In Memoriam: Cloudrat

In the years between the closure of our original, launch-era home, Steamfont , and the opening of the game's first Free to Play server, Freeport, Mrs Bhagpuss and I played almost all our EverQuest II on the Test server. It was a small community, insular even, and it was exceedingly difficult to avoid learning the names and at least something about the personalities of almost everyone who played there.

One of the most active and vocal members of the community was Cloudrat. She was always around, usually building or decorating some house or other, often offering advice and assistance, sometimes chiding, usually encouraging. I thought of her as a Test local but over time it became apparent she played on just about every server.

Long after I stopped playing regularly on Test I could still hear her chatting away on the cross-server Test Channel. When SOE added Leaderboards for housing her name began to appear prominently in the lists of award-winning houses, not because of her amazing decorating skills but because she worked tirelessly to install fully-functioning public transport hubs wherever she played.

Cloudrat's Dojo is a small, two-room house stuffed to overflowing with just about every portal and transport device ever added to the game. You can go from there to pretty much anywhere. Whenever something's happening in some obscure corner of Norrath - a guide event in Cardin Ward, for example, or the recent Heroes Festival event in Obol Plains - and someone asks plaintively in General chat how to get there the answer, likely as not, will be "Use Cloudrat's Dojo".

I'd noticed back in the Autumn, playing a lot more EQII this year as I had been, that I'd not heard her in chat for a while. I wondered if she'd finally had enough of the game, as even the most dedicated players eventually may.

It also crossed my mind that she might no longer be well enough to play, or even that she might no longer be with us at all. As long as I'd known her, she'd always been unwell, in some unspecified manner that she'd mention but not dwell on. MMORPGs do tend to become homes and playgrounds for those whose options in the physical world are limited and both EQII's Test server and its housing community have historically attracted more than the average number of such players.

When this Winter's Frostfell update arrived at the beginning of December, one of the new items was a Ratonga Tree Topper Plushie, ideal for placing on the highest branches of one of the game's many seasonal trees. Being a huge fan of both Frostfell and ratongas, almost the very first thing I did to clebrate the season was to buy one.



As soon as I examined my Tree Topper I exclaimed out loud "That's Cloudrat!". She'd long had a signature look: a tiny, honey-colored ratonga, reduced to the smallest possible size (which in EQII is very small indeed), dressed entirely in flowing white with a circlet of flowers on her head and fairy wings to carry her on her travels.

The Tree Topper was her to a tee. I was as sure then as I could be that Cloudrat had levelled up, ascended, passed on.

Sure enough, over the next few days several people asked the question in chat and those who knew her much better than I ever did confirmed she'd died during the summer. Someone at Daybreak had taken the trouble to immortalize her in the game she'd loved (and found infuriating) for so long.

I went back to the goblin vendor and bought ten of her effigies but it wasn't until today that I got around to placing some of them. My Berserker keeps two Frostfell trees, year round, in the entrance hall to his Maj`Dul Mansion. Both of them now have a small, white, winged ratonga at the very top.

He also maintains a Frostfell crafting area at his Mara Estate, where he and all his imaginary friends come to craft. Cloudrat's avatar looks down on the crafting tables there, smiling.

I hope she'll be happy there. I hope she's happy, wherever she is. She wasn't Aradune but she had an impact on Norrath that won't soon be forgotten. Norrath remembers its own.

Don't Start Me Talking... : EverQuest, EverQuest II

Yesterday, as Wilhelm pointed out in the comments, I magnificently managed to miss the post-hook I'd been waiting on for weeks. Instead I chose to witter on about how I had nothing to write about. Comedy gold.

The news I'd missed was that The EverQuest Show had put up their interview with Holly "Windstalker" Longdale, Executive Producer of the EverQuest franchise. They were also good enough to provide a full transcript, which I've read. I haven't watched the video so anything that's given away by facial expression or body language is going to have to wait until I do.

As Wilhelm says, there aren't any major revelations but there are several tasty morsels of detail and a whacking great hint of something big to come. The whole thing doesn't take long to read but I'll pull out a few of the more interesting quotes anyway:

EQ Show :

How are the games doing?

Holly :     

...since 2015 , since I came on board, breaking all the rules both games have grown. So where we had a trend of the audience trickling off, we’ve now grown and we’ve grown revenue at the same time, so we’ve actually hired some people to fill out the teams...

