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Frost's voice is absolutely perfect for narrating such an epic tale of overcomming impossible odds. And it really shows how great their strategy was that the only way to stop them was for Sony to despawn it.
It's why there are "aspects" of D&D deities (Bahamut and Tiamat for now) that allow players to fight them without risking them destroying the God themselves.
I mean... If I had been tasked to dev the thing and to make it seem like fightable at second glance but undefeatable in practice I'd add code in damage handling that regens its HP back to full if the damage would cause it to drop below 25% or so. (Although maybe not if HP is edited directly by the code of each ability. That would be a software engineering nightmare.)
you can give something stats and make it so it can't be killed. if it drops to X% of health anything and everything that attacks or has attacked it dies instantly and cannot be resurrected or revived.
Virgin looter shooter players: Wah! I spent a month grinding and the loot was trash! Chad Everquest players: Kills unkillable dragon, gets no loot, best day ever.
@@ExileHeretic For real though. As dorky as this story is to 99.9% of the earth's population it's truly gotta be a memorable experience that each and every one of them will treasure for the rest of their lives. Early MMOs were something special
Ironically this is kind of oral history is missing about games in general because very few people care to write it down and remember, but this matters, because it is so human :D Also excellent episode, thanks!
As someone watching the general chat and other channels from the safety of the Plane of Knowledge when it happened, everything described here is true. There's a few minor details that are inaccurate, but that's just splitting hairs. It is told exactly how it played out. 3 days later after all the backlash, Verant Interactive released a statement that they would be resetting the encounter and allowing them to play it out (although they claim they removed the non-agro invisible NPC that was contributing to the damage being done to Kerafyrm.)
EverQuest is probably the most well documented and preserved game ever. The wayback machine has saved a lot of the forums and websites, every patch note has been preserved all the way back to the game's closed beta. The first prototype, multiple alpha and beta builds. Even with all that being the case and the decades-long effort to keep a hold of that stuff, there are still lots of holes and lost information.
As someone who absolutely cannot stand to spend a single solitary second playing most MMOs, this was captivating. At this point I'm pretty convinced I would listen to Frost narrate paint drying.
and most of the greatest surprise events occur because of bugs or players breaking the game (plague was hunter pets getting infected and preserved, and falador massacre was a bug where players in Construction house arenas [enables PVP] who were then kicked from house would keep PVP enabled in non-PVP zones)
@@nolanerckert4515 No doubt! Sony clearly didn't fully understand MMO's and that lack of experience led to them underestimating the players' ability to summon an insane degree of determination and absolute willpower when faced with such an obstacle. They will congregate, coordinate, and cooperate before proceeding to systematically break down and dismantle the challenge or learn with 100% certainty it is literally unbeatable. I've never been into MMO's but I've had friends who played them, such as one guy now who has played EQ2 for like 14 years I think? He even went a step further by leveling his battle mage into a goddamn rampaging beast who could solo raids, something he managed to do by mastering the economy and grinding other characters who could make whatever items the mage would need to become what is essentially a demigod. I'm not exactly sure how impressive this actually is but it sure is fascinating to listen to him talk about the game.
@@nolanerckert4515 What made this special is that such events had never been done before in video game history. The first guild to awaken him didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't know that they were about to witness the first example of massive online game world being permanently altered by their actions, and it would take a few more servers to awaken him to realize that doing so was actually detrimental to everyone in the long run.
Frost: "...but what Dulux didn't factor into their predictions was a phenomenon - unheard-of by all but the most hallowed tiers of chemistry's elite - known simply as 'Diffusion'. They watched, helpless and horrified, as the solvent they had so carefully blended in with their precisely calibrated secret sauce of proprietary polymers and pigments, evaporated into the air, leaving nothing but a hardened shell, irrevocably bonded to its previously unblemished substrate, thus altering its appearance forever. My throat gets dry just thinking about it... or maybe I just need a drink. Until next time..."
"Overzealous players making a tank resurrecting conga line" is a sentence I'll never hear again. And I'm a little bit sad for it... Keep doing this, whatever it is, you got me hooked
All my screenshots from the two times we had to do it were covered in "so and so is resurrected by divine intervention. That's all you could read lol. And for the poster above it was absolutely a planned strategy as it was used on all of the raids. The untold but truly impressive thing is that our 3 guilds were forced into doing the event as some people were purposely attempting to wake him so the sleeper gear wouldn't drop anymore but when we found out like what 150ish people called out of work to make it happen....all to have a gm reset the dragon. I haven't finished the video yet so maybe it was already mentioned but eq2 was already rolling out ads and the artwork was published for the box sets, with the sleeper wakening and changing the world. They had to redo all of it including the "plot" of eq2 because we had our protest and were told the second time they wouldn't interfere and we won. Good effin times. Long live AD
@@bikerboysrus1 My toon was known as Yuffie, a human Monk. I was watching the game chats from the Plane of Knowledge when it happened. I was cheering you on! Yeah, it was weird how Skyshrine had been revamped to reflect his awakening, but he was still sleeping on our server. I remember getting a couple of Prismatic fistwraps for Yuffie. Even farmed the warders a couple times along with the rest of the server rotation. Good times!
I wouldn't know how to have felt back then since I was 10 during this event, but hearing the boss your fighting spending hours on gets removed mid fight from a publisher/developers because you were doing too good would crack my brain.
Keep in mind they did this without a reliable player wide voice chat like discord. I've been in guilds that can barely manage to clear end game zones with full voice chat.
I remember doing an EQ raid a couple years after this where we had 1 group in the raid who had to take care of a crucial mechanic just in a Skype room, and IIRC we couldn't even have the entire group in it due to channel size limitations. Even when I retired from raiding voice chat was more just a luxury hangout thing that was starting to get used, we never used it for raid calls.
@@TheFloon Yeah, when I was a raid leader, I spoke in ALL CAPS for raid orders. It was a lot of fun pre-setting up the shouts before the raid for different outcomes. We would bribe a lvl 60 cleric and necromancer to be ready for corpse runs and go kill that big red dragon.
Voice chat was the worst thing to happen to MMOs It's actually way more fun to raid when people trust you to know your fucking job and aren't constantly nagging about stupid shit. Discord is also chinese spyware, so there's that.
Kind of like the guy who grinded to level 99 in the first dungeon of _Final Fantasy VII._ Took him 500 or so hours of mind-numbing repetitive activity and all for no other reason than being the guy who did it.
@@meapickle No idea what kind of ingame items Everquest had, but if Sony had time to add an exp drop on death they could've at least added a "I killed the unkillable dragon and all I got was this t-shirt" kind of item drop.
@@acoupleofschoesthe boss didnt drop xp, the admins themselves gifted the players the bountiful xp because the dragon didnt even have xp coded in lmao
Learning about Sony's reaction to it all is pretty damn hilarious, too! It didn't come off as them being malicious in any way despite the cheating accusations, because they seemed to just not fully understand how an MMO's player base can become unified and prove capable of displaying an impossible degree of single-minded determination. They will come for the biggest, "insurmountable" challenge, they will find it, and they will kill it. They absolutely will not stop!!!
I didn't know this story! Wow, that was so, so fun to listen to. When you said they despawned Kerafyrm, I said "you motherfuckers!" Man, that was cool. Thanks for this new series, crew! You all rock 💙
As an OG Everquest fan who still plays classic Everquest to this day (on an unofficial server), I never would have expected the Escapist to cover the story of Kerafyrm.
