Do It Again!

I've left it a bit late for a post today so let's hope this is going to be as short as I think it should be. Doesn't always follow that when I have nothing much to say, I don't take long saying it.

The post is about EverQuest Online Adventures again because apparently that's what I play now - a decades-old, discontinued game for a console three generations out of date, reanimated as a grey-market PC emulation. I mean, it's not like anyone's made any new games since 2003, so it makes sense, right?

But that's where the mouse-pointer finds its way now, whenever I feel like playing a video game. I played yesterday and I played today. Couple of hours each time. These days that's a lot for me. 

And did I get much done? 

Hah! Has anyone played this game? Wouldn't be asking that if you had, I bet.

No, I did not get much done, thank-you. Not by any reasonable estimation. And yet it felt like I did. 

Sound familiar? It will if you ever played EverQuest or one of its contemporaries, back in the days before MMORPG players began to value their time. An awful lot of doing nothing and then feeling smug about it. Or furious. One or the other, depending how many times you died.

Let me see if I can remember just what I did achieve in those two, two-hour sessions...

About as bright as it gets in Steamfont, believe it or not.

I started off by going to see if I could solo the Level 5 Gnome Magician Class Quest. The one the guy who gave it to me said I'd need a group for. 

Actually, what he said is that I'd need the help of some other apprentices because if EQOA is anything it's a role-playing game. More self-consciously so than EQ, I'd say. Everyone seems to be very much in character there. The NPCs, that is. Not the players.  

The quest asks you to go kill some Mindwhippers. To the best of my knowledge, the Norrath I'm familiar with doesn't have any of those so I had no clue what they might be, let alone where. The quest guy seemed to assume I'd know, being a local. 

He did give me some extremely vague directions but nothing I could use. I'd already done a lot of running around. I won't dignify it by calling it "exploring". I hadn't seen any mindwhippers so I thought I'd at least try and save myself a little trouble by looking the quest up online. 

From a few sources I found out that Mindwhippers are wasps. Why they're called something so dramatic I have no clue. Are they wasp enchanters? It's possible, I suppose. I also got a rough travel plan on how to get to them, which boiled down to "Go out of the West gate, turn West and keep heading West". 

So of course I went out of the East gate.

That wasted about a quarter of an hour. Once I'd figured out the problem, I went back in and then out the other gate and glory be I found the damn things! Took me another ten minutes but there they were. Most of them conned red but one was yellow so I thought I'd give it a go.

• First pull, it killed the pet. I ran away and lived. 
• Second pull, I tried to root the wasp, it came after me, I ran away and lived. The pet didn't.
• Third pull, I got killed by a roaming red con wasp before I even finished casting. 
• Fourth pull, I sent the pet in and nuked. I got the wasp quite low before I got aggro. The wasp came at me, but I thought I still might be able to take it so I stood my ground and kept nuking. I was wrong.

At that point I decided the guy had been right all along and I'd need some help. Or else some levels. 

Anyone know if he was always called Q`Anon?

I was also fed up to the back teeth of it being dark all the frigging time so I thought I'd go exploring and see if it got any lighter anywhere else. I was Level 5 and I didn't seem to lose any xp on death or gain any xp debt and there's no corpse recovery in EQOA so it seemed like a good time for a roam.

Using Right Button as a kind of radar I headed South, threading my way through the increasing number of aggressive red mobs - Large Spiders, Fire Ants, some sort of bear, a few wolves, a Decaying Skeleton and eventually something very unexpected - a Dragoon. 

Dragoon in Norrath is a rank peculiar to Dark Elves. These Dragoons turned out to be guards outside the DE home city of Neriak. 

At that point I hadn't begun to come to terms with the extremely different topography of this new Norrath. Since then I've studied the map in the Prima Guide and I have a slightly better understanding of the layout but at the time I came across the Dragoons I was very confused.

I stopped and took alook at the map (Out of game, of course. There is no in-game map.) and saw that Klick`Anon is in the far North-East, directly above Neriak, which is directly above Freeport. That last pairing is the same as in the Norrath I'm used to but in that one the gnomish city is on a different continent altogether.

That gave me the idea of finding my way into Freeport, where I thought I could at least register with the Coachman so I could get a ride next time. That's something EQ never had but which EverQuest II, which came out a year after EQOA, did - point-to-point, safe travel by NPC mount. I even thought I might bind in Freeport, since they have a Magicians' Guild there, along with something approximating an actual day-night cycle.

