Dirty Old Town

EverQuest II's Origins/Anashti Sul beta began yesterday. This morning I took a very quick look at it. I'm not intending to spend much time there but I couldn't resist the temptation to remind myself what  Freeport used to be like. Having spent half an hour or so walking the streets of the old city I can sum it up in a couple of words: shabby and inconvenient.

Before I get to the details, I'd just like to complement Darkpaw on the beta process itself, which is exemplary. I haven't bothered with an EQII beta in a long time, one of the reasons being that it used to be something of a pain installing the client. I remember it involved a lot of fiddling around to get it working and that switching back and forth between beta and Live could be awkward. 

Not any more. It could scarcely be simpler. There's a drop-down menu on the launcher. You just open it, select the server "Version" you want from a choice of four (US English, EU English, Beta, Public Test), apply your selection and that's it. The patcher sets up a separate installation in your EQII folder. It holds the unique data and it uses the same common data as your regular install, so there's no need for an entire duplicate client, which was one of the things that used to put me off. 

When you want to switch from one version to another, you just re-select your preference and everything is done for you. It's flawless and fast.

Am I the first to arrive?

The same can't quite be said for my trip to Freeport but it wasn't too much of an inconvenience. First I had to make a character. That didn't take long. I knew I wouldn't be playing her for long so there was no point in trying to make her look perfect. And ratongas tend to look pretty decent whatever you do with them, anyway. Unlike gnomes. Or most other races in EQII, come to that.

Speaking of gnomes, the captain of the Far Journey can't tell the difference between gnomes and ratongas. All "shorties" look alike to him, apparently, although he doesn't exactly come right out and say it. It's a weird moment, presumably unintentional, possibly related to the game not recognizing player races correctly and it would most likely have gone unremarked in 2004 but it struck me as quite uncomfortable in 2024. 

Of course, the Far Journey Tutorial was re-instated in the live game several years ago, so this may not even be anything specific to the Origins project. I don't think I'm quite curious enough to make a new ratonga on Live and see if it happens there, too, but I might submit a feedback report to the beta team.

I didn't really want to play through the tutorial yet again but by the time it occured to me to wonder if there was a way to skip it, I was in the middle of it anyway so I just carried on. Fortunately, the Origins build does allow you to opt out of all the Isle of Refuge content, something I'm pretty sure you couldn't do at release. I'm not sure when that option was added so I can't say if it's authentic to the 2006 game.

That doesn't look safe...

If not, then I'm very surprised it got left in. The rule of thumb for the upcoming server would appear to be: if it counts as a "Quality of Life" improvement, take it out. After a while it became so obvious that was what they'd done, I started to think more generally about how these retro servers work. 

It's bizarre, once you look at it objectively. The PR for every Old School or Vanilla or Classic server in every MMORPG always goes hard on authenticity, the idea being that by playing there you'll somehow come closer to the ur-version of the game: clean, pure, unsullied by commerce, undiluted by compromise, somehow real in a way the modern game can never be.

What that generally translates to in practice is the removal of most of the changes that players, specifically those who played during the era that's being - faultily - replicated, lobbied long and hard to bring to the game in the first place. While devs often make changes players didn't ask for, those rarely involve things like adding more convenient travel options or reducing loading times.

Old East Freeport. Unfriendly and unkempt.

New East Freeport: Urban renewal and civic pride.

As I was walking around Freeport, looking at but not really admiring the city the way it used to be, I kept running up against things that made my progress slower, more awkward, less fluent. The most striking example was the return of closed gates between each district. Not just the Neighborhoods, which have always required a zone transition, but the cardinal quarters of the city itself.

Each of those districts is now a separate zone once more but the inconvenience goes further. I'd forgotten that none of the internal "Bells", like the one you can click on in West Freeport to go to North Freeport, for example, existed in the original game. I don't know when they were added but it must have been after 2006. 

