EverQuest Legends is a powerful nostalgia machine

I wasn’t surprised when I got the call that my dad was dying, even though we’d been estranged for many years. He’d suffered addiction for decades and eventually ran out of time, which also meant he ran out of time to reconcile with me. About 15 years after we stopped talking, my aunt and uncle held the phone up to his ear — 1,400 miles away, between me in Connecticut and him in Nebraska — to help me say goodbye. I’ll never be sure if he understood my words, but, as I watched waves crash on the shore from the Long Island Sound, I cried and told him I loved him. I forgave him for things he probably never forgave himself for. I hung up, and, soon after, he died. Then I thought about EverQuest.

Dad bought me EQ for my birthday in 2000 when I had just entered high school. He brought it home with a grin on his face. EverQuest was one of the first massive multiplayer online roleplaying games, but at the time, the box just read “fantasy.” Years earlier, we’d explored Sierra Online adventures for MS-DOS. Compared to that, EverQuest was a revelation.

We got hooked on EverQuest immediately. My brother played a Wood-Elf Ranger, my dad played a High-Elf Wizard, and I played a Human Magician. Back in my dad’s small one-bedroom apartment, powered by CompuServe dial-up internet, we had to share EQ. If you know anything about MMOs, you’ll know that sharing one computer is a prickly situation. Taking turns in an MMO is unimaginable these days, the kind of thing you’d only be subjected to if Mr. Beast found a new way to torture people for money. We made it work somehow.

Our home was already primed to appreciate the spectacle of battle. Dad was obsessed with Lord of The Rings. It was the second movie I clearly remember him bringing us to years after the family went to see Titanic in theaters, because fantasy was a big enough deal to warrant the rare movie outing. He’d otherwise source plenty of lessons from cinematic battlegrounds, like this one from Braveheart: “First, learn to use this, then I’ll teach you to use this,” says William Wallace’s fictional movie-uncle Argyle, played by Brian Cox, tapping his noggin before he hoists a broadsword. It was one in a stable of apocryphal tales shared by a man who nearly only let himself cry in public while watching the Notre Dame football movie Rudy. Now I see that these things gave him a permission slip for being vulnerable. I wish he knew they grow permission slips on trees.

EverQuest ended up being one of the most important boxes I ever opened

Thanks to dad’s fateful decision to buy one of the first MMORPGs, EverQuest ended up being one of the most important boxes I ever opened. I went on to spend more than 10,000 hours in EQ and its sequel over the years. Most of those hours had nothing to do with playing the actual game. I formed friendships that could not have existed otherwise, meeting people from all kinds of backgrounds all over the world. You could be anyone you wanted, but EverQuest felt like a rare place online where what people wanted was just to be themselves.

Because of these friendships, I couldn’t put the game down, to the point where my grades at school suffered. This was a difficult thing to explain to parents at the time who justifiably couldn’t appreciate the idea of me spending a month hunting a digital winged horse in South Karana all to collect a Pegasus Feather Cloak for an epic quest that would result in… oh shit, I’m doing it again. Yeah, you can barely even explain this now without sounding like an internet-pilled maniac. Eventually I did capture the legendary Quillmane, but only because I spent weeks befriending a higher-level Ranger who could help me track it down. We kept in touch for a while.

Grades be damned. I ended up learning more from EQ than in a lot of my classrooms, including how to type 120+ words-per-minute by necessity, because you simply had to be able to tell your party as quickly as possible that a mob was on the way to kill everyone. It was an excellent way to avoid taking a typing class.

So it was exciting to learn that the latest owners of EverQuest, which is still going 27 years later, are doing a kind of reboot of the original. Sure, I’ve had problems with the franchise after it was sold off by Sony Online Entertainment and ended up in the hands of Daybreak Game Company. But there’s something rare happening here. Daybreak’s new EverQuest Legends is supported by the developer of an original EQ fan project, Project 1999, which revived the early experience via emulation and custom code for the people who were there from the beginning. It’s not the kind of deal on the scale of Rockstar buying FiveM, the team behind some of the biggest GTA roleplay servers, but it’s just as meaningful.

