This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice. Like our own Joshua Wolens, who checked out Everquest Legends and liked it a whole lot.
Here are my memories of EverQuest in the year 1999. Me, six years old, pondering race and class options as my father offered guidance over my shoulder. His character was a gnome magician; I did not like the idea of being short. I settled on a half-elf, possibly because they looked the most like me, and named him Karokan. Dad, perhaps, chose my class and god for me, as I remember neither.
Then West Freeport. Then paralysing, all-consuming fear. The videogame worlds I had experienced before all felt finite. EverQuest, by contrast, felt incomprehensibly vast. I was scared of dying, sure—of the dreaded corpse run—but I was more scared of simply getting lost. I felt certain that if I strayed far from the city I would plunge into a fathomless ocean of map and never return. So I spent hours fighting rats and orc centurions outside the gates, dad's efforts to coax me out further than the East Commonlands confounded. I stayed home. I loved every second (hey, I was six).
The promise of EverQuest Legends, which released late last month, is simple: you can go home again. EverQuest in its infancy has been lovingly reconstructed. Its graphics are bright and rigid, its mechanics slow-going. Its UI does not feel contiguous or, really, designed. It sits scattered across your monitor as if surprised by a gust of wind. It's EverQuest (mostly) as the old-heads remember it, not as it endures, heroically, in the year 2026.
I used to live here
The weird thing is that this has already been done. In fact, it's still being done. Project 1999 is a fantastic free-to-play version of classic EverQuest that operates with Daybreak's explicit permission. If you want to nose around the game as it was back in the day, you can do it for free. Why fork out the $20 and recurring $10 sub for Legends?
Because for most people, these are fundamentally different propositions. Project 1999 has its check-in-daily stalwarts, no doubt, but for most people it is something you sign into once, get your shot of nostalgia, and stop thinking about until you want another one about five to seven years later. For those who never touched OG EverQuest, it's a historical curiosity. You can visit home, but you probably won't stay.
Legends, meanwhile, aims to keep you there. It's original EverQuest, yes, but only mostly as you know it. No more corpse runs, a tweaked and soloable MMO experience, in-game maps(!?)—all these things and more exist to fan your nostalgic curiosity into a full-blown dedication to this revitalized 27-year-old game.
Does it work? I think so. Make no mistake: the list of people for whom EverQuest Legends is not will forever be longer than the list of people for whom it is, but Game Jawn, a new studio comprised of EverQuest fans-turned-developers, has been smart in what cruft it's cut out and what it's left in place. This EverQuest has grown kinder in its dotage—it is more prone to hand out the candy pellet of a level up and forgive your mistakes in combat.
It's a game I've found myself dipping into at lunchtimes and on idle evenings. I can take a wander, marvel at some places, think 'hey I remember that,' and slaughter enough helpless creatures to net myself a level up. It is a satisfying, undemanding loop, despite the classic MMO trappings.
At the same time, it's still crusty as hell in ways that will charm you, if you're a certain sort of person. Your walk speed is glacial, you have approximately 4,600 distinct equipment slots on your body, and the game's MUD roots are still visible right there on its face—in the way you CONSIDER potential enemies, run WHO commands to check if pals are online, and play the entire game with one eye on the chat window. It feels sometimes inscrutable but never, at least in my time with it, cruel, where the rigorously old-school experience of Project 1999 is perfectly happy to send you scuttling off naked on a corpse run.
It is an MMO for MUD enjoyers and Morrowind perverts—no longer hard, but still authentically idiosyncratic. It is for people who can't truly enjoy something that doesn't demand you wrap your mind around it first. It is a charming struggle. It is the Linux of MMOs.
There are people for whom that paragraph is practically engineered in a lab to repulse them. We call those people 'most people'. But for the rest of us? For me? Legends is probably the only kind of MMO that stands a chance of hooking me in 2026. My six-year-old self would be delighted.
