Sense of place

Funny how certain topics always seem to come to the fore at certain times, and you get preoccupied thinking about them and lots of conversations are about them. Games for one. Something else I have been thinking about lately is the sense of place you can develop from online worlds. Or maybe I should be talking about my enjoyment of the sense of place I have from a particular online world – Norrath, of the original EverQuest. M and I played EverQuest, or EQ as we call it, for about five years. Would you believe me if I told you I still reminisce about certain places, or zones, in that game world? We were talking about particular EQ places yesterday, with a friend who is an EQ 2 fan. Here’s me waxing lyrical about Norrath:

Ohhh I loved Crushbone – the place reeked of orc stink! Remember the insane gnome necromancer [I loved his name: Retlon Brenclog] who would rampage and kill all the low level players if someone let him out by mistake???

And Kelethin – ugh! It was a tree house city, literally all on tree tops and if you fell off as a newbie it was instant death! And I always got lost there too.. Very embarrassing when you are a level 55 character and lost in Kelethin…

Kaladim was where my first character ever was born – the dwarven paladin, Aasta LaVista… Ahh the memories.. I remember running around and then falling into a moat and drowning because I was too inept and clumsy to get myself out of the water…

And remember Ak’Anon, the gnome city? All those clockwork (because gnomes are tinkerers, of course) guards and creatures?

The fear you would feel going through some zones, like Mistmoore and Nektulos Forest… And of course there’s my favourite zone of all time, the Oasis of Marr.. Complete with a beach and great swimming spots, and of course zombies, salt water crocodiles, sand giants and spectres… Nothing better than enjoying a picnic of jumjum salad and honey mead in the dunes (after first clearing the spot of dune tarantulas and desert madmen, of course) and then doing bombies into the water off the stone spires in the sea. I can’t swim in Real Life but in EQ Aasta LaVista was a champion swimmer 🙂

I’ll let M have the last word:
I think the reason why we gained those attachments was that we hung out there for socialising as much as xp’ing [completing quests/killing monsters for experience and levels]. We used to hang around and chat. Cause huge trains. Go swimming, high diving, etc. People used to bitch about trains in EQ1 and we havent seen them in subsequent games but with the loss of trains we lost a lot of the excitement and danger of an area. Any particular dungeon you walked into you had to be careful people werent running back out dragging the a whole zone worth of mobs right over the top of you 🙂

Maybe the lack of it in EQ2 is that there really hasn’t been any overly populated zones we’ve come across yet. In EQ1 you used to have hundreds of people in the same zone causing chaos. All fighting over their small camping spot. Training over each other. Everyone screaming and running for the zone exit when someone pulled the uber mobs down on everyone else. It was a hell of a lot of fun 🙂

Maybe it was just that it was our first MMO 😛

(For more information on EQspeak, see this wikibooks glossary. That’s another reason I loved the EQ experience – the whole language that evolved in-game. I should go and add some of the words I’ve collected over the years.)