Welcome To Anashti Sul. Please Have Your Papers Ready.

While I'm sitting in the queue, waiting to log into the new EverQuest II Origins server, Anashti Sul, I thought I'd kill a few minutes by pointing out a couple of interesting items in the Update Notes and the Live! announcement. There's a lot of general guff about the specifics of the ruleset but these two seemed much more wide-ranging, with possible implications for the game as a whole.

Firstly, from the Update Notes:

" To patch the Origins server, you just need to set the version on the launchpad to "Origins".

An Origins server is a server set into a specific timeframe with as much rolled back to that exact timeframe as possible. In the case of Anashti Sul, the timeframe that the game exists in is early 2006."

That very much confirms Origins as a new branch of EQII, with Anashti Sul as just the first example, something that's re-inforced strongly by this, taken from the Go Live announcement:

"Origins works like EU, where characters on that server are separate from US. So, if you have 10 slots (membership + purchased), you could have 10 characters each on US, EU, and Origins."

I knew you got another set of slots if you played on Test but I didn't realise you could double your character slots by playing on both EU and US servers. Now you can triple them by adding an Origin server to your portfolio.

It seems clear now that, if Anashti Sul proves successful, we'll be seeing other Origins projects in the future. I wonder if that might include variants that deviate significantly what from what we've had in the past, as in the much wished-for but so far never-seen WoW Classic Plus? 

Only time will tell.

Addendum: I'm in the game now and I just reached the Isle of the Overlord, the Freeportian's version of the Isle of Refuge. When I stepped off the boat, I landed in the 45th instance of the zone. Even at the busiest launch of a new server, I can't recall seeing instances above the teens. I imagine there are even more for the Qeynos version, Good generally being more popular than Evil in these games. 

And most people have probably already moved on to the mainland...

All this at midday in the middle of the working week, too. Makes you think, doesn't it?

Addendum 2: Just before I logged out (It's getting late here...) I saw that General Chat had reached its cap. I didn't even realize it had one. Something else I haven't seen before.