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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ย. 2024
- Why did EverQuest fans hate World of Warcraft? Was the hate for good reason? EverQuest was the king of the MMO genre until 2004. World of Warcraft came out & everything changed. I remember the amount of hate that EQ players spat at WoW. “It’s a game for kids. It’s dumbed down. WoW sucks.” That was the majority of what I remember. But those aren't good answers. Why did EverQuest players actually hate WoW? I wanted to know. And I took this attitude to heart. I never played World of Warcraft because I always thought it was a horrible game.
Why Boxing is Good: • Why Multi-Boxing is Go...
Episode 1 of EverQuest Adventures: • Why We Broke Up | Ever...
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Viewer Discretion Advised: EverQuest is rated "T" for teen. But Discord & In-Game Chat may contain material not suitable for minors. Cursing is kept to a minimum when possible.
#WorldofWarcraft #EverQuest #EverQuest2
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Why Boxing is Good: th-cam.com/video/yyDSChEdv7U/w-d-xo.html
Episode 1 of EverQuest Adventures: th-cam.com/video/LZbNzmz48sM/w-d-xo.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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
WoW simplified the genre. Easy to use AND APPEALING UI system. Quests that were fun. EQ didn't really have many quests. And as you stated, early EQ2 didn't have quests from start to finish either. The graphics for WoW wasn't the selling point. It was the smoothness of gameplay. Movement felt good. The world size felt good (but not great imo, I want bigger). Just look at your EQ UI vs WoW UI. The difference is night/day. WoW clearly wins this aspect. I didn't mind skill smashing in WoW, because EQ2 has the same bullshit. Its no different.
You are wrong though, I solo'd EQ/2 with no issue. It took longer, but its totally possible. This idea that one or the other is based on solo or multi is factually a lie. WoW was designed for teams to level together. If you solo level in WoW it takes forever. Generally for me, in a team, i can level twice as fast. So if i hit level 20 in 2 days, I can hit 40 in two days in a full party. The difference is night/day. WoW was never designed as a single player game. In fact, If you played WoW starting with classic and moving to each expansion, you would have seen them literally change the game over time. So much so that it went from a game that was better in a party to a game where the only time you party was raids/dungeons. Which is a bit like EQ, because I solo'd EQ's main story, but dungeons required me to team up. They are similar in that regards. It also looks like you played wow classic, which means you are on the ass end of the game, where no one teams up. Back in the day, wow fresh, everyone loved teaming up and being friendly. especially going around open world pvp and trolling the opposite faction.
WoW over simplified the genre. meaning it was easier to get entry. if EQ had been more easy to pick up, a more simple easy to use UI without breaking the back end elements, EQ could come back (eq3?) but I doubt daybreak is even making a new mmorpg. Classic wow did have a death penalty. You lost xp, but you couldn't de-level. and gaining back that xp was faster.
FOR ME, I dont like the idea of having multiple hot bars full of skills. I think instead, players should focus on certain skills they like to use, and level those skills up. so for example one fire mage might use fireball and meteor but another fire mage might use firewall and fire rain. both are viable, both can play endgame, but you have less skills that are more focused on your gameplay style. if you like doing AOE, pick all AOE skills. if you like single target, pick all single target spells. if you want a little of both, pick a little of both. even the ideal warrior, sword and shield or two handed weapon like a spear. it should be player choice to specialize. having 30 skills you have to constantly cycle through is really fucking stupid. new world sort of got it right, you have less skills and you are more focused on using those weapons their way. however new world also failed because there is less choice. even within the skill tree for each weapon, you have left/right paths and they aren't different enough to make the game feel like you have choice. so while you have some choice, its not enough. new world was too limited, like many new games. wow was limited in the sense that you are on a roller coaster. you hop on, lock in, ride the rails, and then its over. you can ride again, but nothing changes. its the same ride. and i hate that. in wow, every warrior is the same. every rogue is the same. there is no variability. and i think newer mmorpgs need that. elder scrolls online was headed in the right direction but oversimplified it. in ESO, you could pick up a bow, learn bow skills. you then also had class skills. GW2 does this similar thing. you pick up dual axes and you have specific skills that go with it. and then you had class skills. so you would combo your own role by using weapon+class. but we need to expand that even more. and of course, we need to make mmorpgs where you cannot learn everything. you shouldn't be able to just change your class (final fantasy) whenever you want. that's stupid. go make a new character. but the problem is FF is a bad game, people get bored, hence why they keep changing classes. its a feature to keep people playing because the game isn't good enough.
the future of mmorpgs is bleak....
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..
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
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.
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.
You didnt play vanilla classic it wasnt just button mashing with every class. The old school paladin slog rofl
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!!
Solo game with grouping? Try playing GW2 next. Pretty much the description of the game. Can solo everything, but progessive zone based quests that draw in the whole zone, is a great mecahanic no other MMO has seemed to master like GW2 has.
