Planes of Power: The peak of EQ (or is it?)

Many people hail PoP as the glory days of EQ. I am here to tell you how PoP could be seen as the downfall of Everquest.

The first piece of evidence is how much people love classic. Every classic server that

opens has a rush of players who want that fresh out the gate feel and to breath the air of nostalgia. People love running un and down the levels of the tree city Kelethin on their wood elf, sulking in the dark city of Nariak or trekking through the snowy mountain of Halas. There was a plethora of dungeons to crawl and fun outdoor zones to travel in. Characters were different and unique and the choices you made on that server select screen ment something and changed the way you would experience the game. But much of that was lost. What happned?

Well after kunark and vellious expansions began to take a new turn. Kunark and Velious

were in my mind true expansions of Everquest adding onto the vast world with different and new content. Then Shadows of Luclin came out and brought with it the beginnings of sin. Luclin brought with it the Nexus and the Bazar and Shadow Haven. All of these zones eroded at the immersion of Everquest by adding zones that were safe and accessible to all. Now we had Iksars mingling with High elves and dark elves doing business next to halflings also stats began to bloat (Velious is also at fault for this) making thouse tense moment in the character select screen more and more meaningless. People began to hang out less and less in their hometowns as the Nexus and Bazar became a hub for all and sure while it added quality of life for gameplay much was lost. However this was not the end...

Planes of Power in October of 2002 was released and Everquest would forever be

changed. Planes of Power introduced a whole slew of content mainly at the end game. Along with it came one of my most hated zones of all time The Plane of Knowledge. I can hear the gasps from the crowd. Yes the Plane of Knowledge was one of the worst things to happen to Everquest in my opinion. Not only did it have the same problems as Nexus and Bazar as acting like a central hub for all of Everquest but it contained a library with all the spell vendors, almost all the trade skill vendors along with every trade skill tool, two banks, and a collection of stones to teleport you to most places. To add insult to injury every starting city had a neat little book to teleport you to the Plane of Knowledge right outside its gates. Now these ones prosperous zones that held meaning and significance and that people spent many months maybe years to create were rendered obsolete and while PoP added lots of content it also in a way destroyed some.

Yet people were too absorbed in the vast gameplay improvements to notice this. The

exciting new raids powerful and cool new gear and abilities distracted people from this loss. It was not until after Omens of War did people start to realize the Everquest they used to play was suddenly no longer there. Realizing there thirst for more and more progression had made what was once a deep and interesting game much more shallow. Now days new expansions on Everquest are just some reskinned gear with buffed numbers with a lore story and new raids to do and every year they have to create a little more content to keep the players busy for anther year while the older content sits unused and eventualy becomes nothing more than an museum exhibit of what Everquest used to be. Now every other year we all clamor to relive that amazing feeling of bursting out of our guildhall at level one killing some rat and bats with some other lowbies eventually grouping up in a entry level dungeon and forging friendships until Everquest goes back to that point where is all about doing the progression and hitting the raids and logging out.

Pop was the startof thr best times of eq imo. GoD was kinda meh but for me OoW was the second best expansion after pop.

Did PoK shrink the world? Yes it did, but at that point the world was getting massive, and it was starting to be needed.

The bazaar is either a love or hate thing... I personally hated having to waste time in the tunnel buying and selling, so the bazaar was a plus for me.

I understand why a lot of people hated luclin onward, but for me it was some of the beat times in eq.. Just for reference, i started playing 2 months after release.

PoP and onward (well it really started its infancy in kunark) brought new ways to increase the power of your character through aa, focus effects, and item specific right click buffs.this was really nice for casters, as before cool 30 more mana is kinda boring but 30 more mana and 5% more spell damage is way more interesting. Melee at least got weapon upgrades before.

Yes, the gameplay of Everquest massively improved over these expansions with new and interesting ways to improve your character but at the sacrifice for immersion and making obsolete previous content. I too enjoy Everquest from Luclin on as I believe the game gets more involved and the classes gather more depth and balance but sometimes I miss having a reason to travel to highpass.

Thats true but that is the nature of mmos and expansions. Previous content becomes obsolete...even in velious how often do you go back to say highpass at max level??

I agree with a lot of what you have to say. I think people that disagree must have started EQ in Velious or beyond. For me, the peak of Everquest was the Legends server. You brought your character to the Legends server and GM's were extremely active. In exchange for a higher monthly fee, GM's held events and Best of the Best tournaments weekly. During a Best of the Best tournament, GM's would spawn Dragons and other monsters during down time. Pre Luclin, I think a great part of EQ were the halloween and other events using GM creativity, and I wish Daybreak would expand on these events. Maybe a server that locks at Velious with added events. Also it needs to be a PvP server. I have yet to relive the Rallos Zek experience.

Did you write this for a college course or something?

