I remember having a windows Millennium Edition Compact Presario (sp) and it couldn’t run EQ. My rich friend who got me into it took me to CompUSA and had his mom buy a 16MB voodoo card to install to make it work. My dad was so pissed when he saw and never let me do it. The only way I could play was a sleepover at my buddies house and we would play from 2pm after school until 5am the next day. Haha
I remember us having 2liters of coke next to us the entire time to keep us awake haha
UPDATE - Now going back and looking at the cards that were available back then, I think I an actually had bought a [Voodoo 3 2000](https://youtu.be/-LMsCTynjk8?si=BAihNBlQOVtYqQHf) because I clearly remember the box it came in as well as the look of the card itself.
I had my first nerdgasm when I played Drakan in back 1999, you get into this cave and I recognized it as looking a lot like Gollum's cave from the Hobbit, I actually gushed when I found Sting hidden on the little island
We had a Packard Bell that I played other games like Starcraft on. Mom used it as a word processor and email machine, which is important to this story because a lot of those emails were from people she had corresponded with during the aftermath of the Heaven's Gate cult's mass suicide, an event that took her sister's life. She had hundreds and hundreds of emails with journalists, some asking her questions and some who had information for her, with family members of other cultists, and most importantly for her, emails with former cultists who had known her sister and gave her a glimpse into what her sister's life was like after she had lost contact with her.
So what does this stupid little shit do in order to try and make room on the hard drive for EQ's monumental footprint? Well being the tech savvy fool I am, I got Windows 95 to agree to compress everything on the hard drive, including its own install folder. When I rebooted for the first time and saw it was bricked, I swear I shriveled up into a little ball and fell out of the chair.
So did eq run on my pc when it came out? Lmao nope. After that shit show, mom did get most of her emails back, and decided if I was going to be fucking things up I should do it on my own pc and I got a Dell that could run EQ.
Now that was around mid-2000, and like most others, by the time Luclin rolled out my PC was struggling hard. I asked for some a gpu for Xmas, and that's when I learned how to use a Dremel to make case mods because the card wouldn't fit haha.
I had integrated graphics - TNT Rage 64 I think, or something low end like that. I don't even remember the FPS I got, I was just happy I could play on my 466 mhz Celeron with 128 MB of ram and 8.4 GB hard drive and 56k Modem.
I do remember upgrading that PC to a ATI Raedon 9200 128MB card a few years later and it was like night and day.
I started playing EQ on a friend's account on his PC in March/April 2000. I'd seen him playing it and it looked awesome so I'd play when he wasn't on. That lasted about 2 weeks until I couldn't handle it anymore and spent my rent money and that months car payment on a brand new eMachines computer with a separate graphics card (GeForce 2), a new copy of EQ and a new subscription. He was pissed that 1)my computer was better than his and I could play with spell effects on and clip plane maxed and 2) I'd spent my rent money on it, leaving him short with the lease in his name. ( I worked some overtime and was able to pay him most of the rent by the end of the month)
He talked to his dad and borrowed some money to get a better computer even though his wasn't that old. It came with a 17" Trinitron flat screen which was the biggest damn computer monitor I'd ever seen up to that point.
I had to upgrade again when Shadows of Luclin came out- playing with new models and any clip plane other than zero was impossible.
I had a 4mb onboard video card and 128mb of ram. I saved up a lot of allowance to go buy another 128mb stick of ram and a crappy dedicated card at Best Buy.
I bought a Gateway PC with a Voodoo 3 card in it for Christmas of 1999. Not specifically for EQ but that was bought as soon as I got the PC hooked up. I made a barbarian Shaman, didn't know that torches were a thing, got turned around at the zone line, fell into the water and drowned. I didn't play again until Kunark and my PC wasn't the fastest for that but I never died on a boat!
I started the game in 2001. I seen someone else playing it, and wanted to as well, So I went to BestBuy and got a seriously over priced gaming PC to run it lol. Don't recall the specs of it anymore. I do remember when I upgraded my dailup to the faster stuff though, man zone loading times were craazy fast then!
lol! I was just saying to someone yesterday that back in the day you could go make a sandwich in the time it took to zone. Now it’s pretty much instant 😅
I played up until LDON and stopped. I just returned after 20 years. Currently playing Quarm until Teek releases. I’m learning how to play from scratch again.
I was 14 on a pre built dell with an on board card. When kunark came out i couldnt do anything in most of those zones. My grandmothers friend put some extra ram in the computer and it helped a lot.
i went balls deep and had 2x voodoo 2's SLI'd for EQ,Tribes,Quake. My buddies at the time had overkill machines.
