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SOE Announces New Expansions for Everquest, Everquest 2
Kotaku reports that Sony Online Entertainment has announced new expansions for both Everquest and Everquest 2. The announcement came at SOE's Fan Faire today. Kotaku made available some screenshots and the press release, which gives details about what to expect in the new content. Zonk has some more in-depth coverage on EQ: Seeds of Destruction and EQ II: The Shadow Odyssey over at Massively.
It's surprising, but there are pretty committed audiences to all the old online games. Not only everquest, but Turbine has an ongoing Asherons Call 1 community (they just released their 100th free content update a week or two ago), and of course there's the UO crowd still going strong.
It surprised me too when I first heard about it, but after a while it seemed logical. It's their own social network, and asking if someone still played is a lot like saying "Usenet? Do people actually still POST on there?"
Apparently? OK, so not a lot, but according to MMOGChart.com, they've both got a little under 200,000 subscribers, which isn't too shabby.
Granted that doesn't exactly match Blizzard's 10 million, but hell, what does?
EQ2 is still the third largest MMORPG (if you ignore Asian MMORPGs and Dofus) behind WoW and EVE.
So, yes, it still has a presence amongst western MMORPG players. Well, if you completely and totally ignore WoW.
I have a feeling Second Life -- ((ducks) Yes, I know it's not a game! -- will one day reach a point where it can no longer improve. Patches and server upgrades won't make it significantly better. ("Better" being subjective, of course.) So there will have to be a 2nd Second Life: I don't know, maybe Third Life. Whatever. Point is, those who've already lived in the original Second Life will want to maintain an existence there even if they begin anew in Third Life or whatever.
Harold