EverQuest Online Anemoia

This morning I realized a lifelong ambition. Alright, not lifelong. Maybe a decade? I've had it for a while, anyway.

As plenty of people reading this will most certainly know, there was once a console version of EverQuest. It was called EverQuest Online Adventures, usually abbreviated to EQOA, and you can read all about it here. 

Or not, because that's a really skimpy Wikipedia article. I'm astonished. If there's one area of human activity that's been heavily over-represented on Wikipedia ever since it started, it has to be video games.

Still, it covers the basics, which is that the game launched in 2003 and closed down in 2012. Nine years isn't terrible but by MMORPG standards it's a blink. That's always going to be more of an issue with console games than on PC, I guess, thanks to the need to remake them for each new hardware generation at the same time the old generation is becoming obsolete, taking much of the playerbase with it. 

Or maybe that's not how it works. How would I know? The last console I owned was an Atari 2600. I vaguely knew the game was around while it was up and running so it was of notional interest to me at best. I sure wasn't about to buy a PS2 just to try it.

At some point, though, I started to get curious about what I'd missed. Not just with EQOA but all kinds of EverQuest-associated spin-offs and side projects I'd paid no attention to while I was playing the real thing. I bought almost all the EQ RPG and EQII RPG books, one of the comics, the Lords of EverQuest offline game... I even dabbled with the possibilities of playing the EQMac version, which was still running at the time.

The one I really wanted to play, though, was EQOA, which I'd heard good things about and which everyone who'd played it seemed to remember with great affection. There was an emulator project called Project: Return Home that I kept an eye on for a while - I have the website bookmarked and I'm in the Discord, although I rarely remember to look at either of them - but I wandered off and mostly forgot about the emulator before anything much got going.

And somehow I managed to miss completely that there was a fully-functioning emulator out there, with a public server that's been up and running for a while. It's called Sandstorm and I spotted a post on MassivelyOP about it last night, just before I was about to turn off the laptop and go to sleep. It seems they've just added fishing and that's news...

Well, it was sure news to me, anyway, even though it seems MOP have been reporting on the "Rogue Server" for at least a year. Shows how much attention I've been paying. It was after midnight when I read that post and I was excited enough to start downloading the files on the laptop immediately before I came to my senses and postponed the attempt 'til morning. 

After I'd had breakfast and walked Beryl and Mrs Bhagpuss had gone off to do some grandchild-minding, I set to the daunting task of figuring out what needed to be done to get the thing working. On the desktop this time.

And it wasn't that hard. I found the Sandstorm homepage, downloaded the patch that gets you access to the server, then downloaded the  PCSX2 emulator that lets you mimic a Playstation 2 on your Windows PC. Probably should have done those two the other way round...

 

After that I pretty much followed the instructions, interspersed with watching a YouTube How To video and downloading some stuff I apparently wasn't supposed to. All of that would have taken me about half an hour, tops, if one of the downloads hadn't slowed to a crawl. So I went and had a bath and did some chores and came back an hour later and... it was still downloading. 

But only for another couple of minutes, thankfully. I carried on with the Swedish furniture approach to computing, slotting file a into folder b as instructed, until I had what looked like a working PS2 emulator with one game installed - EverQuest Online Adventures. 

I double-clicked and up came the old, familiar tune. Seems EQOA used the exact same version of the theme as the original. I was soooo excited!

I hit Play and... it didn't work. No network connection. 

Fixing that took about twenty minutes and if you asked me how I fixed it, I wouldn't be able to tell you. That's been my experience for most of the time I've been doing stuff like this. I know enough to muddle through but not enough to know why something I've done has fixed a problem I didn't understand to begin with.

 

It's results that count, though, isn't it? Not like anyone's going to ask me to show my workings. And it's amazing how often googling fixes, applying them then fiddling about with them when they don't work seems to get the job done in the end. I ticked and unticked a lot of boxes and eventually something must have shaken loose because the greyed-out option to add a network connection colored up and I was able to work through the new set of instructions and make contact with the Sandstorm server.

And there I was at character creation. Quite a moment. And very interesting for an EQ player. Everything was the just same but not really.

For example, there's a class called "Alchemist" that doesn't exist in PCEQ. I was very tempted to try that first but then it seemed like it would be better to go with something familiar just to get the hang of things so I picked a Gnome Magician. If there's one class/race combo I ought to know how to play, it's that.

I was very impressed with character creation. In 2003, PS2 graphics would have been aesthetically superior to PC, I imagine, but even if that's not generically true, the EQOA character models are a lot prettier to look at than their contemporary EQ equivalents. I really liked the tall, pointed hat and one of the facial options even came with a huge pair of spectacles.

