From the EQ2 Forums:

Chains of Eternity is EverQuest II’s 9th expansion! In Chains of Eternity, adventurers will travel to the realm known as Ethernere in their quest to stop the siphoning of souls from Norrath. Here, the heroes will fight to save not only the mortals of their world, but prevent the imbalance in Ethernere, as well as meet the God of the afterlife, Drinal, the Silver Reaper. They may yet find the answer lies not in fortunes and portents, but deep in Norrath’s past. Adventurers will also uncover all new areas in the mortal realm of Norrath.

The fate of the living and the dead are in your hands, heroes! Are you up to the challenge before you?

From the EQ2 Forums:

We’re just hours away from Chains of Eternity™!

All EverQuest II servers will come offline at 7:00 AM PST* on Tuesday, November 13, 2012 to prepare for this content update. We anticipate game servers will be back online before 12:00 Noon PST*.

Important: This is an estimate of our anticipated downtime.

While the servers are offline tomorrow, make sure you keep an eye on Twitter, Facebook, the Forums, and the website for special countdown activities and updates, including diary entries from our off-duty server hamsters!

From the new EQ2 Forums:

Tomorrow EverQuest II will launch its ninth expansion, Chains of Eternity™! In addition to the two new overland zones (previewed last week here) and many other features, this expansion will include nine new instanced dungeons with unique, exciting encounters and loot! Check out the video for more about these new dungeons!

Remember, today is your last chance to pre-order Chains of Eternity™! The Collector’s Edition is available at a special discounted pre-order price. Both the Standard and Collector’s editions include an exclusive Cloak of Mourning for pre-orders as well:

Make sure you get your copy before 11:59 PM PST* today (Monday, November 12, 2012)!

CLICK HERE to pre-order now!

Today’s the day that gaming news sites who went on tours of the upcoming Chains of Eternity expansion are able to post their impressions and screenshots. And to go along with these stories is a new video interviewing the talented artists and animators of Chains of Eternity.

Commentary

I have to be honest. After seeing how energized the EQ2 team were at SOE Live, this video is a bit uninspiring. Everything is given in a flat inflection, and the visuals are mostly slow flythroughs. Where’s the combat? Where’s the epic battles?

I’m genuinely excited about Chains of Eternity, and there was an infectious enthusiasm when talking to different developers and designers in Vegas. After a year of revamps, retooling, and not enough endgame group/raid content, this expansion delivers massive, beautiful, well put-together zones in spades. But this video doesn’t quite communicate the team’s efforts.

Showcased above is the new EQ2 Character Select screen set in Eidolon Plains.

Screenshots of the two Chains of Eternity: Collector’s Edition mercenaries (your choice of Templar or Paladin for each of your characters), as well as the SOE Live mercenary (a Vampire Shadowknight) which became available early this week can be seen in our previous article EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity CE Items, AoD, and SOE Live. We’ve also posted a screenshot of the Collector’s Edition exclusive Wyvern Flying Mount in Ethernere colors.

From the EQ2 Forums:

EverQuest II is preparing to launch its ninth expansion, Chains of Eternity™! This expansion will take intrepid adventurers into Ethernere. Part of this expansion is the two new overlands in the spirit realm: Obol Plains and the Eidolon Jungle.

Nathan “Kaitheel” McCall, Game Designer; Maria Del Casino, Senior Environment Artist; Brandon McDonald, Environment Artist; and Chris Atkins, Character Artist talk about what went into creating the lush environments of Eidolon Jungle and Obol Plains. They may have started with Loping Plains and the Feerrott, but after all the changes, they are almost entirely new zones. The incredible art and animation coming from the EQ2 team continues to astound me.

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale‘s twitter:

We are excited to announce we’re adding an amazing Ethernere wyvern mount to the CoE Collector’s Edition!

and for SOE Live attendees who have been justifiably balking at the $50 upsell to get the Chains of Eternity: Collector’s Edition, it looks like there may be some movement on that price:

Also, our Community and Marketing team has exciting announcement coming this afternoon for SOE Live folks looking to upgrade CoE…

Glad to see these two changes based on player feedback.

From Dexella on the EQ2 Forums:

SOE Live attendees will be able to upgrade to a Collector’s Edition for $20.00 (or foreign currency equivalent). Please complete the pre-order purchase flow as normal; you will see the reduced price once your credit card is charged. You must pre-order the Collector’s Edition on the same account you registered for SOE Live with and you must pre-order before the deadline at 11:59 pm on November 12th.

When the Chains of Eternity expansion was announced, the Collector’s Edition goodies were revealed to include Krivix Honorclaw, a Werewolf Mercenary, a healer. Then at SOE Live, players suggested that it would be great to have a choice of healer or tank for the CE, and so the decision was made on the spot to offer a choice of Paladin or Templar for each person who claims the merc.

Today, Holly “Windstalker” tweeted a screenshot of Krivok Honorclaw the Templar, who is a new Werewolf-like race, the Lujien:

So last night, we announced that we had made a snapshot of the AAs for some 150,000 characters which people could view at Beetny.com. We were pretty proud of ourselves until someone asked if that included the Beastlord warder AAs.  It didn’t.  Beatny doesn’t cover Beastlord warders.

