Surely the golden age of MMORPGs must be found in the last years of the 90s of the last century and the beginning of the 2000s, when some companies that are now mythical crossed their path. We have Blizzard that put World of Warcraft on the market, Microsoft with its Vanguard and other online experiments and, above all, some gentlemen who called themselves SOE. That is, Sony Online Entertainment.
What had become of it?
It was during this time that SOE ruled with a certain iron hand thanks to a game that is now a legend of MMORPGs: EverQuest . Launched in 1999, it did not officially reach Spain as such, but even so it managed to bewitch thousands of players who got lost in its maps and dungeons while they slept in the morning to adapt their schedules to the afternoon and night activity of the US servers. .UU.
But it wasn’t until the summer of 2004 that the surprise announcement that SOE was going to release EverQuest 2 came out. It happened suddenly, during E3 of that year, and it was perceived by everyone as a hasty response to the already confirmed threat of the release of World of Warcraft in the US. So from there a battle broke out between the players of the title. from Sony and those from Blizzard to find out which of the two was the most role-playing and complex of all. As if that war was going to decide the winner for the next few years.
And so it happened. Seemingly the simplest, easiest and least MMORPG by definition took over the market and EverQuest 2 was left in the hands of a much smaller portion of players. Now, when World of Warcraft is still receiving new expansions, and already without so many subscribers, the old threat of SOE returns (in other hands) with new content for the title released in 2004.
Return with Renewal of Ro
Indeed, just over a month since the Renewal of Ro beta was announced, we already have the nineteenth content expansion for EverQuest 2 in its slightly over 18 years of life. A delivery that could make you fall in love again with one of the most iconic and representative online role-playing games of the time, and that now focuses all the extra content on pure and hard exploration.
And how could it be otherwise, the controversy pursues those who continue to play with the old EQ2 , who accuse World of Warcraft of having expansions “much less more focused” than those of the SOE game. As if that was a sales pitch.
In case you were an old EverQuest 2 adventurer at the time and you have lost track of it, you should know that with this new extra content we return to the Desert of Flames which, as you will remember, we were already able to explore within the first expansion pack that came out a few years ago. already a few years. Now, we’ll have to “dig up some new stories and explore some additional ground.”
Either way, it’s surprising that he’s still alive, one of the few real opponents World of Warcraft ever had when it first appeared in 2004.