Now, Scott, before we begin can you first just tell us a little bit about the expansion? Scott: Sure, absolutely. Rise of Kunark signifies a big direction we wanted to take the EverQuest 2 franchise next. After coming out with Echoes of Faydwer and realizing how much people loved seeing things that were very familiar to them, but still had a new take and how much fun, bluntly, we had making it. We decided to do the same type of thing for the next expansion and so naturally once we made up our minds there, Kunark was the natural place to go. So, some of the big things that you´ll be seeing are... Obviously with our last expansion we did not do a level increase, this time we will be. Kunark is a very very very dangerous land and as such people are going to need to be able to gear up a little bit and level up and spend some time learning the place before they are able to come in and just decimate everything. We´ve got a brand new race and a new starting area. The Sarnaks are making their return. The beloved race from the original Kunark. Epic weapons will be coming back. Epics are one of the things we´ve kind of put off doing until we had a huge chunk of time to do them right. In a game like EQ2, you´ve got 24 classes, ya know that´s a whole lot of quests and a whole lot of art and a whole lot of stuff that´s gotta get done. So with the dev cycle we have behind Kunark we´re pretty confident that we can get them in and make it fun for both group and raid folks. Beyond that we´re mostly going to be focused on the quality of content and the interesting environments and the things that you´ll be fighting while you´re there. So, that´s Kunark in a nutshell pretty much. Tamat: Sounds pretty exciting. Definitely. Can you give us a general run down of the things that have transpired in Kunark over the last 500 years? Scott: It´s kind of interesting. Kunark kind of got beat up a little bit by all the trauma that´s gone on with Luclin exploding and there was the Rending and the Shattering and all kinds of terrible things happening in the world. And Kunark didn´t escape all of that. The general storyline for the past 500 years, Venril Sathir is, as most people might remember from his original place in Karnor, wasn´t particularly happy with his station there. And when the gods first abandonned the lands he saw and opportunity and he lept on it. He moved himself back into Caballis and he decided to take over and started building himself up a power base there. With the gods gone, everything was just not going very well for a lot of the established races of people and he saw the opportunity and jumped on it. So, yeah, he goes back into Caballis and starts spreading out towards the East. And what you saw over time was his base of power shifted towards Sebellis. Cause he wanted to retake their ancestral home. And so he cleaned that place out and turned that into their new base of power. And it´s a good thing he did because the Rending and the Shattering and all of this and suddenly Caballis finds itself half above ground and half below ground. Where it turned out to be on a huge fault line. So Caballis is for the large part unusable. So after that all happened, what you see is the Iksar Empire really getting rebuilt and so Rise of Kunark, the title, is as much about the rise of the Iksar Empire again and how the rest of the races on Kunark have had to adjust to that. The giants now are being pushed up to the North. You´ve got the Sarnak being pushed off to Chardok in the West. The Iksar are slowly taking over, so it is a war torn land that players will be showing up on, on day one. |
Lesezeichen