My mother’s day present was my son washed and detailed my car :) But I was also left alone to play EverQuest all day.
I took my inky shadow knight from 1-6 in about ten hours of soloing. I got one piece of the newbie quest armor made (this won’t be available on Aradune). Everything else she’s wearing was dropped by some skeleton or other.
Not sure how many times my character has died. Even though this server is only a few months old, those people still in the newbie zones are boxing or severely twinked.
The oddest bit, to me, was how the game kept announcing when guilds would kill bosses. Quarm bit the dust at least three times that I noticed. Vox died; Naggy died twice. Significantly, though, no Vex Thal bosses died while I was playing. Ain’t nobody have time for Vex Thal. All open world bosses (and all those were open world in the original game) now have instanced variants. Probably there’s a lockout to prevent people from farming the bosses.
Lost Dungeons of Norrath was the most recent expansion, I believe, and there were lots of LDoN groups forming. There were even a few low level groups – one group was apparently camping the zone in Unrest. If only I had been a few levels higher…
EQ is still addictive after all these years. This character, though, I won’t play again. I just wanted to get back into the rhythms of EverQuest.
May 27 is when the two new servers come out. General chatter was that the opening of Aradune server will be the death of Mangler, but one person replied that there were still plenty of people who stayed behind on Coirnav when Mangler opened.
Well… that person was on Mangler now, though, so…?
Mangler has been live a little over a year. The Plane of Time is a casual farm raid. I checked the newbie camps throughout Nektulos Forest and the Commonlands – all were empty, or being soloed by twinks or two boxers. The general chat had no questions from new players.
Anecdotal evidence over the couple of days I’ve been playing is that the only people playing on the Mangler server are expert EverQuest players who go from new server to new server trying for server firsts, or nostalgic players like me who just are checking in on an old friend.
MMOs like Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen, a hypothetical
or the still very much a thing EverQuest 2 are all fighting for the same, limited pool of aging gamers who had fun with a particular videogame 21 years ago, and didn’t abandon EQ for World of Warcraft when the vast majority of their friends left.For a new MMO to really rise from EverQuest’s ashes, it has to die first. And it’s still got a lot of life in it.