I was a little worried on Saturday.  EVE University was doing an update to their wiki and my gut response to that was a deeply felt “please don’t break anything.”  It is one of the EVE Online community resources I lean on regularly and its departure would be missed.

A core of the New Eden community

Also, it would leave a ton of dead links on my site, which is what happened when CCP shut down the game wiki they were running.

Fortunately, not too long later, there was a message saying that the update was a success.  The wiki carries on.

Op success!

I should go donate some money at their Patreon.  I probably won’t, but in the words of Todd Rosenberg, the fact that I seriously considered doing so will make me feel better about myself. (I bring him up because I found an Odd Todd sweatshirt in a drawer and I had to sit and think about which economic downturn and layoffs that was from.

Shout out if you have any memories of this…

It was the Dot Com crash of 2001, which was like four Wall Street induced economic crises ago by my count.  Welcome to capitalism!)

As usual, I am off on a tangent, so back to the main thread here.

The Equinox expansion brought a host of new things, including new skills to learn, which meant that I was at least momentarily interested keeping an eye on my training queue.  I remember a time when that was almost an obsession.  In the days before the training queue you had to keep an eye on EVEMon to make sure you knew when to log in and start another skill because time subscribed without a skill training was time UTTERLY WASTED!

Old hands will remember being admonished to start training a long skill the day before an expansion as we never know how long the downtime would be or if CCP would do something wrong, like delete your boot.ini file.  (And no, I am never letting go of that bit of ancient history.)

Things are better now, but I do still feel a bit of the old obsession to stare at some utility while not logged into the game to see exactly where current skill training stands.

This is especially dumb because my currently training skill is Jump Portal Generation V, which I am a good 68 days from learning as of when this post goes live.

The top of my skill queue currently

I want that skill because I need it to do the carrier conduit jump and I want to have that capability.  I have a carrier, a twelve year old Archon that I bought back when we lived up in Delve and have never once used in combat to my recollection.  That is largely because nobody wants a carrier in the fleet when every capital pilot has a super carrier and because I can never remember how to use fighters.

Seriously, I’ve been through three Imperium capital training ops on how to use fighters and I know how to used them when the class is done, then I don’t use fighters at all and six months later when I think about it I have totally forgotten how to use them.

Odds are I’ll never use it, or if I am in a situation where a fleet needs somebody to do this, there will be two dozen others ready to go who also know how to use fighters.  But maybe, some day, Asher will need somebody in some set of circumstances and I’ll be the only one at hand who can manage it.  Be prepared.

So I want to be able to bring up my training queue and stare at it, all the better to make the training go faster.

But what can I stare at?

I mean, we used to have an official app from CCP, the EVE Portal Companion App, which showed up back in 2019.

EVE Portal App

I was not a fan, the app’s primary purposes seeming to be allowing PLEX trading.  But I had to admit that it did have some utility, including the ability to manage your training queue offline.

And I still have the app on my phone… the way I still have Harry Potter: Wizards Unite… because I am that kind of person.  But tapping on it gets me nothing because CCP gave up on the app last November.

So no joy there.

But the EVE Online community provides!  There must be some app out there I can use.

Except, there really aren’t that many other options.

There is the Neocom II app on iOS, the author of which lives in Belarus and went silent after the  anti-Lukashenko protests after the last election there, so I was told.

This version is made with moon goo

As such, the Neocom II app, while a fine app and well worth the money I spent on it, has been slowly decaying as EVE gets updated.  As such, no new skills show up in the skill queue in the app now and any sales transaction for a new item causes an error in the app.

But at least Jump Portal Generation is an old skill, so it appears in the app allowing me to stare at its progress on the couch, in bed, at the kitchen table, or any number of other household locations.  Except, it is wrong.  Look at what it tells me.

Things are thirteen days faster on the Neocom II app!

For whatever reason… CCP no doubt made some change with Equinox… the training progress in the app is somewhat more optimistic than what the in-game queue, pictured up the page, is telling me by nearly 13 days.  Also, you can see the Upwell skills simply don’t show up the way they do in game.

Anyway, that seems to leave Neocom II out.  I’ll still watch it to keep an eye on my PI and a few other things, but another aspect of it is now broken.

So my next stop is EVEMon.  Good old reliable EVEMon, which has been around since just after I started playing EVE Online.

