EverQuest (PC)

By PETER ELEY

(Herald rating: * * * * * )

Software companies are paranoid about piracy. Read the small print and you'll find that you face the same sort of penalties for copying games as you do for embezzling church funds.

So online games where the punters pay a monthly subscription are their idea of heaven, promising guaranteed cash flows, with piracy well nigh impossible because of registration requirements.

The three big "premium" online games — ones where you have to pay subscriptions of about $US10 a month — are Electronic Art's Ultima Online, Microsoft's Asheron's Call, and UbiSoft's EverQuest, which lives on the Sony Station site.

A review of Asheron's Call and Ultima Online brought a flood of calls from EverQuest fans. Why not try our game, they said.

After a couple of sessions I can see their point. EverQuest is good, and perhaps the best graphically. But if great graphics are essential to your gaming enjoyment, none of the big online trio is cutting edge.

The need to attract a wide user-base keeps the minimum specs down — EverQuest runs on a Pentium 200 with a 28.8kbps modem. And too-fancy graphics would be too slow for many users on standard phone connections.

But EverQuest has some nice effects and its graphics are good enough not to detract from the point of the game, which is to survive and thrive in a challenging online world.

The latest package features The Ruins of Kunark and The Scars of Velious versions of the game. I spent a fruitless hour trying to log on using the Scars of Velious CD.

All I got were incomprehensible error messages. But a switch to the Kunark CD worked — Velious seems to be an upgrade which needs the original installed first.

Another minor frustration was that a 10mb patch had to be downloaded before the registration process could begin. This took almost an hour.

But that apart, it was smooth going and was soon on one of the newbie servers, with my new identity. You create one from a wide range of characters — anything from a hobbit-style halfling to a high elf.

I took a stab at being a barbarian — why not? — and set about the task of living online. You start with little in the way of possessions and have to scavenge for food and items.

You can trade these for money or other goods, and slowly build up an inventory of possessions. This can take some time — the manual says weeks — so be prepared to be patient.

EverQuest is more about enjoying the journey than getting to a destination.

Label: UbiSoft

* peter_eley@nzherald.co.nz