20th Expansion: Call of the ForsakenFollow

This was announced Friday night at SOELive. Seems like storyline-merging with EQII has begun...

Had to look elsewhere for info (this was posted by Matruk at tenton):

"Senior Producer Thom Terrazas took the stage at SOE Live tonight to discuss the future of EverQuest with its next expansion – Call of the Forsaken. The expansion brings players back to stories about traditional characters and some new zones that have existed since the beginning of EverQuest , but have, until now, remained inaccessible.

The expansion story will begin with events in North Karana following the arrival of Lady Lindenaria, a dragon that arrives through invisible seams that bind countless realities together, exposing the realm of Ethernere. Of interesting note, both the dragon and Ethernere have recently been added to EverQuest II as part of a huge storyline event in which the profits [sic] there, same as in EverQuest, are calling it the end of time...."

It sounds like LDoN 2.0 in some respects... which could be interesting.... O-board thread

Zam posted an article now so I figured I would edit that in for future reference (i.e., when it isn't on the front page)



Edited, Aug 5th 2013 5:55pm by snailish

Thanks Hexeez!

I've always been behind level wise (in every game I've played it seems). With EQ that has always meant to returning to lots of new stuff to see (even though it's old for those that don't take breaks).

I'll add that my main was a chanter during Ldon... and that was a fantastic time to be a small guilded pug-reliant player levelling up that class. Not sure if that is recapturable in the game or not, but at least it sounds like there is some new ideas being tried in the next expac. New ideas can be bad of course, but let's be optimistic!

/agree. I'd like to see it at least 80-100, preferably even 70-100. Basically allow folks to do instanced missions above the level range at which the old LDON's stopped.

I'd also like to see them change/remove the group requirements on them. One of the things that basically killed ldon was that once folks moved on, it was dead. You could not do anything with it unless you could get a group there. Which left boxers as basically the only consumers of the content. I understand the concept of wanting to get people to group and interact socially, but the reality is that as content ceases to be "new", this serves only to make it "unusable" later. I'd honestly prefer if group requirements were lifted on a whole host of current content as well (but I'm not holding my breath). If someone wants to get some flag/achievement/whatever from 20 level old content that is more or less trivial, why the hell require that person to have a 3 person group? We often complain that everyone just ignores old content and grinds/PLs there way to the top, but this is part of the reason. I *could* stop and smell the roses along the way, but unless I happen to run into someone doing the same time when I happen to decide to do so, a whole lot of those roses are fenced off.

It looks like they're creating this as a side path for gear, rather than an upgrade. Which, despite crying and moaning on the main site, I think is a great idea. Progression shouldn't be linear with one "best path" through it. I like the idea that you can get equivalent gear via different paths, depending on what you want to do. It also alleviates some of the bottlenecks to higher level content.

Dunno. We'll see what it's really like when they release it. I did find it amusing that at first all the folks on the SOE boards were complaining about new higher content when they haven't finished the top level of the current stuff, then when they found out that there wouldn't be a level increase or significant gear upgrades, they started complaining about that. Guess you can't please some people. To me, this is a standard "in between" expansion, which expands things horizontally rather than vertically. I happen to think that's a good thing. It gives the top guys time to finish the top tier stuff, while having something on the side to play around in when boredom sets in. It also gives folks still moving up alternatives to the linear progression that a single tiered expansion model tends to create.

Being able to gear up mercs and get them AAs sounds nice, but I'll wait to see how it's implemented. There's some risk here IMO. One of the nice things about mercs is that they are generic. A given merc type at a given level is identical to any other. There are choices in terms of race, but those are pretty much cosmetic differences. Allowing folks to customize the actual abilities of the mercs raises the question of switching them. Currently, you *can* buy/obtain additional merc slots, but by default you get one and only one at a time. But since there's no real negative to dismissing my current one and hiring a new one (other than immediately having to pay the upkeep cost), other than convenience of switching out in the field, there's no real need. With gear and AAs on mercs, that may change. I would not be terribly happy about this if you lost everything on a merc if you dismissed him (if for no other reason than I've accidentally dismissed instead of suspending at least twice). Now, if it's a tracked by merc type rather than individual merc, that would be fine. Or if any given level of merc gets a set number of AAs you can customize when hiring, that would be fine as well (cause if I don't like the current config, I can just dismiss that one hire another and try a different combo).

