Grab Your Breastplate!

By Michael Krantz/San Diego

Jim Kesselring is not at liberty to reveal the dungeon from which he procured the Mytheral breastplate. And the identity of the monsters he and his party spent 11 hours slaying in order to win the item is likewise proprietary. But he will talk about the auction that his character, a gnome named Razor, held that night in Mithaniel Marr. Roughly 200 players showed up, and the armor sold for 4,000 platinum pieces. But then, turning a socially responsible profit is Razor's forte. "It's how I add value to the economy," he says, "and to the game itself."

So it goes in Everquest, the state of the art in multiplayer, online role-playing games. It's been clear for decades how enthralled gamers are by such adventures, in which they visit invented universes whose inhabitants create their own stories by exploring territory, making alliances, seeking treasure and so on. But the Net has advanced the form considerably since the halcyon days of Dungeons & Dragons, the original game played by dateless dweebs in rec rooms across America on Saturday nights. Today's fantasy worlds are designed by software gurus, are presented on the Web and swarm with tens of thousands of players. The result is virtual societies like Ultima Online, which in two years amassed 125,000 players so fervent that pieces of exclusive real estate on the Ultima site--think of it as the Ultima in-game equivalent of a duplex on Manhattan's Upper East Side--regularly sell on eBay for more than $1,000.

Everquest raises the bar again. Three years in the making at Sony's 989 Studios in San Diego, it's the role-playing market's first 3-D online world, a lush environment reminiscent of immersive shoot-'em-ups like Quake and Doom. The Everquest team, says 989 president Kelly Flock, took a chance by deciding to leap-frog the 2-D Ultima and create a game so graphics-rich it would require a 3-D-accelerated PC in order to play it.

Smart move. Everquest launched in March and was an instant hit; after only two months, more than 100,000 people have purchased the CD-ROM, and dutifully pay an $8 or $9 monthly subscription rate. Each night 30,000 people fill the cities, deserts and forests that constitute the 19 Everquest zones.

Yes, worried parents, there's violence in Everquest. But the game's best post-Columbine feature is its marginalization of slaughter. In sharp contrast to Ultima, in which veteran players often murder "newbies" just for the thrill of it, Everquest, says producer Brad McQuaid, lets users choose whether or not to be "player killers"; only those who do can kill--or be killed by--others. Thus far only 15% have opted for killer status.

Instead, Everquest thrives on the relationships that develop among players, who talk via chat windows in one of the languages spoken by the game's 12 races (elf, gnome, human, etc.). Players attend concerts, auctions and weddings; bicker over everything from wolf meat to scimitars; and pool talents and resources to quest for distant treasures. "Stuff like that," says McQuaid, "is more binding than shooting your friend with a rocket launcher."

Well, millions of Quake freaks would beg to differ, but there's no doubting the depths of the Everquesters' passions; already tales are circulating of companies' banning the game from their in-house machines and college girlfriends stealing the discs from their boyfriends' PCs. Last week eBay had 140 virtual Everquest items up for auction: weapons, spells, even the game's currency trading for U.S. dollars--what one might call a cyber exchange rate.

The players themselves aren't always quite what you'd expect. Kesselring, 32, for instance, is an Ohio computer-network engineer with a wife and three kids. "We all play together," he says. "For us, Everquest has pretty much replaced TV."

And, say enthusiasts, you ain't seen nothin' yet. In a few years, predicts Flock, "people are going to have faster connections and processors, more memory and more storage. These worlds are going to become the dominant form of entertainment." Which should even bring down the cost of those Mytheral breastplates.