They're Making an Emu ... of EverQuest Online Adventures?

[loramin]

I never actually played EQ Adventures (the PS2 port of EQ), but I only heard that it was just a lame version of EQ Classic.. So, I was surprised to see that there's an emulator project for it (https://massivelyop.com/2024/06/19/the-everquest-online-adventures-revival-server-is-pushing-onward-toward-a-public-release/) (active in 2024!)

Thoughts?

[Ekco]

i bought a ps2 for it when the expansion came out and played it for about a year, the actual world i like better than classic eq but the limitations of a ps2 controller made raiding/inventory management awkward

Sandstorm server: https://sandstorm.kiekko.tv/

[loramin]

the actual world i like better than classic eq

Now I'm curious: I thought the EQA world was just a (worse) copy of EQ classic ... what was better about it?

[Kiithsa]

Never played EQOA but I wouldn't mind giving it a shot since I was far too entrenched in regular EQ at the time.

[Ekco]

Now I'm curious: I thought the EQA world was just a (worse) copy of EQ classic ... what was better about it?

the zones are literally more polished, like compare the freeports

TgDdxVP5U3k

can see the full map here https://sandstorm.kiekko.tv/map/?

[Jimjam]

Play station? More like fay station.

[loramin]

Never played EQOA but I wouldn't mind giving it a shot since I was far too entrenched in regular EQ at the time.

Yeah, after Ekco's praise I'm starting to get curious too.

[Ciderpress]

EQOA was an original project using the EQ ip, not a port. I never played it either. Mmo on console just seems.... nah.

[Trexller]

EQOA was an original project using the EQ ip, not a port. I never played it either. Mmo on console just seems.... nah.

Never played eqoa but champions of norrath on ps2 was pretty good

[Swish]

I didn't know anyone who had a PS2 and actually connected it to the internet.

[Ekco]

I didn't know anyone who had a PS2 and actually connected it to the internet.

SOCOM 2 multiplayer was the fuckin shit, most people played that

[Zuranthium]

I beta tested EQOA and got a free month when it came out, it was nothing special, nowhere close to the "new 1999-esque EQ" I wanted. Was easy to run across the whole game world with no real danger and after visting the waypoint in a given area you were able to teleport back there for free.

the zones are literally more polished, like compare the freeports

TgDdxVP5U3k

In what world are any of the zones more polished. They don't have nearly as much personality. Less interesting details, boring randomly placed assets, too rounded and evenly spaced out everywhere, and in general a more cartoony feel.

[Ekco]

>In what world are any of the zones more polished
reality? lol

it just objectively looks better... i would honestly flip your criticisms back to EQ1 with the "less interesting details, assests..ect"

basically every zoneline and skybox in EQ looks like complete dogshit and unfinished it's immersion breaking and makes it feel like the zones aren't connected at all

EQOA tech of streaming in the assets without zoning alone makes it a better fucking game lol

[Zuranthium]

it just objectively looks better...

Nah. It's impossible to really say "objectively" about this though. But for me EQOA definitely looks worse and felt like something that was artificial and lacking inspiration. Whereas Everquest feels like stepping into a real fantasy world. It's twisty, claustrophobic, expansive, wondrous, and the cities are designed with care for the civilizations there.

Not having zones didn't make EQOA better. Honestly that is a charm to Everquest, you feel transported to a new place when entering a different area, in part because many of the zone entrances visually and physically feel like a clear demarcation. This is important to the game world being an avatar of something more; a game is always going to be smaller in size than an "actual" world, unless you want a game where it takes months to travel across a continent, but it should still give that feeling of largeness and difficulty to traverse.

There still were "zones" anyway in EQOA. The areas of the game were very boxily-conceived, which means that even though the zones are superficially more "open" to each other, it ends up feeling more same-y and less expansive, as things are uninterestingly spaced out and you just take a shortcut to get somewhere.

[Ekco]

no it objectively looks like someone spent 10 minutes doing the geometry on eq1 freeport or most zones for that matter and didn't know what the fuck they were doing and shipped that shit anyway

EQOA had people with actual experience working on it and it shows


>There still were "zones" anyway in EQOA.

yeah okay, Odus and Faydwer and Antonica are 3 separate zones + the planes but the 1 zone of Antonica on EQOA is bigger than Classic,Kunark and Velious fucking combined though i'm pretty sure so yeah the waypoint system was fine considering how fucking massive the world felt

https://i.imgur.com/hyT10v1.png

[Zuranthium]

no it objectively looks like someone spent 10 minutes doing the geometry on eq1 freeport or most zones for that matter and didn't know what the fuck they were doing and shipped that shit anyway

EQOA had people with actual experience working on it and shows

What "shows" on EQOA is something that looks worse and is less interestingly designed. Like I said, everything is too rounded, boringly spaced, cartoony, and lacks interesting details. Landmarks weren't as awe-inspiring, nothing felt very scary. It very much felt like just running around in an obviously fabricated environment, instead of a fantasy novel brought to life.

