Earth and Beyond Emulator Beta

[barstein]

Kind of encouraging for people like me who really miss the game. I may fire up my own instance and give it a whirl, before what they are calling the live beta comes around.

http://forum.enb-emulator.com/index.php?showtopic=4291

[Rollory]

I have never understood what people saw in that game. It's EQ In Space.

... did I just answer my own question?

[quatoria]

It was fun! It's a shame it lacked an endgame.

[Brian Rubin]

I enjoyed the game a lot, but eventually returned to Jumpgate for my space simmy MMO goodness. Dunno if I'd be interested in playing again.

[barstein]

For me, assuming they succeed in restoring the original game more or less as it was, and assuming they also manage to churn out a fair amount of new stuff, I think I'll be more motivated to commit. Even though it had problems (didn't care so much for indoor environments to name one) this was the only MMO to ever hold my attention for an extended period of time.

[Robert Sharp]

This means you can have your own personal server? My wife and I would LOVE to be able to have our own WoW world, where there are no other players in it at all. Want to farm? You know where to go. Yeah, the economy might present problems, but so what? It would be our own little world. Of course, the server space would be immense, probably. But down the road, when HDs are massiver and such, they should go this route. Sell people the software to run their own personal server.

[thamer]

I have never understood what people saw in that game. It's EQ In Space.

... did I just answer my own question?

It's far far far more casual than EQ in space. I only played it a bit but it's more like a watered down disney version of Elite in space.

Funny thing is I seem to recall you absolutely needed other players to take on tours in order to gain exp at later stages. Could be wrong though.

[Eric Majkut]

I remember being sent a CRATE of promotional crap before E&B came out. There was a bunch of hats and shirts and keychains and all sorts of other useless stuff. I always thought the game was terrible though, and my review showed it :(

[malkav11]

This means you can have your own personal server? My wife and I would LOVE to be able to have our own WoW world, where there are no other players in it at all. Want to farm? You know where to go. Yeah, the economy might present problems, but so what? It would be our own little world. Of course, the server space would be immense, probably. But down the road, when HDs are massiver and such, they should go this route. Sell people the software to run their own personal server.

It's not too hard to find WoW private server stuff if you look. It's also not a lot more space-hogging than a regular WoW install, since it reverse engineers most of its stuff from the WoW client.

The tradeoff is that it really doesn't work properly. Most of the scripting is broken, so the more creative quests simply don't work and instance bosses and such are just beefed up mobs without any sort of special powers.

Or at least that was so when I tried running one for similar purposes.

[Brandon Clements]

It's far far far more casual than EQ in space. I only played it a bit but it's more like a watered down disney version of Elite in space.

Funny thing is I seem to recall you absolutely needed other players to take on tours in order to gain exp at later stages. Could be wrong though.
They changed that a bit toward the end of the game, but yeah. I really did enjoy the game; they had a pretty good backstory and were pretty good updating at least low and mid level content while EA was interested in funding the game, but high level raid-style content took awhile to get in there. The V'rix stuff was interesting, but ultimately went nowhere as the staff got re-assigned.

[copeknight]

E&B remains the only MMO game that I ever enjoyed. Of course, all the time I was playing it, I kept thinking, "Gee, I wish this were a single-player offline game."

[barstein]

Arise

The emulator has been seen a lot of progress (http://enb-emulator.com/index.php?/topic/2643-public-test-realm). I highly recommend checking the public beta out to anyone who misses the game. There are no promises about retaining character leveling progress since they have to do server wipes from time to time, but the game footprint is tiny, installing/updating the client is a breeze, joining a game is simple and overall the game seems to be quite stable, all things considered.

[Miramon]

Earth & Beyond had great content, including the best quest dialog and quest structures ever implemented for MMOs, but its core gameplay was weak. 2 of the three basic systems were totally unfun -- trade and exploration were tedious, slow and stupid.

Moreover, the basic combat system (the third leg of the tripod) was profoundly unbalanced, because they didn't understand:

* If armor reduces damage, then heavy slow weapons >>> fast light weapons even with the same pure DPS.

* Given equal DPS, long range >>> short range.

So they apparently unwittingly gave the supposed combat-specialist race the lame short-light-fast weapons, and they gave the trader race the long-heavy-slow weapons. Just for the hell of it, apparently, they made the short-light-fast ammo cost more than the long-heavy-slow ammo.

I will concede that if you played the trader-race (sol humans), combat wasn't totally unenjoyable. It was fun kicking the crap out of foes who were balanced for the other two sad races with the short-fast-light weapons who had to take multiple rounds of attacks before they could even start fighting....

I had a long interesting talk at a GDC with the Creative Director who it turned out was primarily in charge of content. The gameplay lead was a friend of the CEO and wouldn't work with him or accept criticism. This is why the content and gameplay seemed to come from totally different realms.

[Spect]

So, being one of the few people who actually enjoyed E&B, I was pretty excited to hear about this, and spent a few hours last night with it. While on the one hand, it was awesome, because, well, I'm actually playing a game that I thoght was dead again. On the other hand, though, is the fact that this is really in rough shape right now. There are tons of bugs and missing content. The tutorial didn't seem to make it into the emulation, so if you're not familiar with the game, or it's been too long and you've forgotten everything, it's hard to get started. I've stalled out on 2 different toons now because of missing quests early on, or missing mobs needed for quests.

I'll keep an eye in this though. I have faith that the people working on this will get a lot of stuff fixed, but it'll probably take a while.

[barstein]

I've logged a few hours since installing the emulator recently, but have yet to encounter a single bug. I've heard complaints, though, and it seems that the dev's, while doing a great job overall, do not invest much time into the kind of communication and coordination required for effective and informed testing. What class were you playing, Spect?

[Spect]

I've tried several so far. A GM came on and acknowledged an issue with monster spawns. He said the fix may take some time though.

My TE is stuck at a promotion quest to locate a navigation point. I can fly all around the point, but the mission won't update. So, no promotion, which means I can't progress at all.