Really? Yes, really! It's happening, everybody! As an experiment, we're trying something different this year. We're posting our development roadmap for 2022. As far as we know, this is the first time we’ve publicly laid out our major plans like this. Before we get to that, however, we'd like to highlight some of the things that we accomplished in 2021. 2021 was a whirlwind of a year. We celebrated our 22nd Anniversary with a special sweepstakes for a one-of-a-kind Firiona Vie statue, in addition to in-game bonuses and a new fez party hat. Later in May, we embarked on our experimental Random Loot Servers: Mischief and Thornblade. We also released the Item Compare system to allow you to more quickly compare your currently equipped items with other items. May was a busy month and we also launched new hunter achievements for our older expansions. In July, Overseer got a large update with new quests and agents. In October, we released the Membership Perks program. In November, we released the EverQuest Original Soundtrack on Black Vinyl. December saw the ship of the 28th expansion: Terror of Luclin! For those of you that participated in the expansion beta, you also got to see a pre-release candidate for our servers and clients 64-bit port. We're excited to share our plans with you. Please remember that these are our high-level goals and expected delivery dates and do not list everything we will be doing. We will be working on other updates to the game, fixing issues, and making "quality of life" improvements (such as UI tweaks, etc.). We hope giving you a general snapshot of the roadmap that we are striving to complete this year is something you'd like to see from us moving forward; otherwise, please let us know if it's something you never want to see us do. Without further ado, here are our big plans for EverQuest 2022 and beyond! 2022 Roadmap: January: Community Resource Council Application Relaunch - Your chance to help advise on the future of EverQuest. February: 64-Bit Servers and Clients Release to Live Servers March: 23rd Anniversary - New quests, missions, and a new raid. New Content for Bristlebane's Day New Content for Stomple's Day April: New Classic Achievements - Adding achievements for many original quests in EverQuest's starting cities. May: New Progression Servers - Rulesets to be announced at a later date. Mercenary Rank Simplification - Simplify mercenaries down to the two ranks primarily in use and remove the quest line requirements for obtaining them. New Tempest Festival Event June: Server Merge - Merging the Phinigel and Miragul servers to Vox. July: New Scorched Skies Event New Overseer Achievements and Reward Improvements September: Heroic Characters Update - New Heroic Characters will start at level 100. October: 2022's Expansion Beta + Preorder New Content for Nights of the Dead November: Extra Life - Help us raise funds for the Children's Miracle Network. New Content for Feast of Giving December: 2022's Expansion Launch New Content for the New Year's Event Throughout the Year: Raid Zone Performance Improvements Class Tuning and Balancing Anti-Cheat Improvements Beyond 2022: New UI Engine This is a selection of our high-level items; dates and events are subject to change. Additionally, we'll be working to improve on your overall experience. We're keeping our SPIRITS high, Jenn Chan Head of Studio
I am really looking forward to the release of the 64bit client. Played back in 99, just started playing again more often
Thank you for the update! The increase in new seasonal content is welcomed news. The new client, engine, and anti-cheat measures are heartening. Props to the team to make all of this happen.
I Love, love love LOVE when these roadmaps are made public. No matter what I may agree with or disagree with therein, I love that it was shared. So please consider my comment a giant +1 to doing this in the future.
Please let this be the year when ALL servers get Turkey familiars, Turkey mounts, and/or turkey or pie weapon skins. Maybe a Turkey hat skin, or recipe for hat makers. And maybe a turkey "catch em all" event that gives a fun item. please please please please
Very interesting and thanks for finally actually telling us what you plan to make happen for the game we all love. The 64bit client is soon... how "tested" is it... will we beta tester with heaps of crashes and downtime and weird issues or has it been tested "a long time" before release in the wild? the merc change sounds interesting, does that mean you will make them less sucky at higher levels? new tlp sounds nice... hint hint free trade (not random loot crap) boxing allowed server as one of them and can make the other one NOBOX if you please, couldn't care less... but please bury the truebox stuff aw poor phinny merged with vox? it was a good server, served us well for many years, may it rest in pieces on Vox. (I moved to AB when guild collapsed just before CoV expansion, we almost made it to live status)
I hope these have nothing to do with the number of quests completed as many of us have had our overseer quest counts reset.
This is a good roadmap; thank you for releasing it publicly. I'm especially interested in the items mentioned in the "throughout the year" section. My hope is the specific monthly deliverables (e.g., old-world/overseer achievements) don't end up taking priority over those much more important improvements, but it's at least good to know that those topics are being given some focus.
to answer the question of if this is something we want you to continue doing, yes 100%. More communication is never a bad thing.
They mention "two ranks primarily in use" so I expect them to keep A5 and J5. One of my F2P accounts was granted Silver after having membership so I suspect a majority of F2P players used A5.
Please - heck no to this x 100. We need to let go of the past, let them bring in a UX Designer and redo the UI from scratch. Carrying along that 20 year baggage has no useful purpose to making EQ more user friendly. You will have to adjust to a new UI. That is all.
No thanks. EQ's UI, (despite the default being in desperate need of an update) is the most customizable of any game, and is 10x better than most because of it.
Personally, I would like to see these quest lines retained, with the rewards changed to a merc gear chest of some kind (merc equipment didn't exist yet when these quests were created). The content is fun and non-trivial.
Can we please get the Barter, Baz trader system fixed? this system is just terrible and 15+ years old, we should be able to put up buy orders and sell items with out requiring 2 different gold accounts and toons logged in to do that while having to have a 3rd account just to play the game. EQ had a great system and that was 2006... please add this to the roadmap thank you from someone whos been playing since mid 99.
I thought: FTP = A2 Silver FTP = A5 Paid = J5 I was assuming A2 and J5 were the two most used, and Silver accounts are uncommon if not rare. Am I wrong about that?