posts I Cite:
EverQuest Official Forums: forums.daybreakgames.com/eq/index.php?threads/why-did-some-eq-players-dislike-wow.285658/
Project 1999 Forums: www.project1999.com/forums/showthread.php?p=3510745#post3510745
World of Warcraft Forums: us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/to-the-people-who-left-everquest-for-wow/1027187/4
@Ion Blaze, hey man nice vid but you failed to mention revolutionary reasons besides being the first for EQ. You didn't mention how everyone was required to buy food and drink or would suffer during combat, or how real time day/night cycles were the first of its kind, or how players needed to sell their wares by actually listing the stats and all etc... Yeah I know WoW made everything better but those are just the tip of the iceberg so to speak
6:26 at that point you story collapsed. you never played WoW at that time ;)
Eq taught me patience as a young adolescence. I felt more satisfaction when I got that rare item on a rare enemy after 3 real life days while also competing against other's doing the same. I loved it
Looking back just crazy the time sink that was the game, though having spent yrs on Proj 99, got some server firsts etc, it wasn't just nostalgia. Still healthy playerbase. But toxic as all hell, that's what multiple guilds all capable of holding down most of the raid content leads to ultimately, but also made it so much more satisfying at the same time. Cheers.
Great video! Just to add a little extra tidbit of info here. When WOW initially released, they had no endgame (raid) dungeons except for Onyxia, and they were quickly scrambling to build out the content. They actually hired MANY current (at the time) EQ developers to help build and design Molten Core, the very first proper WOW raid. The EQ team had a lot more experience in high end (large group) dungeons, so they were definitely instrumental in getting Molten core up and running!
Huh, never knew that, but it makes sense. MC was a lot more like the traditional EQ with super tanky 1-mob pulls. Screwed if you over-pulled
Wasnt MC first?
Great vid! As far as the pulling/CC classes, I also thought the Haste/Slow aspect was unique. Bard/Sham/Enchanter made fights so much faster with their haste and safer with their mob slows. Monks could pull and do high dps with haste, almost like having two DPS. Enchanters could CC, Haste/Slow and charm a pet for major dps. Shammies could heal well, and with their mob slows, would be safer than a cleric. Now cleric and pally could Rez. Warriors were great at tanking raids, but pally and SK were better in groups due to their spells having more taunt. Rogues appreciated that. Their were so many group configurations and you took who you could get, but it always made the experience unique, even if doing crushbone for the 4th day that week. And if you found good players, you kept in touch bc it made the experience flow better.
For me, there were always 2 factors that kept me from being sucked into WoW like I was EverQuest: one subjective and the other objective.
On the subjective level I just never got into the world of WoW the way I did EQ. There’s something about Norrath as a world that calls to me. WoW definitely had the more intricate and visually impressive world space, but I remember being obsessed with the world of EQ. I bought all the guides, read all the lore tidbits we got here and there, and generally set a goal for myself to learn all the lore of the world I could. With WoW I just never found myself caring that much. I suspect it had something to do with the faster pace of the game. I never felt the need to slow down and really investigate the world I was in.
The second factor was definitely all the tweaks to WoW’s play style that made it less social. Classes being far more homogeneous, faster and easier soloing, and in general a “less talk more action” vibe really took away from one of my favorite aspects of mmos. To me, a single player experience with other players “around” will never replace the early, party-based gameplay of the first mmos.
Thank you for sharing all that Gardyloo. I definitely get you on the grouping gameplay that is so much more fun.
I agree about the world, Norrath was home, azeroth is just a game space. In fact, one of my biggest problems with EQ2 was it's total revamp of Norrath to be unrecognizable to the original game. A WoW Cataclysm revamp of the world map would have been much better than whatever they actually did.
Personally I think you should've started with Classic Era instead of Wrath since there's more class identity and difficulty in some ways but Wrath is a happy medium between the jank and grind of vanilla and how single-player and semi-easy retail has been. I went in the opposite order, having played PoTCO and a bunch of other MMOs since 2008, WoW since 2017, and especially Classic since 2019. I dabbled in EQ in early 2019 and got more into it in the past month. So far P99 and Oakwynd are fun for me. I really appreciate these incredible stories and videos.
I think the biggest differences were the focus on being built for PvP and thus the frantic twitchy input. I suspect a lot of such design choices were made for EQ to make it more resilient and playable on the weak internet connections of the day.
One thing I really liked about early EQ was how diverse some classes could be. It allowed the raw skill of a player shine in many circumstances. A person could play a necromancer and be an amazing puller depending on how well that player knew how to FD split. etc... With WoW, and most MMO's that came in after wow, they are much more paint by numbers, the classes were what the classes were and there was little deviation anyone could get away with.
A Norrathian day is 72 minutes, 3 minutes per hour.
I'm 40 years old now...and I started my mmo experience in EQ. I was one of those people that made fun of my friends that played "that stupid game". I made fun of them because I young and didn't know how great it was. So one night one of best friends in the air force told me the basics and left me at his computer. That was the beginning of the end because I fell in love with EQ. I started as a Necro. Then in 2004 my same friend moved to WoW and I resisted because I loved EQ, however I eventually tried it and fell in love all over again.
I have wanted to get into EQ but the interface is just too much for me to handle. I dislike WoW because of the toxic community and have tried LOTRO but nothing really feels right to me. Have even tried Ragnarok online, D&D, ESO, DaoC, Asheron's Call, and many others but something is always off.
I think a lot of the problem for me with EQ is that the chat box is ALWAYS going and it's easy to get lost. I'm bad with directions in real life but in a game it's damn near impossible.
@@Travybear1989 I tried most of those as well. It's hard to suggest a game because everyone is different....but mmo's aside, if you like games you can get lost in, maybe try some single player survival games. The pros - no chat box, no time constraints, and the ui is usually pretty staright forward. Cons - no chat box, can be lonely unless it does have a multiplayer function. Valhiem was an especially addictive game for me or fallout 4 or Grounded. Those are just some but regardless keep looking sometimes the game your looking for is right in front of your face, you just haven't seen it yet.
This comment is a bit late, but one thing I really appreciate about old EQ and the main reason I go back to p99 over modern MMO's is that the game isn't *just* aimed at end game content. The journey to max level is a worthwhile experience and doesn't just feel like you're going through the motions..
Bro this is severely underrated, what a great video
WoW had its upsides and downsides. The main downsides for me were how crap the community was because it was much larger, and less personal. Things felt more rushed, especially dungeons. They're closer to an ARPG run than a classic MMO. People didn't talk as much, you can't just pick a camp and grind mobs, questing endlessly is the thing, which makes WORLD of WARcraft and EverQUEST seem... backwards. Think about it lol.
EQOA was my first MMO, still my favorite, and for me MMORPG's were a short affair. Oh i still play them off and on, but the real love died around 2008 for me.
I love how you put it. Weird how the game names don't really describe how they actually play. They're the opposite. I never got a chance to try out EQOA. I wonder how it plays relative to EQ1 & EQ2
@@IonBlaze1 It plays a lot like EQ1 but less of a time sink for a lot of things such as downtime between pulls. It was still there but not as crazy.
No corpse runs but we had debt. Instead of AA we got MC (Master Class) with class mastery points up to 1500 post max level to keep the end game going.
Still crazy hard to level the first few years until exp buffs came in. My first lvl 50 took like a year lol. Epic quests at 49 and 60 for your class. Armor quests every few levels.
Hopefully our private server will be up within a year or two. We have one now but it's bare bones. EQ1 fans would get the most out of EQOA, EQ2 fans might not care unless they were original oldschool fans before the WoWification process.
I've covered EQOA since 2011 under this name, check out the playlist if you're curious. Such a shame it was shut down.
I was a beta tester for wow and it had some good parts but what really killed it for me was the lack of challenge for anything not group content. I tried playing it a few times, I was talked into raiding in WtLK and actually had a good time, our guild was one of the first dozen or so to down the LK and it felt damn good. When Cata came out the game just died for me for a while, I eventually came back near the end of the expansion to do the deathwing raids and again they were alright. Panda land came out and meh, couldn't get into it, I stayed gone till near the end of BFA and again the raiding was fun but outside of that the game was just meh. I tried shadowlands and again the day to day slog of mindlessly killing boring trash and doing meaningless quests just made me hate life and I quit before even hitting level cap.