But where GW2 struggles, is every class can do every thing. So you're just another number adding 10% DPS/Heals/HP to the zone zerg. Isnt perfect, but is an interesting take on the systems.
Huh yeah I've seen Josh Strife advertise for GW2. It tried to do away with the trinity design yeah?
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
one of the worst parts about WoW was and still is today, with the servers. the playerbase creates faction imbalance, and can solve the issue, but refuses. meanwhile the triple A game company refuses to address the issue of servers, which are merely a technological limitation and should be cut from dozens of servers to TWO and TWO only, PvP and PvE. so the game can truly redeem the two M's in MMORPG once more.
Oh I didn't know about the faction imbalance. Thank you for sharing that.
The crazy successful marketing campaign and simple PC requirements made an average mmo into the most well known and popular. As a result nearly all other mmos tried copying the bland formula and created countless dull mmos that has nearly killed the genre. Little good came out of WoW.
Oh yeah I remember that. Mr T saying Nightelf Mohawk
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.
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.
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. 😂
I feel somewhat differently about WoW and EQ than you seem to portray about your experiences in this video. Everquest all but died because of wow. Every single person I’ve ever played with or was in a guild eventually went to WoW and never looked back…that I know of.
With that said, the current version of WoW is nothing compared to original WoW. Today’s game is broken and not fun at all.
EQ2 never really succeeded precisely because of the ultra realistic graphics and the unfixable glitches the graphics caused. When EQ2 launched, I had a fairly new and powerful gaming rig, and I had to turn the graphics WAY down just to make the game playable. Plus, I was still on a dial-up modem, and EQ2 had a much larger data footprint than WoW, so I can see why many people preferred WoW over EQ2.
And largely, I found many people in EQ2 to be intolerable to be around. It wasn’t like EQ1 where the majority of players were friendly. There was a huge troll population that joined EQ2 at launch and stuck around for the couple of years that I played.
Oh I had no idea about how data intensive EQ2 was. Didn't know the community wasn't like eq1. Thank you for sharing that Living Soule
@@IonBlaze1 Well, to be fair, some of the people I used to play with probably got the nostalgia bug like I do from time to time, but it’s hard to see EQ1 as pretty much a ghost town like it is today. When I played in 1999 - 2002, every server was packed and finding a group was super easy.
You played Wrath so you didn't get the real vanilla wow experience. It's not to the degree EQ goes, but many classes such as warrior needed to group at certain level breakpoints. Without it, quests would run dry, and you would have to solo grind, which sucks. World grouping is very minimal in WoW, per design, but even then questing groups were much better in harder areas. There weren't even enough quests in game in vanilla to get you to max level, I believe it would get you to around level 58 of 60.
By the time wrath came out, the game was made much easier in terms of leveling. EQ is invariably harder than WoW ever was, but your experience in Wrath has led you to believe that most people solo "99% of the time", and that just wasn't really the case in 2004/2005.
Oh thank you for sharing that. I heard classic was harder but didn't know to what extent.
@@IonBlaze1 It still will never rival EQ in terms of difficulty, I guess that was kind of the point of WoW, but I think you may have enjoyed your experience just a little more on a classic server.
Either way, love your videos I was sad when you said you'd stop. Really glad to see ya back man!
You should of went to the SOM and classic forever servers. Puller and CC was a way bigger part of the game in Vanilla and Tbc. Wotlk pretty much put the end to puller and cc is almost not needed either. I always wished wow did something to make group play as lvling a bigger deal but the EQ style of you can't do anything without a group is not good either. Wow has spots that need groups i just wish they made them more impactful.
Agree but still think it still exist less because of final patch progress. Problem is for him hard to compare lets say first patch example classic 1.0 vs 1.12.3 final patch but well he cant so he can here as example only see wotlk in his final patch state what buff or nerf(dk we know how imba DK was in 3.0) alot of class. WoW legacy server became way more easier Hunter puller example or cc(mage sheep rogue sap) was just not necessary anymore tank and heal could esay tank and spank large grp because of knowledge and better gear progress not to forget better internet connection.
But totally agree this system died with Wrath if not way earlier in mid/late BC. Sad thing is what you mention with grp spots that most spots of them got even nerf to the ground example moonbrook you could not go in solo meaning going deep into the town / the mobs will just swarm you and kill you short you would pull 2-3 no elite mobs(but the quest was still doable because the mobs that you need to kill could be found solo outside the town you did not need to go in the houses) most in time and die unless you are really a strong solo class(hunter/warlock/mage) example in low lvl, (here a note yes class like warlock/hunter could do alot of elite solo but not 2-3 on the same time)
in mid lvl example you would never go solo kurzen cave unless you may want to go in solo with over lvl/solo class
Well even this got nerf you could say with every patch less say it compare classic most class fight no elite mobs 1v1(2 depending gear 3 on class/gear) bc first nerf of solo you could esay 1v2 most in time even with bad gear wotlk you could 1v3 most in time and still would not die. Hell would even go this lvl that you could do end of BC final patch that most class could even solo elite mobs and with wrath every class could solo 1v1 a elite mob ofc some worst other esay mode.