Kerafyrm's Awakening was the first instance of a massive multiplayer game world being permanently altered by the player's own actions. The concept hadn't been done before. You look at games like Fortnite and they change things up on a regular basis like when they did that Rocket launch event way back when. This is small-scale in execution compared to other events like WoW's plague, but none of the players knew what was going to happen. Much like how a player in Ultima Online was eventually sued for finding a way to kill Lord British, the guilds on Rallos Zek were determined to prove it could be done.
If I had to name 2 others... the council of six was unbeatable for months until they relented and nerfed it, and there was a monster on ff11 that took more then half a day and multiple free companies to kill. It was nerfed after that like wise.
@@ultimatecalibur EVE Online alone has probably had about 1000 legendary events that'd be a good fit here. I hope for April Fools 2024 we get Sleeps-On-Bridges though.
@@rushi5638 I know there was a big battle that caused something in the $100,000s of losses but for a Legend story, there was story from years ago where a player named Bobby (I think) had a years long scam planned for a corporation called Titans4U where he stole like $50,000 worth of stuff. Now THAT is legendary
I play on zek...wasn't around when this happened, but have always heard stories about it. You did a great job with this! Some of the old players are still around, too. I'm sure they're going to enjoy watching this.
Honestly, spunds like the kind of legend I'd have stuck around for. Being a tank main means soaking damage for everyone else and I've done a rez conga line for the Odin field boss in FFXIV.
A little background that was glossed over. The Sleeper's part was to be awakened during Scars of Velious to enact a quest in the Secrets of Faydwer expansion (if I remember right). His script was to awaken, be invincible, send out a zone killing AoE, and 'fly away'. During the Shadows of Luclin expansion his script was broken which took away his invulnerability and something with his 'flying away', but by that time the only servers that had yet to awaken him were the 3 pvp ones (Tallon Zek, Vallon Zek, and Rallos Zek). Tallon and Vallon were both team pvp and eventually got their stuff together enough to awaken him and noticed he was no longer invulnerable. That let the guilds on Rallos Zek better understand how to keep the Sleeper from despawning and do actual damage.
the corrupted blood was just an exploit for a mechanic that was never intended to be in the open world. It wasn't something you could beat. And no one DID beat it. you just died.
@@MaNameizJeff Doesn't matter the corrupted blood incident was legendary enough that governments actually studied it to see how it can effect real life pandemic models.
I loved this story time so much. I’m getting on in years but was a WoW geek from 2005 on. I never played EverQuest, but my husband, who I met playing WoW was BIG into it before we met. Would love to hear you narrate other fun old gaming stories!
Everquest is much better as a retelling than experiencing live. There is a reason WoW became a mmo juggernaut: it basically took every good thing from EQ and removed the mountains of unfun shit that surrounded those pearls of fun.
What an amazing story. Also fucking shame on the suits for trying to pull it. You have a once in a lifetime opportunity for amazing organic storytelling and you drop it? What a bunch of sooks. This stuff is great. I'm not into MMOs but loved this. keep up the good work Frost!
Yeah it was pretty lame. 3 days later they admitted they were going to give the guilds another try and just let it happen. A few weeks later, Game-wide messages across all servers played out a story telling of the armies traveling across the frozen snow-covered Eastern Wastes of Velious and entering into the Sleeper's Tomb, then killing he warders and eventually killing him.
If you're going to end a fictional world to progress the storyline, the best thing to do is have the players work to mitigate the damage instead of stopping it entirely. See FFXIV 1.0 or Exandria Unlimited: Calamity for examples of how to pull it off successfully.
The details of this video aren't *entirely* accurate. In the game's lore, Kerafyrm is a Prismatic dragon (not a dragon of pure energy, but I'm splitting hairs). He grew up to be a great general among the dragon armies, but started growing unstable and wanting to raze the world and bring about a new age. The other dragons managed to subdue him and put him into stasis. His awakening saw him storm through the dragon city of Skyshrine and killing the city's leader Lord Yelinak before he flew off over to the Temple of Veeshan and rampaged against the dragons there. From that point, he flew off into parts unknown and the game world kept moving on with its conflicts and whatnot. Skyshrine was eventually revamped where four new Crusaders took up the mission of subduing him and becoming the new four Warders to keep him asleep, but they never get the chance to do so. It's not to say that his awakening was going to bring about the complete destruction of Norrath (the evil God of War Rallos Zek would later try to do that by using a gigantic magical Nuke, but would also be thwarted), but he was completely opposed to the current dragons and their rules and wants to start a new age of dragons at the extermination of the lesser races.
Amazing story, never going to have that again. As MMO's probably don't make raid bosses like that anymore (no plans for "unkillable" bosses) . Also thank you for making me realise that Dabarella has Heterochromia, one blue eye and one green eye, that's neat
Everquest was my first MMO as a teen, well before the days of WoW. I loved my days spent wandering the deserts and wastelands around Freeport, the snows of Everfrost and the jungles of Kunark. Loved this little bit of nostalgia from 20 years ago. Thank you!
The finite health pool I can assume to be engine limitations. The death animation is what I'm curious about. Maybe it's that every skeleton has shared animations, so if there are other creatures with that body, they all play the same animation on death?
Never got into EverQuest back in the day but it looked like fun. My only memory of it is seeing the guy who had his character deleted by his wife lose his shit.
I feel like fricken' Elrond saying, "I was there, 3000 years ago..." Although I was on Saryn, not their server, it was the talk of the entire community for weeks after.
I played a halfling druid on the Povar server. When Sleepers Tomb was finally cracked it was one of the most immersive experiences I ever had in 30 years of gaming. Such a badass story.
I really loved this. It was inspiring, dramatic and taught a lesson. When people come together we can kick some ass, someone always want to shit in your cereal, and sometimes even high aspirations and goals can still result in nothing.
Great telling of a fun story. It'd be nice if modern MMOs realized that the shared world leading to collaborative experiences is what they were all about and not the single player stories crammed into always online games like they are now.
There were a *few* minor details that aren't entirely accurate from this (Kerafyrm is a Prismatic dragon, not made of pure energy, but I know I'm just splitting hairs here), but this is pretty much how it went. Shadowknights and Wizards noticed that their respective Harm Touch and Manaburn abilities helped take down his health, but all other class's direct damage and damage over time spells were completely resisted. They had exceptionally long cooldowns, but both abilities were designated at unresistable. The video describes how killing the Warders was supposed to bring about better loot after the event, but this wasn't entirely true. The Prismatic weapons that the Warders dropped ended up continuing to be some of the absolute most powerful weapons anyone could obtain, well into multiple expansions that followed in the years after. Normally when an expansion brings about a level increase and higher level gear, you expect that to be superior-- but the Prismatic weapons were just that powerful that they remained viable for DPS output well into the raid zones of later expansions. As long as one of the 4 Warders was kept alive, all would be good. The other 3 would eventually respawn after a few days, and a sizable population of the game was able to get these weapons. The gear that eventually replaced after the event were essentially nerfed versions-- they were not terrible, but not worth using in later expansions. This is what made the Prismatic weapons so valuable. Stynkfyst and his PK guild wanted to ruin it for everyone on a server where griefing others and ruining it for everyone was EXPECTED, and yet this was the last server at the time that persisted and kept him asleep (All of the footage from this video came from more recent servers that were created after this event and had better gear to survive the encounter). His guild tried, but failed, being wiped out by the last Warder who was still up. I watched the chat channels from the Plane of Knowledge when it happened. I had my Prismatic weapons for both hands, and there was an acceptance of the server finally ready to move forward with the storyline. The developers had already revamped other zones to reflect the storyline of Kerafyrm's awakening-- This made things awkward on RZ since Skyshrine now had the four new Warders who were training up to replace the old ones who had been slain--- who were still just chilling in Sleeper's Tomb and keeping him asleep. lol.
