“I feel shabby and inadequate,” says player Devon Gozjolko.
So read a quote in a recent Polygon article detailing one Animal Crossing: New Horizons player in regards to seeing elaborate designs from other players on social media. Another player is quoted as saying:
“Every time I get on Twitter I see posts from both friends and internet people I follow who have these either incredibly ornate or certifiably insane setups on their island, and it honestly feels terrible, like, who did I think I was buying this game?”
The author of the article states that seeing all these other highly detailed and creative designs, “the more it becomes impossible not to compare yourself to others.”
I’m writing this post for players like these. This isn’t a new phenomenon for those of us in MMORPGs where housing is available to design and decorate as you like. So I want people to really really take this to heart.
There is peace in simplicity. You can be content without being complex. And you absolutely do not need to pursue what others have created.
Or, as J.R.R. Tolkien said, “it is no bad thing celebrating a simple life.”
With this in mind, I wanted to share my own house from Final Fantasy XIV, but first I want to demonstrate the similarity described in the Polygon article to our own MMO housing comparisons.
Someone designed an entire village marketwithin their house.
This is my large house in the Shirogane residential area
You’ll find many houses have a lot of stuff put into their front yard, making some really impressive designs.
However, while I wanted to do something like this at first, I realized that looking at other players’ creations was leading me less down a path towards creating my own design and more towards copying what others had done. There’s nothing wrong with taking a bit of inspiration here and there, but it’s easy to just copy someone else’s complicated design and think it’s pretty. I decided to take a different approach.
Since my home is in Shirogane, based off Japanese architecture and styles, I decided to model my yard and home after actual Japanese designs. I googled “traditional Japanese yard” and “Japanese garden” to get some ideas and found images such as this:
A simple walkway to the door branches off to the meditative garden. If I had more slots available, I’d have another going to the other side as well.
I would like to have made a more intricate garden, but due to limitations on number of items, I had to keep it small. Still, I’ve managed to have different elements present. A small lantern offers light at night, a traditional rock garden with two large stones representing islands, a copse of bamboo, and a few plants with shishi-odoshi and a pot with water lillies at the side. There’s also a nice bench to sit in the shade and enjoy the tranquility.
The other side of the yard is a little empty from the stepping stones, but there’s a pond with a tree and a Doman style deck for sitting. I chose the plot because the area looks out towards the waterfall in the top right corner.
On the sides of the house, I have a clothesline, a training dummy, and some firewood.
Moving inside….
Inside is where I took a very different approach in designing the house. I had been looking at other players houses and they looked nice, but also very busy. I stepped back and went a different direction by looking for photos and videos of traditional Japanese homes to blend fantasy and realistic design.
I kept the standard walls for the ground floor, along with wooden floors throughout the house to keep with the traditional Japanese style. Tatami mats are used in different rooms.
I found this image, among others, that I started from.
I made sure to put a stool (somewhat hidden in the left) and plenty of utensils on the wall and filled in on the counter top.
The table with the fruit is a place holder. I can’t craft the one I want just yet.
Likewise, the living room was designed from an actual photo of an interior shot from a Japanese home. I modified the existing house in game to hide the standard windows and added more Japanese style ones to partitions along with a painting. Overall, the intention was to keep the ground floor very open.
Upstairs, I made a side hallway into a little study using just a room divider.
A bathing room has a shower, bath, partitions to differentiate the walls, and shelves with towels and flowers for deocration. A kimono hanger was added for the impression of having something to change into after a relaxing bath.
The bedroom is likewise kept fairly simple, with a bed, dresser, and a few tabletop items.
Downstairs, however, had a lot of effort put into it.
If you Google for “FFXIV dojo” you’ll find a lot of creative designs that people have put a lot of work into. Not only designing the idea, but the effort taken to glitch items into places they don’t go by default in game. Once again, I was trying to figure out how to do some of these, but ultimately went back to looking at actual photos of real places.
I found martial arts sites and schools that detailed some of the design concepts, with the front being a place of honor, usually with a photo of the school’s founder, a shrine, various items there. Some detailed different cardinal directions to different elements, which wasn’t really an option with the way the house is designed in game.
On the left side, I have two mannequins that I plan to suit with ninja gear and either monk or samurai gear.
At the front, I put a shrine and an image of the Four Lords from the Stormblood quest series. There’s also a drawing of Gosetsu, the samurai, and Yugiri, the ninja. Scrolls fill out the area of the center. On the left I chose a chest with drawers mostly as decoration. The center also has an empty table with an incense burner and eventually I’d like to put a small shrine there (I’m not able to acquire it yet).
