Once More, With Feeling : Earth Eternal

It was inevitable. If you unexpectedly discover an old MMORPG you thought was lost and gone forever, still up and running, what else are you going to do?

It's not that I was knocked sideways and overcome, mind you. It wasn't as though someone had found Rubies of Eventide at the back of the cupboard, dusted it off and set it running. Now, that would be fireworks and cake!

I was never in love with Earth Eternal. It had almost everything I wanted but none of it was ever exactly what I wanted. My dream MMORPG would use tab-target and hotbar mechanics. It would have anthropomorphic animals as player characters. It would take place in a virtual world with a fantasy setting, have levels and quests, crafting and player housing.

Earth Eternal has all of that but somehow it never gelled for me. The very simple graphics weren't the problem although they don't help. I'm not a full-on graphics snob but I do like a bit more eye candy than EE has to offer.

Twenty-two races!

No, what kept me from falling hard for Earth Eternal wss the way it played. I always thought it was just a little bit dull. It's hard to put a finger on why. It's really not all that much different in tone, style or execution from any number of MMOs I don't find boring at all but it lacks some hard-to-define element of compulsion. It's short on zing.

The quests can seem a little bit worthy. They're certainly on the dry side. Combat is familiar and comfortable but rarely exciting, even though it's tuned quite well. I recall dying quite often but never feeling out of my depth.

I remember gameplay as consisting of a lot of running to and from quests, working my way around mobs and areas I couldn't handle, dying not infrequently and having to start over. It should have felt like early EverQuest, where I did all those things, happily, for years, but it never really did. Mostly it just felt too slow and not fun enough.

Still, I liked it. I must have put in twenty or thirty hours, at least, back in beta. It was a pleasant enough kind of place to spend an hour or two. Reassuring and amiable.

I spent an inordinate amount of time playing with the colors and then I went with this. I'm still not sure about it.

Indeed, everything about Earth Eternal is amiable. The animal characters look affable, the NPCs are friendly, the countryside is well-kept, the color palette is pastel. Everything looks homespun and artisanal in a picturesque village kind of way.

The lore, which is extensive, is impenetrable. The setting is... peculiar. The game supposedly takes place on a version of Earth after all the humans have died in some self-inflicted cataclysm. Most of the playable races are animals but you can also choose to be a robot, a demon, a cyclops or a yeti. There may be a lore reason for that or maybe someone just thinks robots and yetis are cool.

Once you escape from one of the shortest tutorials I have ever seen (kill three spiders, grab a hammer, fix a boat, sail away: Congratulations, you're done!) you arrive on Corsica. Why Corsica? Why not?

As you step onto the beach, the meet-and-greet NPC sends you to talk to Sir Lancelot of the Round. The round what?  The round nothing. Just The Round. And come to think of it, why is Lancelot in Corsica? I have no idea. He just is.

22 races and just four classes. I get your priorities.

It goes on like that. It's not badly translated. It's an American MMO and all the quest and lore text is written by Americans in good American English. It's just...peculiar.

All of this came back to me when I was finally able to log in last night. That wasn't as easy as it could have been.

The registration process was long-winded. It seemed overly concerned with security for a private server for an obscure MMO but then there have been all too many examples of bad behavior on such servers in the past. I suppose it's best to be cautious.

Downloading the game was quick and easy but getting it to run was not. Installing Earth Eternal didn't put any icon on my desktop so I had to go looking in the files. I'd accepted the default instal location but of course I hadn't bothered to pay any attention to where that was. I eventually found it buried in AppData under Users, somewhere I would never normally think of looking.

More of a Ranger, I'd say.

It wouldn't run from there so I reinstalled it and put it in file of its own out in the open. It wouldn't run from there either. The updater seems to be trying to run the game from the old web address at http://www.eartheternal.com which doesn't exist. The executable (as we used to call the thing that makes the game appear on your screen) just throws a generic error.

I googled for help but didn't find much. I tried the website, which has a FAQ that includes a section called Installing the Game Client, which sounded promising. I clicked on it and got the message "You are not authorized to access this page".

At this point I was about ready to give up but I thought I'd just try installing it once more. Third time through I noticed there was an option right at the end of the installation to "Play" the game immediately. I took that and it worked.

It's going to be somewhat inconvenient to have to reinstall the entire game every time I want to log in but it's a sixty second install so I guess I could. If I was that interested. Which I'm probably not. Or I might be. It's hard to say.