All Sony had to do was say: "Valiant Heroes of the Lands, you outdid yourself and prevailed against all odds. Keraphim vanished, this time of his own accord (admin action) and has learned a lesson, that creation will stay its course, even against a godlike being such as itself. And yet...with him taking his leave, a new threat, unseen and unheard of, held at bay so far only by the presence of Keraphims magic, will fill this world with a new kind of terror. A horror from beyond will emerge, prepare yourselves" aka: "you guys done did it now, we have nothing, but with your commitment, you have triggered something...we will have to make new content for the game because you defeated what we did not think you could". That´s all it would have taken to validate the players efforts and buy themselves time. Instead of doing a business move all they had to do was play alongside the players.
Also if people wonder why MMO golden age was a thing, this. Yes, these days it is just a theme park for most - with few exceptions like EvE Online - but people dedicated time to their communities and got rewarded with stories to remember.
Holy shit guys, this is fantastic. I don't think the escapist has put out content this great since the day it signed Yahtzee. No offense Yahtz, I have bought all your books on physical and audiobook, but this is probably the best content I have seen from the escapist in years. I am so excited to see where you guys take this series and Frost your voice and delivery is on a whole other level. I am more than excited to follow this series as long as it will go on and I hope to bug him too tell him I'm a big fan while Yahtz and Marty are talking in a podcast:)
Thats the biggest slap to the face with that ending, and makes a lot of sense to be honest. Of course it wouldn't havr any loot, the creators never planned for it to be beaten so why would the code loot into it.
I knew about the story but I didn't know that last part. I just thought Sony made Kerafyrm invincible or immune to anything and prevented anyone from killing it. It ended up being a happier ending after all.
They didn't have the technical ability to make it actually invincible, so they figured they would just make it so insanely powerful that nobody would survive long enough to put up a fight. They didn't account for the playerbase's sheer determination.
Personal question from someone who never played EQ, what was the in world/universe reason for awakening the sleeper? Like how did the characters and people in the game world justify awakening armageddon? Or was it classic MMO type deal of "loot".
From a story standpoint, you could say us mortals royally messed things up by meddling with things we knew nothing about, as we quite often do. From a gameplay perspective, it had never been done before. The idea of a game-world changing event had not existed before EQ came around. Fortnite now has game-changing events on a common basis, but back then, it had never been done before. The first guild to awaken him didn't know what was going to happen. It was curiosity as well as another boss to possibly fight and farm. Boy, were they wrong when they found out. Both Everquest and Everquest 2 have had storylines that directly addressed how us "mortal adventurers" have unleashed destruction upon the world simply because we desire new riches and strengths. A later storyline in EverQuest would have us raiding the Plane of Time, killing physical manifestations of the very Gods themselves, in an effort to unlock a prisoner who knew the very secrets to becoming a God themself. The Goddess of Magic, Druzzil Ro, stepped in and reversed time to right before the Plane of Time was invaded, because the universe itself would cease to exist if hundreds, thousands, millions of mortals became gods and irresponsibly started using their chaotic newfound powers. This event actually ended up creating EverQuest 2's alternate timeline, and the two have intersected in the storylines since. Doctor Who Timey Whimey stuff.
Or multiple, with each held off by that deity/eldritch entity's opposing factions. The ultimate endgame is finding a way to awaken and protect the world raid boss until it destroys the spawn point of the others, winning the server for that cultist faction. Then you could have other mechanics, such as two or more of these being fighting it out Kaiju style, because after the first was being summoned everyone was trying to stop that and left an opening for another faction to summon their world ending boss. Maybe even have a mechanic where after one faction as "won", other factions might still be able to seal the boss away, or those cultists that serve the winning being can perform actions that can subtly aid another server in summoning that world boss's incarnation of that winning entity.
I played eq from 2002-2012 and I was online when both fights were happening, and the subsequent systemwide message a day or two later. Truly an incredible achievement. I miss the old days of EQ, an d while I'll likely never go back due to the state of the game I'll still always have that itch.
The video did say there were other dragon bosses, so it probably just used one of theirs. I would assume the devs made Kerafyrm by basing him off the assets of another dragon boss or some sort of dragon preset.
Sleeper's tomb is something I will never forget playing for the rest of my gaming life. We actually had a GM friend of our guild teleport us around the tomb when only about 7 people in the guild had keys. We couldn't really do much at the time, but it was a really unique experience. Also, it was actually kind of common for certain fights to have a team dedicated to "first aid" duties. Usually one person to drag corpses back to a safe spot with clerics ressing and maybe a shaman/enchanter to rebuff, and a bard to be mana battery.
I wonder if the game's story ever took that into account. It must be strange for the world killing dragon to be prevented its rampage, only for the damage to still be done
You could always just flavor it as the dragon going "Man, fuck this. Why am I wasting my time here on you assholes? I'm just gonna leave and go burn down some cities now" lol
A game-wide announcement across all servers played out a few days later detailing how the guilds gathered together and killed him, but the actual game's storyline was unchanged. It was part of the story for him to awaken and go off on a rampage. He would later return as the final raid boss of a later expansion, and played as the overarching storyline for the good majority of Everquest 2's own storyline.
Absolutely loved this series, I started withthe EVE one as I'm most familiar with it.. but Jumped on the next two videos instantly. I have heard vague stories in Everquest, but nothng rich and full of detail like this! I really hope this becomes a long standing series as there really are so many stories in & around games since the very beginning! Thank you so much for working on a fun way to archive some of these really epic &/or interesting stories!
It makes total sense for Kerafyrm to not drop anything. Rolling for Loot was the way of the day back then, and having 300+ people trying to decide who gets the 1 whatever super weapon? HA! Not happening. God................ I don't want to go back to P99 for a "similar enough experience", but MAN adventuring through Norrath during the time of the original 3 continents back in 1999 was so amazing... As long as no one called your phone while you were online. Lag during the days of dialup was a CUNT. Not a bitch, a CUNT.
Heh yeah the video just ends, but it's true. Kerafyrm's corpse didn't have any loot in it. When a body has no loot, it has a decay timer of 30 seconds. The guilds had to quickly take their screenshots when the raid leader looked in the corpse and realized there was nothing there. If he left the loot window, the corpse would poof. 30 seconds later, it did, but the guilds proved that this unkillable dragon indeed could be.
@@DRCEQ I guess at that point, putting in over 7 hours of raiding and overturning an executive decision from Sony, the loot wasn't even the point anymore. Now we have this incredible story that would fit right in with mythological tales.
Old EQ lore was as high as the Evercrack name would suggest. There was one dude who was tasked by the gods to teach living races things because spreading knowledge is awesome He taught a bunch of lizard people necromancy and military tactics and it kinda caused a bunch of bad things to happen He was then put in prison and the God was like "yeah OK so I said spread knowledge in all of its conceivable forms, but not THAT knowledge" And by TIME PRISON I meant "In order to get the guy out of jail, the actual gods your character worshiped will try to stop you. Themselves. As in, you murder your own god to get there".
Modern MMORPG players have no idea how punitive Everquest was. Raids needed 72 players, lasted 6-8hours for a couple of items to share among everybody. I had to raid every day without reward to be allowed to join the top raiding guild of my server back in the day. I still remember having to contract other raiding guild to recover bodies and equipment from botched "Plane of Fear" raids. In the lore, after being awakened Kerafyrm "the No-Longer-Sleeper" blew up the moon of Luclin to flex and went after the dragon goddess Veeshan... He was not meant to be killed indeed !
