Still a fun game despite its age and first generation shortcomings.

User Rating: 8.2 | EverQuest: Shadows of Luclin PC
Well, I find myself in a love-hate relationship with EverQuest after playing the game for over five years now, often to the exclusion of most other games in my collection although I don't spend that kind of time on it now. I do still enjoy playing and recently resubscribed yet again.

While the game does suffer from its share of first gen MMORPG ills, it still is entertaining and fun to play with more done right than wrong. Recent changes with the last expansion, The Serpent's Spine, have gone a long way to cut down on downtime between encounters with monsters in the game. Regeneration of health and mana is far faster now than it used to be and this makes a big difference in the gameplay. There is a lot less sitting around waiting for people or yourself to regen sufficiently to take something else on. This should have been implemented years ago but at least it finally has been now. This has reduce the grind considerably.

The graphics are a mixed bag with newer areas looking very nice although not on par with the most recent new titles overall. Other areas still sport NPCs that date back to 1999 when the game launched. Overall, while the game is lacking in this area, it does not look terrible by any means.

The music and ambient sound are plentiful and always seem to fit the place and situation well.

The game is relatively stable overall with little downtime except when major fixes are patched in or when a new expansion launches. In all this time, SOE still is unable to properly launch an expansion without days of problems ensuing immediately thereafter.

Every time I leave the old Norrath claiming it is for good this time, I wind up coming back months later. There's really nothing else quite like EverQuest and above all else the game play is the draw for me. The enormous world and vast depth with so much lore and so much to know and see continues to entertain for years and years. Maybe it is simply the familiarity with this particular virtual world that makes it as appealing to me as newer games. I don't know.

Although it is true that as an aging game the player population is top heavy with most players being high level and lower level characters being the alts of high level players, the fact that many of the classes can solo very well to high levels helps to negate the potential lack of groups at lower levels. It is hardly some barren wasteland however. The hubs of the EQ universe, namely the Plane of Knowledge and the Bazaar usually have many players about and general chat channels and other tools help make finding other players easier than you might expect. Like any MMORPG if you expect to arrive and have people invite you and provide your fun all the time then yes, you might be hanging around but if you can be proactive about making your own fun, there is certainly plenty of it to be had in Norrath.