It was only a matter of time until Daybreak announced its yearly EverQuest II expansion, and this week it’s happened. EverQuest II: Reign of Shadows is coming to the MMO later this year with beta testing and pre-orders starting on November 10th.
The tentpole attraction for the game’s 17th expansion is most definitely playable Vah Shir, the first new race added to EverQuest II in five years. Now players can explore life as a bipedal cat: “Get distracted by shiny things, knock things off of high places, hate dogs.”
Cats or no, adventurers will head to the dark side of Luclin for another bout of hair-raising escapades. The expansion will include a massive AA revamp (“so that every point has an impact on how your character plays”), more prestige abilities, a bump to the guild level cap, and plenty of group content.
Daybreak said that it’s going to be kicking off a level up event on October 29th to help players get ready for the fun.
I really like the SWTOR cat race.
Wait so basically this is like the GoBots version of the Transformers if the Transformers were Khajiit.
Technically no. Vah Shir were playable in Everquest 1. And Khajiit are more similar to EverQuest II’s Kerrans which were playable at launch. Vah Shir are more lion-like.
A rework of AA sounds great. Could they perhaps get rid of 2/3 of the abilities as well?
EQ2 definitely suffers from expansion bloat. If they ever go back in and clean that up, I’d definitely consider playing again.
I dunno, I’ve always found the amount of forgotten depth to be a huge draw to EQ2.
Altho i wanted a pruning of sorts, the AA revamp has me a bit scared. I don’t want AAs to lose complexity, i want them to be relevant decisions.
I also wonder about ascension, aren’t Ascension skills like, extremely powerful?
The AA system has no complexity whatsoever at this point in time, its just bloated. This argument is why EQ2 grew into a convoluted mess. Meanwhile you can play the game with a 1 button super-macro for most classes…. so complex.
It isn’t even just the AA system at this point, they just keep adding and adding and it all ends up pretty meaningless.
Having choices is already a point of complexity, the problem stems from powercreep making some abilities being bad to be specialized on. Which brings me to the problem: Most games prefer to shave off choice in the name of balance. Everquest 2 should not be one of those. I’m all for gutting bloat, but EQ2 in it’s nature is a expansive game. They shouldn’t pull off a GW2 and give us 3 choices per tier.
Casually? Yes. Optimally? No. Macros are really fickle and weird in EQ2.
Also, macros exist because of ability bloat. Not because of AA bloat. Sure, the AA system adds to the bloat, but it’s not a problem it created.
I would very much love a full graphical upgrade for EQ2.
Unfortunately EQ2’s engine was designed thinking that CPUs and GPUs would continue the trend of larger and larger single cores, and this turned out to not be the case, as a result it is highly unoptimized and there is not much they can do about it at this point, and it definitely wouldn’t be worth the cost.
I’d be happy with just a revamp of the player models. The vanilla ones were so… Claymation like. And the SOGA were only marginally better in most cases, unless you played one of the elven races
I’m VERY intrigued by the AA revamp. That’s a system that the game has mostly just added to, rather than changed as far as I know, so I’m interested in seeing what they do. Absolutely love the look of the new race.
I think I could possibly love the Vah Shir as much as ESO’s Kahjiit.