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Watch the official SoE video exploring the new expansion lands, then read below for a write up of my beta tour!

I played EverCrack, uh, EverQuest for 7 years. The game was hard. Death meant loss of experience that would erase an entire week's level gain. It also meant all your equipment stayed on your body requiring venturing back down to the mob infested pit to retrieve it, but this time you're naked and it's 3am. On a school night. And many core game mechanics that we know and love were not developed yet, such as having no way to get gold and items to alts other than to hand them to a random stranger and hope they would be there when you logged on your alt.

The game evolved, making time spent in Norrath not quite so harsh. But it when World of Warcraft launched, I went running to it like the Promised Land: no corpse runs, no experience loss on death, a mail system to move items and cash to alts. It was all good with a side of good. It soon became hard to justify logging on to EverQuest where a 5 hour experience grind could be lost in a few deaths.

So it was with some trepidation that I poked my head back into the game to get a tour of their 14th expansion, Secrets of Faydwer. And I what I saw made me want to come back to the game that I remembered so bitterly and so fondly at the same time.

The Facts

Let's get a few facts out of the way up front. Secrets of Faydwer is a high level expansion scheduled for release on Tuesday, Novemeber 13, 2007. It raises the level cap from 75 to 80 and opens up unexplored lands on a continent that has been in the game since it launched in 1999. The purchase of this expansion will include all 13 expansions before it and the original game.

What this expansion doesn't have is low level zones, new races or new classes. This expansion isn't so much about bringing in new players as it is about keeping the current level-capped player base happy and, more importantly, enticing long time players who moved on to return to the game. Players like me.

Fat chance, SoE. I know how this game is played. I spent years lagging behind others with more time and raid availability. I didn't get my Epic Weapon for my Druid until 8 expansions after it was introduced. And I was one of the lucky ones.

The Casual Focus

Such was my attitude when I began the tour of the expansion lands with veteran EQ developer Rashere. I made a crack about the game being too raid-centric and not casual player friendly. Boy, was I wrong. Rashere explained how the last couple of expansions had been designed to appeal primarily to single groups of players. And SoF is no different: a single group can explore every zone in the expansion. Every. One.

This was an eye-opener for me. I played almost my entire EverQuest career in a single group wishing I could see the many, many raid locked zones, but knowing I never would. To think that the game I left behind for greener pastures had finally catered to my preferred playstyle was staggering to me.

However, raiders have not been pushed aside either. End-game zones in the expansion come in static versions for the groupers and instanced versions for the raiders. There's plenty of content love and loot to go around.

Rashere explained that long development time for this expansion and the casual (and by "casual" he means "non-raider" in this case) focus drove the design decision to split SoF into four tiers.

The First Tier

A world event starting yesterday will transform the recently revamped Steamfont Mountains and introduce access to the new lands. Meldrath the Malignant, a Gnome Necromancer who has been in the game since launch, has secretly been building a flying fortress in the mountains. As of yesterday, he has launched his fortress into the sky and is assaulting the gnome home city of Ak'Anon.


The first two zones players will be able to head into will be the Dragonscale Hills and the Loping Plains. Though the most players are at the level cap of 75, these Tier 1 zones can be explored at level 70 with basic gear from the previous expansion, The Buried Sea.

The Dragonscale Hills was the former home to Human and Elven settlers as well as gnomish refuges, but it's mostly in ruins now. Roaming the Dragonscale Hills is a very large mechanical guardian. But this is more than a steam powered zone-wide menace. Players will be able to get missions that place them inside the guardian to do battle. This was my first hint that the dev team have thought long and hard about new game mechanics they could introduce. My interest was piqued.

Next was the Loping Plains. This zone is populated with Crushbone orcs that have been infected with lycanthropy from the werewolves of the Depths of Darkhallow expansion. Thus, you now have wereorcs. When you first engage them in battle, they are typical orcs, but after they take a certain amount of damage, they transform and become much more difficult to fight.

The Second Tier

After gearing up in the Tier 1 class armor sets and hitting the new max level of 80, players can tackle the next tier where they will spend most of the time in this expansion. Rashere gave us a tour of one of these T2 zones, a dungeon called Bloodmoon Keep.

The Keep was once a haven for Elves, but the wereorcs have taken over and only the spirits of the High Elves remains. We are introduced to crystals that are unique to the expansion and play a big part in Meldrath's plans to rain destruction down from his flying fortress and onto his enemies.

There are six other Tier 2 zones for players to explore and gear up in. But Rashere was eager to show us a Tier 3 zone. To that end, he took us to a very large telescope in the Dragonscale Hills. I climbed up the ramp of the gigantic contraption to see if I could get a better look at the flying fortress in the sky. When I got to the top I looked around for the telescope's lenssssssssssssssss.....

Turns out that wasn't a telescope, but a mechanical catapult that shot me high in the sky. Fortunately it was aimed right at the Fortress Mechanotus, another T2 zone. On the surface of the Fortress is Meldrath's war machines: catapults, clockwork armies, even a dirigible!

The Third Tier

From there we were summoned to a dynamic Tier 3 zone used for missions (EQ's private instance system). This zone was named the S.H.I.P. Workshop, which in true Gnomish tradition, stands for Somewhat Hazardous Industrial Prototype. Basically, it's a giant lab for dangerous experiments.

We were also shown Meldrath's Majestic Mansion. Though this is a raid zone, access to it requires a quest that just a single group can accomplish. Inside we saw many interesting rooms such as a puzzle room and a very large laser beam that served no purpose other than "it looks cool." And that it does.

We weren't shown the Meldrath encounter, but instead were transported to the ed-game raid zone of the expansion. And its chief denizen is someone old time EverQuest players will remember well: Kerafym the Prismatic Dragon.

The Fourth Tier

The Scars of Velious was the second expansion for EverQuest. In it was the ultimate raid zone: The Sleeper's Tomb. Kerafym, a dragon born of two different colored draconic parents, was imprisoned there. And when he was awakened, nobody knew what hit them. Not only did Kerafym wipe the first raid force that awoke him, but he then left the Tomb and continued his rampage across multiple zones. And that was when raiders discovered that they only had a single shot at Kerafym. Once the Sleeper was awoken, he never reset back to sleep. If you didn't defeat him initially, you never would. And if you did defeat him, your guild would have the honor of being the only one on your server to do so.

Until now.

Kerafym has fled to Crystallos to recover his strength after being freed. And from there he plans to wipe the world clean of life and reseed it with his progeny.

Now, long time players have a second chance at one of the most popular and controversial raid targets in the history of EverQuest.

And here's the best part: this final zone of the game is doable by a single group in Tier 3 equipment. There is also an instanced version for raiders, but if you're not into the raid scene, you will still be able to explore every zone in the expansion. Reread that last sentence, it probably didn't process the first time.

Wrap Up

With a year to design and implement Secrets of Faydwer, instead of the former half year development cycle, SoE has focused on creating an expansion that will keep current players happy and has an excellent chance of bringing lapsed players back to the fold. With its emphasis on single group content and making every zone in the expansion accessible to that group, I believe they will see a resurgence of players looking to recapture that old magic.

I, for one, have already activated my old account.