Letter From the Producer

What's coming for EverQuest in the months ahead? Here are some answers!

What's coming for EverQuest in the months ahead? Today's Letter from the Producer gives us a pretty good idea! The Plane of War, heroic characters, future Call of the Forsaken content, heroic adventures, changes to Leader AAs, and some new class/race combinations (the first of which is revealed here) are among the topics touched upon:

Hello All!

It’s hard to imagine that the 20th Expansion for EverQuest launched just one month ago! The team is already gearing up for more great things. Twenty expansions in fewer than fifteen years is a phenomenal statistic, but what I’m most proud of is the passion that my team brings every day, dreaming up the world that we all live and play in. There is pleasure in creating a game that demands respect in staying true to its origin and vast history. Not to mention, we love doing this.

There are some awesome stories within Norrath and some of those stories haven’t been told in quite some time. In Call of the Forsaken (COTF), we get to revisit some of those traditional stories and iconic characters while introducing something new at the same time.

One new thing introduced in Call of the Forsaken was the Heroic Adventures. You can go into a Heroic Adventure zone and accept tasks that allows for a unique experience every time you enter the zone. The content you encounter will scale to the character levels in your group allowing for some additional distinctiveness. When you successfully complete these adventures, you can gain specific rewards for your character and, for the very first time, you can collect and equip items on Mercenaries. With New Mercenary Equipment, you can now customize and upgrade your Mercenary – only available with the expansion.

The Heroic Adventure system was created in a way that allows us to scale content to your level. Currently it scales for those of you in the 95 to 100 range, but we're going to open it up to lower levels, complete with meaningful rewards for those levels as well. We are also working on having more Mercenary Equipment available at lower levels in the very near future! So even if you do not play a high level character, there will be many benefits for owning the Call of the Forsaken Expansion. We hope to have this ready for you early next year, but stay tuned for more details in the next couple months as we get closer to this launch.

With COTF, we also introduced a big feature allowing you to customize your Mercenary. This feature wasn’t solely with equipment you can obtain for your Merc; you can now also obtain Mercenary AAs to further increase its power and effectiveness. We have noticed a few questions on how your character’s experience affects the Mercenary’s AAs, so we have added more tips inside the game to make sure you know how it works. If you use your Mercenary, you can gain experience to use towards your Mercenary AAs. If you don’t use your Mercenary, you gain nothing towards Mercenary AAs. If you use an experience potion, your Mercenary also benefits from that increase to gain more experience and thus earn AAs faster. I hope this helps explain the system more.

On a side note, we have been discussing the Journeyman 5 Mercenaries and changing some of the aspects of the quest to smooth out how you achieve them and possibly have another means of obtaining this tier. We recognize that there are some issues with the quest and we want you to be able to achieve them with a realistic effort. More information will come out in the near future.

Leadership AAs – In the very near future, we will be moving Leadership AAs from the current location in game and will be integrating them into other areas so that everyone has the ability to use these AA benefits. The UI will go away during the transformation and you’ll have one less window cluttering up your screen. Win-Win! Release date is expected just after the New Year, which is coming very fast.

I mentioned at SOE Live this year that we will be creating more content for the 1st quarter of next year. This content will be available to all players free of charge, though some of the content will require the expansion Call of the Forsaken in order for you to be able to access it. Storylines in Call of the Forsaken will be extended,, which you will discover in the launch zones and in additional new areas.

In March, we’ll be celebrating EverQuest’s 15th Anniversary in great form! Still hot after all these years! At SOE Live, we announced that you’ll have new Race/Class combinations to play. We have been reviewing your feedback on the forums about what you would like to play, and one combination that frequently comes up is the Froglok Monk. So we’re going to be creating that new race/class combination for the Anniversary. That’s not the only combination we’ll be creating though! Because interest was all over the board, we have selected eight more combinations that you’ll be able to vote on. When we start voting, you will be able to vote between two combinations to promote the winner to the next round of voting. This will more than likely be a tournament-bracket style of matchups with one or two matchups to vote on each round until we determine the next race/class combination to be launched in March. More information incoming…

We also promised you the Plane of War. This zone was to be released with the Planes of Power expansion but we were unable to complete the zone in time for that launch. We have wanted to release this zone for a long time now, so we have carved out some time to release it also at the Anniversary. It just made perfect sense to release a nostalgic area during this time.