1 zone of Antonica on EQOA is bigger than Classic, Kunark and Velious fucking combined

Antonica in EQOA was absolutely not that big. It didn't take me much time to run across the entire width of the continent and there was no real danger doing it, in stark contrast to trying to travel in Everquest (particularly at low levels).

The zones I am talking about in EQOA are the squares you can see on the map you just posted. There were notifications when walking into a new "zone" and MOBs never moved out of their zones, I seem to remember MOBs would never chase very far in general. The game world was more sterile and the zones being more "open" wasn't interesting at all, because everything was clearly designed as a specific square area with "content" in the middle.

[Ekco]

'The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.'


e_SCqloSteg

shit's kino idk what else to say

[Ciderpress]

EQOA came out in 2003, EQ came out in 1999. It does "look better" than EQ1 on like a pixels per second basis or whatever, because obviously. Doesn't tell you much about the expertise or talent or abilities of anyone who made either game. Vanilla Quake 1 looks much much better than EQ and came out in 1996. All about the art direction.

[Zuranthium]

That video proves exactly what I was saying - there was not much change in geography or anything interesting to see when running across the entire continent, and it didn't take very long either (obviously the video is sped up but now time running across the continent in Everquest with no buffs, not to mention how dangerous it is).

[magnetaress]

e_SCqloSteg

shit's kino idk what else to say

This is what my dreams look like except its a combination of lake rathe and highpass


should really be a run from grobb to everfrost tho showcasing the diffrent biomes

the transition of tree types in the karanas was kinda nice wondering if they did that elswhere

[Wakanda]

I really want to know what vanguard was actually like. My PC couldn’t handle it at the time even though I upgraded everything I possibly could 😹 like I always wonder if it had the crazy loot like EQ or if it was more streamline like WoW and EQ 2.

[randazzinator]

oi! I started EQOA right at the beginning. about a month after it launched. so I heard tons of snobby EQ1 players making remarks about it back then xD

First off however, I want to say there are 2 eqoa emulator projects. One of them is Sandstorm, which was linked above (https://sandstorm.kiekko.tv) and the other is EQOAemu (https://eqoaemu.com). To cut to the chase, sandstorm has a playable pre-pre-alpha kind of thing setup. EQOAemu is waiting until it can have a more polished test before putting a server up. Sandstorm is written in java, and eqoaemu is written in C#. Personally, I think eqoaemu has the better chance of being functionally the better server, as in it's been written from the ground up with performance in mind.

Also, EQOAemu wants to launch with the game as it was on live, and then they will consider making changes after observing what would need done to keep the game fun. Whereas Sandstorm has made no such statement and even has a public discussion thread in their discord about possible changes.

Onto EQOA itself!

So to further allude about the EQOA zones, well they all existed in a seamless, open world. Seamless meaning there was no loading whatsoever between zones, you just walk across and you're there. Open world meaning zones aren't bounded by endless amounts of mountain ranges, walls, or other things acting as walls. Just how you could go in any direction with only a few mountain ranges to block you in The Elder Scrolls games, so too could you in EQOA. So you were not forced to cross into zones at narrow areas, you could walk along the entirety of the borders of zones and move back and forth as you please. Basically, any direction you looked, you could walk in and cross over multiple zones in that straight line. Also, EQOA was bigger than EQ1, according to SOE. It took a long time to walk across the continent, and depending on what zones you are in it may have been easy, or maybe have been impossible to do without invis. If you are following the paths then depending on the path you were mostly safe, but you still had to be careful as they weren't completely safe. Also, at no point, did the game ever give you any type of message at all about you entering a new place or zone.

I did not play EQ1, aside from the first few levels in P99, but from what I saw there and from asking EQ1 vets, it doesn't seem to me that the gameplay was vastly different between the two. EQOA did not have skills, did not have mes and feign death, and it drinks/food worked differently. Also, EQOA only had 4-man groups. So given these differences, pulling mobs and downtime were quite different at times, but the endless grinds and late night chats were the same.