Unfortunately, I overshot the entrance to Freeport by what must have been several relative miles, ending up deep in the Desert of Ro. I only figured that out when it was too late, after something killed me and I woke up back in Klick.

Somewhere in the desert,
where if it isn't exactly blazing sunlight,
you can at least see where you're going.

That was the end of my first session.  No material gains maybe but plenty of valuable new knowledge acquired. That's why it felt so satisfying.

Today, I thought I'd finish that trip to Freeport. To spoil a good story, I never got there. I didn't even get as close as the last time. Somehow, whereas the previous day I'd been able to avoid all the dangerous mobs, today I kept getting jumped on in the dark by ants, spiders and things I never saw coming.

After a couple of deaths, I did a bit of googling to see if  there was an easier route. There wasn't, but there was another coach station near a village on the way to the Elf starting city, Fayspire. It looked like it might be an easier trip, so I changed my travel plans and went there instead.

Tried to go there, I should say. All the advice is to "follow the road" but I never saw any road. My screen is so dark I can barely see the trees in the forest let alone whether I'm running on a paved surface or just dirt and pine needles. Another hour of wandering around in the dark, hammering RB and getting killed a couple more times and I'd had enough. 

If you're frustrated by things you can't change, concentrate on something you can. I couldn't get the screen any brighter (I tried...) and I couldn't kill the mobs that were killing me but I could kill weaker ones and level up and with enough of that, maybe I'd be able to survive a few more hits and run away more effectively.

I spent the next half-hour or so grinding light and dark-blue cons back in the starting area until I dinged Level 6. That was astonsihingly enjoyable. I didn't realise how much I'd missed it. 

My new clothes.
(Image auto-leveled so you can see them.)

Once I'd dinged, most of the mobs went green or light blue so I moved outside the walls and went looking for slightly tougher prey. I found enough dark-blues to be going on with but once again I ran foul of some aggressive red con ants and got myself a free port back to bind. 

Which was fine. I was loaded down with insect body parts and bits and pieces of rat and snake. I needed to get shot of it all anyway. I sold it all to one vendor and checked another for new spells. 

Nothing more until Level 8 it seems, so I spent my money on a full set of vendor armor instead. It added a lot to my armor class although I very much doubt that will mean much to an angry red-con. Still, if it helps me run an extra few yards before I fall over, it might be the difference between life and death.

I re-summoned and re-buffed my Water Elementaling for what seemed like the twentieth time and went out to carry on grinding xp, which was when I discovered Level 6 is the point at which xp debt kicks in. Took me half a dozen kills to clear my debt before I started making real xp again. It also made me a lot more cautious, which slowed things down a bit more.

A bubble into Level 6, Mrs Bhagpuss announced it was tea-time so I stopped and after tea I started writing this but once I've finished, there's a very strong possibility I'll log back in and grind some more. If I can get to Level 8 and buy the next pet, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to take those Mindwhippers without outside assistance and probably survive the trip either to Freeport or Fayspire, too.

Someone by the name of Judy Thompson left a comment on today's post at TAGN in regard of World of Warcraft, saying "you can’t go back and do it over". I read that right after I'd been thinking just the opposite. 

EQOA thus far really does feel going back in time. It's not exactly like doing it over but it's the closest I've come since the first time I played on a retro server, many years ago. Maybe closer. 

The trick is that it's the same but also different. A lot of the skills and knowledge are transferable but not so many that it feels straightforward or obvious. There's a lot of learning to be done and also some unlearning. 

I guess what I'm saying is that it's familiar but not over-familiar. How long that feeling will last remains to be seen but it's a good one to have, while it lasts. 

Oh, There You Are!

This is one of those days when I wouldn't normally be posting so I don't feel too bad about popping up a few screenshots and a couple of paragraphs on something I just posted about yesterday. In fact, in normal (Read: Not Blaugust.) circumstances I'd probably just have made this an edit to Saturday's post but why waste the opportunity to carve another notch on the Blaugust tally-stick?

It probably won't surprise anyone who's ever played an MMORPG to hear that no sooner had I complained about how I couldn't find Merchant Samwe to finish a quest, or Merchant somebody-or-other to buy my missing Level 1 to 5 Magician spells, the moment I logged back into EQOA I found both of them pretty much immediately.

Samwe, it turns out, is exactly where the Prima Guide map says he is, except for one vital fact they neglected to mention: he's at the top of a tower. It seems the z-axis differential was enough to occlude his presence from showing up on Right Button targeting until I was actually in the room next to him!