I was standing in Shadowhaven just near the zone in from Nexus when I saw the Yellow text : BROADCAST message to all of the servers from the GM's giving congratulations to the adventurers for their victory. I was playing a monk on the Quellious server at the time. Now I currently play on the Time locked progression server called Mischief, the server is currently on the Secrets of Faydwer expansion now where Kerafyrm is the final end game raid boss. So much Nostalgia and fun.
The cleric epic weapon of the time has/had a clickable proc which would resurrect the target with 96% of lost experience restored; this took ten seconds and cost no mana. Experience lost from a single death was, as I recall, equivalent to a full level at level 50, which was less than a full level at the level 60 cap of the time, but if you're losing 4% of a level hundreds of times it starts to hurt. Of course, it made the clerics' jobs pretty easy, as basically their job was to chain-cast their resurrection proc. Given that the healing meta of the time was chain healing (each person casts Complete Heal in turn at a specified interval) this would probably have been a welcome change from their usual job - still boring, but less stressful - and more sustainable, since the mana cost of complete heal was relatively high for its time (if dirt cheap by later standards). It's probably the availability of the clickie epic that made this possible, since a large enough group of clerics could rez people indefinitely - if they were willing to eat the 4% experience loss. There was also an AA (Alternate Advancement) rez that restored EVERYTHING - full health, full mana, full experience, everything but active buffs - but it had a ruinously long cooldown.
How amazing would it have been if the dragon dropped a unique, unduplicable, useless kazoo named "TEST_ITEM" and only one player could pick it up... And this was a pvp server.
Conquest, formerly Soul Assassins, were the ones that first used the ramps to avoid the AoE, hence they were all Banned, at least any corpses in the zone were. There is a video of it. Server: Lanys T'Vyl. I was there for it. After the ban they went to Dark Age of Camelot, which was just released and proceeded to get the whole guild lvl capped 50 in 2 weeks, heh so developers had to add the first expac and increase the lvl cap to 60, Itzlegend, Rurog, Diirk, Kestui and dozens more were a small guild that did Epic things!
Great storytelling! I really felt that heart-dropping dread and outrage when they despawned the dragon, really captivating. I'm a little too young to have been an active player during the early days of MMORPGS but these stories really make me feel like we've lost something. Don't get me wrong, I like modern MMOs fine as games, I'd even say I love them, but they feel sort of overdocumented & disconnected in a way that makes them less interesting. It doesn't feel like, 20 or 30 years from now, there will be a lot of stories of this calibre to tell to the youngins from our MMOs today--but maybe I'm wrong, I'm sure it's hard to recognise history when you're living through it
I hate PvP, and usually hate PvP players. But this story, that I learned years ago, instilled the primary reason I hate them. I fear nothing more than organized PvP players. They are the Lawful Evil, the Eve Online emperors. And they are Rallos Zek, who kill the unkillable.
Developer: Here's this immortal dragon god that's unkillable. Player: Can it bleed? Yes! Can we get its health down? Yes!! Alright, that's all we need to know. It's time to no life this so-called god.
WoW may have popularized MMO's and gotten millions into them as addictions, but people were keeling over their laptops long before then playing Everquest. Would love an episode on FFXIV and the disastrous 1.0 launch, only for them to gradually turn it into one of the top MMO's to this day!
I once played a game called "Duke of Aladda" that had a slight flaw in its program ... one that allowed me to play one encounter over and over again until my army had leveled up from the Goonies to the Avengers. Then we left that encounter and started making like Godzilla. I mention this because what the EverQuest guys did to that dragon-god reminds me a lot of what I used to do with my Duke of Aladda army: Zerg Rush the foe, get beaten off, then Zerg Rush him again. Rinse, repeat, until ever so slowly the foe's overwhelming might begins to erode. Then ...
So...those guardian dragons re-spawned, right? If not, the inevitable sabotaging of a server to do improbable quests with no reward, rather than leaving it alone for a goldmine of loot is disheartening. This looks like what Skyrim's Alduin was purported to be.
Came here for the original story on Lanys T'Vyl where Soul Assassins Itzlegend and Ketsui spawned the dragon by figuring out a way to complete heal in a rotation, then were all immediately banned for "cheating" even though the encounter was so badly unfinished that Kerafyrm spawned in as a Human Monk model. Cheers to the real heroes. Rallos Zek story was pretty cool too, though.
We hope you enjoy the second episode of The Stuff of Legends! New episodes will drop every other Monday, and you can get a week of Early Access and support the show directly via Patreon or TH-cam Memberships!
Very much so
Do the Assassination of Lord British from Ultima Online please!
😍😎
This was sick, keep em coming.
the MMO pandemic would be a great episode
Frost's voice is absolutely perfect for narrating such an epic tale of overcomming impossible odds. And it really shows how great their strategy was that the only way to stop them was for Sony to despawn it.
Agreed
Oh man, this series is amazing! Keep making more please! I never even heard of this story before but what an epic saga
Easily my third favourite series in Escapist, after ZP and EP.
If you give it stats... people will kill it. This is a golden rule in any game or DnD campaign.
"If it has hit points, we can kill it." (Read in Austrian accent.)
It's why there are "aspects" of D&D deities (Bahamut and Tiamat for now) that allow players to fight them without risking them destroying the God themselves.
If it can bleed, it can die
I mean... If I had been tasked to dev the thing and to make it seem like fightable at second glance but undefeatable in practice I'd add code in damage handling that regens its HP back to full if the damage would cause it to drop below 25% or so. (Although maybe not if HP is edited directly by the code of each ability. That would be a software engineering nightmare.)
you can give something stats and make it so it can't be killed. if it drops to X% of health anything and everything that attacks or has attacked it dies instantly and cannot be resurrected or revived.
Virgin looter shooter players: Wah! I spent a month grinding and the loot was trash!
Chad Everquest players: Kills unkillable dragon, gets no loot, best day ever.
No amount of premium currency can buy the prestige of being in the army that killed an immortal dragon.
@@thrownstair
Chinese whales: "Wait, what?... "
For glory and a guaranteed spot in Valhalla. No loot can buy it.
They'll be singing songs of their battle for all time.
@@ExileHeretic For real though. As dorky as this story is to 99.9% of the earth's population it's truly gotta be a memorable experience that each and every one of them will treasure for the rest of their lives. Early MMOs were something special
@@PlebNC Why Chinese? Pretty sure the whales from all other demographics would have the same reaction.
Ironically this is kind of oral history is missing about games in general because very few people care to write it down and remember, but this matters, because it is so human :D Also excellent episode, thanks!
As someone watching the general chat and other channels from the safety of the Plane of Knowledge when it happened, everything described here is true. There's a few minor details that are inaccurate, but that's just splitting hairs. It is told exactly how it played out. 3 days later after all the backlash, Verant Interactive released a statement that they would be resetting the encounter and allowing them to play it out (although they claim they removed the non-agro invisible NPC that was contributing to the damage being done to Kerafyrm.)
@@DRCEQ i would have asked for the name of that npc if namechanging was possible, IF i had been one of the 300 amd changed my name to it out of spite
EverQuest is probably the most well documented and preserved game ever. The wayback machine has saved a lot of the forums and websites, every patch note has been preserved all the way back to the game's closed beta. The first prototype, multiple alpha and beta builds. Even with all that being the case and the decades-long effort to keep a hold of that stuff, there are still lots of holes and lost information.
These are the legends of our time
As someone who absolutely cannot stand to spend a single solitary second playing most MMOs, this was captivating. At this point I'm pretty convinced I would listen to Frost narrate paint drying.
most popular MMOs have great events, like WOW's plague or runescape's falador massacre.
and most of the greatest surprise events occur because of bugs or players breaking the game (plague was hunter pets getting infected and preserved, and falador massacre was a bug where players in Construction house arenas [enables PVP] who were then kicked from house would keep PVP enabled in non-PVP zones)
@@nolanerckert4515 No doubt! Sony clearly didn't fully understand MMO's and that lack of experience led to them underestimating the players' ability to summon an insane degree of determination and absolute willpower when faced with such an obstacle. They will congregate, coordinate, and cooperate before proceeding to systematically break down and dismantle the challenge or learn with 100% certainty it is literally unbeatable.
