EverQuest is getting another expansion - guess how many we're up to now?
Refuses to Faydwer way.
A milestone 25th expansion pack has been announced for 19-year-old online game EverQuest. It's called The Burning Lands and will be released 11th December 2018.
What's left for a 25th expansion to add? A luck statistic, luckily, as well as six new expansion zones themed around the planes of air, smoke and fire. You can see these in an archived Burning Lands livestream below.
EverQuest today is obviously a different place to when it launched in 1999, when it was queen bee - the MMO all other MMOs aspired to be. Today the herd has moved on, to WOW and beyond, but the committed veterans remain. And they remain to raid, it seems. EQ still goes in for big-numbers raids, you see - raids with 40 people or more. WOW scaled back to 25 players years ago in an effort to make raiding less hardcore (it takes a lot of organisation getting 40 people in one place at one time).
What it means for EQ is there's generally a friendlier community pottering around today, made up of people who've been playing for years - playing a game designed around them. Kotaku wrote a nice piece a couple of years ago from the perspective of an old EQ player returning to the game many years later.
There's an EverQuest 2, by the way, which suffered by virtue of launching almost alongside World of Warcraft in autumn 2004. And there was going to be an EverQuest 3, or EverQuest Next as it was called, but it was canned in 2016. It's not a huge surprise: MMOs aren't the proposition they once were. Battle royale is the hot ticket today, and Daybreak Game Company (renamed from Sony Online Entertainment after Sony sold it to a private investor) has H1Z1 King of the Hill for that reason.
Daybreak also operates a long list of old MMOs, including The Lord of the Rings Online and others which weren't made by SOE/Daybreak. Daybreak has become, in a sense, something of a retirement home for MMOs.
Anyway! Here's a list of EverQuest expansions, should you ever want to memorise them for a party trick (please don't).
- The Ruins of Kunark
- The Scars of Velious
- The Shadows of Luclin
- The Planes of Power
- The Legacy of Ykesha
- Lost Dungeons of Norrath
- Gates of Discord
- Omens of War
- Dragons of Norrath
- Depths of Darkhollow
- Prophecy of Ro
- The Serpent's Spine
- The Buried Sea
- Secrets of Faydwer
- Seeds of Destruction
- Underfoot
- House of Thule
- Veil of Alaris
- Rain of Fear
- Call of the Forsaken
- The Darkened Sea
- The Broken Mirror
- Empires of Kunark
- Ring of Scale
- The Burning Lands