EverQuest 2, successor to the most popular online roleplaying game ever, was released last Tuesday, two weeks ahead of schedule. Sony Online Entertainment truncated final testing in an effort to beat EQ2’s competitor, World of Warcraft, to the market. Both games are massive multiplayers—they create worlds in which thousands of gamers coexist and interact to form elaborate communities.
EQ2 hopes to capitalize on its predecessor’s noteriety by updating the graphics and changing play. Despite failing to gain mainstream appeal, EQ1 was incredibly successful economically. With eight expansion packs, each costing about $30, EQ has accumulated approximately half a million subscribers in its five years of existence.
Despite a strong player base, EQ failed to achieve broad appeal because of its incredible time requirements. Veteran EverQuest player, junior Patrick Rivenbark, admits that a single session playing these games can take anywhere from an hour to well over 10 hours. Reaching maximum level took him hundreds of hours, and now that the game is further developed, maximum level is only the beginning.
This increase in the number of levels was instituted in order to retain subscribers. The genre’s blessing and curse lies in its reliance on subscriptions. In order to stay in the game, subscribers have to keep paying. The result of this economically-based development is a slow-paced game with enough content to entertain even the most hardcore players.
EQ players often complain of tedium and are well aware that the time spent playing is ludicrous. Nevertheless, they remain a close group. Players join together through their time online, and large groups (guilds) form to kill the biggest bosses. Some of these guilds have been around for years, and inevitably, playing together “creates a human aspect to games that can only be found in these online role playing groups,” Rivenbark said.
Weddings have occurred in EQ because couples have met while playing and want all of their online friends to be able to attend. A true companionship can develop out of these games—that is their beauty.
These friendships have a price, however. Support groups like EQWidows.com have begun to spring up as a result of the games’ negative effects on real life. “You hear stories of people losing loved ones, jobs, even neglecting their kids,” Rivenbark said.
While EQ forced players to team up to advance, even from an early stage, WoW allows players to play alone until the very high levels. Time need not be wasted looking for a group, so a player can enjoy themselves spending as little as 20 minutes playing at a time. WoW is a visceral form of EQ that hopes to capitalize on the casual player: fights are quick, leveling is easy and everything moves faster.
Developed by Blizzard, creators of the Diablo, Starcraft and Warcraft universes, WoW illustrates both the success of Everquest and the hope for a new form of such online games.
For many, however, the joy of EQ was always the community—grouping, fighting and chatting together for hours on end. WoW moves towards removing this kinship by allowing solo hunting, and changes the speed and difficulty to make playing innocuous. WoW is EQ without the pain, but it is also EQ without the soul.
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