Well, that's reassuring. And surprising.

It's been my consistent impression as a player and customer that, despite the surrounding intrigue, chaos and conspiracy theories, and notwithstanding the sequential layoffs and downsizings, my playable experience has undergone continual improvement throughout Daybreak Games' curation of the franchise. Even so, I would have guessed that both the audience and revenue for EverQuest II in particular would have decreased over that period. EverQuest, I would have imagined, would have done well to hold steady.

That both games have grown both numbers playing and money taken is fantastic news for those of us who want to see Norrath prosper. As Holly says, after fifteen and twenty years,

"It is staggering that both these games are still profitable ventures..."

Part of the reason for this turnaround is, as we more than suspected, some smart and effective managing of players' nostalgic affection for the franchise and the life experiences it has given them over two decades:

Holly:

...obviously nostalgia is really important to our players. Being able to revisit places we visited 15 years ago. 16, 20 years ago. 

That accounts for the popularity of the Progression servers but there's more to it than that:

...we’re trying to be smart about the content we do do... We don’t want to go too far out... I know we’ve been to the moon and back but you know, we don’t want to go too much farther and too much crazier than that. So we want to go back to those themes and develop those stories.

That's why almost every expansion is some kind of return to versions of the past:  areas, regions, continents or (coming up, we all believe) moons that players know and remember from the core game and from earlier expansions. It's not just a clever re-use of assets, although I believe there's some of that too; it's a key turned in the lock that opens the heart.

It's a policy that means Live players are as entangled in past glories as are those engaged in Progression. They are different audiences and the same all at once:

EQ Show:

How do you balance the TLP players, with the LIVE players, because they seem to be two vastly different groups playing the same game.

 Holly:

They are. But they’re also almost equal to each other now, in numbers.

That's another surprise. Although we all knew the Progression servers were doing well it's only natural to assume the bulk of the game is on the Live side. I imagine an expansion year with level cap increases for both games will unbalance (or balance, if you prefer) the ship a little but clearly the future of the franchise lies in the past.

Or does it?

EQ Show:

...a lot of people have asked, what are you guys going to do with the intellectual property... is there another game in development? 

Holly:

I can’t talk about what’s in development. But I promise you there is a future for EverQuest. I promise you. There’s a lot of work has gone into evaluating our past. We’re in a really unique position where we have more than 20 years worth of data on players and what they like in MMOs and MMOs we’ve made. Why wouldn’t we take advantage of that when we craft something new for EverQuest?

Which is about as broad a hint as the PR person, who was confirmed to be in the room making sure nothing got said that shouldn't get said, would allow. I read that as confirmation that DBG are working on another title in the franchise and that, unlike the ill-fated and ill-advised EQNext, it will be squarely aimed at the faithful.

As one of them I can't but be happy to hear it.

There's a lot more in the interview that's worth reading or watching or listening to for any dyed-in-the-wool EverQuest Franchise fan. There's stuff about the dedication of the team and their insistence on doing work on the EverQuest games in their own time; there's confirmation that they've had to learn how to do more with less, something I personally feel has contributed to the improvement in the games that I mentioned at the top; there's aknowledgment of the lag and database issues currently dogging the games and there's even a little squib about the upcoming re-organization of the whole Daybreak portfolio.

I'll leave you with Holly's reply to Fading from the EQ Show's "final" question:

EQ Show:

Final question I’ll ask you. How long is this game going to be around?

Holly:

At least another 10 years.

EQ Show: 

You think so?

Holly: 

Absolutely.

Works for me!

Life In The Old Dog Yet : EQII

In the comments to the previous post, Topauz said it was interesting to see a Producer's Letter for EverQuest but nothing for EverQuest II. For a moment there it looked like fair grounds for speculation. But only for a moment.

Yesterday, when I took a quick trawl of Feedly, between finishing my breakfast (muesli and a cinnamon and raisin bagel, thanks for asking)  and getting ready to go to work, the first thing I saw was this welcome headline from The Ancient Gaming Noob. I clicked through the link to the full text of the letter on the official EQII website, dashed off a quick comment at TAGN and then I had to go.

