KainUK wrote:As I remember reading on here that you guys were looking at making the Emu compatiable with GU56, I thought I should probably warn you about one of the incoming changes (for anyone who doesn't read the official forums).

Qeynos and Freeport will no longer be starting city choices. Basically, Queen's Colony and Outpost of the Overlord are being removed... at least for the moment. A few of us are -trying- to argue with the dev's about that, but we've basically just assumed it's going to happen no matter what.

I'm personally hoping that people running servers will be able to decide if users get to start there or not with this Emu... but I thought I should throw the FYI out there.

Hey folks. I understand that many of you would like to see the old starting islands remain, but I'd like to explain the decision, at least so you see where we were coming from.

Primarily, the starting islands and following content, simply put, are not up to the standards of the newer starting cities. Players who start in these zones are at a disadvantage when compared to players who start in the newer zones. In the more recent starting zones, the play experience is laid out better, with improved loot and quests. From an art and design standpoint, the islands were great five years ago when the game launched, but the game has changed and improved in many ways and we don’t feel the newbie islands are as good as they should be today.

A great positive effect of having four starting zones is that it helps focus players into areas with other people, and encourages interaction and community. The current content revamp helps players travel along a common path as they level up, so that they will more likely come across other people, and form relationships, form communities, and experience the game when it's at its best - with friends. Making sure they have this chance by focusing them into content we feel is strong is one of the goals with turning off the islands as well.

Finally, I'd like to say that we are not planning to abandon Freeport and Qeynos. However, we'd like to repurpose them somewhat into content destinations rather than starting points. A good deal of overarching content deals with these cities directly, and we'd like to create even more content that basically turns these into important quest and activity hubs, so to speak - I can't go into it too much right now (although you saw some of what I mean during the destruction of Freeport live event), but there's definitely an idea on how we'd like them to be presented going forward. The legacy content that is there (especially the racial quests) are not being removed, but we've been discussing ways to make this content more functional overall.

Anyway, we really appreciate all of the feedback, and we hope you can see why we felt this was a necessary change.

Thanks again, all!

John Adams wrote:As long as SOE doesn't disable the zone files themselves (tutorial_island vpk), EQ2Emu should still be able to utilize them. I am not sure SOE has ever fully removed abandoned zones from their client... so I am pretty sure Queen's Colony and Outpost of the Overlord will continue to exist in an EQ2-emulated world. Our content DB will continue to have those zones fully populated and functioning as they are today, and when Halas comes out, we'll add that as a new starting city as well.

Eradani wrote:i hope this implementation never supports all the features of GU56 - particularly the travel maps.