On the right is a painting of the Sekiseigumi barracks (the samurai police of Kugane) and a katana beneath it. A sake set, drum, and vase round out this side.
To the back of the dojo is a meditation room. Once again, I read on articles about designing a meditation room and designed this is a mix of nature – the potted plants and trees and water with an aquarium. I did use inspiration from another player’s design to overlap things and make the aquarium look somewhat like an outdoor window, but I may add fish in the long run.
An indoor garden piece has the shishi-odoshi so the sound effect is there and I added a bonsai tree to it to add a little more plant life.
There’s a small chest with incense burner as well.
All in all, my house is not terribly complicated. There’s not a lot of tricks utilized to make things float, to combine multiple pieces of furniture to create a unique one. Most of it is put together just creating furniture and placing it with the default tools.
My focus as I kept reading about actual interior design advice and traditional Japanese design was to keep things simple. While other houses are well designed with very complicated and complex designs, there’s no shame in a simple design either.
While this post is about Final Fantasy XIV housing, it can be applied to Animal Crossing: New Horizons or any other game with similar aspects. Your goal isn’t to have designs that match or rival other people. The purpose of designing your in game home is to make something you like and that you enjoy.
Look at other players’ designs for inspiration if you like, or think of a general design theme you want for yourself and look up photos of real or art images to inspire you and create from those.
In the end, these are your own little digital home, not someone else’s. It’s for you, not them. Take comfort in that, enjoy the simple things, and relax. Celebrate a simple life.
I took a break from MMORPGs after Final Fantasy XI, but it wasn’t too long until I heard about a new game: World of Warcraft. Some notable EverQuest alumni were involved and I found myself checking out details on the website. The description sounded interesting enough and I really liked the way the site described the survival specialization for the hunter class. Setting traps, then drawing enemies into them with a mix of both melee and ranged attacks with a pet companion. Of course, the melee turned out to be minimal in practice, but I didn’t know that just yet.
I bit the bullet and bought the game in January, activating my free month on 1/29/2005. This proved to be good, akin to my EverQuest experience, as starting near the beginning of an MMO’s release puts players on equal footing in awe and wonder and a good dose of uncertainty. I had settled on playing that survival hunter and chose to play a night elf rather than a dwarf. I named the character Faroth from my Tolkien Elvish Dictionary instead (yep, I’m a nerd).
Starting WoW was quite an experience after the past two MMORPGs I had played. The clear ! indication over NPCs for quests was a nice guide and I read every word of text as I began my adventures in Teldrassil. I quickly learned that WoW was not designed as vicious as EverQuest when I had my first scare by seeing an Ancient Protector on my way out of the starting area and on to the first small town. I freaked out, expecting it to be a high level enemy about to crush me. Though it was max level, it was friendly and not there to crush me. I quickly learned that there were no randomly high level enemies roaming zones to slaughter players.
I thought this was going to crush me the first time I saw it.
I moved on to Darnassus, the night elf capital, and beyond. Now, I could have stayed in the next zone on the continent of Kalimdor, but I wanted to learn to use one-handed swords. So, as many players did, I stocked up on food for my Nightsaber (a large cat) pet, Aratiel, and headed for the Eastern Kingdoms. Per my EverQuest and Final Fantasy XI training, this would surely be an arduous journey.
The entrance to the center of Darnassus, night elf capital.
I arrived in the Wetlands of the continent in the east, the Eastern Kingdoms and started down the road for the dwarf city of Ironforge. This was the most EQ-like experience as I ran from mobs many levels higher than me, often only rescued by sending my pet after them first and racing past them until the pet despawned due to distance or was killed by the high level enemy. Either of these options, or even dismissing the pet, resulted in me having to either resummon or revive her and then having to feed her. Originally, hunter pets had a happiness status. At full happiness, they did extra damage, but if they were unhappy for too long, they would abandon you!
Eventually I made it through the Wetlands, Loch Modan, Dun Morogh, Ironforge, and to Stormwind to learn to use swords and returned home to continue questing. As I leveled, I upgraded to new cat models for Aratiel, but always favored the dark striped ones similar to her original model and kept the name as I changed them. She became a lifelong companion for my hunter and I still have her today with the model of an elite named cat from Stranglethorn Vale.
Faithful companion for over a decade
The world seemed vast as I explored every zone, doing every quest, the conveniences of the hearthstone and flight paths helping, but not eliminating travel while the thought of a base speed mount was far away due to the high cost. I was probably five or more levels above the requirement when I could finally afford my first racial mount.