I mean, it is past its prime.  It hasn’t been the same since Battle Clinic, which used to host its development page, went away back in 2016.  But it gets updates now and then, though where it lives can be a chore to find.  I think the link in the about page of the app is wrong, but the links in the EVEMon thread on the forums still seems good.

So how is that doing?  Well, on the bright side, it at least puts in placeholders for the skills it doesn’t know about.

My skill queue in EVEMon

On the down side, it seems to have the same problem with the training time for Jump Portal Generation V… though the first of the Unknown Skills seems to have the correct training time for the skill listed.  That seems odd, but at least I can see it somewhere I suppose.

Like I said, EVEMon does get updates now and then… and they even alert you and allow you to download and install them directly from the app… but there isn’t a lot of news going on that front.  The last update I see was in 2021, which doesn’t give one much hope.

It could get an update I suppose… or it might never get one.  So it goes.

I fished around a bit more and found EVE Skillplan.net, which is better in that it does get the time for the one skill correct, but then doesn’t acknowledge any of the new skills and it is about 6 million skill points shy of being accurate for my total skill points… which, now that I mention it, so is EVEMon… pegging me at 258 million SP when I am close to 265 million. It also doesn’t look like the site has been updated for a while, and his ISK tip jar has received zero ISK this month.

So I am feeling that gap in the EVE Online community that supports the game with the news and utilities and information that CCP has been consistently unable to supply on its own for the last 21 years.

This is the pain of depending on your customers to essentially do things for free.  When they are done with your game anything they built tends to fall apart.

And that’s when I start worrying about things like the EVE Uni Wiki and DOTLAN EVE Maps and zKillboard, all of which support the community for a few donations now and then but mostly out of the goodness of their collective hearts and their passion for the game.

It feels like it is getting a little late in the season to kick off the events that will lead to the twentieth Alliance Tournament.  I mean last year things were already in motion in April, though the final events were in August, while this year the actual tournament will be at the end of October, so perhaps the timing is fine.  It just feels off.

All of which is an awkward intro to the fact that CCP has announced the timeline for Alliance Tournament XX.

Alliance Tournament XX is coming!

And the first date on the list, pre-season and signups for Thunderdome server access starts today and team registrations close on Friday, July 5th, less than two weeks from now.

This year the tournament will be sponsored by CONCORD so you can expect a more law & order theme I suppose and the yet to be announced prize ships could be variations on their hulls I suppose.  What would an AT prize ship based on the Monitor look like?  I mean, it features in the teaser trailer, right?

This also means that the Marshal, Enforcer, and Pacifier will be allowed in the tournament this year, probably with enticing point values to make them more attractive.  Also, the new Upwell ships will be available if you have some sort of hauler based cunning plan in mind I guess.

CCP is changing the point system, giving each team 200 points to spend, double the 100 point system used previously.  Ship values will be scaled up to match this new system, but there will be space for more granularity between hull types.

CCP is also going to host the tournament broadcasts back in Iceland this year which means that travel plans and short notice will probably make it awkward to get as many presenters.  We shall see.

Full details for the tournament will be released on June 27th, the far end of this week.  But yesterday’s dev blog about it does have the planned timeline of events:

• 22 June – Pre-season begins & signups for Thunderdome access open
• 27 June – Rules announced, team registrations open, Thunderdome opens
• 28 June – Recruitment for commentators/analysts begins
• 5 July – Team registrations close
• 9 July – Team roster (and mercenary) submissions open
• 19 July – Feeder tournament format announcement & team draw
• 1 August – Roster (and mercenary) lock concludes (ad submission deadline for the Feeders)
• 24 & 25 August – Feeders tournament broadcast weekend 1
• 31 August & 1 September – Feeder tournament broadcast weekend 2
• 4 September – Post feeder roster lock begins
• 17 September – Post feeder roster lock concludes & flagship submissions begin
• 24 September – Flagship lock deadline (ad submission deadline for the main tournament)
• 19 & 20 October – Alliance Tournament XX weekend 1
• 26 & 27 October – Alliance Tournament XX weekend 2

That is the plan.  CCP is also encouraging people to use the AT channels on their Discord server to look for teams or keep up to date.  You can find the EVE Online Discord server here.

Related:

• CCP – Announcing Alliance Tournament XX!

