Reviewed: October 16, 2003
Reviewed by: Aaron Daigle

Publisher
Sony Online Entertainment

Developer
Verant Interactive

Released: August 26, 2003
Genre: MMORPG
Players: Online
ESRB: Teen

5
6
8
9
7.6

System Requirements

Also in a feeble attempt to reduce the amount of hate mail I receive, this review is intended for new players who are thinking of getting into the game now. If you’ve been playing for years and have a few dozen characters and a Legends account, you obviously know whether or not you like this title(s). But if you still feel it necessary to email me and rant about how poorly you’ve been treated by SOE or how much you hate this game or how wrong I am on a certain point or make suppositions as to irregularities in my family tree, I’ll be replying to those at my discretion.

Evolution is the latest addition to the EverQuest product line and is essential an anthology of all of the existing products bundled into one nice tidy package. Marketed toward new gamers or existing adventurers who don't want to juggle a half-dozedn CD's or archive those massive downloads, Evolution contains the original EverQuest along with the five current expansion packs, The Ruins of Kunark, The Scars of Velious, The Shadows of Luclin, The Planes of Power and The Legacy of Ykesha for the suggested retail price of $29.99. Evolution also comes with a comprehensive new manual to help newcomers get integrated into the game.

I cooked myself up as dashing a human Ranger as the somewhat limited character creation screen would allow. There are a bunch of races to make your character selection from but from that point the options are fairly limited, when it comes to faces, hair and there are no options for adjusting your characters build, as a result in some areas of Norrath it feel a little like moving through a bunch of clones. The upper level players you encounter, are more unique looking than their low level counterparts, but it seems that months of play shouldn’t be necessary to give your character a little, "character".

My Ranger, Evando, spawned into Surefall Glade and after struggling with one of the most unintuitive default keyboard setups I’ve encountered in all my years and an almost equally crummy key binding menu, I was able to get under way. The next step revealed that the system for conversing with NPCs must have made really good sense in some board meeting, after a few tries, I had to consult the manual. The way the NPC conversation system works is that after you right click on them they will greet you in whichever chat window you have relegated to the task, in the instance that there is anything further to learn from the person, some words and phrases will be in brackets. What you have to do then is ask a question of the NPC using the specified words. Sounds simple, it isn’t, it is the single most frustrating system of any kind that I have encountered in any game, ever.

What the developers were trying to do was deepen the level of immersion in the world of Norrath by simulating the act of conversation with NPCs, what they created in the process is a flaw that will jar you out of your gaming zone every time you encounter it. A simple drop down menu would have worked fine or give me multiple choices to click on, I just want to stop talking to these constructs and get back to my adventuring buddies. One more gripe before I get off of the character issues. While I usually am a big fan of games with depth, EverQuest’s skill system is enough to drown a beginner, The fact that you are given a compass on your screen, that won’t work till you have accumulated enough levels on your Sense Heading skill seems more than a little absurd, as is the fact that the most efficient way to build up this skill is to keep clicking on the hot key for it over and over and over. I’ve got better than 80 hours into this character and he still can’t reliably read his stupid compass. For other skills like swimming, the principle of using it to improve it makes sense, but some of the skills are so boring to practice, like Fishing, you know, standing next to some sub par looking water clicking the fishing hot key till you catch something.

EverQuest’s game flow works like this, spawn, drag a quest out of a nearby NPC, go kill stuff ‘till you have satisfied the quest requirements (because they almost all are related to looting the corpses of your slain opponents for certain items), take said items back to the quest giver to receive experience points, money, maybe an item and probably another quest so that you have the joy of going out and doing it all over again.

EverQuest wasn’t the first, but it probably is one of the best selling leveling treadmills on the market. Usually I enjoy games that let me loot every corpse in sight, I love Diablo and Baldur’s Gate and I would probably bear Everblue’s young were it possible and that title is nothing but looting, literally. But in EverQuest despite the fact the game world has been expanded to truly prodigious proportions and is thickly populated by creatures, some hostile, some not hostile yet, the gameplay is highly repetitive, and mostly revolves around a combat system that has been simplified to the point that there is really no skill involved in determining the difference between a victory and being fertilizer. And should you become fertilizer after reaching the tenth level, you’ll get to experience the joys of corpse looting.

Actually, I think that the process of corpse looting adds some much needed gameplay variety to EverQuest as it completely changes the strategic focus of the game. Instead of kill, loot, kill, loot, sell stuff at the Bazaar on Luclin, kill, loot, level, kill, loot… when you spawn with no equipment or cash and have to find your way back to where ever you died avoiding another death in the process, EverQuest gets fun. Maybe you beat a Gnoll down with your fists and take his rusty ax to give your avatar a little more defensive punch on the trip or beg a few coins off an NPC to buy some food to sustain your character on their journey back to their bod. Perverse as it seems, corpse looting is probably the part of EverQuest that is the most fun and offers the most challenge, especially if you are going solo without a party.

Since I just mentioned going solo, this is probably a good time to talk about the alliances you can form in the world of Norrath. There are two ways that you can join up with other players; the first is by forming a group. A group is just a collection of players that get together and watch each other’s backs while undertaking quests that it’s individual members are too weak or ill suited to accomplish on their own. The various trips through the Gnoll stronghold of Black Burrow that Rangers have to undertake, offer an excellent opportunity to group up with other players to acquire additional cash and experience points as you traverse the dark warrens in search of your quarry.

The other type of player alliance that you can form is called Guild. For those unacquainted with the MMORPG genre, a Guild works a lot like a Counter-Strike or Quake clan, it is a lose group of players that frequently get together and form groups to undertake the more challenging areas of Norrath, joining a guild also provides you with a network of trading partners that can help greatly when it comes to acquiring some rare drop items. Guilds have their own chat channels and while there are exceptions, frequently attract players that are actually role-playing.

Those are the ways players come together, now on to PvP combat. EverQuest’s Player vs. Player combat varies depending on what kind of server you are playing on. Stromm like most of the EQ servers only supports PvP combat in certain areas and you are notified in your chat window when you enter them. For those of you lusting to carve up your fellow subscribers, you are probably going to want to play on one of the “Zek” family of servers. Depending on which you choose you will be able to engage in Open, Race or Deity based PvP. The rules vary slightly from server to sever to what you can loot from your kills and whom you may attack, but I will say that throwing down with another human being does add a little much needed variety to the game’s stale combat system.

If it weren’t for my main men Asriel and Heepo, my Ranger, Evando would probably still be trying to slay the ferocious rats in North Qeynos. A lot of the activity that has kept this game a float for this long has been generated by its dedicated, (mostly) friendly and generous players now numbering more than 400,000. There’s always someone who will invite a newbie to join their group, or will sell you some good armor on the cheep to help you stay alive. I was actually not expecting a lot out of the players of this game, the press at large has made them out to be a band of whiners and malcontent cheating idiots. This is simply not the case, on more than one occasion I’ve had my butt saved when I was stuck in the middle of a mob of Gnolls by the quick thinking of a nearby Mage. Thanks guys, you folks really make a somewhat mediocre game worth trying out.

Aesthetically, for the most part I like the look of Norrath, the dank twisting warrens of Black Burrow, the icy, the odd lunar landscapes of Luclin and of the many different cities and hamlets, each with their own set of decorative aesthetics. A lot of the monsters you encounter are well designed as are a lot of the garments, armor and accessories you can acquire, although my Pine Scout suit has rendered my dashing ranger into a muscle bound Peter Pan.