• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 414 0

problems in MMORPGs that soloers cite as their reason for soloing is that they are unable to find parties. The reasons for soloing can range from picking a character who is not suitable for most parties (highly specialized classes often suffer from this), to the time of day when the player is on, to the fact that the player does not have the necessary social contacts to form a party quickly. Soloers, in essence, arose out of a more casual style of play necessitated by the constraints of modern living. Soloers are not limited to these reasons, of course. Many players shift in and out of solo play as circumstances require, fighting lower-level monsters until they are able to find an appropriate party.

Character Roles

Although EverQuest has a role-playing preferred server, Firiona Vie, most players don’t otherwise role-play outside of this server (Taylor 2006:30). In fact, players can have up to eight distinct characters per server, and usually share their player identity with others such that characters are easily identified by their owners (96). This was not true of all MMORPGs. One of the players from my Dungeons & Dragons campaign shared his experience with Asheron’s Call (AC):

I started AC one week into the retail launch. Some of my D&D friends had been playing during Beta, and convinced me to join. I played regularly for seven years, then took almost two years off, then came back for another year before finally retiring. I created a Gharu’ndim mage, though the game was strictly skill-based, and there were no rigid class distinction. You were free to create an armor-wearing, sword wielding character that also could cast offensive spells. I continued my emphasis on role-playing in AC, choosing skills that were more suited to the character I wanted, rather than trying to “min-max” the system. I rarely spoke out of character for the first couple years in the game [Jellig 2010].

This player’s experience was very different from his experience with the Lord of the Rings (LotR) online game, which focused more on status established in the early creation of the game’s community during the Beta:

During the time I spent in LotR beta, I did not find as many people interested in role-playing as I did in AC. I think there may have been a couple of reasons for that: There was an opportunity to save some advancement of Beta characters when the official launch came, so people were more inclined to power level to ensure the maximum benefit when the launch came. There seemed to be a larger gap between the older, more advanced Beta players and the newbies. It seemed that more of the established groups were not interested in recruiting lower levels into their allegiances. This may have also been a consequence of the Beta experience, as there was no guarantee that your followers would keep the allegiance after the launch (especially once the extra levels were lost and everyone was on more or less of an even playing field) [Jellig 2010].

Race

EverQuest’s races include traditional races from Middle-earth: halflings, gnomes, dwarves, several species of elves (high, half-, dark, and wood), dwarf, and human (Taylor 2006:12). Barbarians, a class in tabletop Dungeons & Dragons, are instead a race in EverQuest—taking the outsider view (that barbarians are a group of people) rather than an insider view (that any race can be classified as a barbarian). Like the Tinker gnomes of Dragonlance, gnomes in EverQuest are also associated with technology (Taylor 2006:14).

In EverQuest, all humanoid characters are white or tanned except for the dark elves, who have blue skin, and the erudites, who are dark brown. Erudites are a human-like race, juxtaposing a curious differentiation between species and race—they are not human, yet seem to represent a darker-skinned human analogue (Taylor 2006:114). As Van Dyke noticed in Dungeons & Dragons, this is likely due to the biases inherent in a fantasy framework drawn from European myth.

Class

EverQuest has traditional Middle-earth archetypes: bard, ranger, rogue, warrior, and wizard.