It's Déjà Vu All Over Again

And here it is: the obligatory EverQuest II Origins Anashti Sul - Day One post. It's would be neat if it was also the first one I'd written about the new server since it opened for business at eight in the evening last night but of course it's not. I had a few minutes to kill while I was waiting in the queue, which I joined about three-quarters of an hour after the Noon Pacific launch, so I pre-empted myself with a quick squib about the general implications of the whole deal. Now we get to the specifics.

I'm guessing the long beta paid off because it seems the launch went smoothly enough. At least, I haven't seen any headlines to the contrary this morning and I've had no issues getting in and playing. It seems pretty popular, too. I noted the astonishing 45 instances of the Outpost of the Overlord last night and even today, deep in the small hours in the US and the middle of a workday morning in Europe, there were still eight instances running when I logged in. The server is listed at Character Creation as "Heavy Load".

I did see one bizarre glitch, which I suspect is an artefact of the instancing system. I was in the middle of a conversation with an NPC when she suddenly flicked out of existence. I looked around, puzzled, but there was no sign of her. Then, a few seconds later, there was a shudder and she re-appeared, only this time there were three of her and all of them yelling at me.

The triplets were still there by the time I'd finished her quest and come back to do the hand-in. For all I know, they're still there now, although I suspect once the instance goes away, so will the bonus Field Investigators.

That's literally the only non-standard occurence I've witnessed so far. In fact, I'm struggling somewhat to come up with anything to say about this new/old version of the game that I couldn't just as well have said about levelling the equivalent character on a regular, Live ruleset server.

I was considering doing just that so I could make a note of the differences. I'm fairly sure it wouldn't take me two and three-quarter hours to get to Level Five on a Live server, which is how long it's taken me on Anashti Sul. However long it might have taken though, it seemed like it'd be too long just to satisfy such mild curiosity, so I shelved that plan. For now...

In any case, there's a bigger problem to consider: an existential conflict between the underlying concept of Anashti Sul and the way it introduces itself at the very earliest stage of the game. The whole point and purpose of the server is to come as close as possible to recreating the look and feel of the game as it was almost two decades ago, back in 2006, allowing us to contrast the game as it was then with how it looks and plays today. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to the first five levels or so, Daybreak already did that, nearly ten years ago. I wrote about it here and here. I'm not sure exactly how long the Far Journey/Isle of Refuge sequence was unavailable but however long it was gone, it's been back for longer - the last nine years -and I've played through it several times since it returned.

As I said earlier, I haven't checked whether the version of IoR on Live is identical to the one on Anashti Sul but it seems very much as I remember it and those memories are almost certainly no older than last time I played through the content on a current Live server. As I said in the second of the linked posts, the version re-added to the game in 2015 wasn't the original and now neither is this one.

Worse, any nostalgic thrill I might have had at seeing the old place again has been more than sated by the several trips I've taken through it relatively recent times. I remember getting a genuine frisson of excitement the first time I got to sail on the Far Journey again, back in 2015. Now I just think "Here we go again...".

I could and probably should have skipped most of it this time. The short but eventful trip on the Far Journey is non-negotiable but you can opt out of of the Isle altogether and get Captain Varlos to take you straight on to Freeport. I probably should either have done that or else picked a race and class that starts in Qeynos. Then I could have gone through the "good" island questline with a little more enthusiasm. I haven't levelled up in the Queens's Colony anything like as often as I've done it in the Outpost of the Overlord.

I didn't, though. Instead, I slogged all the way through the main questline to the instanced finale in the cave. I was a little wary of going in alone. I remember when most people waited for a group for that one although I'm pretty sure even back in 2006 pet classes and other strong soloists were scurrying past the rest of us as we we waited outside for a group.

By the time I got there today, though, I was already Level Five and I'd managed to solo two Named mobs and kill the guy at the top of the treehouse, a very awkward fight, when I was just Level Three, so I thought I might as well give it a go. That turned out to be the right decision. It was a tough fight but I won first time. 

Altogether, I died just twice on the way to Level Five, both times entirely my own fault, carrying on fighting when I could easily have run to safety. On the whole, though, I didn't feel much sense of risk, let alone danger, not least because there's no death penalty at those levels, distances are small and respawns are fast. Death feels like a brief interruption at worst.

Was it like that back in 2006? I tend to think not but honestly have no real idea and that's the problem. My nightmare memories of EQII - and I have a few - come from well before then. The game was horrifiically unwelcoming in so many ways at launch and for much of the first year but Anashti Sul takes its starting point from the time most of those issues had been fixed.

