One of the side benefits of the Welcome Back program, which has seen all City Festivals (Qeynos, Freeport, Neriak, Kelethin, and Gorowyn) live simultaneously, is that we now have access to items on the merchants which weren’t going to make an appearance for several months. From Domino:

The new stuff was originally intended to slowly be revealed over the next half year as the festivals cycled around … but with them all turned on at once you have a bit of a deluge of new goodies! Glad they are enjoyed anyway.

There may be some new things coming in the mushroom rings after GU60, too … but live servers will have to wait for next month to see those!

Today’s Update Notes for March 31, 2011 bring those Itemization changes we’ve been hearing about, a redesign of the Storm Gorge Public Quest, and the Aether Races flying event has now been folded into City Festivals, starting with Antonica. From SmokeJumper:

There will be a new track for each city until we start looping around again. Each city’s track will only be available during the City Festival and you can earn festival coins and titles when you race.

We might trot them all out at once at Tinkerfest or something, but they’ll usually be linked individually to the City Festivals now.

The full update notes after the jump…

From Domino on the EQ2 Forums:

The festival is now active on those servers (Butcherblock and Permafrost) and has been for a while, but did start almost a day late.

We will extend the event on the affected servers. The Gorowyn city festival on Butcherblock and Permafrost this month will end at 11:59pm on the 8th [07:59 on the 9th GMT]. (The festival will still end on all other servers at 11:59 on the 7th). Apologies for any inconvenience!

The City Festival has rolled into its third destination since these Festivals began in January. The first event was in Kelethin, then Gorowyn. Today, the City Festival arrives just outside the gates of the city of all things dark and gloomy — Neriak.

Once again, a selection of both local and traveling rewards, house items, and temporary costumes become available.

The theme for Neriak seems to be all things blue. Here’s a sneak of what you can purchase with City Tokens for the next week, before the event rolls on to the next city:

City Festivals

City Festivals are now live. The first one is just outside of Kelethin near the Butcherblock Mts. ramp. City Festivals are held the first week of every month. If you have been doing city writs, tradeskill work orders, etc. you may have noticed a curious item — City Tokens — as quest rewards. City writs, tradeskill writs, and special quests only available during the City Festivals will all earn you City Tokens which can be spent to buy house items, special appearance gear, etc.

For all those folks wishing to see more activity in the cities, here’s your chance. These festivals are accessible to all alignments regardless of city due to them festival parking just outside the city gate and offering quests to all who visit.

Frostfell Ending Soon

If you haven’t run all of the Frostfell quests, including the Icy Keep: Return which requires a group, or any of the other quests, tradeskilling, etc. don’t miss out! Frostfell ends January 7th.

EQ2Wire would like to wish a Happy New Year to all of you. We’ll be back with more news about the EverQuest II: Sentinel’s Fate expansion and any other news in the world of Norrath soon.

It’s going to be a busy week for Norrathians.

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In other news, the Highland Stalker — the Sentinel’s Fate Collector’s Edition mount — will get a speed boost over the previous announcement. Out-of-the-box it will have a runspeed of 65%.

Looking Ahead

On December 20th, we’ll see the return of the monthly Moonlight Enchantments event which takes places in the forests of Norrath. These zones will have several new house item rewards including tiles with the textures of water, clouds, sand, etc.

Also around the first of January, we can expect the new City Festivals to start up. Every month, there will be a city festival just outside the gates of one city for the first week of that month. These offer many house item and other rewards.

Understandably, some players are taking a look at Game Update 54 (aka the Great Bug Stomp) and not seeing a lot of new content. Part of the issue is, normally, we would be just 2 weeks away from an entirely new expansion at this point. However Sentinel’s Fate won’t hit until February. Also, it is now unclear just when we can expect Shaders 3.0, although I’m hopeful that we’ll get it as an early Christmas present.

Of course, we have Frostfell 2009 to look forward to this December. If this year has proven anything, it is that live events get bigger and bigger, with significant new content each year (next year, I figure it will take all 20 days just to complete all the old and new content of Nights of the Dead!!). Seasonal and recurring live events (eg. Moonlight Enchantments) have been extremely popular, so a lot of attention is being focused on them.

And now it turns out that in response to many complaints that Guild Halls and other game design decisions have “emptied” the home cities, a new recurring event is being introduced in Norrath: City Festivals.

From Kaitheel‘s announcement:

The Far Seas Trading Company is proud to introduce a traveling festival for all to participate in! When this event goes live, a different city will be chosen to host a week long event, once each month. Gorowyn, Neriak, Kelethin and Freeport will each get their chance to host their version of the event. On Test and Test Copy the great city of Qeynos is the first to find the traveling caravan outside it’s gates in Antonica. Adventurers will find new quests, collections and rewards, many of which are city specific! And for those of us that don’t want to wait for the festival to reach our city’s gates, we don’t have to. City Tokens are now being given as further reward for completing city writs!

This event should now be available on Test and Test Copy and we’ll report back soon with the details.

Remember, the Spires event is still in-game and some of the rewards from that event may not re-appear in EQ2 for a long time. In addition to the variety of house items, there are some unique items like the Magic Mouth house/guild hall item which can be set up to make announcements to passers-by. And don’t forget in-home teleporters. You buy them in pairs, right-click to name each one, and then you can port between them.

Knapsacks and Wrecked Cities

One perhaps overlooked feature of Game Update 54 is larger Backpacks. The largest size using a rare component (Mahogany) is now a 40 slot backpack with 20% weight reduction. You can read more about these here.

And finally, if you have been on test and wandered through West Freeport, you may have been shocked at what you saw. Norrath is changing in the leadup to Sentinel’s Fate…