For me, endgame content consisted of running dungeons for my dungeon set, particularly Stratholme Baron runs, which refused to drop the Beaststalker Pants for months on end. I never got into really raiding in Classic WoW, but one day my guild asked if I had the leaf from Molten Core. I was attuned to enter the raid, but had never set foot inside. They pulled me in and let me loot it rather than let it rot. As I thanked them again and again, not fully knowing the quest it led to, I was told I was staying for the Ragnaros fight. With only my dungeon set. And no fire resist gear. Oh boy.
I died, but saw the raid’s victory and returned once in a while as a substitute for missing members, acquiring pieces of the hideous Giantstalker armor set. Primarily, I turned my attention to completing the quest from the Ancient Leaf my guild had gifted me. It required the player to really master different aspects of the hunter class and ultimately granted me the weapon Rhok’delar, a bow, and Lhok’delar, a staff.
Rhok’delar!
I never really did much more 40 man raiding other than Onyxia, but I joined a 15 man my guild formed and ran Zul’Gurub with them weekly. We never saw the tiger or panther mounts drop, though. We were still farming it when the next 40 and 15 man raids came with Anh’Qiraj. The opening of these raids was definitely interesting as the story began with a war effort in preparation for the gates to open. Entire servers were farming materials to donate to the war effort, gathering leather, making bandages, and such. I wasn’t in the raid group itself, but I was able to participate in the final step’s fight in Moonglade on the Feathermoon server that acquired the final component to open the gates.
Once the gates opened, lag consumed all. However, I still managed to fight enemies in other zones away from the raid opening itself. As classic WoW drew to a close with the final raid, Naxxramas, I had started my first alt by recreating my EverQuest paladin, Feneril. I managed to get him to 50 with a bit of gear just a week or two before the first expansion: The Burning Crusade.
As fond as my memories of roleplaying in EverQuest are, I’d say WoW is more where I really stretched my legs. I was on a RP server in a RP guild with players who really developed their characters and focused on their views on the world, the game’s current stories of raids and events, and their place in the guild rather than focusing on personal character relationship drama. Much like EverQuest, I have fond memories of my friends and guildmates and our adventures together. Hanstall, Tziva, Lapheer, Alhena, Zaria, Rautrix and Lochlaen, Cynvia, and many more.
Guild gathered in a tavern
Faroth was fleshed out into his own character, as was Azeroth’s version of Feneril. Over time, I went on to create six more alts, all with their own character concepts, personalities, and focus when playing them. One was a sort of homage to an EverQuest guild member in my dwarf warrior.
WoW’s first expansion was a lot of fun and introduced flying, though it was a pretty big achievement, much like epic speed riding. Although Faroth remained my main, I got Feneril up more quickly and wound up with both getting into raiding and their roles slowly reversing in the process. I always thought the expansion had a good pacing of gearing up from faction reps, dungeon drops, and then heroic dungeons before raiding. I actually have some really fun memories due to survival hunter’s design at the time.
The first was in Hellfire Ramparts where a pull went wrong. I activated my pet’s growl (a taunt to get enemy attention) to hold one target while I kept mend pet up to heal the pet and kept a second enemy frozen in a trap while I held a third myself. It was enough to impress the guildmate I was with, a rogue, after so many bad experiences with bad hunters.
The next dungeon memory I love is from heroic Shadow Labyrinth. I think it was the first pull to start clearing the first boss’ room. I was able to double trap two enemies, pet tank a third, wyvern sting a fourth, and kite/temporarily tank a fourth while the group burned the fifth target. They would then move to the wyvern sting target just as it was about to wake up or right after it had. I would continue to kite while keeping my pet healed and re-trap the first ice trap just as it was about to wear off. Usually the second trap would break as they killed the second enemy. Once that was down, they’d pick up the pet’s target, then my kited, and finally we’d take down the remaining enemy in an ice trap. It was a lot of fun juggling all of that and it let skilled survival hunters show off a bit.
My first raid experience in TBC was fairly random. Someone was shouting in a zone about needing one more and I joined them. That became a static group that I continued to run Karazhan with on my hunter, where I made new friends in Errdo and Hayleybrianna. Being geared from that led me to Gruul’s Lair and Magtheridon with members of my guild who had raided together since Classic along with other members gathered through the Molten Core Alliance. The raid was called MCA: Shrieky and I made two new friends here: Dulcea and Aryaltel, both of whom I’ve met in person and see a couple times a year.
