Feldon In a thread pondering when we might see the rest of Velious, SmokeJumper hinted much:
We didn’t do the Wakening Lands. We just have that one small tribute area to it. Think of it as a doorway to a potential future area.
and:
We intend to grow a lot of the Velious stuff you’re missing. I have to stay mum for a bit until I get approval on *how* we want to roll it out to you, so I can’t say much else at the moment. Sorry.
It’s going to be interesting to see whether they’re able to honor their commitment to deliver the rest of Velious without an additional fee. Nothing in the game’s recent history suggests that they have any spare capacity for delivering any more content than the bare minimum for the next year’s paid expansion (with that bar plummeting each year).
What seems EXTREMELY unlikely, but which SmokeJumper’s comments suggest, is that this year’s Game Updates will actually include most of the Velious content, and the next expansion will really be something different.
But like I said, extremely unlikely and goes against everything we’ve seen in the past 2 years which is smaller expansions delivering less and less content.
Considering at least the past year, it indeed seems highly unlikely.
On the other hand, I believe SJ recently stated that the dungeons and raidzones that will come out in future GU’s are pretty much finished, but that they are holding them back to spread out the content over a longer period of time.
If this is true, then the remaining devs have their hands free to create more of Velious.
“I have to stay mum for a bit until I get approval on *how* we want to roll it out to you, so I can’t say much else at the moment. Sorry.”
Mr. Jumper certainly says these words together quite often doesn’t he? Dangles something enticing at us and we have to wait till he can say more. It would be interesting if someone had done a study on how often these words have been stated by him and correlate it to how often it actually comes to fruition.
Marketing holds back a lot of info about EQ2 — for absolutely no reason.
Many people I know didn’t buy Velious specifically because the beta testers reported how very small it was. I would be of the opinion that keeping “mum” is precisely the thing NOT to do if SOE intends to keep making money. I’m not buying it myself until I feel it reaches a level of content worth my money.
I also have to wonder, what’s the point of releasing stuff over a year? If they released it now, everyone would be tired of it in a year and ready for the next expansion. But if they release it in bits over a year, there will still be content people are working on when the next expansion hits the shelves, thus reducing the number of people that are desperate for the new content.