It needs to be delayed on Test until they complete the whole thing tbh In its current state it would have made Live unplayable
Spend many months working on upgrading dependencies and what not on legacy code base many months could have been spent EQ3, NEXT GEN content Expansions where armor designs are easy thing to do like every other game. Not no current EQ with no new armor designs no new nothing because legacy code doesn't support it, need upgrade code, dependencies, etc. Doing all this rework, meanwhile its easier to do EQ3, using fresh NEXT GEN code, and have a solid up to date, NEXT GEN foundation. Rather than falling apart old legacy code, updating it because of vulnerabilities, trying to make it better. Doing all these code changes on legacy for staying relevant, 64 bit, UI upgrade. These are staying relevant changes. That's a lot of work, rather have them spend it doing something else. Been over a year since the 64bit, I hardly notice anything different, just staying relevant it seems is what these changes are about. Over a year. Buddy, could spend time better doing something else.
They tried EQ3 and gave up. I'm sure many people with short attention spans will happily jump to whatever is new and shiny and stay until the next newer and shinier thing comes along. However there are plenty of us that are happy with EQ, we've been here for years (decades even) and it just feels like home. The idea of simply throwing that history away for some pretty graphics is hard to understand.
EQ2 split EQs population. Lower population means fewer groups. MMOs competing with themselves is bad and has hurt EQ. EQ3 competes with EQ2 and EQ1. Not just EQ2 but also EQ Next, EQOA, etc, all were resources pulling from EQ development. The biggest failure of EQ Next was it pulled resources from the established franchise. Plenty of people who play EQ1 are committed to their avatars and their guilds. They have no interest in EQ3. EQ1 is a good game and good lore. At this point, enough people have never played EQ that EQ itself is a new game. EQ would best invest its resources with a Remastered TLP that uses all of the existing EQ gameplay and lore in a game engine. Make absolutely minimal changes to the game. Switch to a Battle.net client that keeps people in EQ1 and EQremastered in direct communication with each other. Eventually EQ remastered could catch up with Live, at which point, all of the existing servers could be merged into the new engine. The existing player base would continue in the same game, same guild, same everything, just a new engine, that gets merged 1 server at a time. EQ expansions end when EQremastered catches up. A well developed Remastered can even have the option for legacy models. Even the TLPs could continue with legacy gameplay but in a new engine.
