Champions of Norrath

Champions of Norrath for PlayStation 2 is a fantasy action role-playing game developed by Snowblind Studios and published by Sony Online Entertainment. Released in North America in February 2004 and in Europe later that year, it brings the world of EverQuest to a console-focused, overhead adventure. Players create a hero and set out across Norrath as a growing threat gathers against the land, making the game a self-contained quest in the wider EverQuest setting rather than a conversion of the online role-playing game.

Play begins by choosing one of five class-and-race combinations: Barbarian Warrior, Wood Elf Ranger, High Elf Cleric, Dark Elf Shadowknight, or Erudite Wizard. Each can be created as either a male or female character, with appearance choices available at creation. The classes establish a different approach to combat, from weapon-led fighting to healing, ranged attacks, magic, and darker martial abilities. Defeating enemies and completing the journey earns experience, allowing a character to level up and develop statistics and abilities.

Viewed from an elevated perspective, Champions of Norrath centers on real-time battles, exploration, and collecting equipment. Heroes move through hostile wilderness, settlements, dungeons, and other fantasy locations, cutting through monsters with weapons and class-specific powers. Enemies can leave behind gold and gear, while shops provide another way to acquire supplies. Inventory weight puts a limit on what can be carried, so choosing which finds to keep is part of the adventure. Rare enhancements can also be used to alter a weapon with added properties.

The campaign is organized into five acts and takes its party from the early conflict involving elves, orcs, and goblins into increasingly dangerous territory. Areas mix fixed story progression with randomized dungeon elements, helping successive expeditions vary. Checkpoints serve both as save locations and as a recovery point after defeat, while activated portals make it possible to revisit important locations in a region. Boss encounters, traps, concealed routes, and optional discoveries give the dungeon crawl more to do than simply follow a straight path from one battle to the next.

Cooperative play is one of the PlayStation 2 game's defining features. A single player can tackle the campaign alone, or as many as four people can adventure together locally with the required Multitap hardware. The original release also supported four-player online cooperative play through the PlayStation 2 Network Adapter, with one player per console. Characters could be imported and exported, making it possible to take an established hero, equipment, and progress between compatible sessions; the original online service is no longer active.

Champions of Norrath uses an expanded version of the technology behind Snowblind's earlier Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance games, but its fiction, classes, and world are rooted in EverQuest. It was released only for PlayStation 2 and later received a Greatest Hits edition in North America. Snowblind followed it with the 2005 sequel Champions: Return to Arms, which continued the series' console action-RPG approach and supported returning characters. For PS2 players looking for an EverQuest-themed quest built around character development and shared monster-slaying, Champions of Norrath remains the starting point of that two-game series.