Why Luclin was the Pinnacle of Everquest

I know no one is asking for this essay, but it’s that time of the MMO cycle when I’m treading water, waiting for the next big thing. While MMORPGs don’t grip my life anymore in nearly the same way that Everquest did in the early 2000s, they’re still a constant presence. Without even taking into account the moral objections to not wanting to support Blizzard, WoW’s latest expansion, Shadowlands, was especially disappointing, though the previous iteration, Battle for Azeroth, was lackluster as well. FFXIV and Guild Wars 2 are great in small bursts, but ultimately don’t offer the right combination of things to keep me hooked for more than a month or two at a time. And, unfortunately, the genre seems to be in stagnation — WoW is no longer the mountain it used to be, but no one is taking the expensive risk of trying to do something markedly different from it.

For a brief period I tried out Project 1999 , the now officially sanctioned, private, free Everquest server that seeks to recreate the original Everquest experience from vanilla’s launch in 1999 to the final Scars of Velious (EQ’s second expansion) patch from 2001, then pressing pause or reset. Now, obviously the experience can’t be recreated for tons of reasons, so grinding out the first ~30 levels was a fun trip down memory lane but didn’t entice me to continue at all. The main reasons were a lack of appealing community and a lack of mystery. However, playing it I also realized that while that 1999–2001 stretch might’ve been the peak for a lot of people, for me the peak came just after, with Luclin. And so, a reflection on why that might be the case.

Part of the reason is external to Everquest. 2004 was the end of truly loving Everquest — that year, Everquest 2, World of Warcraft, and Facebook all launched, and each of those would eventually serve to undercut the reasons I loved EQ. From WoW’s launch on, even if you kept playing EQ, so many conversations that might’ve been about a dozen other things became a comparison to WoW, alongside a string of goodbyes. (EQ had competitors before WoW, most notably Dark Age of Camelot, Ultima Online, Runescape, and Anarchy Online, but none of those poached people I enjoyed playing with like EQ2/WoW did.) In 2001, before all that, I was someone who loved interacting with people online. Few of my real-life friends used MySpace, AIM, ICQ, IRC, or bulletin boards, which means I sought digital friends, and found the people I liked best on Everquest. For the first year I played, I shared an account with a friend and was limited to using dial-up when my parents would let me. It wasn’t really until Shadows of Luclin that I (disastrously, in terms of my first year of university) had the freedom to play as I wanted. Then, after, the rest of the internet became social in a way I didn’t like, from Facebook’s omnipresence to 4Chan’s awfulness to ubiquitous voice chat instead of text chat for video games. Its timing meant I didn’t know much about the people I played with, didn’t know what most of them looked or sounded like, which led me to be very generous with my ideas about who they were. It hit that sweet spot when the future of the internet seemed much more optimistic than the reality turned out to be.

Everquest was a pain in the ass to play. Information about the game was limited and hard to find. It was incredibly slow-paced (a big pro and big con). It was buggy. It was tedious. It was punishing. Shadows of Luclin began to prune back a lot of those last two. Travel became slightly easier, with The Nexus allowing you teleport to a handful of locations around the world as opposed to relying entirely on other players who could cast teleport spells. The Bazaar allowed you to sell items to other player while AFK. Mounts allowed casters to not have to constantly sit and stand in a lot of zones. The next expansion, Planes of Power, made travel even easier and death less punishing. I’m not going to argue it went too far, but I do think PoP’s added convenience and division of the playerbase based on how it locked most of its zones behind raids definitely caused problems.

Luclin was the third expansion to the game, and it was also the third expansion with the same max level: 60. Vanilla Everquest went up to 50. Because expansions 1–3 (Kunark, Velious, Luclin) all had the same level cap, all three expansions remained relevant for groups. At the beginning of Luclin, the most efficient way to experience was to kill the easiest mobs that gave experience en masse, but then at the end of the expansion the game was changed to make higher level mobs give more exp, thus adding even more possible exp spots to groups and making non AE-based groups more competitive, a good change since the handful of prime exp locations (Velk Frenzy, Sebilis beetles, Deep zone-in) were permanently occupied.

