The Case of EverQuest
In the “first EverQuest“, the overall package of a vast game world, 14 classes, 12 races (plus their alignments, categorized as Good, Neutral, and Evil), countless special abilities (such as mastering the Troll language), guilds, and much more thrilled players. For 5 years, no MMORPG was more successful in the USA, and 29 expansions have been released to date – the latest in December 2022.
Exciting number games from 25 years of EverQuest:
With the fourth expansion “The Planes of Tower”, EverQuest also introduced the first raid challenge in MMORPG history. A whopping 72 players had to cooperate to master 6 time-critical phases. The first phase already consisted of 5 different trials. Later, there were countless waves of opponents and battles against several gods.
Sounds like a safe genre milestone, right? Almost, but there was nearly a lawsuit because the EverQuest developers allegedly borrowed heavily from the aforementioned DikuMUD from 1991. So much so that there were even accusations that parts of the code for EverQuest were copied. On the official website of DikuMUD, there is still a concluding statement on this:
The DIKU group is proud that the ‘DIKU feeling’ has found its way into such an entertaining and award-winning game as EverQuest.
However, this does not change the fact that EverQuest truly belongs to the most important milestones for the MMORPG genre and has significantly influenced subsequent games like World of Warcraft (various early WoW developers were passionate EverQuest players and called it “Evercrack” internally because they played it every free minute).
Fun Fact: EverQuest holds a quirky record in the Guinness World Records. There is no other MMORPG that was banned in a country so long after its release (via guinnessworldrecords.com).
By the way, Daybreak Games is currently working on a reboot of the first part, with modern graphics and updated gameplay. In an interview, the developers explain that EverQuest II was a kind of curse for the first part because many players switched to the new MMORPG. They want to prevent that next time.
In this first generation of 3D MMORPGs, there were already some titles that could achieve strong sales and subscription numbers. EverQuest is said to have sold 3 million copies by the end of 2004 and reached a peak of 550,000 paying subscribers.
Nonetheless, the genre had not yet reached the mass market. This was mainly due to two reasons:
– Anyone wanting to experience an MMORPG needed a computer with sufficient power and the internet at home – an expensive hobby.
– The online role-playing games from the 1990s and early 2000s often had high entry barriers, offered little comfort, and potentially frustrating penalties (such as for the character’s death).
For Context: According to Landesmedienzentrum in 1997, only 6.5 percent of Germans aged 14 and over regularly used any online services. No wonder. There was neither Facebook nor X, Amazon Prime, or TikTok, and there was no internet flat rate either.
Every online minute drove up the monthly phone bill. It was no fun with a slow phone modem from back then (DSL or even fiber optics were still pure fiction). The subscription fee was additional for various MMORPGs. Exactly these conditions only changed widely in the mid-2000s.
More SciFi – Anarchy Online, Eve Online and Star Wars Galaxies
Several years before Funcom created MMORPGs like Age of Conan and The Secret World, the Norwegian developers tried their hand at an online role-playing game in a sci-fi setting – in 2001 this setting was still something special. The name of the game: Anarchy Online.
As a crashed colonist on the planet Rubi-Ka, you are on the hunt for experience and credits. How you get them is up to you. You can take on missions, pursue professions, fight monsters in the wilderness, trade, participate in PvP, and tackle dungeons. Anarchy Online is still playable today, for example via Steam.
The universe of Eve Online is gradually expanding, also into other genres:
Just like Eve Online from May 2003, which stands out with its space setting and has long been considered the most beautiful Excel spreadsheet for players (since June 2023 even with official Excel integration).
The sandbox universe consists of 7,800 star systems where you can try your hand at warfare, politics, trade, piracy or exploration. As large player communities pursue very different goals, there are repeatedly record-breaking large battles involving thousands of pilots and where countless spaceships go to wreck.
One might think that the first mobile MMORPG was created by some Asian developer. After all, studios in South Korea and elsewhere have been making incredible amounts of money with online role-playing games for mobile devices for years.
In fact, the first mobile MMORPG comes from Regensburg, from the German studio CipSoft. With TibiaME, a mobile spinoff of Tibia from 1997 went live back in May 2003. The franchise still boasts over 32 million players and over 200 million euros in revenue.
In 2019, Tibia won the German Developer Award in the “Long-Running” category.
Also in 2003 (but in June), Star Wars Galaxies went live for the first time. Sony Online Entertainment secured the coveted license and brought on Raph Koster (Lead Designer of Ultima Online) as an experienced developer for the position of Creative Director. In addition, there was support from Verant Interactive (EverQuest).
Challenging: All content for the game had to go through an approval process, not only with LucasArts but also with Lucasfilm, and sometimes even up to George Lucas in the executive suite. Everything that had already been seen in movies had to be replicated down to the smallest detail. This is one of the downsides of using a big license for your game.
The sandbox MMORPG focused on crafting, economy, social interactions, and role-playing. How to become a powerful Jedi was initially a well-guarded secret. However, this changed because Star Wars Galaxies could not meet the high expectations. More Force-sensitive individuals were needed! This eventually led to the infamous NGE patch, which marked the beginning of the end.
When the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic loomed on the horizon, the decision-makers at LucasArts decided to take the MMORPG off the market to avoid cannibalizing the two games. Nevertheless, Star Wars Galaxies continues to live on unofficially: The discontinued MMORPG for Star Wars is still so popular that a private server crashes during an event.
