What a year EverQuest has had. 2004 brought many changes to EverQuest. New content, new features, 2 new expansions, hundreds of community requested features, the first Community Summit, a Fan Faire in New Orleans and Las Vegas as well as thousands and thousands of hours of enjoyment for hundreds of thousands of EQ fans. A new Graphics Engine was launched allowing our artists to use new tools when building zones and NPCs. Zones were revamped to add some new life to older areas, new Adventure zones were added to keep small group gameplay fresh. We are quite proud of all that we accomplished but we are not sitting back and resting.
EverQuest in 2005 will continue to expand with more of what you have come to expect and appreciate from the game we all enjoy. While EverQuest will soon be 6 years young, it is aging well and still setting standards in the industry. A new expansion, EverQuest®: Dragons of Norrath™, has been announced which opens an area that has long been on the maps of Norrath but not yet available. We are adding new tradeskill recipes, new features that ease communication and gameplay. You will see the continued addition of new NPCs and Zones modeled to make use of our New Graphics Engine and will bring a new quality standard to EQ art. In the coming weeks you will see more of the improvements as screenshots and movies are released for the upcoming EverQuest: Dragons of Norrath launch.
We have announced that we are re-envisioning classes in EverQuest, which in itself is a huge undertaking. We are looking at each class and what roles they fill in groups, followed by raids. Our goal is to make certain that each class has a desirable role to play when grouped and while raiding. We will have a series of developer chats to discuss our plans and our findings as we gather and collate all the additional data the servers are currently mining and we will share any conclusions we come to at the appropriate times. There will be ongoing discussion threads on the EQ forums (Eqforums.station.sony.com) and we encourage you to take part in them.
We are aware that with the recent release of new MMO's that some of our fans have moved on and we wish them the best of luck. We have noted that this has had an impact on some server populations, most noticeably our PVP servers. The PvP community has asked that we further explore the idea of server mergers and to that end, we’ve put a poll for PvP players asking if servers were to be merged, which rule set they would most like to play under. More details for you on that soon. Although we are satisfied with the current population of most other servers, we will take a look at each after the release of EverQuest: Dragons of Norrath and identify whether any additional mergers will be needed.
We do have another Fan Faire planned for June in Las Vegas and again hope to meet many of you there. We enjoy meeting you in person and sharing our mutual passion for this world of Norrath. We also have begun planning for two community summits this year, one in conjunction with the June Fan Faire and one tentatively planned for the fall. We are quite proud of what was accomplished in our first summit and our goal is continue the feedback process with the community leaders. We plan to have representatives for raiding players, non-raiding players and each class in attendance. This will provide a solid cross section of the EQ community to share ideas and discuss concerns with.
Of course this is only what comes to mind now, we have other projects in the works and will continue to expand this little world we share. We want Norrath to be a living vibrant world for years to come and with the team we have here, partnered with your passion and feedback, we are sure we can accomplish that goal.
Thanks for playing!
Robert Pfister
Executive Producer EverQuest
