Just out of pure curiosity I looked up Everquest on wikipedia

Looked it up to see if it was still running and active and to my surprise they are still even releasing expansions for it (said the next one is scheduled to be released next month).

That is might impressive considering the game would be 15 years old now and the graphics would be totally out of date (though I guess it is possible for the expansions to have updated the graphics.

I assume most here played Everquest at one time or another. It has been one of the few MMO's that I played and was the first so it is the one that sticks out in my mind (even though I didn't stick with it more than a couple months).

I wonder what the draw continues to be for the people that have stuck with it all these years when plenty more up to date games have come out for them to spend time playing. After all those years is it generally the friendships that they have developed through the game that keeps them playing?

WoW was the mass market hit but it seems most MMORPGS enthusiasts cite EQ as the game that made them fall in love with the genre. Something about the world, its music and progression made it such a special place to play, hence why so many still cling to it. Personally I have very fond memories of hoarding bone chips to summon skeletons and forming parties to spawn camp Orcs for their belts.

I never played EQ. I did play FF11 though, which is sort of the same, just with an FF skin.

Everquest had model updates in one of their patches and have been patching it and expansion updating it as it goes. It doesn't look too bad. I played it waaaay back when. Then I got into WoW and have been playing that ever since (it's about to hit its 10 year anniversary!)

I played EQ and then EQ: Adventures on the PS2 with the HDD. I Also tried XI on the HDD but wasn't a fan. Then WoW came. I've played a few other MMOs as well.

What looks really exciting though is Everquest NEXT. You have destructible worlds and interactive worlds. So if on one server you don't save a village, it's forever lost or taken over on that server. And you can dig like in minecraft and there are three world layers. In fact they have Everquest Landmark where you can build things in it and hten those things can be used to build fortresses in the game. It's really really really cool. Combining Minecraft with MMOing.