Rogue servers are on the brain right now, particularly since a certain superhero MMORPG got its rubber stamping, which brings us to look toward the rogue server projects that sprang forth from the fanbase of EverQuest Online Adventures, a console MMORPG run by Sony Online Entertainment between 2003 and 2012 (our Game Archaeologist chronicled this one’s history previously in case you need context).
Two of the rogue servers we’ve covered previously are EQOA: Return Home, an open source revival project, and Sandstorm, a separate closed source test shard that’s being developed by a member of the same group. So whatever happened to them?
We’ll begin with Return Home purely because it needs to have its slightly muddy waters cleaned: Devs on the original Return Home project decided to rebrand it in 2018 as EQOA Revival: Return Home, then rebrand it again as EQOA Emu last December. This is still the same group, however: the game’s Discord server still bears the Revival moniker and the link on the original site directs to the same server.
Whatever it’s called nowadays, this project still appears to be slowly pushing forward with updates, though the vast majority of its progress reports are now fully housed in Discord instead of its website, which hasn’t seen a new post since last September. That said, the fans behind this project promise “more under the hood in 2024” and have been busy mostly restoring dialogue recently.
As for Sandstorm, that saw an uptick in activities as well, from the beginning of December 2023 and all the way into this week. Much of the progress here is incremental but steady, with level cap raises, the addition of a “quick and simple” weather system, preliminary implementation of several types of abilities, and item additions and fixes. All told it looks like this one is taking longer to assemble, but its creator joukoq has most certainly been busy recently.