The game was rather meaningless outside of the endgame is what you're saying? I heard asmon say something to the effect that Blizzard doesn't cater to casual grouping that much.
You missed some of the best content in MoP. Rip man
@@IonBlaze1 The game currently is a giant slog even at endgame, the only thing thats worthwhile is progressing through the mythic+ dungeon system and raiding. The content that would be for casuals just isn't there.
Good video! Very interesting to see an Everquest player go over the differences between the games and share his first impressions.
I want to add to the two objections you made however: how WoW is more into the singleplayer experience, and how WoW lacked specialization and roles in their class design.
Firstly, it is true that WoW can be played solo and generally degraded the need for group play. However there were a lot of elements in WoW that tried to encourage group play. In almost every zone there are elite quests and monsters that you cannot complete by yourself under normal circumstances. These quests and monsters give the best rewards and you always see people try to group up in order to complete them. Secondly, you said yourself in this video how you had problems at lvl 14 in Westfall. You looked for help and people advised going to other areas. But what more commonly happened was that people also grouped to solve this. Solo leveling while possible, was dangerous (especially on PvP servers!) and slow, so grouping always had major benefits.
Then on to your second point. Keep in mind, you are playing the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, which was released 4 years after vanilla WoW, and implemented a lot of changes in class design that made every class super strong. In the original form in 2004, WoW classes were a lot more unique and niche, exactly with the kind of pulling and crowd control abilities you favored in Everquest. Only warlocks could summon party members to far away places or make soulstones to save from a wipe. Hunters could kite mobs and tank with their pets in emergencies, rogues could sap (but only humanoids), priests could shackle (but only undead), druids could hibernate (but only beasts). There were three hybrid classes who's versatility was their strong suit. Not to mention all the specific buffs classes would have that made them all bring something unique to the party.
So as you see, and other comments also have pointed out: there was a lot of the spirit of Everquest that made it over to WoW. And this is because many of the devs were Everquest players. like the lead developer Rob Pardo. I feel that is actually pretty well known, which is the reason why I stumbled on this video, when I was looking for comparisons between the two, in the first place.
I played EQ when it first came out for a couple of years. I played it a lot those two years. To me when I played WoW for the first time it was like the developers had played a lot of EQ and made a game that improved upon many aspects of it to make it more fun, similar to what you say in this video. Thank you for trying out the game instead of just hating it. There are things that I still think EQ had them beat on, though, like class/race diversity, cities and the grouping aspects to name a few. As always, appreciate your video.
Thank you for the kind words Ck :)
that's understandable, wow was literally designed by ex-Eq players.
@@cardigansrule Evil Empire! archives still funny.
When I played WoW, I really missed AA's and numerous buffs from other players. They really dropped the ball on buffs IMO, but AAs would probably screw up dungeons and raids hehe, I still miss em tho, getting high level buffs rocked back in the day.
Pulling / CC was huge in World of Warcraft especially when they introduced Heroic Dungeons in The Burning Crusade, Mages had sheep, other classes like hunters had stings that would put enemies to sleep, druids could put certain things to sleep, and root was huge because some of the heroic dungeon pulls in Hellfire Citadel for sure had sets of mobs that would come in 5's that would just destroy any regular geared group so we actually used markers in game on pulls to determine who was sheeping who was frost trapping etc. The CC could be pre'marked before the pull with the markers they have in game so each class knew what they were doing and which order to kill things in. As far as having someone pull, I used to have to pull on raids as a hunter just in case the pull went bad I could feign death if it went bad. The game difficulty did go way down hill after Wrath of the Lich King but if you played on the classic server during when they made Burning Crusade and even in WoTLK in any heroic dungeons you would see how important the cc/pull role actually is in the game.
One of the big difference I never see addressed is the gear. EQ gear is just more interesting with procs affects and clickable abilities. I had a whole toolbox of things sitting in my bags I could pull out when needed. No slower in group, out comes my sword with a slow affect then swap to better dps weapons. Gear from previous raids could still be relevant an xpac or more, think there was a flowing thought mana regen earring in luclin that was still bis for a long time in PoP.
Also related to gear, it wasn't all soulbound, so I could pass down older gear to lower level players among other ways higher level players could interact with and build ties with newer player, offering buffs, out of party healing. So many things about EQ beyond the slow paced grind a spot grouping facilitated social interactions between players.
You have been pumping content these days! Good job love these quick vids.
I no longer play EQ but still logging to get my monthly db cash, since im subbed for life.
Oh I wish I could have gotten one of those life subscriptions. Thank you for the compliments
@@IonBlaze1 im sad I didnt buy for my 6box crew. I got it on 2 of my accounts
Being a WoW player for more than a decade who tried out EQ only some years ago I've become somewhat disenchanted with the former. So many WoW's ideas and mechanics that felt fresh and immersive at its release turned out to be remnants of something more complicated and deep (reputation/faction standing system as an example). I've also grown to appreciate the group play oriented approach of EQ more than the counter-social ("anti-social" sounds too harsh in my opinion) adopted by WoW and the genre as a whole after its wake. The free-roam world design also appealed to me much more than the WoW-clones' questing railroad one.
Don't get me wrong, I find Classic and TBC WoW a very fun, engaging and addictive game still. But now I can't help but see it as a copy of something much more ambitious and compelling that was made to look pretty outside but is made rather meager and shallow inside.
EQ is not an ideal game of course. Even a "worse" one than WoW in many aspects. Especially given its age, accrued feature and content creep. But its highs more than cover its lows for me. I never expected the game to captivate me as it did but here I am. As of now, I had been exploring EQ's history on a TLP server grouping, progressing and raiding with a certain guild for more than 2 years already. And I'm glad I decided to give this game a go, one of the best gaming-related decisions I've made in my life.
WoW was too easy EQ has more lore it's harder like raids that require 54 or more players to win, WoW is for people who cannot handle EQs difficulty.
Good explaination. During the earlier years chat was more exciting, with WoW it wasn't... it's easy to forget it wasn't that it just wore off, like all cool things do, but the game mechanics helped to kill that social interaction without a doubt.
Ironically, I've been trying to go back and give EQ2 another chance but one of the issues I'm having is that I feel like -it looks significantly worse- its presentation is worse than WoW's and I know they released around the same time so I guess I wasn't expecting a noticeable gap there. I definitely remember thinking EQ2 looked good in 2004
To me, the movement and animations in EQ2 just feel very... stiff? Combined with the audio, It never feels like any of my abilities or attacks have any weight to them. Maybe that eventually changes.
Yeah EQ in general has a bad onboarding system. WoW was a lot more streamlined & I feel the animations were better & smoother
The Developers of EverQuest 2 was in a hurry to beat World of Warcraft and some of them wish they took their time and done better. EQN was suppose to be an lets do it better and they failed. issue is they were to much in a hurry and should of waited a year after WoW came out and then Release because a month after EQ2 Release World of Warcraft got popular and hurt EQ1 & 2.
Tanks Ion, Christmas has come early with all the uploads!
Thank you Zool :)
Grouping, you're so correct, I found myself becoming (annoyed) when I'd communicate with people in WOW. I didn't need them, they only felt like slowing me down. When I'd group with people, no effort was made to get to know the person.
In EQ we felt the trama together, we hurt together, we died, together, this is why people helped people in EQ.... You knew karma was a real thing in EQ!!
Good stuff as always, Ion. You could look into Brad McQuaids Vanguard: Saga of Heroes and "soon" to be Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen as well, as he very much made EQ into what it was, and Pantheons classes and abilities are almost a copy/paste of EQs (back to more than just tank, healer and dps).
Not too optimistic about Pantheon but I definitely heard good things about Vanguard before it shut down. Someone said Vanguard's bard was the best bard class ever made.
@@IonBlaze1 Aye, Vanguard definitely had a lot of very interesting and different approaches never seen before or after anywhere else. It's actually got an emu-server as well, which is sadly lacking mob abilities (except autoattack for the most part), but otherwise it's quite nice, as one can experience most of the rest of the game as it was.
