"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.

The Doctor Will See You Now : Daybreak Games

The final piece of this week's news jigsaw fell too late for me to fit it into Thursday's portmanteau post. This is the first chance I've had to write about it.

The upside of the delay is that at least I've had time to mull it over. Otherwise I'd have been reduced to posting a giant 🤔

Wilhelm wrote at some length about the possible reasons for Pearl Abyss's acquisition of CCP  (which I only learned this week is an acronym for Crowd Control Productions). So did Nosey, who posited my favorite explanation for the unexpected move so far - improved access to the vast  Chinese gaming market.

I have no dog in that fight although I'm very happy to watch. I do, however, have a major interest, both emotional and practical, in the current and future stability of Daybreak Games, publisher of two of my favorite MMORPGs, EverQuest and EQ2.

Unlike Nosey and Wilhelm, I have neither the academic background nor the personal experience to parse these kinds of financial transactions. I have worked for a couple of businesses that were acquired, bought or taken over and I've seen how that changed both internal practice and external presentation, but I don't think any of that is particularly relevant.

Anyone can google, though, and anyone can read Wikipedia. The entry on Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire behind the "strategic investment" leading to the "joint venture" between NantWorks and DBG, is intriguing to say the least.

Dr. Soon-Shiong has a background worthy of one of the current flurry of highly-popular novels examining the Asian-American experience. He was born in South Africa to Chinese parents who had fled the Japanese occupation in WWII. He grew up in South Africa and got his first degree there before moving to Canada for his Master's. From there he moved to the U.S., where he went on to found the bio-tech firm that eventually made him America's 47th richest person, with a current estimated worth of $9b.

None of which appears to explain why he would want to buy in to a relatively obscure company running a series of somewhat elderly and largely over-the-hill gaming franchises. Dig a little deeper into his extensive biography, though, and you find a considerable interest in both media and technology.

Earlier this year he bought both the Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune for something over $500m. One might consider that buying newspapers in the current digital climate is not that far away from taking a financial interest in a gaming company whose products come from a bygone age.  Perhaps it indicates nothing more than an interest in our recent cultural history and a desire to preserve it.

The Doctor isn't just a nostalgist, though. Nor is he "just" a bio-tech entrepreneur. For the last decade much of his drive seems to have been directed towards the new digital world, particularly the infrastructure that supports it. His NantHealth company focuses on "fiber-optic, cloud-based data infrastructure to share healthcare information".

NantWorks, which seems to be the catch-all holding company for all the Nant projects, is also the company that has now taken an interest in Daybreak Games. It has a stated mission to "converge ultra-low power semiconductor technology, supercomputing, high performance, secure advanced networks and augmented intelligence to transform how we work, play, and live." Now we're getting somewhere!

NantWorks, curiously, is also the only one of the many Nant-prefixed operations listed in the wikipedia article not to have a hyper-link to a Wikipedia entry of its own. It does have a website.

There are nine Nant variants listed there (so far), handily laid out on the main page, each with a brief mission statement. The ones on the right are all directly concerned with healthcare. The ones on the left seek to cast their nets far wider.

NantStudio ("Sharing knowledge through education and storytelling") owns and operates "The only next generation soundstage easily configurable to both traditional and virtual production with a pre-lit 360° green screen and compatible with real-time compositing". It's "Conveniently located in Culver City" which is near L.A.

The other relevant Nant would seem to be NantMobile, which "provides technology solutions that harness powerful image recognition technology with artificial intelligence to create immersive augmented reality experiences". At this point I think it's becoming clear that Dr Soong-Shiong does indeed have interests that overlap with those of gamers in general and Daybreak Gamers in particular.

According to the DBG Press Release, the intent is to co-develop a "Next Generation Game Publishing Platform" which will "Establish E-Sports Leagues Across Multiple Games". All that unecessary capitalization is because I ripped the quotes from headlines, by the way.

It also involves the creation of yet another Nant, "NantG Mobile, LLC, which has been formed to develop and publish mobile versions of Daybreak’s current games – H1Z1 and EverQuest – and to build and publish video games across all platforms". Presumably the "G" stands for Gaming. Let's hope so, anyway.

NantG, naturally, has some mission statements of its own, the most intriguing of which promises "creative problem solving to create fresh possibilities for new gameplay, improved quality of games, and increased fair play." Fair play? Hmm, now there's an idea...

