EverQuest Expansions
What are Everquest expansions?
An Everquest expansion is a periodic, fairly large chunk of content that we produce and is sold for various amounts of money. Generally, our expansions cost around twenty nine, ninety nine. It's a primary way that we introduce content at this point in the game. We create new zones and then content to fill those zones, quests, and rating counters. What we call base pop , which is just these MPC's that are running around in the zone and then we itemize those things that you can go out and get and use swords and shields and armor to outfit your character and increase the power of your character.
How do expansions affect the story of Everquest?
Every expansion has a story that we're trying to tell with the expansion. We work very hard to look at the game world as it exists, and to find a way to expand upon the story that is already there. Or, if we're going to go in a completely new direction, we try to make sure that it is consistent with what's come before. A lot of our expansions are very complementary to each other - they tell the same story, so it's like the next chapter. One example of that would be the Depths of Darkhollow expansion, which began the tale of Mayong Mistmoore the vampire, ascending to demi-godhood through the action of players as they work their way through the expansion. Prophecy of Ro followed that up and took that story a little bit further. Then, in one of our most recent expansions, The Buried Sea, that story culminates with a battle that takes place between Mayong Mistmoore and another one of the gods, and the players again intervene and conclude the story arc there.
Who is Mayong Mistmoore?
Mayong Mistmoore is a character that's been in EverQuest since the very beginning or at least been alluded to, but he hasn't actually made an appearance other than in a few Game Master (GM) run events that would take place in-game. So, he might make a brief appearance controlled by a GM, but he wasn't somebody you could go visit and talk to, perhaps because a lot of interest has been surrounding him as a character. In Depths of Darkhollow, you see him for the first time, really taking center stage. He is a very powerful and very ancient vampire. In the expansion, he leads players on a path that culminates with them actually killing him. The trick is, he uses that to ascend to godhood, so in a very convoluted way, killing him fuels his power and he ascends to godhood status at that point. In Prophecy of Ro, he moves onto the next step in his master plan, which involves taking over a plane of existence that's run by another god and stealing her power. He attempts to do that again in The Buried Sea, where he confronts the sun god Solusek Ro. In Prophecy of Ro, when you get to the plane of music, its already been corrupted. The damage is done and there's nothing players can do about it. In Solteris, the home of Solusek Ro, as a player you actually enter the story part-way through -- the battle is still raging between Solusek Ro and Mayong Mistmoore. So when players move through the zone and conclude the story arch, they actually halt Mayong is his tracks, stop him completely and end his story.
What is the Everquest Serpent Spine expansion?
The Serpent Spine was an expansion that we did fairly recently that raised our level cap from level 70 to level 75, and what we did with that expansion is we took the opportunity to try to create a coherent content path from level 1 all the way up through the new max level of level 75. Our idea and our goal was to create a coherent set of zones that you could move smoothly from level 1 to level 75 without ever needing to leave the expansion, so that there would be content for you at every level. We also wanted to take a lot of the content creation tools that we had developed throughout the previous expansions and put them all to work in one place, so that you could see the fruits of our labour in all the different expansions. On every expansion we have what we call "box features," which are the new goodies that we create to make new exciting content in each expansion. Serpent Spine was our attempt to take all of those things and fit them together into a polished, coherent package.
What direction will future Everquest expansions take?
Prior to recently, we had two expansions that we would do every year - one in September, and then we would do another expansion in February. One of the things that we found was that we were actually producing content faster than most players could consume it. So, we've changed our direction and we're now going to be releasing just one expansion per year. The first expansion that's going to be on that schedule will be the one that we see in November. Instead of a full year, it's only going to be nine months, but subsequent to that, Ever-expansion is going to hit in November. We're really looking forward to this because we think it's going to give us the chance to spend more time polishing the content, and also focus more on the live game.
