EQ2 has announced their new expansion which includes a new playable race.

Since my EQ1 main is a Vah Shir I have a fondness for the lore. It would be interesting to see the EQ2 alternate timeline on the subject. I can't judge how something looks from one picture so I'm curious how they look and if they escape the smooshed faces the EQ2 Kerra have (not to be mean, but I don't think they were very well designed as far as feline heads go).

Aren't Vah Shir the same race as the Kerra though, just their ancestors were the upper classes likely intentionally nuked by a faction of Erudites for fear of them being a rising power? I suppose the divided culture is enough to treat them as separate again though and any descendants of Vah Shir survivors on Norrath would have little connection to the moon anymore. I wonder if the anti-arcane sentiment, or whatever the lore terminology is, faded over the centuries since the timeline split. At least I think I recall that being a thing due to what the Erudites did, but it's been a long time since I was a low level Vah Shir in Shar Vahl.

So little time for so many games. I stopped playing EQ2 casually when Guild Wars 2 came out, a game I haven't played in a long time despite loving it. Now I occasionally casually play Final Fantasy XIV since its storytelling eventually gets ridiculously good I hear. I never disliked EQ2. There's just only so much time in the day, and it's a very different game than EQ1, which I have no intention of quitting.

They aren't going to use old EQ1 models for EQ2, but there is absolutely asset overlap with icons and music. I'm not sure how deep the overlap with music goes, but it definitely applies to one or more VoA songs.

If I remember right (and I might be mixing non-cannon stuff in my head), the spell cast at the heretics was redirected towards the vah shir and teleported them to the moon instead. It wasn't an intentional attack on them.

Also they are.. the noble class of the kerrans. Same race but they were the elites. (possibly the warriors?) In any case, it WILL tempt me to re-make my beastlord in EQ2 as a proper vah shir instead of being a kerran; but I still don't really like the combat there, it never feels like it flows right. It always feels janky to me for some reason. (MAYBE its partially due to being use to EQ1s mechanics and hating the REALLY SLOW DELAY on melee weapons lol)

Tempted me to login to eq2 but I think I would need to buy the expac to play vah shir.

You can have a lot of new things when you haven't hardcoded 2 bit registers into your game

i see no reason nor room for more races in eq1, we have 16, how many more do we need? should we be sifting through pages of races? come on. races and classes choices are rather large in this game vs pretty much every other game in existence. we do not need more. other points about illusions are are valid here, theres nothing meanfingful about asking for a 17th race or class and it would take resources from things that do matter.

i'm coming back to EQ2 from a big break to level up the new race. i always liked EQ more than EQ2 but due to the fact i play cleric and am now a casual player EQ is no longer playable for me. adding a new race to EQ is not a good idea.

maybe EQ needs to streamline like WoW to pull people back to retail (live) version. drop level back to 60, AAs become limited and capped, and ALL classes can solo productively PVE content to level up (not boxed). the question is why do people like TLP? maybe less bloat and a fresh server. but on the other hand retail version has some really nice features, so streamlining maybe what is needed to pulling people back to retail. the ones that like TLP can live there or, like myself, play over there when the retail servers are down ....

new race not going to do it for me. streamline and add new content that can be soloed by any class.

at this time Cleric is not able to solo without boxing and Luclin is dead except for raid night.

If no room, get rid of Halflings to make room for a new race

lol. kill the hobbittses she says

i never really saw the point in halfelves myself

wonder if this is what happened to the Dwarfs in other MMOs. my vote would to only have human and just sell race illusions. this would simplify things for sure.

Actually Live EQ2 is in a pretty bad way, so i see this as encouraging sign towards fixing this.
Kaladim the TLP (or TLE as it's called in EQ2 land), isn't too bad but it hasn't got to the point where EQ2 started to break horribly, so is still pretty viable. The server will have a finite life though and just be merged into a live EQ2 server once it starts reaching 'broken status'

Just to list some of the things that arebroken.
AA's: There's pages upon pages of AA's, all of which have been released over the years, have their own caps and are pretty confusing.

XP: The only levelling mechanism is quests. you get practically nothing for grinding.

Potency: Everything is locked behind one stat: potency. If you don't have enough potency you can hit a mob all day and not damage it. If you have more potency a mob has mitigation then it just dies in a blink. There is no skill involved, level differences don't matter, it all comes down to the potency stat.

Gear: This is linked with potency. all the latest expacs give you a base set of gear which is better than some of the top tier raid stuff from the previous expansion. This gives you enough potency to grind solo dungeons till you get enough potency to damage stuff in heroic dungeons. Once you can do heroics, you then start the grind again to replace all the solo dungeon stuff.... till you get enough potency to start raids... which you then have to grind to replace all your heroic gear. At this point everything becomes trivial, till the next expac drops and you begin the whole thing again. Basically a new player can't raid till they've been carried through enough heroic dungeons in charity groups, to get a set of heroic gear. It doesn't matter what level you are... if you've not got the gear, you're useless in the next tier. In addition stats are so bloated (talking millions here) the actual numbers are meaningless.

