One thing I didn't immediately realise when the new Sharandar module was announced was that this also meant that the old Sharandar was going away: currency obsolete, zones and quests gone, campaign removed. I still don't know why Cryptic felt the need to do this to be honest, as there are precedents for having more than one version of the same zone in the game, e.g. Helm's Hold the levelling zone and Reclamation Rock the Elemental Evil zone, which are both the same place but at different points in time.
I'm not too torn up about it right now, seeing how I completed the old Sharandar campaign on eight different characters and have plenty of memories of the place. But I'm not generally a fan of removing content from MMOs, and occasionally I do get all sentimental and experience cravings to revisit.
For example one of the new Sharandar quests mentions that Kehl Skywatcher now has a plaza named after her and is missed by everyone or something like that. This then made me go "oh no, did she die" and suddenly I wanted to do nothing more than be back in the Witch Fen and be asked to disperse magical fog or torch giant toadstools.
Yeebo posted about this general issue (and got linked on Massively's Global Chat). I meant to comment at the time but what with one thing and another...
ReplyDeleteIt's really annoying. About the only reason I'd find acceptable would be a technical one - that the bloat of too many zones was causing infrastructure problems or lag or something - but if a decades-old game like EverQuest can keep 500+ zones in play I can't see why that should be a problem for most developers. I know that in the EQ games the way it works is that the zones don't even spin up unless a player zones into them.
If Neverwinter makes a habit of this kind of thing I'd have thought there'd be a market for Classic servers there. An yagitation for those among the playerbase? Also fodder for grey-market emus, too.
Thanks for pointing out Yeebo's post; I hadn't seen it!
DeleteI don't think there's a huge demand for classic servers for Neverwinter, but from what little I've heard of private servers they do seem to like emulating older versions of the game.
Had the same feelings with Kehl. At least there's a nice memorial for her in the first area across Celadaine's tower.
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