I'd logged out in pretty much the spot where he was meant to be and as soon as I logged in and had another look around, I noticed a ramp going up. Ramps are really hard to navigate with a controller (Well, for me...) so I haven't been exploring the upper stories much but once I spotted that ramp I would have bet money he was going to be at the top and he was. 

He tried to sucker me into buying the wrong spring by putting a gold one in his visible inventory and making me scrol down to find the correct, copper one but I'm wise to those sorts of gnomish tricks.

I bought the spring, which was the last thing I needed for the quest, then trotted back into Klick (Which I notice I have been spelling wrong up to now. It has a "C" in it.) I did the hand in, which got me 17k XP and a new staff, a huge upgrade to the one I'd been using.

In one of the screenshots here you can see someone by the name of Starcrusher talking about the class quests. He was complaining about the inaccuracy of such online information on the class quests as he'd been able to find and also that he hadn't even wanted to do the quests in the first place but his guild had told him they were essential. Everyone agreed with both propositions - the info is hard to find but you have to do them anyway. I'm assuming that's for the gear they give, which certainly seems nice to me.

Those class quests had also given me my only spells so far, a grand total of three. And one of those was Return Home, which barely counts. I was pretty desperate for more, particularly my pet spells, without which a gnome can hardly claim to be a Magician, but I looked at all the vendors in the caster guilds the other day and the lowest-level Magician spells I found were in the thirties.

I must have missed one because after the hand-in I had another look and found the right vendor almost straight away. She also tried to play the "scroll down" trick but I wasn't having any of it. I scrolled down until I found this:

She had several new spell scrolls for me including the Earth and Water pets and the pet buff and heal. I bought everything. The good thing about having to wait so long and having to kill so many mobs for quests and XP is that I had plenty of money from selling body parts. 

I scribed all my spells and then memmed them and in doing so finally figured out how to set up my hot bars and select the spells I want to cast. No more accidentally returning home when I'm trying to kill something. 

Then I summoned my Water Elementaling, buffed him and took him out to kill stuff. The pet models are excellent. A lot better than the basic starter Mage pets in EverQuest. Or EverQuest II for that matter. The water pet is a big, floating globe of water with a skull in the middle. Makes some weird noises, too.

The spell effects are also excellent but that is something EQ got right. I'm not sure if many people who haven't played would know but EQ spell effects are ridiculously spectacular for a game of its vintage and they always have been. It's like a bunch of fireworks going off in a neon striplight factory sometimes and that's just when people are buffing.

Anyway, I now have a pet and a staff and a new Level 5 quest to go kill some Mindwhippers, whatever they are. My guildmaster says I should team up with other apprentices to do it. Which, of course, I am not going to do. If they're too tough I'll just grind levels until they're not.

It's so nice to be playing a game where that's an option again... 

Lost In The Dark

An update on where I am with EverQuest Online Adventures. I wish I knew! This may be the darkest game I've ever played. Not dark as in edgy and unsettling. Dark is in I can't see where the heck I'm going nearly all of the time.

At first I thought it was just at night. Then the sun came up and it barely made a difference. This is outdoors I'm talking about, by the way. Out in Steamfont. Or Steamfont Mountains if you prefer. Sometimes people call it that although given most of it is flat as a pool table, I'm not sure why. 

At least, that's what they call it in the Norrath I know but then, this isn't that Norrath. Here, the gnomish capital is called Klik`Anon not Klak'Anon so who knows what the locals call the countryside. Maybe it's just the gnomish accent.

Anyway, can you even call it a capital when there's just the one city? I guess that'd be a city-state and those don't have capital cities by definition. Come to think of it, most nations in most MMORPGs are city-states, aren't they? How many have more than one city? Freeport and Qeynos are supposed to be the centers of empires but apart from a few villages and trading posts, what other towns and cities do they control? 

Dragging myself back to the point, Klik itself isn't too bad. It's underground so it's not exactly sunny but at least there's decent street-lighting. Not to mention the glow from the lava pool. 

There's another thing. When did the gnomish homeland turn into an offshoot of Lavastorm?  There must be an active volcano somewhere in the area, judging from the burning embers constantly falling from the sky. 

That's outside, obviously. Inside the city there's just this great pool of seething lava. It's not even cordoned off but then gnomes never were big on health and safety.

The same screenshot from the top of the post, with the black borders removed and the rest "auto-leveled" to show what it would look like without the filters. I'd take this version any day. Or night.

 

After several hours running around the tunnels, mostly looking for merchants who aren't even there, I have a vague sense of the size and layout of the city although, if I'm honest, I wouldn't even have that much if it wasn't for the Prima Guide. 

