"You have logged onto EverQuest and created a lithe wood elf youth called Eraltyth who dreams of becoming a famous warrior. You move past the character selection screen and the world around you fades out as a new world appears in front of your face. You are standing in the tree city of Kelethin. You look inside your backpack and notice a small sword, a lamp, some food, and a note. Picking up the note you see that the Guild Master of the local warrior guild has invited you to join the guild. Bursting with excitement you look around and see the guild hall up a ramp to your left, after walking up the ramp you enter the guild hall where the master welcomes you in and gives you a training tunic, after a brief instruction session he sends you back out into the world as experience is the best teacher of all. You put on your new tunic, wrap your sword belt around your waist, and venture down the elevator to the world below. Stepping past the guards at the elevator bottom you venture out past your homeland of Kelethin into the wilds of the Greater Faydark. A path leads off from the elevator and you follow it for a while. Soon you see an object in the distance, as you get closer you see it is a giant bat. You know in your heart that as a warrior you should help to rid the community of this pest, so you draw your sword and prepare for battle. With some trepidation you charge toward the bat and take a swing. The sword knicks the wing of the bat causing some blood to fall on the ground, but then the bat is flapping all around biting at you. You take a few more swings not causing much damage, then the bat bites you on the arm and the situation becomes a lot more serious. Fortunately for you on your next swing you chop a wing off and the bat plummets to the ground where it soon dies. As you bind your wound and clean your sword you realize what a long hard journey you have embarked on."
This is a snapshot from the first few minutes of a players EverQuest life and this writeup is really an attempt to provide a perspective on the phenomenon known as the "game" EverQuest (more commonly called EQ although also quite commonly called EverCrack) coming from a 2 year (170+ days played) relationship with the game. (When I say relationship that is really the word I mean to use) This writeup is split into two main parts because you can look at this game in at least two ways and I personally look at this game on two levels. First there is the game level and next there is the community level, at this point in time it is hard to tell which of these two levels is more essential to the existence of the phenomenon of EQ but I will leave that discussion to my writeup on Can EverQuest survive? First let us take a look at the game level and see what it is all about.
EverQuest the Game
EQ is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (or MMORPG for short) that is generally played from a 1st person perspective although it does contain the capability for 3rd person perspective playing. Think of it in some sense as a mixture of a Quake like environment with your favorite MUD. The game is set in the world of Norrath which is a fantasy world constructed by Verant the company that created the game. This world is inhabited by a wide range of fantasy creatures, in large part based on the lore laid down in the various editions of the popular D&D and AD&D systems. Every person plays a character in this world that grows through the adventures that he or she experiences. These characters come from a set of classes that range from wizards to warriors and have skills and play styles unique to each class.
From the game standpoint, the goal of this game is several fold. First you want to explore the world of Norrath, see the sights and monsters. Second you want to grow your character in a power sense or in game terms level the character up (currently the highest level is 60). Leveling a character is achieved by killing monsters in the game which give you experience or by completing quests that can give experience as well. The 2nd route, questing, is not really feasible as a route to leveling by itself although it does give experience. The vast majority of experience in the game and thus levels will come from killing monsters. Finally from a game perspective you want to grow your character material sense by acquiring platinum (the currency of the game) and equipment for your character to use. In some sense the material wealth and power "wealth," if you can call it that, are highly correlated. One of the keys to EQ's success is the ability for a person to easily see an improvement in their character by means of increasing one of these two factors: experience or equipment. Every play session is usually marked by some improvement of one of these two factors, which provides an addictive appeal.
You play the game from a client installed on your computer, but all the data including character data and updates are stored on a server that Verant operates. Once you are online you can use the client to connect to Verant's servers bringing reality to the slogan they like to toss about "You're in our world now." The game is divided into servers which house roughly 10,000 accounts, on each of which approximately 2,000 may be active (i.e. online and playing) at any one time. Being an entirely online game the focus of this game really isn't the individual or solo experience but rather the group experience (although at times it can be argued that the solo experience is preferred). At the lowest scale the group experience is just a simple pairing of two characters that pool their resources and abilities to share the experience and loot from killing a particular monster. This simple level can increase up to a party of 6 characters which are all grouped together and sharing in the experience and loot from a group of monsters or a camp. From here things grow slightly more complicated coalitions of groups can join together in an informal relationship and try to tackle a harder camp or a boss, or as termed within EQ an uber-mob. In these situations you can have the upwards of 100 characters all allied to kill the same creature. Characters can also be associated with each other through the creation of guilds which are player created factions within the game. The dynamics of how these groups and guilds interact will be looked at further in the next section.
EverQuest the Community
In some sense EQ is much more than a game, EQ is a community. With roughly 360,000 active subscribers and almost 90,000 people playing at any one time the EQ community is larger than many cities and has many of the social interactions you find in any city. There is simple communication between people, but there is also trading and selling, coalitions of characters, friends, marriages. It is a full-scale online community. The main advantage of having an online game is that people can cooperate with each other to achieve something that none of them could do individually. As I mentioned before on a low level this is done through grouping, but on the higher level this is done through a guild. With a guild players can establish a more permanent relationship with other players and affiliate themselves under one name, have their own private communication channel and create a separate identity within the game. The world of Norrath is a dangerous world not just in terms of the monsters but also in terms of the politics and relationships that exist. By joining a guild you benefit from having all of your guild mates to back you up and they in turn benefit from the skills that you bring to the guild.
Even though guilds are created in the name of cooperation, they in turn bring about a more defined sense of conflict among the various players on a particular server. Since the world is only inhabited by a finite number of monsters and loot at any one point in time, there is great deal of competition over particular monsters and particular loot and it quite common for players and guilds to have arguments and conflicts over the rights to fight a particular monster. To some players this continual friction is a turn off. However to me this is just a symptom of any real community and is part of the appeal of EQ. It is in essence a validation of the community of EQ.
The inside the game community is not the only manifestation of the EQ community. The community has built a large presence on the internet through websites dedicated to the game in general (Caster's Realm and EQVault being popular examples) and guilds in particular (Fires of Heaven being one of the more well known in the game). The community has even moved to the realm of having gatherings in various cities where players from all over the world will attend and discuss the game and their experiences.
I could go on further and I will at a later date, but this should give you a snap shot of what EQ is all about.
If you want to talk look me up here or on EQ. I play on Xev server on the following characters in The Harmonium guild.