Gonna really depend on how they implement some of these things IMO.

Sony's totally moved away from emphasizing the social aspects of EQ, in complete deference to multi-boxers who, to be honest about it, constitute a major part of their subscription cash flow these days. That's why I doubt "LDON2" will have the grouping requirements that LDON did. I think I read mercs will be allowed into the missions and that's a good sign for those who worry that assembling a full 6-person player group to do these missions would be nigh-impossible.

I also agree it would be wise of them to scale these missions down to as low as 70, if not lower. Shouldn't be that hard to do as they already do it for some of the anniversary missions. I see lots of noobs and returnees these days (actually more returnees than noobs but they return from so long ago that they're essentially noobs) and encouraging them to stick around and buy new xpacs is a smart way for Sony to keep the game alive even if it's just until EQNext is released.

I seriously doubt it. From everything I've heard (from devs as far back as Rashere), epic quests are the nightmare houseguest from hell. With only a few exceptions, they're obsolete sometimes before the expansion they're in is completed but making them very powerful is a recipe for ridiculous mudflation. Plus, they take loads of time per class to write and design, time that the current (skeleton) crew doesn't have when their other responsibilities are considered. I'm going to guess no for one reason: the person who would be primarily responsible for designing them (Elidroth) was designing quests and zones for CotF and redoing hotzones for the Live game during the only time period this could have been done (between RoF and today).

Then again, that wasn't always the case. I remember being told by one of the codemonkeys years ago that Holly Longdale ('Vahlar' on the EQ boards when she worked there as a writer; she's EQ2's producer now) wrote a couple of the 2.0 quest lines, or plotted them out or something. Long time ago though. Now you have devs doing six things at one time (like, say, spells and itemization) so only the stuff considered to be essential gets on the work order.

They see new epics as a problem because they don't look to solutions. They see 16 x lengthy questlines to match the epic precedent. Of Kunark and OoW.

1.0 Kunark era epics were awesome weapons requiring a good raid force to accomplish that were nearly all banked (not bagged on character) partway into PoP (being generous). 2.0 were banked shortly after OoW for all but a few classes. Necros were basically forced to use theirs for years due to the effect on it.

Obvious fix at the time was a Plane of Time drop being the necessary 1 next step to make the Epic 1.1... aka original epic with high-end planar stats. This epic would have carried through LDoN and LoY (as it was so poorly itemized) and into GoD. Developer me (a fiction) would have put Epic 1.2 into the end of GoD and so on for every expansion moving forward.

..."but this makes the epics beyond 1.0 only available to endgame raiders!"... --Yes... in the era of that expansion. Retrofit this system onto a progression server and you would see the more-casual guilds epiccing up once the end-guilds were past steady farm on the zone for that expac. Once a few level caps come into play, groupers and solo casuals would be there too, especially as keying/entrance to zones frees up.
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There's a lot of fantasy in the above... but if our current EQ devs just saw the 2.5 epic as presently implemented as something that a better version of should be introduced every expac or 2... with a quest (even if it is a raid kill, that is still a quest) that itemizes the new version of the epic within the era statwise (if they make the quest casual doable... then the epic would have modern casual stats. IF it was an endgame raid kill then it should have endgame stats).

That's asking for dev time for 1 quest that takes 1/16 possible prereq weapons and give the class-approrpriate (16 items to be coded) reward. Epic questlines with another stage are more epic. It doesn't even need a new graphic. Sure I would rather have 16x truly epic quests every expansion, but I don't see this as a good $ return for SoE so I can't realistically hope for it.