@@siv1388 100 percent right on. My guildies and i were talking about the early patches yesterday. Early wow is much different from what even classic was. Dungeons could be all 15 man. 5 maning them to get the quests seemed harder then MC. Playing wrath classic i really miss vanilla and tbc hardness. I hope they do a a classic plus server for tbc or vanilla.
It’s interesting how wow is starting to copy the support rolls now with augmentation evokers and changing certain other dps abilities but it’s time for eq3 rip saga of hero’s
Oh yeah yeah! I was Redbeardflynn talk about that. He got instant booted from groups lol
Yeah people didn’t understand that the damage showed on the logs and not on the addons lol 😂 but I’m having fun playing eq on p99 right now. Did some tlp will join the next one want to start fresh on one :) love watching your videos and redbrardflynn :) keep ‘em coming gl man
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.
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 would not say i hated it, i played it for a few years but it clearly was less complex and when they did the stat squish was the part that got me to start loosing my interest, then the follower in your garrison that you needed to log on and send on new missions more or less daily, add level squish and well not a fan.
But in the end i still play EQ1 and rarely EQ2 but not touched WoW in a long time.
Could EQ use a stat & level squish? The stats on gear is kinda nuts
@@IonBlaze1 I prefer no, but Blizzard squished stats the in the next breath started bringing them back up in a nuts way again, but sure it got bit silly with a lvl 30 getting hit for 1.5m damage by a max level :)
Simple answer. I was playing everquest2 and everyone went to wow. I tried it and wanted to vomit. The graphics were hideous compared to eq2. The gameplay felt sluggish and just boring. The colors all blended together. And everyone loved it. I could never understand why. It just amazes me that people loved wow. But it was all hype. Wow never should have taken off. Only issue with eq2 at the time was it took alot to run the game which really hurt it as well. I tried wow recently and it's still a cartoon with junky combat.. just a more polished cartoon. The colors make me dizzy and looks like a blend of just basic colors cheaply made. I'll always hate wow for ruining eq2s future potential
EQII was, and still is very jank. Idk what they did with that engine but holy crap i'll take the buttery smooth movements/animations and Disney style graphics any day over that game.
@@EQOAnostalgia As someone that plays EQ2 currently in an extremely casual capacity. It runs incredibly smooth. The only thing I had to turn down to get it to run smooth was shadows. I can even run both EQ and EQ2 side-by-side without any slowdown in either. Playing on a pretty old configuration of hardware.
It's funny because now looking back WoWs graphics have aged soooo much better than EQ2. If you can't understand why most people like WoW, you've really got to check your perspective. 2004 the ability to play with 40 people was insane to most people. Most people who played WoW didn't play EQ, like you and I, they played Warcraft 3, possibly 2. They played Diablo, they were familiar with Blizzard. The game was streamlined. EQ is totally unplayable for most people. WoW was still difficult, had grouping, had corpse runs, felt a lot like a polished EQ. You clearly don't like the aesthetic and that's fine, but WoW is a 100% superior game to EQ2 it's not even close.
@@kingboy280 when eq2 and wow released eq2 was superior graphics 10000%. I don't play either anyway these days. I play ffxiv. As I said the cartoon and colors of wow are just awful to me. A polished cartoon is still a cartoon. I'll stick with more realistic graphics.
@@Tailionis You're entitled to your opinion, but the test of time shown otherwise.
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 :)
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.
Bro this is severely underrated, what a great video
I hear the comment that WoW is not as social as EQ because you can solo in WoW and EQ requires grouping. This is only technically true. There is a lot of wow content that requires grouping and 5 man groups as well as 10 and 25 man raids are required for experiencing anything beyond the barebones minimum the game has to offer. Also wow raiding with its 10 and 25 man raid sizes is far more social and puts far more emphasis on individual players doing their part than the EQ 72 man zerg raids where most players are just part of the pack. Im saying this as someone who loves both games and has spent years playing both. Both games are social and have solid communities.
A lot of the hate was because if you make something easier, people will always take the easier option. So now you have a new title that's casual and easy with instant gratification, but then another game comes out promising even easier and casual play, then to counter that, another comes out promising even faster instant gratification. Eventually, you have an entire industry that has devolved in low quality instant gratification game styles. As a whole, it just simply kills off the quality across the genre. Nothing is difficult anymore, nothing challenging, everything us just instant gratification, and there's no longer any point to anything. Now here we are, where the MMO genre is nearly dead. That's why most of the everquest players didn't like wow, it threatened the health of the mmo industry with lures of instant gratification, and ends up the concern was legitimate. Now it's just a niche set of players who expect and want a challenging experience. It's human nature to go the path of least resistance, but with that, quality is always reduced.
