EverQuest Online Adventures slays its final dragon

EverQuest Online Adventures, the console spinoff of SOE's EverQuest franchise, is counting down the hours until the server is switched off at midnight tonight. In addition to EQOA, SOE is shuttering three other underperforming titles today: Cosmic Rift, Infantry, and Star Chamber: The Harbinger Saga.

Instead of spending its final days in sorrow, the EQOA community joined the dev team for a series of epic battles against marauding dragons this past week. Players have filled the forums with posts about their favorite in-game memories over the past nine years of gameplay. To compensate players for the loss of their game world, SOE gave EQOA subscribers three months of gold-level status in EverQuest and EverQuest II.

EQOA came out in 2003 on the PlayStation 2 and was one of the first generation of console MMOs. For those Massively readers feeling nostalgic or curious about it, definitely check out our series on the game: part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Reader Comments (12)

I've literally never even heard of those other three underperforming titles. Were those PC games? Console games? I'm not surprised they're underperforming as I've heard of even most vague, small games and have never heard of those.

@SnarlingWolf

Cosmic Rift and Infantry Online were overhead 2.5d shooter. Cosmic Rift = spaceships, infantry was ground combat.

They were pretty damn fun to be honest.

@SnarlingWolf

They weren't major games or even MMOs, but they were a lot of fun.

I used to play Cosmic Rift when I was in college... it was a great space ship pvp shoot, almost like an arcade game with simple controls, just with different 'classes' of ships to spice up the strategy, varying in speed, weapon power, shields, etc.

To be honest, I didn't even realize SOE still offered it. It wasn't a bad way to kill 30 minutes, despite its simplicity. It could actually get kind of addictive if there were a lot of people playing.

RIP EQOnlineAdventures.
This was my first MMORPG back in 2003-04.
I loved it for a short time. Lots of great memories playing and listening to Conway & Steckler on the radio!

@(Unverified)
Mine too. I have the game and expansion, and beta 2/3, and frontiers beta disks.

ended up dropping it just after the release of the planes of sky/air/whatever.

WHAT?! They're shutting down Infantry?!

... Well balls, my friend's gonna be peeved, he knew the Devs of that game. Tried it once, was fun...though it's been underperforming for ages now; it was once a free game the devs made in their spare time, then they tried to charge for it and it's pretty much been going downhill ever since.

Shame, it was really a game from a different era. It was an entirely skill-based birdseye shooter, and we're not likely going to see another like it any time soon. Ah well...

..oh, and uh, yeah, sucks for console EQ and whatnot...

Of all the things you can say about SOE, you can't say they're quick to shut games down. They keep games on life support until the bitter end. EQOA ran for 9 years! That has to be one of the seven wonders of the MMO world.

@Daemodand

Not to mention how long EQOA ran after the disks (and console) stopped being manufactured.

The three months of gold status in EQ 1 and 2 was nice. I know it is just to hope they will go get addicted to those games instead, but still nice.

They should update the graphics and port it to the PS3. I doubt Everquest Next will make it for the PS3 so updating EQOA would be a great alternative for console players.

@HokieKC

EQOA had a horribly outdated design from day 1. It was my first mmo, and honestly, if not for my friends playing, I doubt I would have stuck with it for so long.

No instancing made planned raids all but impossible. A lack of quests meant it was a 60 level, pure grind of a few hundred hours per character. Minimal ram cause major issues with raiding, armor/weapon sets, etc.

I'd rather see EQ next dual released on pc/ps4, rather then an updated EQOA. Heck, i'd settle for updated Champions of Norrath, those games were quite fun for diablo clones.

@HokieKC

I actually think porting it could make sense, but I doubt updating the graphics would. If you were to upgrade the graphics, you may as well start from scratch.

I've really wondered why they don't put it up on the Sony PS3 store for free, and create a $5 or $10 subscription for it after a month free. I'm willing to bet it would have been profitable, but maybe I underestimate the difficulty of porting it.

Maybe it still would have been profitable, but they just want to bank all their energy on the F2P move with EQ and EQ2... and then focus on EQ Next.

EverQuest Online Adventures slays its final dragon

Reader Comments (12)

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:06PM SnarlingWolf said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 7:03PM Maseno said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 11:57PM Lionhearted said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:20PM (Unverified) said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 6:52PM mrantimatter said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:27PM Adeptus Enginus said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:33PM Daemodand said

Posted: Mar 30th 2012 7:34AM Omali said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 4:57PM madcartoonist said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 5:36PM HokieKC said

Posted: Mar 29th 2012 6:51PM mrantimatter said

Posted: Mar 30th 2012 12:02AM Lionhearted said

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