It did have more than the "trinity" as well, as mess was still a huge factor, the Enchanter (called the Psionicist) was almost too powerful, though, and other classes (mostly melee dps) could mess/stun one mob for longer periods as well to some extend.
People gotta stop dick riding Brad because everything he's done in the past 20 years has been bad. Pantheon is just cashing in on your nostalgia for EQ but ultimately is an unmitigated disaster. Don't get scammed by that trash.
@@Saiku If you had actually played his games from launch and experienced them while they were alive and fresh, I bet your perspective would be very different. Either way, our opinions differ. Vanguard was a fantastic game, so was EverQuest, and I bet Pantheon will be as well. If that style of game is not for you, so be it.
EQ was awesome because it required sacrifice and had large consequences. A sacrifice from you personally in the form of time, patience, social discipline + the risk of huge consequences was literally EQ's game design. You cant have a sense of value without sacrifice. The larger the sacrifice, the more sense of value you gain. The slow grind that is baked into EQ, with gear progression, exp, aa, tradeskills and personal + guild reputation is what made it so awesome. It's why I will always have a desire to go back to the original. To re live the feelings of accomplishment I had while hanging out with friends + relying on each other whilst simultaneously having tons of fun with the gameplay.
You should check out the vanilla wow private server everlook which launches on the 11th. I recently started playing p99 for the first time from being a mainly vanilla wow player and love both games a lot. Vanilla wow is a lot closer to eq than wrath, when wrath launched it took me about a week to hit level cap and get near best in slot gear, vanilla I was playing for months before I got any good gear and entering the molten core for the first time was an experience I will never forget. Really hope they come out with a new p99 server in the future, would love to be there on launch
The thing about vanilla WOW quests is that they weren't mandatory, they gave decent rewards and more importantly, gave players direction. When I was playing vanilla in 2005 the fastest I leveled was actually leveling tradeskills, specifically cooking and alchemy, which required me to kill mobs for meat and clear my way to herb nodes, all on one of the slowest leveling classes in the game, the warrior where I got to 50 in 3 days of casual play.
Great video! I usually don't comment on UA-cam video, but am feeling compelled as this is an area that hold some special meaning to me. I played EQ from Sept, 2000 until I got married in June 2004, pretty much non-stop. Then off and on in different ways (prog servers, E99, etc) up until a couple years ago. I played in parts of the closed beta for WoW in around April 2004. I didn't actually play retail until Burning Crusade came out, again, because I had just gotten married and games were largely put on the backburner at that time. This is just to set up some context for my next comments.
As far as people hating on WoW. You have to remember something. For nearly all of EQ's early life, every MMO that came out was termed "EQ Killer" by people who didn't like EQ, or who were fans of the upcoming game. And every time, it failed to make an impact on EQ's playerbase for more than a couple weeks. It was a meme (though, we wouldn't call them that back then) about EQ killers. So there was already some animosity towards the game. But, the reality is, it was only a small vocal minority that truly hated WoW, and I think you hit on it, they were mostly baseless things. The reality is, most people were either pretty neutral or excited about WoW back then. There might be some jokes made about the cartoony look (though, the thought of an EQ player making fun of any games graphics is hilarious to me looking back) or how "easy" it was perceived to be. I think most people understood that something new, and potentially better would come along at some point. The fact that so many people left EQ for good shortly after WoW came out speaks volumes about what EQ players really thought about WoW.
You did hit the nail on the head about the social aspect of the game though. The interesting part though, old school WoW was far more social than most MMO's (even WoW today) now are. The LFG tool's didn't exist like they do now. You weren't magically ported to dungeons like you are now, you had to run to the entrances. Raids required a lot more coordination than most EQ raids even. The home cities, especially Stormwind and Orgrimmar were filled with players and interaction. But nothing like EQ. Everything you mentioned about why WoW is potentially a better game is 100% true. Though, like you, I like EQ more than WoW, I just don't have the time to devote to a game like EQ. I actually don't play WoW anymore either because the game just isn't as good as it used to be, and, well, let's just say the contraversies with Blizzard. My game of choice now is Guild Wars 2 (Free to play and on Steam if you want to give it a go....it is not as social as either EQ or WoW though) and I'm pretty happy with how that game operates.
The last thing I wanted to hit on was the "holy trinity" thing. The idea of the holy trinity (the name came much later) has been around as long as RPGs have been around. You see primordial versions of it in old D&D books. The thing is, WoW popularised the whole "Tank, DPS, Healer" as class roles, but EQ had them too. The reality is, we should be replacing "healer" with "support." You mentioned "Puller, Crowd Control & Support" in your video. But really, pulling is just a type of Crowd Control. And, what is the purpose of crowd control? It's to prevent damage to the party. This is probably controversial, but, in essence, crowd control is just a sort of pre-emptive healing. Support roles, in general, tend to directly make either Tanking, DPS, or Healing more effective. EQ's roles were a little bit more obscure, and not baked into the system, like WoW, but they most certainly existed.
Interesting thing to note, the first time I heard the term "holy trinity" was actually in EQ ibn probably 2001 or 2002. It didn't refer to the class roles above. Instead, it referred to certain classes, specifically Warrior, Cleric, Enchanter. The idea was, if you had these three classes, your other group slots didn't matter. Those three could handle any single group content in the game (though without some damage dealing, they would be long fights). In early EQ, no one could touch a Warrior for tanking. Sure, Paladin and SK could hold aggro better, but they couldn't take damage nearly as well. No one could touch a cleric for healing and HP buffs. Yep, Shaman and Druid had both healing and HP buffs, but without complete heal, they were extremely inefficient healers, and their HP buffs weren't as good as a cleric's (well, druids was as good as one of clerics, but no symbol for druids). And enchanters literally filled all the rest of the holes. They had the best haste buffs. They had slows that were, for all intents and purposes, just as good as a shaman. They had the clarity line. And they could CC. That was EQ's holy trinity, and even that one shows some version of the current holy trinity, just missing DPS. All this to say that I largely disagree that EQ doesn't have "The Holy Trinity." But it does still have class roles that can pretty easily fall into those categories.
I've played both for long periods of time and I think your video is a good 90% on target. I think with WoW the 60+ game requires more teamwork and grouping though. I never thought of WoW as a pvp game with pre added in until I watched your video. I think you may be on to something. As I tend to be a more casual player (12 hours/week tops) WoW is more friendlier to me. I remember a friend once saying around 2002 when we were playing EQ hardcore, "As much time as it took me to reach smithing grand master, I could have learned it in real life!" ... LOL that comment puts the game comparison into perspective. But I still miss EQ and sometimes consider going back and playing it. --Belegir, Wood Elf Ranger, Solusek Ro/Druzzil Ro/Stromm.
I hated WoW when it came out and for years afterwards because, all other new MMOs after that point copied WoW's format. I was bitter about WoW not because I didn't like it but because it was so successful that all the MMOs that were in development that I was excited for were either cancelled or changed to copy WoW such Middle-Earth Online changing to Lord of the Rings Online.
And WoW's popularity killed Star Wars Galaxies by making those devs release the "new game enhancements" that turned SWG from an individual skill based game to a cookie cutter class based game just like WoW. I also didn't like the fact that they made it much easier to play as a Jedi. I liked the idea that finding player Jedi was rare because that was lore friendly for that time period in the Star Wars universe.
I'm just happy that now there are finally 2 MMOs in mid-stage development that aren't WoW clones: Ashes of Creation and Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, both of which have promising funding sources.
Thank you for the really good comment. That's an interesting perspective on how WoW affected every later MMO & not necessarily in a good way.
It's a race to the bottom with loot boxes these days
What I disliked about the newer RPGs is they try to make you feel like a badass right from the getgo, Questbosses at lv 2 are already armored hellknights or something you take down by simply autoattacking. But then you struggle soloing a lv 5 wolf, it doesn't feel coherent at all. In EQ you started hunting vermin and when you were able to take on orcs, dervs, guards you felt how much stronger you had become, your own powerlevel in relation to the world made sense and felt coherent, and when you were able to kill a badass SK NPC after months of getting stronger it felt earned.
Oh yeah I definitely get that. Classic EQ makes you earn that power.
