It puts too much pressure on people with family obligations and guild devotion. It's a game and should be fun and a stress release. Expansion launches during the holidays are a bad idea. If also puts pressure on the dev team that also wants to be with family for the holidays. Crunch time right before and the specter of emergency patches during just sucks.
Taking your sweet time with keying/leveling/AA'ing is one of the reasons to join a casual raiding guild. Not all guilds requires you to be done with everything the first month.
Remember the Daybreak company line "We're innovators, not imitators" They innovated using heroes forge to make 95% of their new zones feel fresh.
I'll be happy if content happens. I'm sure we'll get some newly designed zones, but to me, I want the content. Quests, raids, missions. Lots of them.
I suspect a split expansions just like EOK/ROS. This one will feature two elemental planes, fire and air, and the next one will be earth and water.
I've .. mixed thoughts? PoP was a fine playing experience for questing & adventuring, but the zones themselves mostly weren't super. The homes of the gods, the primal sources of elemental power and embodied virtues - mostly had a disappointingly mortal feel & scale to them. Verticality helped in some zones, but EQ's graphical limitations kept that heavily in check since overlook isn't possible.
Was there a release date mentioned? I'm game for a January release though. Releasing just before the holidays or mid holidays sucks. I highly doubt EQ runs on holiday numbers. We're all old and buy the expansion because it's an expansion not because it's a Christmas gift.
Combine a January release date with a gift program geared to the holidays. Likely too late to make it work this year, but with sufficient lead time it should be workable.
the release in December is just the worst time to have an expansion - ever --- most people in December are crazy busy and work is usually insane - trying to book time off in December is like pulling teeth especially a week --- sure you peeps in school have a break but unless your Shennron you all gona graduate and get a job and then you shall see how much fun booking that week off in december is....... Yes a release in January would be great -- and yes trying to key 54 people over the xmas is also a huge pain in the for the top guilds trying to do progression
In the producers letter, I quote:We are happy to say that EverQuest: The Burning Lands is scheduled to launch this December. Would have been less stress if set for January.
It’s a business guys, December launch means the most amount of time preparing content while also allowing for a large cash grab for that tax year. #ContinueTSGear #ContinueChaseTSRaiditems
Even if there is a fiscal reason to launch in December there isn't a need for any (progression) Burning Lands raids to go live in December. Having raid progression overlap the holidays is something that indicates a lack of understanding of societal holiday norms and/or a lack of the intellectual rigor to realize that just because one progression raid was available on the first day of RoK, VoA and TDS and more for every other expansion launch it does not create a mandate for the newest expansion. The Devs will launch the expansion with Progression raids and will blame "management" or some euphemism but the additional time burden and/or missing Progression raids you will face is a decision made by the Dev team who have a two decade track record of being unable to fathom a solution as complicated as: Game Update Notes: January 9, 2019 - Quellious now offers raid expeditions (to players who have completed the pre-requisites)
Bigger Bags via mission/expansion rewards or TSing.. and Illusions let me repeat that more Illusions pls .. oh and MORE iLlUsIoNs thx
There are lots of reasons for raids to go live on day one. Many of them can be easily summed up as we've been doing the same raids for close to a year and want new raids.