Fippy is still going
The perennial EverQuest went free-to-play in March. Since it’s one of the MMORPGs I cut my teeth on, and since I’ve not played a sufficient allotment of racist1, furry2 games lately, I gave it an install.
It hasn’t changed appreciably. All the weird, old, bad game design elements are still there. Single fights are still protracted affairs watching your automatic attack run itself while you press a hotkey every fifteen seconds for an extra five points of damage. Dialogue interaction with NPCs is done by reading their speech, looking for a keyword in [brackets], and typing - typing! - a response chat with that word in it.3 If an NPC desires objects for a quest (say, ten rat tails), you must hand them over in separate slots, and no more than four at a time. To gain stat bonuses from food, you don’t eat it. Instead, you leave it in your inventory, and whichever food is the one the game would automatically eat for you the next time you get hungry is the one you get bonuses from. (Then you manually eat other food from time to time to avoid getting hungry, because if you let the stat-boosting food get eaten, you lose the boost.)
There is a dedicated tutorial zone for newly-created characters. It’s over three years old but it’s new to me. I can’t say how much it improved things from before its introduction; I learned how to play from friends face to face in the early era of MMOs, when mentoring and manuals were the way of things. I can say that, as good as the tutorial may be, it encourages too much reliance on quests and NPC henchmen and ignores some fundamentals, like how skills rise.
The F2P structure is restrictive. The biggest hit by far is that you only have access to four out of sixteen races and four out of sixteen classes. Having half the inventory space of a subscriber hurts too. A one-time payment of $5 raises your status from Free to Silver and slightly loosens a handful of lesser restrictions, but most premium features remain available to full subscribers only.
The game’s population doesn’t look healthy. At first glance it seems busy, but that’s because everyone is in either the global tutorial zone (if they’re new) or the Plane of Knowledge with its game world-wide hub of portals (if they’re not). You’re lucky to find another live player in any of the original cities, and a noticeable number of posts on the newbie forum concern which classes work well together when one person plays alone by running two different characters simultaneously on two different computers.
1 Human PCs are all white in EverQuest. You can pick a vaguely quarter-Asian look, but that’s as non-Caucasian as you can get. There are black characters, but they’re a separate race, related to but distinct from Humans. That’s more racist than not having dark-skinned people at all.
2 Six of the nine playable races added by expansions and sequels have been anthropomorphic animals, and NPCs have always included a number of novel anthro races mixed with stereotypical fabled ones. Nothing says “fantasy” like a Dark Elf hacking up walrus-people.
3 NPC: “Will you slay this foul [dragon] for me, adventurer?”
You: “kumquat dragon bbbbbbp synecdoche”
NPC: “Oh, thank you!”