Saw a random guy wearing a EverQuest shirt today and it reminded me of this drama. I never actually played either game (was a console bro shooter/sports gamer back then) but these 2 guys I worked with were always talking about their EQ stuff. I asked one day how long they’d been playing World of Warcraft and they completely flipped out! “We play EverQuest!!!! It’s a far superior game!” It became my running gag to get them fired up every few weeks acting like I had completely forgot there were 2 games. Wonder if they ever joined the dark side….
I was on the Seventh Hammer server the day WoW launched. EQ players were trying to crash the East Commons first before leaving. There must of been over a thousand players in that zone before they left. The players that would raid zones as level 1 gnomes did the same thing when they went to WoW how I remember it.
Oh holy smokes that was a crazy day.
Death penalty was the biggest difference for me between Wow and EQ. Death in EQ was harsh with corpse runs, EXP loss, and even possibility of losing everything on your character if you couldn't get back to your corpse. WoW made death no big deal with respawn points. I seen a lot of people switch to WoW for this very reason. In fact most all games, full loot PvP excluded, have expanded this idea and make death inconsequential part of the game. Could have saved a lot of quarters if the games in the arcade had endless respawns.
Awesome idea for a vid. I fell in Love with Flatts and Reptox at the start of the pandemic...at the perfect time of a new TLP. I made an iksar monk and followed along with his videos loosely. I watch your stuff just as intently man, keep it coming!
1999,2000- raided for 11 years. and returned several times.
I’ve also played other mmo’s WoW, warhammer, guild wars, lord of the rings.
Nothing beat Grouping with people from all over the world on Eq for the time it was groundbreaking.
But having to keep updating my computer to keep up with the demand of expansions was hard on the wallet.
I played WoW classic to get that experience and it did have that community feel to it.
I agree WoW has a better aesthetic and for that reason probably won the popularity. EQ still has a place in my heart.
You can tell the people that really played WoW and those that didn't in this comment section. EQ was amazing, but brutal. WoW leant for an even better community in some ways because it was bustling. Vanilla WoW held your hand just enough and was based on an already popular franchise. Instanced dungeons and raids, more accessible mounts. Solo and group content. WoW is the best MMO of all time by a longshot. Everquest is niche and is my personal favorite.
Thank you for sharing all that Oz :)
Calling it a kiddie game isn't exactly unwarranted as during Wrath era I had actual toddlers in my group at times.
I was big into EQ from 2000 to Planes of Power. I was also big into WoW from Vanilla to the end of Lich King. I love both games, and I agree with what you say about grouping.
However, just want to mention WoW changed alot even from vanilla to the second expansion, Lich King.
While it is true Lich King is high regarded as possibly the best expansion the game ever had, it was fewer and fewer people going through the original leveling zones 1-60, which meant alot of the quests originally meant for groups were nerfed to be much easier to do solo.
Originally, Blizzard designed a few group quests in every zones, with mobs known as "Elites"(marked with dragon icons) being usually too hard for a single player to kill. This is where people grouped, 2-5 people, and where people often bonded and made guilds. I re-experienced this just a few years ago when I played the original Classic(which is kinda weird to say).
Each quest line also often ended with a dungeon run, which also required a group, though as each expansion came out, leveling through previous content was made easier each time.
Also I do remember running WoW dungeons without the standard tank/healer/3dps setups, without a tank we had to get creative with a hunter/warlock pet tanking with me as a healer paladin offtanking. Going through Maraudon(one of the biggest dungeons the game ever had) in a group setup like that, was always some of my best WoW memories.
The game went and streamlined the content even more, current dungeons(last played Battle for Azeroth, previous expansion) is just an AoE-rush to the end with usually none or very simple mechanics nobody cares about, which is something I personally dislike.
Given the state the game is in right now with Lich King being the current classic content, and the context of you having never played the game before, I think your arguments are fair, I just wanted to mention the game is and always was changing, and even classic Lich King is not as the game was when it competed against EQ1 and 2 back in 2004/5. Lich King came 4 years later.
Thank you for sharing that. Yeah I heard classic was much harder but didn't have the frame of reference you gave.
Hi Ion. First of: great video. As a player of both EQ classic (i play on Green) and WoW classic (i've been raiding since classic launch up to now), i have something i'd like to point out (in case noone else did)
At the moment, as you said, you are playing on the Wrath of the Lich King expansion in classic..which is not really comparable to Vanilla WoW (unfortunately right now most Classic servers have progressed to Wrath).
This expansion really deemphasized a good chunk of the social aspect of the game, hence why many people who played at the launch of Classic WoW in 2019, have now gone back to vanilla private servers. Not to mention that, with the expansion out now, the "Old world" is borderline empty of players, as most simply stick to the Northrend continent.
Not only that, but Wrath of the Lich king made so many tweaks that..the game simply can't be compared at the moment. Most "elites" in the open world are now just normal mobs, making it less dangerous. Enemies in general in the open world (and many dungeons) are MASSIVELY nerfed, making group questing less desirable. Drop rates of items are massively increased, and scarcity of loot is not a thing anymore.
Basically at the moment you are playing in a version of WoW that could be compared to the Luclin/Planes of power expansion in terms of how it regressed in mandatory social interactions.
Unfortunately the days of Classic launch in 2019 are kinda gone, when the world was populated 24/7, and people formed groups non stop to quest, dungeon grind and do raids.
The sad thing is..there is no real way for you right now (other than a private server) to relive what Classic really was like. Blizzard has some servers that are denoninated as "Classic Era" servers, which are stuck in vanilla..but nobody plays on them unfortunately, and those who do are already max level and simply do Naxxramas runs (which is the latest raid in Vanilla's timeline) or play in nieche comunities for the HC/Ironman challenge.
Don't get me wrong...as a player of both i'd never claim that WoW vanilla emphasized mandatory grouping as much as Everquest did. But Wrath of the lich king brought the social dependency to a new low, thus i dont think you can really compare the two : |
Let me keep it 100: I loved EQ, and refused to play WoW for years and often talked trash on it. Even after making friends in college who politely invited me to play WoW, I still declined in favor of EQ -- even though I had been barely playing EQ at that point.
Why?
Elitism. My MMORPG was first. WoW was just an imitation. There couldn't be another game like mine, so I had to fight it.
It's stupid.
I play WoW now on Classic and Retail. Even looking at Classic, WoW is the game EQ wishes it was. It's a better game. Smoother. Better interface. More enjoyable to explore world. Easier time getting good equipment drops. More entertaining raids.
I regret that I didn't play WoW in 2004.
But I still love EQ thought. I play on P99 and TAKP sometimes. I tried my first EQ TLP since 2008 last year. Grouping was fun. New Freeport sucks. Seeing Krono spamming everywhere and bot armies of mages was emotionally crushing.
WoW was great and got better. EQ was great and then got worse.
I was wrong about WoW.
I think one of the main problems was that EQ2 released too soon. I remember playing EQ, then trying EQ, going back to EQ, but eventually moved to WoW. I saw a dev interview where they say 'that's just how it is those days, you create a sequel. We never thought people would play for years '
My approach was entirely different with WoW though. I had already done the raiding scene in EQ and didn't really want to do that again in another game. I treated WoW very casual in comparison to my EQ days. I ended doing some raids in WoW but never as hsrdcore as in EQ.
First off, I watch most of your videos for almost a year. I’m not attached to eq in anyway honestly. I played it a bit when I was young and decided it wasn’t for me and really couldn’t find my footing. And while many would say WOW was their first, it was final fantasy 11 for me. I’d love to see your take on that one since it was developed before WoW’s influence and took more inspiration I feel from eq in terms of grouping and grinding. Tons of memories there but just like you mention in this video; it’s hard to go back after playing with some newer mmos with quality of life changes.
Thank you for your support. I've heard great things about FF11. It's still going today? I thought FF14 was the only one active.
@@IonBlaze1 the game is still up and going, however the quality of life changes turned die hards away and their are some private servers with their own take on how or when the game was "great". still a subscription fee attached to it tho even after all these years
I played EQ1 2000-2005, EQ2 2004-2005 and WoW 2005-2010. I loved them all. The way you talked about class balance for PvP, you are absolutely right for WotLK and beyond. Classic vanilla WoW was much more unbalanced and maybe that's why I liked it so much. Great video. Thanks.
You are playing the classic wrath of the lich king version which is on the status of the 2nd expansion by which leveling had been made far easier and faster.