It was a pity I had to work. I was burning to post my thoughts on this very welcome, somewhat unexpected development. The official confirmation that there will be an expansion for EQII this year puts paid to a prediction in last summer's leak, which claimed both EverQuest games would go into what you might describe as "active maintenance" in 2019, continuing to receive new live events but no more actual expansions. I note we haven't had confirmation that EverQuest will get one, though.

That doesn't necessarily invalidate the information underlying the original prophecy. A lot can change in nine months. Ask any mother. Or Trion, or Jagex, or CCP. We have to work with what we have, though, or we're all just scooping soup through a strainer.

Holly "Windstalker" Longdale's Producer's Letter for EQII is immensely intriguing for longtime Daybreak-watchers. There's so much subtext. Some of it's so foregrounded you might as well just call it "text".

The penultimate couple of paragraphs are tantamount to an acknowledgment that speculation on the future of the Everquest franchise has reached a dangerous pitch. There's something close to a tacit admission that focus at DBG may have drifted away from what many paying customers still hold to be the heart and soul of the company - Norrath.

"I promise you that our dedication to you and this game is unwavering. Every moment we share here is focused on bringing this Norrathian fantasy to life every day, year after year. And we aren’t stopping – not by a long bowshot. The world of EverQuest has a bright future".

That's a Mission Statement. Yes, they're easy to make and hard to keep but companies tend not to make them with the explicit intention of breaking them. That comes down to circumstances or, as Harold MacMillan didn't put it, "Events, dear boy. Events".

At least we know that, barring hidden rocks or sudden squalls, EverQuest's current captain intends to keep the ship sailing in the same general direction for the foreseeable future. That's about as much security as you could expect, in this genre, in these times.

The line I found, paradoxically, both most re-assuring and most worrying comes in the following paragraph:

"This game, and our livelihoods, have lasted these many years because of our players and fans."

Coupled with some very personal comments in the EverQuest Producer's Letter (Windstalker being, apparently, producer of both EQ titles) it's abundantly clear that Holly Longdale recognizes that her own livelihood and that of her colleagues is intimately bound up with the health of the EverQuest franchise.

All these protestations of love for the games may read like typical PR puff to some but they represent a significant change of tone. Yes, EQ Producers have always pulled hard on the community chain to get a response but both late-period SOE and Daybreak have often seemed at best to take the older EverQuest games for granted and occasionally to view them as something of an embarrassment. No more of that.

Moving on from subtext to substance, EQII players have plenty to look forward to in 2019. There's "unique in-game content in the Plane of Mischief " coming in March as a tie-in with the twentieth anniversary of the elder game. "Unique" is an interesting choice of descriptor and as far as I'm aware there is currently no Plane of Mischief in EQII, nor ever has been, so that's going to be fun.

We're also getting another progression server, ruleset to be announced. I'm dubious about that. I'm not sure Prog servers have been quite the hit in EQII they have been in EverQuest and I wonder whether there's really the stomach for another so soon after the last one died. It will all depend on the ruleset. I hope it's something short and sharp with a definite endpoint.

Then there's the confirmation of a sixteenth expansion, set in "a whole new unexplored location of lore and legend", a description that has me stumped even though apparently it's "a terrible hint" and some as-yet unspecified "15th anniversary plans for November". Best leave those until we have some solid detail.

The other big news is the return of PvP. PvP in Norrath has, at best, a checkered history. I'm by no means as negative about it as Wilhelm - I remember the Zek servers in original EverQuest as being pretty lively and popular for quite a few years before interest faded - but it's certainly true that PvP in EverQuest has always been a minority interest.

The main concern from PvE players, who make up the overwhelming majority of the population, has always been twofold: diversion of limited resources and compromise over game mechanics. PvP players also tend to be very vocal and hard to ignore, both by other players and by developers, so there's sometimes the sense of a rowdy gang of hooligans crashing a sedate, suburban party. No wonder people get nervous.

If nothing else, a new PvP server will bring some ex-players back, although how long they'll stay is another matter entirely. It's not at all unusual to hear a returning player in-game asking where to go for PvP and being outraged when they get told there is none, so at least it should put a stop to that.

Or it will if it gets the green light. Evidently Daybreak share the general concerns about PvP's long-term viabilty in EQII because all they're actually promising is that they'll "look to launching" a Live PvP server "if it gets a good following" in the beta that's due to start very soon. That's a nuanced promise if ever I saw one.