I will admit that you really have to be in the right mood to take on a new MMORPG… Tarisland is an MMORPG, isn’t it?  It is just Amazon Games that is trying to distance itself from whatever stigma they have made up in their minds for that term, right?

It is here now

Anyway, mood and mindset… you have be ready, to have it within you to go through all the opening stages and the slow progression and the tutorial moments and whatever else is between you and playing the damn game on your own terms.

And it would be fair to ask whether I was in a receptive state of mine, willing and able to go through the pedestrian opening stages that tend to characterize any MMORPG.  There is a dichotomy in play at the start of any such game, where the first, say, 20 levels or so, can be the best part of the game… the way the first 100 moves can be the best part of a Civilization game… or where those early levels can be bothersome, boring drag that makes you want to log off and do something else.

I had earlier this week walked away from the EverQuest II Anashti Sul Origins Server because I simply could not stomach the idea of going through those first 20 levels yet again.

But there was also nearly 20 years of history and maybe 50 characters of weight behind that choice.  So maybe it wasn’t a fair assessment as to my ability to jump into a new game based on that.

So I downloaded Tarisland yesterday morning and spent a bit of time with it while I ate my lunch, and I wasn’t very many bites into that before I decided I hated the game.

It wasn’t the cut scenes, though I did think that the gunship in it looks suspiciously like a rip-off of WoW… was it going to be a WoW clone after all?

Yeah, not at all borrowed from Azeroth

It wasn’t the annoying way you had to go through a ten second flourish every time you wanted to look at a different class in the character creation tool.

He’s a warrior

I mean, seriously, did nobody think that maybe a tool tip or a title or something that would just tell you what each of the classes are on the left hand side of the screen would be a reasonable idea?  Instead you have to click on each one and go through their demo reel before you can even see what they are.

But you only have to do that for a bit, not constantly, so I could get past that.

I wasn’t bothered by the art style, which felt more like what the Daybreak team was trying to achieve with EverQuest Next than WoW’s particular flavor of stylized art, but whatever.  I am good with it.

The rather minimal of character customization options and the rather minimal effect they have on your look… are kind of par for the course for titles of Asian origin.  The most noticeable thing you can change is your hair style, and really only the color of your hair in that set of options has any effect on how you look at even a slight distance.

The slider for height felt like deciding if you want to be 5′ 9″ or 5′ 11″ for range of options, while the size of your head… there is a slider for the size of your head… basically changed your hat size in a range of maybe five notches… maybe size 57 to 62 in scale.

Can you even tell what head size I chose?

But that was fine.  I’ve literally seen so much worse that I couldn’t care about it save to note it in passing.

I did find the fact that there are still some sex locked classes… ever the hallmark of Asian MMOs… to be a bit irksome, but I was going to make a paladin and could be either sex with that class.  Paladins are bi-sexual… or ambi-sexual… or something.

And, I will admit, the lack of support for screenshots was annoying.  There is an option in the menu to go to a photo mode where you can take posed pictures of your character.

Welcome to the photo studio

There are bunch of options within that UI and you can set yourself with or without the UI… though why it would take a picture with the UI is beyond me.  At least I think that is why there is the option to hide the photo UI, to keep it from being in the picture… though trying is, you get no UI either way… so why?

Once you take the picture it saves it away for you and I had to dig around to find where it chose to secret these shots.  They end up in the Pictures directory on Windows, which I guess makes sense, but I thought of half a dozen other places they could be… all based on how OTHER games store pictures… before I ended up there.  And you end up with a bland post card shot that I guess you’re supposed to post to social media or something.

This isn’t all that interesting, honestly

That feels like a lot of work for very little value.  So to get the few screenshots shown here I had to mash the Print Screen button, then tab out and paste the clipboard into Paint.net.  I could have gotten FRAPs setup to take screen shots, or the nVidia overlay thingy, but I was a few minutes into the game and didn’t want to break stride to find out if I remembered how to do either.

Oh, but I did get my first name choice.  I wonder if that speaks to the popularity of the game on the North American server?

There were other little annoyances as well, things that felt like they shouldn’t have been a problem for any company that had ever shipped an MMO before, but nothing game breaking.

On the good side, they do get you right into the action.  Once you get past the cut-scenes when you launch the game… and you have to see them EVERY TIME you launch the game… you are doing something fun, like killing things.

Void Fiend I shall end you!

