Massive Everquest 8-year anniversary collection includes every expansion for $20
Eight years ago Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) set the gaming world ablaze with it’s hugely successful Massively Multiplayer Online RPG EverQuest, which would become the best-selling MMO in history at the time (eventually eclipsed by Blizzard’s World of Warcraft) and earned numerous awards, among them a prestigious Game of the Year award by GameSpot in 1999.
Now SOE has announced that they are celebrating EverQuest’s enormous success and their 8-year anniversary with a new collection for the PC that will include EVERY expansion for the budget price of $19.99. (Note that this is the original game not it’s sequel, EverQuest II, that was released in late 2004). And it composes the largest collection of MMO expansions in history, thirteen total.
“After eight successful years of EverQuest, we wanted to celebrate with the release of a very special Anniversary Edition, which consists of all the expansions ever created for EverQuest, including the most recently released expansion: The Buried Sea,” said Clint Worley, Producer for EverQuest. “The Anniversary Edition is not only chock-full of content, but priced to allow players both old and new to join in the online experience known as EverQuest.”
It’s set for release on April 23rd and is quite the deal for those who would like to dive into a huge online world that’s already fully fleshed out, or to see what all the fuss was about way back when the game first launched in 1999 (although the graphics are sickingly outdated nowadays).
The package includes all the expansions from the oldest to the newest, an entire eight-years worth of content. That adds up to 16 distinct races & classes (including the recently created Drakkin race, formed of a dragon breed), more than 375 zones to explore, and an astounding 50,000 items to earn and collect, in either magical or mundane forms. And with artifacts of great power players can even shape the EverQuest universe as they explore the massive world with hundreds of thousands of other players; all of whom are journeying across massive continents filled with vast dungeons, eerie crypts and mysterious underwater landscapes simultaneously.
The included expansions are:
1. The Ruins of Kunark (March 2000)
2. The Scars of Velious (December 2000)
3. The Shadows of Luclin (December 2001)
4. The Planes of Power (October 2002)
5. The Legacy of Ykesha (February 2003)
6. Lost Dungeons of Norrath (September 2003)
7. Gates of Discord (February 2004)
8. Omens of War (September 2004)
9. Dragons of Norrath (February 2005)
10. Depths of Darkhollow (September 2005)
11. Prophecy of Ro (February 2006)
12. The Serpent’s Spine (September 2006)
13. The Buried Sea (February 2007)
Coinciding with the anniversary celebration, for a month starting on March 16th, EverQuest will be treating players to new in-game content including dozens of Luclin Fabled NPCs, a new scavenger hunt for players of all levels, and the return of the Fabled fiends of years past.
“EverQuest continues to provide players with a massive amount of content, more than any other MMO in the market, and is still continuing to grow, eight years later,” said Michael Lustenberger, Vice President of Marketing, Sony Online Entertainment. We’ll just have to see how long it can be sustained, but if all goes well we may eventually see SOE celebrating EverQuest’s 15th anniversary, imagine that . . .