Until your guild was decked out in Ssra/VT/NTOV loot, Luclin also had a huge range of choices for raiding. My guild was not cutting edge due to being pretty small (side note, one of the upsides of non-instanced content meant you had an excuse for not killing the absolute hardest fights, so players not in cutting edge guilds were slightly more content with that situation than in WoW), but on any given raid night we had a ton of raid targets we could chose from: Rumblecrush or Grieg in Luclin, Halls of Testing or Vindi in Velious, Ring of Slime in the revamped Cazic Thule, maybe catch Zlandicar in Dragon Necropolis up if we were lucky. Planes of Power made the range of available options much smaller due to the bottlenecks early in the expansion, then instancing came along and… yeah, that’s another essay.

Luclin also added Alternate Advancement points, aka AAs. These were tiny increases in player power that you got by continuing to gain exp at max level. While a downside was that you were almost never finished with the grind to improve your character, they also served as a way to keep people who were max level engaged and involved with other people who were still gaining experience, and to continue getting that occasional dopamine hit of improvement. (A dopamine hit embodied by that DING .)

Besides AAs, there were quite a few other paths to solo and group character progression. Luclin required quite a few keys, parts of which could be completed on your own, and they motivated exploring zones that might’ve seen little activity otherwise. Tradeskills got a big boost from Solstice Earrings, which created a whole level of player-driven economy not previously seen. On top of that, old long involved quests like the Kunark epic weapons, Chardok’s Spirit Wracked Cords, and the Velious Ring/Shawl lines were still very attractive (Seru earrings fit here, but just barely, because those were a nightmare). And besides these, there were all the utility items that were cool to have: weight-reduction bags, enduring breath items to breathe underwater, ways to cast buffs on yourself you normally had to get another character to cast, items that could teleport you to hard to get to places, and more. My personal favorite were the resistance buffing flowers from the acid trip known as the Plane of Mischief , a zone I’d love to read a longform article about by itself.

While Luclin’s lore was pretty bad, it did continue the storyline from the first expansion and explain those giant spires all over the world, and it didn’t write the lore into a corner like Planes of Power did with players literally killing gods. Luclin also felt very full and complete and worthy of being an expansion, unlike future mini expansions like Legacy of Ykesha and Lost Dungeons of Norrath, both of which were forerunners to some of the worst aspects of modern gaming in terms of bland tiny parcels of content being heaped onto a captive audience.

Luclin had its problems. The new class, Beastlords, didn’t seem to quite fit the existing game very well. Several fights had wildly out of whack risk vs reward, like The Deep’s Burrower Beast, Acrylia Caverns’ Ring of Fire, or Akheva Ruins’ Shei Vinitras (which is especially sad because all three of those fights, along with a few in Ssraeshza Temple, were more creative and ambitious than anything in the ultimate raid zone, Vex Thal). For cutting edge guilds who were on a stricter schedule, the keying up process to get into Vex Thal (along with the Seru and Ssra bane weapon nonsense) was an over the top commitment. The lore around Katta Castellum’s vampires vs. Sanctum Seru’s supremacists seemed, like their respective zones, to have tons of build up but then no payoff (whereas Vex Thal’s lore was extremely basic and noninteractive). Also, that graphic revamp for the player models? Trash. The new models were required to be used if you wanted to use a mount, but a loophole was that you could leave them off if you turned into a skeleton when you wanted to use a horse, so I remember saving up for an Amulet of Necropotence just so I could use a horse but not have to look at those ugly models.

Of course, when I say Luclin was the height of Everquest, I mean it was the height of my Everquest experience, which in turn means it was probably the height of my gaming experience. Everquest was not a perfect game, but it hit me at the perfect time, and I lucked into a perfect group of people to play with. A handful of them are still major parts of my life today, and a much larger selection pop up in my mind more often than their counterparts in my other life cohorts: high school, college, early jobs.

Here’s a fact I can scarcely believe: Shadows of Luclin launched in December of 2001, just before I turned 17, my freshman year at university. The next expansion, Planes of Power, launched a short 11 months later. A far cry from the expansion cycles of WoW or FFXIV today, but for obvious reasons. I can’t believe how large those 11 months loom in my mind.

• g, of Veeshan server, then Luclin after the mergers.