MCA: Shrieky needed a tank later, so I ran Karazhan with members of that raid and found my paladin raid ready in all of two weeks. Over the course of Tier 5 and Tier 6 raiding, my paladin became my main raid character. We didn’t get through Sunwell, but we did take down Illidan not long before the next expansion.
Feneril in his Tier 6 armor
Moving into the second expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, WoW was at its peak in popularity. I was excited for the story, wrapping up one of the biggest stories in Warcraft’s history with Arthas, the Lich King. The questin/leveling experience was mostly the same, but with some new tools allowing for more immserive experiences as the story went on, such as phasing and the addition of cut scenes in game. Even the outdoor PvP zone proved pretty fun for players who didn’t often PvP.
This expansion really drew me in and had me writing fan fiction for myself to better piece together how I saw my characters fitting in with the big stories. I never liked the idea of my character defeating all the raids and threats or even playing a part in all of them, so I divided them up a bit with Faroth primarily involved in the dragon war against Malygos and Feneril involved in the Alliance’s efforts against the Scourge.
At end game, I raided with a 25 man in the start, but it dissolved in the second raid, Ulduar. I formed my own 10 man raid with Trial of the Crusader, largely with real life friends and their own guild mates. Once again raiding on my paladin, we cleared Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel to complete the expansion. We didn’t, however, really bother with the added Ruby Sanctum.
Our first time defeating the Lich King
I admit with Cataclysm, I started to lose steam. I didn’t find the added 5 levels as interesting and the story was very disjointed as the 1-50 leveling experience tied into the overall story of the new war between Horde and Alliance as well as some information about the story dealing with Deathwing. I felt that the expansion offered the least new additions and features, likely due to how much effort went into redesigning the world for flying and reworking the leveling experience. Transmogrification, allowing players to customize their armor appearance, was the best feature after a long and hard fought debate. The feature had been requested for years and I was quite active on the forums in support of it. Due to a lack of things to do, though, this was the expansion that I got all eight of my alts to max level.
Next came my final full expansion: Mists of Pandaria. I had no issue with the pandaren race nor the Asian aesthetic of the expansion. The content was fun and I liked the story overall. Cut scenes were taken to a new level and voice acting was improved. I didn’t even mind the daily quests as I felt they gave players what they’d asked for in removing the gating of them and removing the daily limit. I think they probably should have kept the limit, but not had previous expansion daily quests count towards it.
I did feel the Alliance players got shafted in Cataclysm’s story and that continued heavily in Mists of Pandaria. Everything Alliance players experienced resulted in loss, failure, and being told even their victories were colossal failures as well. The major “fist pump” moment that Blizzard promised was immediately reprimanded by King Varian as the absolute worst thing we could have done. How being told you’ve ruined a major victory is a “fist pump” moment has never made sense to me. I could probably write a couple posts on where I felt Blizzard went wrong in these two expansions and what I think would have been a better balanced approach.
Also, this is what happens when everyone is funneled into one zone on launch night.
I raided the expansion via Looking for Raid, or LFR, tool, which was not the most enjoyable experience due to the ridiculous ease of content along with player attitude. WoW had gotten a reputation for having a fairly toxic community by this point and LFR brought out the worst in those toxic players. Once I ran the final raid, Siege of Orgrimmar, once, I had no inclination to farm it for gear and the Timeless Isle addition felt like an EverQuest inspired grind fairly quickly. After nine continuous, uninterrupted, years of World of Warcraft, I cancelled my subscription.
Warlords of Draenor didn’t seem like a great idea story wise and the added $10 cost of the game didn’t draw me back, so I waited to pick up the Collector’s Edition on sale during Black Friday and Christmas sales. I didn’t resubscribe, however, until the following spring. I played for a month to see the zone stories, which I enjoyed, but was really irritated by the conclusion where Thrall takes all the glory for what the players have been working towards. After Cataclysm revolved around him and he had been the forefront of so many stories, I was tired of Thrall. For him to show up at the end of this expansion and take the victory was just disappointing. I never ran a single dungeon and never resubscribed to see the rest of the story, just following with information online.
When Blizzard announced Legion, it looked much better than Warlords of Draenor, but I was still uncertain. I waited until release and found the collector’s edition was sold out and appeared to be legitimate limited stock, but I fortunately managed to get one. I planned the same routine as Warlords – subscribe for a month to see the zone stories. What I found was, in my opinion, the best expansion since Wrath of the Lich King. The added features such as world quests replacing daily quests and the gear flow were welcome additions. Mythic dungeons brought back a sense of Heroics from Burning Crusade. I even found myself really liking the class order hall with Faroth where I expected to not like it at all. The story has been well done and Suramar is one of the best cities Blizzard had designed in the entire game (hopefully it becomes a player friendly city post-expansion). However, I don’t like the retcon they pulled in order to bring Illidan back as a hero. A redemption story I could deal with, but “everyone is stupid and Illidan is smart” didn’t hit the mark for me.
