I didn’t know what to expect when I logged into EverQuest Online Adventures for the first time. When a dark elf cleric named Skandalf started following me around, healing me when I fought anything, I thought she was a bot. But now, I’m not so sure.
**Update: **Apparently Skandalf was the name of a mage pet in the live version of EQOA, sort of like any EQ player would know who you were talking about if you mentioned “Jabober”. How I got a healing mage pet for awhile is something I don’t know. Thanks to the folks on the EQOA Revival Discord for setting me straight :-)
Look, I don’t know what else you might say about me, but don’t go telling anyone I didn’t buy both the original EverQuest Online Adventures for the PS2, and its expansion, Frontiers. I did. There they are. Disks and everything. Frontiers even has a full manual, and it’s a pretty beefy one.
You might want to then ask, why play a game that shut down almost a decade ago, that was for a really old system, that hardly anyone even knew about?
Geez. Wow. I really thought you knew me better than that. Because it’s an EverQuest that I haven’t yet played. EQ, EQ2, EQ Landmark, played those mainline games. Lords of EverQuest, yup, played it. Champions of Norrath 1 & 2? I did indeed play those. Legends of Norrath? PLEASE. EQ2 Fortune League? Seriously? The only ones I have not played were the mobile versions for phones I didn’t have. If I can find them and a way to play them, though, I will.
I can play EQOA now thanks to Project: Return Home, an effort by a group of dedicated volunteers to reverse engineer the EQOA servers and bring Tunaria back to life. It’s really astonishing what they’ve managed to accomplish, but even with all the work they’ve done, it’s still pretty far from where the game was when it was live. Most of what you can do at the moment is just run around a barren world, a HUGE barren, ZONELESS world.
The video I embedded up above will lead anyone through setting up their PC to play the game. It includes everything you need. EVERYTHING. I guess I didn’t need to buy the actual discs, but I’m glad I did, anyway.
Character creation is pretty much what you’d expect for the era, and better than original flavor EverQuest was when it launched. The only race I didn’t see was Ogre, though I may have missed it. And I don’t remember if Half Elf was there, either.
The world is smaller; there is only the continent of Tunaria, with what was once Faydwer now northeast of Freeport, and Odus still plastered to the west end of the continent. Of Kunark and Velious, there is no sign.
So, I popped into the world and started running around, trying to figure out what the controls did. I could have read the manual, but it’s 2021. Who reads anymore? Accidentally targeted and attacked an NPC (perhaps it was the mayor) and had my first death.
All this time, a high elf cleric was following me around. I thought at first it was another player. It just kept following me. I found some low level critters all lined up and I started hitting one of them, and Skandalf kept healing me. We kept up with this – me killing, Skandalf healing – until I dinged level 2.
I started exploring, but no matter where I went, soon Skandalf would come running up. They weren’t showing on the /who list. I tried talking to them, but nothing. I eventually bumped into Highpass Hold, and decided to log off there and make a new character so that I could explore Freeport.
But Skandalf wasn’t there, and when I logged back on later to my HPH character, no sign. Wow. I was just thinking about powerleveling to 50, but I guess I won’t, then.
I found a goblin dungeon called Mossmouth. This is apparently a quest mob. None of the mobs are aggro in the game, and there aren’t many of any sort.
The world is wide and desolate, but there are stark moments of beauty, here and there.
I don’t know if Project: Return Home will ever become truly playable (and I think it’s amazing how the original EverQuest emulators like Project: 1999 do the trick). But if you are missing Tunaria, or just want to stroll through a version of Norrath you may not have seen before, give it a shot.
My first half hour in Tunaria is embedded below.