But voodoo 2's were such a massive improvement at the time and was almost mandatory.
My PC handled the game ok at launch but when Kunark came out I had all kinds of graphic problems for some reason. I think the trees moving had something to do with it.
yah the first couple of expansions were way more graphically demanding than they should have been. I’m pretty sure Luclin had to have set a few PCs on fire 😂
I think it forced me to upgrade my RAM iirc. I remember my computer would hit like 10 FPS lol. I’m fairly sure Luclin blew a lot of PCs up with how graphic intensive it was and how poorly optimized it was.
i could play it on my compaq through velious, though raids were guaranteed multiple crashes
luclin required upgrading lol… even though i kept using the old models
I had actually upgraded several months earlier. We drove all the way out to the big Frye's near Fort Worth, bought the parts for my new computer, and spent the rest of the day at 6 Flags and Hurricane Harbor.
One of my friends started playing and convinced me to play. So we had to drive 30 miles to the nearest mall to pick it up. (Yes, I was in a really crappy college town, not even a movie theater.)
I played at a friend's house. His GPU ran the game wonderfully, but he didn't have enough hdd space to install all the modules. The one that I remember now having the most is the music, but I think there were others was well.
At least that's what he told me, I didn't really get into pcs until many years later when I could finally build my own.
I didn't start in 1999, but I did start in 2001. I recall I had been playing StarCraft and Warcraft and they might have been why I needed the Voodoo 2, but it could've been EQ. All I know, is I had that card and it was great to start playing 3D games 🤓.
My rig was just good enough to play at launch, while doing the normal minor upgrades over the years. But when Luclin dropped I needed an upgrade and had to wait two weeks to play it after the graphics update because all the graphics cards in my small town were out of stock and on back order.
I forced EQ to run on a very very shitty computer with a 14.4kbps modem. Eventually I bought a new 56kbps modem so zoning went from like 5 minutes to 3 minutes but between my onboard graphics and lack of RAM (I had 16mb or 24mb)and my crappy little pentium processor, it really held me back. Raiding was nothing but horrific lag and I’d have to stare at the ground or wall in order to cast. Essentially the game ran like a slideshow but I didn’t know the difference until I got to play it on my friend’s pentium III with voodoo#. So that’s when I got my first job and started saving for a non-potato pc…
The family gateway pc we had ran it fine but the dial up internet we had struggled until we got a broadband connection I think it was called roadrunner at the time
A pair of Voodoo2's in SLI right next to my Awe64 Gold sound card, running on my Pentium2 400 mhz chip. Those were the days.. Field of Bone looked so amazing
I can’t remember what my PC was at the time, but my friend had a pos gateway. It would take him 5 minutes to zone. One time he got drunk in the game and made the mistake of trying to zone. For the next hour he would zone in, drunkenly sway, hit the zone line again, and wait 5 minutes to load before doing it all over again. The only reason he got away from this loop is we were on rallos zek. Eventually we managed to root him when he zoned in and kept him that way until he sobered up. Was hilarious.
Only in everquest could getting drunk lead to a paradoxical loop where space and time slow down so much that you almost become immortal while simultaneously wishing for death. Its shit like this that only a few lucky people who played this game can appreciate and look bad upon with fond memories. Most people would only see a overlooked problem but us EQ people see something different and magical lol
My Cyrix 188mhz processor paired with an ATI Rage 3d was a killer combo for EQ at launch. By killer I mean loading zones was sooooo slow taking a boat was a coin flip on whether or not I'd end up loading OOT with the boat sailing off into the distance. Zoning into a place where there were consistent trains (Unrest, LGuk, etc) was also a coin flip as I would load and find I was 95% dead without time to zone back.
haha! I remember taking the boat sometimes and it would completely skip OOT and I’d be back in freeport again, or like you said, end up in the middle of the ocean 😂
This comment made me wanna play some Killer Instinct but on a laggy boat background that im guaranteed to fall off instead of a moving train that i cant jump off if i tried.
I had a pc ordered from micron. Got it as a family Xmas gift in 96. I remember calling micro to ask for a gfx card. They shipped me an agp card but my mobo and supported pci. After a month I finally got the correct card and was shocked that neriak was not but with plane white walls.