This post is definitely one of the longer in this series, but it spans over 10 years of gaming and has been a large part of my gaming life, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise. I’m still playing World of Warcraft occasionally for a month here and there, though another MMO has the majority of my attention in that realm now. For a couple of expansions now, I’ve said it was likely my last and Legion looks like it might be wrapping up a lot of major plotlines. Will it be my final expansion? Or will I give the next one a shot for a month here and there? The latter is probably likely, but I suppose one can never be sure.
One thing is certain, though: It’s hard to walk away from characters you’ve come to know and love over a decade, because you’ve crafted them and come to know them. It’s like a good book series, except you’ve been a part of thee characters’ lives in a way no other media can offer. They’re a part of you.
Since this post took us all the way from 2005 to 2017, we’ll go back to where we were in the next post, which will be the final in this series as I go over my memories and experiences with the Playstation 3.
I’ve been getting behind on posting these regularly as I’ve been consumed by Horizon: Zero Dawn on Playstation 4. I finished with a platinum trophy, so it’s time to jump back into the retro reminiscing with more about EverQuest.
In the last post I went over memories on the Antonica continent, setting sail across the Sea of Tears to the continent of Faydwer. On the way there, the boat would stop at an island inhabited by the Sisters of Marr, who killed my friend’s shadow knight when he mistakenly stepped off thinking he’d arrived at his destination. Once the ship set sail again, however, you did arrive at Faydwer in the Butcherblock Mountains, which housed the dwarf capital of Kaladim. Beyond that you’d venture into Greater Faydark, the elf forest and home to both the high elf city of Felwithe and the wood elf city of Kelethin.
Felwithe – Truly an awe inspiring sight
Nearby was the infamous zone called Crushbone where one quickly learned about orcs and “trains to zone.” The zone boss that players camped was called Emperor Crush, who had a dark elf near him named Ambassador D’Vinn (this NPC has been given a nod in World of Warcraft Legion with a demon NPC named Ambassador D’vwinn).
When adds would respawn during a fight or extra enemies were accidentally grabbed in a fight, parties would have no choice but to flee the battle. EverQuest, unlike modern MMOs, had no leash mechanic on NPCs. Instead, they would keep chasing players until they were killed or until they reached the border of a zone, its zone line. The whole time, players were drawing attention of every enemy in their escape route, building a train of enemies chasing them to the zone, hence the warning shouts “train to zone” told others to beware of the incoming danger. Other zones that were notorious for trains wiping numerous parties were Unrest and Mistmoore Manor, home of the vampire Mayong Mistmoore (also referenced in the original release of World of Warcraft).
Trains could get pretty bad
Like…..really bad.
Lesser Faydark, a second zone that continued the massive forest of the continent, was home to another major GM event I remember hearing about by word of mouth, though this one happened when I was playing. It took place during the first expansion, the Ruins of Kunark, when the god of fear, Cazic Thule, appeared in the forest. Firiona Vie arrived to drive him back with Tunare’s blessing, but not before he was able to corrupt a unicorn that was known to wander the zone. The unicorn, Equestrielle, was a friendly NPC to good races. Firiona was forced to make a choice to save Equestrielle from corruption by killing her or risk corrupting her forever by cutting off her horn, though doing so would allow her to purify the forest of Cazic Thule’s corruption. If I recall, the unicorn asked her friend to save the forest and Equestrielle became the black horse, Corrupted Equestrielle, who would kill anyone on sight and was a very dangerous NPC wandering the forest from then on. She killed me and three friends once and our max level friend had a hard time getting our corpses dragged to the zone line without being killed herself.
Which is another point I’ve not touched on. Death was serious business in EverQuest. If you died, all your gear, your money, and your inventory was left at the point you died. You had to have players bind your soul to cities near where you’d be hunting so you would respawn there completely unequipped and run back to your corpse to reacquire your gear. Death also carried with it experience penalties and the possibility to lose levels (which could render you unable to wear armor you had on). Other players could drag your corpse for you and necromancers made money summoning corpses to them (sometimes the only way to get your corpse back). You had 24 or 48 hours (I forget which) of online time or 1 week offline time to recover your corpse of it decayed and you lost everything on it.