This is a really nice deep dive into both games. Very good.
I played about 100 levels of WoW but was very put off by the push to pvp which i really hate.
It's like you really have to do PvP? I heard many games started PvP first then found out it wasn't as desired as PVE
@@IonBlaze1 there is incentives to pvp in wow. but i prefer cooperative play to competition
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.
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
They didn't just choose that aesthetic for WoW they were already kind of marrie3d to it because Warcraft is an existing IP with millions of players already before the MMORPG. I wouldn't go as far as calling ESO a wow clone, if you wanna know what a WoW Clone truly is there are two free ones available: Allods Online and Runes of Magic. That's what's meant by WoW clone.
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 :).
Shibby
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!
Wow wasnt alway like how it is now. Over the years players have min maxed the fun out of the game. Vanilla world of warcraft required you to group up alot more. There were many quests and attunements that required you to all the way across the world. Many of those could only be done in a group. Wow was so immersive and i dont think they're will be anything ever like it again.
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!
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.
I played EQ when it first came out and I was not very good at all. But you got rewarded in EQ for facing more difficult mobs. So grouping was always a better option. The bigger and better your group was, the harder the pulls you can take. And getting handsomely rewarded for that. That's what is missing from WoW. I played WoW when it came out and I wasn't so bad thanks to my EQ experience. Did nearly all the End of Game raid content in Vanilla WoW (just a few bosses left when TBC launched). My guild kind of fell apart for TBC. But I hated Questing. If you killed a MOB 2 levels above you, you get 10xp more. If you killed a mob 2 levels below you, you get 10xp less. Basically there is no reward for taking on more difficult challenges. The only difficulty in Vanilla and TBC WoW is in an Instance or a RAID. Once you learn the mechanics of either, It's easy. I can't speak for EQ end game, I never got close to max level. I've recently been playing EQ TLP and now I finally understand what I should have been doing all those years ago. If Everquest.Next just had some better graphics like EQ2, removed the speed questing of WoW, made the characters abilities more engaging like WoW, and rewarded players for killing more challenging MOBs like in EQ, that would be the best game ever. Having Raids like Vanilla WoW where they released newer RAIDs as Guilds were completing them would be great too. I can't speak for EQ or EQ2 raids. They definitely need to bring back the support role specific classes. I played DAoC for a little bit and the minstrel made it so we could kill purple level mobs one at a time instead of all of them at once. I think that is the main thing. Get rid of speed questing and bring back MOB difficulty rewards.
Lineage was by far the undisputed king of the MMO genre before WoW. Everquest and Final Fantasy XI couldn't hold a candle to Lineage I and II's numbers. EQ was FAR from the first 3D mmo (Meridian 59 and The Realm share that title). Was it influential? Sure. But most of what it did was already being done by other MMO's before WoW (FFXI, DAoC, AC, UO, Lineage, etc...).
Really loving the latest two videos
Thank you Matt :)
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.
I'm going to watch through the whole video, but I have this feeling you completely missed the mark with this subject. You sound completely oblivious tbh. SoE had their head completely up their ass and HARDCORE EQ PLAYERS went to go to work on blizzard to make wow. There were tons of issues and bugs in EQ that went unaddressed and SoE were extremely arrogant. MANY EverQuest players went to wow because they all weren't close minded and realized wow was extremely well designed. EverQuest was more about immersion. Wow was more of a game with superior class-based gameplay.
lol why would you start with wotlk and not the real classic?
I played Everquest before pvp servers when Guild Warring was the way of PVP. They opened pvp servers with a lvl diff of 5 which made pvp at 60 horrible because of all the 54 pocket heals etc. Then they opened the loot one item but only from inventory not bags and you saw zergs chasing people who were auto running and removing all their gear to bags non stop. Then there was the ghetto of Everquest the place where people only go if they enjoy getting their nuts slammed into door jams...Sullon Zek. The Epic trains and massive pvp off the chain. Finding someone afk at their bind point out of a safe zone=50 something character deleveled to lvl 10 if the wrong group found it. Campoing a corpse until it full dissapeared for people who were truly horrible. A massive amount of people from the PVP servers sat patiently waiting to see what the combined server ruleset was going to be when they decided to combine servers. They Chose Eallos Zek PVP ruleset and at that point about 1300+ of us from various pvp servers said FU EQ and we all went to Stormreaver and split horde/alliance. The next 4 years of pvp were insane, teusday night resets pvp @blackrock mountain. Priest mind controlling people into lava non stop the laughs the tears...priceless.
Bertoxx pre PVP servers one guild named Dark Assassin's Regiment challenged all the big raid guilds to Guild Wars. When both GM's agreed war would commence and PVP was enabled anywhere for the duration of a week between the guilds. If one guild was getting farmed the GM could throw the white flag and end it. Those were some of the best guerilla warfare times in EQ for me. Epic, just porting from wizard to druid spires in our raiding parties finding enemy guild members in their farm spots and comencing the beat downs (tbf corpse runs also lol)
Just some knowledge to pass out from the pvp side of the servers way back when.
