Chris Lena talks about the the next expansion with our own Laura Genender

The Serpent's Spine is coming soon and Laura Genender takes this last chance to chat up Chris Lena about what that expansion should offer players.

They are coming! They just take a bit longer to get ready.

Actually, Highpass Keep is not on the current revamp list but Highpass Hold and Commons will be coming out with The Serpent’s Spine. No promises, but you should be seeing a new Kithicor fairly soon after launch. There are currently three other ones that are in the works but I don’t want to talk about those quite yet – that always seems to get me in trouble. We are committed to updating the zone graphics while keeping the original look and feel of the areas. I think the Desert of Ro and the newest Nektulos are good examples of we think are successful revamps.

Well, if we can figure out a good way that you can kill houses and take their stuff we might just add it in. In other words, I don’t think you will be seeing traditional player housing in EverQuest any time soon. It can be a really fun feature but I don’t believe it is something that is “missing” from our game. The question we have to our ask ourselves is if housing will enhance the experience of EverQuest. Right now, I would say the answer is no. Anyway, I have heard that there are some really popular MMOs out there without player housing.

I won’t get into the specific details here but the idea behind the change is fairly simple. Once you have been out of combat for a certain amount of time you are considered rested and can sit down and enter an accelerated regeneration state that will quickly recover your mana, health, and endurance. The time it takes to get into this state will be relatively short but longer in raid situations.

We don’t want to change the current way combat works but we do want to get rid of the unnecessary annoyance of sitting around for an inordinate amount of time doing pretty much nothing. Let me be clear that with all changes our goal is to remove unnecessary annoyances while maintaining the secret spice that has made EverQuest so popular for so long.

The boats should be running faster and more efficiently than they ever have so the current plan is to remove the translocators. Also, the Plane of Knowledge teleport system can also get you to most places pretty quickly. But, of course, we will evaluate this again once they are live and we can gather player feedback. I wouldn’t be too shocked if the chorus of shouts goes from “Boats! Boats” to “Boat Gnomes! Boat Gnomes!”