In vanilla there is a lot more incentive to group up as every zone bar the first two starter zones leads up to an outdoor dungeon filled with elite mobs and quests that requires you to group up. As they made linear progression in their addons they had to squish ep requirements and make the old content solo-able (outside instanced dungeons) as there weren't/ aren't enough players around leveling up and the core emphasis of the gameplay ever since the first addon was put on the endgame
Didn't EQ devs make Molten core for WoW ?
So, my friends got me into EQ1 about a year and a half before WoW launched. I joined to play with them, but they kinda flaked out on me. I tried soloing in EQ1 and it just didn't feel right, once I started to meet people and group the game really changed for me. We'd go to different zones and socialize while waiting for specific quest mobs to respawn and spam languages at each other until we learned them :P Unfortunately for me, by the time I started getting into raiding. Wow was right behind. I don't know if we would have lost the same amount of people in the EQ community if EQ2 would have launched at the same time or earlier, but people were eager to try out the new. I stayed with EQ1 and then went to EQ2 when it launched. The promises of a upgraded crafting system that would ultimately make better gear than what you could quest for or get in dungeons was my draw as in EQ1 I loved the idea of unique items you had to work hard to achieve. The crafting system initially was quite complex so that if you decided to dedicate yourself to crafting and became a master of it, you would reap the benefits. However, they would then dumb down the crafting system because others didn't want to put in the work and they bowed to player pressure. Now crafting in EQ2 is much less complicated, but no were near as click and go as WoW. There was also another issue early on that I felt hurt us badly, I was in one of the first guilds to reach level 10 on our server, but we found up rather quickly that when someone left your guild whatever status they issued to get our guild levels disappeared when they did. One big fight and our guild went from Level 10 to 1 overnight. Some left because of the issue, others abandoned ship because the ship was sinking and if we were losing levels they wanted to go to another guild that wasn't exacerbating the situation. Anywho, when my friends asked me to join them in WoW, I ran into the same problem with them, they'd invite me, then they wouldn't show up to play. I out level them, and then they want me to spend all my time power leveling them just like what happened in EQ1. But, as this video pointed out, soloing is much easier in WoW and they added a lot of other things you could do. Pet battling was a great thing, but I couldn't get into the raiding in WoW or EQ2. Not like I did in EQ1. Those comraderies from the player base in EQ1 was as stated something that was built up. Also, just reminiscing, aside from everyone knowing your name if you earned a reputation as someone who would help or being a top tier raider, the GM's in that game were SOOOOOO much more active then in any game I've ever played. From passing out cookies and milk to new players to running random events. It's something they do in EQ2 as well, but not to the same degree. Anyway, I loved my time in EQ1, but I tried to go back to it at one point and the graphics literally were hurting my eyes and giving me vertigo after so long with updated graphics :P I tried again and just really didn't know where to start. The old school intro quest had me locked in a certain area and I couldn't remember all the commands. I found my old characters even after being away from the game and the servers being merged again and again, but I was not enticed to really get involved because of my unfamiliarity with the old system. I have the info to get back in, but other games have my attention at the moment :) Still, whenever anyone mentions EQ, it brings back fond memories of being in the Unrest spamming languages between respawns. :)
This is a really nice deep dive into both games. Very good.
Interesting =) I like that you went to classic for the comparison to try to get into the psychology of the why. I would say to you, if you do have time, check out Dragonflight and how compares to other MMOs -- They brought back older systems on loot distribution and introducing an all new crafting system that brings in aspects of some of my experiences in older MMOs where crafting quality levels on gear and materials was a thing.... Also there are advancements that I think people are gonna love such as skill trees for each profession that enhance or specialize your crafting / give you crafting abilities. Im glad that this expac we are getting upgrades to some of the old systems like talent tree revamp, the new editable UI and professions revamp -- but I also might be biased :D.
Oh thank you for sharing all that. I've been hearing good things about Mythic Plus. It's some grouping system where you can get raid quality gear?
@@IonBlaze1 it Is basically a system that makes it so you can make a dungeon for a 5 man group be scaled up in difficulty with random modifiers that can be applied to any of the dungeons to add more of a challenge for the group and also get better gear. It is a nice system that allows for an endgame progression for those who don't like raids and prefer a smaller tight nit group experience
Now I know why that post was created on the EQ forums. Thanks for the video, I enjoyed it.🙂
I miss these days. Thank you for making this video :)
I played EQ for ten years from the day it came out. Made friends around the world, many of whom I am still in contact with via social media. What made me quit? Two factors - guildmates leaving to play WoW and just the general grind of being a guild master. I have recently started playing again but do almost everything solo. I just don't have the hours need to group effectively.
I think what a lot of us touched on is the fact that EQ *was* hard. It was unrelenting in what it demanded of the players, and very unforgiving of mistakes made by them.
Heck, it was kinda like a codependency relationship, where you wore your bruises like a badge of honor, to prove you "had what it took" to stick around for love. 😆
At the same time, it helped to filter out the worst and most toxic players. Reputation was everything, and consequences were for everyone, good and bad. People who were in it for the short haul, who didn't mind cutting corners (or throats) to get ahead, quickly found themselves locked out of higher content by way of no one wanting to group with them, or getting banned outright and losing all the time and effort they'd invested to that point. For others who'd only started out down that road, the way negative consequences built up acted to curb their more sociopathic tendencies and teach them how to interact with other humans in a way that benefited all concerned. A moral lesson was unobtrusively woven into every experience.
That's really why people fell in love with EQ. Because good people can't remain and be a part of something that even passively condones evil, or bad behavior. You see it in government work all the time: bureaucracies exist for the purpose of shielding its constituent cogs (people) from personal responsibility for the actions they undertake on behalf of the system, and consequently, only people actively looking for that freedom from responsibility join or stay with them. Remember the DMV. 🤷♂️
I think people naturally want to take the quick path of fast advancement and easy loot, but in most of us it leaves a sense of unfulfillment. So while later games, especially mobile games, cater to that by offering micro transactions that can offer much faster advancement for ever-increasing sums of money, we know it's not earned or deserved; that's why none of them have the legs or loyalty EQ does. Hell, even those of us that stopped playing decades ago still sometimes have dreams of being in Lower Guk, or the 3 days in a row we spent camping Drelzna before they made the Jboots a quest-only item. That's a staying power you'll not find in any game since, because now games feel the best way to compete is to race each other to monetization, rather than making the best possible game.
Though, I must admit, one of the few videos I have saved on my UA-cam is the Onyxia wipe by that one Guild in WoW that was animated by one of the participants. Whenever I need to put a smile on my face, that's my go-to. 😆
WoW was my first and favorite MMO because I fell In love with the world. To this day I absolutely love the Dwarf and Night Elf starting zones.
The Loch Ness Monsters were sweet & Dun Morough
Loved both. Two biggest games from my childhood and teen years. The thing that seperated them, was that WoW could be played solo. (You didn't have to, but you had the option), where as Everquest you basically had to group. Both games were tremendous fun with groups, but EQ just really wasn't fun alone for most people.
God I remember how overtune Gates of Discord was. To the point top guilds literally report a boss broken, and the team kept saying was working as intended until like 6 months later they admitted the fight was indeed broken. EQ hurt itself big time there. Ascent a top raiding guild quit EQ for WoW because of it.
I joined WoW when it first launched from EQ2, the graphics were really what had me like "This just feels weird". I played EQ2 till roughly 08 when I had some out of game drama that left me in a very depressed state where I decided to try WoW as Burning Crusade was out. I still Miss EQ2 (never played 1) but it's just not the same solo, also I really don't want to redo my UI again lol I've tried coming back many times.
edit: The more I think about it when it comes to EQ2 Vs WoW for me, WoW is very much a game that I can play almost entirely by myself if I want minus dungeons/raids. I'm often solo (not always by choice...) so being able to solo is VERY important to me these days, I can pickup my Affliction Warlock or my Beast Master hunter and even some elites can be soloed if I don't derp out.