Beyond that, only time will tell whether Holly's bold assertion that "The world of EverQuest has a bright future" is true or not. I hope she's right and I believe she hopes so, too. Can't ask for much more than that, although, naturally, many will.

Let's Go Round Again : EverQuest, EQ2

Stargrace's recent post on starting over in EverQuest for the umpteenth time very nearly lured me into doing the same. Just reading it sent waves of nostalgic desire rippling through the backwaters of my mind.

I haven't been keeping up with progress on Phinagel, the latest of EQ's many "progression" servers. As far as I can tell there are three currently up and running - Phinagel, Ragefire and Lockjaw. I think I have a character on Ragefire but an All Access subscription is required to play there so it's a moot point right now.

I definitely had characters on the first Progression server, which was called The Combine and launched all the way back in 2006, at least according to this thread on the forums. Apparently The Combine eventually merged with Druzzil Ro, which itself was later merged into Xegony so I guess I have a level ten on Xegony now. Go me!

The history of EQ server merges is fascinating - or it is if you lived through it. The list in this thread, itself from 2012 and now archived, so presumably already out of date, tells a story all by itself.

The first server I ever played on was Prexus, which I picked because it had a name I found easy to remember. Mrs Bhagpuss joined me there and, as far as I recall, stayed while I wandered, first trying Brell Serilis (supposedly the unofficial RP server) and Test (just prior to The Great Wipe) before settling down for a long spell on Luclin, where I still mostly play - when I play.

For the first four years EverQuest was in a state of continual and rapid growth - not just geographically, with the annual and bi-annual expansions, but in its ever-increasing population. Server capacity back then was a lot less than it would be later on and new servers seemed to open every few months.

There's little in the hobby to beat the first few days of a brand new server for sheer, often near-hysterical, excitement, so I developed the habit of making a character on every server as it arrived. I remember making characters on Tholuxe Paells, Maelin Starpyre, Morell-Thule, Stromm, Morden Rasp, The Seventh Hammer, and Lanys T'Vyl on the first day they appeared. Probably there are more that I've forgotten.

Some of those characters got played a lot, even if they never leveled very far. Morell-Thule was where I made my Iksar SK at the launch of EQ's first expansion, Ruins of Kunark. He was possibly the hardest and slowest EQ character to level I ever had, what with the Iksar XP penalty and the unforgiving Kunark starting zones. I spent more time getting lost in Cabilis than I did killing things. I still get him out and do a bit on him now and again. He's in South Ro these days, somewhere in the high teens, I think.

I made a female halfling Warrior on Tholuxe Paells specifically to play with someone whose name I've long forgotten. They promised to start over there and duo with me and I made a warrior specifically for that - then they promptly left after the first week, never to be seen again. Right after that happened I got into an argument with someone else, which I resolved by logging out and not coming back for six months. That was my Tholuxe Paells experience in a nutshell, although I went on logging  that warrior in, on and off, for years. Don't think she ever made double figures.

Lanys T'Vyl and Luclin started on the same day and I made characters on both - a Druid on Luclin and a Wizard on Lanys. Like the warrior, the wizard had the occasional run out, often on a weekend morning for some reason, for the best part of a decade, without ever really making any progress. It was the druid that stuck. She became my most played and highest level character, eventually making it to 60 when sixty was the cap.

Her career pretty much crashed and burned with the launch of the first European server, Antonius Bayle. For reasons that I no longer remember, Mrs Bhagpuss and I both began playing there, although not immediately. It was the first time we really played together, by which I mean in being in the same guild (and more importantly the same custom chat channel that operated as a supra-guild entity).

For the first time we were sharing the same friends list, rather than duoing or joining ad hoc groups together, which we'd done on and off all along and Ant Bayle became our home for what seems to me, only in retrospect like my first, real, core run through Norrath. It was there that I finally had characters at the cap for two or three expansion cycles and when I mainly played in groups, in dungeons, rather than solo, above ground. It was there that I learned to play the game and not just to live in the world.