Tradeskills : the Blood of Luclin changes to tradeskills was an attempt to make things more interesting, but in reality was so poorly implemented that it just turned people off.

Cash shop: While you don't have to use it, it's pretty painful not to.

The new race will definitely pull in some new players, but unless they address some of the other issues however then the new players will just leave... especially over the gear grind.

EQ2 isn't actually a bad game, but the equipment bloat and poor mechanics added over the later expacs really break it. What it truely needs is a hard reset as part of an expansion...

e.g. a huge planar shift has moved norrath/luclin to a new dimension rendering all previous equipment inert. A new material was found that could be used to craft weapons/armor/spells/abilities/jewelry, but was in no way as powerful as was achieved in the 'glory days'. Fortunately the denizens of norrath were also weakened in the cataclysm, which prevented them overrunning the weakened population etc, etc.

I really don't think this is much different to what they're doing now with disposable gear every time you move up an expac, except you would 'normalise' gear over the whole game, not just the current expac.

In a nutshell... EQ2 early days great game. EQ2 late days.. broken and cash shop oriented.

Anyway my point is that DPG look like they're making plans to do some remediation on EQ2, as this is also an asset of theirs. EQ1 isn't as broken so doen't really need the new 'shiny' race to pull in new players, which i think is part of the reason for why one game got it and the other didn't.

Yes a new race might be interesting in EQ1, but actually it brings fairly little the game.
A new class on the other hand....

I tried eq2 a bit this summer, and its just not as enjoyable as I remember playing it like 10 years ago or something. Seems kludgy. Did they radically change it at some point?

Considering that EverQuest 2 keeps getting new playable races while EverQuest hasn't since The Serpent's Spine, I do have one solution for this...

Normally when you create a new character, you see all 16 races on the left and 16 classes on the right.

Barbarian, Dark Elf, Dwarf, Eurdite
Gnome, Half-Elf, Halfling, High Elf
Human, Iskar, Oger, Troll
Van-Shar, Wood Elf, Froglok, Drakkin.

Now imagine if the race selection was like this on the character creation screen...

Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings
Calibans, Gnomes, Scaled, Sprite

Upon selecting Humans, you get this selection...

Barbarian, Drakkin, Eurdite, Human

Upon selecting Elves, you get this selection.

Dark Elf, Elddar, Flame Elf, Half-Elf,
High Elf, Sand Elf, Wood Elf.

Upon Selecting Dwarves, you get this selection...

Colden, Dwarf

Upon selecting Calibans, you get this selection...

Ogers, Trolls

Upon selecting Scaled, you get this selection...

Iskar, Sarnak

Upon selecting Sprite, you get this selection...

Arasai, Brownie, Fae, Ratonga

The list could go on and this kind of idea would actually allow EverQuest to have more races, perhaps even more classes as well (select Tanks brings up Paladins, Shadowknights & Warriors, select Priests brings up Clerics, Druids & Shamans ect ect). I mean if we finally saw ice shading happen in Torment of Valious after several years, I'm certain they can find a workaround in order for EverQuest to have new races, and this idea I have in mind is one of those thoughts.

EQ 2 was great during the early days of PVP servers with platinum drops. Also, crafted gear was more than enough for the majority of the game a few DLCs in. I liked the game but... bots killed the market with Fossil Temper crafting, collectiables, etc. The raiding was bad and really bad to me. The scaling of the actual dungeons were very odd as well. I did enjoy the game very much so for the first two years.

This is the only thing I disagree with you on your list, but it's subjective.

There's something to be said about actually doing non-repeating questing and storyline to fully level your character vs killing 100,000 frogs.

And this is why I can't respect you on your cleric. You are a cat gdi. Don't ever let that species confusion occur again!

Beautiful cover art for the EQ2 expansion (for the curious).

It doesn't work like that, the issue is that the RACE field in their data is defined as an unsigned 4bit integer ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_(computer_science) ). It isn't some display issue on the client, its something baked deep into the game. Same with classes. This is why they say 16 total of each is the limit. They would have to touch so much code to change those definitions that, and I'm just guessing at this bit, that the risk of breaking other things is so high as to make it not worth even trying.

Its my understanding, that while they have moved from flat files to a database on the back end, most of your character record is one big blob of data with fixed fields. So it would look more like 02372Zanar085000232661514(etc,etc,etc) then like 02372,"Zanar", 85, 23266, 15, 14, (etc,etc,etc)

This means that to change a definition, you have to adjust EVERYTHING loaded from that blob after what your changing. (* I could be wrong about the specifics but the general idea is correct as I understand things. However I have 0 first hand information as I have never worked there ;P )

So half a byte? Ima let that go.

ya I shoulda said INT4 but.. i wrote that up fast and didn't really proof-read it. Ahh well ;P