The Norrath team has pulled together some stats into an infographic on their site to commemorate twenty-five years of EverQuest. I thought I would post those on their own, though I am going to break up the infographic into three parts to make it more legible on my site.
So lets start with the top that brings up some big numbers for the past 25 years.
The top of the 25 year infographic
It has been a long time since EQ launched, but the play time over the last 25 years has added up to a significant number. 5,144 centuries laid end to end and projected back in time would put over half a million years in the past, where we might run into the occasional members of the neanderthal and the immediate predecessors to early modern humans. Basically, that is a lot of time spent.
And Kiith, who has 8,331 days played… I bet you can, or at least could, find them in the bazaar on the Xegony server. A side effect of needing to be online to sell for much of the timeline of the game is a lot of characters sitting in there idle.
The character count, 9.32 million, seems a little low, but they have also had to have a few purges of low level, in active characters over the years.
In the middle there is a little section about races and classes.
The middle of the 25 year infographic
Human warriors I guess. I am not sure I even have one of those. Gnomes, dwarves, and half-elves not making the top five seems a bit odd… so many elf lovers out there I guess… but to be surpassed by the upright lizards that are the Iksar… inconceivable!
It is all old school classes though.
The bottom of the 25 year infographic
Lots of stuff going on in Norrath. When I talk about a heroic boost making a character unplayable, it is the huge number of uniquely names spells that figure high on my list of obstacles. If WoW got one thing right, it was giving spells upgrades through ranks rather than having to come up with a new name for the new variation.
Likewise alternate advancement options, which has both too many options and a poor UI… though the spell UI is fairly heinous itself.
Some of these numbers have a plus at the end, which seems to indicate that there are at least that many, but probably more. The zone count though, that is a solid 880. That is a lot of places to visit.
That there are only 84 character created on launch day still active is a bit sad. Alas, mine is not among them. Selvin the half-elf ranger was not loved and when I gave my initial account to a co-worker, back when we had a new house with spotty internet and a new baby to mind, I was not surprised when he was cleared away to make room for a crafting alt. I’m a little sore about my ghoulbane wielding dwarf paladin being gone, but he wasn’t a day one character.
Finally, I had to look up Breezeboot’s Frigid Gnasher, appropriately over at Allakhazam. They are a no longer available drop that are outside of my scope of knowledge, but you had to be level 60 to get them, so not original EQ in any case I guess.
Anyway, some more Norrath trivia to store away for a future date. The full infographic looked like this, if you need it in original form.
Too tall to size and be legible here
I will have some more to say about the anniversary tomorrow, but I thought I would add this in on what I have today.
Today is the day that EverQuest turns twenty-five years old. It feels a bit strange, like it wasn’t that long ago I was writing about the twentieth anniversary of the game. But with age comes a strange time dilation, where the years seem to speed up rather than slow down, where your perspective is distorted by the weight of the years already passed.
EverQuest Anniversary Time
EverQuest seemed old when I started this blog. It was past seven by then and was already doing its first “classic” progression servers to relive the “good old days” when the game was new. The once famous Sayonara Norrath video was published about when I started the blog, a tear inducing look back at the game. There was also some negative backlash built up about the game. (That link is representative of some of what was being tossed about.) Not everybody loved the experience or how it developed over growth of the game.
Meanwhile, EverQuest II was already two years in, having failed to take up the standard and become the future of the franchise, and World of Warcraft, also in its terrible twos, was eating everybody’s lunch as it hit player levels an order of magnitude above EverQuest at its peak.
And WoW being so successful both set off a frenzy to be the next WoW. At GDC 2007 a panel of MMO luminaries predicted that this would largely fail, and it did. There was no next WoW. Blizzard alone could defeat the monster it created, and even that self-inflicted wound wasn’t what we might of expected at the time. They didn’t make something bigger than WoW, they just couldn’t sustain the level of success and excitement… or even just some fresh content in the back half of most of its expansions, turning the profile of the game into a boom and bust cycle of expansion launches and content droughts until they finally decided to farm nostalgia the way EverQuest did more than a dozen years before.
