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... 

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? 

A Tale Of Two Emus

One survivor of my recent, involuntary desktop cull was the icon for the Vanguard Emulator. Seeing it exposed made me realize it's been a few months since I last checked in to see how things are going. 

Longer still since I visited the forums to read up on what's changed. It's not always obvious just from playing as the detailed and informative State Of The Game post from last October emphasizes:

"While, to the player, the game might seem to be finished, there is a lot of back end work that has not been set up yet. If painting a picture requires one to start with broad strokes and finish with small details - we are still on the broad strokes - but the players see the finished painting."

As one of those players I completely concur. Every time I log in and play for an hour or two I come away with an impression of an almost fully-restored game. My Disciple is Level 13 and he can explore, quest, level , buy new skills, upgrade his gear, harvest, craft, everything you'd expect in the early levels. He can even work the levers of Civic Diplomacy.

Getting on for eight years since the Live game closed down, just to be able to do that much is phenomenal. As someone who tends to enjoy low and mid level gameplay more than endgame activity and who's very comfortable pottering around alone in a seemingly deserted world, I would be more than satisfied if the current iteration was as far as the team were able or willing to go. 

They wouldn't, though:

"...we are not finished, and we will not be finished for some time. We have come so far, but we have a long way to go. Our overall goal is to make the game as it was in its prime, pre-Free To Play Changes."

I couldn't say with any certainty what were the differences between the final subscription version of Vanguard and the first F2P ruleset. As I recall, the game began with a focus on group-play but then there were several, substantial revisions, first making the game easier, then much easier and highly soloable. Later, but well before the sunset, much of the former difficulty was restored and there was a brief focus on endgame raiding before the game went into maintenance mode and previously hard-to-get items like flying mounts were given away to anyone who wanted them.

Where the F2P conversion stands in all that and what kind of cut-off it represents for any given aspect of the game I have no clue. All I know is I found ways to enjoy every era almost equally so wherever the music stops is likely to suit me just fine.

This afternoon, when I logged in, I did what I usually do, namely saddled up and rode out to enjoy the gorgeous scenery. Even now, I find Telon one of the most beautiful virtual worlds I've ever seen. The graphics may be showing their age but, much like Lord of the Rings Online, the deep, fluid, emotional commitment behind the world-building makes the place feel preternaturally real.

By happenstance and good fortune, I ended up following one of my favorite routes in the whole game, along the riverside from Khal to Ahgram. The dry, sunbaked grassland between the two cities shimmers in a heat haze under the merciless blue sky. 

The brittle, yellow grass, taller than a young Raki, ripples in the hot wind coming down from the mountains. Dust cakes the hardened dirt road, where camels stand idle and towers cast welcome shade for the merchants as they pray for rain.

As I cantered across the plains, I found myself wondering whether the recent issues with my PC had somehow improved the graphics. Maybe the drivers I reinstalled? Everything looked even more magical than I remembered. Vanguard has always been a game whose screenshots don't quite do justice to how it feels when you're playing but I think the ones I took today come close.

I didn't do much more than ride the roads, stopping occasionally to kill a skeleton by the ruins of a temple here or a scarab beetle under a tree there. The login message explained there'd been a difficulty pass on mobs to bring them up to the required challenge level so I was curious to see if things felt tougher. So long as I stuck to the mobs I was meant to be killing solo, everything felt fine. 

When I reached the towering walls of Ahgram the sun was almost down. Long shadows darkened the waters in the harbor and the light was almost blue with dusk. It had been a glorious ride. I struggle to think of any mmorpg where I find so much pleasure in simply traveling.

Vanguard is one of the handful of online games I would miss like a friend if it wasn't there any longer so the persistence of the relationship beyond the virtual grave feels little short of miraculous. Another game I'd miss ferociously would be EverQuest II, which is worrisome, given that of all Daybreak's portfolio, EQII is probably the most at risk.

For some years I was concerned by the apparent lack of anything resembling a working emulator for the game. Although it can sometimes seem as if every lost mmorpg can be readily found again in the emulator greyscape, as Wildstar's exiled fans can attest, there's no guarantee.

With that grim thought in mind, I'm exceptionally happy to be able to confirm that today I took the Far Journey once again to disembark at the Outpost of the Overlord, where my latest ratonga necromancer, now a lofty Level 3, is resting after her efforts. It wasn't on any Live server. It happened on the EQ2 Emulator Project.