I've never been into MMO's but I've had friends who played them, such as one guy now who has played EQ2 for like 14 years I think? He even went a step further by leveling his battle mage into a goddamn rampaging beast who could solo raids, something he managed to do by mastering the economy and grinding other characters who could make whatever items the mage would need to become what is essentially a demigod. I'm not exactly sure how impressive this actually is but it sure is fascinating to listen to him talk about the game.
@@nolanerckert4515 What made this special is that such events had never been done before in video game history. The first guild to awaken him didn't know what was going to happen. They didn't know that they were about to witness the first example of massive online game world being permanently altered by their actions, and it would take a few more servers to awaken him to realize that doing so was actually detrimental to everyone in the long run.
Frost: "...but what Dulux didn't factor into their predictions was a phenomenon - unheard-of by all but the most hallowed tiers of chemistry's elite - known simply as 'Diffusion'. They watched, helpless and horrified, as the solvent they had so carefully blended in with their precisely calibrated secret sauce of proprietary polymers and pigments, evaporated into the air, leaving nothing but a hardened shell, irrevocably bonded to its previously unblemished substrate, thus altering its appearance forever. My throat gets dry just thinking about it... or maybe I just need a drink. Until next time..."
"Overzealous players making a tank resurrecting conga line" is a sentence I'll never hear again. And I'm a little bit sad for it... Keep doing this, whatever it is, you got me hooked
The best part was, this wasn't a planned strategy beforehand. They adapted and took advantage of what was happening in real time. Mightilty impressed!
All my screenshots from the two times we had to do it were covered in "so and so is resurrected by divine intervention. That's all you could read lol. And for the poster above it was absolutely a planned strategy as it was used on all of the raids. The untold but truly impressive thing is that our 3 guilds were forced into doing the event as some people were purposely attempting to wake him so the sleeper gear wouldn't drop anymore but when we found out like what 150ish people called out of work to make it happen....all to have a gm reset the dragon. I haven't finished the video yet so maybe it was already mentioned but eq2 was already rolling out ads and the artwork was published for the box sets, with the sleeper wakening and changing the world. They had to redo all of it including the "plot" of eq2 because we had our protest and were told the second time they wouldn't interfere and we won. Good effin times. Long live AD
@@bikerboysrus1 My toon was known as Yuffie, a human Monk. I was watching the game chats from the Plane of Knowledge when it happened. I was cheering you on!
Yeah, it was weird how Skyshrine had been revamped to reflect his awakening, but he was still sleeping on our server. I remember getting a couple of Prismatic fistwraps for Yuffie. Even farmed the warders a couple times along with the rest of the server rotation. Good times!
Come on kill that dragon baby do the conga I know you can't control this raid any longa
I know this line Yugioh. A legitimate meta strategy is an endless conga line of self replacing assholes.
This series just might be my new favourite on the channel.
Try one of Manykudos’s videos, he covers similars event quite often.
I wouldn't know how to have felt back then since I was 10 during this event, but hearing the boss your fighting spending hours on gets removed mid fight from a publisher/developers because you were doing too good would crack my brain.
Keep in mind they did this without a reliable player wide voice chat like discord. I've been in guilds that can barely manage to clear end game zones with full voice chat.
I remember doing an EQ raid a couple years after this where we had 1 group in the raid who had to take care of a crucial mechanic just in a Skype room, and IIRC we couldn't even have the entire group in it due to channel size limitations. Even when I retired from raiding voice chat was more just a luxury hangout thing that was starting to get used, we never used it for raid calls.
hardcore@@TheFloon
@@TheFloon Yeah, when I was a raid leader, I spoke in ALL CAPS for raid orders. It was a lot of fun pre-setting up the shouts before the raid for different outcomes. We would bribe a lvl 60 cleric and necromancer to be ready for corpse runs and go kill that big red dragon.
we all used ventrillo back then.
Voice chat was the worst thing to happen to MMOs
It's actually way more fun to raid when people trust you to know your fucking job and aren't constantly nagging about stupid shit.
Discord is also chinese spyware, so there's that.
What a surprisingly inspiring and demoralizing story
Kind of like the guy who grinded to level 99 in the first dungeon of _Final Fantasy VII._ Took him 500 or so hours of mind-numbing repetitive activity and all for no other reason than being the guy who did it.
"The most legendary raid boss in all MMO history didn't drop any loot." 🤣🤣🤣
The best part is that it makes sense. It wasn't meant to die. Why would they bother coding that in
@@meapickle No idea what kind of ingame items Everquest had, but if Sony had time to add an exp drop on death they could've at least added a "I killed the unkillable dragon and all I got was this t-shirt" kind of item drop.
@@acoupleofschoesthe boss didnt drop xp, the admins themselves gifted the players the bountiful xp because the dragon didnt even have xp coded in lmao
Perhaps the loot was all the friends we made along the way.
Learning about Sony's reaction to it all is pretty damn hilarious, too! It didn't come off as them being malicious in any way despite the cheating accusations, because they seemed to just not fully understand how an MMO's player base can become unified and prove capable of displaying an impossible degree of single-minded determination. They will come for the biggest, "insurmountable" challenge, they will find it, and they will kill it. They absolutely will not stop!!!
I didn't know this story! Wow, that was so, so fun to listen to. When you said they despawned Kerafyrm, I said "you motherfuckers!"
Man, that was cool. Thanks for this new series, crew! You all rock 💙
Don't give things numerical stats if you want them to live. Any finite number is an explicit challenge.
Unless your system can handle infeasibly large numbers with only small amounts of damage being possible. I'm talking in the quadrillions or higher.
@@ashurean It's still finite. Challenge will be accepted.
As an OG Everquest fan who still plays classic Everquest to this day (on an unofficial server), I never would have expected the Escapist to cover the story of Kerafyrm.
Whoa, people still run unofficial servers for old MMOs? That's very cool
i want to find an unofficial server for tibia
@@MissPoplarLeaf oh it's the best. Project 1999 man. Thousands of people playing.
What a bizarre footnote in the history of MMO’s. Really engaging and interesting story.
Kerafyrm's Awakening was the first instance of a massive multiplayer game world being permanently altered by the player's own actions. The concept hadn't been done before. You look at games like Fortnite and they change things up on a regular basis like when they did that Rocket launch event way back when. This is small-scale in execution compared to other events like WoW's plague, but none of the players knew what was going to happen.
Much like how a player in Ultima Online was eventually sued for finding a way to kill Lord British, the guilds on Rallos Zek were determined to prove it could be done.
If I had to name 2 others... the council of six was unbeatable for months until they relented and nerfed it, and there was a monster on ff11 that took more then half a day and multiple free companies to kill. It was nerfed after that like wise.
A good old legend to talk about for this series is “The Falador Massacre” I remember hearing rumors about it when I was a kid
Some other Legendary MMO events to talk about are WoW's Corrupted Blood Incident and FFXI's campaigns to kill Absolute Virtue and Pandemonium Warden.
@@ultimatecalibur EVE Online alone has probably had about 1000 legendary events that'd be a good fit here. I hope for April Fools 2024 we get Sleeps-On-Bridges though.
