With your 'avatar', as it's known, duly built, you must begin to develop your character. In the worst tradition of this type of game - and this is a real pain when you start out - you're weaker than the weak kid everyone picked on at school. You have to build up experience and strength by killing, um, spiders, beetles, bats, snakes, wolves, grizzly bears and the like. Nasty spiders, though. You can then loot the corpses for various items that you can sell for a pittance in the many cities. And you will die a lot. An awful lot. Which means you start again.

The breakthrough comes when you manage not to die for a bit and your avatar grows in strength, giving you the excuse to listen out for missions, or simply start exploring the vast land of Norrath. It's so huge that it'll take literally hours just to cross one of the three continents, and an hour or so of ferry travel to get to another continent.

To get to this stage takes so long that players with less patience may have given up, though. Being so weak early is no fun, and trying to find your way around a strange land for pathways out of town, particularly in the dead of night, is frustrating.

Stick with it, though, and there has never been a world as huge and varied as EverQuest's. It's expensive to play at $10 a month after the initial £40 cost (compared to online Half-Life, for instance), but it's constantly growing and evolving. Bear in mind that the new Ultima Online is coming to the UK too.