EverQuest Online Adventures

» see eqoa.station.sony.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

console mmos were not the platform i was on. in 2003 i was at university in ankara with ttnet's first widely-available broadband at home, a windows pc that could run whatever pc mmo i felt like trying, and a small ultima online private-server habit on the side. the playstation 2 in my apartment was the disc-game machine. it was not the device i would plug an ethernet cable into to log into a fantasy world for nine years.

everquest online adventures launched on 11 february 2003. sony online entertainment had been running the pc original since 1999. this was the console-side version of the same world of norrath, but set 500 years earlier, during what the developers called the age of adventure. the technical decision that defined the whole project was that it shipped without needing a hard drive. final fantasy xi on the ps2 needed the hdd peripheral. eqoa ran on the network adapter alone, which is the reason it was the only mmo pal territories ever got on that console. europe never received a ps2 hard drive.

the game had fifteen classes and ten races. one paid expansion called frontiers landed in november 2003, adding the ogre race and the alchemist class. after that, content arrived as free updates. soe kept the lights on for nine years, which is longer than most mmos managed even on pc.

the servers closed on 29 march 2012. the announcement was short. by then the ps2 had been out of production for almost a year and the mmo market was sliding into free-to-play. soe kept the original pc everquest running. the console branch got the lights-out treatment.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

in 2003 the console mmo was a real category bet, not a hindsight curiosity. sega's phantasy star online on the dreamcast had already proved a console could host a persistent world. square's final fantasy xi was shipping on the ps2 in japan with a hard drive requirement and a cross-platform pc version. soe wanted norrath on the same platform without forcing the hdd. they shipped on launch day with a stock network adapter and a memory card save.

the ps2 install base was massive by 2003. eqoa never reached the subscriber numbers of the pc original, but it ran the same payment model with a monthly fee and a launch box, and it stayed profitable long enough to clear nine years. that is the part of the story that surprised people who did not pay attention to it in real time.

~ the day it died ~

soe announced the closure on 18 january 2012. the cited reason was a contract dispute with the third party that hosted the eqoa back-end, not a subscriber collapse. the server population was small by then but had not fully bottomed out. the contract ran out before the players did. the servers closed on 29 march 2012 with a final shutdown event and a goodbye thread on the official forums.

the ps2 had been discontinued in north america in january 2013, which is still ten months in the future from when the servers went dark. eqoa ended slightly before its host platform did. that timing is unusual for a console mmo.

~ the long tail ~

a private emulation project called eqoa revival has been running since the late 2010s. it runs on actual ps2 hardware, requires a network adapter, and exists in the same shape that the official version did. the population is small. the people running it know exactly what they are preserving and why.

console mmos as a category never really worked. final fantasy xi was the high-water mark, but it required a ps2 hard drive that europe never got. phantasy star online on the dreamcast had proved the shape was possible at smaller scale. eqoa was the experiment that proved you could run an entire persistent world on hardware most owners did not realise was network-capable. it ran for nine years on that bet. the bet does not work on modern consoles, where the cloud-game and live-service shape has absorbed everything the persistent-mmo idea used to occupy.

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