Complete Heal

After playing on the new 51/50 server preview last night, I got motivated to attend a few EQ panels today. The first panel was related to the new Mayong server which will be released to the public this coming Tuesday morning – June 30th. With the 51/50 server, you can start any new character at level 51 with 50 alternative advancement points. You start with zero cash and a few bags but get a full set of flawed defiant gear, max skills for your level, all of your spells and the opportunity to earn one of 33 server first titles on your way to 85. The next title up for grabs, that wasn’t taken already during the FanFaire preview, is for Trakanon. The dev team also mentioned that they will offer secondary titles starting on Tuesday for the bosses dropped during Fanfaire. Server transfers on and off the new server won’t be allowed for at least the next few months.

Also on Tuesday they are e-mailing over 1 million former players who never got a character above level 50 – offering them a chance to come back and start on the new server. These former players will get somewhere between 14 and 30 days free game time to experience the world of Norrath once again. I asked them why it took so long to release this server and they said they were holding it out for a FanFaire release. The biggest obstacle to the server going live was making sure the gear sets and spells were all taken care of. On a personal note, I’m going to be playing when the server goes live on Tuesday. I hope many of you give it a shot as well, especially if you haven’t played EQ in a while. You can try out all the character classes and find something you like. There will be a large number of people leveling up so groups should be easy to find. The best part is you don’t start 10 years behind the curve.

I also watched the world premier of the EQ documentary this morning. The room was packed, as you might imagine, and I camped on the floor in front of the screen. It was a great journey down memory lane and I found it interesting just how many people have been influenced in so many ways by the video game I’ve now played off and on for 10 years. Of particular interest was the favorable commentary by the World of Warcraft lead designers who were interviewed for segments of the show. Also, there was a bit of a teaser in there about something called “EQ Next.” I talked to a few developers later in the day and they were very tight lipped about this deal. I walked away believing that EQ Next is code for the next Everquest project. Maybe that’s not exactly an earth shattering deduction but something is underway for another Norrath based MMO.

The last thing I did today EQ wise was attend the new expansion unveiling. The next expansion is called Underfoot and is based in the plane of power for Brell’s realm. Brell is the “duke of below” and is the creator of gnomes and dwarves. In this expansion, you enter through the Hole and explore 13 cave like zones. There was a bizarre mini-game demoed where you enter an instance with 12 players and 12 npc characters and run around throwing boomerangs at each other FPS style. You will get rewards for finishing high in the leaderboard at the end of each map. This was cool I guess but seemed a bit random. The expansion is basically more killing stuff while getting gear with more hit points and mana. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it I suppose.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 28th, 2009 at 2:07 am and is filed under Fanfaire. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.