If you like in-era serious raiding PoP is a win, though the flagging system is inelegant. AoC vastly improves the ability of capable guilds to enjoy PoP. PoP was a massive fail as far as mid-level content... hence LoY, which if itemized better would actually be an ideal complement to PoP.

LDoN is great for premades that enjoy that content, but offers no alternate dabbler way to access the content (i.e., solo missions/quest to earn the currency, tradable currency).

There's a lot of design in PoP-LDoN that was never done that way again. It took progression to make GoD "good" to more people.

OoW-DoN is the template of the modern game. A template that has kept the game going for a long time. TSS was a great expac, and raiding in tiers and other templatization of the game picked up steam after that. Whether good or bad, it has kept the game going.

However, the OP is not off-base that original trilogy plays very differently. Some of it is fun, some of it is tedious design. If Luclin had been a series of caves under Odus it would not have been nearly as lore-jarring as the sci-fi angle they took. If Luclin hadn't taken the "give everything massive hit points" approach it would be really useable content --as designed, there is stuff a group or solo player can't touch until it is 20+ levels grey con.

Bazaar accessible out of home cities would have been nice.

Static PoK books do break immersion, but translocators would have fit nicer plus then your wizard NPC in Nektulos could have offered more than one port destination as expansions were added.

There's other sublime ways some things could have been done, sure. But unless you embrace revamping early on... stuff is going to be obsoleted by new content, especially when a game lasts more than 3 expansions.

Ldon was the peak of course.

But anyways, to beat the dead horse... I could agree with some of your points, it is just that I weigh other positive improvements much higher. I mean AA alone is the greatest invention in eq history, and without it there would be no eq today. Beastlord my favorite class of them all (not a kitty fan though), numerous QoL in the client, new models, extensive spell/buff improvements/inventions, focus effects, and much more adding complexity and diversity to combat.
Later on Guild hall corpse summon is another of my favorite as a concept, because I finally went deep into those dungeons I never visited in fear of loosing all my gear - BUT!!!! summon should have been at a much greater cost, such as unrezable corpse - Alternatively, not having the stupid zones where you could not summon corpse, would have fixed that too. Fellowship summon, also a great invention.
A grand mix of good and bad, and if I should mention something truly against the spirit of eq, it would be the introduction of Mercs.

You could argue that these improvements could have evolved without the problematic things you describe with luclin and pop... and yes I agree. It would have been awesome if luclin and pop had continued in the same spirit world construction wise, while still evolving and improving with the nice things we got.
But as this is theoretical (until I repair that flux capacitor), I choose to weight the good and bad and the good far outweigh the bad, at least until GoD.. and from then it was ups and downs a lot through the expansions.

People have an attraction to starting over on a level playing field; it doesn't mean that Classic did everything right and had every feature the game should have.

Not a fan of classic-PoP, I think classic is bland and rather boring.... nor do I like Underfoot+, because you get tons of tuning issues later in EQ and insane power bloat.

The best of EQ was the "middle of EQ" for me if that makes sense.

DoN-DoD-PoR-TSS, these expansions are beautiful and had far less group tuning issues than the rest of EQ. (TSS group weapons needing a boost being the only thing I remember)

DoN and DoD also have this mystical character to them that other expansions don't have, they don't look like other EQ expansions at all. They don't even sound like other expansions, DoD has this tingly music in many zones that gives them mystical character. Whatever team was responsible for them was different. Also, because they had group instances, you could discover these zones with a group exactly like a dungeon crawl should be.

So until Monday on Mangler? What about a TLP successful recreates any sense of adventure or unknown? Your repeating 20 year old content that has been min maxed completely. You want to make a rogue? Whole forum post about how stupid you are. Don’t have 75 agi, your a moron. Etc., etc. There is nothing about a modern MMO that stops people from talking, socializing, etc. outside of raids. Most people do, they run dungeons, alts, etc. But the conversations happen on Discord and many players are anti PUGs. That’s a player attitude problem, not a game mechanic problem. I know people that refuse to PUG in full open world or fully instanced, game type doesn’t change the player.

The longing for how someone felt 20 years ago is tied to a lot of things besides any video game. It’s exactly the same as the “back in my day” or “when I was a child” stories our elders always tell us about how everything used to be better. You have to just transferred that sentiment to a video game. But people fail to realize that the world itself (and gaming) have changed. Everquest comes out in 2019? People have their voice chat to premade groups, figure things out, etc. People will create 3rd party applications like Gina and Gameparse if the game itself doesn’t provide those QOL improvements. Guilds (no longer a new concept), raiding (not a new concept), will have kill videos and strategies up on YouTube in days. Players will write packet sniffers or whatever they need to get spell data, item data, etc. harvested and posted to a Wiki.

