EQOA: Desperately Seeking Skandalf

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 馃檪

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.

6 thoughts on “EQOA: Desperately Seeking Skandalf”

  1. This has been on my radar for years. I have their website bookmarked and I’ve read though the various versions of how to set it up a few times but it always seemed too complicated.

    I was just about to look into playing EQOA when they shut down the UK/EU servers and you needed a US PS2 to access the US servers. I did even look into buying an old US PS2 to play for that but it was too expensive, what with the outrageous shipping charges. Then the US server closed too so that was that.

    I just watched the video you embedded, though, and it looks doable. It’s a very clear walkthrough of the whole process. There’s a lot going on in the mmorpg space just now so EQOA might have to wait a little longer but I’ll get there eventually.

    I assume you’ve seen the really excellent Vanguard Emu? That’s in a much more advanced state than this – quite a lot is fully playable at the lower levels, with quests, mobs, xp, skills etc all working. Diplomacy is barebones and I don’t think crafting is in at all yet but it’s a fantastic opportunity to wander around Telon as it was.

    What were the EQ phone games? I know about the PC Pilot ones, which are available to download and play, somewhere, I think. I did a post on them and downloaded the files but I haven’t actually tried installing them. I just discovered, googling stuff to write this comment, that there’s supposedly a Mobile version of EverQuest in development for Android (Yeah, I don’t believe it either) which is going to form the subject of my post for today, probably., so I won’t say any more just yet.

    Anyway, thanks for the video link – might see you in Tunaria some day!

    • There were some for the Pocket PC — Zelda-ish games. I’ve been looking for those for awhile. Those might be the ones you’re talking about. Wikipedia has the full list, but it’s the Zelda-ish ones I’ve been looking for.

    • Hanging out in the EQOA Discord, hearing everyone talk about their EQOA memories, I’m really excited to see what ends up happening with Project Return Home.

  2. I did play me some serious EQOA back in the day. The game was in many ways in between launch era EQ and later games like WoW in its design sensibilities. The game also did some things really well that I think games today could still learn from.

    Long and slightly off topic aside . . .

    Right before the servers went down, I went in and took a bunch of pictures of the game on my CRT TV. I have a post written about how Erudites worked in the game, which I haven’t pulled the trigger on yet. You could visit the island they colonized before the shadowknights and necromancers split off from the rest, and talk to Erud himself. I haven’t put it up yet because I want to do a two or three post series exploring how this imaginary race evolved physically and culturally between the time or EQOA, EQ and EQ II, and I have never gotten around to doing the research for a follow up posts. However, I do think it’s very cool how they went from fairly normal looking humans, to fiveheads, to hairless and alien looking as magic affected their evolution over time.

    • I said in the post that Odus was still attached to Tunaria in EQOA, but I saw an official map and it’s still an island, though not where I would expect it to be.

      I’d love to read about the lore of the Erudites 馃檪 The EQ lore was truly earth-shattering; they blasted a city to Luclin, leaving the Hole behind, and were in some way mixed up with the Combine Empire. I might be getting this wrong, but I remember being fascinated by their history. My very first EQ character was an Erudite wizard, Mehve.

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