Everquest Current

Good morning everyone, hopefully you got a bit more sleep than I did last night. I ended up with another minor round of panic attacks and as a result did not actually make it to bed until after 1 am. However I seem to be mostly functional. Thanks a ton for all the warm wishes I received yesterday through either the blog, twitter, google+ or in game. We didn’t do anything really insane… just went out to dinner and then came back and chilled out downstairs. I piddled around a bit in Rift and eventually made my way over to the SOE Live twitch stream.

What Happens in Vegas

Normally we think of what happens in Vegas… stays in Vegas… however at SOE apparently what happens gets live broadcast over Twitch.tv for free. Having been a long fan of the SOE franchises, namely Everquest 2 I figured I would tune in last night for a bit and see if there was anything interesting happening. I have been immensely curious to find out what is coming down the pipe with Everquest Next. I have so many fears about how the game will turn out… sandbox can mean so many things and not all of them good for the long time survival of a game. So I like many tuned in thinking I might see a teaser for EQNext before the official unveil at Noon PST today.

You could tell that pretty much the only thing the crowd wanted to hear about WAS EQ Next and when Smedley took the stage… he did a pretty thorough job of baiting and teasing the crowd. However he did bring out the very famous Jeremy Soule of Skyrim fame to showcase his work on the Everquest Next theme. Within moments of it happening in the live broadcast the above theme was available on Youtube. I have to say… I am more than a little disappointed. Granted this is “sketch” as they called it, an early synth only version of the theme… but quite honestly it feels a little generic for lack of the better word.

If you listen to the Everquest 1 and Everquest 2 themes… there is definitely a shared lineage there. I expected this theme to carry on in a new way with the original “Everquest Notes” much in the same way that Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim take the same skeletal core of “TES Notes” and make them their own. But what we have is something vastly different and really does not feel at all like “Everquest” music to me. It feels way too ethereal, and not bombastic enough to represent an over the top franchise like Everquest. Apparently however gauging opinion from twitter and Google+ I am in the minority of my opinion.

I listened to the track over and over trying to find some shared lineage back to the original themes… and I think maybe just maybe I figured out what Jeremy Soule was trying to do. In the original Everquest theme… there is an odd little segment that always felt a bit out of place… that starts at roughly 0:46 and continues to 1:06. The more I listen to the EQNext theme the more I think he chose this odd little section to expand into a larger theme. I guess my hope is that Soule was starting with this segment and fading his way into the “EQ Notes”, and that the part that did the unfinished fade down is where the theme would pick up and grow into something we recognize.

I have a lot of faith in Jeremy Soule, I have a 4 disc set of Skyrim music that I listen to at work on a pretty regular basis. I was just shocked at what I heard and how little it represented “Everquest” for me. It also makes me afraid that they are really distancing themselves from the past, and kinda abandoning the Everquest lineage that came before. I love Norrath and probably always will, and while I don’t think I could ever return to playing Everquest 1 I am still a huge fan of everything that Everquest 2 has become. I want Everquest Next to draw upon this pedigree and not just completely abandon it.

So much emphasis has been placed on Everquest Next, but last night was really about showing off Everquest Current. Both Everquest and Everquest II are seemingly unstoppable juggernauts of content. In the video above they announce the 20th expansion for the original Everquest, Call of the Forsaken. It is completely staggering to think of any MMO in todays climate making its way through 20 separate expansion packs. That is really one of the things that the SOE model has done… is allow aging communities to survive and be nurtured by what seems like extremely dedicated product teams.

I don’t really play Everquest other than occasionally logging in to my station account and remembering just how primate the old days were, so the first half of this trip down “everquest current” was interesting but had no real meat on its bones for me. I started to get a little excited when the EQ2 portion came up. While I am knee deep in Rift and living it… I will always have a deep nostalgia over EQ2 and all that it represents. As a result I want it to be awesome, and I want to to successfully draw players. In the above video they announce the 10th expansion for EQ2, Tears of Veeshan.

I remember spending a lot of time farming the North Temple of Veeshan for rep and gear back in the original game… and to some extend I always knew that EQ2 would take us back there. Additionally they will be opening up High Hold Keep, a zone that I travelled through numerous times on my way to the Karanas but never actually leveled in the area surrounding it. Apparently in the storyline we have dug too deep below the keep… and uncovered a band of Goblins that have taken it over. As a result it looks like similar to Kaladim, it will be a former city turned dungeon as you “retake” the keep.

What I found extremely interesting in the talk of going to the “Nexus Core” supposedly an area that powered the Nexus on Luclin. I have always hoped that one of the expansions would take us back to moon and see what remains of it, so maybe this will open the door to that actually happening. I really loved Luclin, I guess in part because this was the first expansion I was actually a loyal player for the release. I started playing Everquest just shortly after the release of Velious, and there was something magical about experiencing my very first MMO expansion pack.

The big reveal it seems was the addition of a 26th character class The Channeler, which is apparently on the SOE Live floor. The shots they showed of the class looked pretty cool, but it also seemed extremely confused. It is a priest archetype, but has a giant mage like elemental construct but wears leather and wields a bow. It will be interesting to see what the class plays like, and whether it feels like a ranger turned pet class or not. The unique mechanic is that the construct is customizable with the ability to swap abilities and appearances to make it into whatever the player wants. Again it will have to be something I see in action to be able to make sense of it.

Finally at the TAIL end of the video Holly Longsdale teased what was coming for expansion eleven. Based on the images shown… I would guess that the Everquest 2 timeline will be discovering the lost continent of Taelosia as see in the Gates of Discord expansion to the original game. I could be wrong… namely because I was not actually playing EQ at that time, but based on some of the artwork I remember… these odd tribal lizardish men look to fit that theme. I am not sure but I believe Taelosia is the last major landmass that has not made an apperance at least in part in the broken world setting. It is good to see that they have a long range plan of where to take the game next. I still would love to get a trip back to the moon however.

Wrapping Up

I am looking forward to seeing the actual Everquest Next announcement today around noonish pst. Additionally from Quake Con there is supposed to be a live demo of Elder Scrolls Online at 1:30 EDT so that should be awesome as well. I will likely be listening to both in the background as I work on various things today. I really hope that both are as awesome as I have built them up to be in my head. I hope you all have a great Friday, and that it leads to a great weekend. Hopefully other than picking up around the house and doing a few chores mine is pretty relaxing. Tonight at 8pm CDT House Stalwart is hosting a League of Legends beginner night for anyone that wants to get their feet wet, so that should be enjoyable. It has been so long since I have played that I am really looking forward to doing it for a few hours.