Once I was in I did get a frisson of nostalgia. Not a surge, just a trickle. It's true, I did have some good times here once, I thought. Not amazing times, not even especially memorable times but still, y'know, times.

I don't believe I got all that far back then. I know I did finish Corsica. I went to the next zone but I can't remember what it was. Where would you go from Corsica? France? Italy? There must be a lot of the game I never saw, plus the new part the current operators are adding as well.

The thing is, had Earth Eternal limped along and never closed down, I wouldn't be wondering whether or not to play it now. I would categorically have forgotten all about it. I'm only considering giving it another try because I thought I would never have that chance.

And this is where I left him. He may be there a while.

Does that make sense? To play a game because you can but you thought you couldn't, even though when you thought you couldn't you never wanted to anyway?

I don't know. I do know I'd rather have the option even if I never take it. And I might take it. I haven't decided and so long as the servers stay up I don't have to. I like the idea of being able to choose to play and choosing not to a lot better than not being able to choose but not caring that I can't. It's a subtle difference, I know, but I can feel it.

Anyway, good luck, Earth Eternal aka The Anubian War. I'm glad you're back even if I never missed you while you were gone. I think one or two people who might be reading this might get more out of the game than I have. If so, I hope they'll offer up a few posts and let us know how they get on. I'd most likely enjoy reading about other people's adventures there than I'd enjoy having my own.

East Goes West

If playing Bless last month had any impact on me at all, it was to make me feel nostalgic for other Eastern MMOs I've tried. Over the years I've played quite a few. Most of them I've enjoyed but none of them have I stuck with for more than a couple of months at most.

Let's see how many I can remember off the top of my head...

The first must have been Silk Road Online. Mrs Bhagpuss and I tried the beta and I remember being quite excited that we were seeing something we'd never seen before - an MMORPG made by and for people from a culture significantly different from our own. I wasn't all that struck with it but Mrs Bhagpuss liked it enough to mention it fondly for a few years afterwards, whenever the topic of imported MMOs came up.

I think Ferentus was the first game where I saw player-placed street vendors.

Then there was Ferentus, a beta for a long-forgotten MMO (also known in some territories as Xiones or Herrcot) that never went Live. Ferentus was the opposite of Silk Road in that it was almost indistinguishable from a Western MMO of the time. We both really liked it even though it was very rough and unpolished. Almost unbelievably, it still has an active Reddit ,where ex-players still hope for some kind of emulator, one day.

Runes of Magic, on which Wilhelm occasionally reports, was the first successful Eastern attempt to play the West at its own game. It was also one of the first generic WoW clones and the standard bearer for the Free to Play payment model. Once again, Mrs Bhagpuss and I beta-tested it and found it lacking, although a decade later I find I can remember it in surprising detail.

After that, the flood gates opened and playing imported MMOs became just something I did rather than something worthy of comment. Back then, I used to be in the habit of playing a number of MMOs super-casually, usually for an hour or so at the very end of the evening, right before going to bed.

That was in the days before I had a Tablet. These days I lie in bed watching American sitcoms or searching for ever more obscure bands on YouTube. I'm not convinced that's progress.

I did take some screenshots of NeoSteam but I have no idea what happened to them. I think I saw this thing once, though.

NeoSteam filled the late-night MMO slot for quite a while. I really liked that game. I was a seven foot tall tiger with a giant hammer - what's not to like? Neo-Steam was around for a good few years and had quite a following at one time. There were a lot of levels and zones but I never saw much more than the first few of either. I'd play it now if it was still running.

I also liked Argo, which arrived a few years later. That one came and went and came back and then vanished. Surprising how often that happens. Argo didn't have much to recommend it but it did have that indefinable vibe that made it feel like a place. Hard to describe but I always know it when I feel it.

Before that, there was the one whose name I always get muddled up with another, Western, title. Earth Eternal? No, it's no good, I'll have to google it...

And this is why we fact-check!  No, it wasn't Earth Eternal. Earth Eternal was the all-animal MMO originally produced by an American indie called Sparkplay Media. Mrs Bhagpuss and I betaed that one too and although we both liked it we found it a tad slow and repetitive.

After Earth Eternal failed in the West (twice) it had a run in Japan, where it was known as Ikimonogatari. According to wikipedia, no version ever made it further than Open Beta bit it still picked up a strong following.

