The Far Seas Trading Company is pleased to bring this traveling festival to Qeynos once again. The Qeynos City Festival is a highly-anticipated spectacle, in which all Norrathians may participate. Also in town is the Qeynos Aether Race. Catch them before they leave!
Each month, a different city is chosen to host this week-long event; Gorowyn, Neriak, Freeport, Qeynos, Halas and Kelethin each get a chance to put on their own version of the occasion. Qeynos will be playing host this month, so make your way to the city and join in the fun!
Adventurers who visit the City Festival will find quests, collections and rewards, many of which are city-specific.
For more information about City Festivals and their rewards, be sure to visit these fabulous guides from our fansites:
Each city has its own collection quest, so be sure to run through the Qeynos Postage Collection quest to earn your Qeynos -themed mailbox for your home!
The Qeynos City Festival will begin on April 1st at 12:01am PDT and run until April 7th at 11:59pm PDT. The festival only comes to Qeynos twice a year, so don’t miss out!
The Velious saga continues! New lands and adventures will be uncovered on April 30 with Game Update 66 entitled EverQuest II: Scars of the Awakened!
Ever vigilant, Norrathians march united under the banner of the New Combine army, deeper into the perilous continent of Velious.
Finally, the army breaches the borders of a region known as Cobalt Scar – a majestic, lush, but tormented region. And from within dark passages in the surrounding mountains, the inhabitants of Sirens Grotto beckon to all.
The first news heard from Cobalt Scar concerns tribes of Othmir that succumbed to an unfortunate fate that now threatens everyone. Further examination into the area will reveal a foreboding presence of the Awakened Legion, a force of evil that decimated dragonkind in the legendary city of Skyshrine.
Nearby, in the watery depths of Sirens Grotto – unseen by landwalkers for the ages – it is said that the caverns hold secrets of their own. And the beguiling siren coven known as the Darkwater Sisters will not give up those secrets easily.
All the while, the Ages End Prophecy looms with its promise to see Kerafyrm – Norrath’s most evil, powerful dragon – bring a violent end to the world. Heroes from every corner of Norrath are called to explore this new land in Velious and fight for a future for all.
For those brave and stalwart, we welcome you to EverQuest II: Scars of the Awakened! Cobalt Scar will have many new carefully crafted quests that tell incredible stories. Sirens Grotto – the new dungeon — will bring you solo, heroic, and raid challenges. You will also find all-new collections, tradeskill quest lines, tradeskill apprentice items, and updated PvP rewards. Not to be forgotten are improvements resulting from the class feedback players gave us on our community forums!
Beta is expected to begin on April 2 and we encourage everyone to log in help us ensure our game is fun and tested well!
Look for more details in the coming weeks as we release art, lore, and gameplay features through articles, webcasts and more! You won’t want to miss a thing!
When Beastlords were added to EQ2, the first thing an alarming number of people wanted to tame was Bristlebane‘s very own Bovinasauros Rex or the Meatbeast! Inexplicably, a month later the Meatbeast was taken away and there were rumblings that not all on the EQ2 team were quite so excited about the idea of players running rampant with them. We thought that was the end of it, but the Walter Bishopesque love for the Meatbeast in the EQ2 community just wouldn’t die! After a year of players clamoring, the Meatbeast was once again available to Beastlords and all was once again right with Norrath. We celebrated, smiled, and moved on. But not the insane evil genius EQ2, Senior Animator Tom Tobey and his cohort Christopher Atkins, Character Artist.
Just in time for the April Foolishness of Bristlebane Day, they have given us a full quart’s worth of hilarity. I could describe it, but you’re better off just watching the funniest video SOE has ever released. If you don’t die laughing, then I don’t know what to say…
Today, Meatbeast baby pets in five different colors are available for your house, and more importantly, you can now get a Meatbeast mount either a Cow or Bull for 1,950SC. I’m logging in right now!
SOE Webcast: EverQuest II – Scars of the Awakened Lore
The Saga of the Swords and the Age’s End Prophecy has captured EverQuest II fans for the last three years, and the Velious saga continues now with Game Update 66, Scars of the Awakened! Your host Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson (Director of Development for the EverQuest Franchise), with Kyle “Kander” Vallee (Lead Designer), Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall (Assistant Lead Designer), and Carlos “Gninja” Mora (Game Designer), will recap the story thus far and take a look at what’s to come as Norrathians march together under the banner of the New Combine army. What awaits adventurers in Cobalt Scar and beyond?