That said I miss the camaraderie EQ2 gave me, playing my wizard and dropping massive nukes or playing aggro thief with my Brigand (lol sorry tanks) is something I don't know if I'll ever get to rekindle. In WoW unless you run with a guild, most dungeons are with random people who don't care anything about you beyond "get me loot and get gone". If you talk in a dungeon it's usually met with insults or a vote kick, there's not just no need for lasting bonds there's no desire again outside of raids. Would I go back to EQ2? Maybe, though I will be trying dragon flight, I'll never lose that nostalgia but neither do I know if I can say "I'm going back for good". For all it's things I miss, I'm a different person today than when I started EQ2 almost 20 years ago.
My parent's also played EQ1, but instead of following them to that game, I played WoW when it released (as a young starry eyed and bushy tailed elementary schooler). I dedicated myself to MMOs all the way until highschool, where I finally got burned out of FFXIV which I felt was kind of the quintessential evolution of all of WoW's problems, it was a deeply anti-social game from the perspective of leveling, which was heavily gated by a long and drawn out main story quest which you could NOT do with your friends. If following the main quest requires you to go into cutscenes or fights that force you to leave your party, you are not playing an MMO. Its more like you are playing a game like Genshin Impact or Elden Ring, where you are playing a Solo RPG where you can occasionally group up to do boss fights.
It made me feel super nostalgic for Classic WoW, and I played a bunch of it on release, but even then it still felt like it was naturally destined to go down the path it always had, which is convenience over social ability. I wished there was a modern style EQ game to try, because I really craved that more social interaction, but simply put, I don't have the nostalgia for EQ to pull me through how much of a dinosaur it is.
I heard there was a game called Evercraft (And it is actually having its free pre-alpha this weekend) that is trying to recreate and modernize Everquest a bit, but with a minecraft voxel artstyle, and it actually looks really good. I would love to hear your thoughts on Evercraft if you end up giving that game a try and seeing a video on it. I greatly enjoyed this video as well :)
Really loving the latest two videos
Thank you Matt :)
Oh, this was a good video. Home come it's unlisted? I found this through your EverQuest Stories playlist.
Lol I didn't know you could see it through that. I just had it uploaded early.
I played eq up until 2003, but when wow came out, myself and the majority of my old eq guild started playing it. I don't remember eq players hating it to be honest, a lot of them played wow for a little while, got bored and went back to eq.
Crowd control in WoW varied a lot over time - some expansions & dungeons made it essential -others made it irrelevant. On my mage I considered CC (sheep) my most important priority for numerous dungeons and I really enjoyed that, but different dungeons required different classes to have any CC - Dire Maul needed druid CC, Karazhan needed Priest (Shackle) - so no one class could always CC, so the role got more ignored and eventually became irrelevant as the designers couldnt assume a specific CC (due to the spread of CC between different classes) was available so they stopped designing for it - which I considered a big mistake.
As an EQ guildleader, I resented WoW for the first few years it was out because we were constantly gearing up players, who once they were geared up, would start playing WoW, so we had to recruit more players, who then needed to be geared up, so then your older raiders got bored of the same raids over and over, so they leave to go play WoW. The constant treadmill of gearing up folks to have them leave is what spurned it. I retired at some point and joined some of my old guild mates in WoW Lich King expansion.
i miss EQ a lot. It IS the most influential game of my entire life. I wish i had the time to play again, but I am having almost as much fun watching you do it for me. the nostalgia factor you cultivate is incredibly satisfying.
definitely have spent way more time in azeroth than norrath, but i only ever played wow cause of EQ.
@IonBlazeGaming
Do you know where I can buy a digital copy of Everquest Titanium so I can play on Project 1999? I can't find any online that aren't the physical disks. Thank you!
Ion, absolutely love your videos and content. One critique ... your videos end so abruptly. Maybe a 3 to 5 second outro. It would just make the video feel more polished and professional. Either way, thanks for the video.
Haha thank you for the advice D. The fact you got to the end means a lot :)
By the time WoW came out, SoE had shot themselves in the foot with EQ. One thing I remember the most is the new expansions taking away the "career" path of druids etc. Portals everywhere put a lot of people in places they had no business being in without knowing how to play their class. By trying to dumb EQ down, they drove off the players that had come to really appreciate the fact what they had, they EARNED. A lot of people were forced to deal with the "carebears" or raiding which was a whole nother level all together with the amount of sheer time required to be in a end game raiding guild.
I played both, Project 1999 is for me since that is when I started. I played till the game was unrecognizable and then tried WoW. It was so easy that I literally soloed my way to level 60. Insane and didnt even take long. Totally Impossible in EQ1 unless you twinked yourself and knew exactly what class to play and where to level.
Haha yeah dying on P99 is such a difficult experience. Nothing comes close
@@IonBlaze1 love the content btw, keep up the good work
as a long time WoW player i can see many of these points i know its an 4 month old video at this point however i'd like to point out that back in Vanilla WoW you still needed a guild to succeed or get stuff done some bosses/content were impossible without a group even in classic to this day, wrath however the one you said you were playing was when the game was turning into a much more noob friendly/newplayer friendly game as it introduced the dungeon finder and stopped people from having to communicate to find a group as you could now just press a button and queue up for a specific dungeon i can see that being a turn off for a lot of players at the time
I had a lot of fun in WoW. Questing was okay and engaging at first but then I moved on to battlegrounds and that was addicting! When I pop in from time to time I end up back in the battlegrounds living up the excitment of PvP. BUT...EQ is still my first love and nothing gives me the feels the way EQ does.
How big were battlegrounds? I heard they were crazy big PvP fights.
@@IonBlaze1 The last I played there were 10V10 up to 40V40 and inbetween. I'm not sure what they have these days. I never thought I would enjoy PVP but WoW proved me wrong :).
World of Warcraft had giant hands and feet that was the only thing I hated
the quest tracker was natively built in with wrath wasn't at launch though but everyone used addons for it anyways
I would say that both EQ and WoW was a "right time and the right place" kind of deal. Ultima Online had shown the world and game devs that MMOs was a viable business model, and when EQ launched with it's classic fantasy (elf, dwarf, wizards) it was a hit, and it was in 3D. There is a good reason why EQ got the nickname Ever Crack, because people got so addicted to the game. I remember seeing a news bit on TV at the time, about a guy getting divorced because he played EQ too much.
I played the lesser known MMO called Asheron's Call, it launched the same year as EQ, played for a few years, and when WoW launched my guild pretty much died overnight. So I tried it out, and hated it. Too casual, too much hand holding I thought at the time. Pretty much everyone that stayed with Asheron's Call called WoW the Care Bear game. It was not until the first WoW expansion pack, The Burning Crusade that I fell in love with the game, and started my journey in WoW.
You mention at 17:25 in the video that EQ never gets the credit it deserves, and I have to agree. But at Blizz-Con one year, Chris Metzen senior vice president at the time, went on stage and did his "Geek Is" speech, and in that speech he did mention EQ and how big an impact it had on WoW.
I did try EQ2 also when it launched. Besides the point you had to have a NASA super computer to run it, it also had some odd design choices. If I remember correct, if you played in a group and one member died, all members lost XP and thus killing the grouping aspect of the game. I might recall that wrong but I'm sure someone will correct me.
Looking back on my time with MMO games I would say I have a Love/Hate relationship with WoW. I have a lot of fond memories playing the game, and the people I've met in game, but I hate what it did to the MMO genre. Every game studio looked at WOW and tried to make the next WoW clone/killer, instead of making just a good game. They got blinded by crazy amount of cash WoW pulled in.
As for the original EQ, I have tried it a few times, and it's a hard game to get into if you do not have any nostalgia or prior experience with the game. I don't mind the graphics, but the UI and the clucky feel of moving and interacting with the world makes for a rough experience, but I'm glad it's still around for people to play.
I played WoW for about a month when it was first released, then quit and never went back to it. The biggest turn off for me was the cartoony graphics. It also felt very easy mode after playing EQ1 for two years.
How do you feel about Pantheon?
TBH I haven't paid much attention to Pantheon as I mostly play single player games. At 56, and working full time, MMOs just require too much of a time investment, in too large "chunks". EQ1 was they only MMO I ever played "seriously". I still load it up occasionally, but I just 2 box.
As an FFXI player when we found out how fast you were able to level in Classic WoW blew our minds.
