Greetings Norrath!
It's been an exciting time for us since EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity went live. We are charging full steam ahead with creating more rewarding, memorable experiences and have redoubled our efforts to tell stories better than any other game.
Speaking of memorable experiences, we are leading up to Erollisi Day with live events that run Feb. 7 to 20. This year there are nine new achievements, new items -- including a set of flying wings, and new reward choices.
Since December, we've been hard at work crafting the "long view" for EQII to forge a really great year for our game. And I am comfortable telling you we have really great stuff coming into the game this year. At the same time, we are watching and listening to the community to resolve issues and fix bugs.
We are starting the year with a Game Update on February 26.
First, we have some new content that's a Two-Group dungeon set in Wurmbone Crag. We have heard the community ask for X2 content and so the team went to work on it late last year. Now it's ready and is being tested.
In this same update we are also adding a Raid version of Dreadcutter -- the ship zone in Ethernere -- with fun raids and new items.
Also, in our ongoing efforts to improve our game, we added enhancements to inventory management with new Bag features. You can now easily sort, deposit, and even categorize your bags. Now when you loot a specific item type, like jewelry, it will drop into your Jewelry bag! You can even dump a small bag of items into a bigger bag, or swap bags. The Bag Options button will be added to the Bag Window for ease of access. You can also quickly sort your inventory from the "Sort" button on the character window, or by typing /sort_bags followed by either "Name" or "Level" to sort by name or level, respectively.
The team has also created daily, weekly, and monthly objectives that offer real and useful items for playing the game. Think of this like a Loyalty program that gives you rewards AS you play the game! This came out of our team wanting to improve upon our Veteran Rewards system that simply required you to wait for your account to get older to get some nifty items. We will still offer a commemorative item for old and wise active accounts each year, but our focus will be on building great rewards into the new objectives system. We will follow up with a more detailed look at the system in the coming weeks.
Last, but certainly not least, are some significant updates to PvP. Not only are there balance tweaks, but new blue adornments with passive and proc effects (several grow in power the more you have), new armor set bonuses, and more. To give you details, we'll put together a separate article and post on that.
Exciting news on the team front too. Kyle "Kander" Vallee is now charging ahead as the Lead Designer of EQII as Akil "Lyndro" Hooper becomes the Creative Director. And to help keep the game in greatness, Nathan "Kaitheel" McCall is now an Assistant Lead Designer.
We will be sharing more details soon too as we prepare our big content update (GU66) for Spring!
Sincerely, as always,
Holly Longdale Producer, EQII
