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 There's a fairly extensive entry about it on "WikiFur, the Furry Encyclopedia", but it's somewhat out of date.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.

Time Capsule

 

FHX:Restoration is an emulator project that's hoping to bring back not one, not two, but three supposedly extinct mmorpgs: Ferentus, Herrcot and Xiones. Those were names of the localized versions of a game that originated in Korea in 2004, then spreading first to North America and later to Germany before finally looping back around to Korea once again.

If you're interested in the convoluted history of the game, and it's an intriguing story, there's a timeline with plenty of explanatory detail in this video:

I first played the game, as Ferentus, in one of its North American beta releases, probably some time around 2006. I remember it as being quite rough and unfinished but it had some indefinable... something, because even though I probably spent no more than a handful of hours there, I never forgot it.

Now I've had the chance to compare my no doubt rose-tinted recollections with the grim reality and... it's even better than I remembered! I've only managed to drag myself away because I know this is a very short (three day) test and there's really no point spending hours and hours on a character I may never see again (although characters are being saved between tests so maybe there is a point after all).

What's so good about an ancient game that's already failed, several times, to hold an audience? That's not so hard to explain.

First off, it's a dikuMUD inspired mmorpg. Kind of. It's not a purebred clone but it's close enough. You can make a character, jog out of the city gates and start killing wolves and things pretty much tick along from there. That already puts it ahead of the pack for me.

Because of its history, though, it straddles two major development phases of the genre. It looks and plays something like a prettier EverQuest but it has some of the user-friendly features of EQ's vastly more popular successor, World of Warcraft. NPCs have punctuation marks over their heads, there's a functional quest journal, melee classes can solo...

Well, I say they can solo. Of course, I have literally no idea what the game is like beyond the starting levels. It might turn into a hardcore nightmare for all I know. I don't remember exactly how far I got back in 2006 but I doubt I made it into double figures.

Leveling in almost all mmorpgs back then was a lot slower than you'd expect to find in almost any game nowadays. Even the first few levels would typically take a few hours, not a few minutes and once you hit double figures you'd expect things to slow down considerably. 

This morning in FHX I got to level five in a couple of hours, but I was lucky. Well, eventually. Things got off to a bit of a false start, when I broke my longstanding rule of always making either a fighter or a pet class when starting out in a new mmorpg.

I don't know why. I did that. Okay, yes I do. As you'd expect in a game of its age and type, classes in FHX are locked to specific races. And there are only three races. And they're all ones I don't like. I mean, come on, Barbarian, High Elf or Wood Elf? That's a choice?

I looked at the class/race combos and I nearly went with a Wood Elf archer. If I have to play an elf then a wood elf ranger is one of the least offensive options. But I had a vague memory of playing one of those the first time round and of it not going well. 

So I looked at what else wood elves could do and apparently they can be wizards. I rarely play wizards and wood elves are almost never given the opportunity to put on the pointy hat. It sounded like it might be fun.

 

Yeah, well, it wasn't, really. It wasn't terrible but despite the question marks hanging over questgivers heads, FHX isn't WoW. If you chain-cast fireballs at level one you run out of mana. Often before the thing you're throwing them at is dead.

It took me a while to get the spells set up and find out I had to spend points to upgrade them. Progression is kind of hybrid between levels and skill based, which I'd have realized if I'd read the very extensive and detailed in-game help guide that opens automatically when you log in, only I'd closed that before I got out of the city because I was impatient to start setting the wildlife on fire.

I pushed on with the wizard for a while. She got to level two but she was struggling to handle even cons. She died a couple of times and because I'd selected "windowed" in the options, the bottom few millimeters of the screen were inaccessible, including the chat line. I wasn't planning on chatting but I needed to be able to enter text I could type in /revive, which is what you have to do to recover from a death, if you don't happen to have a cleric with you or a resurrection scroll in your bag.

After going to character select a few times after a death, just so I could log back in and wake up in the town square, it occured to me that maybe, since I was there anyway, I might as well make a new character. I decided to suck it up and make a Barbarian warrior on the grounds that at least that way I wouldn't run out of mana.

I've never liked barbarians. First of, who wants to be a barbarian? Is that an aspiration? I don't think so. It's more of an insult, isn't it? Secondly, who wants to look like a barbarian? Build like a carnival strongman, decked out in rancid furs, hollowed-out skull for a hat? And don't even get me started on the kilts...