A combination of Guild drama and the EQ2 beta eventually put paid to that run but we came back for an encore less than a year later, when EQ2 turned out to be a dud (until Scott Hartsman rode in on his
charger). We had moved our characters from Ant Bayle to Saryrn on a free transfer before we left. Why was there a free transfer? I  can't remember. Something must have merged with something or maybe it was when SOE and UbiSoft parted company. Anyway, we declined to pick them up again, choosing instead to go back to Stromm, where we'd both played at  server launch, made friends, joined guilds and had good memories.

We had another good run there, possibly two. I think we came back yet again after Vanguard. It gets very hard to reconstruct the sequence as time passes. The past fractures into a series of vignettes and incidents which, as I retell them, polish up like semi-precious stones into anecdotes, all the grit and edge smoothed down to a comfortable glow. It's also surprisingly hard to dig out simple facts like the launch dates of individual servers. Not impossible - it's all somewhere in the official patch notes, all of which are still available online. It's just more trouble than I feel like taking for a rambling, nostalgia-inspired blog post.

Going back to Stargrace, it's astonishing how powerful certain triggers remain despite the drift and shadow of the passing years. She talks about her troll shaman making her way to North Karana to take the Spires to The Nexus on Luclin (the moon, not the server) so as to bind in that advantageous location, only to be killed in one hit by a passing guard as she waited for the twenty minute teleportation cycle to turn.

That one tale combines a wealth of experiences for me. I walked a troll shaman to the gates of Qeynos to get him bound there out of range of the guards so as to have a better place to hunt than the swamps of Innothule. One of the scariest in-game things I ever did and one of the most satisfying when it turned out successfully.

I hung back out of range of the guards at the North Karana portal as an Ogre Shadowknight, praying I was far enough back to stay out of aggro range. Several of my characters made more or less dangerous journeys to The Nexus to bind in what was the premier travel hub of Norrath until the Plane of Knowledge rendered it redundant overnight.

When Stargrace goes on to talk about finding a heavy iron ulak in the Bazaar I can see the same icon in my mind's eye as if it had popped up on a vendor in front of me. She doesn't need to explain that the "PC" where everyone had been getting xp stands for "Paludal Caverns" - I can hear the screams and laughter echoing through that hideous place as though I'd spent all last night there - again!

In layers of irony spread thick and deep, I was pondering the feasibility of fitting in yet another return to Norrath, this time to one of my very favorite times and places, the Luclin Era, while working through a series of crafting quests in Butcherblock on Stormhold, the EQ2 Time Limited Expansion server. Living in the past while living in the past.

It's not as though I'd even planned to be on Stormhold. Playtime for EQ2 is limited already and there's a new expansion on the boil. I don't have time to stir the nostalgia pot and yet of course I do. I always do. Frostfell on Stormhold, how could I resist? I didn't even try. And then it was four hours later and I realized I hadn't even made a coffee and my legs were cramped and just one more quest...

So Luclin will have to wait. Probably. This time. We'll see. Never say never again and home is where if you have to go there they have to take you in and all that. And Norrath is home. All of it. Always was, always will be.

Feast and Famine : EQ2, GW2

I'd been hoping, expecting even, that Tuesday's bi-weekly update to GW2 would include a new Current Event. Last time we got one the storyline, if that's what you call it, was teetering on the brink of becoming interesting.

We didn't get anything like that this time. Instead we got a bizarre Schrodinger's Cat option for previewing the contents of unopened boxes, along with an unheralded extension of the Halloween event for a further week, a decision that struck me as offering altogether more than we needed of a thing that wasn't all that good in the first place.

This longueur coincided with a particularly lackluster period in WvW. Neither players nor developers seem to know what they want or how to achieve it if they find out. Meanwhile, over in EQ2, preparations for the expansion move on apace, with bonus xp, bonus loot and two more events on  the ever-busy calendar.

Hey, I did another two levels of Inquisitor and thirty of Carpenter but no-one cares about that, right? No, it's all about the rats. Always it's all about the rats.

Consequently this last week must be the first time in a year or so that I've spent more time in Norrath than Tyria. As well as the regular late evening post-GW2 sessions, I've been working on all kinds of things at every opportunity I can find. Right now I have more aspirations and goals in EQ2 than I can comfortably manage, whereas in GW2 I struggle to think of anything to do after my dailies are out of the way. The most satisfying thing I did in GW2 all last week was a major clear-out of my bank vaults.