Join us on Thursday, March 28, 2013, at 4:00 p.m. US Pacific Time* on Twitch TV! The webcast is expected to last about 20 minutes.
Don’t miss this first preview of Scars of the Awakened!
Just in case there hasn’t been enough EQNext information to absorb, here’s another video! Garrett Fuller of MMORPG.com interviewsDave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson about EverQuest Next.
Summary
Before Georgeson got involved, the team had been working for about a year on an evolutionary game, rather than something totally new. The team was shuffled around, and they sat down and made lists of the best and worst things of MMOs and a few killer ideas of things that people would say “They’re doing WHAT?” They started drafting AAA talent and assembled a core team of 25-30 people and put together “Holy Grail” ideas of what they could do.
“There are very few people that have the breadth of experience at creating MMOs that we do. There are almost no Western companies that have this number of MMOs, especially this variety of MMOs. Since we treat all of our games as part of the same family, we look at them all and they all act differently. Even EverQuest and EverQuest II are dramatically different from each other. We get different kinds of information from those. That all gets distilled into a knowledgebase that’s second-to-none. We know what we’re doing. We know what works and what doesn’t work in these type of games. We know what kind of obstacles we’re facing when we try to create a new MMO. “
“A lot of new MMOs have spiked and then tanked, mostly (in my opinion) because we haven’t seen a lot of variation in theme. EverQuest and EverQuest II keep winning those battles because people go away and they try a new game. When they get through that content too fast, or they find out that the feature depth isn’t there, they come back. We’ve had incredibly stable populations on those games for years and years now. EverQuest is 14 years old now, EverQuest II is 9 years old. We don’t understand why they would ever end.”
“EQNext has a lot of I think of completely original ideas. That’s why we’re not really tipping off our competitors to what we’re doing right now. We want to have a nice big comfortable lead before we tell people what we’re doing. That’s why we’re in a black box right now. SOE Live is coming up. It’s our annual event where the fans come and they support our games. It’s our hardcorest of our hardcore fans. The people who are willing to go to Vegas and spend money to hang out with us and find out what’s coming next. We’re going to reveal it at SOE Live on August 1st, the first night of the event.”
“Everybody and their brother is thinking about how Mobile devices are going to integrate in with these big virtual worlds that we create. Players really want to stay connected, otherwise there wouldn’t be all these fan sites, we wouldn’t have all these wikis. It’s an obvious thing for us to connect in and participate in the game in different ways. That’s inevitable, that’s going to happen.”
Then he talked about the forthcoming range of peripherals that are coming like Google Glass and wireless hand controllers.
“We’re all guilty of having created combat-oriented games from time to time. Yet that’s not really how MMOs succeed. They succeed when you have a family, when people are part of a world, when people are proud of the world that they’re in. They understand the lore and they get friendships. That’s where an MMO really starts to kick into gear. That’s one reason I don’t expect EverQuest and EverQuest II to ever die.“
“EverQuest has been in full development for 19 years.”
“With EverQuest Next…we have to have something substantially different that attracts people with brand new ideas that they’ve never seen before, in combination with things that they’ve never seen before. That’s what we intend to do with EQNext.”
The Saga of the Swords and the Age’s End Prophecy has captured EverQuest II fans for the last three years, and the Velious saga continues now with Game Update 66: Scars of the Awakened! Your host Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson (Director of Development for the EverQuest Franchise), with Kyle “Kander” Vallee (Lead Designer), Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall (Assistant Lead Designer), and Carlos “Gninja” Mora (Game Designer), will recap the story thus far and take a look at what’s to come as Norrathians march together under the banner of the New Combine army. What awaits adventurers in Cobalt Scar and beyond?
Join us on Thursday, March 28, 2013, at 4:00 p.m. US Pacific Time on Twitch TV! The webcast is expected to last about 20 minutes.
Don’t miss this first preview of Scars of the Awakened!
I recommend watching this video in High Definition (choose 720p or 1080p from the Gear menu) and in Full Screen.
No, we’re not changing our name to PS2Wire. In fact, the audiences for Planetside 2 and the next EverQuest could not be any different, however they do have at least one thing in common: Both games are being built upon SOE’s homegrown ForgeLight engine.