Remember those? I could never see the point of them back when EverQuest was a big enough success to attract third-party publishing. They only told you what you could already read in the manual or get for free from online resources like EQAtlas and Allakhazam. 

Well, I'm glad of them now, I can tell you. Online resources decay fast when a game ceases to be as popular as it used to be and if that game shuts down altogether...

So it's very helpful of Project Return Home to have posted a PDF of the entire Prima Guide to EQOA.  I've been making much use of it, especially the maps, without which I'd probably still be wandering around the Magicians' Guild, which turns out to be stuck right at the back.

I wish I'd consulted it sooner last night. It might have saved me an hour of fruitless searching through the byways of Klik for the merchant who sells copper springs. He's called Merchant Samwe, which I know from looking up the details of the quest on the EQOA wiki, another resource without which I would be both figuratively and literally lost because the game itself tells you nothing.

There's no map, neither full screen nor mini. There's only the most basic quest journal that gives you minimal, static information and doesn't update as you progress. The NPCs do talk quite a bit when you get the quests from them but you can't go back over the dialog so if they offer any hints you'd best not miss them and, if your memory is like mine, better write them down as well. Which obviously I haven't been doing.

So far I have completed precisely three quests. The starting quests you get as a Gnome Magician. Here they are, as detailed in the Wiki, with notes from me appended:

Lvl 01
Starting NPC: Werlib Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
You need to go get a Student's uniform from Tailor Nokar (it's free).

Could not find Nokar at all until I got the map from Prima. Even then it took ages.

Lvl 02
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to Spiritmaster Lacy, who binds you and sends you to Coachman Rizkar.

This would have foxed me because Rizkar is outside the city and Quackook doesn't think to mention it. By sheer chance, I'd already bumped into the Coachman when I was exploring so I at least knew he wasn't in Klik. I still had a lot of trouble finding him again, all the same.

Lvl 03
Starting NPC: Werlip Quackook
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Werlip sends you to out of town to kill rats, return with two strands of rat fur.

Again, I'd seen rats as I was wandering around outside. And this time Quackook does mention they're common outside the city. What he doesn't tell you, and what you'd never believe if he did, is that rat fur is rare on a rat. I had to kill half a dozen before I got my first strand. 

As you can see, you get one quest at each level. I am now Level 5 and still stuck on Starting Quest #4:

Lvl 04
Starting NPC: Professor Dandersoft
Starting Area: Klick'Anon
Dandersoft will make you a new staff if you bring him the following items: A Copper Spring - Purchase from Merchant Samwe, Bottle - Purchase from Grocer Guzzlewugs, Snake fang, Ant Chitin 

Again, I happened to have seen Guzzlewugs already, although in the event I bought an empty bottle off some other merchant because several of them seem to sell them. I was most likely just lucky that the first snake I killed dropped a fang. As for the chitin and the spring... read on.

Each of these ultra-basic starting quests has taken me about an hour, almost all of it trying to find the relevant NPCs. Without the Prima Guide I'd still be looking, mainly because the NPCs who hand out the quests never bother to mention if one of the people they want you to visit is outside the city. 

Even without all the aimless searching it would take a while because when someone sends you get ant chitin they not only don't tell you where the ants are, they also don't mention there are considerably fewer ants than you'd expect, or that most ants do not drop any chitin when you kill them.

I spent about an hour last night just trying to find an ant that would give me what I wanted. I made numerous circuits of the starting area outside the gates of Klik without seeing any ants at all so I followed a path - in the pitch black night - to who knows where until I finally found a couple, who of course didn't give me what I was after. 

In the course of an hour or so, I managed to find about half a dozen more and they dropped all kinds of body parts - legs, antennae, eyes - but not chitin. Eventually, out of frustration, I went through a guarded gate in the wall and wandered about in what I now know must be a higher-level part of Steamfont. It was too dark to see much but luckily hammering the Right Button targets nearby creatures so I was able to track down an ant, which finally gave me the chitin I was looking for.

And then a bigger ant ran up and killed me in one hit. Luckily, not before I'd looted his buddy. 

That gave me a handy ranger port home to Klik anyway so I was happy enough. No XP debt at level 5, either, which is the level my magician is now. 

XP comes in huge chunks. Handing a quest has dinged me every time so far but just killing mobs as I explore brings in a ton of XP, too. I'm not sure if that's how it always was or if the server admins have jacked up the gain. I'm very happy with it either way. I'm sure it won't last.

