"Play EverQuest Mobile On PC".

No, not really. Don't get excited. You can't. At least, I'm all but certain you can't. I'm mentioning it here in the name of completism, not in any belief there's an actual game you can play right now, or even sign up to play soon.

For one fleeting moment, though, I thought it just might be true. Here's what happened. 

I woke up this morning, logged into my PC, checked my blog roll and saw Tipa at Chasing Dings had a post up about the emulator for EQOA, aka EverQuest Online Adventures, the long-defunct version of EverQuest for the PlayStation 2. 

I read the post with considerable interest, having had Project: Return Home on my radar for many years. I have the website bookmarked and check it frequently although I only look at the front page, which never changes. I have no idea why I'm doing that now I come to think about it. All the activity these days happens on Discord.

I have several emulators bookmarked: FHX Restoration, FR Sunrise, VGOEmulator. I've written about all of them on occasion. I thought I'd also posted about the EQOA project but if I did I don't seem to have given it a tag and a search for EQOA on the blog doesn't bring up any posts about it so maybe I just thought about doing it.

Thinking about it is also all I've ever done towards getting the Return Home emulator set up on my PC. Okay, I may have done a little more. I read some guides a while back about how to go about setting it up but it looked so complicated I decided to leave it for a while and a while became forever. 

The video walkthrough Tipa embedded on how to get the whole thing up and running is so clear and comprehensive, though, I no longer have any excuse other than laziness for not doing it. That and the currently excessive amount of new and potentially interesting stuff going on right now, that is. 

Concept art, obviously.

 

I will get to EQOA eventually, I sorta kinda maybe promise. I'll put it on the missing pieces of the EverQuest jigsaw list with those PC Pilot games I downloaded and still haven't installed. Another daunting prospect. 

In the course of her account, Tipa mentioned in passing the existence of some "mobile versions [of EQ] for phones" that she hadn't played. I couldn't remember there having been any of those so I googled it and came up with a couple of interesting results.

One was this comprehensive and informative report from The EverQuest Show (Currently residing in the "Where Are They Now?" file, sad to say.) The other was this bold and unequivocal announcement from PC mobile emulator platform BlueStacks.

Play EverQuest Mobile on PC yells the headline before carrying on

 "EverQuest Mobile on PC is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) where you explore a world of fantasy, embark on numerous epic quests, and fight battles to defeat challenging foes."

Note the tense. "Is", not "will be". Tenses are important.  The rest of the page carries on in the same, confident tone, letting anyone who cares know, albeit with some peculiarly stilted syntax 

"You can fully customize your character and make it whatever you’ll like it to be. Change the hair, face style, eye color, etc. Now you can move your character and explore Norrath, a medieval fantasy world."

There's more! 

"You have the choice to select the race of humans, elves, barbarians, trolls, etc. Choose what your life occupation will be (your class) from options such as ranger, wizard, or cleric."

I don't know, maybe it's me but don't those "etc" and "such as" suggest a certain, loose, cavalier attitude to the facts? Someone who doesn't really care what races or classes are in the game might not really care much about the game at all, not even whether it actually exists. 

It doesn't exist. It never did. For all the relentless present-tensing there's one revealing moment when reality slips in: "This MMORPG will soon be available for downloads on both Android and iOS devices." 

Soon. Not now.  Not ever, most likely. 

But this an in-game screenshot. Anyone know where from? Could it actually be <gasp> from the mobile game itself?

 

This is the mobile EQ port being developed under the agreement (Arrangement? Alliance? Sweaty handshake in a dark alley?) between Daybreak Games and NantWorks, that peculiar, ill-defined relationship that was meant to bring both the EverQuest and H1Z1 franchises to phones and tablets but never did. 

Here's a news item from three years ago telling Android users what they could expect. The links in that article to "the current publisher of the title" and "the press release related to this news" go to Daybreak's website, where they run up against the buffers of "Page Not Found". Whatever connection there may have been between Daybreak and NantWorks was, presumably, severed for good by the assimilation of DBG into EG7 (or vice versa, if you prefer). 

Whether that means any work that may or may not have been done on mobile versions of either game vanished into the void with the dissolution of the ties between the various rights owners and developers is another matter. Perhaps the much-hinted in-development EverQuest title is being cobbled together as we speak, from the scattered fragments of the doomed NantWorks mobile port. 

Maybe BlueStacks knows something we don't, with the relative plethora of details they supply, not just  the classes, races, monsters, hairstyles and manifold gameplay options but also the macros, multi-instancing and other automated ways to have the game play itself for you... oh, wait, no - that's just a feature of BlueStacks itself, cleverly dressed up as a feature of whatever game they happen to be using as a hook to reel you in.  

So no, sadly, I don't believe you can, as the BlueStacks page claims,"Pre-register for EverQuest Mobile" or "Download and play EverQuest Mobile on PC". 

You could try, as they suggest, looking for EverQuest in the Google Play Store but you're not going to find it. (Although, as I've just discovered, typing "EverQuest" into the search field there is possibly the best way to find a great selection of mobile mmorpgs that aren't set in Norrath.)  

I strongly suspect that we will, one day, see a genuine, new, playable mobile app that uses the EverQuest name. Whether it will be this one or even if it will be of much interest to anyone other than EQ completionists is another matter entirely.