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I am having friendly debate with a friend of mine. More of less just teasing eachother about our respective games. He thought it was cool that you could "link" items in WOW. He never played EQ and i rolled my eyes. Thanks to EQ other games are better I know that. Is there somelace I can find out when eq first came out as well as the expspansions. Id also like to be able to find out when the implemented "linkable" items etc. A listing for all the things EQ implemented first. The reason why its the leading mmorpg. Can anyone help me out?

EQ1 was released in 1999 I believe, think it was around summer.

UO was, and had been out for a while - but before even that were MUDs (Multi User Dungeons), which - if you are unfamiliar with the term - is an old text based online rpg. That is the true mother of mmorpgs.

For an example of a MUD, www.necromium.com is the website of the one I used to be on. To access it (yes its still running) telnet to necromium.com port 4000

EQ beta began in early 1998, and was released in April of 1999.

Realm and UO were both active then.

EQ expansions:
The Ruins of Kunark (April 2000)
-- Epic quests introduced.

The Scars of Velious (November 2000)
--- i cant remember if the level increase to 60 was here or RoK

The Shadows of Luclin (November 2001)
---(updated graphics - characters more customizable)

The Planes of Power (October 2002)
--- level cap increases to 65

The Legacy of Ykesha (February 2003)
--- concept of in game mapping by players
--- shared bank slots for an acct on a server, meaning your other characters on that acct and server could pick up items from a "shared" bank.
^^these were simultaneous patches with the expansion; you didnt have to get the expansion to get these features

The Lost Dungeons of Norrath (September 2003)
--- the concept of an instanced, temporary zone is introduced
--- extremely popular expansion

The Gates of Discord (February or March 2004)
-- this one made SOE rethink their strategy for expansions

The Omens of War (August? 2004)
--- level cap increases to 70

that's all i can remember off the top of my head about the expansions... now for how this fit into the history thing...

MMORPG longwinded history lesson!

Here we go...

PvP was a big part of UO, and UO also introduced the concept of player housing, which the original EQ did not have. Both concepts were sources of frustration for some players. In addition, UO was quite possibly the first source for saleable accounts, a la eBay.

Meridian was next, and introduced the use of a 1st person view, and 3d graphics.

Then came EQ, which snagged ppl from all of the others, including my guild (who played Realm). [I joined during the EQ period :)]

EQ further developed the social nature of RPGs leading to groups meeting online for bazaar type events, and entire online out-of-game subcultures were built around in-game trade skills, classes, and guilds.

The AI engine for mobs was different... mobs would chase you and when you went in a building, the mobs would open the door and come in and kill you anyway :).

EQ also introduced the concept of the raid, with mobs too powerful to be killed by a single group, requiring the coordination, at the time because of lower level caps and less impressive equipment, of up to 72 raid participants. Player guilds became essential to reaching and defeating higher level encounters.

The nature of rare mob spawn patterns also engendered the concept of "camping," or waiting for a rare spawn by killing a placeholder for hours, days, and even months. (Can you say "desiccated halfling mask"? I knew you could!)

EQ also had different types of servers, for different types of gameplay, including a role-play only server, where a player was limited to one character, and role-playing was strongly encouraged... like with frowns and admonishments and such.

There were hundreds of zones, each unique in some way, with a great deal of lore that you had the option of learning.

Microsoft's Asheron's Call was moderately successful, and was released after EQ. Character customization is more flexible, but some choices had extreme advantages, so players had to be very careful about how they chose character abilities.

Dark Ages of Camelot was next, being *very* PvP oriented, with realms at war over areas, and stealing relics from other realms. Some people went to DAoC solely for the PvP aspect.

Most games since these have been rehashes of the ones listed above.

Recent releases (Planetside, Star Wars Galaxies) have been a bit more innovative, but I didnt play those, and dont know much about them, other than they didnt appeal to me.

... and yar i know i can be verbose :). good thing i'm headed to a meeting eh?

have a great day :).

Excellent run down runyariel, but I wanted too add one more thing.

Luclin brought forth the concept of the Bazaar. That was not added as a patch, it was a seperate zone in which you had to have the expansion to use.

And one question:



Why? What happened? I had quit before this (I quit in October of last year) and wasn't around when this came out.

yar i went to GoD like 3x total, and then only because they begged ... omens was much better :).

The level gap increase was RoK. Scars of Velious introduced a more in-depth mob faction system. (It wasn't anything 'ne', but it played a big role in the expansion.) Along with new textures.