EverQuest caused so much pain, but I still love it

Over the last few days, I’ve gone from struggling through Elden Ring to mourning my youth in a way that feels increasingly distant. And all because of a forgotten username and a closed email account. That doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Let’s back up a little. The simple truth is: Elden Ring reminds me a lot of my teenage years playing EverQuest. EverQuest was the World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14 of its time, namely the early 2000s. It was released in the UK in 2000 and I came across it fashionably late, mostly because someone I had a crush on talked me into it. Teenage choices, eh?

EverQuest was a brutal introduction to the MMORPG genre, with maps being the most glaring omission, which made the game that much harder. To start, I chose to be a troll shaman, since the person mentioned above was already one and was able to outfit me with a few valuable pieces of equipment. This meant I started in the village of Grobb – home of the trolls. Just outside the village was Innothule Swamp, a dark and desolate morass filled with trolls out to kill you. At what seemed like a very long distance were zone entrances for moving between different areas. The biggest catch? Again: no maps. You had to figure out the location yourself by learning the hard way.

I have a decent sense of direction, but zones like the swamp felt like they were designed to confuse me. There were few memorable locations in the swamp, which made traversal complicated from the start. Some zones were more open and airy, but that often just meant you could more clearly see the immediate threat nearby. I remember once seeing a massive sand giant coming toward me and knowing death was inevitable. Beautiful stuff.

Saving the limited maps in the game (there was a compass, after all) was the efforts of others. EQAtlas was full of hand-drawn maps. I printed out many of these maps and carried a folder full of them with me every time I played. They were lifesavers in a world that was anything but welcoming. It was hard enough back then to find a remote spot in a city without a map, let alone a game that was only too happy to kill you.

Still, the rest of the game wasn’t so bad, was it? Wrong. Death in EverQuest was a frightening and potentially game-defining experience. When you died (and you died a lot), you respawned with no items or clothing. Completely naked and vulnerable, you often respawned a few zones away from where you’d just fallen, meaning you had a perilous journey through unfamiliar territory ahead of you. The way back was long, and you couldn’t fend anything off particularly well. Worse, there was a time limit that determined how long you had to recover your corpse and possessions before they simply vanished and all was lost. This would be a comparatively minor annoyance at the beginning, but in the more demanding game it could be catastrophic. Real tears.

I was a member of a raiding guild for a long time. It wasn’t the biggest, but it still required you to play a certain number of hours to defeat a huge boss together. Planning was everything, with the tank having to be incredibly good at holding aggro while healers constantly healed and other classes destroyed all nearby enemies.

While it was still stressful when done perfectly, it gave a huge sense of accomplishment. However, the game was consistently against you, right down to the fact that enemies would chase you until you left a zone. This meant that you could theoretically be chased by dozens of enemies until you decided to flee. This led to players yelling “Train to the end of the zone!” to warn others that something very, very bad was about to happen to them. With such major problems, we always had a Corpse Run planned for the next day. A Corpse Run! This was as bleak as it sounded. A bunch of well-equipped players would go out and search for the bodies of those who had died the night before. This concept is fittingly extinct, but I guess the hunt for lost runes in Elden Ring is somewhat similar.

Sometimes it wouldn’t be so bad, but if your guild just spent two hours fighting their way to the bottom of a dungeon before getting wiped out and mostly dying, you have to repeat all that just to get a few people back to fight another day. Experience was lost with each death, and it really kept you on your toes when it came to thinking about risk. In comparison, when I play World of Warcraft today, I throw myself into whatever awaits me with glee. EverQuest kept you on edge the entire time.

I played on a PvP server – Tallon Zek. I didn’t realise it at the time, but that server had a rather unpleasant reputation for being the home of all dubious views on the internet. PvP was a rough experience because anyone eight levels higher than you could attack. It was team-based, a bit like Horde vs Alliance in World of Warcraft, with two sides. Some guilds would link the two sides and then inevitably be shunned by everyone else who was keen to keep the division. It was all incredibly tribal, made worse by the fact that many of the players were young and new to the genre and generally had too much time on their hands: nothing was more important to them than the game.

I wasn’t in one of the big guilds. I didn’t really have time and I wasn’t a particularly good player. You learned to recognize the names of the best players and the best PvP players. In the latter case, you were really afraid of them. Sometimes you’d be in a zone and someone would shout a warning to the zone that a certain well-known PvP player was there. People would scatter. That level of recognition and fame must have felt great, but I think these players ruled with an iron fist born of selfishness. In a way, I can’t blame them, but it was a game and a server that could make you feel like you were being bullied.

And yet I liked it. It came at just the right time for me. It came during my A-levels, when I had time to focus (just) on my studies and spend the rest of my time playing EverQuest. The game was based on teaming up with others. You couldn’t just dive in for 30 minutes on your own and expect to accomplish much. Despite the name, the game was more about defeating giant monsters than completing quests, so it was suited to group play. You could spend entire evenings playing it and accomplish surprisingly little.

These days, I think life is hard enough and I don’t need games that punish me (though I do participate in Elden Ring and World of Warcraft Hardcore). But when I recently realized that my EverQuest account details still worked, I suddenly found myself very happy to be able to return to Halycona Pietas, the noble troll shaman with mediocre gear whose name I was, disturbingly, able to remember. If gear is so hard to get and keep, it’s definitely worth remembering names.

So the other day I logged into EverQuest, which is somehow still running (albeit in the somewhat dubious free-to-play version), and sighed. It was the wrong account details. I’d forgotten that I had two accounts. I could still access one, but there was nothing there for me. The account I needed, which had thousands of hours of gameplay associated with it, was lost due to a now-closed email account and my inability to remember the password.

I think that’s a good thing. Of all the fights I’ve had in EverQuest, this is the one I can’t win. And that’s probably for the best. My patience isn’t what it used to be, and I like that I can be lazy and complacent in World of Warcraft. But as they always say, remember: it actually used to be harder.