The combat is very ability oriented and reminds me, at first glance, more of a Guild Wars 2 style of combat that WoW, with a limited set of combat skills available, though I haven’t played GW2 in years so don’t take offense if you disagree strongly with that characterization.

They even throw you into a group right away to go through a mini-boss fight… though I suspect those are all NPCs in my group as opposed to actual people.

NPCs or the most boring set of name choices ever to be in a single group… I mean, “Janet?”

And you take that group and fight a dragon and have to go through some simple boss fight mechanics that get shouted at you… Catherine gets on you about going here or avoiding that, though at least never quite gets to “more DOTS” level of raid boss… and things happen.

Look, I am tanking a dragon two minutes into playing!

Things do fall off a bit after that as you get into the more normal introduction tour of the game, but at least it gives you a taste of what could be achieved.

Summing up so far:  Some minor annoyances and a modestly above average intro.

So what is the issue?  Why “hate” in the title of the post.

Let’s talk about movement controls.

I am old and set in my ways, so for a classic, over the shoulder, fantasy MMORPG I am good with two movement control schemes, both based on the WASD keys.

The first is the way that WoW and EverQuest and frankly most western title in the genre handle it, which is A rotates you left, D rotates you right, and if the game decides you need to strafe left or right, you probably use the Q and E keys for that.  Boring but reliable.

Sure, you can also mouse turn using the right mouse button on your mouse… I did try not to use the word mouse three times in that, but failed… and some people will get very upset if you do not do this in certain circumstances… but it isn’t the only way you can turn.

The other method is the first person shooter way of life, where the cursor controls where you face when moving and the WASD keys make you move, with A and D allowing you to strafe left and right.

This is what Valheim uses, along with every first person shooter I can recall off hand, mostly because mouse aim is a requirement.

I prefer the first, but can adapt to the second at need with a short transition.

What I cannot abide is how Tarisland has decided to setup their movement controls, which is the same way that V Rising chose to do it, where it is mostly the FPS model, but you need to hold down the right mouse button to engage directional control.  And I get why you might want to consider this in a title where you might need the cursor free to do other things.

Actually no, no I do not.  I do not get why somebody would chose this control model as it seems inferior to me that the previous two methods I outlined.  On find out this is the way the game played I immediately went into the settings in the hopes I could remedy this… but the settings options are so minimal as to be laughable.  And there was certainly nothing in there to deal with the movement controls… probably a side effect of the game being on mobile as well as PC.  So I was cut off.

I have taken this tack before and had somebody get quite annoyed with me when I said this was why I immediately stopped playing V Rising.  Their annoyance in that moment came from the fact that I could not immediately articulate why “just holding down the right mouse button” was a problem for me.

But I can do so here.  The reason is that I don’t use a mouse on my home machine, I use a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball.

Kensington Expert Mouse… old picture, but I have the same mouse still

And with the trackball and button configuration, holding down the right mouse button any time I want to move… which would be pretty much constantly in any combat if the intro demo is to be believed… is pretty much a non-starter as it probably requires more pinky finger endurance than I posses that being my go-to right mouse click finger.

So, easy on a normal mouse, kind of tough, or at least annoying, on my trackball.

And I am committed to that trackball.  I have been using variations of that same heavy ball model trackball since the late 1980s.  I am so committed that I have on the bookshelf behind me another one, still new in its box, just in case the current one fails and I find out that whoever owns the brand these days… Logitech owned it last I checked… has discontinued it.  I am not letting things go down the way they did with that G15 keyboard in the picture above.  No way!

Now, I am not completely unreasonable on this.  If our group decided that Tarisland was really the next game we wanted to play, I would probably find a way to deal with the issue.  But that seems unlikely to occur and for a free MMO that I do not have any real investment in beyond the 25GB download.  It is easier to let it go that try to get invested with that particular barrier in place.

But it does answer the one question about Tarisland that I have been harping on since it was announced, which is whether or not it was really the blatant and obvious WoW clone that some in the gaming press made it out to be long before they ever cast an eye on the actual game.

The answer to that, in my book, is “no.”  If a game is going to adopt a different set of movement controls, then it isn’t doing a very good job of being a clone.

That, however, is me getting into details.  I could point out the combat skills and the hot bar arrangement and the character models and probably many more things that would disqualify it from that appellation in the eye of a discerning fan of the genre.

