Is it Heartless to Unmake Everquest?

Posted by Stropp on March 11, 2008

There’s a bit of a meme (theme?) making the rounds of the intarwebs at the moment. Started by Paul Barnett over at his MySpace blog, he puts forward the notion that you could go back and unmake any game so that no trace of it existed and it would have no influence on anything that came after it. If you could do this, which game would you unmake?

Heartless over at Heartless Gamer chose the game that he would unmake. As you can see in the title – yes, I know it’s a bad pun – Heartless chose to unmake Everquest.

Everything I despise and loathe about MMOGs is epitomized in Everquest. Grinding? Check. Leveling? Check. Harsh death penalty? Check. l33tn3ss? Check. Housing? No. Role-playing? Limited. Player cities? No. Anything other than just playing whack-a-mole? Not really.

I agree with everything Heartless has said here. Everquest was the second MMO that I tried playing, Asheron’s Call being the first, and I encountered all the above – and never got above level 15. Once I got through to about level 6 the game got much much harder. I tried getting into a guild – noone would have me, I was too low level and they were all after 40+ to raid. I tried a lot of alts, trying to find a solo friendly class that would get me to a guildworthy level. All to no avail. I finally gave up and went to Anarchy Online.

So yes, EQ was all that Heartless said. But I don’t agree with him on the unmaking thing, for one main reason.

Everquest was the first MMORPG that really proved it could be a success.

While Ultima Online, Meridian 59, and Asheron’s Call were all successful in their own right, none of them managed to get the number of subscribers that EQ did. At its peak I believe that Everquest gathered around 450,000 subscribers. AC on the other hand, I think managed about 125,000 at its peak. Star Wars Galaxies was aiming for a million at release. I’m not sure SWG broke through the EQ barrier.

If we look at the progression of MMOs as a sort of evolution, the early MMOs evolved from the MUDs, MUSHs, and MOOs as an ecosystem of several moderately successful games, and one very successful game. As is normal for an ecosystem, there is someone at the top of the foodchain, and that someone was Everquest. If EQ was removed from that ecosystem, would it have made room for another to become successful? Maybe, maybe not.

For that, we’d need to understand what conditions made Everquest more successful than the other games around it. And honestly, I couldn’t tell you. All I know at the time is that I enjoyed AC more than EQ and personally think it was the better game. Everquest must have done something right.

So removing EQ wouldn’t have necessarily stimulated the development of other better games. They were already there, some for longer, without achieving greatness. Perhaps they were evolutionary dead ends.

The other question to ask is did the success of Everquest spur on other game developers? Specifically did it influence Blizzard to create World of Warcraft?

While Heartless argues that World of Warcraft does a lot of things better than Everquest – and I agree with him here – did the success of EQ influence Blizzard to make WoW? If it did, wouldn’t the unmaking of EQ also unmake WoW?

Heartless’ final comment:

Erase Everquest from the history books and the MMOG genre might actually be at an innovation flood instead of an innovation standstill. Ultima Online, The Realm, Meridian 59, all had better approaches to the online space. All have been ignored.

It’s entirely possible the erasure of Everquest would have spurred competition in the MMO space. I think it’s more likely that it would have set the evolution of MMORPGs back until another game had achieved the success that EQ managed. At that point the overall industry would have enough incentive to jump into the MMO genre with gusto. As an example, look at how the success of WoW has stimulated the MMO industry.

At the very least, the mistakes of Everquest – the death penalty, corpse runs, slow grinding leveling – would not have been made in such a high profile way. If Blizzard hadn’t had those to learn from when developing WoW, would those mistakes have been made by Blizz. Would World of Warcraft be the game it is today?

Perhaps I’ve watched Back to the Future too many times.

What do you think?

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