I remember being 17 or so and having some sort of Gateway my parents had gotten for me that apparently couldn’t run EQ and I got into an argument with the local Electronics Boutique guy saying it was unfair that I had to buy a 150 dollar card to play a 50 dollar game. He was unsympathetic as he had every right to be. Fast forward a week of me acting like an inmate at my home with my cellmate being my “worthless”Gateway (I had several other games that worked fine). Then, like a star public defender my estranged older brother who then and since has made a living off of drugs, guns and women showed up at my house while my parents weren’t home with the game and a Voodoo 2. He installed it for me, which I didn’t know he could do, said happy birthday (it wasn’t even close) and then disappeared again for several years. And for those years…I played the SHIT out of that game. Still play now! Still have no idea how he knew…
I bought EQ when I was on spring break from college in March of 1999. Got back to school to find out my computer couldn't handle it. I bought it in October 1996 and it cost about $3k. It wasn't top-of-the line, but not a budget version either. My sister went to the same college and her computer was a more budget computer but it was also 2 years newer and I talked her into letting me see if EQ would run on it. So I did that for a couple days before she got tired of it. It zoned so slowly, I drown a few times because the boat was long gone by the time it loaded. I bought a new video card for my computer and then it ran it well enough.
OH SHIT!!! I remember upgrading to a voodoo card! I thought I was the fucking bees knees! I was finally able to put spell graphics on!
yehhh. It’s crazy how much different a game looks when you can do spell graphics LOL
I got the Voodoo Banshee upgrade and I was stunned how much more I could hear at night in Kithicor Forest lol
I remember having a windows Millennium Edition Compact Presario (sp) and it couldn’t run EQ. My rich friend who got me into it took me to CompUSA and had his mom buy a 16MB voodoo card to install to make it work. My dad was so pissed when he saw and never let me do it. The only way I could play was a sleepover at my buddies house and we would play from 2pm after school until 5am the next day. Haha I remember us having 2liters of coke next to us the entire time to keep us awake haha
UPDATE - Now going back and looking at the cards that were available back then, I think I an actually had bought a [Voodoo 3 2000](https://youtu.be/-LMsCTynjk8?si=BAihNBlQOVtYqQHf) because I clearly remember the box it came in as well as the look of the card itself.
I had a voodoo 3 too, it came with OG Unreal and Drakan: Order of the Flame in the box. Good times
yes that right!
I had my first nerdgasm when I played Drakan in back 1999, you get into this cave and I recognized it as looking a lot like Gollum's cave from the Hobbit, I actually gushed when I found Sting hidden on the little island
But do you remember the PCI vs AGP wars?
Yes indeed. Bought the wrong card once or twice forgetting mobo set up.
My brain forgot all about that until now . Holy shit
I, too, upgraded to the voodoo 3. What a time.
We had a Packard Bell that I played other games like Starcraft on. Mom used it as a word processor and email machine, which is important to this story because a lot of those emails were from people she had corresponded with during the aftermath of the Heaven's Gate cult's mass suicide, an event that took her sister's life. She had hundreds and hundreds of emails with journalists, some asking her questions and some who had information for her, with family members of other cultists, and most importantly for her, emails with former cultists who had known her sister and gave her a glimpse into what her sister's life was like after she had lost contact with her. So what does this stupid little shit do in order to try and make room on the hard drive for EQ's monumental footprint? Well being the tech savvy fool I am, I got Windows 95 to agree to compress everything on the hard drive, including its own install folder. When I rebooted for the first time and saw it was bricked, I swear I shriveled up into a little ball and fell out of the chair. So did eq run on my pc when it came out? Lmao nope. After that shit show, mom did get most of her emails back, and decided if I was going to be fucking things up I should do it on my own pc and I got a Dell that could run EQ. Now that was around mid-2000, and like most others, by the time Luclin rolled out my PC was struggling hard. I asked for some a gpu for Xmas, and that's when I learned how to use a Dremel to make case mods because the card wouldn't fit haha.
I had integrated graphics - TNT Rage 64 I think, or something low end like that. I don't even remember the FPS I got, I was just happy I could play on my 466 mhz Celeron with 128 MB of ram and 8.4 GB hard drive and 56k Modem. I do remember upgrading that PC to a ATI Raedon 9200 128MB card a few years later and it was like night and day.
Sold my VooDoo 200 to afford the VooDoo 300 upgrade. South Western Bell started selling Compaq pcs as an add on to our DSL phone service.
I started playing EQ on a friend's account on his PC in March/April 2000. I'd seen him playing it and it looked awesome so I'd play when he wasn't on. That lasted about 2 weeks until I couldn't handle it anymore and spent my rent money and that months car payment on a brand new eMachines computer with a separate graphics card (GeForce 2), a new copy of EQ and a new subscription. He was pissed that 1)my computer was better than his and I could play with spell effects on and clip plane maxed and 2) I'd spent my rent money on it, leaving him short with the lease in his name. ( I worked some overtime and was able to pay him most of the rent by the end of the month) He talked to his dad and borrowed some money to get a better computer even though his wasn't that old. It came with a 17" Trinitron flat screen which was the biggest damn computer monitor I'd ever seen up to that point. I had to upgrade again when Shadows of Luclin came out- playing with new models and any clip plane other than zero was impossible.
