Before I get into this preview, there’s some back history we need to visit about my attitude towards EverQuest. On May 30th of this year, I wrote a critical editorial about EverQuest’s current state. There were two main bullet points to what I felt needed to be done for SOE to turn the game around: stop catering to the uber-players who need to get out of the house more; and put in content that can be managed in small 1-2 hour chunks. At the time I wrote that piece, Gates of Discord, the previous expansion, was still a buggy mess, and worse, was balanced against the level cap already having been raised to 70 (it’s being raised to 70 in Omens). The fans were getting ready to riot. It didn’t help that initial reports from SOE hinted that OOW was tuned towards guilds that where already capable of conquering most of Gates already, and few guilds were at that point. Last but not least, SOE had just rolled out the latest graphics engine to EQ – which also had issues – so Gates got a double whammy of bugs, making its launch about as smooth as a stucco bathtub.