A companion to the Vanguard Emulator and linked on their website, I've looked at this one before but this is the first time I've been able to download, install and play the game. There are full instructions here, including the necessary links and I had absolutely no issues following them to get the game up and running in short order.

Once I'd made a character I was surprised to find myself watching a narrated slide show laying out the history of Norrath, from the Rallosian invasion to the Shattering. The emulator requires the Altar of Malice client, so I'm guessing this was the introduction you got back then, when you installed the game from scratch. 

I'm not sure whether I ever saw it before. Bits of it seemed vaguely familiar but that could be because I already know the story or because I've seen very similar introductions in other games. 

Whether or not it was really new to me, I watched the whole thing with both interest and pleasure. The illustrations are sumptuous, the voiceover is mellifluous and the whole thing makes for a very good primer on how the world got to be the way it is. 

Whether a genuine first-timer would get as much out of it as a veteran is another matter. I tend to feel having new players sit through long lore cut-scenes before they get to play their characters can be something of an own goal but then I guess it never did Final Fantasy XIV much harm. Compared to that carriage ride, this is barely a bump in the road.

The EQ2 emulator as it is right now, based on the very small fragment I experienced, feels considerably rougher around the edges than the Vanguard emu. Nothing wrong with how it looks or plays, more in the technicalities. 

I ran into several UI glitches in the half hour or so I spent there. None of the icons on the bar at the foot of the screen worked and I couldn't open my inventory with the keyboard shortcut. I suspect I may have glitched something by running ahead of the tutorial prompts and clicking on things before I was told to.

I'm not complaining. It makes me feel safer just knowing the emulator exists, especially since there's also the option to set up your own server. With that, it feels highly unlikely EQII fans will ever end up slumped on the Wildstar bench, out of the game for good.

I have no intention of playing on the EQII emulator regularly. I probably won't even check in on it every few months, like I do with Vanguard. I'm happy playing - and paying for - the Live version. But if that ever goes away...

Vanguard Gives A Crafting Masterclass - Again.

 

This is by way of being a placeholder post about crafting in Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, the game I would contend had the best overall systems and mechanics of any I've played in the mmorpg genre when it came to supporting crafting as a genuine, full and complete playstyle the equal of adventuring (And when I say "crafting" I mean just that. I don't mean manufacturing. That's a different activity altogether.)

The post is a placeholder because, having just worked my way through the crafting tutorial, I realize just how much I've forgotten and how much there was to remember. Vanguard crafting is deep and complex, considerably more so than the runner-up in my personal poll, EverQuest II.

I'm very familiar with EQII tradeskills, which had a glorious flourishing after several years under the guiding hand of Domino but even those don't reach the standards set by Brad McQuaid's team at launch. SOE/Daybreak outpaced Sigil in the way they adapted narrative storyline techniques from adventuring and refomatted them to work for crafters but in doing so they turned crafters into non-combat adventurers. In Vanguard every questline teaches you to be a better crafter and that's that. No saving the world with your needle and thread.

This is the very basic start-of-the-tutorial version. It already has four stages, one split into two parts, four different reagents, tools, action points and a choice of crafting station. It gets a lot more complicated than that...

 

In Vanguard, tradeskill progression is about two things: learning and perfecting practical skills so as to make better items and travelling the world to find and meet master crafters willing to share their secrets. The former is something the player needs to do in much the same way a player of an adventuring character needs to perfect their rotations and develop muscle memory. The latter expands and increases the range of options available to the character, allowing them to make more things.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Before I can write a post about the subtlety and sophistication of crafting in Telon I need to refresh my memory on the way it all worked. How am I going to do that with the game long gone and all my crafters with it?

Sound simple? No, not really. And it's not even as simple as it sounds!

I'm glad you asked! And I'm even gladder some thoughtful ex-player chose to stop by the comments on a two-year old post to let everyone know that "As of now crafting and harvesting up through tier 1 has been implemented and is working well."

Working well where? On the wonderful Vanguard emulator, of course. I knew harvesting was in but last time I checked crafting wasn't. And now it is!

I logged in this evening to take a look. I ended up running through the tutorial in the Crafter's Forum in Khal. It took me the best part of an hour and it really was just the basics. It reminded me how much time and energy I put into learning to craft the first time around, how challenging it was and ultimately how satisfying.

As I recall, crafting in Vanguard was reasonably simple at the start but became increasingly more difficult in the low to low-mid levels. I seem to remember the high teens being particularly "challenging". Or maybe it was the high twenties. Whichever it was, a lot of people faded at that stage. Certainly I remember hearing a lot of complaints and I had some tough times of my own. 

