EverQuest • Eurogamer.net

EverQuest Landmark will close in February

Voxel Astra.

EverQuest Landmark has been cancelled and servers will close 21st February. It follows the cancellation of EverQuest Next nearly a year ago.

EverQuest Next has been cancelled, Landmark still on track

"We found that it wasn't fun."

EverQuest Next, the ambitious MMO by Daybreak Games (formerly Sony Online Entertainment), has been cancelled.

The colossal MMO had been in development for years, and indeed our John Bedford played a build of it back in 2013. He came away from his EverQuest Next preview equal parts impressed and skeptical that the developer would be able to follow through on its ambition. Verily, that skepticism was warranted.

So what happened? Daybreak president Russell Shanks quite bluntly admitted in EverQuest Next's cancellation announcement that the game simply "wasn't fun".

Don't Google it: What number EverQuest expansion do you think we're now on?

The legend continues.

EverQuest holds a special place in my memory. I was 16 when it came out. I didn't have computer but my mate Rupert did, and I'd outstay my welcome at his house playing it - hardly a sustainable arrangement and it didn't last. But it sparked in me a longing to become a proper part of a 3D online fantasy world (and on my own computer) - a plan I would carry out with Dark Age of Camelot - and it wasn't long after that Rupert (Loman) and his brother created Eurogamer.

All that seems like a lifetime ago, which is why it's weird writing about EverQuest now, 16 years later and on Eurogamer, and about how the game has launched a new expansion - its 22nd, called The Broken Mirror.

Broken Mirror is a proper $34.99 expansion with new and revamped zones, and all the new quests and loot and things that go with them. There are new spells, new alternate advancements, and there's a strange new toy called an Illusion Key Ring.