Anyone wanting to scout as much information as possible about EQNext really should be ogling videos of Planetside 2, as they undoubtedly serve as a window into the type of graphics and multiplayer gaming we might expect! As you watch the video above, imagine epic battles in Antonica, Velious, the Sinking Sands, and so on (but without the laser rifles).
Picking Your Open World Battles
Despite valiant efforts by server optimization geniuses Autenil, Rothgar, and Zoltaroth, the creaky EverQuest II engine (which was developed before their time) struggles to handle 100 simultaneous players in a Ring War or Storm Gorge public quest. So it is a revelation to watch Planetside 2 videos where the engine effortlessly renders 500, 1000, or more players in all-out battles.
While some viewed Public Quests as a mere aping of a competitor‘s live interactive events, I saw them as a glimpse into the future of MMOs. I have no objection to instances, but there is nothing more visceral and exciting then players being called to each others aid, challenging a seemingly insurmountable enemy that grows in power directly proportional to the number and strength of players present, and declaring victory all without the bureaucracy of trying to form up groups or the perfect raid force. Public Quests gave us a taste of truly open world collaborative play.
What Happened to Public Quests?
Alas, an overabundance of caution that players were getting rewards for standing AFK led to months of “anti-slacker” code being developed and redeveloped before the designer threw up his hands and moved on. The original plans to add Public Quests to other zones (including one just outside Sleeper’s Tomb which briefly appeared in the first week of the Velious beta) fizzled as a result.
It seems a no-brainer that we’ll see this type of ragtag impromptu battle in EQNext in some shape or form and I for one am excited by the prospect of hundreds of players working together to defeat enemies that could not be attempted with just 24.
TODAY, March 22, 2013, Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel (Lobby Bar)
7:00 – 9:00pm EDT Don’t miss a chance to gang out with SOE folks at the Lobby Bar in the Westin and chat about Dragon’s Prophet, PlanetSide 2, the EverQuest franchise, and other exciting news and events from SOE! Do you love dragons? So do we! SOE folks will hand out coveted Priority Access Beta keys for our upcoming Dragon’s Prophet Beta, as well as one hundred limited edition Dragon’s Prophet t-shirts. One per person, and first come, first served until they’re gone! No pushing, shoving or biting, please. We’re really excited about Dragon’s Prophet, a game created by Runewaker, and can’t wait to talk to you about it. We’re bringing along Todd Carson, Senior Producer, to answer all your Dragon-related questions… well, some of them, anyway! Omeed Dariani (Sr. Brand Manager) and Brasse (Director of Global Community Relations) will also be there to talk Dragons with you! Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson, Director of Development for the EverQuest franchise (that’s EverQuest, EverQuest II, and EQ Next), is on two panels at PAX East. Take in the Friday panel and then join us to discuss it right afterward in the Westin lobby! Dave loves chatting with players about all aspects of EverQuest games! Here’s the info for his panels:
Friday, 3/22, 5:30 p.m. EDT: MMORPG “Future of Online Gaming”
Sunday, 3/24, 12:00 p.m. EDT: The Escapist’s “Future of Playing a Role in Videogame RPGs”
Also joining us: Maggie “Luperza” Krohn, our PlanetSide 2 Community Rep. She’ll be running demos for PS2 at the nVidia booth inside PAX East, and will be joining us to talk with all you shooter fans. Warning, she is Vanu, so come prepared! Eric “Piestro” Cleaver, our Sr. Community Manager for EverQuest. Old school gamers, he’s your guy! Compare stories of CRs and talk about the latest expansion for EverQuest, which celebrates its 14th Anniversary this year! I am sure he’ll bring some schwag as well. Don’t have a pass to PAX East? No worries! You can still come and hang out with the SOE team at the Westin lobby. And best of all… the beer’s on Brasse!
BE THERE! RSVP on Facebook Follow @SonyOnline, @dragons_prophet, @planetside2, @everquest, and @everquestii for Twitter updates!
At long last, the EverQuest2.com website has been updated with a current list of Community Fan Sites and News pages. This page can be reached under the Community menu under Links.
Of course we’re happy to see EQ2Wire listed — hey it only took us 4 1/2 years! — as well as our sister site EQ2U and Dethdlr’s recently updated Adornment Calculator. It’s great to see the number of sites listed which have contributed so much to the EverQuest II world and player community.
Thanks to Dexella who reached out to the Fan Site community to make sure she was working with the best possible list of sites that are still relevant to the EQ2 world.
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