Pulling was mostly done by body pulling, or as we called it, aggroing. Pulling was almost always done by the tank in my experience, but occasionally others would pull, but not often. As the mob we were killing would start to run away, the tank would run and grab another mob for us to kill. Chain pulling was great in that game.

Breaking a camp wasn't a term I ever saw in EQOA either, but that's because if you knew what you were doing you could usually only pull one or two mobs instead. And we did do things to keep a camp broken, it's just this concept, and calling it that, wasn't really there like in other games. It wasn't so hard to do that we needed to call it something. We would kill roamers and sometimes other mobs to keep things easier/safer, but the concept itself didn't exist in EQOA like it did in EQ1. Mob spawning worked a little differently too. A mob wouldn't spawn as long as the previous mob in that spot's body was still around. And if you left something on the body, the time it would stay around would be longer. Effectively suppressing or slowing spawns, but not stopping them. And you could look at the body every once in a while to extend it's time being there, but it wouldn't make them last that much longer.

In EQOA food and drinks weren't a necessity, there was no hunger, but they would greatly decrease your downtime. In EQOA characters had a little bit of HoT and PoT that would tick every 6 seconds I think. The amount was your Max HP or MP divided by 50. So it wasn't enough to sustain you unless you were barely using any spells. Downtown occurred less often, but if you didn't have drinks it would take a lot longer. Food and Drinks basically gave you a tick heal or tick mana regen that would last a long time, but would immediately break if you did anything but move. You only needed food if you were soloing, because otherwise you'd have a healer lol.

Speaking of heals, our healers got tick heals that would heal 4 times per spell cast. If that sounds like ez mode than you apparently can't imagine games being balanced around their mechanics lol. There were a few stacks heals in the game too, but those were for emergencies.

From what I gather, the quests were a lot better in EQOA. They would send you on journeys across the land and into cool or dangerous areas. They made you explore. They would tell little stories. They kind of remind me of playing DND and going on a few session side-quest. Not just "grab this thing and bring it to me" or "grab this thing and bring it to them" or "bring these words to this person" lol. I mean sure, all quests at their core can be broken down into these simple components, but it was just a lot of fun in EQOA. And a lot of fucking grief too when your group keeps wiping trying to accomplish this. And no, by no means could you ever rely on questing to level as opposed to groups. There weren't even quests to do at every level. So don't worry, you will be grinding.

And on the topic of death, EQOA did not have corpse runs. And it did not have deleveling. It had XP debt. When getting a rez, if the rezzer had line of sight, you would rez back to where they were standing. And if they rezzer did not have line of sight on your, you would teleport back to your dead body.

Avoiding death when things went awry was sometimes harder in EQOA, and sometimes harder in EQ1. If you were near a zone line EQ1 then surviving could be absolutely trivial. If you were far from one, then surviving could feel nearly impossible. In EQOA, if you were in some sort dungeon or otherwise surrounded by things, the it was not much different than being far from a zone border in EQ1, you were pretty much guaranteed to die. If you were out in the open, then your chances were better, but assuming you're not at the noob levels, your camp is going to be surrounded by dangerous mobs. Having less crowd control abilities in EQOA, and less spots in the group for classes with crowd control abilities, you had very little recourse for correcting a mistake. Unless you could sow yourself, or you had an appropriately leveled Wizard or Druid to have an evac, you were probably going to die. Even with evacs, the earlier ones took enough time that most or all of your group could die before it casted.

Mobs ran faster than you, of course, and every single sow type of buff in the game would pop off of you if you took any offensive action. So if you had somebody with sow in your group, you'd have to survive long enough for them to cast it on you to even have a chance of living. Mobs would follow you for half a zone, they wouldn't just despawn after walking 15 feet away. And even then, they would follow you a very long distance further than that and not despawn until they hit you, or you managed to get an ungodly distance away from them, which led to many deaths when you otherwise would have survived.

The game designed for you to get to level 20 pretty fast, slowing down the closer you go to 20. This would give you time to become acquainted with your class and feel out how much you liked it. Your 20s-30s would slow down a lot. This is when you would become acclimated to a proper grind, learning the ins-and-outs of your class and when to use certain abilities. By time you hit 30, your level progression is on par with EQ1. You're going to be grinding. You're going to be getting less points to put into your stats (str/sta/agi/dex/wis/int/cha). You're going to grind, and you're going to like it!

