RIP Brad McQuaid

Games
61

Well that sucks. RIP Mike Hutchins.

My very first EQ character was a dark elf, so Neriak was the first zone(s) I ever encountered in Everquest. It remains my favorite starting city thanks to the the almost cyberpunk aesthetic of the magic (neon) runes everywhere lighting the dark caverns. I also can’t count the number of times I got lost in there my first week of play. The Sol zones were all great as well. Lots of good memories in there with guildies, and so many deaths to lava and the resulting corpse runs/summons.

It’s so sad that we’ve lost two of the original creators so suddenly and unexpectedly. These guys created what was, for me and so many others, something that had never been seen before in computer gaming, not in the size, scope and scale that Everquest brought to the market. It was truly something unique and brilliant.

62

Hard to figure out which old thread to bump, but this one seems pretty appropriate given the shit show that EQ has turned into in “Aradunes” name.

EQ recently went through yet another ‘restructuring’? Another subsidiary company claimed ownership, and proceeded to fuck the game up beyond all comprehension. Past handoffs have resulted in mild hiccups, personal vendettas against certain classes, and the usual assortment of hamhanded idiocy you could expect.

This time it’s different. The current company…dog paw games…dog food games…dog pound games…not really clear, has broken things that have long been ok. The recent launch of the new TLP (time locked progression server) ‘Aradune’, has been an incredible shit show. Multiple hour long q’s, followed by 20 minute zoning times, random crashes that place you back at the start of said Q…the list goes on. Pretty much everything that could be fucked up, was fucked up. This isn’t exactly new for EQ TLP releases, but what is new, is that: A. They literally couldn’t fix it. B. They didn’t open a spill over server to try and fix it. B is way more concerning than A for me. Their “solution”, was apparently to let so many people un-sub, that the problem would fix itself. That doesn’t bode well for the future.

There are a ton of examples of the current dev team trying to do something, and obviously having zero clue what they were doing. They continue to break more than they fix, by a ratio of about 3 to 1. It’s just alarmingly apparent that they really do not have any idea what they are doing.

I post this because I worry about the future of EQ, and I love EQ. I’ve been playing this game off and on since release, and have never been actually worried about it closing down. It always seemed to be limping along just enough, and with enough competency, to keep it going. This current debacle is a much different story. This has been so mismanaged, and they have had to have lost so many subs visa vi the Aradune server debacle, that I fear for the longevity of this game.

I will be very sad to see this game go under, and I’m VERY surprised this hasn’t happened a long time ago. For me, EQ is the best video game ever made. Nothing has even come close to touching its scope, its lore, it’s sheer size, it’s sense of danger, it’s classes, it’s interaction… There is a magic to this game, that I can mostly decipher, but not entirely. That magic that I can’t decipher, is what has kept me coming back, over and over, and year after year.

I’m always on the fence about omens, but the fact that the server that was named after Brad has been such an abysmal shit show, doesn’t sit well with me. I care about this game, and I care about the people that made it, I guess that’s what pisses me off the most about this, it just seems like such disrespect for the original creators, and such a sad way for them to go out if it is the case.

This game deserves to go down in whatever history of gaming there is, as a real benchmark of what is possible given what you have to work with.

63

I look at EQ and the time it launched and often think: This game could not have been made then. But, it did, and it was awesome. In a lot of ways its as primitive as Metallica’s first EP, but to launch an online 3D persistent world game in the era of dialup is amazing.

64

This was pretty shortly after the first Tomb Raider game, and the idea that a world you could explore could be this huge, AND in first person was…staggering. When this was first released it was mind blowing.

65

Fippy Darkpaw, EverQuest’s only true hero, has a company named after him, Darkpaw Games. Darkpaw was split off from Daybreak, they run the show.

66

Sure, it was the first graphical diku. Nothing like it had ever been done before. Manifest destiny sort of evolutionary, it would have been done by someone else if that team hadn’t, but they were the first.

I don’t have a lot of love for EQ, quite the contrary, it was uniquely frustrating and grindy in a way you thankfully don’t see in western games these days, but it was certainly a big deal.

67

I was never a great EQ player, though I was playing in the beta and afterwrards, and did our review for the magazine. My wife was extremely into it, though, and did the whole guild and raid thing. Even though I kind of sucked at it, and yes it was grindy, frustrating, arbitrary, and weird in many ways, it also had something that very very few other games have had, that “magic” @Ultrazen speaks of if you will. For all of its flaws the game created, well, a world, in a way even the Ultima stuff never did for me.