@@rushi5638 I know there was a big battle that caused something in the $100,000s of losses but for a Legend story, there was story from years ago where a player named Bobby (I think) had a years long scam planned for a corporation called Titans4U where he stole like $50,000 worth of stuff. Now THAT is legendary
The fally massacre was truly a legendary event. I joined Runescape too late to enjoy the golden age of mmos :(
I play on zek...wasn't around when this happened, but have always heard stories about it. You did a great job with this! Some of the old players are still around, too. I'm sure they're going to enjoy watching this.
come to project 1999, current EQ is nothing like this story
This story is enthralling!!! Love these stories and can't wait to learn more about amazing niche gaming moments
Honestly, spunds like the kind of legend I'd have stuck around for.
Being a tank main means soaking damage for everyone else and I've done a rez conga line for the Odin field boss in FFXIV.
this is why people liked immersive MMOs in the past - second life, work even, but this is something you remember for the rest of the life.
I liked the first episode but this.... was.... BETTER! Really great, I look forward to the next episode
I love how stories from MMOs can be told with such drama.
A little background that was glossed over. The Sleeper's part was to be awakened during Scars of Velious to enact a quest in the Secrets of Faydwer expansion (if I remember right). His script was to awaken, be invincible, send out a zone killing AoE, and 'fly away'. During the Shadows of Luclin expansion his script was broken which took away his invulnerability and something with his 'flying away', but by that time the only servers that had yet to awaken him were the 3 pvp ones (Tallon Zek, Vallon Zek, and Rallos Zek). Tallon and Vallon were both team pvp and eventually got their stuff together enough to awaken him and noticed he was no longer invulnerable. That let the guilds on Rallos Zek better understand how to keep the Sleeper from despawning and do actual damage.
another cool MMO story would be the final stand in the original final fantasy 14 online.
now I want Froste to go over the Corrupted Blood incident
I wouldn't expect him to. Yahtzee did an "occasional guide to 'special' moments in gaming history" on it 3 years ago.
the corrupted blood was just an exploit for a mechanic that was never intended to be in the open world. It wasn't something you could beat. And no one DID beat it. you just died.
@@MaNameizJeff Doesn't matter the corrupted blood incident was legendary enough that governments actually studied it to see how it can effect real life pandemic models.
I remember hearing about this. But this video was so good. Frost's voice, the script, the editing. Great stuff, Escapist
I loved this story time so much. I’m getting on in years but was a WoW geek from 2005 on. I never played EverQuest, but my husband, who I met playing WoW was BIG into it before we met. Would love to hear you narrate other fun old gaming stories!
Everquest is much better as a retelling than experiencing live. There is a reason WoW became a mmo juggernaut: it basically took every good thing from EQ and removed the mountains of unfun shit that surrounded those pearls of fun.
What an amazing story. Also fucking shame on the suits for trying to pull it. You have a once in a lifetime opportunity for amazing organic storytelling and you drop it? What a bunch of sooks.
This stuff is great. I'm not into MMOs but loved this. keep up the good work Frost!
Yeah it was pretty lame. 3 days later they admitted they were going to give the guilds another try and just let it happen. A few weeks later, Game-wide messages across all servers played out a story telling of the armies traveling across the frozen snow-covered Eastern Wastes of Velious and entering into the Sleeper's Tomb, then killing he warders and eventually killing him.
This is perfect video game story telling. Great video.
Love the story. But especially Frost's storytelling, it was great.
And the ending was great.
I am loving this series, feels better than watching a documentary.
If you're going to end a fictional world to progress the storyline, the best thing to do is have the players work to mitigate the damage instead of stopping it entirely. See FFXIV 1.0 or Exandria Unlimited: Calamity for examples of how to pull it off successfully.
The details of this video aren't *entirely* accurate. In the game's lore, Kerafyrm is a Prismatic dragon (not a dragon of pure energy, but I'm splitting hairs). He grew up to be a great general among the dragon armies, but started growing unstable and wanting to raze the world and bring about a new age. The other dragons managed to subdue him and put him into stasis. His awakening saw him storm through the dragon city of Skyshrine and killing the city's leader Lord Yelinak before he flew off over to the Temple of Veeshan and rampaged against the dragons there. From that point, he flew off into parts unknown and the game world kept moving on with its conflicts and whatnot. Skyshrine was eventually revamped where four new Crusaders took up the mission of subduing him and becoming the new four Warders to keep him asleep, but they never get the chance to do so.
It's not to say that his awakening was going to bring about the complete destruction of Norrath (the evil God of War Rallos Zek would later try to do that by using a gigantic magical Nuke, but would also be thwarted), but he was completely opposed to the current dragons and their rules and wants to start a new age of dragons at the extermination of the lesser races.
Amazing story, never going to have that again. As MMO's probably don't make raid bosses like that anymore (no plans for "unkillable" bosses) . Also thank you for making me realise that Dabarella has Heterochromia, one blue eye and one green eye, that's neat
Everquest was my first MMO as a teen, well before the days of WoW. I loved my days spent wandering the deserts and wastelands around Freeport, the snows of Everfrost and the jungles of Kunark. Loved this little bit of nostalgia from 20 years ago. Thank you!
Damn this series is great. You always hear about the stuff that goes on in MMOs so having a series documenting it is an incredible idea.
I was there on that day, 20 years ago. Such great memories.
I am loving these episodes, so good, cant wait for the next one!!
Well, why the heck does it have a finite health pool and a death animation if it's supposed to be unkillable?
The finite health pool I can assume to be engine limitations. The death animation is what I'm curious about. Maybe it's that every skeleton has shared animations, so if there are other creatures with that body, they all play the same animation on death?
@@U-Flame Both of your explanations check out. I enjoy when things that don't make sense actually make perfect sense.
Never got into EverQuest back in the day but it looked like fun. My only memory of it is seeing the guy who had his character deleted by his wife lose his shit.
Love this! I did not know this story, and I love that this video is just recounting it. Nothing wrong with a nice little history lesson
This should have been the first episode, it's awesome and entertainingly presented as well. Looking forward to the next installment.
Holy crap,I remember this! I remember the unkillable dragon, but don't recall someone actually killed it! That's crazy! What a fun story.
This was incredibly entertaining and also incredibly distracting whenever Frost said the server's name, lol.
Yup, that's humanity for ya.
Everything is immortal, until proven otherwise.
And we refuse to lose.
I feel like fricken' Elrond saying, "I was there, 3000 years ago..." Although I was on Saryn, not their server, it was the talk of the entire community for weeks after.
Wow...I'd never heard of any of that. That was fascinating and kickass.
I played a halfling druid on the Povar server. When Sleepers Tomb was finally cracked it was one of the most immersive experiences I ever had in 30 years of gaming. Such a badass story.
I really loved this. It was inspiring, dramatic and taught a lesson. When people come together we can kick some ass, someone always want to shit in your cereal, and sometimes even high aspirations and goals can still result in nothing.
Great telling of a fun story. It'd be nice if modern MMOs realized that the shared world leading to collaborative experiences is what they were all about and not the single player stories crammed into always online games like they are now.
And that's why God has no stats in the bible - even though Nietzsche later bragged some players had killed him.
you know Nietzsche never meant that God had literally been killed, right? He meant that the impact that religion had on society was disappearing
There were a *few* minor details that aren't entirely accurate from this (Kerafyrm is a Prismatic dragon, not made of pure energy, but I know I'm just splitting hairs here), but this is pretty much how it went. Shadowknights and Wizards noticed that their respective Harm Touch and Manaburn abilities helped take down his health, but all other class's direct damage and damage over time spells were completely resisted. They had exceptionally long cooldowns, but both abilities were designated at unresistable.