By picking this specific snapshot for Anashti Sul, Darkpaw has neatly avoided most of the worst of the original experience, while still making it feel, at least for returning players who quit at various points after that, when the game changed out of all recognition, like a huge rollback to better days. From the perspective of someone who's stuck around through most of those changes, though, it all feels remarkably familiar, still. On the Isle, anyway.

Then again, I know this particular slice of content very well indeed. It is possible to get to Level Nine or Ten on the Isles and I've done it more than once. I had one character who lived on the Isle of Refuge for years, refusing to leave. 

Not this time. As soon as I finished the main quest I was straight down to the Far Journey, asking for passage to Freeport. When the ship docked, I logged out, leaving my Ratonga Necromancer on the docks in Temple Street, the neighborhood Ratongas share with Gnomes. Next session I'll see what the old place looks like. That at least should feel like something fresh.

Or maybe not. The 'hoods (Or 'burbs as they were once called.) also haven't been gone as long as some veterans like to claim. The originals were removed and replaced in 2011, something I wrote about at the time. but they were partially restored three years ago for the launch of the Kaladim server, as I recorded in a post when it happened.

That revival didn't include most of the quests but I'm not sure how much of a disappointment that ought to have been. I'd have said I missed them but according to what I wrote when they went away, it seems as though I might even have been glad to see them go.

Even if I didn't wholly welcome the change, I was certainly full of compliments about the new content:

 "... if I had in mind that the villages might be ruined, or just wasted, I needn't have worried...What's really changed is that the villages have come alive...There's more going on than I ever knew and much more than I expected." 

I am curious to see the fully-restored versions again. Quite honestly, I can't remember all that much about them, although apparently, just before they were changed, I "went round my favorites (Temple Street, Beggars Court, Big Bend) using EQ2's spiffy newish in-game video option to make my own documentary on the Way We Lived." 

My reason for doing so was apparently that I thought it might "be nice in a few years to look back at the good old days." It wasn't. As far as I can recall, I have never looked at that video since the day it was made. In fact, until I re-read the post today I'd completely forgotten it existed.

So much for nostalgia, eh? We'll have to see how the returned reality stacks up. At least I can rely on not having done any of the quests for the best part of fifteen years, although I suspect that may turn out to have been a blessing. I don't remember most of them being all that great.

Further reports may follow, although I suspect not many and not for much longer, especially with Tarisland about to launch.

Welcome To Anashti Sul. Please Have Your Papers Ready.

While I'm sitting in the queue, waiting to log into the new EverQuest II Origins server, Anashti Sul, I thought I'd kill a few minutes by pointing out a couple of interesting items in the Update Notes and the Live! announcement. There's a lot of general guff about the specifics of the ruleset but these two seemed much more wide-ranging, with possible implications for the game as a whole.

Firstly, from the Update Notes:

" To patch the Origins server, you just need to set the version on the launchpad to "Origins".

An Origins server is a server set into a specific timeframe with as much rolled back to that exact timeframe as possible. In the case of Anashti Sul, the timeframe that the game exists in is early 2006."

That very much confirms Origins as a new branch of EQII, with Anashti Sul as just the first example, something that's re-inforced strongly by this, taken from the Go Live announcement:

"Origins works like EU, where characters on that server are separate from US. So, if you have 10 slots (membership + purchased), you could have 10 characters each on US, EU, and Origins."

I knew you got another set of slots if you played on Test but I didn't realise you could double your character slots by playing on both EU and US servers. Now you can triple them by adding an Origin server to your portfolio.

It seems clear now that, if Anashti Sul proves successful, we'll be seeing other Origins projects in the future. I wonder if that might include variants that deviate significantly what from what we've had in the past, as in the much wished-for but so far never-seen WoW Classic Plus? 

Only time will tell.

Addendum: I'm in the game now and I just reached the Isle of the Overlord, the Freeportian's version of the Isle of Refuge. When I stepped off the boat, I landed in the 45th instance of the zone. Even at the busiest launch of a new server, I can't recall seeing instances above the teens. I imagine there are even more for the Qeynos version, Good generally being more popular than Evil in these games. 

And most people have probably already moved on to the mainland...

All this at midday in the middle of the working week, too. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Addendum 2: Just before I logged out (It's getting late here...) I saw that General Chat had reached its cap. I didn't even realize it had one. Something else I haven't seen before.

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...