Here comes a long ass post. I may have a different take since I mostly played classes that could solo well in EQ due to at the time college and then afterward work and family commitments. I remember the inability to solo just to get decent xp really frustrating back in the day and basically being forced to play my druid, necro, or wizard just to be able to log on and get something done in short time windows. (At least as far as leveling and then getting AA xp. Getting meaningful loot was never a thing solo.) I still remember logging on and sitting at the Sebilis zone in for a couple hours looking for a group then eventually giving up and just being sad that I didn't actually get to play the game that night.
When wow came out it was refreshing to just be able to play the game solo whenever I wanted. Each of the servers had a decent community and you slowly got to know everyone from grouping, raiding and pvp. Old wow still made you socialize to get in a group for dungeons but only needing tank, healer, and 3 dps made it a bit simpler to find groups although it was occasionally still frustrating depending on if you played at primetime hours or not. The pace of the game did definitely make it harder to talk while doing a dungeon but generally they were 30ish minute runs and the socializing was done before or after and occasionally during a bit of downtime after something went wrong.
At some point they added the group finder system and you queued up as your preferred role and it would put you in a group with 4 other random people that you've never talked to before. I can't remember if it was the case at the start but at some point these group members stopped having to be from your own server and were just random people from your server cluster (6 or 7 servers grouped together if I remember correct.) This to me was the beginning of the complete douchebag groups that wouldn't ever say anything, would roll need on everything and would leave without a moment's notice if things didn't go their way. At least before that you had to maintain a reputation on your server so people would group with you. Now you were just an anonymous troll on the internet doing speedruns for sweet lootz. A nice feature (getting quick groups without travel time before dungeons) totally ruined by the player base. I feel this was the beginning of the end as far as community outside of your own guild in wow.
I still return to EQ every once in a while and play for about a month but I quickly remember that it's still a game where grouping is king and if you don't have a consistent play schedule it can be very difficult to get everything you want out of the game. I may be fooling myself but I feel like if I had much more play time then EQ would be the best game to be into hardcore in terms of community and just an overall rewarding play experience. I'm still annoyed every wow expansion when all the work you did in the previous one is completely invalidated with random gear drops in the first couple zones that are better than raid gear from the previous expansion. (Removed barrier of entry at the cost of invalidating previous work is a bad system in my opinion.)
I also return to wow when each expansion comes out but am repeatedly frustrated by the developers constant need to waste player's time. Grinding mindless daily repeatable quests for faction, or eventually enough currency to purchase a slight upgrade gets old pretty fast. Being time gated from certain content because they want you to keep your sub active also sucks. The endless dumbing down of the game to again lower the barrier for entry has made playing many of the classes an exercise in mashing 4 or 5 buttons. These are apparently things they are finally going to remove/minimize in the upcoming expansion but we'll see.
This is a really good comment. Thank you for sharing all that. I didn't know dungeon finder had that much of a negative influence on the game. I didn't know about the grindy aspects too.
Crowd control, and things like buffs and auras are a part of WoW classes. Also if you want smaller content where your actions feel more impactful you've Mythic+ in Retail.
I never played EQ however I spent a lot of time in Lineage 2. Like pretty much any Korean MMO there it was very grindy and while some classes could solo the game heavily promoted grouping in order to do must stuff, this like you said promoted the social aspect of the game however talking from my own experience I was a Eva Saint (healer) and couldn't do anything by myself I wasted a lot of time just sitting in the city waiting for my friends, guilds or even trying to get into some random groups to start playing.
I played both for years, the major differences aside, the biggest things I found from EQ to WOW is that in WOW you actually quest for something and it DROPS, not only .02% of the time.
Wow you can solo almost all the way up, until you want to raid or do dungeons, nothing is forced you don't have to go anywhere.
EQ forces you to work together, or multibox to do content. It also has harder quest to find, nothing just shows up above a head and says HEY TALK TO ME.
EQ has be diluted since then with allowing 5 or 6 boxing or more, and having mercs, making challenging content almost trivial.
Interestingly the same thing that old-school players(today Classic) hate about retail WoW = too much accessibility, not a social environment, were saying Everquest players about WoW Vanilla ... How the tables have turned...
I was there for the great migration from EQ to wow, EQ2 failed right out the gate due to stiff animation, bland art work, poor particle effects, floaty movement, and computer requirements being too high. Even EQ1 players in my community wouldn’t drop their heavily invested into characters for EQ2. WoW wasn’t seen as an enemy in any way. It was just seen as an evolution in MMOs. Games just advance, we all knew the day would come when EQ become too old. There was no anger, envy or hatred. It was more like “well, we all played this game to death and it’s time to move on to newer things”. So everyone left. Wow had all the grouping systems that you could want with easier control. But offered something EQ didn’t. Self determination. You had self agency. You want to join a group, sure go ahead. But if you didn’t want to be bothered with other people’s BS and drama (EQ had plenty of drama) then you didn’t have to be. Easier play also lifted a massive barrier to entry for new players. What no one expected was wow to survive on top as long as it did and still thriving with only FFXIV competing with numbers when WoW became massively mired in legal and social controversy. I personally been ready for a while for the next big step in MMOs.
You should really try out Turtle WoW. It's a private server and it's basically Vanilla +
It's AMAZING! Instead going the route of future expansions where everything is faster, it instead retains classic wow's feel while adding new zones, dungeons, a new profession that allows you to farm, make torches etc... The community is very tight and there's no annoying gatekeeping. Just talking about it makes me wanna jump in again!
Highly recommend you check out ffxi 75 era servers i feel like it really struck a good balance of grouping vs soloing(depending on your class). Also it has those same feelings of accomplishment that eq has when you get certain items.
I played EQ during beta phase, and I played WoW during the official launch. I liked both for very different reasons, and today I still play both of them, for most of those same reasons. EQ does get neglected when talking about MMO's, honestly though I kind of like it though, because it means those of us who were there during the beginning, are a very exclusive community of people. WoW may currently be the best MMO around, but it will have its sunset as well. EQ will always in my opinion be the grandfather of the 3DMMO genre.
I did try out WoW shortly after release, and was very underwhelmed. The community seemed to be a bunch of kids and the graphics just didn't do it for me. Things were too easy overall. I also played EQ2 for a while, and it was far more similar to WoW than to EQ.
As an EQ2 player, I always hated that EQ2 came out before WoW, but everyone always seems to claim the opposite and say that EQ2 copied WoW. The problem was that EQ2 needed such a high end machine at the time to run well and WoW could run on a potato. This shows all these years later though in that EQ2 still looks pretty good and runs great on todays systems while WoW looks like a 90's cartoon.
Gameplay wise, I still think EQ2 is lightyears ahead of WoW. I did try WoW a couple times, but I got bored with it before I even finished the free trial. Here I am 20+ years later and I still go back and play EQ2 from time to time.
lol the cat ad was dope
I played both and the drastic difference between EQ and WoW to me was much like the initial reactions at the beginning of your vid. It's too dumbed down. It really was, quest here go there kill this, it showed you everything. Everquest was a world in which there wasn't much if any online data. We all had maps drawn out or knew the way without them. There certainly wasn't any NPCs telling us where to go and what to do for exp. It's too easy, it really was. I solo'd a mage to max level pretty quickly. I didn't feel much resistance it was just a quick grind really. And lastly "it's for kids" it was. I seen Barrens chat. I seen all the little kids spewing vitriol everywhere. EQ wasn't absent this kind of stuff either, but it was handled, and handled quickly. Either the person was ignored by everyone, or the GMs stepped in and did something. In WoW other kids would add in or pile on the rhetoric and it was just like playing a game with a bunch of kids. So after reaching max level in early WoW I quit. Never even raided. I wasn't presented with anything of a challenge. Even today, on a TLP server on EQ where it's meant to be much easier....it's still harder than any point in WoW that I ever played. As for later days in WoW I'm sure it got better and things were more challenging. But my foray into the game was not pleasant, fun or challenging.
Thank you for sharing that experience Brock. I didn't think the TLPs were still more difficult than WoW.
@@IonBlaze1 They probably aren't nowadays. WoW has gotten a lot harder and more complex over the years. I tried to point out that my experience was only early day wow.