Since I was back in town and I had all the other bits and pieces the Prof wanted, I thought I'd just quickly find Merchant Samwe and get the spring, do the hand in and then quit for the night. Hah!

I did a couple of circuits of Klik, tapping RB to bring him up on target. No luck. I went round again, more carefully, stopping to cycle through everyone and going into all the buildings. Still no luck.

I went to the Prima Guide and looked at the map of Klik. Every NPC is listed and numbered with their location marked. Samwe is not one of them. He isn't in the fricking city at all.

Even in Klik it gets ridiculously dark away the main drag.

After some time searching online and in the guide I finally figured out he's somewhere in Steamfont, near the lake. I found him on a map and went to look for him. 

I'm still looking. I couldn't find him anywhere and it got so late I had to give up.

I did find the spot on the map where he was meant to be, or I thought I did. He wasn't there. Neither was the guy who sells low-level mage spells in the guild when I looked for him, which is why at Level 5 I still only have three spells and no pet. Which is a problem. Magicians get pets at Level One. It's kind of the point of the class...

The problem is, I don't know if my information is out-of-date or just plain wrong or if, this being an emulator, the merchants I'm looking for just don't exist. I find it unlikely an emu would be as functional and stable and well-populated as it is (Chat is like any live MMORPG - busy all the time, people trying to form groups or get rezzed...) yet still missing the most basic starter content like spell vendors but who knows?

What is plain to me is that EQOA is very old-school in its design  - much more so than modern EverQuest - and yet the old hooks that made EQ so infamously addictive in its day still work. I'm not remotely suggesting the gameplay I've been describing hasn't been frustrating - it very definitely has - but also weirdly compelling. 

I do wish I'd started in a city with some daylight, though. Maybe Freeport. The Deserts of Ro are usually glaring by day and starlit by night. That would be a big improvement on dark all the bloody time.

I'm considering making another character for that reason alone but there's every chance I'll end up making a character of each race anyway, just to see all the different starting cities. The not-exactly-nostalgia factor is very high with this one.

That's EQOA then: not the MMORPG I was expecting to be playing but the one I am. And may be for a while. 

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? 

Expansions, Pandas, Events... It's All Happening In EQII

So, we know the name of the next EverQuest II expansion at last. It's Renewal of Ro. Jenn Chan slipped it in at the end of her latest Producer's Letter.  

Darkpaw seems to be developing some kind of slow release, drip feed for expansion news, a technique I find rather effective. There's just enough new information each time to keep the appetite piqued and it takes several bites out of the news cycle. Like most things Daybreak is doing these days, it feels like a solid, competent effort from a significantly more focused marketing department than we've been used to seeing in the past.

There's still very little detail on the exact setting or storyline for EQII's nineteenth expansion, other than the hint hidden in the very last sentence - if you can call something hidden that's been both bolded and italicized. "Get ready to Tack on your best gear and establish yourself as one of the greatest of spelunkers in hiztory". Jenn does love her puns.

You could engrave everything I know about Takish Hiz on the head of a pin - if you were a gnome with one of those sets of magnifying goggles they all seem to wear. I have a passable grounding in Norrathian lore, myth and history but the first I ever remember hearing of the legendary home of the elves was in 2003's Lost Dungeons of Norrath, the sixth (And in my opinion one of the best.) expansions to the original EverQuest.

Takish Hiz was one of the LDoN dungeons, where I spent a great deal of time in the six months before the next bi-annual expansion suddenly made getting groups to go there all but impossible. I remember it clearly as a complex of marble halls and corridors entombed beneath the desert sands. Of the sylvan forests so dear to the elves who once ruled Norrath during the eponymous Takish Age, there was no sign at all.

How long Takish Hiz has lain beneath the sands I'm not sure but by the time Renewal of Ro drops it has to have been a millennium at least. EQII is set five hundred years after EverQuest. EverQuest Online Adventures, the iteration of Norrath created for Playstation 2, was set five hundred years before. Much to my regret, I never played EQOA but from the wiki I can see that Takish Hiz was a zone in that game and the pictures and descriptions clearly show it long abandoned, the desert already in the process of reclaiming a land left empty by the vanished forests of the elves.

I have to say I am very interested by the choice of location for this year's expansion. While I do like to see and explore brand new places, I feel one of EQII's strongest cards is its connection with EQ . Every time we're offered the chance to re-visit old haunts there's a powerful emotional charge freighted in that frisson of familiarity, combined with curiosity. 