Anashti Sul or She Who Could Not Be Destroyed

As time creeps forward and the mists begin to clear, Darkpaw's plans for the upcoming EverQuest II "Origins" server are slowly starting to take shape and they're... interesting. Yesterday, an outline schematic appeared on the official website and among the general information you might have expected for any forthcoming special rules server were some unusual and curious details.

Let's start with the beta. Daybreak has long been big on betas for everything from major updates to full expansions, so it's not particularly surprising to hear there's going to be one for the new server. The whole beta process is so routine now, there's a permanent Beta server waiting to be populated with whatever new code needs testing and a relatively straightforward process for players to participate.

What is notable in this case is the extent of the beta. At six weeks, it's edging towards the length normally reserved for annual expansions. That's a serious beta, as the bullet point list acknowledges:

• There will be a 6-week Beta to ensure we cover a wide breadth of testing.

Indeed, serious seems to be the keyword for this event. By far the most unexpected revelation in the announcement is the news that the server will operate on its own "design depot".

That didn't have much of an immediate impact on me because I have never heard the term before and had no idea what it might mean. Google was no help, pointing me towards any number of disparate businesses trading under the name. I suspect it's a piece of purely internal jargon used at Darkpaw or Daybreak or even EG7 but nowhere else.

Luckily, whoever wrote the announcement thought to include a brief but fairly clear gloss:

• It cannot be affected by Live design updates, and vice versa.

It appears a design depot isn't just an offshoot of the Live game running on a separate server with a different ruleset, the way all Time Limited Expansions and special projects have worked until now. It's almost (But crucially not quite.) a standalone game. 

• Code and Art are still across all server types, for a variety of reasons. For example, connections to external or shared resources such as Database, Authentication, etc. have completely changed over the years.

That deserves some unpacking. And a little speculation. Firstly, there's no real reason to provide that much detail in the context of this announcement, other than to try to head off the inevitable complaints that the new server isn't separate enough from the main game. 

EQII players, by and large, tend to be traditionalists but a significant and vocal minority are positively luddite. They tend to think whatever they had before was better, just because it came first. No matter how far the clock rolls back it won't be far enough for some of them, so it makes sense to get the rebuttals out there ahead of the attacks. 

For once, I do wonder if there isn't something more going on behind the upfront explanation than mere defensive positioning. There's just a slight suggestion of frustration in the phrasing, a sense that whoever set this up would have liked to go further but had to stop a little way back from where they wanted because they'd run up against technical issues they weren't able to overcome. 

It makes me wonder whether there might be a few regrets that no-one thought more about the game's past when they were framing its future. Players may not be the only ones who sometimes wish they could go back to their glory days. Assuming EQII ever had any glory days, that is...

Then there's the confirmation that this has never been done before:

• This is the first time for this type of separation for EverQuest II

Doesn't that make you wonder why it's being done now? It does me. If it wasn't deemed necessary to silo the previous TLE servers as securely as this, what's changed? Is it simply a case of the technology having moved on, making this a viable option when perhaps before it would have been too difficult or too expensive? Or is required to sustain a different pattern of development altogether, one that requires more strict segregation to minimize any risk of contamination?

When the project was first announced I somewhat flippantly described it as Darkpaw's response to the success of WoW Classic. Now I think that might actually be what they have in mind.

SOE, followed by Daybreak, pretty much invented the retro-server concept. They iterated on it until it became a major money-maker and a popular success but it took Blizzard, finally caving and copying the format, to show just how big a deal it could be. Classic's success made it clear that sailing as close as possible to the authentic past could grab the attention of literally millions of ex-players. People who used to play WoW "when it was good". 

I get the feeling Darkpaw's new server, which they've tellingly named Anashti Sul, the misunderstood goddess of death and resurrection, is intended to be something much more than just another version of the familiar format. By taking a number of extra steps to recreate as closely as they're able not just the general feel but the very specific ambience and gameplay of the original game, it looks like they're making a bid for more than just the usual suspects, the crowd who turn up for every new TLE server, play for a month or two, then leave.

What I'm suggesting is that this seems like an awful lot of extra work to take on, just for an Anniversary event. It seems a lot more like something you'd do if you were hoping to start a whole, new, separate strand of the business. Something like WoW Classic or Old School Runequest. 

Whether it'll work is another matter. I suspect the demographic that fueled the success of those two retro-spin-offs simply doesn't exist for EQII. It never had the numbers of either of those mega-successful titles and it's more than likely that most people who ever cared to come back to EQII have already done so, probably more than once. 

