EverQuest II Celebrates its 10th Anniversary

It's hard to believe that Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest sequel has already been online for a full decade, but that does indeed appear to be the case as indicated by this announcement on the official website, a celebratory retrospective piece on Kotaku, and a developer commentary video to drive it home. On to the video:



Followed by an excerpt from the latter article:

November 2004 was a magical month for MMO fans. Up until that month, EverQuest was synonymous with the genre, held up as an example of the appeal of playing online together as well as the possible negative side effects of immersing one's self in online fantasy worlds.

EverQuest II took the series' setting of Norrath five hundred years into the future, a cool time-jump that gave players of the first game a chance to rediscover the locations they'd spent five years inhabiting. Each new expansion pack uncovered a little more of the old world, often transformed in amazing ways.

I haven't got to spend a lot of time in EverQuest II, sadly. A relatively hardcore player of the first game, I was disappointed by the sequel's answer to the Bard, my class of choice. They took away my speed and my ability to twist songs. Between that and the odd, plastic-looking character designs, the game failed to capture my imagination for more than a couple of months at a time.