The problem with EQ when WoW dropped is the same as it is today. Almost everyone is max lv or very low lv. Almost no mid lv people to play with. So new people would try the game get to like lv 25 and all the sudden you couldn't find a group and you'd be sitting around for hours or days. Wow gave out a 7 or 15 day free trial. I watched my wife play WoW for about 45 minutes before I subbed to it. "OMG! You don't have to sit for 20 minutes doing nothing waiting for your mana to come back. I can just eat out of combat and I'm back to full in a few seconds." In EQ you get a quest and its like go talk to xyz character. Ok you look around the cleric guild and even the paladin guild and can't find the character. Off to the internet. "WTF xyz is deep down in a dark elf city that I'm KOS at! WTF How could anyone ever figure that out with what the quest giver said." And to top it all off after 2 weeks you finish the quest and your exp barely moves. WoW quest "To the north is a pack of wolfs. Slay them and bring me back 5 pelts." Head north and look around a bit and Yup there's the mobs. Finish the quest and ACTULLY get a significant amount of exp. Yeah within a month we both left our high end EQ raid guild to play WoW. It was so much more fun...Until Cata where it promptly fell on it's face and we went back to EQ.
Not sure if it has been said here or not, but the comparison of EQ vs WoW Classic isn't truly fair if you're trying to figure out why people hated WoW at launch compared to EQ. While I commend you on playing WoW Classic vs going straight into WoW Live (ie: the current expansion), WoW at launch was almost nothing like the WoW you get in Classic. They tried to make game play similar to launch, but they kept a lot of the game play mechanics and features that were in the live game, and just distilled it down to as close to an original feeling as possible.
Many of the things you called out in the review are accurate but I think it overlooks some of what made people enjoy WoW over Everquest. My evolution of MMOs ran Ultima Online -> Everquest -> Dark Age of Camelot -> back and forth to Everquest -> Star Wars Galaxies -> World of Warcraft. I played EQ regularly right up until about Gates of Discord / Omens of War. I never really did much raiding, but I was part of one of the biggest guilds on Tarew Marr at the time.
When I started playing WoW in the late beta, and then into live, the graphics (cartoonish as they might be) were overwhelmingly impressive to me. Bright, vibrant, and alive is the best way to compare it to EQ. While EQ zones were extremely flat and barren, every zone in WoW felt alive and lived in and populated, not just by people, but flora, fauna, and insects alike. The quest system, while it was definitely very "hand hold-y", was a welcome addition. For a game called Everquest, there was a significantly noticeable lack of actual quests in the game, and no way to tell if an NPC had something for you to do. You had to rely on constantly hailing every NPC you came across. There was certainly no hand holding in EQ.
After playing EQ, and DAoC, the painful punishment of death (losing xp, losing your level, losing all your gear), WoW was a welcome change of pace. Sure you still had to run back to where your body was if you didn't want to use the
spirit healers, but at least you never risked losing all of your gear, and it only cost you a bit of coin.
Grouping wasn't a requirement to feel like you were accomplishing something, although it was always an option. Again, and you pointed this out in your video, in EQ, you could log in, stand around for an hour or more trying to put together a group to go accomplish something, but then you had to get everyone to the place you were going to hunt, and then hope there was an open camp. WoW "fixed" that by making the content instanced, repeatable, and easy to consume in bitesize servings if you wanted to. Having spent many nights wanting to play EQ, but camping in frustration after four hours of the above mentioned hassle, and then not getting to play, WoW was a welcome change.
I didn't like the split factions very much because I wanted to play a shaman, but my friend wanted to play a paladin, so we didn't get to play what we wanted to play. FWIW, all of that is changed now. In the current live build of the game, you can run dungeon instance cross faction, and even cross server, so you can still do some stuff with your friends even if you are playing different factions, etc. That isn't in place in WoW Classic, though so you wouldn't have seen that.
So, why did some Everquest players hate WoW? I would say it's because WoW made things too easy, and was too appealing, and was splintering the already failing subscriber base by drawing more players away. I think I saw at one point that at PEAK, EQ had something like 500,000 players, which was unheard of in the industry. When EQ launched, Verant figured if they could get 50,000 subscribers total they would be considered a runaway success, and they had over 100,000 subs in the first three months. But by way of comparison, WoW launched with over a million subs, and conservative numbers estimate over 12 million subscribers at peak.
Everquest players saw their community dwindle, and didn't want to lose their game, so they "hated" on the game. In the end though, the last laugh has been Everquest, and DBG. Everquest just announced their 29th expansion, and while they aren't posting the same numbers as they had at their peak, there are still plenty of people playing it daily. I'm one of them. I've been playing EQ (2 accounts), since July of 2020. I came back to EQ because I missed the community, and the sense of accomplishment, and the diversity of how each class plays differently and brings something different to the game, not the same watered down classes with different skins.