It's subtly different from pure nostalgia, more like the odd, disconcerting sensation that comes from seeing how things have changed when you go back to a place you once knew well, after a long time away. I find that feeling compelling in the real world and it's no less energizing in virtuality.

Added to that, the EQII expansion which the new one references, Prophecy of Ro, was very good indeed. It had a truly huge amount of content, much of which I've completed more than once, and it had a strong, consistent theme that held everything together. I had many good times there and still do, whenever I go back.

The last expansion, Visions of Vetrovia, was lots of fun. It ticked all the expected boxes for an EQII expansion and I got several months of quality entertainment from it but perhaps the only thing I felt a little unsatisfied by was the supposed connection with the troubled EQ expansions Gates of Discord and Omens of War. I was looking forward to revisiting some of those locations - Wall of Slaughter maybe, Natimbi certainly, but in the end there was barely a namecheck for any of the places I knew.

Takish Hiz is much more of an unknown quantity. It was already lost in the mists of history the first time around. The Desert of Ro, on the other hand, has already had its day in the sun in PoR. I'm very curious to know just what the balance between new, old and new-old will be this time around.

Before the expansion arrives I probably need to do some work on whichever characters I intend to take through it first. I haven't been neglecting the game entirely but these last few months my activity there has tailed off a lot. I'm substantially further behind than I have been for a couple of years.

One way I've been able to benchmark is by the new gear available from 2022's Panda, Panda, Panda! event, which was patched into the game earlier this week. The event itself was always on the schedule, but it hadn't been entirely clear whether there would be a new set of quests this time.

There will. Nine weeks of quests, just like usual. This year they take the format of Creature Catalogs, a very smart way of reducing the workload for the team, while still giving players a similar experience to previous years.

This morning I did the first, a series of identifications around Kylong Plains in Kunark. With instant travel, flight and a surprisingly accurate memory for the exact locations of all the creatures needed, the whole thing took me about five minutes. If you did it old school and weren't familiar with the area I'd guess it might take fifteen or twenty.

Either way, it's a very good return on time invested. The first tier of rewards includes weapons which, at 315 resolve, will be upgrades for all but one of my characters. Browsing through the very large selection of gear, augments and sundry items available from the full sequence of nine quests, I can see that I'll need to pick up most of what's on offer, even for my best-equipped character.

Last year, for the first time, most of the Panda gear wasn't really an upgrade for the character I was planning on taking into Visions of Vetorvia so it shows how much I've let things slip. Of course, these days, the panda gear itself tends to be made obsolete by the hand-outs from the box on the floor next to the first questgiver in a new expansion, so it's a moot point whether I really need to take this short-term, interim upgrade. Since I'm going to be doing the quests for the fun of it anyway, it would be crazy not to pick up the rewards.

There's also a huge number of housing items to be had, all of which you'll be able to see at EQ2Traders as the event progresses. Niami Denmother also always has the best walkthroughs for the panda quests, should you need any handholding.

As well as the pandas there's also the other "get you ready for the expansion" event that always runs alongside it: Gear Up, Level Up. It comes in three phases and this time its available on all servers (Emphasized as "yes, all servers".

The schedule, should you need it, is as follows:

• September 27 – October 10 = Double Loot
• October 11 – October 17 = Mount Training Drops
• October 18 – October 24 = Spell Research Drops

I don't usually bother with Gear Up, Level Up but I might this year. Spell research boosts are always the most souhgt-after but to take full advantage I really need to get on and make all those Expert spells I've been avoiding.

Mount training boosts I already have in abundance, thanks to Overseer, but unusually, there's still content I haven't finished in the last expansion. Those double drops from instance bosses might have some things I want, even if I don't techically need them at this stage.

Either way, it's great to have options. Now all I have to do is find some time to excercise them.

Works In Progress

This morning I thought I might do a quick catch-up on the handful of obscure mmo-related games and projects I've been keeping tabs on for a while. Not the big ticket events like Ashes of Creation, Pantheon or Camelot Unchained, none of which ever seem any closer to a genuine public unveiling, nor even the more recent buzz titles like Nightingale or Palia, both of which I'm keen to get my hands on as soon as possible.

The titles and developers I have bookmarked are much lower-profile than any of those and there are only five of them that ever show any signs of life. They are, in alphabetical order...

• Antilia
• FHX Restoration
• FRSunrise
• Project: Return Home
• SmokymonkeyS

Antilia is an odd one. In a former life it was briefly an mmorpg that went into open alpha but it's currently being re-tooled as a "sandbox-style RPG" with "an open world, single and multiplayer modes". There's a fairly extensive entry about it on "WikiFur, the Furry Encyclopedia", but it's somewhat out of date.

