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10 Years Ago This Week: EverQuest

10 Years Ago is a recurring feature that looks at whatever the new hotness was around this time 3,652 days ago. Ostensibly it will look at the game’s impact both in past and present terms, but mostly it will just make you feel really old.

While not the first successful MMORPG (Ultima Online is frequently cited for this accolade), EverQuest (released March 16, 1999) was undoubtedly the first truly culturally relevant MMORPG, and the first one to achieve critical mass in its player base. The things EverQuest did in its five years at the top of the genre defined not only the way MMORPGs are designed. It also codified how the MMO business is structured, cemented a great many aspects of massive game player culture, and began the controversies that continue to haunt the genre to this day. It’s hard to overstate how much EverQuest has contributed to the medium, and you could certainly make an argument for it being the most important game of the last ten years (though you only have the rest of the day to do so).

Posted Mar 16 2009, 10:00 AM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments

Filed under: world of warcraft, sony online, mmorpgs, pc games, everquest, joe keiser, 10 years ago, the realm, mythic, meridian 59, stormfront, ultima online, mac games

Here Comes the Science: 60TB of Everquest Server Logs

Interesting news courtesy of Ars Technica: Sony has donated a big hunk of user behavior data from the Everquest 2 servers. Surely a Herculean task awaits those who have to sift through the data in order to glean useful information. That's 400,000 users over a four year period.

To give a concrete example of the data's utility, Srivastava described how he could explore the phenomenon of customer churn, something that's significant for any sort of subscription-based service, like cell phones or cable TV. With the full dataset, the team can now track how individual customers dropping out of the game influenced others who they typically played or interacted with. Using this data, the spreading rate and influence factor could then be calculated, providing hard measures to work with.

Posted Feb 16 2009, 05:00 PM by Cole Stryker with | with no comments

Filed under: cole stryker, sony online, everquest, science

NYCC 2009 - DC Universe Online

Editor's note: I'm still pretty darn worn out from the frenetic pace of New York Comic-Con this past weekend. My entire body hurts. Expect a good amount of post-con reporting over the next few days as I sift through my notes, photos, and edit together a few videos which will hopefully be fairly rad. For now, though, let's just start off with something easy, the first massively multiplayer online game to officially license characters and scenarios from one of the biggest pop-culture publishers in the world...oh lord, what am I doing?

One of the biggest crowd-pleaser games at New York Comic-Con was Sony Online Entertainment's DC Universe Online. The massively multiplayer online action title was set up for anyone to play using either keyboard and mouse or or the Playstation DualShock3 and there was a panel discussion about the game featuring several members of Sony's design team along with human-style-guide Jim Lee and story and scenario writers Geoff Johns and Marv Wolfman. Those names should sound very familiar to you if you're read any superhero comics in the past twenty years or so.

That they referred to it as an MMO action game rather than an MMO RPG is very telling in what we saw from the presentation and our play sessions. It plays just like all the other open-world action brawlers, only you're playing with other people to either cooperate or compete in objectives which are continuously sent to you from the game's servers (cleverly disguised in Hero mode as Oracle from Batman and Justice League). Run, jump, smash, repeat, no arcane spell casting.

Posted Feb 09 2009, 03:00 PM by Derrick Sanskrit with | with 1 comment(s)

Filed under: playstation 3, derrick sanskrit, dc universe, mmo, sony online, dc comics, nycc

DC Universe Online and the Console MMO Conundrum

You’d think that people would be more excited about the reveal of Sony Online’s DC Universe given that it premiered a mere three days before The Dark Knight, but reactions have been decidedly mixed. It not too surprising to me. SOE doesn’t exactly have the best track record. The Untold Legends series is crap, they’ve been unable to recapture Everquest’s initial success, and Star Wars Galaxies was a complete nightmare. But even beyond SOE’s reputation and the wonky looking DC Universe trailer, there’s never been a truly successful MMO on home consoles.

Posted Jul 22 2008, 03:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s)

Filed under: john constantine, star wars, final fantasy, untold legends, dc universe, mmo, sony online, the agency

about the blogger

John Constantine, our superhero, was raised by birds and then attended Penn State University. He is currently working on a novel about a fictional city that exists only in his mind. John has an astonishingly extensive knowledge of Scientology. Ultimately he would like to learn how to effectively use his brain. He continues to keep Wu-Tang's secret to himself.

Derrick Sanskrit is a self-professed geek in a variety of fields including typography, graphic design, comic books, music and cartoons. As a professional hipster graphic designer, his recent clients have included Nerve, Pitchfork and MoCCA, among others.

Amber Ahlborn - artist, writer, gamer and DigiPen survivor, she maintains a day job as a graphic artist. By night Amber moonlights as a professional Metroid Fanatic and keeps a metal suit in the closet just in case. Has lived in the state of Washington and insists that it really doesn't rain as much as everyone says it does.

Nadia Oxford is a housekeeping robot who was refurbished into a warrior when the world's need for justice was great. Now that the galaxy is at peace (give or take a conflict here or there), she works as a freelance writer for various sites and magazines. Based in Toronto, Nadia prizes the certificate from the Ministry of Health declaring her tick and rabies-free.

Bob Mackey is a grad student, writer, and cyborg, who uses the powerful girl-repelling nanomachines mad science grafted onto his body to allocate time towards interests of the nerd persuasion. He believes that complaining about things on the Internet is akin to the fine art of wine tasting, but with more spitting into buckets.

Joe Keiser has a programming degree from Johns Hopkins University, a tiny apartment in Brooklyn, and a fake toy guitar built in the hollowed-out shell of a real guitar. He writes about games and technology for a variety of outlets. One day he will stop doing this. The day after that, police will find his body under a collapsed pile of (formerly neatly alphabetized) collector's edition tchotchkes.

Cole Stryker is an American freelance writer living in York, England, where he resides with his archeologist wife. He writes for a travel company by day and argues about pop culture on the internet by night. Find him writing regularly here and here.

Peter Smith is like the lead character of Irwin Shaw's The 80-Yard Run, except less athletic. He considers himself very lucky to have this job. But it's a little premature to take "jack-off of all trades" off his resume. Besides writing, travelling, and painting houses, Pete plays guitar in a rock trio called The Aye-Ayes. He calls them a 'power pop' band, but they generally sound more like Motorhead on a drinking binge.