MMORPG – A Return to Everquest Online Adventures
Recently I talked to an old friend from an online gaming guild on MSN messenger, and the guy really got me into wanting to play some MMORPGs again. He had recently resubscribed to SquareEnix’s popular multi-platform MMO Final Fantasy XI and appeared to be having a ball. Now I had played that game several times before, and it just never quit clicked with me. I always found the level of progression to be a bit to monotonous and the game itself to be relatively sleep inducing. Throwing FFXI out of the picture, I was left with one choice – Sony Online Entertainments pioneering console MMO Everquest Online Adventures.
I am one of the few loyal MMORPG gamers still left out in the dark ages of dial up internet (only until this March) so my choices of games were quite limited. My old favorites such as Everquest I & II, Lord of the Rings Online, and World of Warcraft had long since dropped their support for most dial up connections and I was left with relatively few options. EQOA is one of the few MMORPGs that still runs well on dial up in addition to the fact that it is on the PS2, meaning that I didn’t have to worry about poor performance. When I put those aspects into perspective, the choice was obvious.
My biggest obstacle concerning this journey was the scarcity of players across each of the servers. This game was first produced in 2003 back when Everquest was the reigning king of PC MMORPGs and when World of Warcraft was little more than a twinkle in the eyes of gamers everywhere. The game, unlike FFXI which was ported to the PC, also was developed for a now obsolete gaming system which meant, for one thing, that the game can’t even be considered current generation any longer. Secondly, the game seems to loose more and more players each and every day as just a quick glance at the game’s official forums will prove. In addition to that, every guild that I ever joined in EQOA was lively during my time playing, but after I would take a break for several months, the guild would be all but dead. All servers but the most popular server – Castle Lightwolf – have become ghost-towns. Freeport, the largest city in both square feet and player population, once averaged around fifty people in the zone across all servers. These days Castle Lightwolf is the only server that still retains such a number. All the other servers struggled to have anywhere from ten to fifteen on peak playing hours, but while each server had a noticeable drop in population, the recent death of all other servers has actually served to strengthen that one solitary server that still retains some hint of acitivity.
As players from unpopular servers such as Marr’s Fist, Proudpine Outpost, Direnhold, and Feran’s Hope left the game, the remaining players saw fit to leave as well only to start anew on Castle Lightwolf. This accomplished two things. The first of which bolstered the population of an already popular server thus extending the game’s life as a whole. Secondly, this new influx of players brought about a steady increase of experienced, low level players which vastly improved the ailing low level population. The experienced players also served to efficiently guide the few legitimate low level players still left in the game. Surprisingly, the fact that the players left the other servers actually made the game more fun and more like it was before so many players began to leave. The following text will serve as a recap of my first few days in the new world of Everquest Online Adventures:
As I logged in, after spending a great deal of time remembering my randomly generated password, I immediately laid eyes on that ugly armor in which my level 35 ranger was forced to wear. It was a dark red suite with scales that could hardly be seen thanks to the hue of the items. My helmet was of the same color, but it had a giant spike on the top that made it look like a red Hershey’s Kisses. As the loading screen disappeared, my deadly giant strawberry set foot on the world of Tunaria (the world wasn’t referred to as Norrath at that time) for the first time in almost a year. The first thing I notice was that, of course, my guild was now dead. I must admit to not being totally concerned or overly sad because I wasn’t sure if my time in EQOA was going to even require me to find a guild, and, by their very nature, guilds in EQOA don’t have that same personal feeling of closeness that guilds from computer MMORPGs have. Console players have always had a reputation for being less refined than computer players and that old idea holds true in Everquest Online Adventures more than almost anywhere. After having made the discovery of my dead guild, I realized that I was nowhere near any civilized area of the game world. I quickly activated my return home spell and landed myself right smack in the middle of Freeport, the meeting place of all EQOA players.
My first wish upon entering Freeport was to try and find an XP group so I could make some progress. I threw up my LFG flag, stood myself upon one of the chairs by the Freeport Arena (small platform under a small tent) and began reading a novella that had been assigned to me in my Advanced Placement English Literature class – Joseph Conrad’s literary classic Heart of Darkness that from here on out will be jokingly referred to as the abortion, with all due respect to Mr. Conrad.
“One evening as I was lying flat on the deck of my steamboat, I heard voice approaching – and there were the nephew and the uncle strolling along the bank. I laid my head on my arm again, and had nearly lost myself”…..hey, there’s a fly on the wall!……….. “in a doze, when somebody said in my ear, as it were: “I am as harmless as a little”- Awesome! group invite! I eagerly accepted the group invite in anticipation of all the experience points that were calling out my name. “Hexbones,” the said. “We’re killing Hexbones.” I had barely made it outside of Freeport when, as groups in EQOA often do, they announced that they had decided they were tired of killing Hexbones and were just going to log for the nite, thus my short journey was for naught. As a result of this, I stole away back to Freeport, threw up my LFG tag, picked up the abortion, and began reading again.
” The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there – there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were – No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know”……coming soon
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