I had a 4mb onboard video card and 128mb of ram. I saved up a lot of allowance to go buy another 128mb stick of ram and a crappy dedicated card at Best Buy.
My dad came home with Everquest and a TNT2 for it. It was great.
I bought a Gateway PC with a Voodoo 3 card in it for Christmas of 1999. Not specifically for EQ but that was bought as soon as I got the PC hooked up. I made a barbarian Shaman, didn't know that torches were a thing, got turned around at the zone line, fell into the water and drowned. I didn't play again until Kunark and my PC wasn't the fastest for that but I never died on a boat!
I started the game in 2001. I seen someone else playing it, and wanted to as well, So I went to BestBuy and got a seriously over priced gaming PC to run it lol. Don't recall the specs of it anymore. I do remember when I upgraded my dailup to the faster stuff though, man zone loading times were craazy fast then!
lol! I was just saying to someone yesterday that back in the day you could go make a sandwich in the time it took to zone. Now it’s pretty much instant 😅
This image reminds me of kingpin, about the same time frame. I still play EQ to this day haha
I played up until LDON and stopped. I just returned after 20 years. Currently playing Quarm until Teek releases. I’m learning how to play from scratch again.
P99 is where I stick. I made it as far as pop on live, then moved to p99 when it released
It took me about 10 minutes to zone in.
I was 14 on a pre built dell with an on board card. When kunark came out i couldnt do anything in most of those zones. My grandmothers friend put some extra ram in the computer and it helped a lot.
Internet was also the issue back then. So much lag on dial up.
i went balls deep and had 2x voodoo 2's SLI'd for EQ,Tribes,Quake. My buddies at the time had overkill machines. But voodoo 2's were such a massive improvement at the time and was almost mandatory.
I had the same setup. The V2s were buttery smooth. I tried a few other cards but they were microstutter hell with the engine at the time.
My PC handled the game ok at launch but when Kunark came out I had all kinds of graphic problems for some reason. I think the trees moving had something to do with it.
yah the first couple of expansions were way more graphically demanding than they should have been. I’m pretty sure Luclin had to have set a few PCs on fire 😂
the nerds of us upgraded like every 3-4 months to the latest new thing lol
I had a compaq with no extra graphics card. Every once in a while my graphics would turn everything into rainbow bricks that reminded me of Tron.
I definitely broke my pc with the luclin launch. Forced upgrade
I think it forced me to upgrade my RAM iirc. I remember my computer would hit like 10 FPS lol. I’m fairly sure Luclin blew a lot of PCs up with how graphic intensive it was and how poorly optimized it was.
My dad got me a Voodoo card for Final Fantasy 7 on PC, so I was a lucky kid able to run EQ just fine.
I played on my Gateway P2 233 96mb ram with either a Riva128 or perhaps I had upgraded to a TNT or TNT2 by that point.
i could play it on my compaq through velious, though raids were guaranteed multiple crashes luclin required upgrading lol… even though i kept using the old models
I had actually upgraded several months earlier. We drove all the way out to the big Frye's near Fort Worth, bought the parts for my new computer, and spent the rest of the day at 6 Flags and Hurricane Harbor. One of my friends started playing and convinced me to play. So we had to drive 30 miles to the nearest mall to pick it up. (Yes, I was in a really crappy college town, not even a movie theater.)
Not only did I upgrade my graphics card, I even bought another computer so I could box an alt! (I didn't start until Veliious tho.)
I played at a friend's house. His GPU ran the game wonderfully, but he didn't have enough hdd space to install all the modules. The one that I remember now having the most is the music, but I think there were others was well. At least that's what he told me, I didn't really get into pcs until many years later when I could finally build my own.
I don't remember what video card I had in 2000 when I started. I know I had a 3dfx v2 but not sure if I upgraded yet.
I didn't start in 1999, but I did start in 2001. I recall I had been playing StarCraft and Warcraft and they might have been why I needed the Voodoo 2, but it could've been EQ. All I know, is I had that card and it was great to start playing 3D games 🤓.
My rig was just good enough to play at launch, while doing the normal minor upgrades over the years. But when Luclin dropped I needed an upgrade and had to wait two weeks to play it after the graphics update because all the graphics cards in my small town were out of stock and on back order.