I can say I am one of the EQ players that hates WoW. Is it justified? Maybe not. Have I tried WoW and found it lacking? Yes. For me there are two reasons:
1. Dumbing down the genre. I started hearing the signals in 2003, I believe, people not wanting to "work" to achieve something in the game. The attitude of "we paid for the game, so we have the right to see everything without having to do a lot for it". I always had the feeling that WoW gave into that. For me, even now with EQ, I have much more of a sense of accomplishment and pride for doing something in the hobby (what I sometimes call EQ instead of a game).
2. Saturating the MMORPG market. This is with so many products and it is not WoW specific (I actually moved to EQ2), but 2004 was the time that MMORPG market went from "one" game to dozens of different ones. I lost guildies and friends because they went to other games and the feeling was never the same afterward.
Everquest forced us to learn to type. It forced us to learn to interact with people. It forced us to stay vigilant and attentive. EQ had classes that felt powerful for their role, and the original trinity, Tank, Healer, CC. I quit EQ for WoW back in the day. Smoother animations, more fluid gameplay, newer controls and camera controls. It felt better to play at a surface level. However, all of my friends today all these years on will still play EQ with me and start new characters. They won't play WoW. They hate the non-stop hub exclamation mark quest grinding solo play. You literally need NO one to play WoW. Well...that's not why we play MMOs; to need no one.
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 could be wrong but I recall EQ2 starting about a month before WoW.
WoW came along a month or so before EQ2 decided to completely rework classes and how they progressed.
That upset a lot of EQ2 players and resulted in a mass exodus. For my server, it brought us together into a more tight nit group. (That whole struggle bring people that stay together.)
Unfortunately, Sony continued to make bad decisions and ultimately drove their customer away. (Note because WoW was better, but because Sony destroyed their own game trying to compete and make it more like WoW.)
I stuck with EQ2 for years until it basically turned into a solo/duo game due to so few players.
Friends eventually convinced me to move over to WoW as my main MMO, but I was never happy.
Felt like a was playing a child's game on rails. I'm sure a big part of that was due to timing and the majority of people leaving WoW when I finally started playing. :)
Looking forward to Pantheon. Not investing in it until I gets there, but there is hope!
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.
My first MMO was Ultima Online when EQ came out i gave it a try and didn't like it as much as UO. The thing that i didn't like was the class base that you didn't have the customization that UO had. At the time it felt too cookie cutter for me. I went back to UO and didn't move on until Dark Age of Camelot. For me DAoC was a fun mix of PVP and PVE. The one draw back was the lack of customization that UO had. I also played WOW at release and to be honest I didn't like it. When it released you did need to group up to play and you did farm mobs like in EQ. Now I don't know if it was I chose to play on the Horde side over the Alliance, but i only played for the first 2 months and quit and went back to DAoC didn't go back until the Burning Crusade expansion that is when I got hooked. To be honest I never thought that any of the games were bad, I think it just came down to personal preference in the way people liked to play the games. Currently I'm playing New World but no where to the extent that I have played other MMO's. For me I would like to see a game that takes the PVP/PVE aspect of DAoC but combine that with the flexibility of UO.
The difference for me personally was I had been playing EQ for 5 years when Wow launched.
No game with the possible exception of Mario 64 had such a WOW! factor (no pun intended).
The whole EQ experience was just so much fun, it was way too hard very unfriendly and brutal.
But they didn't call it Evercrack! for nothing.
People were supportive and friendly in EQ in WOW they were condescending, childish and abusive in groups. If you weren't born knowing something it was because you were an idiot.
EQ was basically abandoned by the player base and was virtually unplayable so I switched to Wow.
It was similar to EQ but very candy coated a great game and content was able to be played solo, which I liked.
I really missed a lot of the EQ mechanics which felt a lot more enjoyable but did not miss the constant spamming LFG for hours waiting for a group.
As for EQ 2 I didn't like anything about it the whole feel of the game was not EQ made better, but instead it just felt foreign and unenjoyable.
If EQ 2 had been updated to be friendlier like Wow and that had become EQ 2 it would have been wonderful.
What I really missed about EQ was the fear factor of dying and trying to get your stuff back from your corpse. Or being in a raid knowing that as a melee you have no way of leaving unless someone ports you out.
The penalties were so severe it made you think more than twice before you did something stupid. It also highlighted foolish or insane group members over pulling or just doing stupid things.
So by the time you found a group fought for two hours died once you had little to show for 4 hours of work.
But it was truly ground breaking and a wonderful experience.
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.