I also have no screenshots of my time in Earth Eternal. Nor did I ever play a frog.

As if to prove that nothing on the internet ever goes away, I am astounded and delighted to discover that there is an Earth Eternal emulator! Now known as The Anubian War, it's even had an expansion, Valkal's Shadow, and the game is still up and running. I'm downloading it as I type!

Getting back to the topic at hand, the Eastern MMO I was thinking of was Eden Eternal. A natural mistake, even more so when you consider that in EE I played a mouse. A large mouse, I'll grant you, but a mouse all the same.

Eden Eternal was probably the first Eastern anime-influenced MMO I tried. It's bright and bouncy and not at all serious, which should please Wolfy and Jeromai. It was also, I think, the first time I came across the wonderful auto-quest feature, something I wish all MMOs would adopt.

Eden Eternal is still up and running. It even has a Back to School event on right now, which tells you something about the demographic that plays there. I don't think I'm going to download it again but it's an Aeria game and I have their launcher on my desktop...more on which later.

Blurry when stretched. Then again, aren't we all?

Then came Zentia, probably the best Eastern MMORPG I ever played. Mrs Bhagpuss and I downloaded the beta one Saturday on a whim and neither of us played anything else all weekend. The game had a unique style - cheerful, whimsical, lighthearted - that was exemplified by the giant dragon mount that players could hop on as it passed by, like boarding a bus. You could even do trivia quizzes in the central square of the main town.

The whole gameworld had an upbeat, happy atmosphere that was mood-elevating just to be around but it was also a very solid MMORPG, with traditional questing and combat that felt solid and satisfying. It's a game that deserves to be revived but sadly no-one seems to have bothered.

I think most of those games pre-date this blog, although I did write about Argo back in 2012. I also played, and briefly wrote about the oddly (and inaccurately, given how little time I spent there) named Loong, one of many games tipped by Kaozz of ECTmmo. She finds and plays even more obscure MMOS than I do, although currently she's with the crowd in WoW.

Almost the definition of Generic Eastern Import, Loong appears still to be available from Gamigo under the name of Loong Dragonblood

Since Inventory Full arrived, most of the Eastern imports have been relatively big news. In no particular order (least of all chronological) there's been Blade and Soul, Black Desert Online, Revelation Online, Aion, Riders of somewhere-or-other, that one about Dragons that SOE licensed and of course Final Fantasy XIV, which is a whole different story.

Bless Online is the latest and it's... okay. I wouldn't put it much more strongly than that. As I said at the beginning of the post, Bless's main impact on me has been to remind me of other imported and translated MMOs I like more. Two in particular: Dragon Nest and Twin Saga.

Not that Bless is anything like either of those. It's just that I remembered, while playing Bless and reading about how badly translated it was supposed to be, that there's a particular style of translated quest text that I love. Twin Saga is dripping with it and so is Dragon Nest.

It appears we've crossed out last bridge in Dragomon Hunter.

It's as though they'd found a really articulate, bi-lingual seven-year old, with a vivid imagination, and given them a completely free hand to translate the original quests - without worrying too much about whether the finished version made much (or any) sense. It's almost like naive art.

I tried to find my old installation of Twin Saga yesterday but after booting up several Hard Drives without success I gave up and re-installed it via Steam. As it was downloading I thought to google "Twin Saga", which I probably should have done at the start.

Turns out it's also published by Aeria Games, for whom, as I mentioned above, I have a generic launcher on my desktop. They also published Dragomon Hunter, another quirky import I liked a lot, which has sadly closed. The launcher itself is also dead. You have to download and update directly from the website now - or use Steam.

Following that discovery I was able to find the original installation buried in the Aeria Games folder on my C Drive so now I have the blasted thing twice! I linked my Aeria account to Steam and now I'm up and running with my old character, who turns out to be level 50! Proof that I really did like Twin Saga when I last played.

Best name prefix ever!

Dragon Nest is more problematic. It has a convoluted history of versions and territories. Last time I tried to play I couldn't get it to run. I'm running short of drive space right now so I don't think I'll download it again just yet but I guess I shouldn't wait too long. Grab 'em while they're still alive seems to be the motto for some of the less-celebrated imports.

Anyway, that wasn't the post I sat down to write. I was going to muse over returning to MMOs and how it can vary from impossible to ecstatic. That'll have to wait for another day. This has run far too long and there's double XP in Norrath that won't last forever!