Tuesday I was pleased to be invited to a Press Tour of EverQuest II Game Update 49, "Raising the Banner" (now on Test servers). With several other members of the press/fan site set, I followed Christine "Kiara" Renzetti, EQII Community Manager, on a whirlwind tour of some of the goodies in store for EQII players.

Our first stop was at a dig site in Sinking Sands. Here we met some D.I.R.T.Y. Excavators, largely of the gnomish caste. Apparently there are strange things to be found 'neath the shifting sands! Allakhazam is pleased to have people scouring Test for information on this intreguing event leading us to The Shadow Odyssey ; we've found nine new quests so far.  (Warning: That link is a spoiler!)

Next we discussed the introduction of multi-core support for animations, which many people noticed in the Test server patch notes . This support has been in high demand by the players, and Testers are putting it though its paces . 

Also in "Raising the Banner" we will see changes to XP. The average number of play hours needed to get to level 70 has been reduced a little. There are now large mentoring bonuses; a mentor can earn a 300% bonus if mentoring 51 or more levels down. And yes, that includes achievement experience! While many players argue this is a form of dumbing down, according to Noel "Ilucide" Walling :

Quite simply, we want people to have a better play experience. When you think about levelling through a 10 level spread when we do a level cap raise, there are a lot of other players around. The game feels really alive, and vibrant, because you've got people around you making your experience different every time you log in. Now look at levelling alts, especially in the 20-70 range. It's a completely different experience, especially if you don't have a few friends doing the same thing with you. What we want to do is to get new players into the game faster, give them a better experience while they're levelling up, and at the same time, give some of you folks who've been with us for a long time a chance to level up new characters without spending forever doing it. More on this later. This change to the level curve should also help veteran players choose which content they want to play through rather than always playing the same levelling path every time you create a new character.

More information on the XP changes is available at EQII Players .

Kiara then snuck us into what was apparently one of Niami Denmother's houses on Test to play with some furniture. I'm pleased to report that, with the exception of snowglobes (which can't scale, according to Domino, because the image inside doesn't scale) everything we played with from pets to crafting stations was scalable from half to three times its normal size.

We didn't get a chance to see the Tier 1 guild hall, which was designed from scratch by Lead Environment Artist Timothy Heydelaar in record time after player feedback at Fan Faire; reports are it's much larger than expected and Testers seem quite pleased. We did get to go into both the evil and good Tier 3 Guild Halls. There's a lot of great Guild Hall information already available here , so I'll leave you with some screenshots. Some of these are your intrepid reporter's, some are from SOE.  Folks on the press tour seemed to prefer the evil (Freeport) Guild Hall, but I like the lightness and lines of the good (Qeynos) one myself.

Freeport Tier 3 Guild Hall

Qeynos Tier 3 Guild Hall