[zeras]

I remember playing Ultima Online and really enjoying that game when I heard about a new first-person MMORPG in development called EverQuest.

I ran a couple of popular game sites back then and had industry connections so I got early beta test access to try out EverQuest.

Unfortunately, I made a bad choice when I chose to make a Human character, which was night-blind. On top of that, it seemed like every time I logged in it was night time and the game was nearly unplayable away from lights, fires and torches for that character.

To make matters worse, I started in Freeport which had several invisible zone walls so on top of not being able to see, I constantly kept zoning which constantly interrupted the game.

As you can imagine, I lost interest rather quickly and went back to UO. I gave my beta account to a gamer friend of mine, who had a much better experience than I had during beta.

When EverQuest eventually launched, several friends of mine bought it so I decided to buy it as well. By then I had learned to make elven characters because they had infravision/ultravision that allowed them to see at night.

It was fun for a little while, but then bad game design concepts led to another problem. They arbitrarily decided to assign some of the classes with experience penalties, including the one I played which had a 40% experience reduction, which was ridiculous.

The problem was that at that time, that information was not well known so I all I noticed was all of my friends were outleveling me because none of their classes had penalties.

Eventually by around level 12 (which took a while back then), I was too low to group with them, despite playing the same amount of time they did, and I could no longer gain experience in their groups.

Since EverQuest was heavily group-focused, I decided to go back to Ultimate Online.

A few months later, I decided to give it another try and made a bard. Suddenly, everyone was inviting me to group and that made the game a lot more fun and led to a lot of great memories.

A few years ago I tried to go back and play it but, either due to age or having less free time, it was just too slow and difficult to play after all of these years.

While I don't play it any more, I am really glad that it is still online and even if it shuts down, there is another player-run (and licensed) rogue server available.

I met so many good friends in that game, including one of my best friends to this day, so I will always have fond memories of it.