Legends of Norrath

» see legendsofnorrath.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

EverQuest never reached me, and neither did the layer of things built on top of it. Turkish players who wanted a persistent world in those years mostly got there through Ultima Online private servers, which were free and run by people you could argue with on a forum. Norrath was a subscription in dollars to a company in San Diego.

Legends of Norrath was announced by John Smedley at SOE's Fan Faire in 2007 and shown at Gen Con that August. It went live on 5 September 2007, a collectible card game set in the EverQuest world. Its actual trick was that it was not a separate product you had to be talked into buying.

You could open it from inside EverQuest or EverQuest II without leaving the client, or run it on its own if that was what you wanted. Paul Dennen led the design. He later helped found Dire Wolf Digital and designed Clank!, which is by now a considerably better known credit than this one.

I am reading this entirely from the outside. Card games bolted onto MMOs were a North American business, and the tournaments were restricted to players located in the United States regardless, so even the version of me that had an EverQuest account would have been locked out of half of it.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it worked ~

There were four archetypes to build a deck around, running from Priest through Scout, and each one could take a Light or a Shadow path. You brought four quests into a deck and every ability you spent pushed value onto one of them. Completing all four was one way to win the match.

The other ways were the ordinary ones, beating the opponent's avatar or running them out of cards, with a clock loss added in timed play. What made it worth remembering is the loot. Cards in this game granted items inside EverQuest or EverQuest II, which meant a card game was quietly paying rewards into two live MMO economies. That interconnection was unusual in 2007 and it mostly stayed unusual.

~ what it became ~

Sets arrived every three or four months at first and there were sixteen of them in total. Then the pace broke. Debt of the Ratonga came almost a full year after the set before it, and Drakkinshard eight months after that, in August 2013. Nothing new was made for three more years while the servers stayed on.

Daybreak, which is what SOE became after Columbus Nova bought it in 2015, posted the notice on 17 June 2016. Legends of Norrath and PlanetSide would both close that summer. The stated reason was blunt enough, no active development team for quite some time. It went off on 17 August 2016 at noon Pacific.

What it leaves behind is a design idea rather than a game. A card game living inside another game's client and paying out into it is a structure almost nobody attempted again, and the nearest modern equivalent is the battle pass, which keeps the interconnection and throws away the cards. The items those cards granted are still sitting on characters in EverQuest, which is the only part of this that still runs.

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