This corruption of Equestrielle was just one chapter in a larger over arching story in Norrath that played out over time involving Firiona Vie and the return of her old nemesis, the Child of Hate Lanys T’Vyl. I remember Lanys went on a quest with numerous players that culminated in the Rathe Mountains with a sphynx or some such creature posing a riddle. The player that answered it was granted special armor from the GM playing Lanys and a special title, I believe something like “The Discerner.”
Not all GM events were grand stories, though. My friend and I were in a volcanic zone when the sky turned red and a goblin was shouting to the zone he was cold. We managed to find him and my friend gave him a high level item with cold resistance. The goblin despawned, but then appeared again and gave my friend a breastplate that only came from very high end raids.
I never got high in level, enjoying the game at a leisurely approach alongside my guild and roleplaying as if we were having a D&D night all along the way. I did complete the Armor of Ro quest as well as the paladin’s class weapon to get the 2 handed sword the Soulfire. I didn’t play too far into the Kunark expansion before the Scars of Velious expansion released. I was barely high enough to travel to the moon when the third expansion Shadow of Luclin released.
What impressed me with each expansion was how big the new continents seemed. Ruins of Kunark introduced the Iksar race and Shadows of Luclin introduced the Vah’shir. Each race started at level 1 on their newly released continent, making an expansion introduce enough zones for 1-50 if not higher without going back to old zones, though that was of course still an option. It made the game seem so vast and expansive that few players would ever spend any real time hunting and exploring every zone across the world, especially since soloing was rather rare. Of course, the camp-and-grind leveling made this easier than modern models with quests and story driven experiences.
The one last story I recall from EverQuest is not a GM event, but rather a player enacted one: The Battle against the Kerafyrm, or The Sleeper. This dragon was the forbidden product of a blue and red dragon mating. Lore stated if the Sleeper were to awaken, it would rampage across Norrath and bring about the end of the world. This was meant to be a far later storyline that would be explored, so the Kerafyrm was never intended to be fought and killed. It was also a one attempt per server fight. If they woke the Sleeper and failed to kill it, it would never be in the game to attempt again. But gamers like a challenge.
Kerafyrm, the Sleeper
Dozens of players, if not over one hundred individual players, gathered to take beat the unbeatable. They started the fight and anyone who died would run back to their corpse for their gear and jump back into the fight. One would think with 100+ players, this strategy now commonly known as zerging should have made short work of any enemy, but I’ve always heard it took hours for them to whittle the monster’s health down. Just before it died, though, a GM despawned the monster and denied them victory. Players took to the forums to decry the action and caused such an uproar that SOE eventually made a statement saying it was the wrong decision. They would reinstate the Kerafrym and allow players to try again, though as a non-canonical kill should they win. The players organized again, this time with 200 players, and managed to kill the dragon after four hours.
I stopped playing EverQuest during the Shadows of Luclin expansion, before even getting a horse. However, in many ways I still like aspects of EverQuest’s design philosophy more than what’s become commonplace in many MMOs today. The world felt so large, danger lurked around every corner, and players would form friendships over true fear of death. Bad or good behavior could build a reputation in the server community, allowing players to often police themselves more than is seen in modern MMOs. The guide program furthered that, allowing players to take on minor issues as mini-GMs in exchange for free game time. The level of socialization was simply above and beyond anything in the games today.
The story was not told in quests on set paths, it was a living part of the world. SOE would add things to the world in a patch without mentioning them in the patch notes. Players would then notice crates with a weird symbol had appeared in dark elf camps and orc camps, spurring speculation of a coming alliance and possibly war. When those crates appeared in High Hold pass, there was discussion on the forums of the possibility that High Hold was infiltrated and going to turn bad, cutting off access for good races to get to Qeynos without a lot of difficulty. Many stories and speculation sprang up, some proving to hit the mark on what later unfolded in GM events and stories, some being completely speculation, but it made the game’s story feel organic because players, like their characters, didn’t know every detail of what was going on in the behind the scenes politics of Norrath.
That’s not to say the genre hasn’t improved and EverQuest was the golden age, only that some aspects that made it so unique have been lost through the years of improving accessibility and faster experiences rather than expecting long hours of commitment. Norrath was a large world that you could take time to escape reality and live in, not just play a game and do a routine for loot. It was about adventure and comradery, stories told by the developers as well as by players, and a world that asked you to explore it. I hope someday these design concept comes back to MMOs and we see a true return to MMORPG rather than MMO Theme Park designs, but I personally don’t see this happening until we develop Virtual Reality to the levels we’ve dreamed of for years in sci-fi and anime.