There were plenty of helpful descriptions, too. A lot more helpful than I remember anything being in EQ back then. That happy trend continued throughout the time I played, which ended up being an hour or so, with plenty of genuinely helpful tutorial tips and explanations.

And I needed all the help I could get, I can tell you. Klick`Anon, the EQOA analog of EQ's Klak`Anon, is a lot flatter and easier to navigate than the original but it's still a fricken' maze and as far as I can tell EQOA has no in-game map. 

I needed one because the first quest I got was from my guildmaster, who wanted me to go find a tailor called Nokar and get a student's uniform. That took me about forty minutes, most of which was aimless wandering and the rest looking the quest up on the web.

My research told me Nokar liked to hang out in the Marketplace, which would have been more helpful if there were any signposts or notices in Klak to tell me where the Marketplace was. By then, I had already spoken to several merchants as I blundered in and out of their stores, including at least three tailors, none of whom were called Nokar. I figured he must be in the area somewhere but I just couldn't see the blasted gnome.

I was using a controller because as far as I can tell there's no other option and it didn't help that the on-screen prompts about which buttons to press didn't match the ones on my generic accessory. It kept saying Press X when in my case X did nothing and what I should have been pressing was A. 

After a while that all sorted itself out as my brain began to translate the instructions to the language of my controller without my having to think about it. I figured out I could mash R1 to cycle through all the nearest interactables just like hitting TAB in Old EverQuest, so I ran around the dark streets of the clockwork city randomly targeting gnomes until finally Nokar showed up on my radar.

 

Luckily, by then I'd also read that you had to BUY the robe off and thank Tunare I had because it was way down the list of things he had for sale and I would never have thought to scroll down that far. I really expected him to know about my quest and just give the damn thing to me for the asking. At least he didn't want any money, which was just as well because I didn't have any.

Before I found him I had a few unscheduled adventures. There's a really annoying bridge over the river that runs right through the middle of town that has a gaping hole in the middle. I jumped over it the first time but on the way back I fell through and landed in the river. 

I couldn't figure out how to swim upwards to get my head out of the water and I couldn't find a way to get out. My breath meter was ticking slowly down to my inevitable death by drowning and I'd reconciled myself to finding out how the death mechanics worked the hard way, when I miraculously swam up a ramp with about two seconds of air left and found myself back on dry land.

That wasn't the only time I fell. I came out of a building one time and stepped in some hole or other to find myself in what I guess must have been the bad part of town, where the Rogues hang out. Probably the Necromancers too, if Klick is anything like Klak. 

One nice thing about EQOA compared to its originator is the naming conventions for NPCs seem to be a lot more comprehensible. Half the NPCs in regular Norrath seem to have been named in the same way gold farmers used to name their throwaways. In truth, they aren't - their names follow some arcane lore rules - but the effect is much the same. 

 

In EQOA, they all have proper names that someone clearly spent some time thinking up. Well, the gnomes do anyway. Can't speak for any of the other races. I found it made the place feel quite cheery.

Before I got my student uniform, I even managed to get a bit of fighting in. My explorations took me out of the city into what I presume must be Steamfont. It was hard to be sure because it was the middle of night. It's always the middle of the night in every game somehow, especially when I want to take screenshots. 

Leaving the safety of the town gave me the chance to see how much more thought had gone into making the game user-friendly than ever went into EQ itself. As soon as I emerged from the city gates a pop-up appeared to warn me I was going to have to think about combat and asking me if I'd like to learn how to equip a weapon.

I said I would and the game proceeded to walk me through Inventory and all the associated tabs, where to find my abilities, how to equip spells and weapons, how to con mobs, how to attack and - crucially - how to run away. I found it all very helpful, particularly when it told me what buttons to press on the controller, even if they weren't always the same buttons I had to press on my controller. At least I knew what I was looking for.

 

Since I was there I thought I might as well have a bash at fighting something. Literally a bash, since I had a stick in my hand. I conned a few things and the lowest was a white (Even) con spider. I chased it and hit it and killed it in a couple of blows. 

Charged up with my victory and figuring if a white con was that easy, how hard could a yellow con be, I took on a yellow-con rat and got my chance to discover how the death mechanic worked after all. I think I did two points of damage to the rat before it killed me in three hits. It'll be a different story when I get my pet. Well, I hope it will...

And I will, too. Get my pet. Now I've finally made my way into this version of Norrath I'm reasonably confident I'll hang around for a while. I've been waiting long enough to visit, after all.

There seemed to be quite a lot of activity. Chat was busy all the time I was there and it was far from peak. My next quest is to find Spiritmaster Lacy and Coachman Rizkar, both of whom I bumped into while I was looking for Nokar. 

The question is, will I ever be able to find them again?