I finally tried EQ on Oakwynd and got to max level.. And without a doubt WoW in 2004 in a better game in every single aspect. Vanilla WoW still to this day has the best community in any mmorpg, and yeah you won't see it in an expansion server or if you play super late into a classic server now.. But the 2 times I went back to classic in Nost and offical Classic, the community was just amazing. I see where EQ influenced the entire genre, but blizzard do what blizzard do best, they found a genre they wanted more out of and made it insanely good. Just look at the design of WoW, in every single aspect to when you get abilities/the mobs in those areas to how the game leads you.. Hell the tutorials don't say they're tutorials, but they teach you perfectly how to play the game. EQ vanilla has a lot of bad design, and I'm sure they learnt from a lot of it.. But when lvling is sitting around grinding mobs for endless hours, the truth is that its bad. It should be fun, and that experience was not.. Not to mention to farm any mob you had to sit for hours hoping for a respawn for any quest.. Who has that time? lol
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
A graphical downgrade from EQ2? I dunno man, I think even classic WoW looks better than EQ2
I jumped over to WoW when it came out, day 1. I was a diehard EQ player up to that point with some characters having a literal year of playtime. What WoW did expertly was give the player an easy barrier to entry. You could get in, do stuff and not have to sweat the hard stuff. It may of looked cartoony but its caricatures, aesthetic and systems were very easy on the eyes and effort. I enjoyed it up till its first expansion where months of raiding was instantly invalidated but thats another rant for another day. WoW was very much easy mode and thats the charm it had. However it lacked a lot of the personality that came with a harder difficulty and approach. A lot of it only felt skin deep whereas in EQ a lot of the time you had to bleed. Through that you really felt like you had earned something. WoW was a game and EQ felt like life. WoW you could just mess around with and get far where in EQ you really had to put in the time and you felt rewarded. Stuff you worked for meant more and thats the biggest thing I can say between the two. One was a world you lived in and the other you played in. This is to say nothing of the social aspects, friends, family and even serious relationships garnered through EQs archaic systems and difficulty.
EQ is a shell of what it once was and no matter of nostalgia servers or effort will bring it back. Aside from being from a time where it was all like new for a lot of players, EQ has been simplified out of necessity for its lack of playerbase. Mercenaries and experience gain etc. We will never again experience the adventure of running to high pass your first time against the risk of losing it all. Never the wonder of living life as an Iksar and everybody hating your guts but being able to really work to remedy that. WoW and time has taken that from us forever and to me thats the biggest grudge I have. All the good times and nostalgia will never be again largely due to WoW. (And Daybreak and the passing of time) WoW is theoretically a better game but it will forever be a worse game to those who remember EQ at its best.
I've tried playing EQ again time and again over the years. Its not the same anymore. I first played it when I was 18 and now I'm 40. Most of the people I knew have moved on, had families and lived life. A few I knew have passed away. Imagine standing in areas you and your friends once stood and where you consider some of your most fond gaming memories of decades of life, only for them to not be there and the areas to be vacant. Its depressing more than not. The game is empty if you aren't a max level player for the most part and is extremely unfriendly to new players on top of being an old archaically designed game by the times. I will always view EQ as my most loved, favorite game of all time but it can never be what it was to me before WoW. I guess that is where I hold my resentment.
To be bluntly honest, a lot of the critiques of WoW seem to come from people who didn't try it until later expansions when a lot of the Ease of Use tools were implemented. Vanilla and Burning Crusade WoW both very much required you to be social and to build a community and know people. You literally could not dungeon or raid without getting to know people, whether they were in a guild or not. And anyone who thinks Vanilla WoW was an easy time gearing is looking at it in a very weird light. Two items per boss for 40 people with a very realistic chance that those two items wouldn't be for anyone in the raid does not an easy time gearing make.
Now on the art style and graphical side, I can more get those criticisms. I played EQ when it came out and struggled to keep up with it through the years before WoW came out because the gameplay of EQ for me was waaaaay too slow. So for me, when WoW came out it very much filled the gameplay niche I wanted that Everquest hadn't quite been scratching.
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 really enjoyed the video, but I do think your points about raiding ring pretty hollow. Wrath of the Lich King introduced 10 man raiding, which is pretty intimate and every player needs to fully participate and communicate. And then it comes to the "warm body going through the motions" comment, raiding in wow is notably more complex than EQ so even in bigger raiding groups, people will often have specific jobs/plans depending on the boss. I'm not saying it requires the social aspect of EQ, but I think its something that hard to touch on if you haven't experienced one of the experiences youre talking about.
A group for exp design is inherently flawed and always will be. EQ Players are looking at something with a rose colored, it WAS great lens, when the entire industry has moved on with better QoL. Also EQs expansions as you said literally buried themselves. Also I can confirm as someone who played patch 1 with vanilla wow That the best gear (raid gear) WASNT easy to come by. You had maybe one or two pieces to dole out to at least 5 or more of each class. Gear wasn’t easy at all to obtain once you finished the quest gearing. Just my two cents. Much respect for EQ and their players
Here are the reasons as an EQ player why I always hated WoW
- I hate WoW / EQ2 leashed mobs and makes it feel like an on rails experience & fighting felt like a button mashing fest
- Questing was go to (?) Icon, accept, kill X number of mobs and return to get finish. Felt more like a list of chores to complete than a quest.
