Looking for Fun in all the Wrong Places...part 2: Norrath

First school work and then the ending of the Asheron's Call beta program interfered with my quest for master chef-hood. However it wasn’t long before my friends – still enthralled by Everquest – decided it was about time I joined them. So I tore open the wrapping paper at Christmas to find a shiny new Everquest game, tempting me to give up my soul and life. “Oh well…” I thought “what the heck?” Oops. I created a new incarnation of Kelrynn (this time as a half-elf Ranger) and spent the next several months consumed with my new dream – granting her the power to turn into a wolf. I have to say that picking a ranger as a first character was a move smarter than I had anticipated. The tracking ability was endlessly useful. Not only could I find orcs to hunt down and slay, but getting lost in the woods wasn’t nearly so dreadful when you could track your way back to town by following the trail of a friendly town guard. Choosing to play a female half-elf was not nearly so wise. Kelrynn was a table top RPG character originally, and in that game she was a half-elf, so it seemed making her digital translation a half-elf as well a natural choice. But in Everquest, where there is very little control over your character’s physical attributes or what their clothing will look like, half-elves were the boosomiest of the bosomy, and had a tendency to wear not nearly enough clothing. This resulted in many less-than-amusing encounters with other characters whose players would make most 13-year-olds blush at their level of immaturity. I made some friends in Norrath, and even got to the point where we were discussing starting our own guild. Most of my social interaction was fun. But overall, my experience was less than inspiring. For one thing, Everquest had a terrible economic system. Inflation was so bad that by the time I was playing, other characters would regularly throw me a few platinum pieces here and there for nothing. Imagine being a tourist in San Francisco, and having strangers walk up to you smiling and handing you $100 dollar bills. (Although maybe it was my impressive half-elf cleavage that loosened their wallets). I decided to become a bowyer/fletcher only to realize after much hard work and tedium that I was working towards creating useless products. Why buy arrows from me when a player could buy them just as easily from an NPC shop keeper for less money than it took me to make them? Exploring on your own was murder. I loved the really interesting and beautiful locations in the game that were reflective of their respective denizens. But getting from one to another took a good deal of time and woe to the lone traveler who wasn’t quite the right level to be traipsing through that area. Trying to find someone who will help you retrieve your corpse from “I’m not quite sure…but it was over this way…” is no picnic. Everquest also subscribed to the theory that “anything worth doing is worth doing over and over again.” To be fair, most MMORPGs do. But the level treadmill was truly dreadful here. Almost all my time in that game was spent camping, killing, camping, killing, with only some occasional friendly banter to ease the tedium. Making arrows was the same way. Click-drag-click-drag, buy more supplies, click-drag-click-drag. What a drag. Patience was a key virtue in Everquest. You would spend a good deal of time waiting. Waiting to collect people to go hunting with. Waiting to camp out the spawn points so you could kill things. Waiting to get to high enough level so you could get all the fun powers. Waiting to find your corpse so you could re-join the fray. Waiting on that frickin boat to transport you from Butcherblock to Freeport! (At least you could fish on the boat). Finally my patience ran out. Sitting down to log on after a week’s vacation I paused, realizing that all the friends I had made during my time in Norrath had surely gone up many levels in my absence. Because of the design of Everquest’s partying system, I would no longer be able to team up with them. My chances of catching up given my schedules vs theirs were nill. In the space of a week, they had essentially become too cool for me, and now I faced trying to make all new friends or going on some insane level-grinding spree. I turned the computer off and instead gave a call to some real-life friends who I had not talked to for the previous three months. When all is said and done though, I do have to give the Everquest designers a nod for one thing. EQ had by far the best drinking system of any MMORPG I have ever played. The more your character drank, the more slurred their speech would come out and the more distorted and wobbly the display on the screen would become. I had the most fun of my whole stint in the game when my would-be guild mates and I spent one evening liquoring up our characters and tried to run across the bridges in the elf tree city of Kelethin without falling to our low-level deaths. Good times.