Returning to Everquest 2: The Oldest Beastlord on the Server

The Oldest Beastlord on the Server

One of the most unexpectedly enjoyable parts of my recent gaming nostalgia journey has been returning to Everquest II.

I originally played Everquest II when it first launched back in 2004. At the time it felt enormous, mysterious and alive in a way that very few online games ever have. Massive multiplayer games were still relatively new territory then. The idea that thousands of players could inhabit the same persistent world together still felt almost magical.

What I never expected, over twenty years later, was to log back into that same world and discover that one of my earliest characters had survived the passage of time.

Not merely preserved in a screenshot or backed up on some old hard drive, but actually still existing inside the live game itself.

The evidence that this really was a genuine launch-era character was everywhere.

One of the quests still sitting unfinished in the journal was the old "Spirit Shard Recovery Quest", a mechanic that has long since vanished from the modern game. Another outstanding quest was "Lasydia's Call". These are relics from an entirely different version of Everquest II; fragments from a game design philosophy which has itself become history.

I can almost reconstruct the exact moment this character was abandoned.

Back then the starting island still had dangerous sharks swimming around the coastline. I strongly suspect I died fighting one of them, logged off afterwards and simply never returned. The named shark apparently still exists in the current version of the game, but almost everything else around it has changed beyond recognition.

The character himself was another clue. He was simply classified as a "Scout".

Modern Everquest II players may not even realise that classes originally evolved in stages. At level 5 you specialised into an archetype and later specialised again into a proper class. My main character followed the path from Scout to Bard to Troubadour.

But Jikaril never made it that far.

For over two decades he effectively existed in suspended animation.

During that time entire MMORPGs have been born, risen to prominence and died. Companies have collapsed. Hard drives have failed. Internet forums have vanished. Social media empires have come and gone. Yet somehow this tiny fragment of digital continuity survived.

The server names changed. Servers merged together repeatedly until eventually there was only a single European server remaining. Expansions came and went. Mechanics were redesigned. Zones were rebuilt. User interfaces modernised. Entire systems were removed from the game.

And still there he was.

Waiting patiently for his player to return.

What fascinated me most was not simply that the character still existed, but that Everquest II itself had evolved in such a way that this ancient unfinished character could still function seamlessly inside the modern game.

When I logged in I was prompted to select a proper class. Among the available choices was Beastlord.

Now this is where things became truly interesting.

The Beastlord class did not even exist when Jikaril was created.

This meant that a character made in the first weeks of Everquest II's release could be adapted, upgraded and integrated into the newest incarnation of the game two decades later.

In a strange way, that made Jikaril simultaneously one of the oldest characters on the server and potentially the oldest Beastlord on the server as well.

A Beastlord class created years after the character himself.

There is something oddly philosophical about that.

We often think of online games as temporary things; disposable entertainment products destined to vanish when the next title appears. Yet here was a persistent digital identity that had outlived entire generations of gaming trends.

The character had effectively travelled through time.

Of course the first practical task was relearning how to actually play.

The user interface needed substantial adjustment. Fortunately this was fairly simple; mostly involving opening additional hotbars and arranging abilities into something logical. I eventually settled on six hotbars, separating melee attacks, ranged attacks, permanent buffs, temporary buffs, utility abilities and non-combat skills.

Then came the process familiar to anyone returning to an old MMORPG after years away: staring blankly at dozens of mysterious abilities and wondering what any of them actually do.

There is always a period of experimentation. Which abilities have the longest range? Which abilities chain properly into Heroic Opportunities? Which attacks should open combat and which should finish it? Muscle memory built twenty years ago does not instantly return.

Thankfully Jikaril himself was still very low level. On login he somehow gained two free levels, bringing him to level 7, but that is still manageable enough to relearn gradually.

Some of my other characters are much higher level, reaching the old level cap of 90 from my previous period of play. Jumping directly onto one of those characters after years away would be a recipe for disaster, particularly in group content where ignorance can rapidly become everyone else's problem.

That is where the chronomage system becomes useful. Modern Everquest II allows players to temporarily lower their level in multiples of five, effectively letting veteran characters revisit older content at an appropriate difficulty level. It is an elegant solution for relearning the game without immediately humiliating oneself in front of experienced players.

More than anything though, returning to Everquest II has reminded me just how unusual persistent online worlds really are.

Very few digital creations survive for over twenty years while still remaining active, accessible and continuously evolving.

Even fewer allow you to step back into a forgotten character from another era and continue their story as though merely resuming a paused adventure.

Jikaril began existence in the launch era of Everquest II.

He died on a now-vanished version of a beginner island, carrying unfinished quests tied to obsolete mechanics, before disappearing through decades of server mergers and game redesigns.

And now, improbably, he walks the modern world of Norrath once again as perhaps the oldest Beastlord on the server.

Level 20 Beastlord / Level 20 Provisioner as of 25th November 2024.