With the recent announcement that Neriak will be returning to the Everquest universe, I’m pretty excited. Yeah it is cool that something with a given history like EQ1 lore in it is making its way into EQ2, but I never played EQ1 much so that part I don’t care about. What is exciting about the announcement is that it is coming (I think along with another low level zone) free of charge later this month. Yeah you heard me!
So apparently Sony must have initially come up with plans for 2 player races with the newest expansion but realized that it was just too much work so they cut one side out of it and just released Kelethin and the Fae. So the early rumors of a dark fae turned out to be true in reality, I figured it was something that got cut out of the expansion, but something I wasn’t expecting to see again. They apparently decided that instead of getting rid of it entirely that they could unload the work over to the SOTA team (they are the team that runs the Asian versions and have done Fallen Dynasty and the SOTA graphics previously). This move was brilliant because then, yes it’d take about 6-9 months longer to do, but they can continue working on other stuff and have more content coming with a unique and different feel to it that really rounds out the world, and helps give areas that feel better to the Asian market.
Now EQ2’s free content this year seems huge, absolutely huge. They released Unrest earlier in the year, redid the quests in butcherblock, redid Darkfist Citadel, added the warg mount, finished the last 4 or 5 Hoolah hats, and now they are adding 2 newbie zones and a new player race, just amazing.
I wonder where Neriak is going to be? I don’t know the original location, I know it is underground which makes it fairly easy to put a hole anywhere for the new entrance. I think it was originally located through Fallen Gate off the Commonlands, but given this is part of the faydwer stuff I would almost expect it to be more off butcherblock or something. (Since BB picks up at about level 20 and the new zones are going to be 1-20 this would make sense). This could also explain why they went back through BB a couple months ago and fleshed its quests out more, to help the next influx of new characters….
So right now my plan for my new alt is to make a Defiler since that is a fairly needed class both in the game in general and also by our guild. And I think I’m also going to be upgrading my account to the access pass so that I get the two extra character slots. Maybe we can start having guild days in other MMOs SOE does too cause I think most of us have the access pass and at least the base copies of a few of the games (like EQ1 and SWG).