Producer's Letter: Coming Right Up!

Mighty Norrathians!

Since SOE Live and Game Update 67: Darkness Dawns there’s been a lot of focus and excitement here about Heroic Characters and this year’s expansion, Tears of Veeshan. We’re well on our way and working hard!

To begin with, we have some date adjustments. Our expansion launch date has moved out a bit to mid-November and our Level 85 Heroic Characters are likely coming in the first week of October.

We got some great feedback on Heroic Characters and we wanted to polish it up to make it more user-friendly before we launch! We are still working on fine-tuning the details and I will have more info soon, I promise. Until we nail it down, I don’t want to throw misinformation about.

The introduction of Heroic Characters also made us change a few other things, like including EverQuest II: Destiny of Velious zones into the Free and Silver account access so Heroic Characters have a place to play! And while we are still going to offer the EverQuest II: Age of Discovery expansion, we will also sell the features individually, including the Beastlord class, Mercenaries, Dungeon Maker, Reforging, and Tradeskill Apprentices. We’re still working on pricing and have some other cool things in progress we'll announce shortly.

Our 10th expansion, EverQuest II: Tears of Veeshan, is getting closer to Beta. This team is putting together an expansion that will be something special! The overland -- Vesspyr Isles, the Eternal Broodlands -- is really amazing. Flying through it is incredible with more and more variety and flavor every day. The dungeons are coming together beautifully and the content is too! We appreciate all the feedback we got during SOE Live and are grateful for all the playtests of the Channeler class. We are putting final touches on that too.

When Beta opens on Oct. 15, we hope you’ll come take a look at Tears of Veeshan and give us feedback!

There will be lots more to come so you’ll be hearing from me sooner (tm) rather than later!

Holly Longdale
Senior Producer
EverQuest II

Holly,

I appreciate the time you've taken to write this up, but aside from the delay in the expansion, you've given us no new information about anything at all. I was under the impression that we'd at least have a few new pieces of information about how these heroic characters will work. We don't need details. Just simple things. Unless nothing is set in stone at all, there has to be something more that you can give us.

Is there a limit to the number of heroic characters that an account can create? And will there be a cost associated with additional heroic characters at any point?

Surely those two basic ideas have been hammered out already.

Any plans to make Tears of Veeshan purchasable with krono?

Not gonna lie.. fairly disappointed with no new news. Sucks for delays but understand it needs polished!

Its realy no wonder if you kick out such a number of persons... I really just waited for this post.
And Holly please promise nothing to us...

That was much ado about nothing....

We're gonna need a whole lot more than this. A lot of promise was told at SOE Live about the future of EQ2 and then two weeks later SOE's actions spoke in stark contrast to that. There are a lot of players waiting on an honest state of the game that helps them decide whether or not to continue putting energy and money into a game when SOE has made the decision to pull theirs out.

Thanks for the update! Tbh, most of us already guessed/knew Beta would start in October, and the expansion -- mid-November.

Is this a producers letter or a shout out that a producer's letter is coming up?

Agree 100%.

This is pretty bad news. If the game doesn't have the staff to maintain the schedule on this, then we're going to be seeing schedule delays on almost everything in the future. The expansion was worked on by a full team before this, so what does that say for future Game Updates where we only have the reduced team starting from scratch? There is no way we're going to see the same update schedule we are used to in regards to new content and things are going to stagnate.

This isn't the fault of the developers or CSR people ... but man, it definitely is going to suck.

Wonderful, thanks for the update Holly.
Have a wonderful weekend.

This isn't a particularly large change from as it is now and to be honest, November was the month everybody was thinking it would be before the announcement, so it's not that huge of a surprise either.

Our expansions have technically been in November or February with 2 exceptions:
Desert of Flames
Expansion
13 September 2005
Kingdom of Sky
Expansion
21 February 2006
Echoes of Faydwer
Expansion
14 November 2006
Rise of Kunark
Expansion
13 November 2007
The Shadow Odyssey[6]
Expansion
18 November 2008
Sentinel's Fate[7]
Expansion
16 February 2010
Destiny of Velious
Expansion
22 February 2011
Age of Discovery
Expansion
6 December 2011
Chains of Eternity
Expansion
13 November 2012
I was initially excepting it in November and was surprised that it was originally announced for October.

Still not thrilled about the idea of starting from scratch at 85, with everything pre-set (so much for "play YOUR way!" ["but with everything done for you!"]), but I love, love, LOVE the idea of the AoD elements sold separately!! Seriously! About the only things I was looking at from there was the Beastlord (which I always thought should either be a) incorporated into expansions beyond AoD as a recognized class [forgive my ignorance if they are; just never really thought most of the new only-post-85th level-content was worth the money for expansions], or b) handled like the Freeblood, where you pay a one-time fee to unlock the race forever afterwards) and maybe the Dungeon Maker. Thanks!

Uwk
looking forward to seeing how much these are, and hoping they're not $20 each :-/

so you plan on keeping the AoD expansion for sale for $39.99 just so people have to pay for the 20 AA is what you are saying.all other features of AoD will be available for SC,just not the 20 AA

That would be pretty ridiculous. I would assume they're just gonna roll those 20 into ToV.

She didn't mention SC or the marketplace. Betting they'll be sold off for real $.

Heroic characters are a horrible idea.

One of the main reasons people play mmo games is so that they may work hard towards goals and then be proud and show off their hard earned accomplishments to the community.

Too bad devs always decide to make things way easier for new players so they can get more money and it ruins the game for the vets..

I'm not sure where you are getting that. She clearly says that the expansion pack would remain available for 39.99 and features will be sold seperately. Then she just listed out a few saying "including ...." not only these will be purchasable individually.

I personally wouldn't be shocked if the 20 aa didn't end up being just added on with all the DOV stuff when that goes to the F2P package or rolled into the new expansion rather than having people pay say 10 bucks for aa.