Jenn Chan is great. As a customer and a player, I've been very happy with her tenure. She's the epitome of a safe pair of hands. Just looking at her smiling face makes me feel the future of Norrath is secure. As a blogger, though, she doesn't give me much to work with.
It's been so long now since I last played EverQuest seriously, I can barely make sense of most of what she has to say in the letter for the elder game. There's something about making Hero's Journey quests more group-friendly. I don't know what Hero's Journey quests are. There's something else about improvements to the Resource Hunter system. I don't know what that is, either.
After that, there's a couple of paragraphs about bug fixes, class "tuning" and UI upgrades, all of which I can understand in theory but none of which have any meaning for me in practice. Then we get some notes about festivals, most of which I've never heard of (Fall Fun? Festival of Shadows?) and a brief mention of some changes to Account to Account transfers.
Account to Account transfers is a bit of a sore point with me. I would long ago have given SOE, and then Daybreak/Darkpaw, my money, if they'd been willing to let me transfer characters between the accounts Mrs Bhagpuss and I set up back in 2000. It would have been worth hundreds of dollars to us to get all of our characters on the right accounts, back in the days when we were both playing EQ.
Sadly, the Account to Account option exists solely and only for accounts registered to the same person. Both accounts have to have the exact same name associated with them. There has never been any option to move characters between accounts owned by different people.
It sounds very reasonable until you factor in the monthly subscription for those accounts. I always paid for both our accounts on my credit card, from the day they were created and ever afterwards. It seemed to me then, and still does now, that that the defining proof of ownership ought to be whose name is on the card that's being charged, especially when there's only ever been one source of payment, but that's not how they see it.
Not that I care any more. Mrs Bhagpuss hasn't played either game in a decade and a half and never will again. I have all the login details to all the accounts (I think there are at least eight of them...) and I can play any of the characters on any account whenever I like, which in most cases will be never. Even if they did change the rules, I wouldn't bother now.
With that little piece of technical tomfoolery out of the way, we're down to the only part anyone's really interested, namely the upcoming expansion. It's called Favors of Fortune and it involves some gods falling out about something. It would. It's an EverQuest expansion.
It also involves the return of someone or something called Scorn. I have never heard of Scorn but his/her/their/its return is emphasized in heavy, bold type: Scorn has returned. Like that. Whatever impact that's meant to have is lost on me but the effects of Scorn's return do sound intriguing:
"Across the lesser planes, chance itself twists unnaturally. Simple gambles collapse into disaster. Once‑reliable odds warp into impossibility. Victories slip away as though guided by an unseen hand. The very fabric of luck feels poisoned, bent toward failure by a force both deliberate and unseen."
I wouldn't mind an expansion that turned all the expected results into a crap shoot but I bet most people would hate it. So I don't suppose it's that. Not that I'm ever likely to find out from personal experience. Chance would have to twist a very long way out of true for me to find myself back playing EQ at all, let alone in current content.
There's a very much higher chance of me playing the upcoming expansion for EQII, though. I'd put it no lower than 90%. I've played every EQII expansion on release since 2014's Altar of Malice and I have no particular intention to stop.
The ten per cent wiggle room I'm giving myself comes from two things: firstly the ever-increasing number of games I'm trying to play (There might be a post about that soon.) and secondly the tendency of my PC to crash when I log out of EQII. It's doing it much less than it used to but it still happens and it puts me off playing because otherwise the machine is working perfectly and I don't want to screw that up.
Don't believe me? Go read it for yourself. It's chock-full of minutiae like that,. The sort of detail that makes perfect sense in a set of patch notes but isn't exactly what you'd imagine would make the cut for a Producer's Letter.
I'll spare you the excruciating specifics but I will just mention the list of upcoming holiday events. Again, we all know these are coming. They're long-established annual holidays, after all. Not to mention there's an in-game calendar that has them all listed.
Browsing the list, though, I did notice there was no mention of the event formerly known as Days of Summer, later rebranded as Panda Panda Panda. That would normally have started in mid-September. I might not be playing at the moment but I still get the PR emails and I hadn't heard anything about so I did a bit of googling.
Gemini, once again, seems to be operating in an alternate timeline. I asked specifically if Panda Panda Panda was going to be happening in 2026 and the AI told me "Yes, new "Panda, Panda, Panda!" content and tasks are scheduled to run in EverQuest II in September 2026". Once again, the links it gave as sources for this confident assertion not only didn't support the claim, they didn't have anything to do with pandas at all!
I had to go to the official forums for the correct answer, which is that "We are doing alternate things in place of the panda content. The Splendid Celebration Crate content has taken its place." Angeliana said that. She is not an AI. She knows what she's talking about.
I'm quite pleased they've pensioned the event off. It was a great addition to the game back in 2017, when it first appeared but it's been a while since it made much sense. What with the big summer update in August and the Expansion in December, not to mention Overseer, there are plenty of ways to get much better gear than the pandas hand out these days.
And so to the only thing anyone really cares about: this year's expansion. It's called Descent to Val’Zyroth, which may be nowhere near as good a name as Favors of Fortune but does make up for in accuracy what it loses in style. Well, it might. That's assuming Val'Zyroth is somewhere in the Underfoot, which is where we're going.
The Underfoot is Brell's realm below the surface of Norrath so this is another spelunking expansion, the first since 2015's Terrors of Thalumbra. I have mixed feelings about underground expansions. One of my favorite EQ expansions at the time was Depths of Darkhollow. I had some good times down there. I also quite liked Terrors of Thalumbra.
They do get quite claustrophobic, though. And this one is full of Dark Elves. I am not a big dark elf fan.
In DTV, which really is not a very memorable acronym, we're set to
plunge through the treacherous tunnels of Subtunaria into the glowing, magic-soaked reaches of the Underfoot. Infiltrate the resplendent Teir'Dal city of Neriondalon, battle alongside unique subterranean allies like the resilient Tontu molemen, and breach Brell Serilis’ legendary planar workshops before dark magics swallow the realm.
The infamous ruler of Neriak, Queen Cristanos, has spotted the absence of Lucan from Freeport and fancies her chances. Having played EQII pretty consistently since launch, that does actually mean something to me and I'm mildly invested in putting a stop to her territorial ambitions. Most of my characters come from Freeport after all. The last thing any of them want is to end up living in a Tier'Dal police state. Stick with with the police state you're used to, that's my advice.
There is, as usual, a pre-expansion event. This one's called Paths of Sedition and it begins on October 6. Generally, pre-expansion events aren't all that exciting but there have been a couple of notable exceptions. The Letter doesn't give much away about how this one's likely to go.
And that's about it. I'm not convinced the whole Producer's Letter tradition shouldn't go the way of Panda Panda Panda. It seems like most of what's in both of these letters either didn't need to be repeated yet again after the numerous previous times we'd been told about it or could have simply been handled by a regular News item on the websites.
Still, it's always nice to hear from Jenn Chan. And if she enjoys writing letters, who are we to stop her?
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