Player vs. Everything: Rebuilding EverQuest

Ask any MMOG player about EverQuest, and you'll get one of three responses: either they loved it, they hated it, or they didn't play it (and don't want to). Nobody thinks that it was just a mediocre game, and a lot of people look back fondly on their time there, warts and all. There were a lot of warts. When I was chatting with Scott Hartsman at this year's IMGDC, he explained to me that EverQuest was rife with any number of "pain points" which later games were able to identify, fix, and build upon to make their own game better. Taking most of what was good about EverQuest and cutting most of what was bad was one of the things that helped World of Warcraft dethrone the game and take its seat as the number one MMORPG on the market.

However, not everyone agrees with all of the "improvements" that Blizzard made to the genre when they created WoW. The arguments over what should and shouldn't be left out of a great MMORPG continue to this day, and there's no quick and easy guide to what's MMOG gold. Plenty of companies are learning the hard way that cloning World of Warcraft isn't a winning strategy. It's a great game, but that doesn't mean it's the only way to play. My question for you all today is this: What if instead of EverQuest 2, Sony had given us EverQuest 2.0? EverQuest 2 was a spiritual successor at best to the original game (Vanguard is much closer to an actual sequel). If SOE had remade the DikuMUD-inspired world of Norrath, set in the same time period, with an updated graphics engine and the pain points fixed differently than WoW chose to do, what might it have looked like? More importantly, is it something you'd want to play?

The problem with proposing something like this, even as a thought experiment, is that everyone liked or hated different things about EverQuest. We all had our favorite zones, favorite classes, and aspects of the game we thought were brilliant or moronic. Since I won't be able to please everyone no matter what I suggest, I'm just going to toss out my personal ideas for what should have been fixed and left alone and let the rest of you hash it out in comments. EverQuest had any number of pain points, but one man's pain point is another man's feature. That said, there were a few aspects of the game that I think would absolutely need to be tweaked.

The first thing I think that EverQuest2.0 would benefit from would be a totally new graphics and physics engine. Instead of going for a plastic pseudo-realistic look like EverQuest 2 uses, I think a stylized and fluid system like Warhammer seems to have would be interesting. I don't need my gnolls to look like real gnolls, but I do need them to look cool. I also need my running and jumping to look and feel "right" (although maintaining the first-person viewpoint would also be critical). The movement thing is something I think both Age of Conan and World of Warcraft do very well; EverQuest 2 and Lord of the Rings Online, not so much. Putting the world of EverQuest in an updated environment where movement was easier and more natural would go a long way towards making the game more fun, just by itself.

The death penalty would absolutely have to be addressed. The harsh death penalties of EverQuest are legendary, and they're what keep many players away. Of course, EverQuest wouldn't be EverQuest without them. How would you fix them without breaking them? Here's what I would do: First, EverQuest is hard enough with a full set of gear on. Getting to your corpse naked is pretty nigh impossible without help, in many cases. I would keep the experience penalty and returning to your bind point, but I would let the players keep their gear on death. If they wanted their XP back, they could fight back down and recover their corpse (and have it automatically reimbursed, which fixes the problem of having to stand next to your corpse shouting for a high-level cleric). This would also maintain the sense of fear I discussed in yesterday's article. You're still looking at a serious setback if you die -- a lengthy run, and a requirement to fight your way back to your corpse.

I would make soloing an option for more classes outside of the traditional soloers by offering cheap buffing potions at vendors, usable only outside of a group. The game already has these, but they're usable in groups and fairly expensive if you don't have piles of platinum handy. It would still be faster XP and better loot to group than to not, but Warriors and Rogues wouldn't be stuck standing around bored if no one needed them.

The user interface would have to go. It would be kicked out the window, annihilated, obliviated, smashed to smithereens, run over with a truck, and rebuilt from scratch after the model of newer games. As Brenda pointed out in a comment recently, it is totally customizable and can be replaced with a little work, but the basic UI that came with the game would have to be actually functional and intuitive. The absolute first thing I do every time I go back to the game is spend 20 minutes fixing that god-awful UI.

I might give melee classes a few more abilities. Not a lot -- that would ruin the flavor of the class. But a few. Maybe make intimidate and disarm actually useful. Give them some extra damaging moves to help with the soloing. That kind of thing. Just enough that Warriors and Rogues wouldn't be bored to tears in fights, and give them a little something to play with so that they could be in the same league as the hybrids and monks.

Otherwise, I wouldn't change a damn thing. EverQuest was a graphical DikuMUD, plain and simple. It was hard, but it was fun. I'd have played what I just described. I would still play it. Everyone assumes that the Diku model would fail in today's market, largely due to WoW's success and the knowledge that everyone hates harsh death penalties. But the fact remains that the only real game on the market that adheres to the old model is EverQuest, which is over 9 years old! That's ancient in games industry time. No AAA company has actually tried a tweaked, updated version of that model in recent memory. Don't try to trot out Vanguard, because that had more problems than I can count. It wasn't nearly polished enough, it tried to do too much that was really unique, and it copied some stuff from newer games that probably wasn't necessary. It was too ambitious and poorly executed.

EverQuest reigned supreme for years. People still play it. It was based on enduring legacy of games that people really enjoyed. There's really something special in that older style of gameplay. WoW's way of doing things, as fun as it is, does not need to be the golden path to megabucks (nor is it, for anyone but Blizzard). Since nothing is really new and everything repeats, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a big game come out in the next decade that takes a lot of what those older games did, gussies it up for a new generation of gamers raised on World of Warcraft, and presents it to them as a more mature, more exciting alternative. That game might end up looking a lot like what EverQuest 2.0 could have been.

You can be sure that I'll be the first in line for a copy when that day comes.

	Cameron Sorden is an avid gamer, blogger, and writer who has been playing a wide variety of online games since the late '90s. Several times per week in Player vs. Everything, he tackles all things MMO-related. If you'd like to reach Cameron with comments or questions, you can e-mail him at cameron.sorden AT weblogsinc.com.