WOTLK is a great expansion, and many would argue it is peak WoW, but you really need to play vanilla to get the true experience. Don't get me wrong, play WotLK too, it's fantastic. But there's something unique and EQ-like about vanilla compared to any of the xpacs. It's more raw and old-school feeling, far less handholdy and far more challenging than future xpacs, which actually went back and changed/nerfed the vanilla content. For example, in vanilla, almost every zone had an un-instanced "elite" area, which was filled with elite mobs and had a bunch of quests associated with it. These quests were harder, gave better rewards and more importantly YOU NEEDED a group to complete them unless you were drastically over leveled. It was essentially un-instanced dungeons, complete with bosses, that acted as a De facto meeting ground for groups in that zone. Yes, you could probably solo 90% of the zone, but when it came to the elite zones, soloing wasn't an option. Examples include the ogre area in Loch Modan, the Orc Castle in Redridge Mountains and the Syndicate Fortress in Arathi Highlands. When the first expansion came out, Burning Crusade, they went back and nerfed all of these zones, so that all the elite enemies are now much weaker, normal mobs, and only the bosses are elites, which makes them much easier to solo to the point where no one has to group anymore.
Another example is Uldaman, it used to be this grand dungeon spanning from content appropriate for levels 36 all the way up to early 50s (the final boss was lvl 47 with tons of high level adds) this means it was entirely possible you and your party would get through a good chunk of the dungeon, but face roadblocks where you suddenly find yourself unprepared, under leveled, and actually wiping a lot and have to choose to keep persevering or give up, get stronger, get more gear (perhaps even use a bit of esoteric cheese you picked up from an experienced player) and come back ready for the challenge. It gave you obstacles and hurdles that you had to work hard to get around. It allowed you to taste failure and defeat instead of giving you a free win. Now the dungeon has been nerfed so nothing, including the last boss is above level 40, so it can be packaged nice and neatly in a more concise level range, around 35-40 instead of 35-50s. Sure this seems like a good change right? It makes sense for a dungeon to not cover so many levels, what's the point of having to go back twice? Well to me, that jank is charm. It's dynamic, unique and exciting. It incentives people to run more than once, and so more groups form and it's easier to find group content. Yes, I have horrible memories of getting to the last boss, just to wipe over and over because his level is red to everyone, including the tank, and we had to pack our bags and go home with a sour taste in our mouths. But it was a damn memorable experience, to the point where I'm still talking about it years later. It was a days long adventure, not a 1 hour in and out dungeon grind. And you bet your ass it was so sweet to come back stronger myself, with a stronger party and finally manage to topple that titanic turd, Archaedas , and uncover the loot, secrets and lore that is contained in the previously inaccessible vaults of Uldaman.
Another big example, WOTLK you get your first mount at lvl 20, then fast mounts at lvl 40. In vanilla, it was first mount at 40, fast mount at 60. And they were about 10x more expensive and that's not an exaggeration. Having a mount actually meant something. People would stop and look at you with admiration and congratulate you, because it was a real accomplishment. People would roll paladin and warlock JUST for the "free" mounts. Now, it's easy enough that anyone will have a mount and so no one even looks. For example, you can look up a guide and read everything that's required for a level 60 warlock to get his epic mount in Vanilla. It was a HUGE CHAIN that spanned countless zones, dungeons and NPCs. You have to collect so many items and pay a fair bit of gold, it could easily take days or weeks to complete, but the reward was that sweet sweet fast mount. Now that it's WOTLK, as a warlock, you literally just talk to the trainer and get the mount. They completely made the entire epic chain obsolete, and literally just give it to you now.
Now don't get me wrong, there was a lot of QOL stuff I appreciate, and even the mount change I've grown to appreciate more as I have less time to play, and more alts to roll. But there's something to be said about the classic experience that was truly EQ-like that was utterly cut out or gutted from future expansions that I really miss. I strongly implore you to try a vanilla server one day, just to see the differences. I think it would give you a lot of stuff to make videos about! But first, enjoy WOTLK, although it's much more streamlined, I still think it just might be my favorite incarnation of WoW, and it was also my introduction to the game!
Yes! King, go off! So much truth, so much passion. Rip vanilla wow o7
I’d say about 95% of my Everquest experience is soloing since I play a Necro. The other 5% is split between missions and raiding…
Necros could do it all. Such a cool class.
@@IonBlaze1 They’re a pretty self-sufficient class for sure. Outside of missions, I should be able to finish most of the new expansion quests solo.
What’s next for the channel man?
I have a 70 war and 61 hunter on Wow classic and play P99 a lot and also played back on EQ live. Biggest difference I felt was the end game vs the journey experience. WoW players say routinely that the game begins at max level. I saw that. People rush to max level as fast as possible and then stay there to gear grind. This means a casual player like me grinds to max level in a mostly empty, groupless Azeroth. It is the biggest problem I had with that game. EQ, people are enjoying the journey to 60, because EQ 60 experience is not so great. So as a casual player, I enjoy EQs journey to max level more than WoW
I've always felt the main feature of WoW vs Everquest is that WoW respects your time (possibility to quest alone - never required to group) while EQ fosters community so much better which in the end comes from the focus of forced grouping to clear content.
Both are great in the end, and WoW owe a lot to Everquest for the success it gained, but so does Everquest from all other MMOs before it (even though non 3D ones). They all stood on the shoulders of giants that came before them.
A big thing that you might like from a grouping perspective is the end game m+ scene. It described what you where talking about pretty well.
Turtle WoW has been so much fun, it's a WoW vanilla plus cross faction server. Cross faction is a huge positive in my opinion. Still play EQ from time to time as well for nostalgia fix.
Played for about 3 months. Unchallenging and the amount of immature players was staggering…
Lol sounds like you already watched it :)
@@IonBlaze1 Not yet…. Shows the 28th.
EQ challenges your patience. WoW has Esports
@@Anonymous-ru2wk You’re telling me… I spent the majority of the past few days just trying to find the Partisan NPCs in the NoS beta. I’ve never respected the people who do the quest/mission write-ups more than I do now. 😂
Ngl this is very entertaining content for someone who really misses “new to wow” feels. Man reading quests really did make it a different game
In the current retail version of wow, Horde and Alliance can team up to do all sorts of content. I play with friends from the opposite faction. I have characters in both.
I love the aesthetic of EQ. The sound track and musical score are amazing. The day night cycle, the stars, the ocean at sunrise. One of the most powerful and customizable UI's ever made. Forward slash commands and macros are fascinating and an excellent minigame in themselves. However, EQ has a deep undercurrent of nerd elitism. I think some of the animosity towards WoW comes from the small part of the EQ player base that need to stand on top of the player pyramid. That pyramid was made drastically smaller by players leaving for other games, Wow in particular.
You might have seen by now, but Josh Strife Hayes likes Everquest and did begin reviewing the live server. So far he's given it a fair a chance, and really likes the tutorial. He hasn't played in a minute, but I'm sure some of that audience will at least come find this content and learn mmo history.
This last expansion for EQ is underwhelming. Mostly soloable by several classes, I play a shaman and soloed almost all the quests and named mobs with my pet tanking. Not the group missions and raids of course, but all the rest of it. Prior expansions, I could usually solo a lot of the content, but always had to find others to help with parts of it.
My brother played EQ in late 99 just a few months after it released and I was really into Diablo 2 at the time. So, paying for a subscription was not going to happen. In mid 2000, we started working at a new job and 30+ people played EQ. So, I jumped in and gave it a try and loved it. We all were in the same guild, tons of grouping, raiding, we would plow through entire zones looking for names and helped each other with their Epics. The plant closed in 2004 and we mostly went our separate ways as life changed. Some jumped to WoW for the single player aspect and some of us still continued to play EQ. The friends and community is why i love EQ. I played Wow for a month and for me, it seemed like a bunch of kids were playing it. No maturity, filthy mouths and the disrespect of the WoW players turned me off. I hit max level in 3 weeks and felt it was far too easy and everything was just handed to you. I felt as though it wasn't earned. I don't play EQ as much as I did. I do get on from time to time to grind some exp. Mostly box some lower levels because I know how and where to farm lower level exp. I didn't like EQ2 much and I never found a game that could replace EQ. I just can't get into modern games that cater to the people that like instant gratification. I really hoped New World would have been that game, but we all know how that turned out!