Smed gives an EQ2 update

[Lyion]

http://eq2players.station.sony.com/news ... ine&id=133

EverQuest II Update - 9/06/2004

Hello Everyone,

I wanted to give you all an update on the progress we’re making in EverQuest II. We’ve been in a closed beta since July, and things have been progressing nicely. We’ve got almost 5,000 in this portion of the Beta and if things progress as they have been, that number will be increasing rapidly over the next couple of weeks.

Our goals during this phase are:

1. Make sure everyone’s having fun.
2. Make sure all of the content is balanced and tuned with the help of our Beta Testers. They’re giving us great feedback and we’re making sure that feedback is incorporated into every patch we do.
3. Bring the server population to the levels we expect to see when we launch, and then go over those numbers to make sure we can handle the load we’re expecting.

In addition to our US servers, we recently opened up Closed Beta for our French and German localized servers in Europe, and we expect to be opening them up to a wider audience in the upcoming weeks. Our goal is to do a simultaneous release in North America and Europe a little later in the year. In the short term, you can expect to see us inviting a lot of the people that signed up for the European Beta. Our plan is to have anyone in North America or Europe being able to log into any server that they want to, but we will have specialized French and German servers for players that prefer to play in those languages.

Our goal is nothing short of one worldwide EverQuest II community, and it’s a goal we’re meeting.

The EverQuest II team is doing a terrific job keeping up with the insane pace of running a Beta, tuning content and polishing the game all the while still adding new and exciting features. In the upcoming weeks we’ll be widening the Betas in North America and Europe to include a whole lot more people as we move forward. As we open the next phase of Beta, you’ll also get your first look at some very exciting community features we’re working on. We’ll put out more information on these features soon.

Thanks for your support for the EverQuest II community!

John Smedley
President, Sony Online Entertainment