From there, I learned that Antilia is pretty much the life's work of a single developer, Jeff Leigh, who's been at it in one form or another since 2002. The wiki mentions a second developer, a visual artist by the name of Kathryn Crownover, but the IndieDB entry for Right Brain Games, the company credited with developing both Antilia and the TOI game engine it uses, lists no employees other than Jeff.

I ge the feeling Jeff is always very busy on Antilia but of late he's also been very communicative. He's moved away from posting lengthy but sporadic videos on YouTube to giving weekly updates on the website. They're very specific, with a level of detail that would probably be of more interest to another developer than the ultimate intended audience of furry-friendly gamers. 

This week he's been telling us all about the "Network Refactor" he's been working on, which is something to do with the way players will eventually log in to the game. Probably of more interest to the prospective Antilia player is the section on World Building, in which he shows off "A variety of decorative temporary weapons." 

Combat is presumably a significant part of the game. I hope so, anyway, because there seems to be one heck of an armory: "So far I've added 18 bows, 40 swords, 17 axes, and some arrows. I have a variety of hammers and maces, polearms, shields, daggers, and staves currently in the works".

All of this and much, much more is leading up to an alpha at some unspecified date. I've been following development for several years now and it's always winter and never Christmas, as Mr Beaver might say. I'm pretty sure other games have gone into Early Access in a less-ready state but Jeff's clearly something of a perfectionist. I just hope he feels the world he's building is fit to accept visitors someday.

FHX Restoration is a very different story. This is the emulator project dedicated to bringing back a cadre of mmorpgs that even most dedicated fans of the genre probably never heard of, including a game I played in beta, when it was known as Ferentus. 

I last wrote about the project back in December 2020, when I played in several of the limited-duration test events. I bookmarked the game and promptly forgot about it for a quite a while, until one day I checked back to find a bold headline on the front page of the website claiming "We come here to announce that finally the world of FHX is going to open its doors for everyone".

Below there was a detailed table of exact opening times across the world including an early start for anyone who'd managed to get a character to level 35 during the test events. The full, global launch was scheduled for 28 January 2022.

I meant to log in for that but, discouragingly and predictably, I forgot about it all over again. Turns out I'm not quite so keen to go back the unrestructured pleasures of pre-WoW mmorpg gameplay as I used to think, especially when it comes in the wrapper of a minor also-ran.

Ever since then I've had the occasional urge to see how things are going but when it comes to doing anything about it I somehow think of other things I'd rather be doing instead. Until today, that is, when I thought I ought to do some due diligence for this post and check the game really is up and running. 

It's not. Well, it might be but as I write this the login screen shows a message reading "Log in is currently disabled". I tried it anyway and indeed it is. 

So, is the game running or isn't it? The website is contradictory, with the FAQ still referring to the January 2022 launch date as something yet to happen and the front page talking about the game "only being playable during recurring events", which is the text from before the launch was announced. The Reddit thread about the launch has precisely one reply but the Discord server is not only alive but very active, with much discussion of PvP tournaments and updates going right up to this morning.

I guess I just happened to try to log in at a time when the login server was down. Either that or there's some other portal these days. Whatever the reason, chances are I won't try again. I think I satiated my nostalgia last time around. Good luck and best wishes to all those enjoying the old game but I believe I may finally have moved on from hardcore diku-MUD gameplay...

... although not as far on as all that.

FRSunrise is the reason I started writing this post. I signed up for open beta, oh, must be about two years ago now but so far I've heard nothing. This is another emulator project and like just about all the ones I've seen, it has a website that pretty much never changes. 

All of the real activity happens on Discord servers these days, which is fine in theory but in practice that one extra step is enough to put me off. This morning, for some reason, I pushed through. I think I was just frustrated enough by the perpetual procrastination to want to find out what the heck was going on over there.

It seems I'm not the only one. The Discord itself is still up and running but in a move eerily reminiscent of the Great EverQuest Forum Disaster I was reminiscing about the other day, the FRSunrise team have had to pull the plug on most of the public discussion channels due to bad behavior by the increasingly unruly crowd on the other side of the velvet rope.

In a lengthy statement the team explains the scope and necessity of their action: "the public discussion channels (#free-realms-sunrise, #lore-discussion, #off-topic, and #art) have been temporarily closed. This decision was made last night by the Enforcement Team as a whole following an influx of disruptive and blatantly disrespectful behavior." 