- Like you mentioned I dont think EQ ever got the recognition or praise it deserved and I held a grudge for a long time about that.
I can acknowledge that WoW was a good game that popularized a genre with streamlined mechanics... itll just never be for me
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.
Wanting a Puller type class implies wanting that spot camping type gameplay. As a ranger of 2001-2004 - no thanks. Spot camping is objectively terrible game design.
Lil story for ya: When wow was set to release the geniuses @Sony decided to combine the PVP servers in EQ to one server with a ruleset to be voted on. OFc the most populated and oldest servers got the vote their way and the new PVP server ZEK was a 5 lvl + or - difference to engage in pvp. A giant portion of us disgruntled players went to wow when it opened and saif FU to Sony. We split into half horde half alliance on Stormreaver and went ham with the most fun pvp ive ever had in video games...
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.
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 hated wow. I tried it out as soon as it was released and it was just far too easy and sterilized, from what I was used too from playing eq. boring classes too. To this day I hate it because it basically altered the trajectory of the mmo space and that's why theres nothing to play thats decent anymore. If they just remade eq up to say... planes of power and added some QOL and better graphics and animations I would play it.
This video basically describes a lot of the differences between Classic and Retail as well as vanilla to WoTLK and especially after Cataclysm. Vanilla was the most social and emphasized the world. You still start in the old world in WoTLK and whatnot but most people are in Northrend for the last 10 levels and of course the endgame. Vanilla gave reasons for higher level players to return to old zones. Every expansion ever since TBC emphasized the new continent rather than the world. Cataclysm revamped the old world and changed a lot of game mechanics. The general consensus in terms of when was most social and immersive is pretty much the same between EQ and WoW, that being Classic and the first couple expansions. Yes, paladin is very autoattack heavy in Classic WoW and you pretty much do what's called seal twisting for your rotation to buff your autoattack and I think it's funny that Nathan Napalm plays paladin a lot in both games even though they're not the same. Necromancer was cut from WoW since the very beginning with the closest classes being warlock and later death knight which are in some ways similar to EQ's necromancer and shadowknight respectively. I agree that it's hard to get things done in EQ. Certain quests and elites are hard to solo in WoW and you definitely form and drop groups more frequently. I did have a static Heroic dungeon group in WoTLK the other night but those are rare. The Yelinak series on this channel reminds me of what has happened to WoTLK's player base and how it became infested with botters, cheaters, gold sellers, elitists, GDKP which has its place but is not a welcoming form of endgame progression if you wanna earn gear rather than buying it, etc. Logging on and hoping you get anything done is how I feel about daily Heroic dungeons and PUG raids personally or even raid attunements in vanilla. Classic Era is equivalent to P99 and the current progression Classic servers (currently WoTLK) are equivalent to TLPs. I hope the next Classic season after Season of Mastery will be kinda like TLPs, rolling through expansions and providing reasonable catch-up mechanics since the pacing of a season is faster than normal servers. Heck, Classic WoW even got Holly Longdale on the team so I guess we'll see. I absolutely love fresh servers on any MMO even though I was such a slow leveler for the first couple of Classic characters I leveled fully. 2½ years on my main since 2019 between vanilla and TBC, almost a year for SoM, and most recently a mere 3½ months for the Classic Era resurgence early this year. It's especially impressive considering vanilla is slower than Wrath even if you don't have Joyous Journeys or heirlooms to boost your XP in Wrath.
Sounds like the EQ community got complacent and liked gate keeping based on mechanics & who you knew. Why couldn't their friends have moved onto a different game together? MMO styles that existed around 2004 are a dead genre because those who grew up with that sort of content are largely grown up & too busy for the grind.
I still play both and prefer EQ over WoW but play more WoW over EQ simply because it's nearly impossible to progress if you don't have a group in EQ. Once you fall behind the leveling curve you are stuck just grinding or spending time trying to make groups. Guilds help but being older with responsibilities I don't have the endless game time I had as a child. In WoW I can log on accomplish progression and do a few dungeons in two hours. EQ needs to catch up to this model in today's time and age as its truly a more adventurous game. I just don't have the time needed to commit to progress through it
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.
@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!
I played WOW but everyone who I new that played it always played on the Horde side. I really didn't like the characters designs or the horde until they got blood elves. But even with that there was not as much diversity with class and race. The graphics are better in WOW and to me even beat EQ2 since it did take a lot more pc power back then to play EQ2. At the end of the day EQ was my first true mmo (I played Phantasy Star online via the Sega Dreamcast first but that was basically an intro).
you didn't get the Vanilla WoW experience-- which was *closer* to what Everquest laid for the foundation of MMOs. You experienced a lot of QoL changes to WoW that weren't part of the original vision.
Still though, WoW was a lot easier than EQ.
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.