EverQuest

"TRAIN TO ZONE!!"

—Any unlucky player

EverQuest (1999) is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game inspired by DikuMUD, a Dungeons & Dragons textual multiplayer game. It is famed for being highly addictive and having an excellent social environment. It's also one of two games that really put MMOs on the map, sharing the title with Ultima Online, and the model it used for high-end play has been the model used in almost every other game since, even World of Warcraft. It has also spawned many Expansion Packs, a sequel game in EverQuest II, a novel series, and a film is in the works.

EverQuest has been around for so long that balance between new players and long term players is becoming a real problem. Most newbie characters (in the EverQuest lingo, "toons" or "chars") actually belong to veteran players who give them castoff gear from their level 105 mains (i.e. "twink"). If you're below level 60 and actually new to the game, you're nothing besides useless to a group full of twinks.

Set in the fantasy land of Norrath, you start as a race. Technically, you have a hometown, but you start in a tutorial dungeon and then head straight to the Plane of Knowledge. Screw your hometown. After perhaps hundreds of hours of Level Grinding and quests, you can reach a level where the wildlife, highly aggressive to your innocent adventurer, won't kill you in seconds. This can be sped up much by having a team member or five.

The general party includes "The Holy Trinity", meaning a tank (Warriors, Paladins, Shadowknights), a healer (Druid, Cleric, sometimes Shaman), slowers/crowd control (Shaman, Enchanter, Bard), and a DPS (everybody else). That's right, EverQuest trinities get four members. Combat on your own is often dull suicidal. Seriously. If you're a fighter, you click an enemy, and hope their loss of health is faster than yours (it won't be). But with a friend or two, you can chat, share kills, and live much longer through a fight.

Many comics poke fun at the MMORPG scene but http://www.gucomics.com/ got their start from it. And although The Noob pokes fun at other MMORPGs, you better believe that EverQuest is its primo target.

By the way, everything relating to the sequel EverQuest II can now be found at EverQuest II. The move is still in progress, so if you find any tropes or examples relating to the other page here, please move them. Not to be confused within the series of author-to-player interactive RPGs from Tgchan.

Tropes used in EverQuest include:

• Acceptable Breaks From Reality
• Aliens Speaking English: Despite never having had contact with Norrath prior to the expansion opening, the inhabitants of Kuua (Omens of War) speak and understand the Norrathian Common Tongue.
• All There in the Manual: A lot of the storyline that goes along with the expansions isn't readily available to players, or at best has to be pieced together bit by bit as you learn the lore.
• Amazonian Beauty: Female barbarians. Humans and High Elves are right at breast height on female barbarians, whose tops consist of a leather strap with a massive Cleavage Window. Jokes about "retiring to Halas" abound.
• An Adventurer Is You:
  • The Medic: The various priests, but the cleric is the best at it.
  • Stone Wall: Paladins, Shadowknights, and of course the Warrior.
  • Fragile Speedster: Rogues, Rangers and Monks.
  • The Beast Master: Beastlord, Enchanter, Mage and Necromancer. Giant iconic animals, floaty weapons, elementals, and undead, respectively.
  • Squishy Wizard: Wizards, mages, enchanters and necromancers.
  • Master of None: Bards in the first game have abilities and skills that make them a mix of almost every other class in the game.
  • Of course, anyone not listed in Stone Wall is probably going to find out the definition of Glass Cannon.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: Subverted. Technically, yes, you get rewarded for most things with clothes, but since your gear directly affects your stats, it's entirely functional.
• The Artifact: This is very prominent in EverQuest. As the expansion packs mount up, old world content is increasingly useless: it's now possible to get armor dropped from random monsters better than the stuff you had to go through extensive questing to get back in the old days. Many zones, especially dungeons, lie abandoned for various reasons. Sometimes Sony reworks a dungeon to increase the level (this was notably done to Splitpaw and Cazic-Thule). However, since EverQuest isn't designed well for solo play, people all hunt in the same few zones since all the other players are there, rendering most of the game an artifact.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Most raid bosses.
• Back Stab: The class-defining ability of the Rogues class.
• Big Bad: Most every expansion pack came with its own. The original game had Vox and Nagafen. Kunark added Trakanon. Velious had Kerafyrm. Gates had Tunat' Muram Cuu Vauax. Omens of War had Mata Muram. And it just keeps on going.
• Big Boo's Haunt: LOTS of them. In just the initial EverQuest, there was Befallen, Deeper Guk, the Estate of Unrest and Mistmoore Castle. Those are entire zones: many zones had smaller Haunts (for example, the spectre tower in the Oasis of Marr). Rise of Kunark added Kurn's Tower, Kaesora and the City of Mist. Scars of Velious added more still... and it just keeps on going.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: It's an ongoing joke how most of the natural wildlife (wolves, panthers, snakes, etc...) are normally sized, but the bugs are all monstrous.
• Black and White Morality: Qeynos Guard vs Bloodsabers, Order of Marr vs Freeport Militia.
• Body Horror: Many of the so called "creatures" of the Legion of Mata Muram were intentionally subjected to horrifying mutilations in order to heighten their own hunting skills and malevolent influences.
• Bond Creatures: Beastlords.
• Bottomless Bladder: Played straight for players. Not always so true for NPCs.
• Breast Plate: Mainly averted. EverQuest is generally quite realistic about armor for female characters. The female half-elf model in leather armor, however, plays this one completely straight, as do many of the cloth armor sets. EverQuest got its reputation for filling the Breast Plate trope because characters without armor quite literally run around in their underwear, and because most of the advertising of the game consists of the skimpily dressed Firiona Vie.
• Canon Discontinuity: In terms of the lore and history behind the world of Norrath, things are split up into two categories. First is that anything actually found inside EverQuest, EverQuest II (up to a certain point in time for it's own storyline with EverQuest), and EverQuest Online Adventures is official canon to the games. There's also the tabletop Pen & Paper versions of the games, which have much more detailed stories and lore, but aren't considered canon unless it's also covered in the game.
• Cast from Hit Points: Necromancers and Shaman have a series of spells called "Cannibalize", which convert hitpoints to mana.
• Catfolk: The Vah Shir.
• Chekhov's Gunman: The Priest(s) of Discord. Around from the earliest days as a method of opting into Player Vs. Player on non PvP servers, they suddenly became very important shortly before the Omens of War expansion was released.
  • Meldrath the Malignant was a gnome necromancer rangers had to kill for a mid level armor quest when the game launched. Eight years later, it was revealed that that Meldrath was a decoy, and the real Meldrath became a high end raid target.
• Collection Sidequest: Quite common.
• Continuing Is Painful: EverQuest used to have one of the nastiest, if not the single nastiest, continue penalties in all of gaming. However, ever since SOE took over from Verant, the penalty has gotten steadily less painful, with the exp loss reduced and corpse runs fully done away with. See Death Is a Slap on The Wrist below.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Lava hurts. Quite a lot in some zones. However, players can float or jump right over it without any problems.