By contrast, there's so much going on in EQ2 right now I hardly know where to start. It seems busier than I've seen it for while, too. Heroes Festival has loads of people out and about, running the repeatable quests and beating on the patchwork pinatas. The rewards are very good - especially so for anyone conditioned to austerity by four years of GW2 - and it's one of the most relaxed, easy-going of all Norrath's many holidays. It's also short so there's no time to hang about, especially if you want a lot of the goodies on offer.

All levels welcome. These bosses don't hit back.

Norrathian Hop doesn't have the same ring to it.

This year the Festival is also live on the Time Limited server Stormhold. I wasn't planning to go there but then there was 12th anniversary mount that flies at Level 35. On Stormhold it only leaps but even so... My SK ended up doing some crafting as well and next thing you know he'd added five levels of Alchemist and two of Shadowknight to his resumé. I foresee more TLE fun in his future.

Stormhold was strikingly busy with players everwhere I went  but even on Skyfire, my regular server, things are bustling. It's very evident that plenty of people are working through the same check-list of pre-expansion requirements as I am. Criss-crossing Kunark at the behest of Cazic-Thule I repeatedly ran into others doing the same.

I hope it all made more sense for them than it did for me. The lore, or perhaps I should say the logic, behind this Heritage Quest is baffling. Why would a ratongan citizen of Freeport, who worships Rallos Zek, spend hours of his time helping an Iksar rebel rally resistance to Venril Sathir with the intention of re-instating Cazic Thule's primacy and kickstarting another wave of Iksar expansionism?

Is this the part where I wake up?

That would be, shall we say, shortsighted but when the conclusion of the questline turns out to be facilitating a full-scale Iksar naval attack on East Freeport, any sense of who my character might be goes right out the window. This is one of the rare situations when I really would have liked some dialog options that actually branched, rather than the hand-wringing "Lucan's really not going to like this" dithering that was the only response on offer. In the end, of course, I did as I was told, but unless I missed some crucial plot point along the way my Berserker is now simultaneously one of Lucan's most trusted, loyal citizens and an openly declared rebel and traitor.

It would bother me more but I do have a get-out. The whole farrago began when my Berserker touched an idol of Cazic Thule and came over all peculiar. From then on, as far as I'm concerned, Cazic was driving the car. Anything I did was his fault and if Lucan doesn't like it he can take it up with The God of Fear. I wouldn't put it past him at that.

The gnomes seem to have gussied these things up a little since last time I flew the course.

With Greenmist completed I've done all the necessary adventuring tasks ahead of Kunark Rising other than, y'know, actually having an Epic or Mythical weapon. I was never planning on going that far - I just didn't want to be locked out of the Signature questline.

When it comes to crafting, which has it's own Signature, then I'm more interested in going all the way, even if I'm somewhat less prepared. But only somewhat. As I mentioned in my reply to Topauz in the comments after the last post, it turns out I have done almost all of the very lengthy pre-reqs for the upcoming expansion's Crafting content after all. What's more I did them on the character I'll be playing. Great news for me if somewhat worrying for the state of my memory.

I wonder if they have Patchwork Trakanon on the Race To Trakanon server? I guess that wouldn't be much of a race...

I just need to find someone to make all the items for the final step, which shouldn't be all that hard. I can make two of them myself and I am fairly sure Mrs Bhagpuss can make the rest. The hard part might be persuading her to log in and do it since she hasn't played EQ2 since we moved to Tyria four years ago.

At the moment I have to say I'm enjoying EQ2 a lot more than GW2. Much more seems to happen in Norrath, or happen faster. In GW2 we're glad for any crumbs of content whereas in EQ2 there's feast after feast.

This view is alive with sparkling motes and shimmering mist. Not that you can tell from this postcard.

Also - and this is surprising, even confounding - EQ2 often looks better these days. I have no idea why this is and frustratingly it can't be borne out by screenshots, which reliably fail to look much like the vibrant, deep-focus in-game views they purport to represent.

For whatever reason, possibly my more powerful PC and GPU, which by now approximate a decent gaming rig from two or three years ago, even older zones look fresh and remarkable, while newer ones are positively eye-popping. Tyria, on the other hand, suffers from over-familiarity, its astonishing watercolor vistas dulled from too many commutes.