That being said, I am quite happy to leave it in the past. Ain’t no way I’m going back to the days of real dark, no maps, losing experience on death, deleveling, brutal difficutly, forced grouping, and the like.

68

Uhoh. I dont follow the drama around the new servers as i use a freebie account on the older servers but i played EQ for a few days in the last week, finally completing some of the exploration achievements for the original and expansions. Its something i always like to log back into every now and then. You’d think something so well established and long running couldnt be fucked up so much.

69

My guess is their codebase is ancient and nearly impossible to support. Engineering probably turned over seven or eight times since the people that wrote it worked on the game. And yet they’re still churning out expansions every couple of years.

70

That really sucks to hear, Ultrazen. EQ doesn’t hold the same place in my heart that it does for a lot of people, for me it was Ultima Online. I get what made EQ special for a lot of people, though. I don’t want to go back to those times: the endlessly staring at a spellbook, the constant full-out assault on the player’s time, the brutal death penalties. But I can admit that those are the same ingredients that made the game special, even if I would prefer to have the recipe formulated differently.

WoW was a big leap in accessibility but over the years but in the pursuit of convenience it has lost a lot, and basically all the MMOs that followed shared the same hollowness. EQ for me was far too harsh with everything (too much downtime, too strict enforcement of grouping, too harsh death penalties) but I still hope that a future MMO pulls some aspects from that game and realizes that the relentless pursuit of convenience carries a cost.

In any case, it sucks to see a grandaddy of the MMO space be treated this way. What a bummer.

71

I guess. It’s kinda amazing to me that it’s not only still running but actively updated.

72

Even an old server like mine is still pretty busy. 86 people in Guild Lobby right now (where I afk as its where people cast the mass buffs)

I installed Anarchy Online the other day and i was the only player on test. The main servers seemed really quiet too. AO is super clunky and yet whilst EQ obviously looks old, it plays a lot smoother and the UI is far better, even the default one i use.

73

It’s interesting that EQ has retained the players it has over the years, with the TLPs and whatnot. WoW Classic was amazing fun for the first little while, but my goodness the community is so far down the “water finds a crack” path of divining maximum reward for minimum effort that it has completely killed the game for me (I’m long since quit).

Might just be you can never really go home again.

74

I had hopes for WoW Classic with an active, laid-back guild, but The Wanderers ended up being just like any other guild. Some leveled faster and left to join a raiding guild and hosed the rest of us. It was disappointing.

I was hoping for a guild of 40+ who were happy just play and hang, and do raiding when we could and otherwise run 5-mans and BGs at the level cap. We needed the fast levelers to be patient while the slower ones leveled. We never got there.

It was a fun two months, though. I enjoyed going back in time.

75

It’s a pipe dream, I think. Every guild I’ve been in in MMOs with end-game raiding and progression has ended up like this. The games are simply built to push those buttons in people who need to be first, be on top, and do it all right now. This is true whether the designers know it or not, and EQ is a great example. The early days of EQ saw them roll out the game with unfinished end game content, confident no one would get there in that very difficult and new environment before the team could create the bosses and raids they needed. Oops. Power guilds slammed through the existing content and ended up in an “under construction” area in effect.

76

I mean it definitely would have, because Asheron’s Call came out less than 8 months later and had been in development for four years. Plus it didn’t have zones.

77

EQ was distinct in that everything was non-instanced, so guilds had to compete for limited raid content. You could be in a raid guild, but if it wasn’t the top one or two guilds on the server then you likely weren’t doing endgame content from the current expansion, and were always in danger of losing members to those top guilds.

EQ did eventually start instancing raids, but that was after WoW was released (and after I stopped playing).

78

I agree it was disappointing, but I quit not because of that but because of blizzard’s actions about hong kong and have not played a blizz game since. Which is a shame, cause I was enjoying WoW classic a lot and slowly working up my level.

79

I don’t think AC would have EQs success if it launched first. I think EQ was just that almost magical blend of programming and business who let each other do what they do best. Brad and Smedley just were a great partnership.

80

I hit the cap with a priest and quit not too long after. It wasn’t easy to find 5-man groups without an active guild to draw upon. You’d think a priest would be in demand but it was the tanks that were hard to find. Quite a few groups fell apart because we could never get a tank.

I did really enjoy the journey to 60. After I got there, not so much. In retrospect I wish I had played on a PvP server and played a DPS class, probably a rogue.