So, on a whim on Saturday night I decided I wanted to play EQLive again. I do this now and then, every couple of years. I get nostalgic for what I once had and try to go after it again. Not this time, though! This time is a whole new experience, and I’m not even doing it for nostalgic purposes. I genuinely want to have fun and see the new zones and play around with a new character using the mercenary system.
Luke and I started playing last night. Me – a Dark Elf Enchanter, and him – a Drakkin Ranger. We started in the new Crescent Reach area, which is a whole new newbie experience that was released a couple expansions ago. We logged in, and first thing we thought, is “QUESTS?!”. That’s right, there’s this whole task system that they throw in your face right when you log in. Familiar with that sort of thing in all recent MMOs, I jumped into it with excitement, ready to start collecting crap and delivering parcels in typical fashion. After about a half an hour, Luke and I looked at each other and thought “This feels incredibly wrong. We don’t play EQ to quest!”.
For some reason, it just felt completely wrong to try to quest – especially as an EQ newbie. While in EQ2 I enjoyed questing, I spent 4 years in EQ with the only quest I ever completed being my epic 1.0. That’s simply not why I love that game. In EverQuest, it’s all about the exploration and the grind – and I have no problems admitting that. It felt like EQ was trying to wear a costume.
So, we dropped the ‘tasks’ and went back to grinding with our mercenaries. In a matter of two hours, we were level 10 with all of our spells. Luke started fletching and making his own arrows to shoot. We were actually surprised by how much fun we had. I’m actually excited to go home and play again, thankfully someone bought some Spiderling Silk off of us for around 50 plat, so we have a little bit of cash. I still have my level 70 cleric on The Rathe server as well, and I want to try to group up with her again for old times sake. So far, the only negatives I’ve found are:
If anyone else is playing on Stromm, let me know! I don’t promise we’ll stay playing too long though as there are lots of game choices out there on my plate, and the EQ fun generally wears off for me pretty quick. We’ll see though!
Tami Baribeau is the Associate Producer for Metaplace, Inc, currently working on Island Life. She is also the Lead Editor of feminist gaming blog The Border House, and the National Facebook Games Examiner for Examiner.com. She can be reached on Twitter or by email.
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*whispers*
Crescent reach, not ridge! *giggles*
So glad to hear you’re enjoying your stay in EQ, even if it is brief!
Hahaha, oops!!
Fixed 
I’m often ashamed to admit it, but I actually never played EQ properly. I first started MMOing with DAoC. Yet, all the same, I do find this particularly interesting – more so why you enjoyed EQ and how you quickly abandoned quests. I’ve often wondered about quests in MMOs in such a way…
In any event, I totally understand how the fun of it can fade fast. I’ve gone back to many a game I use to enjoy, only to find that while I enjoyed it, I just couldn’t stick around after nostalgia wore off. Yet, I always leave again feeling like I’m missing something.
I heard EQLive may open a new server that’s voted on by the players and that one of the options could possibly include the “Classic” server that only includes EQ, Kunark and Velious. If that happened, I’d be back in a heartbeat.
Are you still able to go out and set up camps to just grind though, or did they set it up so the game is mostly quest-based now? Are you still able to go through ALL the content, like PoP and Time and OoW stuffs? Just curious because I think now EQ would be the largest MMO out there content-wise if that were the case
Wiqd -
Only the new newbie area is all questy like. The rest of the game is still the same, and yes – all the content is there. The game is by far the largest MMO content wise, I think you could play 20 characters to the level cap without visiting the same zone twice. Haha.
Not only the new newbie area is all questy like! The zones attached to CR offer huge numbers of quests too, and there are tasks in pretty much all of the latest expansions that you’re required to do for progression of some sort.
The ‘old world’ zones are still all there and don’t seem to follow the surplus of quests that the newer expansions are host to (everything released from 2006+) but they certainly have up’d the number by a large amount. I use quests as my means of leveling for other games (where I’m used to it) but even having returned to EQ, it feels some what odd and foreign. There were only particular quests I ended up doing when I started to play, and now they’re everywhere!