In Norrath we really know how to hold a feast. And get down off the table!

With almost every other major MMO dropping or threatening to drop some form of Expansion or Expansion-like update before the end of the year, you'd think the endless, informationless drift towards the unnamed XPack #2 that we're told lies somewhere beyond GW2's event horizon would hurt the game's attendance and retention figures, but it seems not. Everything just trundles on much the same as always. I can't say the servers seem any less busy now than a year or two ago. Apparently cash shop sales are holding up nicely.

With Wintersday due in just a few weeks I'm not holding my breath for any substantive new content like, say, the next chapter of Living Story 3, this side of 2017. Fortunately I have other eggs and other baskets.

Back to Norrath it is.

Not Waving But Drowning : EQNext

The comment thread following Massively's breaking news that Daybreak Games have cancelled Everquest Next runs into four figures. The blogosphere similarly resounds with the clangorous echoes of a mighty giant fallen. Wilhelm, chronicler of all things Norrath, is keeping a tally. I suppose we're all obligated to say something so here goes...

I agree one hundred per cent with Wilhelm when he observes that EQNext "was in its ideal state for a few hours after that first SOE Live presentation about it". It was a great presentation. One of the best I have ever seen for a game. It had verve and enthusiasm and punch. What it didn't have, as became increasingly obvious in the weeks and months that followed, was a game.

Actually, if all the team working on the project hadn't had at that point was a game, they would have been in a much happier place. After all, making games is supposed to be what they do. They could have come up with one in a year or two.

But it was much worse than just not having a game. They also didn't have a game engine or a voxel engine or an AI engine. They didn't have any of the basic infrastructure they needed to hang their game on when they made it.

It didn't stop there. In addition to having no game and no game engines they didn't even have a game plan. Instead they had "open development". That high-concept take on game-making amounted to not much more than a sporadic series of talking shops that asked questions that no-one cared about and didn't even listen to the answers to those.

There was a series of videos offering the unedifying spectacle of various staffers goofing with each other and sending up the project even as they were supposed to be promoting it. There was a whole beta application process, made hideously complicated and controversial by the involvement of PSS1, all for a product that had no earthly chance of entering any kind of beta in any reasonable time-frame.

Let's see, how about we put Qeynos...here!

And, of course, there was Landmark or, as it was initially known, Everquest Next: Landmark.

Landmark came as a total surprise. I never heard anyone claim to have anticipated or expected that SOE would simultaneously announce that they were going to make a new EQ MMORPG and a voxel-based, Minecraft inspired quasi-MMO at one and the same time, let alone that the latter would be available to play in less than six months.

They did, though, and it was. Or it was for those early adopters and curiosity-seekers willing to shell out the price of a triple-A release for what turned out to be a poorly-optimized tech demo.

The weirdest thing about Landmark and its controversial alpha-launch is that, if you go back and read the coverage from those first few months, it seems a lot of people were having a really good time. I was. I bought the most expensive pack for Mrs Bhagpuss as a birthday present and the cheaper one for myself so I could play too.

I have never regretted it for a second. I believe we got good value for our money. If you read my blog posts from back then you can see I was having a lot of fun. A couple of months of fun for the cost of a regular game is about what you'd expect. Of course, some of the supposed perks that were included in the price, like Early Access when the game launched and the ability to carry some of your work into release will never be fulfilled, but I knew then that I was paying a fee to get into the alpha. Everything else was just window-dressing.

I really enjoyed those first two or three months in Landmark. In many ways I liked it best back then, when it was rough and ready and there wasn't much to it. Over the years it has been smoothed and rounded and plumped up so that it's actually quite presentable, although that means it now runs like a three-legged dog on my aging PC.

I'm not so pessimistic as some about Landmark's upcoming launch. It's always been a fun...toy. It's not really a game. At $9.99 it could be a bargain. I'm looking forward to playing it again, whenever I finally upgrade to some tech that can handle it.

Wherever there are Combine Spires there'll always be Norrath

Landmark wasn't only (many would say "even") a "game" in its own right. It was also supposed to be the test-bed for the systems that would drive EQNext. And it was, controversially, the crowd-sourced sweatshop for some of that putative game's actual content.