I’d already played Project 1999 and came away thinking it was one of the greatest digital game preservation projects ever. It’s a largely faithful implementation of the original game with some custom improvements — but forget all of that. Almost as soon as you sign into P99 you’ll be greeted by people who want to shower you with free gear and talk to a person with a similar background. Because, of course, who couldn’t be like-minded if they chose to be in this particular place in history at this particular time in the present. I’ve quietly joked to myself for years that if I make it to a retirement home, I’d be locked into EverQuest reruns, and that actually seems possible now.

Thanks to a closed beta code from the developers, I logged in to EverQuest Legends last week. I have a laundry-list of complaints about Legends, mostly because I don’t think it aims high enough. The “quality of life” improvements are perceptible only to the people who have been most hooked on the game since 1998 — anyone else would open this thing, think it’s an ancient computer virus, and immediately uninstall it. I find myself scratching my head at some decisions and wishcasting for others. But 24 hours of gameplay later, I remember why I kept coming back for years.

Back in 2000, I devoted myself to the adventure and ended up reaching much farther than the other turn-havers in the household. Dad, who was once very smart and ambitious — a former Marine Corps officer — set lowly sights in EQ, and I’ll never know why. At a time when the max level was 60, he resigned himself to forever live a level-12 life camping Orcs on the unofficially named “Orc hill,” just outside the tree city of Kelethin in the Greater Faydark zone. While my brother and I dared explore nearby Crushbone Castle, the Orc stronghold, dad was content to post up outside as if the beachhead had never been won.

For the 90 minutes we allowed him to enjoy the game without hounding him for our turn, he set out to do his best on this hill; dual-wielding a beer and a cigarette in one hand, and the keyboard in the other, harnessing his demons to rid another world of theirs. Occasionally he’d be interrupted by a friendly passerby who forced him to work on his keyboard skills, replying in the best possible haste with single-finger typing, well before the age of voice chat.

I have to imagine Sisyphus was happy on Orc hill

At some point, dad reached the limit of gaining experience from slaying lower-level creatures, which effectively froze him in time within the game. Thanks to getting a philosophy degree instead of joining the armed forces (sorry, dad), I know this is just The Myth of Sisyphus. Dad climbed Orc hill over and over again. He must have known at some point that he wasn’t making any progress. (Addiction, in its many forms, has a similar texture.) I have to imagine Sisyphus was happy on Orc hill. But, then, I think maybe he wasn’t. I never witnessed him doing the one thing really worth doing in EverQuest: making friends. I can barely remember the recipes for quests these days but I will forever remember the late nights I spent talking to strangers who were almost always willing to open up and offer their hearts to the unknown. I wonder if he ever snuck on late at night while I was asleep to do the same.

EverQuest Legends is a lot like Project 1999 in the sense that it’s entirely built around a pretty well-established group of nerds who will keep coming back to this place over and over again until the end of time. Commercially that makes it a quixotic quest for recruiting new video game buyers, but also an endearing one. At a time when the biggest video game companies in the world struggle to make live service games work, EQL is a blessing to those who grew up with the concept at the right time. This place was real for you, and it still can be.

The biggest irony is that EverQuest Legends is actually designed to be more lonely than its parent. It enables extremely powerful solo-playing options that make it possible to plow through much of the game by yourself. Aside from the global chat channel, I’ve noticed that people seem less chatty in general, which should be expected considering you don’t need other people as much as you used to. Smart move for a dwindling player base, but also maybe proof that lightning in a bottle diminishes the more you open it.

I’ve long thought if I got a blank check I’d buy the rights to EQ and reboot it myself — that’s how much this thing means to me. But as I get older, something like EverQuest Legends seems less like an opportunity to make an old video game great and more like a great opportunity to keep an old internet community together. Till death do us part, but at least now without the part where you have to spend hours retrieving your own corpse. Hey! There’s a quality of life improvement.

Even though I rarely thought about dad during the later years, I’d always had in the back of my mind, if we had ever reconnected, that I would have loved to share with him the advancements that came in video games. The mind-blowing graphics, set pieces, and depth — bordering now on what we expect from great movies. Just to see if there was a spark in his eye like I’d had in mine. Maybe to see that grin once more.

Now I just wish I could have gotten to share his favorite place with him again. A small little part of an old game where he would have felt right at home at level 12, guarding the tree city against the forces of Orc hill. It made him happy. And now it’s one of the last places I can visit his memory.

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TC Sottek