I’d heard wonderful things about Shards of Dalaya, a game built on EverQuest’s assets (and using the EverQuest client) but with a different plot, zone names, zone connections and so on. SOE knows about it and turns a blind eye to it for reasons of their own.
Nonetheless, even with the changes, Dalaya gives a fairly nostalgic look back to the simplicity and danger of old EverQuest, and though I realized I wasn’t as interested in the pure vanilla old school experience as I thought it was (half an hour to level 2? Madness!), the community is passionate and enthusiastic and active development on the game continues.
Ramon AKA Psyq123 started a couple of characters on Shards of Dalaya and writes about it on his new blog, Dalayan Diary. Even though SoD is not quite EverQuest classic, it really does bring me back to 1999 when I rolled my first character, an Erudite Wizard, and stepped into the Stygian darkness of Toxxulia Forest.
Great reading 🙂
11 thoughts on “Shards of Dalaya blog: Dalayan Diary”
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Wow, thanks a lot for mentioning the blog 🙂
Toxxulia is known as “Mistwoods” in SoD. And I’ll soon post something about a crazy newbie druid quest that leads there 😉 The quests in SoD are quite well-crafted. I’m most surprised about how compact the world is, you always see actual people running around in zones that in EQ live are long dead.
By the way, the leveling curve does get steeper after a while. The SoD guys think it’s no fun to run a server where everyone can just level and teleport and turn into a GM at any time (like on many emulated servers). I think that wouldn’t be fun either. Instead, you do have to fight for your exp pretty quickly, and even newbie mobs have quite sophisticated spellcasting AI. In Fearstone Keep for example (a level 8 – 20 dungeon or so), you’ll find mobs that fear, root and DoT reasonably close to the zone entrance. Refreshing! 😉
Thanks for the shout out!
Have been reading your blog since Psyq linked it for us and have been enjoying it!
That is absolutely fascinating. I almost wish I had the appropriate version to try this out.
Anjin, have a look at the SoD forums, they have guides for all sorts of versions. If yours is too new, just make a copy of the folder and then run the SoD patcher on it. It will take quite a while, but it’s safe and leaves your proper installation alone.
Can’t hurt to try, although at the moment a worldwide war is going on and the Kaezulian forces have invaded many cities, so newbie life is not great in some areas 🙂 The players actually have to drive these guys out of the cities before things become normal again, I think. Fun!
You need no appropriate version! If you have eq installed and have patched further than our version 99% of the time our patcher can revert you to SoD goodness. Worst case scenerio just patch back to live and its no harm no foul.
When a newbie logs into a war zone (<level 30) they can either escape or get evacuated. The evacuation happens to any city of their choosing with appropriate quests. Feel free to petition to get a quick evacuation!
Otherwise the Kaezulians are not huge fans of not hurting the newbies =(
Yeah, I’ve gotten caught in a war-loop. After a couple of kills, I was evac’d. Another time, I was actually able to survive and scoop a cool weapon for my lowbie by following someone who was killing Kaezulians. Yes, these happen with some regularity. One of the coolest things about Dalaya.
My bard logged into Kelethin during the way, got killed once by a kaezulian and then jumped off the platform. Downstairs, there was a huge pile of kaezulian corpses 🙂 If I had been a bit lower-level, I would have looted all of them and sold their shields and axes to vendors the next morning.
Cheeky and bardlike! 🙂
You guys are gonna force me to give SoD another shot 😛
Hi all,
Used to love playing Eq years ago, saw SOD the other day and said lets give it a try. Well finnaly after 2 days of trying I get it up and running. I zone in to The Dream and talk to the guide and when I say Ver well what should I do.. he buff’s me then the spell turns into a dot and keeps killing me spawn zone, I die spawn zone etc… What am I doing wrong plz any help will be appreciated.
Patching now…sooo excited! Have always wanted to go back to 2000-2002 EQ.