The video describes how killing the Warders was supposed to bring about better loot after the event, but this wasn't entirely true. The Prismatic weapons that the Warders dropped ended up continuing to be some of the absolute most powerful weapons anyone could obtain, well into multiple expansions that followed in the years after. Normally when an expansion brings about a level increase and higher level gear, you expect that to be superior-- but the Prismatic weapons were just that powerful that they remained viable for DPS output well into the raid zones of later expansions. As long as one of the 4 Warders was kept alive, all would be good. The other 3 would eventually respawn after a few days, and a sizable population of the game was able to get these weapons.
The gear that eventually replaced after the event were essentially nerfed versions-- they were not terrible, but not worth using in later expansions.
This is what made the Prismatic weapons so valuable. Stynkfyst and his PK guild wanted to ruin it for everyone on a server where griefing others and ruining it for everyone was EXPECTED, and yet this was the last server at the time that persisted and kept him asleep (All of the footage from this video came from more recent servers that were created after this event and had better gear to survive the encounter). His guild tried, but failed, being wiped out by the last Warder who was still up.
I watched the chat channels from the Plane of Knowledge when it happened. I had my Prismatic weapons for both hands, and there was an acceptance of the server finally ready to move forward with the storyline. The developers had already revamped other zones to reflect the storyline of Kerafyrm's awakening-- This made things awkward on RZ since Skyshrine now had the four new Warders who were training up to replace the old ones who had been slain--- who were still just chilling in Sleeper's Tomb and keeping him asleep. lol.
All Sony had to do was say: "Valiant Heroes of the Lands, you outdid yourself and prevailed against all odds. Keraphim vanished, this time of his own accord (admin action) and has learned a lesson, that creation will stay its course, even against a godlike being such as itself. And yet...with him taking his leave, a new threat, unseen and unheard of, held at bay so far only by the presence of Keraphims magic, will fill this world with a new kind of terror. A horror from beyond will emerge, prepare yourselves" aka: "you guys done did it now, we have nothing, but with your commitment, you have triggered something...we will have to make new content for the game because you defeated what we did not think you could".
That´s all it would have taken to validate the players efforts and buy themselves time. Instead of doing a business move all they had to do was play alongside the players.
This really makes me with FFXIV would do more cool things with its mmo format instead of basically just being a multiplayer game sometimes
Should go over the Thistledown defense in Asheron's Call. Hell, Asheron's Call itself is still king in oh-so-many ways of the MMO.
When he despawned I was outraged!
Great storytelling
That must have been so bad ass to be the only player to survive 2 hits but such blue balls to have the plugged pulled the first time.
Also if people wonder why MMO golden age was a thing, this. Yes, these days it is just a theme park for most - with few exceptions like EvE Online - but people dedicated time to their communities and got rewarded with stories to remember.
Holy shit guys, this is fantastic. I don't think the escapist has put out content this great since the day it signed Yahtzee. No offense Yahtz, I have bought all your books on physical and audiobook, but this is probably the best content I have seen from the escapist in years. I am so excited to see where you guys take this series and Frost your voice and delivery is on a whole other level. I am more than excited to follow this series as long as it will go on and I hope to bug him too tell him I'm a big fan while Yahtz and Marty are talking in a podcast:)
Thats the biggest slap to the face with that ending, and makes a lot of sense to be honest. Of course it wouldn't havr any loot, the creators never planned for it to be beaten so why would the code loot into it.
i would be willing to bet that the players weren't really expecting it to drop anything since it wasn't intended to be beatable.
wow what a great fucking story.
I knew it would pay off to read that whole phantom menace crawl.
Reminds me of the occasional wow player who solos a raid boss by themselves. But this is more epic because the dragon was meant to be unbeatable
I knew about the story but I didn't know that last part. I just thought Sony made Kerafyrm invincible or immune to anything and prevented anyone from killing it.
It ended up being a happier ending after all.
They didn't have the technical ability to make it actually invincible, so they figured they would just make it so insanely powerful that nobody would survive long enough to put up a fight. They didn't account for the playerbase's sheer determination.
@@DRCEQ No, I mean after the players' attempt.
...didn't drop any loot .😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
Personal question from someone who never played EQ, what was the in world/universe reason for awakening the sleeper? Like how did the characters and people in the game world justify awakening armageddon? Or was it classic MMO type deal of "loot".
From a story standpoint, you could say us mortals royally messed things up by meddling with things we knew nothing about, as we quite often do. From a gameplay perspective, it had never been done before. The idea of a game-world changing event had not existed before EQ came around. Fortnite now has game-changing events on a common basis, but back then, it had never been done before. The first guild to awaken him didn't know what was going to happen. It was curiosity as well as another boss to possibly fight and farm. Boy, were they wrong when they found out.
Both Everquest and Everquest 2 have had storylines that directly addressed how us "mortal adventurers" have unleashed destruction upon the world simply because we desire new riches and strengths. A later storyline in EverQuest would have us raiding the Plane of Time, killing physical manifestations of the very Gods themselves, in an effort to unlock a prisoner who knew the very secrets to becoming a God themself. The Goddess of Magic, Druzzil Ro, stepped in and reversed time to right before the Plane of Time was invaded, because the universe itself would cease to exist if hundreds, thousands, millions of mortals became gods and irresponsibly started using their chaotic newfound powers. This event actually ended up creating EverQuest 2's alternate timeline, and the two have intersected in the storylines since. Doctor Who Timey Whimey stuff.
Now i want a cultist mmo with world ending boss kept under control by checks and balances of the player guilds
Or multiple, with each held off by that deity/eldritch entity's opposing factions. The ultimate endgame is finding a way to awaken and protect the world raid boss until it destroys the spawn point of the others, winning the server for that cultist faction.
Then you could have other mechanics, such as two or more of these being fighting it out Kaiju style, because after the first was being summoned everyone was trying to stop that and left an opening for another faction to summon their world ending boss. Maybe even have a mechanic where after one faction as "won", other factions might still be able to seal the boss away, or those cultists that serve the winning being can perform actions that can subtly aid another server in summoning that world boss's incarnation of that winning entity.
less an mmo more a long term PvP game
Man would I love to hear Frost tell the story of the Falador Massacre or the devolution of RuneScape into RS3 and eventual resurrection as OSRS.
I really like this series. keep it up!os
I played eq from 2002-2012 and I was online when both fights were happening, and the subsequent systemwide message a day or two later. Truly an incredible achievement. I miss the old days of EQ, an d while I'll likely never go back due to the state of the game I'll still always have that itch.
"The 300" is very appropriate.
They never intended to have the dragon be killable, so no loot, but they still made a death animation for them
The video did say there were other dragon bosses, so it probably just used one of theirs. I would assume the devs made Kerafyrm by basing him off the assets of another dragon boss or some sort of dragon preset.
We need this as a weekly show!
Every other Monday for now!
Play classic Everquest.
Amazing storytelling.
Atleast this unkillable raidboss was more reasonable than pandemonium warden of FF XI.
Sleeper's tomb is something I will never forget playing for the rest of my gaming life. We actually had a GM friend of our guild teleport us around the tomb when only about 7 people in the guild had keys. We couldn't really do much at the time, but it was a really unique experience.
Also, it was actually kind of common for certain fights to have a team dedicated to "first aid" duties. Usually one person to drag corpses back to a safe spot with clerics ressing and maybe a shaman/enchanter to rebuff, and a bard to be mana battery.
I wonder if the game's story ever took that into account. It must be strange for the world killing dragon to be prevented its rampage, only for the damage to still be done
You could always just flavor it as the dragon going "Man, fuck this. Why am I wasting my time here on you assholes? I'm just gonna leave and go burn down some cities now" lol
A game-wide announcement across all servers played out a few days later detailing how the guilds gathered together and killed him, but the actual game's storyline was unchanged. It was part of the story for him to awaken and go off on a rampage. He would later return as the final raid boss of a later expansion, and played as the overarching storyline for the good majority of Everquest 2's own storyline.