• Critical Hit: Warrior types, both player and monster, can hit critically. And if they're low on health, they can do a critical critical.
• Damage Discrimination: Usually. Most monsters will not harm friendly monsters, though there are a few cases where they do, such as a raid encounter where the boss is harmed by steam blasts from his guards, requiring players to make sure the guards are aiming at him.
• Death Is a Slap on The Wrist: Death results in actually losing XP. Not much anymore though. And corpse runs have been done away with. Brutally, BRUTALLY subverted back in the old days of EverQuest, where the exp loss was 40%, and if your corpse decayed before you could get to it (a fair possibility in the high level dungeons like Veeshan's Peak, or hard to reach places like Kedge Keep), all your stuff decayed with your corpse.
• Did Not Do the Research: Exhibited by many of the fans who complain about the way the game changed when run by "Verant" or "SOE" (a.k.a. Sony). Verant was spun off from SOE, existed as its own company for a while, and then was re-bought and again became part of SOE. Even though the name on the box changed, the same team was in charge of the game the whole time.
  • Subverted by SOE themselves. A lot of fans criticized the content of the Gates of Discord and Omens of War for "nonsense names". Actually, SOE had put quite a lot of work into giving the worlds a Sumerian feel and even partially based the names off what little is known of the Sumerian language. Maybe the complaining fans just hadn't heard of Sumeria.
• Difficulty Spike: One of the things that's gotten more pronounced in the latter days of the game. Nowadays, EverQuest holds your hand through your newbie days... and then suddenly kicks you in the nuts right around the time you hit Level 25. In the old days, the game was happy to kick you in the nuts the second your brand-new character spawned though, so this is actually a small improvement... As the updates go on, the difficulty spike kicks in at a higher level.
• Down the Drain: Kedge Keep is entirely underwater. Siren's Grotto in Velious also has large sections under water. Some zones, such as the Qeynos Sewers, have significant underwater areas.
• Dual-Wielding: Warriors, Rangers, Rogues, Monks and Beastlords can all do this.
• Easter Egg: Tons and tons of them, too many to list them all. But we'll hit a few of the bigger ones...
  • In the Qeynos Sewers, some graffiti say "Aradune is Stinky". Aradune was the character of the original game's creator Brad McQuaid.
• Enough to Go Around: It's not uncommon for the target of a quest to drop three or six copies of the needed quest item.
• Expansion Pack: Many many of these. They churn them out so often. As of May 2012, there are 18 total.
• Feelies: The retail versions of the game's expansion packs all came with a cloth or paper map of the world of Norrath, focusing on the new area of that expansion. Planes of Power went one step further and included a figurine of Firiona Vie.
• Fetch Quest: By the bushel.
• Floating Continent: Several, usually as high end raiding zones. First, there was the Plane of Sky, a set of eight connected islands floating above East Freeport, with progressively harder monsters to fight as the raid force advances through each one. In the Planes of Power expansion, one could eventually enter the elemental Plane of Air (called Eryslai: the Kingdom of Wind), home to Xegony, Queen of Air, late in the expansion's storyline. The Buried Sea featured Solteris, the Throne of Ro, a plane which functions as Norrath's sun, and the setting of the final showdown against vampire deity Mayong Mistmoore. Finally, Secrets of Faydwer introduced Fortress Mechanotus, a massive floating continent constructed by Meldrath the Malignant, which is comprised of six zones and plays host to the majority of the expansion's quests and raid encounters.
• Forced Level Grinding: There is a reason the game is sometimes called "NeverRest".
• Forced Tutorial: OK, it's not really forced: only forced if you want decent armor and weapons.
  • If you're not an Iksar or Vah Shir, then you can do the newbie armor quests. They offer better armor anyway, and you can usually get the complete set by Level 15, with most pieces available by Level 10.
• Grey and Gray Morality: Velious, specifically the feud between the dwarves of Thurgadin, the giants of Kael Drakkel, and the drakes of Skyshrine.
• Helping Would Be Killstealing: MMORPGs such as EverQuest and World of Warcraft are the Trope Namer. In these games, killing monsters is a main source of personal growth for your character. If a monster attacks you and hurts you, you normally do NOT want someone to save you. If someone else attack the monster before you do, or if in saving you does more damage/gains more aggression from the monster, then that person has "stolen your kill" and the XP and loot that went with it.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: Kerafyrm in the Scars of Velious expansion. He had insane HP and attack power for the time and was not intended to be defeated, instead utterly destroying your raid party and the inhabitants of Skyshrine, then disappearing from the game until he resurfaced as the killable Big Bad in Secrets of Faydwer.