Player Designed Missions – the team had a wonderful experience at SOE Live this past year in our “Design a Mission” panels. We had such an overwhelming number of participants! The Design Team generally has all the fun during this panel. However, not this time. I was personally able to work alongside the Designers with a group of players to design a mission that was just so befitting to our surroundings in Las Vegas, appropriately named “The Pub Crawl.” This was only one of the many exciting and creative missions created by players with our team that weekend. We have 13 missions designed, and we are going to do as many of them as possible for the Anniversary.

To close, I want to talk to you about something exciting we have on the horizon, and it’s one of the things we haven’t discussed previously: Heroic Characters. If you follow or play EverQuest II, this might sound familiar to you. They recently launched Heroic Characters which permits returning players to create a Level 85 Character, allowing players the ability to try out different classes at a higher level and also giving quicker access to high level areas. Our offer of Heroic Characters will be very similar to EverQuest II’s, though our offer will be unique to EverQuest. After all, the games are not the same, so there are just some things that will be different in order to better suit our game. We are just getting underway on this project, so stay tuned for more information!
Thank you for playing EverQuest!

Congratulations to all of you who are involved in EverQuest’s success.

See you in game!

-Thom

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im not complaining
# Nov 10 2013 at 1:17 AM Rating: Decent
9 posts
I look at it like this, I could only have an mmorpg to play like, Asheron's Call(yuck), or god forbid......WoW(blah, blech!!) or some other inane, sloppy, crap RPG . Now that would be a shame.....Thank you SOE for your vested interest and commitment to EQ!! We all need to remember, we could just have easily been on some other site, saying stuff like, "Man! You remember that game EQ? That game was TIGHT! Its a shame that no one else ever came out with another game like that......sure wish they woulda kept at it."
But look, we don't......and they did keep it up. Cheers EQ (and SOE)!!! 15 years!! Yall ROCK and this game still rocks......Thank you, from bottom of my heart. EQ is the S%$#!!
Race/Class
# Nov 10 2013 at 12:15 AM Rating: Decent
GNOME MONKS!
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Heroic chars
# Nov 09 2013 at 8:49 PM Rating: Decent
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Never even made it to 85 in eq, but than i only played since mid 2001 :)
Older Content
# Nov 09 2013 at 6:25 PM Rating: Decent
I have only been playing for 13 years 159 days, but I am glad to see that EQ is still hustling along. There have been many improvements, and many failures, in those years. We learn to live with them. I think my Biggest disappointment, is how the old zones have been rendered obsolete. I understand how and why this has happened. You focus your energies on the players at the end game, creating new content for that level of character. Why be reminded that you have zones from before PoP?

Occasionally you do something to try making the game fun for the new or low level players, which only makes the older zones more useless. You have let the Defiant out of pandora's box, and its in the world now. All previous quested gear is now useless. You have funneled every new player into the one city, making home cities useless. How many players even know the way around their racial city these days?

I do like the fact that you have finally added Appearances to armor, but not the way it was done. I know WHY you did it the way you did, You do have to make that allmighty buck, But if you had done it using a body slot like EQ2, or even allowed normal armor to be put into the appearance aug slot you made, You would have opened the door to using the old quest gear. The older armors look fantastically better than the newer cut and paste looks. Everything looks like defiant, there is no variety. The older armors all had distinct looks and textures. So much so that there used to be whole web sites dedicated to what each armor looked like on each race. That would at least get people going back to hit up those mobs and quests to get other looks. I dont know if anything can be done to draw players back into actually exploring those zones at the intended level.

