Wow. This is the first word that comes to mind after our tour of the new EQ2 expansion, Echoes of Faydwer. As there are many other write-ups out there about this tour, I’ll keep this fairly brief but post a lot of good screen-caps for you all to enjoy. Click the clickable words throughout to see what I saw.

First, an explanation for those of you that might be new to the Everquest world: this expansion is a re-imagining of much of the old world from EQ1, or EQLive as it is also known. This also happens to be the part of the world that I started my first character in EQ1 and here I spent the majority of my time for the 4-5 years I spent in pre-shattering Norrath. So this expansion is very dear to my heart, as I know it is to many other old-school players, and if this expansion did not live up to my very high expectations I would be very angry to say the least. Luckily, this was not the case and what we saw of the expansion looks to live up to (and possibly exceed) the already high standards SOE has set for Everquest2 and the two expansions that have been released thus far. The scenery is beautiful, the new playable class race and city rock, and there is a ton of content.

Now to get into the meat of things. The tour started in Greater Faydark, which is an amazing zone. I had a chance to fool around in this zone ahead of our tour and it has everything you could hope for: giant trees, giant flowers, a bunch of orcs and wisps, a
freakin giant city smack in the middle of it, and the general sense of magical wonder you would expect from the land of the elves. Not to mention the music in the zone is so awesome – I can’t wait to hear more. As we met for our tour Raijinn Thunderguard was our tour guide and showed off one of the new armor models we can expect to see in EoF, as well as some of the highly anticipated cloaks (more here and here) that players are going to be able to wear. A comment here about the fae, which is the new playable race coming out with EoF. I was worried that the Fae would be a little too “fairy-like” for my tastes, but it turns out they are pretty dang cool. My absolute favorite thing and the thing that may get me to roll a new fae character is their ability to float while falling, therefore basically they have unlimited safe-fall as a class race ability. It rocks to jump off the high platforms of Kelethin and float
down to the forest floor gently as if carried by a breeze. As we proceeded on with our tour we got to run around the new starting city of Kelethin. For you EQ1 fans the city definitely does not disappoint – it’s awesome, plain and simple. For those of you not familiar with Kelethin it is a city in the trees which was built by the wood-elves. My favorite thing about it was not having to zone to get into the city, you just hop a ride on the elevator; oh and the houses that are shaped like acorns – very cute devs.

As the tour continued on we got to see a couple of other familiar landmarks in Greater Faydark, first off was the wizard spires. They looked pretty much the same as I remembered but much taller. What was most interesting about them was not their appearance but the fact that Raijinn told us that they may become functional for wizards and druids to use again in the future – this was the first I’d heard of player teleportation returning to Norrath.

The next stop was Crushbone, which is a dungeon for players around lvl 20-25. It was a pretty cool dungeon overall, I took some pics of the entry hall and the torture chamber. Also within we saw the new orc model, which looked great, and I found a kobold down in the dungeon, looking quite fierce.

Now it would appear that most of the other cities that existed in Faydwer before the shattering have now been taken over by hostiles and are now essentially dungeon zones. The
first one we visited was Felwithe, now known as New Tunaria, which is a zone for players around lvl 50-55. This zone had some of the best architecture
we saw on the tour, and some great water features. There was even a massive oak in the middle of a courtyard that you could go inside. I also noticed another new mob model here, I don’t even know what to call it but it looked neat. More on the other cities turned dungeon below.

Next on the tour was the outdoor zone Steamfont mountains. This is historically the land of the gnomes, containing the gnome city of Ak’Anon and lots of crazy gnome contraptions. The zone is still full of crazy contraptions, but Ak’Anon has been overtaken and is now the city of machines (insert random Terminator or Matrix cliché here)As for Steamfont it’s another great looking outdoor zone, the gnomes have a little safe haven town here where we saw battle bots and happened to see the new horse model standing around. We were told here that the guild cap is being raised to 60 so this might be one of the new higher lvl guild mounts, there was another mount mentioned that will be non-horse or carpet, they are keeping it a secret for now though. I also happened to see another new monster model running around, a mean looking minotaur. After walking around the outdoor zone we went into modern day Ak’Anon, now known as Klak’Anon, again this is the city of machines. Our faithful tour guide told us that they tried to keep this zone’s layout similar to the original, so it feels somewhat familiar. There are lots of robots flying around with scary death gazes, so needless to say it’s a cool zone – surprisingly lag free with all of that animation. Also here is where we witnessed our first raid mob,a giant mechanical thing, and I’m going off memory here but I believe he was lvl 55 x4.

Next we took a quick hop across the new lands to visit the Butcherblock mountains. We didn’t get to see much of this zone but we did get to visit the fabled Chessboard for a quick look and then we went to the entrance to Kaladim. We didn’t get to see inside Kaladim but we were told it’s another dungeon zone, I believe it was reported to be lvls 65-70.

Our next 2 stops featured some of the high level content available in the new expansion. The first stop was The Emerald Hills, which is an awesome looking zone, and we were told is an instanced raid zone 65-70. Interesting to note here the zone seemed empty until we ventured in, then we were attacked by some invisible mobs. Not sure if this will be the case at launch but it was a bit different than normal. We also witnessed the dragon Wuoshi lurking about, he also was happy to kill most of us with an aoe really quickly (we were buffed to lvl 70 but without armor). Some of you might remember Wuoshi from Eq1 and Velious, apparently he has now sought out warmer climates but he’s now angry towards all player races. Wuoshi is in the Emerald Hills guarding the Bloom of Growth, a really cool shiny flower that apparently is the source of everything being enormous proportions in the Emerald Hills. The last stop on our tour was everyone’s favorite, Castle Mistmoore. This was a very high level zone, with most mobs being over level 70, so it will take some serious players to do much exploring within. The zone looked great, it really felt like a castle inside with everything being large and beautiful stained glass everywhere. We weren’t able to explore much of the zone but we did get to see the entry hall and then got treated to a glimpse of Mayong Mistmoore himself. Mayong was rarely seen in EQ1 but he did make the occasional appearance. Here apparently he will be a little more visible, though at a level 75 x4 raid mob he will prove to be one of the most difficult mobs in the game. Unfortunately he was most happy to smite anyone who came near him, so this was the closest pic I could get of him.

That was it for our tour, and although we got to see a lot of content there is so much that we didn’t see. It was commented at the end that although we didn’t get to see it, the Estate of Unrest will appear in this expansion, and it will also be for higher level characters, probably 65-70. At 40 zones this will be a huge expansion, with content for all levels 1-70. A lot of the stuff we saw was higher level just because that is the nature of the beast and what most people want to see, but there is plenty of mid-level content as well. At first glimpse I think EoF will live up to it’s hype, and not only continue on a great tradition that has been set for years by the respective Everquest teams but also vault EQ2 into a new realm and a truly huge world.