Even the spiral staircase that takes you from North Freeport to the East Freeport docks has been seamlessly removed. I ran down there, looking to take a short cut, and found myself staring at a dead end. Now that I cast my mind back, I have a vague memory of that stairwell being added at some stage and having to learn to remember to use it. Now I guess I'll have to learn not to.

Other missing conveniences I noticed included missing vendors all over the place. The woman who stands in the corner of the East Freeport bank, to whom I always sell my status items, for example, is nowhere to be seen. Then again, neither is the banker. There is no bank in  East Freeport any more.

I was somewhat surprised to find all the crafting tables are still in the above-ground crafting building in West Freeport. I half-expected we'd be sent back down underground to the crafting instance in the basement. Things don't seem to have gone quite that far but I suspect that's where everyone will end up anyway because there's no broker or anyone to hand out writs or even sell fuel upstairs now.

In fact, if there's any convenience you've become used to in the last ten or fifteen years, I recommend you forget it. It's not going to be there. It feels surreally ironic to realise that the new server will require a subscription to play but for your money you'll be denied access not just to all the in-game conveniences but also to some of the best perks the sub is meant to give you, like instant travel to any portal on the map. 

Old North Freeport - more gargoyles, more firepots, more water-damage

New North Freeport: more mages, more gilt, better paving.

If you think about the popularity of both Classic and Hardcore servers, where more and more options are removed to make the experience more compelling, maybe the ultimate in authenticity would be a server where you'd pay money not to be allowed to log in at all. The terrifying thing is, you know if any developer added something like that, even as a joke, someone would pay for it. And then complain that they hadn't got their money's worth because they could still see the server's name in the list.

I can't really make fun of such people. I mean, I re-subscribed to World of Warcraft just to play Classic and I will surely be making a character to play on Anashti Sul, as soon as the doors open in June. I can't say, though, that the appeal for me lies in the removal of all those basic improvements we were so pleased to see added to the game in the first place.

Neither am I crazy about returning to the original Freeport, now I've been reminded what it was like. It's not just the inconvenience. It's the way it looks, too. I remember now how often the Overlord's city was criticized for its appearance back in the early days. People complained it was dull and tired and nothing like what you'd expect a tyrant of Lord Lucan's pomp and arrogance to call home.

The problem lies in both the textures and the design. If the intention was to suggest a great city worn down by decades of chaos and war, it hasn't entirely succeeded. It looks more like somewhere that used to be important until the trade routes moved elsewhere and which now can barely raise enough taxes to keep the streets clean. There are even pigs wandering around as if Freeport was some market town that couldn't afford to keep its fences in order, not the greatest seaport in the nation.

If you're gonna eat 'em, don't give 'em names.

By contrast, the Freeport that replaced it looks elegant, austere and foreboding. No-one would doubt its military might or its economic power. It's colorful and almost pleasant in parts. You could imagine Lucan's fraternal despots staying on for a few days after a summit, just to enjoy the sea air and the public executions.

The new Freeport is also much busier. There are people everywhere; no wandering pigs to be seen. In part it's that plenty of NPCs have been added to provide services but there are also more citizens just standing around. The older Freeport looks half-empty by comparison, as though anything worth doing must be happening somewhere else.

And yet, Old Freeport does have an atmosphere, downbeat and depressing as it is. The wandering pigs may make it feel as though the city's glory days are long gone but it's still nice to see Lord Oinkles again. I even thought I heard a few insults I hadn't heard in a long time as I jogged through the backstreets. I wouldn't swap the old for the new but it's good to come back for a visit, if only to see how much better everything is today.

And that's about as much as I'm going to say about it for now. I could go on to talk about the Neighborhoods, several of which I visited today, but I'll save that for when the server goes live in a few weeks. 

I'll also save my thoughts about what it's going to be like to level up in an environment like this for later, too. I'll just throw this out there as something to consider, in case you're thinking of playing: if you'd find it humiliating to be chased out of a zone by a Level 3 spiderling, you might want to re-consider your options...