everquest

Everquest is a groundbreaking game created by Verant. It didn't create the MMORPG genre, but it brought the MMORPG (massive multiplayer online roleplaying game) genre to life with a revolutionary 3D world, unheard of in MMORPGs at the time. Unfortunately, it had numerous problems that dragged it down and turned it into a drug, rather than the intended interactive world. One core problem I always had with Everquest up to the Lost Dungeons of Norrath expansion was that the world felt very vast, yet incredibly devoid of "game" quality. Unlike World of Warcraft and similar games, you weren't lead very smoothly through the experience-, you had to truly focus on the experience to make it feel like a game rather than an enginge, scaffold for a game. The deeply flawed quest system just poured salt into the wounds of the game (you had to inquire about the object spoken of by the NPC, placed in brackets). They eventually corrected this by adding several expansions, making travel much easier as well as just basic interaction. Unfortunately, this caused the attention of players to shift automatically towards new content, leaving the existing world devoid of people and deteriorating. On top of all of this, you could not afford to die in the game. If you died, you would return to a "bind point" as a nude and vulnerable character, where you would have to run all the way back to your corpse and loot it-, unprotected. This often lead to more deaths, amplified by the fact that you lost game experience every time you died (you could shrink in level). It was definitely a bold pioneering game, but ultimately had an abundance of disappointing flaws.