But if you want to just say anything with a stylized art style, over the shoulder point of view, quests, and tab targeting combat is a WoW clone, then there are a lot of those to be found beyond Tarisland.

A philosophical question more than a literal one I suppose.

So Tarisland goes back on the shelf.  The headline of this post is somewhat hyperbolic.  My reaction to Tarisland doesn’t rise to anywhere near the level of hate.  It just has a control scheme I tend to avoid because I find it awkward to use.  In that dragon fight, for example, where, as a melee class, I was deep in the fight, I was unable to tell at times if I was even facing the mob because the camera and movement inputs do not respond the way I expect.

Maybe I’ll try it on the iPad.  Maybe it will be the MMO that I actually enjoy on a mobile device.  There are a few posts over on r/mmorpg saying it is more a mobile title ported to PC than the other way around.  Who knows.

Related:

• MMO Fallout – MMOments From Taris Land: I’m Already Max Level
• MMO Fallout – Tarisland’s Limited Reindeer Draws Anger
• Inventory Full – What A Difference A Year Makes… Or Doesn’t
• Massively OP – Tarisland thanks players for 5M pre-registrations with a free sparkle pony

We are officially in summer, with the summer solstice having passed just yesterday.  Happy Midsommar to all who celebrate.  May your sacrifices protect you and bring a bountiful harvest once more.

I was a bit surprised that the Steam Summer Sale did not kick off yesterday.  Steam has a pretty solid track record of landing summer and winter sales on the first day of each season.  But this year it won’t start until the 27th. [Addendum: Though if I had looked back to 2023, I would have seen it didn’t start until the 29th, so just another issue in my brain.]

So no post about that today, as I had sort of planned.  Instead, some things are launching or announcing dates for launch.  Time for a pass through that I guess!

• Tarisland Launches

Tarisland goes live today, doesn’t it?  Technically it is going live world-wide and will have launched everywhere on the list by the time this post gets published.  At 11am eastern time it was supposed to go live here in North America, the last of its launch regions after Asia, Europe, and South America.

Now here and Free to Play

Derided repeatedly as a WoW-clone in a world where it is tough to be an MMORPG without that comparison, it is available on PC, Android, and iOS as a free to play title.

I have said several times that I wanted to give it a try, if only to see if all this WoW-clone talk had any merit.  But I have I downloaded it yet?  I have not.  Maybe it will strike my fancy this weekend.

Anyway, there is a launch announcement with details on how to join in on your platform of choice.  They have even partnered with an emulator to try and make the game playable on MacOS.  You need an M-series Mac, no Intel models need apply, and there are hoops to jump through, but you could make it happen if you were dying to play.

Finally, looking at that logo, is it Tasisland or Taris Land?

Meh, I’m not going to worry about it.

• Throne & Liberty Launch Date

Amazon Games, fresh off their good times trying to pretend New World isn’t an MMORPG, has announced the launch date for their next venture, Throne & Liberty, which promises to bring online RPG gameplay into a new era.

Throne and Liberty and totally not an MMORPG

Also it is multiplayer.  And a lot of people will be able to play together.  I mean, they literally use the word “massive” later on in the text to describe the PvP and PvPvE experience.  It is almost like it is… I don’t know, another MMORPG?

Amazon, why won’t you say that?  They have literally banished the term from their web site.  They make zero MMORPGs if you believe what they say.

Anyway, a title that I nearly put on the “won’t ship in 2024” list for my new year’s predictions… seriously, it was on there, then I realized I had one too many for the point count, so I removed it, will in fact ship in 2024, landing on September 17th.

So I dodged that bullet.  That and the whole refusal by Amazon to use the term “MMORPG” are the key takeaways from this bullet point.

• Valheim Board Game

Valheim has apparently hit the level of success where somebody felt they needed to make a board game out of the experience.

Please Odin… now in physical form

This will be a crowdfunding campaign and run by another company, which is probably good because Iron Gate has like three devs and they still have a biome to finish some time this decade.   The campaign will be run on Game Found, an off-brand Kickstarter clone for board games which you can find here.

There is a teaser video, but I am not going to bother to embed it because it is 17 seconds and tells you less than I’ve already written.  If you are interested you’ll have to go sign up at Game Found to get alerts as to when the campaign will go live… as they haven’t bothered to tell us yet.