Complications? Recurring nightmares, more like!

If you stuck at it, though, things slowly improved and I seem to remember that by the mid to upper-mid levels I was finding crafting comfortable and reasonably reliable. I could make good stuff for myself and I made good money selling things I made at the auction house. 

If I remember correctly, by the time my Outfitter hit level 47, he could make everything he could get recipes for, to the best quality, with almost no failures. That was why I never finished off the last three levels to hit the fifty cap. There didn't seem to be any point.

All of that is feeling a bit vague now. Some foggy recollection of a time long gone. Rather than eulogize about how great I think the crafting was based on memories a decade old, it might be better if I levelled up again. Not only should that give me some incontrovertible facts to work with (and some screenshots) but it might jog loose some definite, detailed memories.

That certainly seemed to be happening as I worked through the simple tutorial recipes today. I was getting flashbacks to the bags and bags of powders and crystals, the flasks and pouches, tools and trinkets, all the manifold means and measures I needed to make the best jerkins and claws. (Did Outfitters make martial weapons? I think they did. They're just gloves with spikes in, after all.)

If I'd known there was going to be a test I'd have taken notes. Also, the guy with the blur over his head is the player who guild-invited me. I've anonymized him out of courtesy but I'm pretty sure he'd be happy to add anyone who wants to play to his guild.

 

The implementation seems solid. The Vanguard emu is still supposedly in "early pre-alpha" but there's a lot there now and a lot that works. There were great chunks of flavor text missing, replaced by placeholders asking anyone who remembered what the NPCs used to say to get in touch but the stuff that matters, the mechanics, the rewards, the progression - all those seemed to be working perfectly.

I'm going to keep this short because I do hope, some time, one day, to give a more thoughtful, informed overview of the gem of the genre that was - IS! - crafting in Vanguard. Before that happens (if it ever does) I recommend, as I always do, anyone curious to know what this game was like install the emulator and take a look for themselves. There's already more to do there than some games that are taking money.

"Go find them" is the least of it. Survive the journey, persuade them to talk to you, prove you're worthy, basically live the life of a trade guild journeyman of the fifteenth century. Then go to another continent and start over from scratch.

 

You'd probably need to be the sort of mmorpg player who thrives on going it alone. It's hardly a seething mass of players. There are people playing, though (Five, not counting me, when I logged in today!) and they're very friendly and helpful. I got a guild invite this afternoon from someone  standing next to me at the crafting tables. 

Even as a single player game, though, Vanguard still shines, and crafting was always something best done alone. In fact, it may have been the only thing in Telon best done alone, now I come to think of it; group harvesting got you the best mats and civic diplomacy the best buffs.

I wonder if there was group crafting too and I've just forgotten?

"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.

Open The Door, Dora

Anyone remember Dragon Nest? Maybe Dragon Nest Oracle? Dragon Nest Europe? Dragon Nest R? Dragon Nest M?

I've tried them all. There are twenty posts tagged "Dragon Nest" at Inventory Full and at least half of them are mainly about my experiences playing those games. Or trying to.

I started playing Dragon Nest before I even had a blog. In this post from 2015, which is actually about Dragon Nest Oracle (try to keep up at the back - it's going to get worse before it gets better), there's a link back to a post Tipa wrote for West Karana in 2011. It seems I left a comment on it, saying I had a character who'd reached "level 8 or 9". 

It's a good thing I mentioned it in my own post five years later because all the comments I left at West Karana are dust in the wind.  The West Karana domain got hijacked and turned into a shill for some dirt-heel property developer, which is why I'm not linking to it now. This is the problem with the internet (one of them): you can't trust things to stay the way they were.

Wait... I'm in a guild?

And one of the things I've never been able to trust to still be where I left it when I get back is Dragon Nest. Any version. All those posts I wrote are a litany of love for the game itself mixed with frustration over the way it keeps being kicked from one careless owner to the next.

The very first version was so long ago now I barely remember it. I think the gameplay was a little more simple and the quests had even worse translations. There were fewer classes, I think. I'm not sure if there was any English voice acting back then but I seem to remember a lot of high-pitched squealing. 

I can't have been all that impressed. In December 2011, under the heading MMOs I am thinking about playing, but not actually playing, I wrote "Dragon Nest: Thought about logging in. Couldn't remember my account or password details. Couldn't be bothered to look them up. Didn't log in." Then again, the other mmorpgs in that section were EverQuest, Vanguard, DCUO, LotRO and Allods, all of which I am still playing, at least occasionally, ten years later. Read into that what you will.