  • Each server could only wake up the Velious version of Kerafyrm once, and that was it. The guardians keeping him asleep dropped very powerful weapons and armor that everyone desired. The first servers who woke him up soon found that he permanently killed those guardians and the loot they dropped. Despite its hostile environment full of griefers, the Rallos Zek PVP server was among the very last to wake him up. The top three strongest and largest guilds actually banded together to kill Kerafyrm. It came down to little more than a zerg rush. You die, you get rezzed, you grab your weapon off your corpse, and you go back in to die again. In the end, he was killed. He had no loot table.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Every playable race drops meat that can be used in baking to make food that gives stat bonuses appliable to the race. Dark Elves and High Elves give bonuses to casting attributes (Int, Wis, Cha), Trolls and Ogres give bonuses to physical stats, etc.
• Interface Screw: The blind spell and alcohol. Certain bosses try to pull these off now and then.
• Invulnerable Civilians: Both averted and played straight. There are plenty of unkillable NPCs, mostly to prevent players from being unable to start or complete a quest involving that NPC. However, there are also plenty of civilian NPCs that are very killable, even inhabitants of player character cities. Also, an entire city full of snow dwarves will be massacred if the players fail an event to protect the city from attacking giants.
  • Of course, the aversion in the original wound up with many players suffering their first death by accidentally attacking their guildmaster. Since the keystroke for attacking was 'a', and if you forgot to hit enter before you started typing your dialogue...
• Item Crafting: The crafting system in the original version was not very player-friendly. Especially in the old days. There was a blacksmithing guide entitled Click Your Way to Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.
• Jack of All Stats: Humans in both games.
• The Legions of Hell: The Muramites.
• Loads and Loads of Races: Twenty-one in total (twenty if you count Kerrans and Vah Shir as the same race, which some do and some don't). High Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, Wood Elves, Frogloks, Humans, Barbarians, Half Elves, Gnomes, Erudites, Dark Elves, Ogres, Trolls, Iksar, Vah Shir, Drakkin. Have fun making those characters.
  • Mind you, that's only the playable races. Just for fun, here's a list of some of the non-playable races ^[1].
• Munchkin: Munchkinism fairly quickly became the standard way to play the game. It's hard to remember back in the days when roleplaying was actively encouraged in the instruction manuals and in the game itself, and "twinking" (higher level characters giving lower level ones gear and weapons better than anything they could get for themselves) was extremely discouraged.
  • Lampshaded: one NPC has the following response when you ask him about his quest: "Well I haven't figured out that part yet. I guess I'll slay a dragon, maybe save a princess or two. You know the normal stuff. I don't want to get too crazy heheh, you know like calculate which weapon is the most efficient and debate over it in public forums to no end."
• Myth Arc: Starting with The Scars of Velious expansion, every expansion has had one.
• Neglectful Precursors: The Combine Empire was seen as this for a long time. The truth was a little more complicated
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In the Dragons of Norrath expansion, killing Yar'Lir unleashes a curse upon The Nest, making things a whole lot more unpleasant.
  • Played a second time in the very next expansion Depths of Darkhollow. Killing Mayong Mistmoore, the expansion's Big Bad, propelled him to godhood, whereafter he proceeded to wreak havoc upon Norrath's pantheon of deities until being put down for good in The Buried Sea.
• Ninja Looting: This was a big problem in EverQuest's early days, back when it was run by Verant Interactive. Nowadays, you simply can't loot what you didn't kill.
• Nintendo Hard: Ahh, the old days. The next time someone in your World of Warcraft party complains when you wipe and have to run all the way back to the dungeon, try telling them that in original EverQuest, you did the same thing, but not as a ghost... nope, you were alive. And naked because all your equipment stayed on your corpse until you retrieved it. From in the middle of all the nasty things that killed you the first time. No arrows or minimaps, so you'd better remember exactly where you were. If you were unlucky enough to forget to get somebody to cast a bind spell at the nearest city, you might be facing a run across a continent too. It was not unusual to die several times trying to retrieve your corpse. Oh, by the way, every time you die, you lose experience points. Including de-leveling. At higher levels, the ratio of amount lost to how long it would take to get it back got more and more dire. At the high levels, things became insanely stressful. People had breakdowns.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: Similarly to the Breast Plate trope, EverQuest does a relatively good job averting this. EverQuest has three major reptilian races: Iksar, Froglok and Sarnak. The female Iksar have a slightly hourglass shaped figure for no apparent reason, but no actual breasts. Female Frogloks just have slimmer heads and color schemes ranging more towards pastels. Sarnaks aren't a playable race and don't have separate gender models.
