EverQuest II: Age of Discovery Launched, Free-to-Play Model Goes Live

SOE’s latest expansion pack for EverQuest II, Age of Discovery, has officially gone live, and with it the free-to-play business model that the company promised last month. As such, we have a brand new producer’s letter to bring to your attention, as well as three new developer diary videos covering some of the new content players can expect. First, a snip from the letter:

Today, we stop requiring any sort of payment. There are no upfront download costs and memberships are no longer required. Everything is voluntary now. If we’re doing a good job of entertaining you, then you can help support the game you love with purchases or memberships, spending as much or as little as you choose to spend as you play.

We have a fired-up dev team. We believe that EQII is the best MMORPG in existence and we intend to keep making it better so that everyone else has to admit it. What we’re doing today keeps us on that path.

This is your world, and we’re committed to making it more and more your world as we keep growing.

Today, every one of you can walk into (Freeport Reborn). Lucan D’Lere has returned to kick his city into gear and reassert his dominance across the map. And to show how much his desire for power has affected the city, Freeport has been given a huge aesthetic facelift, combining North, South, East, and West Freeport into a single city without zones, and retexturing and improving the impressiveness of the city.

Although we’ve preserved much of the original content and quests in Freeport, we have also added a large amount of completely new content also. The approach on these new quests is unique for this game. For the first time, we’ve focused on race- and archetype-specific quest lines throughout the city so that each time you run an alt through the game, you can experience new content in Freeport. Also, the quest lines added to Freeport dynamically scale in level so that regardless of what level you come into the city, chances are that some of the new quests there will work for your character. With a greater focus on stories and better NPC personas, the city is coming alive like it never has before.

So go be evil. Enjoy Freeport. Revel in the moment of glory that is the beginning of greatness! We bring you to the city via the Golden Path naturally at level 20 (from Butcherblock), but you can go there at any age and a good chunk of the content will scale to your level.

And then we move on to the trailers: