SOE Announces New Expansions for Everquest, Everquest 2 48
Kotaku reports that Sony Online Entertainment has announced new expansions for both Everquest and Everquest 2. The announcement came at SOE's Fan Faire today. Kotaku made available some screenshots and the press release, which gives details about what to expect in the new content. Zonk has some more in-depth coverage on EQ: Seeds of Destruction and EQ II: The Shadow Odyssey over at Massively.
Re:Seriously? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's surprising, but there are pretty committed audiences to all the old online games. Not only everquest, but Turbine has an ongoing Asherons Call 1 community (they just released their 100th free content update a week or two ago), and of course there's the UO crowd still going strong.
It surprised me too when I first heard about it, but after a while it seemed logical. It's their own social network, and asking if someone still played is a lot like saying "Usenet? Do people actually still POST on there?"
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Hey, it says I'm gonna be eaten by a Grue, what do I do? D:
It's okay my child. Step into the light.
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No reason for surprise, those are all really good games.
AO is another great one that keeps on going.
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It's not just the social aspects. Many of the old games have gameplay aspects that they are still the best at.
In EQ1, I played a soloing Wizard. The variety of spells and tools I had to use to make that work well (jboots, staff of temperate flux, my AOE nukes, roots, stuns, snares, AOE rain spells, direct nukes, invisibility, levitation) all worked together in a way to make it interesting and challenging. I've not found any other game that matched that. EQ1 had a great balance between all those spells a
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Apparently? OK, so not a lot, but according to MMOGChart.com [mmogchart.com], they've both got a little under 200,000 subscribers, which isn't too shabby.
Granted that doesn't exactly match Blizzard's 10 million, but hell, what does?
EQ2 is still the third largest MMORPG (if you ignore Asian MMORPGs and Dofus) behind WoW and EVE.
So, yes, it still has a presence amongst western MMORPG players. Well, if you completely and totally ignore WoW.
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Yes:
http://www.bfro.net/ [bfro.net]
It's actually interesting reading. While most of the people there are believers, they are very skeptical of any evidence provided. After spending some time there, I went from "LOL yeah right" to a big "maybe".
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I believe EQ1 still has >100k active accounts, I'm not sure about EQ2; certainly I and some of my old guild-mates keep resubscribing to EQ1 now and again after other games fail to live up to expectations. Obviously that's nothing compared to WoW, but if you sell 100k copies of an expansion by download at $50 apiece every year, that'll pay for a few developers and make a profit.
They have reduced the expansion rate from two per year to one per year, which is actually a damn good move since EQ1 suffers from
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I'm at the SOE Fan Faire 2008 right now.
For what it's worth, at the keynote speech it was claimed that this summer's "Living Legacy [sony.com]" promotion increased the number of paying subscribers for EverQuest and EverQuest 2 by 20%. That's not bad at all, particularly for EverQuest which is close to 10 years old.
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It's a mmog where you sit in groups of 6 for roughly 1 year (real life time) killing things, over and over, and over again. Then, upon attaining max level, you join groups of 30-70 people to kill really big things. Over and over again.
You never, ever quest. I think that's how it got its name.
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It's a mmog where you sit in groups of 6 for roughly 1 year (real life time) killing things, over and over, and over again. Then, upon attaining max level, you join groups of 30-70 people to kill really big things. Over and over again.
You can play any game like that. Its up to the player to choose not to. Everquest was designed before it had really been fully established that people were more interested in watching their xp bar than seeing the world, and doing interesting things.
I don't think anyone really
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It was pretty hard to "pull" some of the early dungeons at the intended level with the available gear. And by hard I mean, a net loss to xp and gear for all but the elite. It was always best to hit the dungeons well above the intended level, with a full group. That's how the camping started - preparations for hitting a dungeon.
EQ was released with some big balance issues, but no one had ever tried an online group-based game before. I think the original designers (including McQuaid, who I don't think of as a
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It was pretty hard to "pull" some of the early dungeons at the intended level with the available gear. And by hard I mean, a net loss to xp and gear for all but the elite.