They go on to make a number of observations about "entitlement" and to emphasize the community-led, voluntary nature of the project, including the somewhat ominous statement "This project is a not a company. We are not asking anyone to pay for a product or service and we gain nothing from providing FRS to the community."

I'm sure the FRSunrise team fully intend to open their servers to the public eventually but they are under no obligation to do so. It wouldn't be the first emulator to end up running as a walled garden with entry by invitation only. I just hope it doesn't come to that.

On the positive side, everything that's been released so far to show how the project is going suggests a technical triumph. I'm in no doubt the observable quality of the experience is fueling frustration at the ongoing lack of access and, as with Antilia, I do worry that the pursuit of excellence may be getting in the way of the achievement of the perfectly acceptable.

I await my beta invite with entirely unjustified impatience.

Project: Return Home is one I probably ought to admit I'm never going to play. It's the emulator for the much-missed PS2 version of Norrath, EverQuest Online Adventures, more widely known as EQOA. Given that the download instructions on the website include a requirement for an EverQuest Online Adventures: Frontiers disk to create an ISO file and an original PlayStation 2 from which to copy the bios I can't see it ever happening. It would just be too much effort.

I guess I could probably get both those down some internet back alley but even that requires more commitment than I'm likely to make these days. I'm loathe to admit it but even the lure of EverQuest variants I've never experienced doesn't have the draw it once did. 

I think I finally maxed out on EQ nostalgia when I bought and read almost all the tabletop RPG books for both EQ and EQII a few years back. I wouldn't mind playing in a virtual campaign using those, if anyone's thinking of running one...

As usual, the Project: Return Home website is ever-unchanging but the Discord confirms work on the project is ongoing. Not only that but you could, theoretically, play right now: "Returnhome isn't private, it's an open source server where in theory anyone can throw up their own server based on it in time." Theory isn't practice, though: "We just don't have a public, connectable server we host based off of our open source, public code, as we don't feel like it is ready quite yet."

If they ever get a public server up and running I'll reconsider whether I want to try and find the files to play. Until then I don't think I'll worry about it all that much.

And finally SmokymonkeyS.  They're the developers who made 9lives, a wonderfully bleak, elegaic mmorpg I played and wrote about quite a while ago. All development stopped in 2016 but the server remains up even now, as though it was some kind of art installation, something it very easily could be, such is the aesthetic quality. 

It works, too. I just re-installed it, which took less time than it took me to write the last paragraph. I found my old login details and they work. My character was waiting patiently, where I left her a few years back.

I'm not really surprised. If there's one thing you can say about SmokymonkeyS it's that they're loyal to their old work. I long ago abandoned any hope of the game returning to development. The team has moved on. only what they've moved on to seem to be games even older than 9lives.

They have two live games, Triglav and Garage. 

Triglav celebrated it's 20th anniversary last June. It was available to play on PC but that version is either now closed or just about to be, following the final expiration of Microsoft's Internet Explorer on which it ran. It's still going strong on iOS and Android.

Garage aka Garage: Bad Dream Adventure is available both on mobile platforms and via Steam. It's a remake of a game originally released for PC in 1999 in which "the player character enters his inner world through a psychotherapeutic machine".

I might be mildly interested in either of those but the real reason I had SmokymonkeyS bookmarked  was the new project they said they were going to work on after 9Lives. The screenshots looked stunning and after 9Lives I was excited for anything they might want to show us...

... and then they went quiet about it. The last mention seems to have been in 2018. Since then the studio appears to have been concentrating on their mobile titles, both of which are conversions of elderly PC games. It seems like an odd choice to me but clearly these games are making money and they do look gorgeous so I'm sure their creators are finding that work both financially and creatively satisfying.

I'm still hoping maybe one day they'll either get back to the "not a train game" (An image from it is in the header for website.) or announce something new for PC. I'll keep checking back every month or two.

And that's really all I can do. Alerts and sign-ups never seem to bring much information my way. It's a curious situation where the customer has to chase the supplier just for the chance to consume but that's what I get for following such niche developers. There's certainly no such obscurantism when it comes to the would-be major players, some of whom send me far more updates on what they're doing than I can find the time to read - or care about.

At least when I check on things I've bookmarked I want to find out what's happened since I last looked. Or I pretend I do. I probably ought to admit it to myself when I've lost interest but checking in on these games has become something of a ritual, now. 

I'll probably just keep on clicking until the links die. Or I do.

"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.