Even so, I'd lay odds Anashti Sul will have a bigger opening than just about any previous EQII retro-server. It does look like it's going to be genuinely different to anything we've seen before. A number of significant changes that haven't been applied to any previous Progression or TLE server are part of the package this time. 

For example, there's a return to secondary functions for base stats. I'd actually forgotten they ever had them, largely because it's not my kind of thing. Still, I instantly remembered what it used to be like when I read:

• Attributes have restored secondary functionality, agility will help avoid melee attacks, intelligence will increase ability potency, strength will increase melee damage, and wisdom will grant extra resistance.

It's not just a detail, either. It's a signifier. It's flagging up the importance to many players of the necessity for a certain kind of mindful choice in gameplay, while tacitly acknowledging that, while the current Live game may be ferociously complicated in many ways, it isn't necessarily as thoughtfully complex as it once was.

I'm not much of a one for min-maxing stats so the thought of being able to passively dodge some damage by having a few more points of Agility doesn't fire my enthusiasm a whole lot. I'm much more excited by this:

• Freeport and Qeynos are back to old school, in both appearance and functionality. Livable neighborhoods, and their quests, are back!

At one time, this would have been huge news but we already had the Neighborhoods returned to us a while ago, which does blunt a little of the impact. They didn't come with all of the quests, though, and I'm not sure we were able to live in them. That's going to be a trip.

As for the starting city revamps being rolled back, I'd completely forgotten Qeynos ever even had one. I'm curious to know what changed because I have no memory of it at all.

Freeport, though; that I do remember. I even wrote about it here, in the very early days of the blog. That was over a dozen years ago and quite honestly I can't remember what Freeport looked like back then although, reading that post, it's beginning to come back to me. I certainly remember the old Blood Haze Inn as it was in that screenshot.

On the flip side of what's coming back is what's staying the hell away, something that seemed even more important to some folks on the forums as I scanned them yesterday. It's a revealing set of negatives. 

No Krono means no way to buy influence or progress with real money, I suppose. It should also stop inflation from getting out of hand too quickly. Coupled with a "very limited" cash shop, it's probably as close as Accounting will let them get to the authentic in-game economy c. 2006.

No persistent instances means every dungeon run has to be completed in real time (Or at least that's what I think it means...). On Live you get a timer, generally three days, during which the server saves the state of the instance so you can go in and out to resupply or take a break as you feel like it. Now if you leave, all your progress will be lost and you'll have to start over from scratch. I'm a bit vague on why we want that but it's certainly how things worked back in the day.

No spell research means no offline upgrades. If you want the next quality level of a spell you'll have to make, buy or find it and scribe it in game. I hope it also means Adept and Master spell books will drop off mobs again or things could get awkward.

Those are what you might call the "Positive Negatives". Then there are the Negative Negatives, at least one of which I don't quite get.

No weight means coin and items will not cause encumbrance. The interesting thing there is that the devs apparently wanted to bring the mechanic back but weren't able to for technical reasons. It's scary sometimes to think what some people consider fun, isn't it?

No tradeskill combines is a huge positive to me but I've already seen people moaning about it on the forums. There's a borderline-sociopathic subset of EQII vets that considers the game's original crafting set-up to have been near-perfect. I just hope none of them hold office anywhere. 

Luckily, the delusion isn't held by anyone at Darkpaw with authority to make it happen so Anashti Sul will use the crafting system as it was immediately after sub-combines were removed, which was also before the addition of pretty much all the crafting quests. Get ready to spend a lot of time at the tables.

No holiday events. This is the one that puzzles me. I can absolutely see why the purebred server won't want to share current holidays with the mongrel hordes of Live and TLE but surely it's going to want the original holidays as and when they arrive? It's not as though they wouldn't be in keeping with the premise of the server. Anashti Sul is bench-marked as "reflective of the 2006 era" and the first Frostfell was in 2005. 

If we're really not going to get even the original events, I can only imagine it's because they've proved impossible restore to their original form. It's going to make for a pretty bleak experience after a while, though, if there literally aren't any holidays. After all, Norrath pretty much runs on egg nog and pumpkin pie...

There's more but those are the highlights. I confess I'm feeling quite jazzed  for this. It looks like it could be quite an event.

I may even be keen enough to make a beta character, just to see the sights a few weeks early. If so, you can count on a photo essay here, assuming there's no NDA. I'll probably hold off until the official launch in June, though. 

It's not that long to wait. Is it?

 

Note: All screenshots taken on the final day of the original EQII beta in 2004.  Complete with original letterbox framing.