Where was EverQuest in all of this? We kind of expected it to… if not die, then go into some sort of maintenance mode. Once again, back in 2006, they were still grinding out two expansions a year, so when they scaled back to one a year it felt like the time might be coming. We were already past the point where we thought MMOs would live forever. The false starts and incomplete ideas were being shut down. Would EverQuest, that felt so old even at that moment, last much longer?
But here we are, twenty-five years after launch and thirty expansions in, almost eighteen years after I started this blog… the second post on the blog was about an EverQuest nostalgia tour… with the game not only still around but still delivering an annual expansion and one of the most profitable titles the now owner’s portfolio. DC Universe Online brings in more total dollars, but it has to share out revenue to platforms and whoever it is who owns the IP these days, while EQ is cheap to run and owes no licensing dollars to anybody besides Daybreak. DCUO and EQ are why Daybreak is still a viable business.
Time flies.
Twenty-five years ago my wife and I were engaged and set to get married at the end of summer, I was less than a year into a new job, we were getting our finances in order to sell the condo where we lived with an eye towards buying a house, and the idea of playing a 25 year old PC video game… I mean, what was even going on with video games in 1974? The Atari 2600 was still three years out and what passed for personal computers were expensive and primitive.
Sure, I could play Tank, Pong, Flim-Flam, or a few other arcade titles if I went to some place like the big arcade at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk that still had the machines. But would I bother? What we had in 1999 was so much further advanced.
So it was pretty natural to question if twenty-five years down the road something like EverQuest, should it still exist, would have been so dramatically surpassed that it would only attract the most dedicated video game nostalgia or history buffs.
Which is not to say that things have not advanced. But it is also true that any new MMORPG in what I consider the genre is separated from EQ mostly by things like graphical quality or interface standards of the current day rather than any fundamental change to the play loop. Sword hits orc, special sword attack hits harder, offensive magic hurt the orc, healing magic keeps the tank alive, and unless roles have been completely abandoned, group play still devolves to tank, healer, damage. Crowd control is in there somewhere, and it comes and goes as well, but mostly it is that trio at the core.
EQ is different in that it is old and somewhat overburdened by twenty-five years of content, mechanics updates, and changing user expectations. While it is the same game when refined down to its essential bits as WoW or LOTRO or any PvE focused fantasy MMORPG that has come (and sometimes gone) since it launched, it also projects its age in so very many ways. It is both now and so very old from moment to moment… or such is my feeling having spent some time with it lately.
But there is no stopping it. It carries on. Maybe it is time to break for a video.
It feels like 30 years is within easy reach unless something dramatically changes. Daybreak could fumble, but they seem to have been able to recover on the EQ front in the past. (Maybe less so when it come to EverQuest II.) And what could change sufficiently in tech or video games to relegate it completely to the past? VR? AI? The Metaverse? I don’t think so. So on it goes.
My celebration of its milestone has been a visit to get a feel for the way things were back then… at least to the extent I could. My tales so far:
I am not done with that series yet… at least I do not think I am. But I am also considering something that would be a deeper look into the old days. That started with picking up this box.
EverQuest Titanium – Gateway to Project 1999
We’ll see how far I get on that project. I picked that box up on a whim on eBay, where somebody had a few up for what seemed like a low price… though the quality of it is hard to assess. It could very easily be a home piece together with some printed labels and a color copy of the box art. Or maybe it is original. That is a post for another time.
I have now rambled on about EQ for what seems like a sufficient amount to note its passing the quarter century mark. It has already been a thing for more than half of my adult life and will, if it carries on as it had, pass the halfway mark of my whole life in not too many years. I’m sure that will the the topic of some future anniversary post, barring late stage capitalism simply devouring the whole thing in the name of shareholder value.
So I will end with some links out to reflections on past anniversaries that I have noted here.
A lot of those posts have links out to other stories and reflections on the game. They aren’t all my meandering prose looking for meaning… but some of them clearly are.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 