Ironically, a machinima for World of Warcraft might give the best indication of what it’s like to remember EverQuest by those who started it from the beginning:
“I want to understand.”
“What we have suffered? It can not be understood by those that did not suffer it.”
With Playstation and N64 in my bedroom as my consoles of the time, I found myself wandering into the land of PC. I was in my final years of high school and had a little experience playing Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II along with even less of X-Wing vs TIE Fighter. I had played a few PC games a little bit in the past with Alone in the Dark and Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be a Hero, but a friend pulled me more fully into PC gaming by introducing me to EverQuest.
Just look at that cutting edge amazing game.
After playing RPGs on consoles, the breadth and scope of EverQuest, or EQ, was quite impressive. What set this game apart from RPGs I had played before was the notion of living in a fantasy world and finding your own adventure rather than just playing through a pre-determined story. I didn’t know of Ultima Online, so EQ was more of a revolutionary concept than a genre for me, but it certainly went on to cement itself as a, if not the, founder of the MMORPG genre of the next number of years.
I started on the server my friend was on: Erollisi Marr, which was still running last I looked. I created a human paladin named Feneril (Fin-er-ill) and started in Freeport. EverQuest is still, to me, the closest any game has gotten to best imitating a Dungeons & Dragons world in a video game.
Night was dark and humans couldn’t see in the dark without a light source such as a torch, lantern, or magical item. As a result, I found myself in the dark falling into the water at the Freeport docks. Now in the water and still unable to see, I didn’t know where to go, so I spent the game’s night cycle swimming against the wall of the docks, treading water and getting my swimming skill leveled up!
From Freeport killing rats, I journeyed to the Commonlands where a tunnel became the go-to location for player barter and trade. EverQuest didn’t have an “auction house” like most modern MMOs, so shouting to hock your wares was how the economy flowed in Norrath at the time. There were tales of people getting cheated during trades, but I didn’t know anyone who was myself. That the area became the accepted player market place is one of the early examples of emergent gameplay that made EverQuest unique at the time.
Commonlands Tunnel Entrance
The Commonlands also had another…we’ll say feature that you don’t tend to find in MMOs anymore: ridiculously high level enemies that wandered into low level areas. While players were in their early teens coming into this zone, a level 36 griffin would wander about. The griffin would fly along and aggro (attack) players below. When they were spotted, players would alert others by using /shout to announce the sighting and players either ran from the area or would get indoors at a merchant’s shop for safety. The latter didn’t always work as the griffin would sometimes come through the ceiling or wall and attack anyway. Norrath was a dangerous world.
The monster itself!
Moving on was the first far-from-town outpost from Freeport where players gathered. It was basically a collection of stones, but druids would make money there offering the Spirit of the Wolf buff (SoW). This let players run faster and was sought after for the next leg of the journey to venture through the next zone of Kithicor Woods. Nobody wanted to get caught in Kithicor Woods at night.
EverQuest, particularly in its early days, had GM (Game Master) events where the game GMs would trigger and/or lead major events. These were often used for major story events that would impact what was happening in the world’s grander stage. Perhaps the most famous of these is the Battle of Bloody Kithicor. The whole event went down before I was playing, but EverQuest had these events only once rather than remaining available for all players to experience forever. As a result, these events passed on to stories that players would tell, which then became the stuff of legend much as the stories have in human history.
The way I read it was players were contacted by GMs posing as messengers of the gods with warnings of a great conflict to come in Kithicor Woods, but beyond that were fairly vague other than how many days they had until it would happen. Players then began to spread the word. One group of players gathered at the city of High Hold, expecting it to be the target. Two zones away in Neriak Forest, home of the dark elves, the dark elf character Lanys T’Vyll spawned under a GM’s control. After a speech, she started a march towards the Commonlands, gathering players who marched with her on the way to Kithicor Woods, resulting in a growing army.
On the other end of Kithicor Woods, the high elf princess Firiona Vie, EverQuest’s mascot character, appeared as well, also played by a GM. Players flocked to her as well, swelling an army to defend High Hold Pass.
The result was a conflict of players against spawning mobs as well as players vs players. Emergent gameplay cropped up during the event as players from the dark elf army split away to invade the bordering zone of the Rivervale and to attack the halflings. Why? No particular reason, but they were still attacking “innocents,” so the defenders followed and the battle spilled into that zone as well.