Anyway, those are just a few thoughts. Keep up the good work, and the bad, just try not to really ***** things up :)
Older Content
# Nov 10 2013 at 10:27 AM Rating: Good
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The devs wilted against forum rage when they did update old content. Once upon a time significant revamps were a part of the game (Cazic thule, Runnyeye, addition of the warrens, the Hole, etc.). They they made the mistake of not doing much for several years...

...and they do a few bad revamps (Nektulos 2.0, new freeport to some people's tastes... I don't hate it as much as some actually, mistmoore was only a bad revamp because they didn't keep the faction people used the zone for available in a reasonable way) and back off. WoW did a much better job with the catacylsm revamps as they basically said "this is the world now, there is no going back".

Note that you seldom hear complaints about the splitpaw revamp now... because it is a mage playground and that class is so popular would be my evaluation of it.

Ironically in EQ... everytime they (intelligently) launch a prog server we can go back so we should be seeing even more significant changes than WoW has dared since people that want nostalgia instead of progress can play the prog server (I like both).

The zone level pyramid for eq has been out of sync with the population base for years... 16 different barely used newb paths to 50 post Legacy of Ykesha is not optimal use of the huge world. Tutorial/Crescent Reach are the not sublime ways of addressing this... what they did with CR could have been accomplished out of freeport for example.
Long Live Everquest
# Nov 09 2013 at 12:48 PM Rating: Decent
7 posts
Thom, thank you for the update on the coming changes. I am glad to see development continue for what is without question in my mind, the best mmorpg ever made. I will never even consider playing another game until SOE shuts it down. That is not to say that I'm a just a gushing fanboy. I've had my share of issues with SOE through the years. It for the most part it has been a love/hate relationship.

I think the dumbing down of EQ was a horrible mistake. Some of my most memorable moments from the early years were the difficulties in retrieving corpses and the creative thinking that was required to solve such difficult situations. The possibility of having to retrieve your corpse from the depths of Nagafen's lair while naked certainly made you step up your game play. Now there isn't a situation that can't be solved by simply summoning in the guild lobby. So I feel that a lot of the of strategic and tactical thinking required for successful game play just isn't necessary any more in both group and raid level game play. While I believe many of these changes were made from a business standpoint of trying to retain customer base, I think SOE like its parent company lacks long term vision which is something at which Japanese companies usually excel.

That being said I think one of the best things that SOE ever did with EQ was the original Refer a Friend program. That was awesome. I still love my RAF accounts. The current incarnation RAF is just lame. If you brought back the original RAF, I would not only subscribe to a couple more account myself, I would have something I would genuinely offer to others and actually recruit new players. The in-game promotion of the original RAF was poor, and I only learned of it as it was ending. I play on Fippy Darkpaw so all of my accounts are gold accounts. Something to consider is to offer the original RAF program with a requirement that they be only gold accounts.

While I clearly do not agree with everything SOE does, I do wish them continued success, and a long and profitable life for Everquest. Long Live Everquest.