• Nostalgia Filter: A lot of people have this for early EverQuest. Sometimes it's genuine "it was better when it sucked" sentiment. Sometimes it's a desire to return to a time when their class was part of the Holy Trinity and groups could not twitch without them.
• Not So Harmless: Guess who one of the major end bosses of the Underfoot expansion is? Fippy Darkpaw.
• Only Six Faces: Literally. Each race and gender had exactly six faces to choose from for character customization. It wasn't all that big an issue though.
• Order Versus Chaos: Discord slaver legions invading our worlds.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: EverQuest's dwarves are indeed the same.
• Our Elves Are Better: Played completely straight. EverQuest has the superior High Elves, the woodsy Wood Elves and the evil Dark Elves. And the Half Elves, who mostly fit in pretty well with the easy going Wood Elves.
• Our Gnomes Are Weirder: EverQuest gnomes are based heavily on the Dragonlance tinker gnomes, although they're much more competent (but still blamed for 99% of everything that ever goes wrong).
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Ogres are big an' stoopid, thanks to a curse. When Rallos Zek tried to invade all the planes at the same time, the other Gods banded together and cursed all the races he created. The Ogres were his favorites.
• Our Trolls Are Different: Again, EverQuest based their trolls off the Dungeons & Dragons version of them. Tall, green, weak against fire, and the least intelligent of all the playable races.
• Our Vampires Are Different: EverQuest's vampires are generally orlokian in design. In the hack and slash Champions of Norrath, the powerful vampires tend to be like Dracula Classic, but most vampires are unintelligent orlokian types with spidery limbs.
• Power-Up Food: Offered through the baking and brewing trade-skills... smoked Wood Elf, anyone? The stat boosts are usually very minor, however, and the best food tends to be an utter pain in the ass to produce, due to the rarity of the ingredients and the zillion subcombines required to make the final product. Want to make a baker cry? Ask them about the Misty Thicket Picnic or the Halas Ten Pound Meat Pie.
• Punny Name: Oh so many of them. There are whole web pages which list them. One example is the zone "Estate of Unrest" (State of Unrest).
• Quicksand Box: Especially in the early days.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: Averted. Initially present, the game introduced armor dye so you could change the color of armor you didn't like.
• Serious Business: Hardcore raiding players and guilds can be... to put in the most positive term possible, "intense".
• Some Call Me... Tim: Lord Doljonijiarnimorinar. Players call him Bob.
• Stripperiffic: Firiona Vie: the character, not the zone. Any female character without armor equipped. And for the first dozen or so expansions, any female character on the box art.
  • Especially silly in the case of barbarians. The typical barbarian male wears nothing but boots and a kilt, while the average female is dressed the same but also wearing a laced together piece of leather over her chest, and they live in the middle of a region of icy, frozen tundra. Handwaved by making it a part of barbarian culture to defy the cold and prove one's mettle by... refusing to wear a shirt? Silly barbarians.
    • Amazingly, Firiona Vie managed to get more Stripperiffic as time went on, moving from a sports bra to two patches of fabric laced together.
• Time Travel: Plane of Time, The Curse Begins, the entire Seeds of Destruction expansion.
• Trope Codifier: One can rest assured that EverQuest popularized just about every single trope we associate with MMORPGs today.
• The Usual Adversaries: The gnolls. Gnolls aren't much of a serious threat, but they are always, always, always making a nuisance of themselves.
• World of Buxom: The females from just about every race has the equivalent of a D cup for that race's size. That gnome may have small breasts, but they're huge for a gnome. The female models were developed by a woman who admittedly wanted them to look both heroic and sexy at the same time.
• You Can't Get Ye Flask: Quests are triggered by certain words. Usually, the relevant [words] are enclosed in [brackets] so you know which ones to use, but sometimes the word has to be used in a certain format. It can get quite confusing. Sometimes an NPC gives you a [key word or phrase] as part of a quest reward, and if you didn't memorize it right on the first try, you're stuck unless you can find the correct line in a FAQ.
• You Shouldn't Know This Already: Sometimes if you say the [phrase] that is supposed to get an NPC to work with you on a [quest] before you're either high enough level to work on the quest or on the appropriate step, that NPC will ask you if you don't have any gnoll pups (or similar low level trash mobs) to go slay.

1. ↑ Aviak, Bixie, Brownie, Burynai, Centaur, Cyclops, Djinn, Gnoll, Goblin, Giant, Kobold, Lizardman, Muramite, Orc, Shadowed Man, Vampire.