A thread was created on the EQ2 Forums a couple of weeks ago entitled “Why is there no hype about Velious?” which elicited responses from Amnerys and Rothgar indicating that we’re still 3 months away and not everything is nailed down. This thread raged on.

However the real discussion about the EverQuest II expansion Destiny of Velious and future of Norrath beyond its release has been happening in the elephantine Server Merges Announced by Email thread, which has become sort of an omnibus discussion between SmokeJumper, Rothgar, and the players.

Hope these are useful…

Our friend Farrel over at Epic Slant has done a great article on player expectations for the Destiny of Velious expansion.

Velious is not something you do lightly. It was the defining expansion of EverQuest and to put it on such a short product cycle is dangerous.

Velious was one of the largest content additions ever to hit EverQuest. The whole expansion was simply massive in scale. Three major cities were added, several open world zones, shared access dungeons and a raid zone that could support more than a single guild at a time. The EQ2 trend of “two over world zones” and some instances will not work here.

From EQ2 ZAM:

EverQuest II players have long hoped for an expansion returning players to Velious.  Scars of Velious, the second expansion in the original EverQuest, was a favorite of long-time players.  With the appearance of the the icy Order of Rime last summer many players were sure Velious was coming, and were surprised when Sentinel’s Fate took EQII players to the lost island of Odus.
Astute player Vulkoor found some interesting files downloading in April, which included othmir (an otter race from Velious) and Tserrina the near-legendary boss of the original Tower of Frozen Shadow.  The appearance of Coldain dwarves in New Halas (now on the EQII test servers), have expectations high.

Today, observant (and persistant) players found an entry at the United States Patent and Trademark Office.  Sony Online Entertainment has applied for the trademark on EVERQUEST II DESTINY OF VELIOUS.

While we’re sure SOE will not announce the 7th EverQuest II expansion before they’re ready, we feel confident in predicting that yes, the next expansion will return us to the land of snow bunnies and Thurgadin, frost giants and the Temple of Veeshan.

With the entire EQ2 team now back to work on EQ2 content, hopefully we get the Velious expansion we’d all like to see.

Game Update 56, or least major chunks of it have been pushed to the Test Server. Already, I and other players have noted that certain textures are missing (especially with Shaders 3.0 enabled), and all housing is currently unavailable (making it impossible to take a peek inside the 2, 4, and 6 bedroom New Halas housing.

But what may be more interesting is not what files are missing, but what files are unexpected. Because the Live and Test Servers are just another development branch of EQ2, inevitably, some Expansion and future Game Update/Live Event files get tagged and download to our computers.

Close examination of these files have revealed some tantalizing peaks into the next expansion, as well as a preamble event.

* MAJOR SPOILER ALERT * MAJOR SPOILER ALERT *

If you don’t like spoilers about the next Expansion, then don’t read further.