Only FHX barbarians aren't exactly like that. I made a female barbarian and she looked... kinda cool. Athletic build, funky boots, clean, shiny hair, cute vest, shorts... she looked more like a sports instructor at summer camp than a barbarian.

The good first impression translated into an even better second one. I picked up a couple of quests the wizard hadn't managed to finish and took the barbarian out to kill some wolves and spiders. She tore through them with barely any downtime. Even the lack of any form of self-healing didn't slow her down. (I'd gone with Knight as a class - I guess I could have picked Paladin for the heals but paladin is the elf of classes...).

By the time she dinged level three her bags were full. Inventory in FHX uses the grid/size method. Each item takes up a certain amount of space and you can carry as much as you can fit into the squares. Which isn't a lot. 

I'd already found the bank when I was playing the wizard so I went back there to stash the loot I didn't want to sell. To my surprise it appears bank storage is by account, not character. All the wizard's stuff was in there. That's a mixed blessing. It's very convenient but it also mitigates against bank muling later on. 

As I was banking something very old school happened. I got drive-by buffs. Really good ones. The kind a high-level gives you that last ages and turn you into a kind of entry-level god. It's such a familiar experience from the golden age of mmorpgs and something that almost never happens in modern ones. Can't happen, usually, because the capacity for doing it has been designed out altogether.

When you get buffs like that you don't waste them. I thanked the buffer and legged it out of the city gates in search of something significantly higher level than me to bully. Over a hill I came across some level five wolves and past them a camp of level six bandits. The buffs lasted around an hour and I spent most of it grinding.

It was glorious. Because I was in absolutely no danger (my hit points had jumped from around five hundred to two and a half thousand, my armor class had gone up accordingly and I was regenning so fast the rare hits I did take didn't even make a blip on my health bar) I had time to admire the combat animations and visual effects. 

 

They're really excellent. Simple but elegant. I think it shows in the screenshots, most of which look almost posed. The accompanying sounds work equally well, all of which makes grinding mobs an aesthetically satisfying proposition. It feels smooth. Really smooth.

As for the mobs, they all dropped useable loot - armor, weapons, crafting patterns - which is exactly how I like it. Well, I have a minor issue with wolves and spiders dropping boots and tunics but that ship sailed decades ago. 

The main problems were lack of inventory space (what could be more traditional?) and the peculiar design choice of making almost everything that dropped require level five to use/equip, even when it came off a level one mob. All that did was make me more determined than ever to ding five, though, so maybe someone knew what they were doing after all.

Even with the buffs progress wasn't fast by modern standards. Of course, the one classic power-levelling buff I was missing was a damage shield. Get one of those and all you have to do is collect as many mobs as you can find and wait for them to beat themselves to death on your spikes. My barbarian had to do it the hard way and her sword didn't hit much harder even with the strength buff she'd received.

In the end the timing worked out just right. The last of the buffs were wearing off just as she dinged five. Then it was back to the bank to sort through the loot and get dressed. No more short shorts and bare midriff: on with the leggings and tunic. It did make her look considerably more like a barbarian, albeit one with access to a loom.

And that was where I left it. I had a great time. If this was an open beta or a launch I'd be adding FHX to my "currently playing" list. If I had one. Which I don't. But the principle stands. As it is, I'm putting it on my "watch with interest and play when possible" list. I do in fact have one of those. 

I'm not sure at what stage of development the FHX Restoration team consider the game to be at right now, but in the starter levels it feels pretty solid. I had a few disconnects from the server and there was that one issue with the incorrect resizing of the windowed display option but other than that everything played perfectly.

It's interesting to compare FHX to Reign of Darkness, which I posted about the other day. They have a very similar aesthetic. I enjoyed both dipping a toe in both of them. FHX, though, still has that mysterious something about it that's kept it in the back of my mind all these years. It's a feels thing: hard to pin down but you know it when you... well, when you feel it.

I look forward to seeing where things go from here for FHX. I have the website bookmarked and the game installed and I look forward to the next test, when, with luck, I'll have more time to play. It'd be nice to see what's out there, beyond the woods and fields that ring the city walls.