EverQuest

Here we go again. The top 38 MMOs in the last 30 days in the USA, as reported by Google Trends.

I haven’t played the Ship of Heroes beta in awhile, and I entirely missed the previous housing beta. I wasn’t going to make that same mistake twice; when I got the offer to join the superhero MMOs second housing beta, I signed right up and dove right in. To recap a little, Ship of Heroes is a superhero MMO that invokes the classic superhero MMO, City of Heroes – except instead of being set in a city, it is set on a giant spaceship, within which is a city. ...

Is there a vinyl album out there that would spur you to buy a record player? I thought I’d never do it, until that one album came along. When I moved from California back to New England, I was bound and determined to take nothing that wasn’t absolutely necessary. Anything I didn’t need – set out by the apartment dumpsters, hoping they would find new homes. I hadn’t had a record player for a long time, but I’d still been lugging around my old vinyl albums from place to place for sentimental reasons. Complete Floyd collection. Local Monterey bands. Those old Ian Dury EPs. A bunch of prog rock. I hoped whoever took them would get some enjoyment from them, maybe discover a new band or two. ...

I had the Ethereum. I had Bitcoins and Doge Coin and even Bounce for awhile, but I had the Ethereum to play a few cryptogames. This is what I found. It’s my feeling the largest barrier to cryptogaming is having to shell out a substantial amount of money before you even know if you like the game. The games I’ve seen are fairly simple and not really innovative, aside from using the blockchain in some way. ...

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 :-) ...

I don’t play every MMO that comes out – not by a longshot. But, I follow a lot of gamers, streamers, and game developers, and between me and them, I see a lot of discussion about the new MMOs that come down the pike. Crowfall was released a couple of weeks ago. Suddenly, everyone was talking about it. And then, suddenly everyone was not. What did it all mean? I asked Google Trends to help me analyze searches for a dozen or so MMOs to help understand what all was going on with MMOs today. ...

Amazon’s new MMO, “New World”, comes out soon. Everyone is excited – but I don’t know if I’m ready for a new MMO commitment.

The problem with playing an older game straight from CD like Lords of EverQuest is that these kinds of games go to production before they’re actually finished. Long lead times, that sort of thing. I think that’s what must have happened here. The SOEGames.Net patch servers have long since been taken down, and the game I am playing here is whatever was on the disc and nothing else; I am very much assuming that if I’d been able to patch up this game, that it would have fixed the issue with the “Contention” map in the Shadowrealm campaign. ...

I am not a Real Time Strategy gamer. I haven’t played Warcraft, or Starcraft, or Dune or even Total Annihilation. So, I really have nothing to which to compare Lords of EverQuest, a game developed by Rapid Eye Entertainment for SOE to tie into the MMO way back in the day. It has the word “EverQuest” in it, though, so when it came out in that far ago time, I wanted to play it, but money was tight and I was already playing the actual game and besides, it would probably be around for awhile… ...

Yesterday, “Kingdoms of Amalur: The Re-Reckoning”, an update of 2012’s “Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning” was released. It’s a refresh of a game that seemed groundbreaking at the time, being a single-player experience that would familiarize its players with the world of the MMO at that time known as Project Copernicus. The story of Project Copernicus and its developers, 38 Studios, would fill books. Its failure left Kingdoms of Amalur in a weird spot: An MMO-ish single player RPG set in an MMO world that would never exist. While playing KoA, it’s easy to imagine other people crafting at the quest hubs, teaming up for the dungeons, and bringing the world to life. As a single player game, it plays like an MMO just after the servers come up. ...