Edited, Nov 9th 2013 10:51am by kodiacFL
no need to pl anymore
# Nov 09 2013 at 10:17 AM Rating: Decent
22 posts
If people thought they have had trouble with PL'd characters before what is going to happen now if you can start at level 85? Also are they gonna start with maxxed skill ups spells, etc? Are they going to be able to continue on to 100 from 85? What is the use of rerolling now. People going to be able to make these toons just to farm? I agree with scaling the missions as it will make the expansion actually useful for everyone to have. Race/class combos I think for the most part were fine although the monk froglok sounds interesting, butsnailish makes a great point about why that race isn't played, if there were more graphics particularly of them kicking might be different. The leader AA's I am wondering why am I putting so much time and effort into them if they are now just going to go away. I think they need some work, or maybe additions since they haven't done a thing with them since they came out in LDoN, I kind of see the point of taking some of your reg xp/aa xp to get them done.
no need to pl anymore
# Nov 09 2013 at 9:57 PM Rating: Decent
i dont believe they will be making it that you can jump all your characters straight to 85. i think on EQ2 its set that you are able to raise one character per account. with that they also are given a set of armor, weapons, shield and a hand full of AA points to be able to spend. it makes it so that any new player wanting to start the game can actually jump ahead to a level where they are more likely to be able to play with other people. rather then them making a level one character and just end up running around in empty low level zones. where after being able to learn more about EQ with their new level 85, they then might make other classes and work them up through all the levels. for the players that already have their high end character, this gives them a chance to be able to level up another class straight to 85. letting them play a class they may not have played before. with all these people then making new characters at level 85, we may see an increase in people grouping together to level up these new characters further. excluding those who multi box group themselves, and those who have someone powerlevel them up. hopefully this will help to bring some new blood into the game as well. i know for myself it would be much easier to invite friends to try EQ if told they can start out closer to the higher end, letting them be able to go and fight some of the bigger mobs and such. rather then trying to tell them, "hey join up and start at level 1 and you can attack a giant rat." but with all new things, we just have to try and hope for the best of it.
no need to pl anymore
# Nov 10 2013 at 10:12 AM Rating: Good
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1 character per account for free is my understanding... (and I'm thinking there's a limited timeframe on this as well for some reason).

Additional pre-levelled characters will be available via the marketplace.


WoW is doing similar... all both games are doing is getting the returnees (and rare actual new player) within sniffing distance of the content that is actually active population and worth being a gold sub for.

I see no harm in it. WoW's deathknight class basically creates a bubble in the PVP brackets (doesn't apply to EQ) where there is a skewed # of badly played DK for about 5-9 levels. By the time you get 2 brackets past the "newbie DK" point you are back to people that can mostly play their respective class.

Across the board "pre-levelled" characters let those of us that like to slow-level alts have less disruption from people PLing. In other words, the people that actually care about playing low level content in meaningful way will still be able to do so.
no need to pl anymore
# Nov 10 2013 at 3:29 PM Rating: Excellent
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snailish wrote:
1 character per account for free is my understanding... (and I'm thinking there's a limited timeframe on this as well for some reason).

Yes. The first two weeks of the feature it was free one per account (for existing accounts prior to some timeframe in October) or one per household (for new accounts after the date they set). That time frame is over and now it's something like 3500 to get a Heroic Character.

They won't necessarily do the same in EQ but I can't imagine them having it for free beyond a promotional time frame.
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Close but...
# Nov 09 2013 at 9:01 AM Rating: Good
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-not having heroic missions scale from at least level 70 at CoTF launch was simply a boneheaded oversight on SoE's part.

-They could open up every class to frogloks and they still will be hardly played. Lots of people try froglok, few stay with it more than a few weeks. The animations being the #1 reason I have heard over the years. (the novelty wears off fast).

-bracket voting for new race/classes is going to probably work out badly as too many will vote funny rather than something they want to play. Watch us end up with gnome, vah shir and halfling monks and gnome and halfling beastlords as 5/8 new options.... and dark elf ranger which is a lock to win any vote it is put in.

-Guess I should stop trying to learn leader AA on my druid. long overdue change though.

At least they are still developing the game. Hopefully my reservations are proven unfounded.
Close but...
# Nov 11 2013 at 7:24 AM Rating: Good
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snailish wrote:


-Guess I should stop trying to learn leader AA on my druid. long overdue change though.


I come back to the game after a 8 year hiatus, finally have a machine that will dual box, and they go and tinker the Leadership AA I've been collecting that I never collected during my previous run in the game.

/shakes fist and capricious EQ gods...


Edited, Nov 11th 2013 8:25am by nekokirei
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Well DUH
# Nov 09 2013 at 4:02 AM Rating: Decent
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Yeah it should be scalable from level 1 to 100 not all of have the luxury to box, nor do some of power level. Here is an idea some of actually like to group, kill mobs, do quests, socialize, enjoy the game as it should be.
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