EverQuest Legends is classic EverQuest, but for people who don't have time for MMOs anymore

True to its name, EverQuest hasn't let the questing end since 1999, but it's been a minute since a big new EverQuest project appeared aside from expansions to the existing MMOs. The last was EverQuest Next, which was cancelled in 2016.

Finally, Daybreak's got something new for us, but what's next this time is what was: Coming this July, EverQuest Legends is vanilla EverQuest as it was originally released before any expansions, with all the same challenges, graphics, and sounds lovingly restored from 1999—but with a twist.

Daybreak is making bigger changes to the original experience than Blizzard did with WoW Classic, heavily buffing player characters to let solo players or small groups experience everything the game has to offer without having to recruit 30 friends to go kite fire giants and kill Lord Nagafen.

Players will choose their race as normal, but will start with two classes, sorta like multiclassing in Dungeons & Dragons. After the briefish journey to level 10, they'll even get a third. Characters will keep all the skills, spells, and disciplines from their initial class, making an individual character much stronger than their true classic equivalent. Imagine playing a wizard that can quad kite with bard speed and give herself clarity, or a warrior who brings his own mage damage shield and shaman buffs. Being able to freely choose three classes opens a truly staggering number of combinations, and it should be an absolute feast for theorycrafters.

Daybreak has also included a huge amount of alternate advancement points (apparently close to a thousand) right from the start, giving players access to a ton of passive power and abilities that they wouldn't normally get until the Shadows of Luclin expansion or beyond. And speaking of Luclin, they've included the beastmaster class and Kerrans as playable races in classic as well as introducing whole new systems like feeding duplicate items to each other to make them stronger and being able to move the proc from one weapon to another with something called Exaltations.

One thing we won't have to deal with from Luclin are the "new" character models. Every race I saw at the demo looked exactly like they did at classic launch, including all the delightful silliness of polygonal bellbottoms and itchy troll butts.

Executive Producer David Youssefi described it to me as the game he's been dreaming about for over 20 years, a version of EQ that a busy person could play by themselves or with a few friends. He referred to it as "EverQuest for people who don't have time to play EverQuest," and sees it as one where you can log on, play for an hour or two, and be able to make meaningful progress. Keeping the world, the graphics, and the challenges the same while totally busting open the ceiling on player power seems like a good way to do that, but they've got a big challenge ahead of them.

To my mind, the greatest things about EverQuest were the ways it forced us to hang out together. Sure, it was frustrating to sit around trying to find a group, but having the game be so challenging that it required teamwork helped push us together into adventures. The long meditation times to get your mana back made for some time sitting around not doing much, but also gave us an excuse to just shoot the shit. Not to mention the delicious stress of being down at the Fungi King with an elite few hoping against hope that you recover quickly enough to handle the next round of respawns.

By giving players the tools to handle the game mostly by themselves, Legends should be easier to play now that we're all old and busy, and a game that newer players can check out without getting smashed by the first lava beetle they try to fight. But time will tell if all this power dims the shine of a game fundamentally about a world that's so dangerous that just getting from town to town is a challenge, a game that created lifelong friendships forged in the fires of teamwork chasing pixels.

Party like it's 1999

I take it as a good sign that Daybreak has collaborated with a couple of legends in their own right to develop this project. Eda "Secrets" Spause and Sean "Rogean" Norton are two of the folks behind some of the most popular fan servers around, Project Quarm and Project 1999.

Having spent a truly ridiculous amount of time raiding at the highest level on P99, I feel comforted knowing that the hands at the wheel of this project really, truly love this game. Together they represent decades of experience tinkering with old EQ code, wrestling with what decisions truly represent a "classic" experience, and dealing with all of the complications that we players throw at them.

Some of these questions are pretty foundational. Will there be raid instances and lockouts? Yes. Will experience gain be faster than it was back then? No, but the zem values (basically multipliers on how much experience mobs give you) have been tweaked. Will we be able to fast travel around the world? No, but they're giving us a modified pair of starter jboots to make scootin' around just a little less painful. Every one of these decisions impacts things like balance, economy, and the feel of the game in ways we won't totally grok until we get our hands on it.

And speaking of the economy, EQ Legends will exist outside the normal structure of EverQuest and EQ2. Kronos will not be used to pay for subs in EQL, and you won't be able to bring them over from Live or the TLPs to be used as currency. This will give the new project a brand new economy without people crashing in with tons of resources, which to my mind was a fantastic decision. I'm not above farming some hill giants on a TLP to transfer some cash over, but that would have put a tremendous yoke around the neck of Legends right off the rip.

While the impact of these decisions remains unclear for now, what is clear as day is the excitement these devs have for the project. Getting to sit with them at GDC, putting some faces to names I've known from the fan server community for years, and listening to their excitement about bringing this vision to the community to the players was a real treat. It's such a common refrain to hear about fan projects being smashed to pieces, and to see Darkpaw embrace these creators instead and give them space to express a vision of classic EverQuest that we've never seen before is a little ray of sunshine.