After announcing that support for older systems would be dropped this summer, EverQuest II has migrated to its promised 64-bit servers and clients. The change went into effect yesterday, and is intended to modernize things a bit to allow for continued long-term development and improved overall performance.
The Darkpaw Games team described what they’re now planning in light of the 64-bit migration in the announcement that it had been completed:
"This update will allow the utilization of more of the memory on your computer and on our servers. Previously, no matter how much physical or virtual memory was on your machine, we were limited to using 4GBs of it. With 64-bit servers and clients, we can now use up to 16 exabytes which improves stability and addresses critical performance issues some players have experienced in the past relating to memory."
EverQuest II joins a number of games that have been dropping support for older and outdated systems over the past year or two. These include Neverwinter and Star Trek Online, EVE Online, and others. Other titles like Guild Wars 2 and The Lord of the Rings Online have made changes that add options (for Guild Wars 2, it’s DirectX 11) or officially end support for clients that weren’t being actively supported (with LOTRO ending Mac client support).
It is an issue that long-running games do have to consider, especially if their original releases supported a number of systems that are now more rare overall. Yet, you also don’t want to potentially alienate your community, and data helps with this.
Now that EverQuest II has officially migrated to 64-bit, we can look forward to more changes in the promised roadmap for 2022. Among these are the coming 18th anniversary, summer events (like Scorched Sky Celebration, which starts tomorrow), and the next expansion coming in December.
See the official 64-bit announcement and updated system requirements and recommendations over at EverQuest II.