• EVE Online Paragon Store for SKINs

The next stage of the Equinox expansion hit yesterday, which included the launch of the Paragon store in game, which allows you to take those rather pricey SKINs you can make with the new SKINR utility and list them on the market.

Want to buy a lime green Harpy SKIN?

And, of course, it is a mess.  The store front is there and you can do some sorting, but as an online shopping experience it rates ahead of the Pokemon Go in-game cosmetic store, but only just barely, and Niantic at least has the poor excuse of having to work within phone sized devices.

Anyway, you can find it in game… not easily, but you’ll get there if you persist… and read the CCP optimistic take on it here.  Or you can go over to r/eve and see what players think.  It isn’t pretty.

• EVE Vanguard Solstice

CCP’s decades spanning desire to make a successful first person shooter game despite all the signs indicating it is a bad idea carries on with a new round of EVE Vanguard testing which starts… wait, it started yesterday, didn’t it?  Yes.

The Solstice is here… which means it will just get darker from now on

The play test… because it is still in alpha so all two dozen fans will get angry and remind you of this should you criticize any aspect of it… features a second map, weapon SKINs, and… um… well, there is still just one gun, but you can now change its stats with chip sets you can find in game.

The play test runs to July 1st, so there is plenty of time to join in.  You’ll need to download it in the EVE Online launcher because CCP is determined to handcuff this potential corpse to its one viable game.  And, of course, they are offering SKINs to people who join in… which feels kind of odd now that they have blown up the SKIN market with SKINR, but whatever.  That is the bribe they have to offer.

You can read more about it here.

• Hearthstone Perils in Paradise

Finally, over at Blizzard they are cranking out yet another Hearthstone expansion.  It isn’t exactly a “month with a vowel in it” level of phenomena, but they do seem to get two or three out every year.

Maybe the WoW team could learn something from them.

Or maybe not, as Hearthstone goes where it pleases with the lore, with the new expansion being called Perils in Paradise, featuring a lot of perhaps unlikely Azeroth activities on the splash screen.

Perils in paradise

Anyway, among the features of the expansion are tourist cards that act as a conduit to bring in cards unrelated to your class in order to spice up your deck.  Blizz is also introducing catch-up packs, which I think was mentioned back at BlizzCon where I made some joke about ketchup packs… wait, here is the joke… was it worth it?

How this helps you with deck building I don’t know…

Anyway, those are here now.  The whole thing launches on July 23rd and you can read more about it here.

That is what I’ve got for Friday.  Did I miss anything?

Yesterday saw the launch of the EverQuest II Origins server Anashti Sul.  This is not just another cheap nostalgia tour through the old content using the modern mechanics however.  This is an attempt to get back to an earlier feel of EQII.  Not the original feel, not the chaos of 2004, nor the transitional era of 2005, but what I like to think of as the “rebirth” that really kicked off in 2006 with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion.

Welcome to the age of origins

To get to this level of “origins” the EQII had to fork the code base so they could do things for this server that they have not be able to do on past fresh start, time locked expansion servers.

Now, this is not a trivial task and something that no doubt kept Blizzard from rolling out WoW Classic sooner than it did, though now they have three branches going, retail, classic, and classic_era.  But they also have something like 5x as many people working on WoW as Darkpaw has working on EverQuest and EverQuest II combined.

So I am kind of surprised that the Norrath team went this hard to bring back a 2006 version of a game that because… and I have a lot of affection and a great deal of investment in EQII… it was the title that launched in November of 2004 that sent most of its initial audience back to EQ or onward to WoW.

WoW Classic was a rousing success because millions of people played WoW to the point that it defined the genre.  Likewise, EQ retro servers succeed because somewhat fewer millions… but still millions… of people played EQ to the point that it defined the genre until WoW came along.

Which isn’t to say that EQII doesn’t have its dedicated audience… but it is a much smaller audience.  And yet, this is where Darkpaw chose to invested their limited and valuable development time.  I’m not saying I don’t appreciate the gesture, but I do question it some as a smart business move.

Here’s to hoping I am just a pessimist.

Anyway, I ended up down the editorial sink hole because in forking the code there are some extra steps you have to take if you wish to play on the new server because it does not use the default client.  From the launch announcement:

• Open your LaunchPad and login.
• In the top-left corner, click the ‘Version’ link which will open the ‘Select Game Version’ panel.
• Choose ‘Origins’ in the drop-down menu, and then hit ‘Apply’ to begin patching.
• Hit ‘Play’ once patching has completed.