Absolutely loved this series, I started withthe EVE one as I'm most familiar with it.. but Jumped on the next two videos instantly. I have heard vague stories in Everquest, but nothng rich and full of detail like this!
I really hope this becomes a long standing series as there really are so many stories in & around games since the very beginning! Thank you so much for working on a fun way to archive some of these really epic &/or interesting stories!
I love interesting gaming stories like this. Hope they make a bunch more of these kinds of videos
Truly an MMORPG moment that can never be recreated
Easily.the most hype MMO story I have ever heard.
It makes total sense for Kerafyrm to not drop anything. Rolling for Loot was the way of the day back then, and having 300+ people trying to decide who gets the 1 whatever super weapon? HA! Not happening.
God................ I don't want to go back to P99 for a "similar enough experience", but MAN adventuring through Norrath during the time of the original 3 continents back in 1999 was so amazing... As long as no one called your phone while you were online. Lag during the days of dialup was a CUNT. Not a bitch, a CUNT.
Wow. That ending gave me the worst case of blue balls I had ever experienced...
Heh yeah the video just ends, but it's true. Kerafyrm's corpse didn't have any loot in it. When a body has no loot, it has a decay timer of 30 seconds. The guilds had to quickly take their screenshots when the raid leader looked in the corpse and realized there was nothing there. If he left the loot window, the corpse would poof. 30 seconds later, it did, but the guilds proved that this unkillable dragon indeed could be.
@@DRCEQ I guess at that point, putting in over 7 hours of raiding and overturning an executive decision from Sony, the loot wasn't even the point anymore. Now we have this incredible story that would fit right in with mythological tales.
Old EQ lore was as high as the Evercrack name would suggest.
There was one dude who was tasked by the gods to teach living races things because spreading knowledge is awesome
He taught a bunch of lizard people necromancy and military tactics and it kinda caused a bunch of bad things to happen
He was then put in prison and the God was like "yeah OK so I said spread knowledge in all of its conceivable forms, but not THAT knowledge"
And by TIME PRISON I meant "In order to get the guy out of jail, the actual gods your character worshiped will try to stop you. Themselves. As in, you murder your own god to get there".
Modern MMORPG players have no idea how punitive Everquest was. Raids needed 72 players, lasted 6-8hours for a couple of items to share among everybody. I had to raid every day without reward to be allowed to join the top raiding guild of my server back in the day. I still remember having to contract other raiding guild to recover bodies and equipment from botched "Plane of Fear" raids. In the lore, after being awakened Kerafyrm "the No-Longer-Sleeper" blew up the moon of Luclin to flex and went after the dragon goddess Veeshan... He was not meant to be killed indeed !
I was standing in Shadowhaven just near the zone in from Nexus when I saw the Yellow text : BROADCAST message to all of the servers from the GM's giving congratulations to the adventurers for their victory. I was playing a monk on the Quellious server at the time.
Now I currently play on the Time locked progression server called Mischief, the server is currently on the Secrets of Faydwer expansion now where Kerafyrm is the final end game raid boss. So much Nostalgia and fun.
The cleric epic weapon of the time has/had a clickable proc which would resurrect the target with 96% of lost experience restored; this took ten seconds and cost no mana. Experience lost from a single death was, as I recall, equivalent to a full level at level 50, which was less than a full level at the level 60 cap of the time, but if you're losing 4% of a level hundreds of times it starts to hurt.
Of course, it made the clerics' jobs pretty easy, as basically their job was to chain-cast their resurrection proc. Given that the healing meta of the time was chain healing (each person casts Complete Heal in turn at a specified interval) this would probably have been a welcome change from their usual job - still boring, but less stressful - and more sustainable, since the mana cost of complete heal was relatively high for its time (if dirt cheap by later standards).
It's probably the availability of the clickie epic that made this possible, since a large enough group of clerics could rez people indefinitely - if they were willing to eat the 4% experience loss.
There was also an AA (Alternate Advancement) rez that restored EVERYTHING - full health, full mana, full experience, everything but active buffs - but it had a ruinously long cooldown.
How amazing would it have been if the dragon dropped a unique, unduplicable, useless kazoo named "TEST_ITEM" and only one player could pick it up...
And this was a pvp server.
Conquest, formerly Soul Assassins, were the ones that first used the ramps to avoid the AoE, hence they were all Banned, at least any corpses in the zone were. There is a video of it.
Server: Lanys T'Vyl. I was there for it. After the ban they went to Dark Age of Camelot, which was just released and proceeded to get the whole guild lvl capped 50 in 2 weeks, heh so developers had to add the first expac and increase the lvl cap to 60, Itzlegend, Rurog, Diirk, Kestui and dozens more were a small guild that did Epic things!
Great storytelling! I really felt that heart-dropping dread and outrage when they despawned the dragon, really captivating.
I'm a little too young to have been an active player during the early days of MMORPGS but these stories really make me feel like we've lost something. Don't get me wrong, I like modern MMOs fine as games, I'd even say I love them, but they feel sort of overdocumented & disconnected in a way that makes them less interesting. It doesn't feel like, 20 or 30 years from now, there will be a lot of stories of this calibre to tell to the youngins from our MMOs today--but maybe I'm wrong, I'm sure it's hard to recognise history when you're living through it
Kamikaze pets were how I defeated Diablo on Diablo II with my deeply unoptimized necromancer. Clay golem, curse of thorns. Repeat. Took forever.
I hate PvP, and usually hate PvP players. But this story, that I learned years ago, instilled the primary reason I hate them. I fear nothing more than organized PvP players. They are the Lawful Evil, the Eve Online emperors. And they are Rallos Zek, who kill the unkillable.
Developer: Here's this immortal dragon god that's unkillable.
Player: Can it bleed? Yes! Can we get its health down? Yes!! Alright, that's all we need to know. It's time to no life this so-called god.
WoW may have popularized MMO's and gotten millions into them as addictions, but people were keeling over their laptops long before then playing Everquest.
Would love an episode on FFXIV and the disastrous 1.0 launch, only for them to gradually turn it into one of the top MMO's to this day!
Do an Eve online story next! No game gives better stories that I also would never want to play, than Eve online.
Miiiiight just be the next video.
@@theescapist Oh... oh no! Oh YES!!
I once played a game called "Duke of Aladda" that had a slight flaw in its program ... one that allowed me to play one encounter over and over again until my army had leveled up from the Goonies to the Avengers. Then we left that encounter and started making like Godzilla.
I mention this because what the EverQuest guys did to that dragon-god reminds me a lot of what I used to do with my Duke of Aladda army: Zerg Rush the foe, get beaten off, then Zerg Rush him again. Rinse, repeat, until ever so slowly the foe's overwhelming might begins to erode. Then ...
So...those guardian dragons re-spawned, right?
If not, the inevitable sabotaging of a server to do improbable quests with no reward, rather than leaving it alone for a goldmine of loot is disheartening.
This looks like what Skyrim's Alduin was purported to be.
Came here for the original story on Lanys T'Vyl where Soul Assassins Itzlegend and Ketsui spawned the dragon by figuring out a way to complete heal in a rotation, then were all immediately banned for "cheating" even though the encounter was so badly unfinished that Kerafyrm spawned in as a Human Monk model. Cheers to the real heroes.
Rallos Zek story was pretty cool too, though.
Was on rallos zek witnessing the health updates in chat while playing on dial up modem. Guess you could say im pretty famous.
A stunningly well told story, I cannot wait for episode 3!