Those are just some examples of how things would be very different now than then, I’m sure people can come up with more. Information is accessible and created at a rapid pace. The people who rant “millennials just want everything handed to them”, while running Gina on raids, using raidloot/alakazam etc. to min/max, Gameparse, etc. don’t even understand the irony. QOL apparently is only bad when it’s not the QOL they wanted.

Realistically there is a small playerbase of “retro” gamers that would be perfectly happy with trilogy mechanics. But even then they have their Wikis and the information is no longer secret. Luckily the company has given them their blessing and they have a server for that though. The industry as a whole has shown their is a much larger potential for an MMO than just niche games. But after 17 years of post PoP EverQuest the game is still rolling along. I think that counts as a much larger success than just the trilogy.

Tl;DR: PoK removed the ability to hold transportation and spell crafting hostage for hyper-inflated ransom.

Exactly why I loved PoK. I can now focus even more on going to the bottom of dungeons, killing mobs, and taking their loot. No more having to worry about one of the worst combine systems in the history of MMOs.

Dumping wheelbarrows full of high plat value gems into a hopper and failing trivial combine after trivial combine is not the grind many of us who loved POP were looking for. Not the first time around, or the 15th time around.

I think PoP was the golden age of Everquest!

For me the downfall were group instances. Starting in a small way with GoD and eventually becoming the entire game as the expansions went on.

I think raid instancing has been a positive change for the game but grouping should always be open world.

PoP and Velious are certainly peak nostalgia expansions for a lot of people. On TLP though they're pretty shallow, short, and extremely simple/easy compared to expansions around them. Gates of Discord and Luclin just have much more and generally more engaging content on TLP for many people and have better replay value.

Uhm, group instances didn't start in GoD. LDON was before GoD and the whole expansion was based on group instancing.

They didn't become "the entire game" either. Many expansions long after GoD are almost entirely open world. TSS is completely open world from lvl 1 to lvl 70.

Group instances are generally better balanced and are far more drama free than open world. Not to mention developers can actually create a much better quest and storyline around an instance. If there's anything I hate about TLP and classic in general, it is the fact that it is all open world and all spawns are static and loot is rare (at least TSS did open world right, classic is horrible).

You can't just play for 30 minutes in classic. It takes ages to get to a camp, and the training and the fighting over spawns in open world is enough to ALT+F4 most of the time and play something worth my time.

The reason there is so much drama in classic is that you have 0 group instances, loot is rare, tradeable and spawns from the same stupid placeholder every time. So you get drama, training, campstealing, hacking, krono farmers, basically everything that is bad about EQ.

The way classic handles loot is comparable to throwing a snickers bar in the middle of a pack of people who haven't eaten for a week. And not only is the snickers bar incredibly rare, the snickers bar drops on the exact same spot every time. This will cause fights, not only does it cause fights over the snickers bar, it causes fights over the spot where everyone knows the next snickers bar will drop. To top it all off, once you have your own snickers bar, you can keep fighting weaker and hungry people over the snickers bar, to then sell them the snicker bars for real money, basically exploiting them. This is what classic EQ with krono is. It is horrendous.

Later in EQ loot becomes no-drop, more common, named spawn from far more random PH, and you get better and more frequent instances. All the drama from classic disappears.

If you think POP is the downward spiral because people leave their home cities you spend way to much time in your home city and not enough exploring. I love me some fippy darkpaw but seriously killing trash in the city yard gets old fast. POK got players out into the world faster and provided more actual playing and less standing around contemplating if the never ending run across the continent that might result in a corpse run was worth it within the time frame of ones playing time.

I forgot about LDON, but it was pretty forgettable!

Instances became the only thing anyone played. Not only that but EQ eventually became a game where players only wanted x, y, z instance and nothing else. No one open world groups.

These are exactly the things I enjoy! Adventure, drama, variety!!

If you ignore the 100s of hours spent in:
Dragonscale Hills
Arcstone
Valdeholm
Riftseeker's Sanctum
Loping Planes
Ashengate
Hills of Shade
House of Thule
ETC, ETC

Sure people only play instances after starting at GoD and open world died.

The actual time period were instances really reign supreme for group content most TLPs will never even make it to (HA’s CoTF...now you get some good fully instanced leveling). But I guess some tasked mission options stop people from playing in the zones people used in era.

TL;DR. That said, while many consider GoD the stumbling block for EQ (timing vs other games, guilds folding due to tuning, etc), I actually think it was PoP that hurt EQ the most. Going into PoP, the population was incredibly high and folks were excited, but the focus on raiding hit an all-time high and many guilds started feeling the impact of that immediately. I know of many 'family guilds' whom spent most of their time in group content with light raiding that were splintered, all around the discussion of "keep doing the old stuff or become a full time raider", thanks to the design of PoP. The batphoning and ****blocking some people found intense, while others saw as a major pain and incompatible with their schedule. While most folks I knew in-game were excited when PoP released, it is also the expansion I saw the most folks quit the game over, going to more casual friendly games.