In the last few days, I’ve gone from struggling my way through Elden Ring to mourning a youth that feels ever distant. And it’s all thanks to a forgotten username and a closed-down email account. That doesn’t sound very exciting, does it? Let’s go back a bit. The simple truth is this: Elden Ring reminds me a lot of my teenage years playing EverQuest. EverQuest was the World of Warcraft or Final Fantasy 14 of its day, the day in question being the early 2000s. Launched in the UK in 2000, I came across it fashionably late, mostly because I got talked into it by someone I had a crush on. Teenage decisions, eh?
EverQuest was a brutal introduction to the MMORPG genre, maps being the most obvious omission to make things so much harder. Starting out, I chose to be a Troll Shaman, because the aforementioned person was already one and could kit me out with a couple of precious pieces of equipment. This meant I started out in the village of Grobb — home of the trolls. Just outside the village was Innothule Swamp, a dark and dreary mire that was full of beats keen to kill you. In the seemingly very far distance were zone entrances to move between different areas. The biggest catch? Again: no maps. You had to figure the place out for yourself by learning the hard way.
I have a reasonable sense of direction but zones like the swamp felt like they were made to disorient me. There were few memorable locations within the swamp, making traversal complicated from the off. Some zones were more open and airier, but that often just meant you could see the imminent threats nearby more clearly. I remember one time seeing a huge Sand Giant coming my way and knowing that death was unavoidable. Lovely stuff.
The saving grace to this limited in-game mapping (there was a compass at least) was other people’s efforts. EQAtlas was full of hand-drawn maps. I printed off many of these maps and had a ring binder folder full of them by my side every time I played. They were true lifesavers in a world that was anything but welcoming. It was hard enough back then to find an obscure place in a local city without a map, let alone in a game that was all too keen to kill you.
Still, the rest of the game wasn’t so bad, right? Wrong. Death in EverQuest was a scary and potentially game-ending experience. When you died (and you’d die a lot), you’d respawn without any items or clothing. Completely naked and vulnerable, you’d often spawn a couple of zones away from where you’d just dropped, meaning you were in for a treacherous journey across uncharted territory. It was a long trek back, and you couldn’t fend anything off particularly well. Worse, there was a time limit ticking down in terms of how long you had to retrieve your corpse and possessions before they simply vanished and everything was lost. This would be a comparatively mild nuisance early on, but in the high-level game, it could be catastrophic. Actual tears.
I was part of a raiding guild for a long time. It wasn’t one of the biggest, but it was one that would still expect you to play for certain hours so you could all tackle a huge boss. Planning was everything, with the tank having to be amazingly skilled at holding aggro while healers would be constantly healing and other classes would be chipping away at any nearby enemies.
When conducted perfectly, it was still stressful but offered a huge sense of accomplishment. However, the game was against you all the way, right down to the fact that enemies would continue to chase you until the moment you left a zone, meaning you could theoretically have dozens of enemies chasing you by the time you’d decided to scarper. this led to players shouting ‘train to zone end!’ to warn others that something very, very bad was coming for you. Such huge issues were why, the next day, we’d always have a corpse run planned. A corpse run! This was as bleak as it sounded. A bunch of well-equipped players would head off to find the bodies of those who had died the night before. It’s a concept that’s appropriately died out, but I guess chasing after lost runes in Elden Ring is kind of similar.
Sometimes, it wouldn’t be so bad, but if your guild has just spent two hours clearing their way down to the bottom of a dungeon before wiping out and mostly dying, you’d have to redo all that just to get some bodies back to fight another day. Experience was lost for every death, and it really kept you on your toes when it came to thinking about risk. In comparison, when I play World of Warcraft these days, I’ll happily rush in whatever I’m facing. EverQuest kept you nervous the whole time.
I played on a PvP server – Tallon Zek. I didn’t realise at the time, but it had a fairly unpleasant reputation for being the home of every dubious attitude on the internet. PvP was a tough experience because anyone eight levels higher than you could attack. It was team-based, a little like Horde versus Alliance stuff in World of Warcraft, with two sides. Some guilds would combine the two sides and then inevitably be shunned by everyone else who was keen to maintain the division. It was all incredibly tribal, made worse by the fact that many of the players were young, new to the genre, and generally had too much time on their hands: nothing was more important to them than the game.
I wasn’t in one of the major guilds. I didn’t really have the time and I wasn’t a particularly skilful player. You learned to recognise the names of the best players and the best PvPers. In the latter’s case, you’d genuinely fear them. Sometimes, you’d be in a zone and someone would shout to the zone a warning that a certain well-known PvPer was there. People would scatter. That level of accolade and fame must have felt great, but I think those players ruled with an iron fist born from egotism. I don’t blame them, in a way, but it was a game and server that could feel like you were being bullied.
And yet, I loved it. It came at the right time for me. It came during my A-Level days, when I had the time to focus on my studies (just) and spend the rest of my time in EverQuest. The game depended on you teaming up with others. You couldn’t just dip in for 30 minutes on your own and expect to achieve much. Despite the name, the game was more about taking down huge monsters rather than completing quests, so it lent itself to group play. You could lose entire evenings to it while achieving surprisingly little.
These days, my attitude is that life is hard enough, I don’t need games to punish me (although I’ll dabble in Elden Ring and World of Warcraft Hardcore). But the moment the other day that I realised my EverQuest account details still worked, I suddenly felt very excited about being able to return to Halycona Pietas – the noble Troll Shaman with middling equipment which, disturbingly, I could still remember the names of. When equipment is that hard to come by and keep, you make sure to remember the names.
So the other night I logged into the somehow-still-going EverQuest (albeit in somewhat dubious free-to-play form) and sighed. It was the wrong account details. I forgot I had two accounts. One was still accessible, but there was nothing there for me. The one I needed, the one with thousands of hours of gameplay tied to it, was lost to a now-closed email account and my inability to remember what the password had been.
It’s fitting, I think. Out of all the battles in EverQuest that I conquered, this is one I can’t win. It’s probably for the best. My patience isn’t what it used to be, and I like that World of Warcraft allows me to be lazy and complacent. But as they always say, just remember: it actually was harder in the old days.