Landmark players were set contests to design and build what were intended to be the cities of Norrath's future. I forget which ones they got around to doing - Neriak was one. The prize was supposed to be seeing your work immortalized in EQNext; to be part of Norrath, forever.

Now there won't be a new Norrath. Of course, it was actually going to be a very old Norrath, a Norrath from the deep past. Another swirl in the mist of confusion that  obfuscated everything about the project and made it harder and harder to explain or sell as time wore on.

There won't be a new Norrath in Landmark. Officially, that is. The precarious thread between the two has finally been broken. When the game launches you should, as always promised, be able to build whatever you want. I'm betting now that someone, probably a lot of someones, will build Norrath. Just because.

So, we'll have Landmark, if anyone wants it. We won't have EQNext. I'm glad about that. Let's be honest, it looked awful. Other than that jaw-dropping first presentation, when did anything about the project inspire excitement or anticipation from anyone with a strong affection for the franchise?

EQNext was going to be a bright, brash technicolor ARPG in which cartoon characters bounced Tigger-like across frangible landscapes with all the subtlety of a runaway wrecking ball. It would have been a center-targeted, left/right mouse button hammering, console-favoring experience that bore little or no relation to any previous version of Norrath's story.

I would have played it despite almost all the features Dave Georgeson and Jeff Butler crowed over, not because of them. Just because it would, in some peripheral sense, have continuity.

They call this place The Graveyard of Dreams.

I'm very sorry so much time and energy and effort and money was wasted on such a hubristic project. I dearly wish they'd stuck with whatever the first iteration of EQ3 was, all those years ago, before they scrapped it, what was it, four more times? If they'd just have aimed squarely at their core market we might have been playing EQ3 for five years now and I could be writing a piece today speculating on when we might see EQ4.

This is the problem with MMOs. It's great to have a franchise. It's great to have a loyal core audience that wants more of the same. But, unlike a franchise in movies or novels or comics you can't just keep churning them out and selling them to the same people because when it comes to MMOS those same people are still playing your last franchise game.

All that happens if you try to sell them another one is that your same  audience splits into smaller parts. Which is why, instead of making new MMOs you make expansions and stack them on top until the whole thing teeters and totters and anyone not already on the top floor gets a stiff neck looking up at what she'll have to climb to get to where everyone else is supposedly having the time of their lives.

That, I guess, is why Smed and Smokejumper and Jeff "No Gamer Name" Butler were so keen to break out to find a brand new audience. They must have known as well as anyone that all their core audience really wanted was EverQuest with better graphics. That's all the core audience ever wants (although the evidence from EQ's various graphical overhauls suggests that even when they get it they don't like it. Then again, that sums up the average EQ or EQ2 player's response to everything).

Well, the dream of growing the EQ franchise into a new zeitgeist and a global brand is over. It was never more than a pipe dream, at that. The people behind EQ already changed the paradigm once, when they laid down the framework for Blizzard to follow as they made World of Warcraft. You don't often get to change the paradigm or dictate the zeitgeist twice in a career and never by doing the same thing over again.

DCUO: doing much better than clinging on by its fingertips.

What the fallout from this admission of defeat will be remains to be seen. I thought Russell Shanks' statement was quite informative, especially if you read between the lines, as I always try to do. He as much as says that they bit off more than they could chew and that's a lesson SOE never, ever learned. If all that comes out of the fall of EQNext is a realization at DBG that projects need to be proven to be practical, realistic and manageable before work begins on them, that will be a fine legacy.

I believe the EQ franchise has been better-served under DBG than it was for many years under latter-day Sony management. The games run well, get regular updates and new content. The small teams working on them are doing a stellar job. GW2 players can only wish they were getting the same level of service from ANet's vastly larger workforce.

It may be over-optimistic to hope that EQNext going down the pan will free up some extra resources for the older Everquest titles, let alone that we might actually see a new, less insanely ambitious EQ game announced at some point. More likely the individuals not required to work on EQN any longer will be re-assigned to DBG's now-flagship titles, which would be the twin H1Z1s and DCUO.

Whatever happens, though, I am sure it will be better either than the endless silence and suspicion of an unreleased EverQuest Next or the inevitable media car-crash that would have ensued should that unhappy game ever have seen the light of day.

Goodbye EQNext. We never knew you and you won't be missed.