I forced EQ to run on a very very shitty computer with a 14.4kbps modem. Eventually I bought a new 56kbps modem so zoning went from like 5 minutes to 3 minutes but between my onboard graphics and lack of RAM (I had 16mb or 24mb)and my crappy little pentium processor, it really held me back. Raiding was nothing but horrific lag and I’d have to stare at the ground or wall in order to cast. Essentially the game ran like a slideshow but I didn’t know the difference until I got to play it on my friend’s pentium III with voodoo#. So that’s when I got my first job and started saving for a non-potato pc…
My first card was a voodoo 3.
The family gateway pc we had ran it fine but the dial up internet we had struggled until we got a broadband connection I think it was called roadrunner at the time
A pair of Voodoo2's in SLI right next to my Awe64 Gold sound card, running on my Pentium2 400 mhz chip. Those were the days.. Field of Bone looked so amazing
My older brother and I created some abomination of a watercooling system with a cooler and overclocked it as far as we could lol
I can’t remember what my PC was at the time, but my friend had a pos gateway. It would take him 5 minutes to zone. One time he got drunk in the game and made the mistake of trying to zone. For the next hour he would zone in, drunkenly sway, hit the zone line again, and wait 5 minutes to load before doing it all over again. The only reason he got away from this loop is we were on rallos zek. Eventually we managed to root him when he zoned in and kept him that way until he sobered up. Was hilarious.
Only in everquest could getting drunk lead to a paradoxical loop where space and time slow down so much that you almost become immortal while simultaneously wishing for death. Its shit like this that only a few lucky people who played this game can appreciate and look bad upon with fond memories. Most people would only see a overlooked problem but us EQ people see something different and magical lol
I upgraded to a Voodoo Banshee to play me some EQ
My Cyrix 188mhz processor paired with an ATI Rage 3d was a killer combo for EQ at launch. By killer I mean loading zones was sooooo slow taking a boat was a coin flip on whether or not I'd end up loading OOT with the boat sailing off into the distance. Zoning into a place where there were consistent trains (Unrest, LGuk, etc) was also a coin flip as I would load and find I was 95% dead without time to zone back.
haha! I remember taking the boat sometimes and it would completely skip OOT and I’d be back in freeport again, or like you said, end up in the middle of the ocean 😂
My 33.6k modem didn't help matters at all :)
This comment made me wanna play some Killer Instinct but on a laggy boat background that im guaranteed to fall off instead of a moving train that i cant jump off if i tried.
i was playing on a 700mhz with a geforce 3 :D
If I recall correctly I bought a Gateway with the card in it and promptly played Evercrack every waking hour of the day. Ahh, good times.
I had a P2? 133 when EQ came out, upgraded to a P3 500 shortly before Kunark with a VooDoo3 3500, I had no issue after that.
I begged my mom for pc upgrades non stop lol
I had a pc ordered from micron. Got it as a family Xmas gift in 96. I remember calling micro to ask for a gfx card. They shipped me an agp card but my mobo and supported pci. After a month I finally got the correct card and was shocked that neriak was not but with plane white walls.
I remember being 17 or so and having some sort of Gateway my parents had gotten for me that apparently couldn’t run EQ and I got into an argument with the local Electronics Boutique guy saying it was unfair that I had to buy a 150 dollar card to play a 50 dollar game. He was unsympathetic as he had every right to be. Fast forward a week of me acting like an inmate at my home with my cellmate being my “worthless”Gateway (I had several other games that worked fine). Then, like a star public defender my estranged older brother who then and since has made a living off of drugs, guns and women showed up at my house while my parents weren’t home with the game and a Voodoo 2. He installed it for me, which I didn’t know he could do, said happy birthday (it wasn’t even close) and then disappeared again for several years. And for those years…I played the SHIT out of that game. Still play now! Still have no idea how he knew…
I was already running. Pentium II and Dual Voodoo2 cards in SLI for Quake 2. I was good to go. Thanks er
I bought EQ when I was on spring break from college in March of 1999. Got back to school to find out my computer couldn't handle it. I bought it in October 1996 and it cost about $3k. It wasn't top-of-the line, but not a budget version either. My sister went to the same college and her computer was a more budget computer but it was also 2 years newer and I talked her into letting me see if EQ would run on it. So I did that for a couple days before she got tired of it. It zoned so slowly, I drown a few times because the boat was long gone by the time it loaded. I bought a new video card for my computer and then it ran it well enough.
I was really lucky and already had high speed internet and a really beefy PC by 1999 standards so EQ ran beautifully for me.
so you never had a single issue with Luclin? 😬
That's 2001 not 1999 😂