Borin! Did you miss me?

The version I remember best is certainly Dragon Nest Oracle. That one appeared out of nowhere in 2015 as a revamped, revised and genuinely improved edition. I was both surprised and increasingly delighted. Skeptical at first, I ended up falling in love with the whimsical insanity of it all. 

In any of its various incarnations, Dragon Nest has always been a game I've played at best sporadically but that was my longest and most concentrated run. It might well have gone further had the then-owner, Shanda Games, not gone and messed it all up. I called my post about how that happened "One Careless Owner". If only it had just been one!

It seems to me that all Dragon Nest has ever had is careless owners. It's a genuinely fine action mmorpg. One of the best I've played. It has a committed and enthusiastic fan base. And yet no-one seems to know what to do with it.

Okay, that I don't remember...

In addition to the serial neglect by successive owners the game's always suffered from divisive regional factionalism. About the worst thing you can do to an online multiplayer game is cut it into pieces and hide them behind IP checks. I started out playing on the North American servers and ended up on Dragon Nest Europe courtesy of Steam. Not my choice. I just followed the game wherever someone would let me play it.

A couple of years back Eyedentity, who created the game and had been operating it in Europe, closed it down. I think that's what happened. They were part of Shanda, reportedly. I started trying to unpick it and then thought better of it. Had enough of that with Daybreak.

Whoever it was in charge, the game ceased to be playable through Steam in the U.K. although, as I found out today, you can still download it there. It just won't run.

Sis! I've missed you!

After that, there was the mobile version, Dragon Nest M. I was hopeful. I played it in October 2019 and didn't hate it. I said "It's not identical to the original but it's very similar. Visually it's a fairly faithful translation." Sadly, less than a year later, typical mobile bloat had all but wiped out the charm of the original game : "I get the impression the game I used to play has gone somewhere else, probably into a dark corner where it can rock backwards and forwards and whimper... Oh, for a Dragon Nest Classic..."

 Well...

The game is still running as a version of Dragon Nest Oracle (I think that's right) in the U.S.A. You can play that one through Steam if you live in the right part of the world or can fool the servers into believing you do. It must be doing okay. They've just moved to a 64-bit client and I don't imagine you do that unless you plan on being around for a while longer.

It's not much use to me, though. But this is. 

Add another to the list: Dragon Age Origins. With the strapline "Bringing back what was lost" this one's an emulator or a fan project or maybe just a plain, old-fashioned private server. In fact, that's what they call it: "Origins is currently a 50 cap private server dedicated to bringing back the classic T4 experience in PvE and PvP".

And today, one of those fifty people was me.  

I made an account, downloaded the client, patched up, logged in and played for nearly four hours straight. By the time I finished to come write this post I was level 15 and I'd gotten as far as the second town, Calderock Village. 

I'm home!

I have no idea what that "T4" in the description refers to but "classic" it certainly is. It was fantastically nostalgic even if I'm not one hundred per cent sure which version I'm being nostalgic about. I loved it. I will be playing more. 

No, really, this time I will. Although how long I'll have the option is another matter. At this stage I am not only not counting my chickens I'm not even counting on there being any chickens. Private servers don't inspire much confidence when it comes to longevity. But then, neither do professional games publishers when it comes to Dragon Nest.

Whatever happens, I'm happy to have another chance to to visit Altea. It's a delightful place and I've never seen enough of it. I'm playing the same character I've played since I began all those years ago, reincarnated yet again as accurately as I can remember her.

A cannon called Angela.

She even has her real name this time. She started out as Dora, became Dorah and Doradella and now she's plain old Dora again. She still wears shorts, has her hair in bunches and carries a gigantic cannon that's bigger than she is. She's one of my favorite characters in any game now, not least because of the sheer number of times she's bounced back from oblivion.

If the private server holds up long enough, though, I might even try another class. I keep getting gear only a Sorceress can wear. Maybe it's a hint.

And Dragon Nest Origins ought to be a hint to anyone who's missing their favorite lost mmorpg. There's always hope. These things are damned hard to kill.

Just like Dora.

Sunrise (Always Comes Around)

Among my ridiculously long list of Firefox bookmarks, to which I continually add things but almost never take anything away, I maintain a small, roped-off area for games and gaming projects in devolpment that I'm monitoring. This doesn't include the various major titles for which I've already signed up and in some cases paid for, the likes of Ashes of Creation, New World or Pantheon, from all of whom I receive regular email updates. Nor have I bookmarked all the games I can count on reading about on Massively:OP or other blogs I follow.