So because we try harder, we’ve gone back and made an actual backup of every character’s AAs right here on EQ2U and will hang onto it until well after the expansion.  That’s over 416,000 characters.

If you haven’t got an EQ2U account, please feel free to sign up and do your own AA Backup! And let us know in the Comments if you have any questions!

With the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity expansion comes new Prestige abilities, and that means an AA reset. In years past, news of an AA reset has seen players scrambling to capture screenshots of their AA tabs or scribbling down notes about where you’ve spent points (and how many) on each tree.

This year, we have a better suggestion: Sit back, relax, and let EQ2U do the work for you!

On October 28-29th, Dethdlr wrote and ran a script to Backup the AAs of every followed character on EQ2U, plus every single level 90, 91, and 92 EQ2 character ever looked up on EQ2U. Since 96% of level 92 characters have been looked up on our site, you’re probably covered!

From EverQuest2.com:

EverQuest II’s ninth expansion, Chains of Eternity™, will be taking adventurers to a realm never intended for living souls: Ethernere. What waits for them there? And what will happen to Norrathians as they cross the barrier between the living and the dead, a barrier that some seers argue never should have been breached?

At SOE Live, we got to see some amazing flythrough videos of the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity. A Youtube video has been posted by CyberInk which includes just some of this.

NOTE: Some of these zone flythroughs were taken a few weeks ago, and we were told by artists at SOE Live that changes have been made since then, so if you want to see how these zones look now, head over to the Beta server!!

Ahead of schedule, the EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity Public Beta is NOW OPEN!

How Do I Get to Beta?

Unlike past betas, there is no Non-Disclosure Agreement to accept, and no separate Beta launcher to run. To access the Chains of Eternity, simply close and reopen your EverQuest II Launcher, click on the Version link in the top left corner (US English for US players), switch the region to “Beta“, click Apply, and let the patching begin!

Beta Copy is 1000% better from how it has been handled in past expansion Betas. Instead of typing /beta and hoping that an hour or two from now, your character will miraculously appear on Beta, the /beta command now takes between 10 and 15 SECONDS to copy your character over.

After the jump, a detailed pictoral of how to do these steps, and some useful time-saving info…

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums:

Sorry we haven’t been more specific. We will do a stability pass in the morning and open when it is stable. We are aiming before noon PDT and we will keep you updated.

So wait a minute… Every other beta, there have been e-mail signups a month prior for us to all sign NDA and all that jazz. I guess we’ll know in a couple of hours what path they choose to go. 🙂

Normally I’d be banging the drum about Public Beta being cool, but hory shet I’ve got plenty of stuff on my plate with SOE Live videos (11 hours), and various articles before I can even get started screenshotting and previewing Chains of Eternity. 😉

Headed to Podcasting panel soon. Dellmon of the awesome EQ2Talk podcast on the panel. Will record a video. Already 7 hours (30GB) of vids, including our EQ2U panel, to crunch down and post.

Panel starting now. Dev intros.

Back by popular demand — CONTENT

* New overland zones
* New Dungeons
* New Raids
* Signature line more accessible
* New type of adornments
* More Prestige abilities
* Level cap to 95

So for those folks behind on AAs, if you buy Chains of Eternity, you get an item you can claim 2 per account (not 1 per character) that if you are level 90 it dings you to 280AAs.

Just starting the EQ2 Art & Animation panel.

Dave “covic” Brown, Tom Tobey, Aaron “Gnobrin” Bisnett, Chris Myers

Lotsa slides.

This is a visual panel, so not going to be a lot of updates.

How we create a 3D environment

Showing a flythrough of a new outdoor 3D dungeon that’s being worked on.

The expac will have 9 individual dungeons (not repurposed)

I just received an e-mail indicating that the new Chains of Eternity expansion is available for pre-order at EverQuest2.com.

Introducing Everquest II: Chains of Eternity™!

This is the 9th expansion of the revolutionary EverQuest II franchise. This expansion contains must-have features such as level increases, prestige abilities and new game items only available with this expansion, such as adornments that become more powerful with your character. Also, explore new content in two overlands in the spirit realm, and experience adventure with new dungeons and quests. Put right the imbalance in the Ethernere!

Nearly every EverQuest II expansion has included some kind of new feature, yet we tend to associate expansions with their content. Think of any EQ2 expansion and our recollections are of the continents, solo quests, group and raid zones, and level cap raises contained within each update. So what happened with Age of Discovery?

It’s no secret that the original plan was to release two expansions — Velious I and Velious II — and charge for both of them. However it must have been felt that players would react negatively to a “Velious double-dip”. So Age of Discovery was envisioned as an a la carte features bundle which would still offer the side benefit of funding continual Velious development.

Yet despite Herculean efforts by SmokeJumper to get players on board with the benefits of Features vs. Content Expansions, players remained skeptical.

So why even release Destiny of Velious and Age of Discovery in the same year?

Today brought a double helping of news for players of EverQuest II, and I wanted to share a few thoughts I’ve got on each subject.

EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity

After a features expansion, and then a “guspansion”, Chains of Eternity puts us back on track with a content expansion. This time around, we’ll see Guild, Tradeskill, and Adventuring Level Caps all raised to 95. We’ll also see more expansion in the Prestige AAs tab with new abilities for each Subclass. Also new in the expansion will be Prestige Tradeskills for crafters wanting to specialize their trade.

A truly new feature is Organic Adornments which sound interesting in that they may further streamline itemization. For the last couple of years, War Runes have been the be-all-end-all of adornments. Once you had won the rights to your desired Red “War Rune” adornment, you had it forever, and could always pick up more for your alts. However as expansions and guspansions go by and player power explodes, some of the older Red adornments have become outdated. If Organic Adornments truly grow with their players, then maybe adornments will stay relevant rather than requiring constant maintenance from the EQ2 designers.

From EverQuest2.com:

Death is rampant across Norrath. Citizens are suddenly falling dead as their spirits are torn from their bodies. No one on Norrath seems to understand why the souls are being pulled from the mortal plane, but all signs point to a massive disturbance within Ethernere, the realm of the dead. The heroes of the world must travel to Ethernere to find the cause of the unbalance in the Grey Wastes, and discover what has become of its caretaker – the mysterious being known as Drinal. If the heroes can return balance to Ethernere, the siphoning of souls may be halted. Should they fail, both the living and the dead will suffer a dismal fate.

Introducing EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity! This is the 9th expansion of the revolutionary EverQuest II franchise. This expansion contains must-have features such as level increases, prestige abilities and new game items only available with this expansion, such as adornments that become more powerful with your character. Also, explore new content in two spirit-realm versions of familiar lands, and experience adventure with new dungeons and quests. Put right the imbalance in the Ethernere!

From Holly “Windstalker” Longdale on the EQ2 Forums:

Greetings Norrath!

The time has come! We are very proud to announce our next expansion, EverQuest II: Chains of Eternity!

The team is hard at work developing our ninth – yes, our ninth – expansion and implementing the finer details, several of which I will go into here.  When the expansion launches, Norrathians will pass into Ethernere, the realm of the afterlife, where all spirits pass after death on their way to their final resting place.

Recently, something has gone horribly wrong in Ethernere and it is bleeding through in the mortal plane.  Over the summer months, evidence of ripples between the realms was in evidence as items with ethereal energy appeared upon the dead.  As the tears between the realms widen, it will be up to the heroes of Norrath to save the immortal and mortal realms from collapse!

The adventures in this expansion will be great ones! The team is spending a lot of time ensuring that you experience the story, rather than merely read it, so I won’t give it all away in this letter.  As for features and details, we’ve got a lot to crow about.  We hope players enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed weaving it together.

Cross Over to More Content

In two re-imagined Ethernere overlands inspired by Feerrott and Loping Plains, players will find a region in chaos.  The natural ebb and flow of spirits passing through the Ethernere to each spirit’s final resting place is corrupted and on the edge of destruction, threatening every mortal’s life and afterlife.  Through the trials of nine new instanced dungeons, players will attempt to mend the end of all things.  Prelude content and dungeons give insights into the threat from the other side while telling all new stories – including advancing the story behind the Ages End Prophecy.  Players meet new creatures from the beyond and face a whole host of new challenges.

Holly “Windstalker” Longdale has broken her forum silence with a flurry of posts today. Chief among them were a couple of comments on the level 91-92 XP grind, specifically a thread where players expressed their frustration at Withered Lands quests giving less XP than simply grinding in level 80-90 dungeons.

From the EQ2 Forums:

To respond to the [original poster] specifically, we want the current content to be meaningful and rewarding, including quests. We will have a solution for our expansion which of course means that we acknowledge there is an issue we need to resolve.

The ‘Future of EverQuest II’ webcast has concluded, and we have been left with more questions than answers. The webcast at a glance:

• the Qeynos Revamp
• a hint of the Sleeper’s Tomb (GU65) and Kerafyrm (2013)
• the next Expansion (December?) — more levels, more Prestige Points, includes a totally new area of Norrath rather than revisiting a part of the original EverQuest
• Play-as-your-Character in Dungeon Maker (using a feature called Level Agnostic Dungeons)
• On-the-Fly Beta Testing
• using Quest Items from your Quest Journal instead of fishing around in your inventory
• the Scope of the Marketplace (even the EQ2 team admits that more items should be available or craftable in-game)
• Softball player questions about Progression server, Armor dyes, temporary NPCs, and the Meatbeast

In the waning days of May, while we anxiously await the delivery of those May Update Plans, there’s word of an upcoming Webcast tomorrow afternoon/evening with the lofty title “the Future of EverQuest II“.

I think we can expect some hints of the upcoming Qeynos Revamp in August, with maybe a screenshot or two, followed by some hints of the November (or December) expansion and/or Game Update. The EQ2 team have played their cards awfully close to the chest since Dave “SmokeJumper” Georgeson‘s installation as EQ2 Senior Producer and subsequent elevation to EverQuest Franchise Executive Producer, and more recently SOE Director of Development.

Details of the May 24th webcast after the jump…