I'll admit it here, I'm hooked on Everquest Macintosh Edition. Evercrack, whatever you want to call it. Been playing since 2005, found the game in the deepest farthest reaches of the Sony Online Entertainment web site. It's like they didn't want you to find it, so that they wouldn't have to provide tech support to any more Mac users. But somehow I managed to find the right page and download the game onto my G5.

Most of my friends from my Diablo 2 days of online MMORPGing left the game when WoW came out, or split off to go play Guildwars. When WoW first came out, I was sick of the sucky battle.net experience with D2 and Guildwars never ported their client over to Mac, so I decided to try something different.

I thought I knew a thing or two about EQ since my GF at the time and I had been playing EQ games on the PS2 for a while. i logged in to Al`Kabor and immediately remade my Dark Elf Shadowknight character that I had been playing on PS2. The game warned me that the race/class combination was of HIGH difficulty, but I didn't believe them.

I finished creating the character and logged into a completely empty beginning zone. There I stood in the Lodge of the Dead, staring at my guildmaster and wondering what on earth to do! Little did I know that I had logged into the deepest part of a confusing city layout. For some reason everything I attacked in my home town would keel me instantly if not sooner. Couldn't find my way out of town at all, so I gave up and made another character with an easier class/race combo.

Went back to my old standby D&D character type, Half Elf Ranger. Created him up and logged in again. This time I was born in Kelethin, a wood elf town built on a complicated series of platforms high in the trees. I proceeded to IMMEDIATELY fall off a platform to my doom on the ground below. I popped back up on the ground and couldn't find my way back into the city, so I wandered around a bit and found a statue of a pedestal with a book open on top of it. I clicked on the statue and was teleported to the wonderous city of New Tanaan.

Littile did I know that I had found the portal to the Plane of Knowledge.

Anyways to make a long story short, I found other players there who taught me the game. The population on Al`Kabor is pretty small and most of the population is in the upper levels so finding groups at the lower levels can be a challenge, but the folks are very friendly and many have alt characters that they will play in order to group with you.

SOE in their great wisdom decided to stop development on the EQ Mac server after the Planes of Power expansion was released. In a lot of ways, our server IS the classic EQ progression server. After PoP came many modifications to the game that skewed the play balance and allowed the players to bypass the regular progression of the original game. This trend continues on the PC versions of the game, and consequently the current state of EQPC is so different from the original game that many folks who started out on EQPC and have switched to Mac have discovered the EQ Mac server, frozen in time with none of the gimping and ridiculous nerfs of the PC servers, much to their collective delight.

Others have grown tired of WoW, and are looking for something more challenging. Plus the high end game of WoW is pretty dull unless you are in a hardcore raiding guild and that doesn't appeal to someone who wants a more relaxed gaming atmosphere.

EQ Macintosh Edition suffers from a severe under exposure problem, which is one of the reasons I'm writing this article.

SOE provides the client as a free download. You can download it here. You can make a character and play for free for 15 days to see how you like the game.

Check it out if you are an RPGer like me, you'll be glad you did!