So back to my first statement: Snobby EQ1 players :p. I heard countless times that EQ1 looked better than EQOA. Having experienced P99, I have no idea what kind of space crack these lunatics were smoking. Keep in mind, EQOA's expansion, Frontiers, did a complete overhaul on the graphics, and these people weren't talking about that since it wasn't released yet. EQOA's original graphics were much more on par with EQ1's in terms of looking cool, and not cartoony. They also looked better in the polygon count (but what would you expect from a game releasing 4 years later, and with starting development of an even bigger time gap? So no hate from me lol.). When I first loaded up P99, I was utterly shocked by how much worse the graphics were than these EQ1 players made it out to be. Contrary to what I just said, I did not expect this at all given all the hate I saw from these players.

Frontiers, on the other hand, while still technically more impressive, it did cheesify some things. Trolls and especially Ogres went from looking like vilely evil things, most notably in their faces, to looking like cutesy putesy oafs you had no reason to fear. Quite the opposite of their initial look. Other things were affected too or course. Some things came out looking better, some looking worse, and a lot of things looking the game. Not everyone agrees with me, but not everyone can be right xD (I joke! I joke!). Now if this paragraph has left you thinking that Frontier utterly destroyed the aesthetics of the game, don't take it as that. It only destroyed some things. Robes, for example, looked stupid AF imo. They were basically dresses on some races. I used to make fun of my cousin (a wizard) alongside my brother saying he was wearing a dress, but once Frontiers came out, he basically actually was wearing a dress.

Having been typing this for far, far longer than I ever intended to, I bring this commentary to a close. If there were things I mean to mention but forgot, well they're gone now. But there will be two last things I will mention before biding you ado from rereading this thread.

There were about 29 coaches you could get in the game. Once you signed a ledger for a coach, you could travel between connected cities freely. Of these 29, keep in mind that a good chunk of them were alignment-based, so you would have about 19 available to you. We had nothing like the Plane of Knowledge. Druids only got 4 group teleports (meaning they'd go along with you), and while Wizards did get a lot more which were also all group spells, most of these weren't very useful. Outside of the wizard themself, people did not really use them. So while the travel system in EQOA was different, it still didn't mean we could just teleport to wherever we wanted to go all willy-nilly either.

Honestly, after writing that out, either I forgot the second thing I was going to mention, or I was going to say "Play station? More like fay station." and "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." are great quotes lol.

tl;dr well i guess you dont get to know what i said

p.s.
I planned to proof-read that, but after clicking "Preview Post" and saying "Jesus Christ" aloud to myself, I changed my mind.

[magnetaress]

^^^^tldr

I really want to know what vanguard was actually like. My PC couldn’t handle it at the time even though I upgraded everything I possibly could �� like I always wonder if it had the crazy loot like EQ or if it was more streamline like WoW and EQ 2.

Most like EQ1

[randazzinator]

^^^^tldr



Most like EQ1



hey, i provided a tl;dr! xDDDDD

[magnetaress]

hey, i provided a tl;dr! xDDDDD

You realize it's at the bottom of that insanely autistic post?

Anyway, applaud u for writing all that up. EqOA clearly meant a lot to you.

[Knuckle]

From what ive read none of these games are close to complete. unless you count the majority of questing not being implemented as almost done.

[Ekco]

yeah, it's just a shitload of database work that needs to be done.

they got all the server -> client stuff up and running quickly though, a bunch of people logged packets before the servers got shut off so all the formulas and shit should be accurate

they update often also: https://sandstorm.kiekko.tv/updates.html

[Wrenwise]

That video proves exactly what I was saying - there was not much change in geography or anything interesting to see when running across the entire continent, and it didn't take very long either (obviously the video is sped up but now time running across the continent in Everquest with no buffs, not to mention how dangerous it is).

No, nothing you said proves anything other than you didn't like EQOA lol, fair enough. The game has plenty of geography, several biomes just like EQ1's Antonica. It's not some shitty game, it's actually pretty awesome. It's NOT easy the world is pretty savage and death is a constant concern. You make it sound like retail WoW or some shit lol.

Try running from Halas down to Grobb with no buffs, takes just as long as P99 since it's almost a 1 to 1 scale, only without loadscreens every zone.


To address what Knuckle said, the Sandstorm server has content up to lvl 40 and a majority of quests working. EQOAemu which are the original devs are taking their time and making sure it's done right. SS is pretty innacurate and the devs are doing their own thing, which many people dislike.

[f4k3n4m3]

If there was a way to make the client function like a normal pc mmo client, it would almost be worth it. Even trying to remap everything to keyboard and mouse was awful.