That sounds simple enough but I still managed to run past it because my copy of the launcher keeps me logged in, so when it said “login” I hit play and if you do that you’ll never find the server.  So I took a screen shot to make it a little easier for the two people this will probably matter to who hasn’t yet logged in.

Origins Server Launcher Settings

So click on that “version” in the upper left, click on “select game version” from the options displayed, select “Origins” from the drop down, and hit “apply” and you’ll be set to start downloading the new client.

But EQ and EQII have long had dynamic background downloading, so you can play pretty much right away.

And what does all this get you?  Here is what the server offers up to tempt you to experience the game once more:

• The Origins Server, Anashti Sul, launches today!
  • The initial launch of the Origins server will be Shattered Lands, with no expansions and without The Bloodline Chronicles, or The Splitpaw Saga active on the server.
  • To patch the Origins server, you just need to set the version on the launchpad to “Origins”.
• An Origins server is a server set into a specific timeframe with as much rolled back to that exact timeframe as possible. In the case of Anashti Sul, the timeframe that the game exists in is early 2006.
• Some specific points of note:
  • Class abilities are as they were in 2006.
  • Character racial traits have been restored to their 2006 versions.
  • Enemy tactics have been consolidated into the class training trees at level 16, 26, 32, and 38.
  • Tradeskills exist as they did just after the removal of sub-combines.
  • Attributes have restored secondary functionality. Agility will help avoid melee attacks, intelligence will increase ability potency, strength will increase auto-attack and melee ability damage, and wisdom will grant extra resistance.
  • There is a marketplace, but it is very limited.
  • Qeynos and Freeport are back to their uncombined glory, complete with suburbs and hoods.
  • Zones have hard lockouts again instead of persistent instancing.
  • Krono may not be consumed, brokered, or traded on an Origins server.
  • Auto-Attacks will not trigger while an ability is in the process of casting.
• Some specific things could not be restored:
  • Weight. Strongboxes specifically have a limitation that will slow players who attempt to use them as bags outside of city zones or house zones. Otherwise, weight does not exist.
  • Mitigation and resistances are still their consolidated versions. For example, there is a single Arcane resistance instead of Divine, Magic, and Mental resistances.
• The Marketplace on Origins is very limited and will not include things that overly impact progression such as spell research.
• Origins Marketplace will work on a seasonal basis, where appearance items such as mounts, houses, etc will cycle on or off of the marketplace over time. If you miss an item that cycled off, it will become available again once that season cycles around again.
• Familiars on an Origins server will be appearance only and grant no bonuses.
• Mounts on an Origins server will only grant ground mount speed. No flying, no leaping, no slithering, no floating, and no stat bonuses.

The part of 2006 they don’t mention in the patch notes, but are clear about elsewhere, is that a Daybreak all access subscription is required to play.  Subscriptions were everything back in 2006, so it is completely authentic in not offering any  sort of free to play.

There is also a brief launch trailer to get you in the mood.

Sounds great.  I should be juiced up to give it a try.  And, since I have had a Daybreak all access account active for most of 2024 so far, all the better to write about Norrath on this anniversary year, I got right in there and rolled up a character.  I even got my first name choice.

Then I got into the game and to the starting isle and… I really felt the weight of having walked these steps so very many times before.  I did a couple of quests and logged off, not really feeling it.

Now maybe I was just tired at the end of the work day.  Maybe the weekend will find me more enthused.  But after having played at launch for two expansions, then again at Echoes of Faydwer with new characters, and once more at the EQII Extended free to play launch with another fresh set of characters, and finally a couple more times on past retro servers… well, it just made me feel tired.  Maybe some things are better left as memories.

But don’t let me rain on your parade if you want to give 2006 a shot again.  It was a different world back then and I was a much younger gamer.

Related:

• Darkpaw – Anashti Sul is LIVE!
• Darkpaw – June 19th Update Notes
• Darkpaw – Tips for New Players
• Massively OP – EverQuest II’s Anashti Sul progression server is live with its 2006 throwback vibes
• Inventory Full – Welcome To Anashti Sul. Please Have Your Papers Ready
• Inventory Full – It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again