Forums » Off-Topic and Casual Chatter

What ever happened to the server side code for EQOA or Vanguard?

    • 35 posts
    June 15, 2017 10:38 AM PDT

    This is more of a question for Brad, but whatever happened to the old server code for those games?  Once SOE became daybreak i would think they lost the rights to those IP's?  If that was the case, then how come we haven't seen any server code pop up freely for any of us wanting to spin up and old server to play our old favorites?  Say i wanted to request it, where/who would i even go to for that information?   I doubt it's something the company DayBreak still has, but i would think some of the original creators would have that code lying around free to distribute?

    • 633 posts
    June 15, 2017 2:27 PM PDT

    SoE was completely sold, which means Daybreak Games has the titles now.

    • 422 posts
    June 16, 2017 5:43 AM PDT

    kelenin said:

    SoE was completely sold, which means Daybreak Games has the titles now.

    Which includes the rights to any IP SoE had at the time. Since both Vanguard and EQOA were their own IP and not licensed (like SWG) those two would have for sure gone to Daybreak. So even if a dev had the code somewhere, which I doubt as that would probably be a break of their contract as data security is usually included, they would risk being sued into the ground by Daybreak.

    • 2130 posts
    June 23, 2017 3:10 AM PDT

    Daybreak likely has it stored on some antiquated server hardware somewhere. It's unfortunate that Daybreak is basically the absolute gutter tier of MMO studios, probably second only to the vomit inducing companies that produce f2p mobile MMOs. I wouldn't be shocked if DBG ends up at that stage within the next 5 years, if they don't cease to exist at all due to the seemingly lightyears deep well of incompetence they exhibit.

    There are some people trying to analyze packet captures to reconstruct the server infrastructure, and they've even attempted to reach out to the creator of the relatively unique server setup that EQOA used, but unfortunately it is very slow going and unlikely to ever happen at all. As far as Vanguard, there is a relatively well-along emulator project, but it suffers from much of the same issues as the EQOA revival project.

    Making an MMO is simply a disgusting amount of work, and without a large team of dedicated professionals who are actually getting paid to do so, it's just impractical. Look how long Pantheon has taken to get as far as it is with a relatively large team of pros. Quality takes a lot of time, and a lot of money.