There's more that I could excerpt and comment on but I think that's enough to give the general idea. This does not appear to be either a cold financial purchase for arcane accounting reasons we'll never know nor a Curt Schillingesque rich man's whim.

On the contrary, it appears to be a move that involves #2 on Wilhelm's list : "Entering a Market". Possibly with a smidge of #3: Tech of Expertise.

What I definitely don't think has much to do with anything is #4 : Brand. Yes, H1Z1 may be the "first-ever standalone battle royale game" but being first isn't what counts. PUBG and Fortnite ate H1Z1's lunch long ago and even PUBG doesn't have the kind of brand recognition that gets your name banded about by politicians and used in banner headlines aimed at terrifying middle-class parents. Only Fortnite has that.

As for EverQuest, much though I love Norrath I'd dispute whether the EQ name even has brand recognition among MMO gamers any more. Try starting a discussion about EverQuest in General chat in your MMORPG of choice and see who bites. Most players haven't even heard of it, unless they have some vague recollection of the EQNext debacle. You might as well try talking to Drake fans about The Last Poets.

If you step outside the MMORPG niche, EQ's brand recognition hasn't just faded, it never existed in the first place. Even gamers didn't know what EQ was until WoW gave them a hint and anything they once knew they've long forgotten. As for the non-gaming public...

All of which puts me in an odd position. I can see why this latest injection of capital is potentially far more beneficial to Daybreak than the purchase of SOE was to Columbus Nova (who, as we now know, never bought anything, ever, wasn't us guv, honest!). Dr Soong-Shiong or his people evidently have an actual, material interest in what DBG does, namely develop and run multiplayer games.

That's certainly not something that could be said of Columbus Nova. We all struggled back then to understand why whoever it was who'd bought SOE had done so, or what they thought they might get out of it.

It seemed that about the only explanation was that someone thought the EverQuest and H1Z1 brands were going to appreciate in value. H1Z1 was a hit and EQNext was still in development. When EQNext got canned for being the pipe-dream it always was and PUBG executed a headshot on H1Z1 it did look like the jig might finally be up.

It wasn't. Instead, the games all trundled on. H1Z1, like a true zombie, staggered back to its feet and lurched towards a minor comeback courtesy of the PS4. The EQ duo acted like nothing had happened, which, from the perspective of the astonishingly insular and blinkered playerbase for both games, it pretty much hadn't. Their reduced teams just kept pumping out content and everyone carried on being as grumpy about it as they had been for decades, while still paying their subs.

As for DCUO, well, for all intents and purposes it might as well be owned by a different company altogether. And then there's Planetside2, which just got a new map and, rumor has it, may spawn Planetside3 some day.

Meanwhile we supposedly have mobile versions of H1Z1 and EverQuest to look forward to. Possibly with ARG and VR versions now NantStudio is in the mix. Not to mention that promised development  "in video games across all platforms". We can't rule out a PC EQ3.

All of which makes me even more inclined to believe the rumors from earlier in the year had substance. I now expect to hear confirmation that this year will see the final expansions for both EQ2 and EverQuest.

I would expect the EQ games to continue in something more than maintenance mode but less than full development, adding small content drops in updates or at holidays and anniversaries, as they have been doing for the past few years between expansions. That's the sort of thing that can be handled by a very few developers or designers, allowing the rest to be moved to new projects.

I'm confident we will see an EQ-branded Mobile game of some description. Given the lack of brand recognition in any other field, it seems pointless for any such game to be anything other than some kind of MMO or RPG. Whether it will be any good or not is another matter, but Villagers and Heroes amply demonstrates that a full-feature MMORPG can work on mobile devices.

A new EverQuest game - an EQ3 - on PC seems a lot less probable. Also, oddly, less attractive. If one does come, it will undoubtedly use action gaming controls, which means almost no existing or former EQ or EQ2 players will go within spitting distance - other than actually to spit at it. It will be something I'll dabble in at most, I imagine.

As usual, for the time being it's all about waiting. Wait to see what happens to the existing games. Wait to see how that works out for the players. Wait to see what new projects are announced. Wait to see if they ever happen. Wait to see if they're any good.

As is my wont, I am cautiously optimistic. At the very least this seems to augur better times for the games and the franchises than either fin-de-siecle SOE or the immediate aftermath of the sale. DBG have managed the games well, particularly in the last couple of years, and this would seem to remove the immediate risk of either a fire-sale or financial difficulties.

Watch this space for further developments and in the meantime, keep on keeping on.