Back in February, Daybreak’s Darkpaw Games opened up an ask-me-anything thread on the EverQuest II official forums – and now the dev team is actually offering its answers, at least to some of the questions. While players did lob a few softballs – like asking the devs’ favorite expansions and favorite foods and the cheesecake mount thing – there are some useful answers too, and many of them are simply “no.”
For example, the studio isn’t increasing broker limits, making character slots giftable, migrating mount/mercenary training into the knowledge books, adding a tradeskill epic item series, bringing back Legends of Norrath, adjusting Chrono dungeon incomes, bringing back the map helper, reducing spell counts, doing away with crafting, adding new hate management adornments, boosting the number of players in zones, opening class/faction swaps more than they are now, reducing the cost of heroic characters or level boosts, reinstating lifetime memberships, making seasonal items always available in the cash shop, adding AA ascension trees, revamping the reforging system for build freedom, adding wall/floor paint for houses, lengthening holidays, adding new veteran rewards, or removing the timers on Overseer loot. There’s more.
- The suburbs aren’t coming back as they once were on regular servers, though they will be on the Origins server.
- “We will undoubtedly reexamine Chrono Dungeons again in the future.”
- The team liked the idea for wigs, but no promises.
- “We would like to create some form of way for people to get house vouchers back for relinquished houses. It’s being discussed.”
- There are no plans “for the near future” to update Chains of Eternity (and so forth) for TLE servers (takes too much time).
- Daybreak has discussed a stat squish but has no plans to implement it right now (would require hand-tuning too much old content).
- “We are, and will remain, extremely stingy when it comes to increasing inventory space, because as soon as we do the next question becomes ‘when are you going to fix lag and decrease loading times’.”
- Daybreak wouldn’t commit to specifics on making old exclusive items available again (or not).
- In response to a question about plat currency inflation and the studio’s intentions about status, Daybreak said only, “Every currency has its place, be it plat, status, or expansion specific currencies.”
- The team is “looking into” other live events later this year.
- A hardcore permadeath server is something the team might consider.
- Cross-server dungeons and grouping are under consideration but not in planning.
Notably, character models are not getting a new revamp (takes too much manpower to do).
“A full character ‘revamp’ is a *HUGE* undertaking that needs a lot of hands and time to accomplish. Really, it took a whole team a long time to make the original models. The art team at the time being is tasked primarily with making new content for updates, live events, and expansions with no added time (even the request list that is submitted must sometimes be pared down so that we can get the best ‘bang for the buck’ with our present capabilities). On the other hand, this doesn’t exclude a possibility that we could take bites out of the whole list of character models we currently have available (regular as well as SOGA models) as we have time, but getting assets in for live updates, events and expansions always takes precedent, so it’s not really on the horizon within the foreseeable future.”
And we may have a fresh explanation for the death of Daybreak’s Player Studio, too; one gamer asked about opening the codebase or art asset contributions to players under an NDA, and Daybreak’s Caith says, “The player studio project that many of the Daybreak games had going for a long time were both legal headaches as well as not viable financially. The amount of art resources (hours) required to work with a contributor far exceeded the amount of resources the teams could have simply allocated to an artist to complete the same work.”
Answering a question about smoothing out leveling processes and grind to make them more universal, Daybreak bizarrely responded that leveling up “is a fundamental part of the game” and that if Daybreak “wanted everyone to instantly and always be max level,” then it would just do that. (This… does not at all address the question.) The team also says it won’t be granting “giant experience jumps to previous content quests” even in an effort to make older zones viable for leveling.
Finally, the devs say they have “no plans to merge Isle of Refuge” – that the free-trade server. According to players, the server is in a dire state, with only a few dozen players even at peak, and players are unable to transfer off.