The event ended with the sky going red (which became a hallmark of GM events) and the woods becoming cursed due to the bloodshed and hatred caused by the battle. After the event, Kithicor Woods remained a medium level zone by day, but became populated by large amounts of higher level undead at night, associated with the Plane of Hate.
Beyond Kithicor was High Hold Pass which led to the Plains of Karana and on to the city of Qeynos as well as the city of the barbarians, Halas. It was in the Karanas I fought gnolls and toward the Rathe Mountains to fight aviaks. Along the way, my friend that got me into the game brought me into their guild, The Champions of Marr.
Combat was quite different from today’s MMOs. Nothing was instanced, so leveling was done by forming a group and taking up a camping spot, then pulling enemies to the group to fight and kill them for experience, then wait for a respawn to repeat the process. The advantage this gave was downtime to chat and get to know other players, making EverQuest a very social game where friendships were formed and relationships began that were known to even lead to real world marriages. I still remember a number of my guild mates: Avaric, Esperanza, Lily, Kharne, Gorndax, and Ariell to name a few, though I’m not in touch with most of them anymore.
Another event, this time in the Karanas, wasn’t so quickly resolved. The god of plague and disease had followers preparing to summon him into the mortal realm, causing polluted rain and diseased, rabid, animals through the plains. There was quite a bit of reported event activity in the city of Qeynos at the time, but I don’t remember all the details as I do with Kithicor’s retelling. I do remember once walking, not running, from Qeynos to Freeport just to do so.
On the opposite side of Freeport was the Desert of Ro where I spent some time leveling as well. There was a number of zones on the continent of Antonica that I never even explored. Instead, I headed for those Freeport docks once again where players could wait up to 30 minutes for a ship to arrive and carry them across the sea.
With the departure from Antonica, we’ll stop here for now. In my next post, I’ll discuss memories on the continent of Faydwer, and we haven’t even gotten out of the game’s initial release and started to explore the expansions yet!
Final Fantasy XIV released Patch 2.38 this week to a bit of an uproar and backlash to some extent. The big addition to the game was the introduction of personal housing which, to be honest, was not exactly what people were expecting. To be fair, earlier this year, Yoshida did comment on player housing being much more affordable than Free Company Housing. This, as it turns out, was not the case.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from personal housing, but I was looking forward to it. The idea that it would be cheaper than Free Company housing made me think it would lack some of the functional features such as chocobo raising or gardening. I expected it to primarily be a house you could decorate and have your own place to hang out, possibly with a summoning bell similar to the inn rooms. But then Square put in the personal quarters in Free Company housing and that had most of the personal housing features I was expecting. So what would player personal housing be?
As it turns out, Square chose to give players the option of owning their own private house completely identical to what Free Companies could buy and build with all the features and functionality. Fairly interesting decision, but players were a bit confused that Square only added two new wards, a total of six new wards per server. The small houses were sold out within hours, if that long, on many servers. On our server, the most expensive plot in one ward has been purchased by an individual player for near 90 million gil. The result was many players, and smaller Free Companies, left unable to purchase a house as things were scooped up fast. The combination of limited spaces and the reset to original plot prices resulted in limited accessibility. A lot of players are unhappy.
Yoshida has already acknowledged the issue and has stated they are facing challenges with ensuring server stability as they continue to add wards, but they are making some strides and plan to double the number of wards with the 2.4 patch. While the hope of getting a house with this patch may have resulted in dashed dreams, our group has seen it as an opportunity to continue to amass our gil in preparation for the plot we want, not just the plot we can grab. If that means we spend more in another 15 days or get it at a lower price in 30 or even have to wait until 2.4, then so be it.
It’s actually a feature I’ve come to really like about Final Fantasy XIV: the lack of instant gratification. It’s disappointing, but if you’re patient and keep working towards a goal, I feel like you will eventually get there. For now, though, my friends and I continue to put our collective efforts into accumulating gil and making preparations for our future mansion.
I would like to have made a more intricate garden, but due to limitations on number of items, I had to keep it small. Still, I’ve managed to have different elements present. A small lantern offers light at night, a traditional rock garden with two large stones representing islands, a copse of bamboo, and a few plants with shishi-odoshi and a pot with water lillies at the side. There’s also a nice bench to sit in the shade and enjoy the tranquility.
The other side of the yard is a little empty from the stepping stones, but there’s a pond with a tree and a Doman style deck for sitting. I chose the plot because the area looks out towards the waterfall in the top right corner.
The bedroom is likewise kept fairly simple, with a bed, dresser, and a few tabletop items.
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