The six sites I currently have listed are:

Antilia

Auteria

FHX Restoration

SmokymonkeyS

Project: Return Home

FR Sunrise

Most, if not all, of them have tags here if anyone's interested in what I've had to say about them in the past. I don't mention any of them very often because month to month, and in some cases year to year, not much changes.

I'm fairly well in the habit now of checking all of the bookmarks at least two or three times a week. I've missed a couple of alpha tests through not keeping up to date and it can be quite annoying to check how something's coming along only to find not only has it indeed come but also very much gone.

Until today, for some reason, I didn't have the bookmark for the Free Realms emulator, Free Realms Sunrise in the designated area. I'd left it languishing somewhere down below, deep in the forest of forgotten links.

That wasn't because I'd lost interest. Far from it. No, it was because I was under the impression the team had moved all their operations to Discord and were no longer updating the website. And, interested as I may be, there's very little I'm so interested in that I'd open Discord to hear about it.

 

I'm not sure why but this morning, as I was going through the others, I remembered I hadn't checked on the Free Realms project for quite a while. I found the errant bookmark and clicked on it. Just in time! I wonder if I might be a precog? Perhaps this is a Philip K Dick novel I'm living in. Certainly feels like one, sometimes.

No? No. Just lucky co-incidence I guess. And I suppose getting a hunch about something that happened almost a week ago doesn't really count as pre-cognition anyway. Is there such a thing as postcognition? 

Whatever you call it, turns out the Sunrise team is planning an open beta and they're taking sign-ups. So I signed up. 

You might wonder why you'd need to register for an open beta. I did. They do explain it. It's because they expect to have limited server capacity and your beta application date will be used to control the queuing system if they need to use one.

There's certainly a good deal of interest in the project. Free Realms was famously highly successful in terms of attracting players and much-loved by many. It didn't close down because of lack of interest or low population. It closed because, as John "Smed" Smedly later explained, kids don't spend money.

Which, when you come to think of it, is a pretty spurious argument. KingsIsle seem to do alright. So does Roblox. I strongly suspect the problem had more to do with SOE's inability to manage income streams, something their insistence on running disastrous triple Station Cash sales and then letting you use the imaginary money to buy expansions amply demonstrated at the time.

Whatever the reason, a lot of people were unhappy when Free Realms shut down and plenty of them would like to see it come back. The team behind the project seem to be very efficient and organized. There seems no reason to suspect the open beta won't be very well attended.

Oh, except for one thing. As the extensive and informative FAQ explains, you're going to need a copy of the original client.

And you're going to have to find it for yourself.

Hmm. That could be a problem. I had a bit of a rummage down the back of the internet this morning and I couldn't come up with anything. There are a few websites that claim to have downloads but the links just go to a bootstrap that refers back to SOE's original Free Realms website. Which doesn't exist.

My virus software sent another possible source straight to quarantine when I tried it but I don't think it was even pointing to the same game. Having the word "free" in your game's name is a dubious advantage. A lot of the results I got on a search were for free downloads of other games with "Realms" in the title. There are quite a few.

If the web can't provide a client and the new operators won't I'm guessing it's going to put quite a crimp in the numbers. Free Realms didn't exactly attract a tech-savvy clientele, what with being aimed squarely at ten-year olds and it closed down almost seven years ago (thanks, Wilhelm!). I don't imagine too many people still have a copy of the client just sitting around.

Although I might. I have a lot of old hard drives going back a lot longer than seven years. A few of them are even still in PCs that kind of work. Unfortunately not all of the drives can say the same and even the ones that still spin up aren't cataloged in any way. I'd have to go through them all to see if I left a copy of Free Realms installed anywhere.

On the positive side, I only ever delete game files if I'm desperate for space so there's a chance. I might have a dig through sometime. It's not like I don't have the opportunity, what with six weeks of lockdown ahead, at the bare minimum. 

Also, I imagine that when the open beta actually begins some kind soul will make their copy of the client available on some sharing site or other. Always a thrill ride, visiting those. I'm fairly confident I'll get to play the game again somehow.

I hope the Sunrise guys can land their project and make it stick. Free Realms was a very good game. It's a shame it shut down. As for its prospects if it does make it back, well late-era SOE and subsequently Daybreak always seemed relatively chill about emulators. P99 is the benchmark for co-operation between official and unofficial servers and that's an emulator for a game that's still in commercial production. 

I wonder what EG7 think about it, though? And I wonder who owns the rights to the closed games?