I can't find any reasoning, so what is the history of why (some) of the islands in barren sky are connected by the giant chains?
Because some of the islands in the original Plane of Sky were chained. Kingdom of Sky is the Plane of Sky "leaking" into Norrath's realm. Some of the islands in the Plane of Sky in EQ1 had unexplained features like chains and stuff, and EQ2 just expanded the artistic concept into three giant overland zones.
well that does kind of answer it, so thank you for that. shame it's just unexplained features though.
I overheard a Gnome say the Islands have to be chained so people can jump-travel island-hop. Even Shakespeare wrote about the EQ island chains. “The chains of habit are generally too small to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”
My thought on this is , that the islands began to drift apart , so the inhabitance chained them together to prevent their home from drifting apart . Some of the chains have broken since , but the islands have stopped drifting anyway .
that's fair. according to the lore (https://eq2.fandom.com/wiki/First_Flight) the inhabitance (aka the Aviaks) also lost their ability to fly for several generations after they angered the god that gave it to them. and they eventually relearned it by themselves.guess you could think they maybe chained them since they had to walk to them for a few hundred years. and then stopped maintaining the chains once they could fly again. but that is merely a guess.
Why do you say the islands have stopped drifting? I don't really understand how time and each expansion works, but the way I understood is that, each expansion is "snapshot" in time. So given that, I don't think we can say they have stopped drifting (unless it says some where in lore). Maybe they are still drifting but we the players won't see it as each time we go to barren Sky zone, we are seeing the same snapshot in time. All bit confusing
Drona , this is just my imagination , some chains are broken , they hang down , but the islands are not moving anyway or they would not be here anymore a long time ago . I think the whole thing was the idea of an artist no big thought behind , let the players come up with their own ideas .
It's confusing because you are overthinking the situation. You are right in thinking that what you are seeing is stuck in a fixed time frame. The game is just designed to be that way. The only way that those islands are going to drift away is if they get put into a new game...something like EQ3...
I hated having to walk up the chain doing the class hat quest back in the day. I was so fearful that my little pixels would fall to their death.
lol Breanna I fell to my death so often , that my gear brock 2 times on one really bad day . Somebody said to me I must have never played Mario Brothers , ( and he was right about that one ) . I hate all those games that make you jump to get to where ever . I can't jump and if my life depends on it .