Pushing it right to the edge, and taking those deaths was how you learned the game, was how you got GOOD at it. How you became 'elite'.
It was always best to hit the dungeons well above the intended level, with a full group.
Best for rolling though it without any risk, without finesse, and above all, without learning anything. Few people who
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Part of the problem with EQ was that, if you played the game 'as intended' the XP bar moved sooo slooooowly. And the XP penalty was extremely harsh. In short, the only effective way to play was as efficently as possible.
Why would it matter how fast the XP bar moved? If you hadn't seen everything in the world that was appropriate for your level, what would the rush be to be higher level. Its not like the higher level parts of the game weren't going to be there when you got there.
In short, the only effective
SOE & MMO's (Score:1)
Has Sony they really had a big hit since original EQ?
Will they ever climb back to being a real competitor in the MMO market?
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I really doubt it. I joined EQ after SoL launched and played for a few years. I even was a senior guide for a time. Then, I got bored.
Interestingly, I only had to quit EQ once. I've quit WoW twice now....
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"... and the meek shall inherit the Earth/Xegony; and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace." Psalms 37:11"
"... and the meek shall be pwned by the sleeper" Bakk 14:07
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NCSoft is doing far better than Sony. Hell, Square-Enix's FFXI still has around 500k subscribers. Sony isn't doing well at all.
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What I didn't like about EQ2 (and I did play it for quite some time) was how you could screw yourself over by leveling too quickly. I'm a completionist by nature, and I want to go back and do quests, even if they're greyed out! Also, it was neigh-impossible to play without a group, and so you end up missing a lot of content just because you couldn't find a group while in the correct level range.
I play LoTRO now. It's quite similar (EQ2, WoW and LoTRO are all very similar) but it is impossible to shoot your
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The thing is, the popularity of Everquest had little to nothing to do with SOE. In fact, SOE has been named as the source of the downfall of Everquest and the reason Everquest II was so poorly received at launch. The popularity of the original Everquest had everything to do with the heart and soul pumped into the game by Verant Interactive.
Many of us old EQ fans were overly enthusiastic when the news of Vanguard hit and that Brad McQuaid (formerly of Verant) was attempting to make a game that was what Eve
Awesome! (Score:1)
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Just do what I do - actually like using Windows and tell people so all the time.
Works like a charm.
MMOGCharts (Score:2)
I can't speak for the accuracy of MMOGCharts, but there's a huge doubt that EQ1 and EQ2 have 200k subs each. 125k for each game is a pretty good (albeit unsupported) number based upon the observations of myself and friends that still play EQ1. I played EQ2 for two years before I got sick of the SOEness of doing things and the rudderless sailing of the crew that worked on it...and apparently so did a lot of other people. My server went from 3 hardcore raiding guilds to zero, and some tops end guilds were so
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I'm pretty sure that they're counting the "Station Pass" in the active EQ1/EQ2 subscriptions, along with SW:G and the Matrix Online.
Remember, they're only counting subscriptions, not active players, so numbers may be misleading as far as what you see in game.
Who Knew? (Score:1)
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I loved the look of the world. I just didn't like:
- The smallness of the zones at launch
- The limited number of zones at launch
- The world felt small, like a bunch of shoeboxes strung together
- Developers without a central vision
- Poor QA process
WoW wide-open world is much mo
Original EverQuest + Kunark + Velious (Score:2)
For many years, SOE has been ignoring what many old EverQuest fans really want: Original EverQuest + Kunark + Velious, and nothing more.
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I don't know about that. Many of us who still play want revamped content and dynamic content, not more expansions... however some of the expansions do have unique challenges. It would be nice to unify some of them, like LDON, LOY, and anything has a new and useless currency.
Sklinker of TM
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You choose to support one OS; the developers of EQII choose to support another. I don't think anyone is shedding any tears over this.
I'd have liked to play EQ (Score:1)
Interesting (Score:1)