During our time at Fan Faire, we got details on EverQuest II's eighth expansion and upcoming Game Updates.

EverQuest II's upcoming eighth expansion, the Age of Discovery, was announced Thursday night at the Fan Faire community address, and we got some more interesting details during a panel. Departing from the traditional expansion format of a large amount of content with a few new features, the Age of Discovery will be packed with only features while Game Updates will continue to add more content to the game. The upcoming new class, Beastlord, was described more and the Freeport revamp was also touched on during the panel.

Continue on after the jump for detailed information on upcoming Game Updates and the expansion!

Game Updates and Upcoming Content

Game Update 61 will be called The War of Zek, bringing with it the Plane of War and two of the first ever dynamic dungeons, revisiting The Silent City and the Djinn Master's Prism from the Desert of Flames era. Dynamic dungeons will most likely be different each time they are run with different creatures and encounters. The Plane of War will have a heroic and raid dungeon, each with a normal and hard mode version. GU61 will wrap up the story arc concerning Rallos Zek that was introduced in Velious and is expected to launch in late August.

There will be many itemization changes coming up in the future, part of which is reitemization for all items between levels 20-90. Mages and Priests will get an auto-attack and a way to shift stats on your items will be introduced. An Alternate Advancement revamp was announced, which was later clarified in the Q&A part of the panel that the objective is to clean up trees, not remove AAs. Players should not have to relearn their characters and they are expected to get more choice from the changes. Tradeskillers will get their own Alternate Advancement tree and the AAs that are spent will be pulled from the same pool as Adventurer AAs.

A house rating system was announced which is reminiscent of the Free Realms Housing Directory. Players can publish their homes and others are able to visit and rate the house. A rankings leaderboard will be established for each server and awards can be earned for those who stay on the top of the leaderboard.

Dungeon Finder will be a new feature that will start out as same server only with the possibility of eventually going cross-server. The interface will allow people to choose the type of dungeon they want and once a group can fill it will pull everyone in. When the group decides they’re finished, they can either leave and go their separate ways or queue right back up for another dungeon.

Fae and Arasai will be able to fly in Game Update 61. Players will still need to be at least level 85 and complete a quest to enable flight. Unpopulated sections of Eastern Wastes will be populated. A Beastlord prelude event will not directly unlock the race but give lore behind its upcoming reappearance in Norrath.

In Game Update 62, Lucan D'Lere will get back in the game by redominating his city and the surrounding area. Evil starter areas will lead to Freeport instead of Butcherblock Mountains to "help Lucan get his game on." The city will be a multi-level questing hub that will keep adventurers coming back for more. Race and class specific quest lines will also be introduced into Freeport's revamp. The neighborhoods and sewer system will be changed into instances with exploratory content that could cause the NPCs nearby to have impulsive reactions to your choices. A public quest will be added to the Commonlands as well as special guards including leapers, gliders and juggernauts.

The central area of Freeport (north, south, east and west) is being pulled together into one seamless zone. The city itself is getting a facelift, which impressed the audience. You can see the new textures, which are a work in progress, in the above screenshot.

As far as the timeline is concerned, the projected future content updates are GU61, the Zek story arc in late August; GU62, the Freeport revamp; GU63 and GU64 will concentrate on Velious again; and finally, GU65, estimated for next summer, will focus on the Qeynos revamp.

Continue to Page 2 for details on the Age of Discovery expansion.